Scripture: Psalm 8, Luke 24:13-35
Blue Skies and Cement Walls Over Bethlehem: Reflections on our Tree of Life Journey
Salaam Alaikum! Welcome!
It’s been a month since we’ve returned from our Tree of Life Journey. As most of you know, twenty-three of us made our way to Palestine, Israel and Jordan this March, counting ourselves among the hundreds of travelers who’ve taken TOL partnership trips over the past 15 years.
This year we joined with many friends from the Berlin Mosque. I’m delighted to be with my traveling buddies again and so grateful that they are here today to join in sharing our reflections. Thank you Ann and Ellen Perry, Ghoufran and Sena Abadaddi, Colleen Keyes, and Mae Moskin for agreeing to participate!
As the disciples said to one another in the gospel of Luke: Were not our hearts burning within us each moment of this journey? Are not our hearts burning still?
Hopefully, through our storytelling, you can see or remember what it was like to be there on the roads of Palestine and beyond. Being able to bear witness to the alternative narrative of life under Occupation is to stand on holy ground.
Bearing witness means to be changed by voices of conscience, our Muslim, Christian, and Jewish siblings, telling their under-told stories.
It is to absorb the painful details of their public and private humiliations, home invasions and forced relocations. These are the practices of the military state.
It is also to feel hopeless in the face of them.
And, it is to be afraid of the daily crossings at checkpoints and to never get used to having teen soldiers board your bus with AK47’s.
And yet, witnessing all of this is also to be welcomed with tiny paper cups of rich black coffee into living rooms and fed piping hot “Upside-down Chicken” on red carpets in a Negev tent woven with ancient pride.
It is to devour bowls of tabouli at the Asparagus Restaurant in the West Bank and dance awkwardly to the passionate rhythms of musicians from the Diesha Refugee Camp.
It is to recognize in one another our sweet humanness no matter how many thousands of miles away from home.
Were not our hearts burning within us each moment of this journey?
Are they not burning still with love for these people and despair for their future?
One morning on this trip, with a rare couple of hours to explore, I tried to follow the Bethlehem portion of the Wall near our hotel. I hoped to find a little shop I remembered from my first TOL journey back in 2012. It was there on a towering concrete wall across from this gift shop, where we painted a Tree of Life mural under the cover of darkness.
The 28 feet high cement wall before me is gigantic, ugly and imposing, save for the graffiti that adds color and resistance art. My favorite is of a soldier and a Palestinian having a pillow fight. I crane my neck up to see where the wall ends and find a slice of blue sky overhead with a military camera poised at the top staring down at me. My neck hurts, my heart races. I feel claustrophobic, penned in.
I scanned the part of the wall I remembered but found only a handprint still visible under new resistance art. Pressing my hand onto the concrete, I said a prayer as the gray coldness and immovability shivered through me in the warm afternoon light.
This Wall of Apartheid is a skyscraper of concrete. Called a “security barrier”, it snakes through the Westbank and spans 440 miles. In total, it walls off East Jerusalem and other villages into 70 separate enclaves.
As you know, Israel’s systematic land appropriation policy for expansion of the Wall together with ongoing construction of illegal settlements creates ever-imposing restrictions on movement and all aspects of daily life for Palestinians.
While in direct violation of International Law, it permanently cuts off peoples, cultures, families, homes and agricultural lands, communities, it separates farmers from their fruit and Olive trees, never mind the impact on livelihoods and one’s self-determination.
More than anything it is an ever-present reminder for Palestinians that they live under militarized subjugation. Increasingly, it is difficult for people to remain in their homes and offer a future for their children.
The human toll cannot be overstated. We saw it. As so many of you before us have…
Turning away from the Wall, I enter the store and chat with owner Claire Anastas who seemed to remember me. I’m delighted by her welcome. Hard to find, her building is surrounded on three sides by the Wall.
Claire’s story, like so many we heard on our trip is one of invasion, psychological trauma and stolen freedom. She told me the Israeli military arrived one night a dozen years ago and locked her and her family up one night, a gun to her young son’s head…for several days they were made to stay in one room as the wall was built all around them threatening to take her family’s building with its shops and apartments all down with it. The military she said wanted to completely wall off her street but thankfully, water pipes prevented them from doing so.
There was no recourse for this family as their home was too close to Rachel’s Tomb.
Saying my goodbyes, I found an art exhibit of Palestinian artists on the next block at the famous Walled-Off Hotel by the British graffiti artist, Banksy. The poster I purchased is depicted on our bulletin cover this morning. It’s by the Palestinian artist, Kalhed Hourani. Hourani is the Artistic Director of the International Academy of Art in Palestine.
Look, here, see all the blue sky? Here is the hope of the world. See how little there is of the wall? It is the hope for a Palestinian child, indeed for all children kept under wraps by walls and borders and security fences, to jump wildly into the blue.
This child, like the sky, will not be fenced!
At this time, I’d like to introduce our next traveler and leader on our journey, Ghoufran Abaddidi.
OTHER REFLECTIONS – of Journey Travelers
We’re not our hearts burning within us each moment of this journey? Are not our hearts burning still?
In closing, I’d like to share a poem by Alberto Rios, the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Arizona. Rios grew up on the border of Arizona and Mexico. His poem is called WE ARE OF A TRIBE and he writes of this other Wall going up along the US border.
We Are of a Tribe – Alberto Rios
We plant seeds in the ground
and dreams in the sky,
Hoping that, someday, the roots of one
Will meet the upstretched limbs of the other.
It has not happened yet. Still,
Together, we nod unafraid of strangers.
Inside us, we know something about each other:
We are all members of the secret tribe of eyes
Looking upward,
Even as we stand on uncertain ground.
Up there, the dream is indifferent to time,
Impervious to borders, to fences, to reservations.
This sky is our greater home.
It is the place and the feeling we have in common.
This place requires no passport.
The sky will not be fenced.
Traveler, look up. Stay awhile.
Know that you always have a home here.
May it be so, Amen.