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Interview with Eliyahu McLean
by Sarida Brown
Editor of Caduceus Magazine, 2002
Sarida Brown: What is the purpose of the Peacemaker Community?
Eliyahu McLean: In Hebrew we are called Ruach Shalom and in Arabic Ruh-al-Salaam, both of which mean 'the spirit of peace'. We are an umbrella organisation that connects, trains and empowers peace activists to work in peace building with a spiritual foundation – and also provides support for burnt-out peace activists.
The Peacemaker Community has three tenets. The first is 'not knowing', that is, giving up fixed ideas of how reality should be. One of the problems in the Middle East is that everybody knows – to such an extent that no one is willing to listen to anyone else and their truth. Rabbi David Hartman called Israel – but that could be extended to the whole world – 'a tyranny of certitudes'.
The second tenet is 'bearing witness': to bear witness to both the joy and the suffering of the world, as an active principle.
The third tenet is ‘loving action'. From the first two principles, then to go out into the field and do actual work in projects to open hearts for compassion, for non-violence and reconciliation, especially between Israelis and Palestinians.
One example of how we put these principles into action happened two years ago, when the intifada broke out. A group of activists with Peacemaker Community, together with another organisation, Bustan L'Shalom, organised a three-day fast and prayer vigil in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King: a fast circle to mourn the loss of lives between the children of Abraham on both sides. We found a small tourist overlook above the Western Wall and Al Aqsa Mosque in the Old City, sat down, formed a circle and slept there, and many Palestinians from the Old City of Jerusalem came and joined our circle and shared their hopes and fears and offered their prayers. Many Israeli soldiers also came to our vigil space and several of them said ‘I more than anybody want your prayers for peace to succeed, because I don't want to be here in this role of soldier.' Many religious Jews and Christian pilgrims also joined our circle.
That Friday was called to be a ‘day of rage' and we knew that there were going to be demonstrations and rioting between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian worshippers, and at 12.20pm we heard clashes and the whole overlook filled with onlookers. The police cleared away the square where we were sitting because they were worried for people's safety, but we were holding hands in a circle, chanting ‘Shalom, Salaam' and they said, ‘Everyone has to leave, but they can stay', pointing to us, and it was a very powerful experience.
We saw a need to continue meeting there every week because there were often clashes coinciding with Friday prayers and we wanted to bear witness and have a healing presence, a prayer space where Jews, Muslims, Christians and peace activists could come together.
How do you find the tenacity to keep working?
One principle we are working with is Holy Hutzpa. It takes a lot of hutzpa (audacity) to hurt another person in the name of religion, of God, of what someone feels that God told them about this land, and many are doing that, Jews, Christians and Muslims. So I learnt from
my Rebbe, Shlomo Carlebach, that we have to have Holy Hutzpa to believe that peace is possible, and to believe that in the name of God and spirituality we can be a bridge for healing and reconciliation.
Jerusalem in Hebrew is Yerusha-Shalom which means the ‘legacy of peace'. In Arabic it is Or Shaleem which means ‘the light of peace'. So we are trying to reclaim Jerusalem as peace capital of the world. We are trying to bring the spiritual dimension in to serve as a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians and to define the land in a way that even a Hamas supporter and a settler could agree upon.
When I am sitting with my settler friends, I only have to say ‘Palestinian National Movement' and the blood will start to boil, and there will be a lot of charged energy; and when I'm with my Palestinian friends, I only have to say ‘Zionist National Movement' and the blood will start to boil. But when I define the land as Eretz ha-Shalom in Hebrew, or Ard ilSalam in Arabic, the land of peace, all of a sudden there is a spiritual definition that bridges the two sides. Or Ard il-Mukadisa, the Holy Land. This is the Holy Land for both peoples. In this approach we can bring together religious leaders, sheikhs and the rabbis. In particular I have been working with Palestinian Sufi Muslims, Israeli Orthodox Rabbis and Kabbalists, and these spiritual leaders are trying to bring religion and spirituality to be a bridge, a pathway to peace, and not, God forbid, an obstacle to peace. This is the essence of what we are trying to do in Ruach Shalom.
Is there any precedent for this?
We know that there is a history of positive relations: we know, for example, that the son of Rambam, the greatest Jewish scholar, studied Islamic Mysticism and founded a Jewish Sufi Movement in Cairo and so there is a group of Jews and Muslims now studying the writings of Avraham ben Maimon, Abraham the son of Maimonides, and his descendents. We are reclaiming the historical movements of Jewish and Muslim spiritual reconciliation as a model of what we need to remind people of today, that this is how we used to live.
Over a year ago, during the Intifada, I helped organise a Sheikh and Rabbi summit in Eilat. During the meeting the chief Rabbi of Eilat said, ‘My grandfather and all of my grandfathers were the chief Rabbis of Halab, which is Aleppo in Syria, and when the Jews and Muslims had a dispute in Halab they solved their dispute in the Jewish court of law and all educated Muslims in Halab knew Jewish law by heart'. Then Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari said, ‘Well that's no big deal, when my grandfather studied at Al Azhar University, the biggest Islamic university in the world, in Cairo, he studied the Talmud and he knew it by heart'. Then the chief Rabbi of Ramat Gan said, ‘Well that's no big deal. When my grandfather was the Chief Rabbi of Libya, they used to call him Sheikh Al'Yahud, the Jewish Sheikh, and he knew the Quran and the Quranic commentaries by heart.' Here we saw that two generations ago the spiritual leaders were more than just on speaking terms: they had an intimate knowledge of each other's faiths. So both sides asked each other, how can we bring this message of what we have forgotten back to our mosques and synagogues and our communities, to transform the hate, to remind people that we are not so far removed? People say this is a 2000-year old conflict; it really dates from the last 70 years. Since it is not so ancient, maybe peace is not as impossible as it appears from the cycle of despair that the media feeds.
It sounds as though part of your work is to open up the definition of this conflict, because it is seen so much in political and economic terms. When you change the focus to the spiritual perspective there is a shift in possibilities for reconciliation.
Absolutely, and there are so many tools within Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There is an elaborate reconciliation ritual in ancient Arab society, involving hudna, ceasefire, and sulha, reconciliation. We want to bring in sulha on the national level, sulha between the children of Abraham. All Palestinians understand sulha.
So what is hudna?
Hudna is a ceasefire, a cooling down period. There is a very poignant initiative taking place right now, led by Sheikh Talal Sider, a Hamas sheikh who was transformed by the love of a West Bank settler rabbi, Rabbi Froman – Sheikh Talal Sider is now a member of Yassar Arafat's inner cabinet, responsible for inter-religious affairs. Rabbi Froman and Sheikh Talal Sider have been working to get a hudna accepted as a way forward, to get the army to agree with Hamas to put down their weapons and re-start negotiations: to actually have a hudna, based on religious tenets that are part of the ancient Middle Eastern way of doing things.
The frustration is that the US administration sends the CIA Director George Tenant to work out the ceasefire plan, but it's never really observed. Rabbi Froman also knows Yassar Arafat personally. I heard from Rabbi Froman that Arafat said to him that one of the problems with the negotiations is that we forget to tell each other our stories; that the Israeli style is too blunt. Rabbi Froman understands that in Arab culture dignity and honour is a primary principle and nothing will cause a more angry reaction from Palestinians than a feeling of being dishonoured. If we would approach the negotiations in a spirit of integrity and respect, I believe all the issues and feelings of humiliation could be worked out.
I know that if you approach Palestinians from a place of honour and respect they will say ‘I'll give you my home, we'll share everything'. But if I come with the arrogant attitude that I am going to control them with force and weapons, there can't be peace.
This involves a transformation on both sides.
It's so easy just to blame Israeli society and the occupation, or the Palestinian militancy and suicide bombings. But we have to get to the underlying issue, which is that we are two deeply wounded peoples in the same land, who are destined and blessed to live together, but we each act our wounds out on each other. For Israelis, we project onto the Palestinians that they are the goyim, the non-Jews, who have always been oppressing us, rather than seeing their suffering; and Palestinians sometimes forget that we also have an ancient connection to the land and we also belong here.
You have been talking about your relationship to Palestinians. What about your relationship to militant and extremist Jews?
I don't even like to use the label ‘extremist' Jews or Palestinians because that already demonises a whole group, and part of the problem is demonisation and projection onto other groups. We have to widen the circle of dialogue to include the hopes, dreams and fears of those ‘extreme' voices, otherwise there won't be peace. I believe that to approach things with a spiritual dimension can transform the nature of how we relate to each other and that everything can be solved – the issues of the territories, of who's living where – in a harmonious way. This is the long term vision and it may be that we are planting seeds for it now.
There has to be peace within ourselves first of all. Our way has to be one of non-violence, compassion and non-judgment and through those principles the overall reality can be changed. It is not to say that you can ignore justice for the Palestinians, but you also have to have justice for the Israelis and equal rights for both peoples. I'm not interested in creating an apartheid state with Israelis controlling the lives of Palestinians, but we also need to acknowledge the Jewish historical connection to the land, so we have to look at the higher vision of how we can live together, not just the lowest common denominator which is a fence separating the two peoples.
Ibrahim and I always say that we have to live together. It may be that the first step is separate Israeli and Palestinian states, but what if the ultimate dream was one homeland, the Land of Peace, with Jerusalem as peace capital of the world and that there is room for Jews to live in the West Bank which is their historical homeland and Palestinians to live within Israel in a homeland that has room for everybody.
Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish, the founder of the Islamic Movement, says, ‘Who am I to negate the dreams of the Jewish people to live in their ancient homeland? If I do there will never be peace. And who are you to negate the dreams of my people to live in the land and to return?' It is a radical statement and most on both sides are not ready for this vision, but we need to be thinking of what's the highest possible long-term vision where both peoples can live in wholeness in the land.
People always ask me ‘Are you left wing or right wing?' and I reply, ‘It takes two wings to fly'. We've got to find underlying unity between people on all different sides. I go to Shabbat in the settlements on the West Bank, and that would maybe upset some of my left wing peace activist friends, and then I spend the next day with Palestinian peace activists in Bethlehem, and that might upset some friends in my Jewish community in Jerusalem. But I see the longing for wholeness, the longing to live in a deep connection with the Holy Land, that unites all of us.
The key is that we have to get past our exclusive narrative of the land, both Israeli and Palestinian, to weave together a shared narrative of what it means to live here together. The problem is desire for exclusive human ownership, Israeli or Palestinian, which is leading us to kill each other. We both need to step aside and say, ‘It doesn't belong to me, it doesn't belong to you, it belongs to the One, and this is why it is called the Holy Land.' We can honour the other people who also can consider it holy; they are holy too. Both Palestinian people's and Jewish people's connection is holy, and that is what we mean when we say Ru'h al Salaam, Ruach Shalom, ‘the spirit of peace'. I believe that the spiritual dimension is the only bridge.
Rabbi Froman says, ‘We need to make a primitive peace. I am a proud primitive; we are two primitive people.' Peace is not going to come by academic or military arrangements; we have to acknowledge this deep, ancient and primitive, almost primal, connection that we both have to the land, to see that we ate not separate, we are just one. Ibrahim and I travelled all over the US and UK this summer, and we found that there are pro-Israel and pro-Palestine demonstrations, one trying to outdo the other to gain public approval. We both think that they both have it wrong. There need to be ‘we are all one family' demonstrations, and ‘no-one can make us separate' demonstrations. We have to give up our ego-centred, arrogant, nationalistic perspectives, both Israelis and Palestinians.
As a Kabbalist, can I find the sparks of holiness in the Palestinian connection to the olive trees?
That is the mystic path. This is a mystical land, the land of the Essenes, the Kabbalists, the Sufis, going back thousands of years, so many layers upon layers. On one hand it has been soaked in blood and all the blood that has been shed needs to be healed, and the mystical healing path is the way to do it. That healing path is in Judaism, in Christianity, in Islam; it is the mother of all those paths, the essence, and that essence needs to be tapped into. We need to re-remember and remind each other of that. It can be a way to unite us and transform the reality of how the Israelis treat Palestinians in their territories, and the hatred that many Palestinians have towards Israelis. We need to get to the underlying truth and reality that unites us. We have to tap into that essence to heal.
There are great beings who have been in similar predicaments, like Thich Nhat Hanh in Vietnam, and Nelson Mandela in South Africa. In each case they have set in train deep processes of reconciliation, each in their own tradition. Is there some such process needed in your country?
That is why we are talking about sulha, which needs to be initiated on a national level: sulha between Abraham's family, healing Abraham's family because our shared father Abraham is suffering because of what his children are doing to each other. We read in the bible that when Abraham died, Isaac and Ishmael came together to bury their father at Hebron, where Abraham is buried in the Tomb of the Patriarchs. The tomb today is the only place where there is a mosque and a synagogue in the same building, but now there is a barrier because a settler went and shot people there. Let's reclaim the Tomb of Abraham, open it up and reclaim it as a centre for healing between Abraham's family.
Many Palestinians and Israelis I have talked to have a deep sense of mourning, because there was seemingly such hope 2 years ago. We say that the Holy Land, this beautiful, sacred and precious land, has become in the eyes of the world Ard il hurub, or in Hebrew, Eretz ha-Milchamot, the land of war, and we do many activities to make it holy. This holiday season we are organising a Hanukkah-Ramadan celebration in the Galilee Muslim city of Tamra. Here Jews, Christians, Druze, Bahai and others will share the iftar-Ramadan break fast meal with the Muslims and then all the faiths will light the Hannukah candles and offer blessings for peace. Even though in the eyes of the world it's now seen to be the land of war, Ard il hurub in Arabic, to become Ard el Salam, the land of peace, we are reclaiming the sparks of peace which are hidden in the soil. We will keep the flame of hope alive no matter how bad the situation may seem and how huge the barrier of hatred seems right now, to soften the hearts, to reclaim the tradition of peace, harmony and understanding, which I believe is the inheritance, the legacy for what this sacred land and the peoples who are destined and blessed to live here together have to offer to the world.
Eliyahu McLean |
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