A world not quite fatal

“Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?”

On Tuesday I sat in the shop owned by Raghida, one of the Nazareth mamas who has taken me in, who regularly fills my social life with introductions to her children and acquaintances, and fills my plate with delicious food. I was gluing rhinestones onto the front of a dress Raghida was preparing for a customer, as Raghida finished sewing a shawl to match. Rhinestones are an essential part of fashion here, and Raghida discovered that I have a small weakness for shiny things as well.

As we worked, Raghida wheezed a huge sigh and looked at me, through eyes heavy with black eyeliner and lack of sleep. She nodded to the TV above her desk, and explained her worry over the news of the last couple of days. In the nearby Arab city of Umm Al Fahm, right-wing Israelis had been marching and “demanding loyalty to Israel,” resulting in counter-protests and violent clashes. I hadn’t heard about it. So I shared with her the news I had been following, about the celebration for Arab culture that had been banned this past weekend in Jerusalem, resulting in clashes, protests and arrests.

“I don’t want to live with this violence all the time,” Raghida said after a pause. I didn’t know how to respond. This is a successful and wealthy entrepreneur, with a strong role in the lives of her doting children, who travels all over the world for business. And yet, she feels powerless in this situation. Can you blame her for feeling frustrated? But life has to go on, what else can you do?

As I read the news every day, I find a few signs of hope, reconciliation, or moves toward a better future for Israel. But most things indicate exactly the opposite: steps if not leaps and sprints in the wrong direction. There are not words to express the increasing desperation and heartbreak.

But people just want a normal life as far as possible. Humans are remarkably adaptable—what is one more breach of human rights? What is one more violent clash in a city nearby? What is one more report of continuing violence in Gaza? The frustration is internalized and life goes on.

If it’s this easy to get used to close up, it’s no wonder we have trouble feeling moved by the stories far away, let alone standing up against it, and finding ways of standing with the people here.

“Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good? Such thinking, in the words of the ecologist Paul Shepard, ‘idealizes life with only its head out of water, inches above the limits of toleration of the corruption of its own environment… Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?’ ” Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Pray for Rain; Act for Peace

Yesterday I had one of my tour groups look down into the cistern at Nazareth Village, which is almost empty of water. I was about to remark on the sad lack of rain this winter when the cloud above me dropped about five drops of water on my head, and then moved on.

I looked up and felt like this was a cruel thing for the sky to do, to ruin my bit about needing rain, without actually giving us any water to work with.

It has been a couple of weeks with no rain, during the season in which the region gets their entire moisture for the year, and this does not bode well for the coming months. The poppies in my back yard already hang their heads in exhaustion.

People have described to me how the land starts to dry out from green to brownish yellow, as soon as the winter rains end. But I had no idea it could happen so quickly. I am used to green, so I take the green of winter here for granted. Besides, I love blue sky and sunshine, and feel pretty down on dreary days. Last year studying in Wuppertal, Germany, I woke up every morning to rain, and groaned.

Rain means something different here. I spent last Tuesday hiking on Mt. Arbel, and ate lunch overlooking the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret), which is Israel's main freshwater resource. My friend Mike pointed out the various pumping stations along the coast of the lake, whose water levels reached a record and dangerous low last fall.

It is difficult to find information on the water crisis here without an obvious political slant. "Middle Eastern rhetoric often portrays the issue of water as an existential, zero-sum conflict - casting either Israel as a malevolent sponge sucking up Arab water resources, or the implacably hostile Arabs as threatening Israel's very existence by denying life-giving water," explains a BBC article, which summarizes the complicated issue much better than I can.

What I can say I've personally observed, though, is that Israelis have much greater access to resources than Palestinians, whether that resource is land, roads, building permits, or municipal trash pick up. The imbalance holds true with water as well.

Water resources--even the aquifers under the West Bank--are used at a much higher rate by Israelis than Palestinians. And although access to land is a constant sore point, access to water is a matter of immediate survival. And every bit of rain is a blessing.

Last night I went to sleep to the sound of heavy, driving rain. I dreamed of running through the rain, and woke to thunder. It can rain all day if it likes.

In the long run, no matter the political conflict, what this land as a whole needs is solutions that increase the sustainability of life in a dry land. As the BBC article states, on the issue of water, "Israel and the Palestinians must work together, because they cannot survive as combatants."

Tuesdays are my day off...

Last Tuesday I went to Haifa. I caught the bus 331 in the morning and arrived successfully at the central bus station.
I should note here that I really love exploring places by myself. I like being able to stop and take pictures, people-watch, change my plans minute to minute, and talk to strangers. So far this has been more or less impossible in Nazareth, where it is strange to see women acting very independently, and there aren't many women on the street. I feel very conspicuous.
So Haifa--an Israeli college town--seemed a good choice for exploring last Tuesday. I set out with a map from an outdated tourist information book and an abstract plan that would hopefully lead to a jog on the beach at some point.

The first sight of the day was the Dagon Grain Elevators, which are pretty fancy for storing grain if you ask me. Maybe they felt the need to pretty them up because of the other close-by attraction, the Baha'i Shrine and Gardens. These perfectly manicured gardens are breathtaking, and take up an entire hillside. Or perhaps I should say mountainside, considering this is Mt. Carmel. To add to the centuries of conflicting religious claims on this region, the Baha'u'llah (who founded the Baha'i religion) pitched a tent at the base of Mt. Carmel in 1891 and claimed it as a holy site for the Baha'i faith.

I stopped by the tourist information office, and the woman at the counter took a break from her lunch to say "Today is Purim. There's a childrens festival in Carmel." She headed back to the break room, satisfied that my needs were met, and I had to call her back out to find out what bus to take.

I had a few misunderstandings with the bus system, but at the first incorrect bus stop, I met an American Jewish couple staying with relatives during a conference in Haifa. They helpfully gave me directions to the festival. As we waited for the bus together, the couple remarked what a new and exciting feeling it was for them to be in a place where the majority of people are celebrating the same holidays and traditions they are.

I can identify with that feeling to some extent, and I understand how great it feels. Growing up as a Mennonite I felt a bit like a minority in the surrounding culture, until I went to Bethel College, that precious little microcosm of Mennonite life... Suddenly everything in my life revolved around a Mennonite-friendly vocabularly and set of traditions. Not only did I not have to explain that, no, I don't drive a buggy, but I was surrounded by other people raised on peace, justice, and zwieback... It's certainly exciting and pleasant to have a place where you feel so at home and so understood.

But any community with a strong majority cultural identity faces the challenge of how to celebrate the culture without excluding or marginalizing the minorities cultures. I think back to the number of conversations I had with people frustrated that, as much as Bethel touts "community," that community didn't usually seem to include them.

I will assume that your thoughts are going in the same direction as mine, thinking about this within the context of Israel, and I don't want to belabor this point, but I will just say: as much as I can understand the good feeling that comes from that feeling of belonging, the majority culture always needs to be sensitive to the exclusion, separation, and frustration for the "outsiders" that can happen as a result.

Oops, tangent. Back to Haifa.

Eventually I figured out it was time to get off the bus when I started seeing parents carrying tired little kids in costume. Just a block off the main street, on the promenade overlooking the port of Haifa, was what appeared to be a giant Halloween party, but we're not in the US, we're in Israel, and this is Purim.

Purim is the Jewish holiday celebrating the story of Esther. Esther hid her Jewish identity from the evil Haman, and so today this is a festival when kids dress up in costume. There was face-painting, a circle of little kids banging on giant drums, a stage where a woman dressed up as a fairy encouraged kids to share their singing and breakdancing skills, carnival food, an inflatable castle with a ball pit, and lots of awesome costumes. I was jealous that I could only be an observer, not a participant.

I eventually made my way over to the churches on Mt. Carmel, where a 70 year old man named Odi adopted me and insisted on giving me a tour of the entire church, including a maze of different chapels with statues of Mary, Jesus, or St. Elias. Sometimes all three. He insisted that I take pictures of all of the statues, and I obliged, but I won't share them all with you here. Our only language in common was my little bit of Arabic, and it took me an hour to gracefully extricate myself from his attentiveness. It was only later that I realized that, with my limited understanding, I nodded and smiled to a question he repeated over and over, and I had accidentally agreed to visit Odi again...

I took a cable car down from Mt. Carmel. I still wanted to take a run on the beach in Haifa, but the sun was down and it was time to head home (so yes, the picture at the top of this post is a lie, that was from a different trip to Haifa)... I wandered around looking for the train station marked on my map, and finally asked a local where the train station was. "This I can tell you with certainty," she answered, which seemed like a hopeful sign.

Unfortunately, her directions didn't work out so well for me. I ended up joining forces with a group of Chinese tourists also lost and looking for the train station, and then taking the train the wrong direction, pleading with the railroad management to let me go the two stops in the opposite direction with my one-trip ticket, waiting at a dark bus stop for an hour, and finally boarding a bus back home. I was the only one on the bus since it was the very first stop on the route, and I used my five words of Arabic to break the ice with the bus driver. He was very friendly and helpful, and after finishing our conversation, I promptly fell asleep for the drive home.

...Tomorrow is Tuesday again. What adventures await?!

Confessions of a German Major

It was Monday morning, and Razan greeted me, “Hi, we have a German group at 2:30. They don’t speak English. Can you do the tour?” Surely I can do it, I thought, with my usual self-confidence. I mean, there are some people I work with who give tours in several languages.

Rodrigo, for example, a 20-year-old Brazilian volunteer, gives better tours in English than I do. He also speaks Portuguese and Spanish fluently, and today he gave his first tour in Hebrew, which he has been studying for less than a year. If he can do that, surely I can do a second language, right?…

Secretly, though, I had been dreading this moment. On my application to work at Nazareth Village, I listed German as one of my abilities, and since I did not claim fluency, it was not quite a lie. And yes, I had had the German script for a few weeks now, but I was kind of hoping that my German skills would never be really needed.

I didn’t want to back down from a challenge, though, so I spent the rest of the morning stretched out on a couch in the break room studying the script, or wandering through the tour mumbling German phrases to myself.

The time came for the tour, and I had been giving myself little pep talks all day, in addition to cramming my brain with new, specific vocabulary such as “Oberflaeche,” “Schriftgelehren,” and “Aufruhr.” But only moments into the tour, my resolve broke down. I noticed people exchanging amused glances as I struggled over sentence structure, word recall, and adjective endings—pretty sure they weren’t being mean, they just felt embarrassed for me. I was feeling pretty embarrassed myself, and as I got more nervous, my errors increased… I foundered.

The group’s pastor came to my rescue. “I can translate into German if you would like…” I still wasn’t quite ready to accept defeat, so I tried again, only to collapse into nervous giggles after yet another roadblock in my speech. Yes, nervous giggles, it was that bad. “Would this be better if I just said it in English?” I asked the group. They agreed enthusiastically, a little too enthusiastically for my pride, but I had no choice but to swallow my humiliation and try to finish the rest of the tour on a positive note.

I was able to use my German to some extent during the rest of the tour—giving directions, answering questions, carrying on conversations with individuals. But when it comes down to it I just have to admit that there is a limit to my German language, and I am currently just not up to the task of appearing as an expert in front of a group.

But why, several coworkers asked (with only friendly intentions and curiosity, I know), didn’t I end up doing the tour in German? These are people who spend their daily lives alternating between Arabic, Hebrew, and English, and it shamed me to say that I am really only competent in… one language.

I am spoiled, I realize, by my own academic abilities and do-it-myself attitude. I am just not used to being unable to do something that other people can do. I can remember having this feeling of failure only a couple of other times in my life. Once was in seventh grade volleyball. As competitive as I was and as much as I enjoyed the game, my mediocrity compared to the other girls was a hard truth.

There was also the moment I gave up my dream to become a translator. I realized at some point in high school that other people in the world were learning so many more languages than I was, and I wouldn’t be able to compete.

That’s not entirely true, though. Yes, I was far behind, but let’s face it, I wasn’t working very hard in Madame Tour’s high school French. And that’s where my spoiled nature gets in the way of actually excelling: I am terrible at studying, and I often rely on natural talents rather than hard work to get me where I want to go. I love learning languages, but memorization and practice are just necessities for achieving fluency, and I can be seriously lazy when it comes to those two things.

…So these days, I’m trying to accept my lack of language accomplishment, and to feel like I’m still an ok human being in spite of it. It’s good lesson for me to be reminded of my weaknesses and shortcomings, but it is intensely embarrassing for someone who is used to doing things right, the first time, by myself.

The other day Rodrigo made an analogy for spiritual discipline and following God’s commandments, but it struck me for its truth in and of itself: In both learning languages and playing instruments, he pointed out, freedom to express yourself stems directly from your level of ability. And your level of ability results from the discipline to practice and to train yourself.

Training and discipline--> freedom of expression. …I had a flashback to standing in front of the group, seeing a mental image of where the word I wanted appeared in the script, but not being able to quite grasp it. Frozen, knowing what I wanted to say, and knowing that if I had studied just a little bit harder, I would have known how to say it too.

This reminder of my own shortcomings is a good prelude to my month in Germany. I really want that freedom to of fluency in a second language, so my goal is to speak only German the entire time I am there. Maybe the lessons I’ve learned from language challenges I’ve faced here in Nazareth will be the catalyst I need to make that really happen. Ha…Maybe.

I learned a new trick.

I'm experimenting with hyperlinks. Let's see if this works.
I really like this image. On first glance, it looks like the people are going to kiss, but as the caption explains, it is a confrontation.

Of course it's a confrontation!
But I love the split second of mistaking the intimacy of conflict for the intimacy of love. Someone remarked to me the other day, "How can these people not get along? They live so close to each other?" It is true--the people affected by the Israel-Palestine conflict are neighbors geographically in a very small land, and are sharing space--coexisting--in every aspect of their lives. As a result, the actions on either side are so personal, and so intensely felt.

This is not the kind of positive intimacy that the word "coexistence" brings to mind but... Just for a split second, reset your image of this place, and imagine the awesome possibilities that the intimacy of these shared communities could bring, could they coexist in tolerance, cooperation and peace.

This article was the picture's original context.