“It Will Not Be Over Until We Talk”

Mark 2:13-16 / Luke 7:1-10

 “It Will Not Be Over Until We Talk.” These are the words on a bumper sticker that is stuck to the front of Rami’s motorbike. Rami Elhanan is an Israeli whose thirteen-year-old daughter, Smadar, was killed by Palestinian suicide bombers. He is friends with Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian whose ten-year-old daughter, Abir, was killed by an Israeli soldier.

This morning, I will share two stories – my story of leaving the United States for the first time to live and work in Jordan with a group of Jordanians, Palestinians, and a smattering of “others” from around the world-- and how it helped me to grow and see myself and these so called “others” through a new lens.

The main story is about Rami and Bassam as depicted in the book Apeirogon by Callum McCann. The book weaves fiction with the real-life stories of the tragic loss of two daughters, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, and how their fathers came together through The Parents Circle, a support group for both Palestinians and Israeli’s who have lost children in the conflict. Both men travel around the world together to share their stories to put an end to the senseless violence and promote peace in their disputed homeland. This masterfully written book opened my mind to the complexities of the conflict and opened my heart to the shared suffering on both sides of this tragic divide. It gives me hope at this time when hope is hard to come by.

Their stories of courage reminded me of the example Jesus set in our scripture readings by reaching out to so-called “others” –the tax collectors and sinners” in Mark 2, and by his openness to receive the Centurion in Luke 7, a man who symbolized the Roman Occupation. In fact, what Jesus and his followers did was set the stage for the Parent’s Circle by bridging the cultural and tribal divide. It was so radical for it’s time. It is also a radical act in this time where there is so much division to make an effort to connect with the “other”, whether it is talking with someone you disagree with politically or breaking bread with those who are homeless.

If you’re wondering about the book title – Apeirogon is from the Ancient Greek for a polygon with an infinite number of sides – a good title for a book that challenges us to think about the nuances of the Israel-Palestine conflict, its contradictions, its ironies and its pain.

Here is an excerpt from Rami’s testimony about his first visit to the Parent’s Circle after the death of his daughter. He was invited by an Orthodox Jew who started the group after the loss of his child. At first Rami thought this man was crazy. Rami had served in the Israeli Army during his compulsory service and may have killed Palestinians from a distance, like in a video game. There was no way that he was going to join this group, he resisted until he couldn’t resist any longer.

Rami says:

“To be bereaved in Israel is to be part of a tradition, something really terrible but holy at the same time. And I never thought that one day I would be one of them. On and on they came, so many of them. But then I saw something else, something completely new to me, to my eyes, my mind, my heart, my brain. I was standing there, and I saw a few Palestinians passing by in a bus. Listen, this flabbergasted me. I knew it was going to happen, but still I had to do a double take. Arabs? Really? Going into the same meeting as these Israelis? How could that be? A thinking, feeling, breathing Palestinian? And I remember seeing this lady in this black, traditional Palestinian dress, with a headscarf—you know, the sort of woman who I might have thought could be the mother of one of the bombers who took my child. She was slow and elegant, stepping down from the bus, walking in my direction. And then I saw it, she had a picture of her daughter clutched to her chest. She walked past me. I couldn’t move. And this was like an earthquake inside me: this woman had lost her child. It maybe sounds simple, but it was not. I had been in a sort of coffin. This lifted the lid from my eyes. My grief and her grief, the same grief. I went inside to meet these people. And here they were, and they were shaking my hand, hugging me, crying with me. I was so deeply touched, so deeply moved. It was like a hammer on my head cracking me open. An organization of the bereaved. Israeli and Palestinian, Jew, Christian, Muslim, atheist, you name it. Together. In one room. Sharing their sorrow. Not using it, or celebrating it, but sharing it, saying that it is not a decree of faith that we should live forever with a sword in our hands. I cannot tell you what sort of madness it seemed. And I was completely cleaved open. It was like a nuclear event. Truly, it seemed mad. You see, I was forty-seven, forty-eight years old at that time, and I had to learn to admit it was the first time in my life, to that point—I can say this now, I could never even think it then—it was the first time that I’d met Palestinians as human beings. Not just workers in the streets, not just caricatures in the newspapers, not just transparencies, terrorists, objects, but— how do I say this?—human beings—human beings, I can’t believe I’m saying that, it sounds so wrong, but it was a revelation—yes, human beings who carry the same burden that I carry, people who suffer exactly as I suffer. An equality of pain. And like Bassam says, we are running from our pain to our pain. I’m not a religious person, far from it—I have no way of explaining what happened to me back then. If you had told me years ago that I would say this I would have said you were crazy.”

He goes on to say:

“You never heal, don’t let anyone tell you that you ever fully heal—it’s the living who have to bury the dead. I pay the price, sometimes I despair, but what else is there to be, in the end, but hopeful? What else are we going to do? Walk away, kill ourselves, kill each other? That’s already happened, it didn’t achieve much. I know that it will not be over until we talk to each other—that’s what it says on the sticker on the front of my bike. Joining with others saved my life. We cannot imagine the harm we’re doing by not listening to one another and I mean this on every level. It is immeasurable. We may have built up our wall, but the wall is really in our minds, and every day I try to put a crack in it.”

Then there was Bassam who grew up in a cave in Palestine. He lost his home due to the Occupation. He threw rocks at the Israeli soldiers and one day in 1985, the same year I was living across the Jordan River he and his friends found old grenades and threw them at some soldiers and they fizzled. He spent the next seven years in an Israeli prison. While he was in prison, he saw a documentary about the holocaust and while he had been a holocaust denier it changed something in him. After being released he got married, became a father and with some Israeli’s started Combatants for Peace.

Bassam says Rumi, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I’ll meet you there. We were right and we were wrong and we met in a field. We realized that we wanted to kill each other to achieve the same thing, peace and security. Imagine that, what an irony, it’s crazy. We sat in the Everest Hotel and talked about ending the Occupation. Even that word occupation makes most Israelis tremble. Of course, each one had a different point of view—they are the occupiers, and we are the ones under occupation, so it looks different to them. But in the end, we were all dying, we were killing each other, over and over and over. We needed to know each other instead. This is the center of gravity; this is where it all comes down. There will be security for everyone when we have justice for everyone. As I have always said, it’s a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy anymore, he just can’t be.

Bassam goes on to say:

“In Palestine we say ignorance is a terrible acquaintance. We do not talk to the Israelis. We are not allowed to talk to them—the Palestinians don’t want it and the Israelis don’t want it. We have no clue what the other one is like. That’s where the madness lies. Put up a wall, put up a checkpoint, write the Nakba out of the books, do what you want. But here’s the key—we are not voiceless, no matter how much silence there is. We need to learn how to share this land, otherwise we will be sharing it in our graves.”

Bassam learned to speak Hebrew and earned a Masters Degree in England. His dissertation was on the tragedy of the Holocaust.

When Bassam was jailed in 1985, I was a freshman at Duke University thinking of majoring in Poly Sci. I attended a speech by Queen Noor Al-Hussein, wife of King Hussein of Jordan. She spoke about a program coordinated by the Jordanian and US governments that would select a diverse group of sixteen American students from throughout the United States to live and work in Jordan. I heard it was the first official cultural exchange between the United States and an Arab country. I applied and was accepted to leave that summer.

I was 20 years old and my first time traveling outside the country.

16 of us (split into two groups of eight) from different backgrounds, races, and religious affiliations.

I had to convince my father to sign a government waiver of liability that included paying for the transport of my body back home, including the body bag in which I would be transported. He had never traveled outside the United States and couldn’t understand why I would leave the greatest country in the world and go to a place that others wanted to flee. I couldn’t explain that I had a burning desire to learn about another people and culture. I ended up telling my mother it was a permission slip and that she need not bother reading it – just please sign it – and she did.

We met at a University in New Jersey and went through cultural sensitivity training….Don’t cross your legs for fear of showing the souls of your shoes- that is disrespectful…Be careful not to admire pictures, knickknacks or anything for that matter as the Arabs are so generous that it will be going home with you (btw- I found that to be true). Keep your arms and legs covered and men and women please don’t touch. When you meet the Queen do not hold out your hand out – let her make the first gesture.

The plan was to work on two different archeological digs. We were told that we were high profile targets and that if anyone asked, we should tell them we were archeology students. The digs were our reason for being there - our cover story.

We would fly from New York to Paris to Amman via Damascus.

On the Air France flight from Paris, I nervously read an English version of Time Magazine. The cover showed a hijacked plane in Athens with the title “Americans out of the Middle East”. It was the summer of hijacking and hostages.

During the layover in Syria tanks would surround our plane and armed soldiers with Kalashnikovs would enter our Air France flight to check passports. We were not in Kansas anymore!!

When we arrived in Amman, I felt like I had landed in another world with the sights, sounds, smells and especially the Muslim call to prayer as the sun set. After two nights in Amman, we headed to a compound in Yarmouk near the Syrian border where we would spend most of our time living, working, sharing and breaking bread with Jordanians, Palestinians, and a group from Germany.

Up until that point in my life I had not known anyone from Jordon or Palestine. At boarding school, I had two classmates from Saudi Arabia, but this was different. I was the “other”, a foreigner in a country and with a people that were foreign to me.

What I learned is that the people I met were for the most part just like my friends in the US. Most wanted a good life, to have a good job, raise a family, and live in peace. Growing up I watched cartoons that depicted Arabs as dirty, wild eyed, weapon toting terrorists. That was not the case.

Each person I met reminded me of someone I knew at home – The computer nerd, the intellectual, the sports fanatic and the devoted father and/or mother.

We met Queen Noor at the Palace in Amman and the American Ambassador and his family at a cocktail party hosted for us at the embassy. There was heavy security everywhere we went.

I befriended a young Palestinian named Faras. He invited me to his one room apartment and offered me snacks and tea. On the wall was a picture of Yassar Arafat and a Palestinian flag. He showed me a map of the region where there was no Israel. I thought that was odd. He then shared that when he traveled to visit his family in the West Bank he and the other young men were often forced to strip naked at at the first checkpoint, to crouch in a circle with their clothes thrown in a pile, even in the cold and rain, for hours, sometimes overnight before allowing them to be on their way to visit their families. He was very angry.

I also joined a Time Magazine photographer on an expedition to document conditions in a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Jordan. We climbed over a wall and snuck into the camp. Neither of us knew much Arabic. There was sewage in the streets and terrible living conditions. I took notes while he took pictures. I was young and reckless.

I had many talks with the people in our house, Jordanians, Palestinians, and the group from Germany that ran the second Archeological dig. They all shared with me that Americans didn’t have a good reputation in their countries and that we were “Naïve”.

By living in Jordan, I realized that we live on a big island that is protected on all sides. We have space to be naïve. Not so in the Middle East. We should be grateful.

Before leaving Yarmouk for Amman to catch a flight back to the states I was arrested for taking a picture while picking up some souvenirs in town. I was taken to a police station, interrogated and released. Maybe they thought I was an Israeli spy. It was a civics lesson I will never forget.

It will not be over until we talk to each other. What will not be over? - Think about that – What is it that will not be over until we talk? For me the obvious answers are war, violence, injustice, bigotry, hatred, brutality, intolerance and their offspring homophobia, homeless- phobia, islamophobia, antisemitism, and even the decimation of the ecosystem that sustains our life. There are more – but you get the point.

Thankfully, there are examples throughout Scripture and the life of Jesus and in modern day movements like the Parent’s Circle and the story of Rami and Bassam that give us hope that it can be done.

We may not agree with each other, but we need to talk to each other like Jesus did with the so-called “others”. Rami and Bassam did it – the 20-year-old me did it – You can do it.

We all need to talk to each other to give healing a chance in a world that seems irreparably broken.

Amen.