Is it
possible to be friends with those who are enemies with one another? Can you
support both sides in an intense conflict? Don’t you have to choose sides?
This
seemingly theoretical inquiry has become real for me, and I suspect for many of
us, over the past few weeks. I found myself downtown on a Sunday afternoon
recently, showing up, as I very much wanted to, at a rally in support of
Israel. I learned there was another group in Freedom Park, braving the blazing
sun just like the pro-Israel group, but in support of the Palestinians and
advocating for peace. I would have liked to join their group too.
I’m no
expert on military policy, or security measures, or the best way to fight back
if you are oppressed, or attacked. I harbor a few private, amateur opinions
like everyone else. But as a theologian, and as someone who dreams of finding a
way to love people on both sides, I can only grieve, and never cheer, when
rockets are launched and then tanks roll in response – and innocent civilians
and even gutsy soldiers die. It must grieve God’s heart, it must be appalling
to all people with a shred of compassion in their hearts, when weapons clash
and life is lost.
Who’s
right? Who’s wrong? Whose fault is this? Blame is the bugaboo of hardened
hearts. Ask the little children of divorcing parents, Whose fault is it? The
children are not much interested in such a question. They love mom and dad.
They want peace in the family.
We want
peace in the Middle East, and in all the world’s distressed, agonizing places.
Not that Hamas or Netanyahu or anybody else in power will listen, but we still
must think and talk out loud about the way to peace, and hope more people join
in, and work for peace, demand peace, refuse to settle for anything less than
peace.
Too much
blame to assign
Peace
cannot begin until we stop placing blame – and this is the hardest part of all,
not because the blame belongs over there, or over here, but because there is
just so much blame all over the place. We live in a broken world. We are fallen
people. The enemy is us, the enemy is them, the enemy is all of us, the enemy
is a world out of sync with its Creator and one another.
Peace
requires us to stop picking sides. Peace begins when we join both sides. Peace
goes off-sides, and listens, and understands. Israel and Gaza, like husbands
and wives and kids on playgrounds, have their deeply felt reasons, fears and
wounds. There has been immense injustice.
Peace
can’t happen without forgiveness, and we aren’t skilled at forgiving.
Forgiveness is having the right to blame or even inflict punishment, but
instead choosing compassion, and frankly, peace.
That day
in downtown Charlotte I tried to think about Reconciliation. How do Israelis
and Gazans reconcile, especially after so much abominable and evil bloodshed?
This is humanly impossible – like so much that bedevils us, be it addiction or
rancor or our culture run amok with greed. We need some power beyond ourselves,
namely the God whose good name gets trampled in the mud on the world stage. God
is invoked on this or the other side, but I wonder if this is what Moses had in
mind when he told Jews, Christians, Muslims, and whomever else not to take the
Lord’s name in vain. The true God is the God of all people.
Or if we
cannot invoke the power of God, I wonder if we can invoke the shattered,
shriveled hearts of mothers who have lost sons, husbands, fathers, friends,
daughters and sisters. Ask them the way to peace. Some would raise a fist
demanding more war. But most would plead for an end to the fighting.
And then
we might turn to the wisest among us, not the political ideologues, but the
aged who have thought deeply, and have befriended those on both sides. Get at why
everyone is so angry. How did we get into such a mess? The humble sage knows
there is no perfect solution. Only the naïve hunt for neat fixes. We live with
the mess, we right what wrongs we can – and then we live on, and refuse to
continue to kill. This “we” is elusive, but our bargain with the universe is
that we will finally choose life over death, for ourselves but also for others.
I love
the people of Israel. I love the people of Gaza. I love Jews and Muslims here
in Charlotte, friends who have enriched my life, and deepened my faith in God
and in the future of a very broken humanity. Maybe, just maybe, peace can begin
in my heart, in our friendships and families here, and become some kind of
contagion that leaps around the world, and maybe in a few years we’ll have that
peace declared impossible by the cynics, but believed in passionately by those
who dare to dream. I see dreamers who are broken but still hopeful on both
sides, and so I can and will support both sides – and so then there are no longer
sides. I believe it is so in God’s heart.
