A restless night last night, full of those vivid, half-cracked dreams one has when the moon is full. The dogs felt it, and were noticeably wild. At one point, Steve, the dogs, and I were all awake, stirring about, muttering in our various canine and human tongues.When I finally did go back to sleep—sort of—I had one of those half-awake dreams that one tends to have at this full-moon, with images scrolling wildly across the screen of the mind. They seemed to be from Gaza, where I was viewing the scenes of destruction with the eyes of a Palestinian child. This was, no doubt, my psyche’s attempt to process the scenes I’ve been seeing on the news, scenes the waking mind tries hard not to process, since they are so horrific.
I ask myself these days how it can happen that a people who have been savagely abused for two millennia (and, yes, by my own people, by Christian people), can now turn around, having sovereignty and self-determination, and pass on that abuse to another set of human beings. The historic oppression that the Jewish people have endured calls out for me to stand in solidarity with them. And I do stand in solidarity and commit myself to combat that oppression, particularly in its theological roots.
But I cannot justify how Israel deals with its Palestinian brothers and sisters. From my graduate school years, when I knew a number of Mennonite families who had lived among the Palestinians in Israel and heard their eyewitness accounts of the savage treatment that Israel often dealt to its Palestinian community, I began to see what was happening in that country with clearer eyes. I could not doubt the first-hand testimony of people I knew to be truthful, loving, committed to peacemaking.
When I read the powerful works of Abraham Joshua Heschel, I wonder how the same religious tradition can produce, in the latter half of the 20th century, on the one hand this prophetic thinker, and on the other hand the significant number of Jewish thinkers who found common cause (read: pandered to) in the same period with the dominant neoconservative politics of the period. In the work of those neoconservative Jewish apologists for what cannot be ethically sustained, what has happened to the prophetic impulse—to Isaiah’s, Jeremiah’s, Amos’s denunciation of the oppression of the wretched of the earth, to the condemnation of the rich and haughty—so central to Jewish thought?
In those servile Jewish thinkers who have found it to easy to justify everything that some of our most morally bankrupt leaders have done, when the arrogance of the mighty and the misuse of the lowly has been so gross and so evident in the platforms of these neoconservative leaders? I stand in solidarity with the Jewish people. I have to do so, because the horrendous suffering inflicted on them has been unmerited. And because it has been my own people, people who claim to live by the vision of Jesus, who have inflicted that suffering, twisting and turning the scriptures to legitimate their ugly prejudices.
But that solidarity does not and cannot permit me to be blind about what Israel has done and continues to do to the Palestinians. People on whom unmerited suffering is inflicted, merely because of their skin color, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, etc., must not be given a free pass when they turn around and try to pass that suffering on to another group unfortunate enough to be “below” them. The experience of historic persecution is not a warrant to bend the moral rules of the universe, chief among which is (in my reading of morality) the firm belief that the moral arc of the universe bends constantly towards justice.
Those who endure unmerited suffering do not earn the right to live above the moral rules. They do not become entitled, due to the suffering they have unjustly borne due to innate qualities like race and gender, to turn around and inflict unmerited suffering on others—say, people who happen to be gay or lesbian. The path to true humanity—for all of us—lies in repudiating every attempt to make some group the despised other, and to justify the oppression of that group because we ourselves have suffered, or because we wish to frame that group’s suffering as merited. When it is as unmerited as our own . . . .
