Jerusalem is a city built in layers. It’s an archaeologist’s dream come true: simply grab a shovel and dig straight down and you will discover the remains of Crusader fortifications built atop Ottoman city-walls, built atop Byzantine churches and synagogues, built atop Roman-era aquaducts and arches. And so on. If you dig in the right place, you may even find Babylonian arrowheads, Persian spear-tips, Assyrian sling-stones, Davidic cisterns and secret tunnels—evidence of sieges, disasters, the rise and fall of empires.
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| Old City Walls of Jerusalem, "Zion's Gate," ca. 1538 CE. The bullet holes are (mostly) from the '48 Arab-Israeli War |
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| Bullet lodged in the wall of Zion's Gate |
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| Old City walls are at the top of this photo, to give you some idea of the "layering" of Jerusalem |
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| Courtesy of Wikipedia |
Recently, scholars from Hebrew U have discovered a large, Iron-Age palace on the southern slope of Mount Zion which some believe to be King David’s house.
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| Ruins of "David's" citadel |
Or is it simply an earlier Jebusite fortress which David destroyed in establishing his capital there? It's possible. Pottery shards dating to the early Bronze Age were unearthed in several rooms.
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| Pottery shard I found, NOT from the Bronze Age, but from late Byzantine Era |
As you can imagine, this sort of archaeology can be a politically charged endeavor—especially if the area where you want to dig happens to be a present-day Arab village, as with the putative “City of David.”
In light of these issues, Ash and I decided to devote our weekend to exploring the Occupied Territories--to experience life, however obliquely, from a Palestinian perspective. This is something we both felt strongly about, thanks in part to some good friends who have worked with Palestinian refugees (and written quite eloquently about it, I might add). No “educational” trip to Israel is complete without learning from those whom Israeli society has marginalized.
However, it was not to be. While sipping Armenian coffee in Jerusalem on Friday afternoon, we were struck by a realization of dismay: our passports were locked up in our dorms in Tel Aviv, safe from thieves and owners alike. With no passports to cross the border, and with sunset fast approaching, we decided to make the best of it and stay the weekend in Jerusalem.
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| Armenian pride |
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| Swiss-German girlfriend, Armenian wine |
Now, Jerusalem is a lovely and fascinating place for reasons mentioned above; but Jerusalem on Shabbat is a ghost-town, a holy wasteland. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Sabbath, in theory and in practice. I, too, want to work less and give restful thanks more. If labor is the dignity of man (the sexist language is Marx’s, not mine), then rest is his crowning glory. By institutionalizing rest, the Sabbath proclaims the sanctity of mere being and cultivates something very rare and precious in the modern world: a sense of the value of existence itself. The downside, however, is that all the falafel shops are closed.
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| Jerusalem street on Saturday morning |
Mericfully, in lieu of spending our free Saturday hot, hungry, and bored, Ash and I were invited by our most excellent Dutch friend, Daniel, to have a real Shabbat dinner with a family of American ex-pats he knows in Jerusalem.
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| Blurry-faced Daniel (right) and dorm-mate Brandon (left) intellectualizing at a rooftop bar in the Neve Tzedec neighborhood of Tel Aviv |
The Silvers, and the Pearlmans (who let us sleep on their floor) were superlative hosts. They fed us, took us to religious services, and engaged us in heartfelt and intelligent conversation concerning the meaning behind all the food and prayers we shared. And while we weren’t able to get a firsthand look at Palestine as planned, speaking with our Israeli hosts did shed some light on the vexing political situation between these two peoples, nevertheless. It also re-opened for me a particular ethical question that has intrigued me for years: under what circumstances do smart, kind people believe they are justified in engaging in programmatic ethnic/religious violence? Why do ordinary, observant people believe it is permissible to kill other ordinary, observant people?
To illustrate what I mean, here’s a brief, reconstructed bit of our conversation with one of our hosts, which started out innocently enough:
Paul: “Tell me what you love most about living in Israel.”
Host: “The sense of family and close-knit community. Everyone here is just like us. We don’t have the kinds of inner-city violence and drug problems in schools that they have in the States. We trust our neighbors here. It’s almost a throwback to the 1950’s.”
Paul: “Those are very important values that, sadly, the U.S. has neglected. But isn’t there a shadow-side to the 1950’s: the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation? Is Israel’s peace built upon arms a true peace?”
Host: “Yes and no. I remember sending my kids to school during the bus bombings. Those were very tense days and I prayed for their safety. But in the last few years, things have been pretty calm. Still, part of me wants to grab my youngest son [who is 17 and will be active in the army next year] and run away with him somewhere.”
Host: “Because I can’t stand to think of him as a soldier! To think of him pointing a gun at someone, or someone pointing a gun at him… But they want to kill us, so we have to defend ourselves.”
Paul: “Let me make sure I heard you correctly. You’re saying that your conscience is revolted by the thought of killing, even in combat; but you don’t think you ought to listen to that voice of conscience, you think there’s something more compelling, more real and immediate than the moral compass inside you—that you should listen to instead?”
Host: “Yes. It would be best if we didn’t have to fight. But I set what my conscience tells me aside for something greater. Israel is such a wonderful, such a transcendent thing to be a part of. And they want to wipe us off the map. I wish they wouldn’t force us to fight them.”
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| Stay on marked trails when hiking in the Golan heights! |
Indulge me for a moment on just a few points that still ring in my ears, and keep me up at night.
(1) As I mentioned before, this is a kind person. What I mean by this term is a person with a rightly-formed conscience. Her instinctual aversion to harming another human being proves this. She invited me into her home and showed me gratuitous, sensitive hospitality. And, as she told me, she knows in her very bones that it is wrong to cause harm to others. But what interests me is that she is only willing to be guided by that knowledge up to a point—and no further. Specifically, she is willing to set conscience aside in matters where devotion to a transcendent cause—a nation-state, in this case—is at stake (more on the dangers of transcendence below).
(2) As I mentioned, also, this is a
smart person. A person with a doctorate in psychology. One might object: even very smart people have weakness and blindspots; we're only human after all. But here is a fact I found absolutely astonishing for its inconsistency: her undergraduate advisor was a professor named Phillip Zimbardo, who conducted the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. You may recall (if not,
Wikipedia provides a concise rundown here) that SPE demonstrated just how brutal an ordinary group of people (in particular, a group of smart Stanford undergrads) could be if they were assigned to act as "guards" in a mock-prison environment. Zimbardo showed how our identity-categories exert influence on our moral decision-making capacities: the roles we adopt in daily life influence the parameters of our moral vision—who is deemed worthy of our sympathy and who is not. In short, how we think of ourselves provides a frame for how we treat others; the problem is that
once we forget that that frame is just a frame, perfectly normal people become capable of perfectly horrible acts. To sum up, we become what we imagine ourselves to be; so we must be very careful about what we imagine ourselves to be.
Before I wax too philosophical, my point here is simply that it doesn’t take a PhD (I got a C+ in psych at Cal Poly, btw, the lowest grade I ever received in my life) to wonder whether Israel (or the U.S., for that matter) has internalized a certain “prison-guard” mentality on a national scale, and in so doing succeeded at normalizing and perpetuating unconscionable violence in the name of policing a lawless region. The danger of the prison-guard role is that it subtly occludes the humanity of those outside the scope of our order. Abu Grhaib is a chilling and still very recent example. At the core of Zimbardo’s experiment, imperfect though his research may be, is a quite elementary phenomenon that the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt named, “the banality of evil.” Even very intelligent people do not seem to be exempt.
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| Israeli observation post in the Golan Heights, ca the '68 War |
(3) Lastly, notions of transcendence play a central role in justifying violence, as illustrated by my conversation with our Israeli host. “Transcendence” is a category traditionally applied to divinity. But in a world where God does not speak, all kinds of false transcendences compete with one another to fill the gaps left by God’s silence. The modern nation-state is simply one of the loudest of these voices. (Although in a politically atrophied nation like the U.S. where "national pride" is less fashionable than in Israel, I’m tempted to say that music or art of some form tends to provide individuals of my generation with its “profoundest” sense of meaningfullness. Does this retreat from capital-letter Causes toward smaller matters of personal aesthetic taste represent an advance in our moral thinking or a setback? No one comes to blows over matters of musical preference, but neither do they perform acts of moral heroism in the name of Britany Spears, or The Avett Brothers, either. Ah, the ambivalences of postmodernism.)
Sadly, religion too is a powerful perpetrator of violence; whatever you are willing to kill for is your God. Sadder still is the fact that religion, rightly practiced, is potentially our most powerful
safeguard against factionalism and violence, because the idea of a truly transcendent God prohibits elevating our own personal beliefs or ideologies to the level of ultimate value. Right worship of God precludes the idolatry of state, self, religion—or whatever else. Which is one reason why the modern world, with its many opportunities for allegiances, cannot do without God, and why God-fearing people must
never rejoice in violent death, not even the death of an avowed enemy.
Here's what it comes down to: governments
must kill--that's what they do. They must protect the lives and interests of their citizens. But as soon as we forget that "Israel" or "The United States" is
only a frame which transforms killing, as if by alchemy, from an affront to conscience into a "regrettable necessity," we lose our ability to think outside that frame, to see the moral possibilities it excludes. I'm tempted to say that, at least from the Second Temple period until 1948, the implicit ethical advantage of Judaism over Christianity was to remain unaffiliated with any state. But the temptation passes when I think of the horrors Christendom perpetrated on the Jews during that time. For this reason, I can sympathize with my host's position. As she frames it, the need for a strong defense seems more pressing than ever. But if God spoke today as of old, what would God say? Relaxing together in the living room after a lovely Shabbat meal, the moment seemed ripe for inter-religious dialogue. So you can imagine my excitement when she told me that there was one group of Jews who exempted themselves from military service for religious reasons: the ultra-orthodox. A point of connection, of peace-building across the major monotheistic traditions? However, my joy was shortlived. It turns out that the ultra-orthodox have no principled objection to killing Muslims; the real reason they don't serve is that they might have to share quarters with...
a woman. FML.
My over-arching point is that religion is a frame, too, of course, but one that draws (or ought to draw) the circle much wider--around the whole human, and non-human world. Yet if all frames focus on some things and exclude others, then what does religion exclude? Religion excludes any reasons or arguments that pretend to trump the love of neighbor. Sure, there are
lots of good reasons why the Israelis need to defend themselves. They are the prison-guards keeping order in the region, etc, etc. But precisely for this reason, radical religious thinking has something vital to contribute to the peace process. In this no-win, zero-sum game, religion opens up a new set of realities by telling you exactly what you can focus on and what you can very well ignore. You must focus on love, and ignore anything or anyone who tells you otherwise, for any reason. Our contemporary ethical and political landscape is starved for this kind of expansive theological thinking.
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I'm sorry for using this "travelogue" to record the wanderings of my thoughts instead of my feet. I'll conclude with one final story about a place we visited yesterday. These are the ruins of the city of Gamla (it means "camel," I hope you can see why):
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| Ancient Gamla. A synagogue sits along the walls at bottom left, and the remains of a round tower stand in bottom center. The citadel sits on the very top of the peak, surrounded by steep ravines. |
During the Great Revolt, Gamla joined the Jewish cause against the Romans. They held out for seven months against three Roman legions. Eventually, using battering rams, catapults, ramps, tunnels, and fire, the Romans breached the walls, only to be driven back by the defenders. But not for long. When the Romans finally pushed the garrison back to the citadel (the peak of the camel's hump), the remaining Jews threw themselves off the edge of the cliffs--preferring death to slavery and apostasy at the hands of the pagan empire. The city was abandoned to time until archaeologists stumbled upon it in 1968, one year after re-capturing the Golan Heights from the Syrians during the '68 War. Beneath the ruins of a collapsed house were interred the remains of a Roman soldier in full battle dress, crushed to death in the final combat and untouched for more than 1,900 years, until his curious resurrection at the hands of Israeli archaeologists.
Until we learn to re-frame our world in terms of the light of a love that knows no bounds, the history of human beings will be merely the story of how we have destroyed one another. And in this scenario, even the victors do not win.
Our university program is now halfway done. Three more weeks till we come home. Stay tuned to see what criticisms I have in store next time!
Peace,
Paul
