Worship in Jerusalem correction

I've tried to edit the post, but I'm not being let into the edit program, so I take a moment to correct myself here - the Interim Pastor at the Church of Scotland in Jerusalem is Rev. Colin Anderson, not Collin Andrews. Sorry, Colin! All the best for your ministry there!

The Haredi Community

After lunch, our next stop was Meir Panim (which means "to light up the face"), an organization conceived and run by Rabbi David Zilbershlag, an Ultra Orthodox Jew who, after the death of his beloved son, decided to make a positive difference in the lives of those in his community. Meir Panim runs many relief centers in Israel, including soup kitchens which are run more like restaurants, where people are waited on by servers, so that they maintain dignity even in straitened circumstances, furniture "stores" where people can purchase couches and chairs and beds and the like for nominal fees thus be engaged in ownership of these items, and after-school education centers for children. "Doodie" was very unusual in his willingness to meet and interact with those not in his faith tradition, especially women. The woman to his right in the first photo is Sara Augenbraun, the USA Projects Director and translator for our meeting. Clearly, he is different from most of his colleagues in the relationship that he has with her and the trust he gives her that she will translate his comments correctly. It was inspiring to meet both of them - it gave hope that our differences do not have to divide us. The other shot is of the whole group with Doodie and Sara in front of the "restaurant" where we met.

Worship in Jerusalem

The rest of our group went to the Anglican Cathedral for worship, but my deep Presbyterian roots longed for home, so I went to St. Andrews Church of Scotland (Presbyterian). My Presbyterian brothers on the trip felt the same, for they joined me. It felt wonderful to sing hymns that I know and follow a liturgy so close to what we do at Sweet Hollow. Here is a shot of the Interim Pastor there - he had just arrived in Jerusalem three weeks before - Rev. Collin Andrews, Rev. Christian Kim of Long Island, myself, a minister who was leading a group from Canada (I did not catch his name) and Rev. Steve Yamaguchi of Orange County, California.

The Role of Religion in the Jewish State

We met Sunday morning with Prof. Menachem Lorberbaum, senior lecturer at the Shalom Hartman Institute, an organization that self-describes as "a pluralistic research and leadership institute at the forefront of Jewish thought and education". Prof. Lorberbaum was raised Orthodox, but stated that praxis moved him into liberal theology. His purported topic was "The Role of Religion in the Jewish State: Can it be a Jewish State and a Democracy?", but his presentation raised more questions for me than it answered. He is certainly wrestling with the social and political ills that have occurred during the last 60 years and made many controversial comments such as: "what is experienced by Jews as a return home is experienced by the Palestinians as rape" and "Israel is a victim of its own success, including the economy, the army and the Six Day War as the undoing of everything". He also believed that religion must not be high-jacked by the extremist groups, as "religious people have the greatest capacity for introspection" and therefore "have more in common with each other than with secular society" especially regarding "the question of Divinity and how it operates in our lives". Clearly, a violent response in the name of religion corrupts this understanding. His hope is that religion can be a Balm rather than make Bombs, but the question is obviously still out.

Lenten Morning Musings

We're beginning our fourth day back from Israel and I woke this morning with my head filled with thoughts, prayers, musings about that war-torn country. My first thought was of the students in the yeshiva in Jerusalem that were killed and that will suffer the trauma as a result of the killings - we visited several Israeli schools while there, and I wondered if it could have been one that we had seen.

I read the article in the Times and of course, it wasn't. Of course, it was one of the Ultra-Orthodox schools, a school that promotes a religiously zealot Zionism in favor of the settlements - altogether a different sort of institution than the ones that we were able to enter. Do you get it? Do you see? The blatantly militant Islamist enters the religiously extreme Zionist school and opens fire. The pain of the situation for both Israel and the Palestinian territories is their own extreme factions. The majority of the people in both lands would be content/able/relieved, if not happy, to live in peace, but the extremists on both sides are condemning their brothers and sisters to war.

I find myself sitting at my laptop with tears on my cheeks this morning for those who are suffering on all sides in that little piece of God's land. We Christians are traveling the Lenten journey right now - we are in the season that recognizes wilderness, that remembers times where God feels absent even if S/He is not, but my heart cried out - why does wilderness have to be so painful? Moses was lost in the wilderness for 40 years. This year Israel will celebrate its 60th year as a nation. When will it end? Can it reach the Promised Land?

Dr. Nazmi Amin Al-Ju'beh

After traveling to Bethlehem and Masada in the same day, we finished with dinner at the hotel. But far from our educational experiences being over, we were graced with Dr. Nazmi Amin Al-Ju'beh as our guest speaker. While archeology and architecture are Dr. Al-Ju'beh's love and profession, and he claimed not to be directly involved in politics, he was one of the three Palestinians to negotiate the Geneva Accords and was directly briefed by Arafat following the Camp David talks in 2000. It was very interesting to hear his perspective and especially to note how closely it aligned with much of what we were hearing from the Jewish-Israelis that we've been meeting. There was also strong sense, though, that the U.S. needs to be a part of brokering a FAIR peace between these two nations and that if it doesn't happen soon, it may be too late.

Masada

Here we are at Masada, the site where King Herod built a palace fortress. The first shot is the view from Masada, you can see how it would be really tough to attack. The second is the mosaic tiles in the bathhouse. It's hard to believe in the middle of the dessert at the turn of the first millenia that the technology was there for water galore, but it's true - it's one of the reasons that the Zealots fled to Masada in 66 C.E. to escape the Romans. The final shot is me amidst the ruins. It was an incredible complex - the cisterns alone held enough to provide water for 1,000 citizens for ten years!