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A Minaret Call in Hebrew
Noga Tarnopolsky, The Jerusalem Post, Aug 21, 2004
Some words are almost impossible to ignore, and some gestures, impossible to forget. On Wednesday of last week I found myself sharing a lunch table with Abdel Jalil Abu Ra'ayan and Sa'adia, a late-middle aged couple from Hebron. Abu Ra'ayan, deeply lined, has the patient manner of an educator, which he is.
I asked how many children the couple had, and Abu Ra'ayan said three boys, three girls, then paused, and said – and one more, a son who died when he was shot in the eye by a stray military bullet. When he explained this, Abu Ra'ayan lifted a heavy finger and poked it directly into his left eye, depicting the puncture. It was technical and true, and was almost too painful to watch.
A day earlier I went to Roby Damelin, who I remember as one of the few pleasant, decent, ethical PR people in Tel Aviv. Until two years ago, Roby represented any number of cool gastronomic products, many of which I enjoyed reporting on. In March, 2002, her son David was killed by a West Bank sniper.
A few months later, she closed the business. The thing about seeing Roby this time is that she had no idea who I was. She smoked and looked right through me. When I said "Remember, I was a food writer?", she replied "Ah. That was another life," and continued looking at me for a while, perplexed, before turning to talk with a man who recently accompanied her to Italy on a trip representing the Forum of Bereaved Families. The eyes never lie. And nothing in this world is as piercingly authentic as a bereaved parent looking you in the eye, seeing or not seeing. The Abu Ra'ayans and the Damelins are members of an awful club and of a wonderful forum. In a way we all, at least partially, belong as well.
I met them as part of two days I spent at The Sulha Way, a fairly astonishing event that won me over completely, and which received all too little publicity. The Sulha Way was established by Gabriel Meyer, son of Rabbi Marshall Meyer (for those of you from Buenos Aires or New York), as a forum for bringing spiritual leaders together for peace. This was not a light or lighthearted enterprise. Rabbi Menachem Fruman was there. Rabbi and MK Michael Melchior was there. The Mukhtar of Majd el Crum was there, and after Fruman led the Jewish prayers for Rosh Chodesh, he called Muslims to prayer as if from a minaret – in Arabic and in Hebrew. It is impossible to describe the silence that fell upon the thousand people sitting and listening to them. A minaret call in Hebrew? Just imagine.
But the Sulha gathering was also a place to lunch and chat with people like the Abu Ra'ayans, or Roby, or a Sufi priest from Ghana via Philadelphia, or a Zulu chief from South Africa, or the personal representative of the Dalai Lama – and so on. The gathering itself was remarkable, and the things said there were striking.
Gabriel Meyer, a musician and Kabbalist from Amirim, said very simply that "Nothing else has worked, so we – each of us – has to accept the creative responsibility to surprise reality, until we are able to change it". To surprise reality. Mahmud Salama, from Calansua, a member of the Sulha Way's organizing board, was so consumed by hatred, he used to dream of being "a kind of Superman, and bombing the Knesset". Something in him changed when he realized he was overtaken with hatred for people he had never even met. Today, he stands on stage translating Rabbi Melchior's words from Hebrew to Arabic and then Sari Nusseibah's words from Arabic into Hebrew. And he smiles when Nusseibah chides him for 'overly liberal' translations.
Gabriel Meyer is not the kind of person who wallows about wondering what to do. In an important way, he has got up and done what many of us feel should be done, without knowing how to do it. He has gathered a consensus of simple objectives that very few Israelis disagree on – the importance of spiritual life and individual identity and the pursuit of peace – disconnected them from political perversions, and presented them to other like-thinking individuals. That's all. As small a thing as it is, it was majestic.
I have no doubt that disagreements could have erupted among the multitudes milling about the three day event, held at Park Jabotinsky (yes) in Binyamina, but by and large, they did not. It wasn't the point. The Likud Central Committee, meanwhile, that met as evening prayers were being said on day two of the Sulha Way, should have been invited, en masse, to observe this gathering of peoples. It might have served to remind them – as it did for so many of us – of their small place in the general order of things.
Eliyahu McLean |
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