Why do we make things so hard?
July 4, 1989. Our bus moved slowly and carefully through the steep, narrow streets of the village. It was summer, and small children ran ahead of us, laughing and chasing goats out of our way, their bare feet raising clouds of dust that glittered in the brilliant sunlight. The houses around us were mostly one-storied stucco'd rectangles, and many of them had grape arbors on the roofs.
Shefar'am is a little village in the northwest of Israel, near Haifa and the Lebanese border, and most of its residents are Palestinians, some Christian, some Muslim. Almost no one outside of Israel had ever heard of Shefar'am then. Two weeks ago, though, the whole world heard about it; a deserter from the Israeli Defense Forces went to Shefar'am and killed four residents who were riding on a bus, injuring twelve others. That this should happen in Shefar'am is a painful irony.
We went to Shefar'am to visit "The House of Hope", a center of The Community of the Cross of Nails (CCN). CCN is an organization founded in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral during WWII. They believe that "Truth + Forgiveness = Reconciliation". The House of Hope was run at the time by a man named Elias Jabor, a Palestinian Maronnite Catholic whose family has lived in the region practically since the days of Ur. His mission, in his words, was "to bring Palestinian teenagers and Israeli Jewish teenagers together and let them scream at each other until they get tired enough to listen to each other." Elias' family and staff welcomed us with the boundless hospitality that represents Middle Eastern culture at its best, presenting us with a sheet cake decorated with the U. S. flag, in honor of "America's birthday".
The highlight of the trip, though, was a visit to the synagogue. There are no Jews living in Shefar'am. During the days of Turkish occupation, before WWI, Jews were not allowed to live in Haifa, and there were Jews in Shefar'am. When Britain kicked the Turks out of Palestine, the ban was lifted and virtually all of the Jews in Shefar'am moved to Haifa. The last Jews who left Shefar'am gave the keys of the synagogue to the Muslim family that lived next door, and for more than 90 years, that family has handed down the keys to synagogue -- and the responsibility for maintaining it -- from generation to generation.
The synagogue is beautifully kept: the stucco was freshly whitewashed; inside was swept and dusted; the Torah was properly and respectfully stored in the Ark. The Muslim family considered themselves honor-bound to maintain the building in the condition in which it was turned over to them. And every year, on the High Holy Days, the descendants of the Jews who left Shefar'am return and get the keys to the synagogue from the Muslim family, confident that all will be as it should be.
The powerful reality here, is that in 1915, the Jews who moved to Haifa knew that they could trust and rely on the Muslims of Shefar'am to honor and maintain the synagogue. As that realization dawned on us, we all just started to cry. It's all so simple. For thousands of years, Jews and Muslims and Christians had lived together in Palestine, and it had all been so simple. Why do we make things so hard?
1989 was in the middle of the first intifada, and even then, this town was a model of what all of the Middle East could be (and more or less had been for centuries). And this was the town where, in his rage, 19-year old Natan Eden Zada chose to go to kill Arabs.
This morning, Miles O'Brien on CNN was speaking with an Iraqi diplomat, a Sunni, about the development of the Iraqi Constitution. Showing a map of Iraq, O'Brien pointed out the boundaries drawn by the British when Iraq was created, designating areas of control for Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds. The Ambassador commented that these boundaries were really rather arbitrary: "We have all been living here together for hundreds of years."
It used to be very simple. Now, people whose grandparents lived as neighbors now hate each other, just because of who they are and where they are, even though neither of these things has changed. We've made it very hard.