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Remembering Rabin

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Remembering Rabin Remembering Rabin Thomas A. Boogaart Since I have returned from a sabbatical year in Israel, many friends have asked me whether I had a "good experience." I do not know how to answer them. It is hard to find adjectives to describe my year. I usually respond by replacing "good" with "full," or "intense," or "tumultuous." This fall on the eve of the Jewish new year (rash hashana), commentators in Israel itself were hard pressed to interpret the past year and to find the right adjectives. Early in my stay Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, and later the war in Lebanon flared up. I and my family were living on the Christian moshav, Nes Ammim, in Western Galilee about fifteen kilometers from the Lebanese border between Akko and Nahariya. My Son now knows what a Cobra attack helicopter looks like and that an F-16 fighter-jet can outmaneuver anything in the sky. He has seen them perform overhead on their retaliatory raids in Lebanon. Sojourner Our experience of Israel? So much blood, so much history, so much energy, so much hope, so much hatred. Israel is a welter of longing and passion. Conversations in the shuk (bazaar) erupt and spill over the passersby; the Arab woman harvesting herbs along the road leading to Nes Ammin raises her head as I walk by, and her obsidian eyes are so brilliant and intense that I avert my own; the butcher in the grocery store in Nahariya with numbers tattooed on his arm moves sleepily from customer to customer, his body in this world but his soul clearly in another; an Arab friend sinks into depression when we visit a zoo of desert animals in the Negev because he sees in their lethargic captivity a symbol of his own. Living, working, and playing in Israel, I could not help but absorb what was happening all around me . The insistent and labyrinthine relationships put my soul into a state of suspension. I found myself someplace between America and Israel, someplace between Christianity and Judaism. Both my naivete and my wisdom evaporated in the extreme heat. I offered my opinions; I embarrassed myself; I had flashes of insight; I felt my ignorance. My Christian beliefs did not settle easily in this passionate and divided land. My theology and I were sojourners. The conviction that light is more powerful than darkness, that good triumphs in the end, that love is more powerful than hate was especially difficult to maintain here. 85 I had come to Israel with some vague notion that the land of Jesus would somehow enhance the experience of Jesus. I had come as a pilgrim not a tourist, or so I convinced myself. I was not just another middle-class American from West Michigan, looking for a spiritual rush by combining exotic travel and religion. I did not join a gaggle of tourists, donning funny hats, and following an umbrella held high in the hand of a disheveled guide ambling through the streets of Jerusalem. I was looking for the afterglow of glory, the embers of holiness. I was hoping that proximity would have the same effect on me that it had had on Isaiah when he approached the temple. I wanted to see the seraphs and to hear another round of "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory" (Isaiah 6:3). And if the coals on the altar were no longer hot enough to burn my lips, I at least wanted them to warm my hands. Almost without thinking, we call Israel the Holy Land. Yet it is hard to sustain any understanding of the holy in the undifferentiated modern world of here and now and this and that. For too many of us in the late twentieth century, nothing is related to anything else, and therefore everything is amenable to manufacturing and marketing. There are no boundaries in our world and therefore ultimately there is no trespassing. We do not violate any spirits when we cut through a forest, dam a river, tear open the land, or demean a person. The holy presupposes a world of relationships, an intimate world; God is the creator and connected to all that exists. God's Spirit holds everything together and life-giving power is potentially made available to us in such ordinary things as land. If the land of Israel is holy, it is holy in ways I was not prepared to see. I have walked the streets of the city of David, climbed the mountain of Deborah and Barak, seen the sources of the Jordan bursting from the rock, dipped my hand in the sea which Jesus quieted, sat on the hillside where he multiplied the bread and fish, knelt where he hung on the cross, and entered the empty tomb. Yet, I did not experience the holy in any of this. I was more tourist than I now care to admit. I, like so many today who travel to the Holy Land, was impulse buying in a shop of religious curiosities. Not having carefully examined what I needed spiritually, much less what the community I served needed, I bought what I merely wanted. Impulse buying can be a dangerous thing in the Holy Land. As a rabbi lecturing at Nes Ammim warned us, Christians can lose their faith visiting the holy sites, if they do not know what they are looking for. What kind of spiritual experience are you likely to have in the empty tomb of Jesus when you have been fighting to hold your place in line for half an hour and a brown-robed priest allows some dignitary to cut in ahead of you? What kind of spiritual experience are you likely to have beneath the cross of Jesus when a man smirks for the camera with his hand reaching for the black hole in which Jesus' cross was placed? Calvary reduced to a Kodak moment. The black box, which some refer to as a camera, is voracious enough to swallow 86 everything holy in the land. Exploiting these holy sites and fighting to control them have demonstrated the worst side of Christianity since before the Crusades. If the land is holy, it will only yield its particular glory after much digging and careful sifting. In this article, I have reluctantly begun the process of sifting my Israel experiences. I say "reluctantly" because to remember is to resurrect. To remember is to feel again the ambiguity of belonging and not belonging, loving and leaving. I leave it to the reader to assess my opinions, my embarrassments, my insights, and my ignorance. In this article I shall focus on the assassination of Rabin, for his blood overcame my year and more than anything else defined it. The sources for these reflections are news clippings from the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Report, conversations with friends in Israel, and documents made available at Nes Ammim. The Blood-soaked Song of Peace The months leading up to the November 4 peace rally at Kirkar Malkhei Israel (Square of Israel's Kings) in Tel Aviv were difficult ones for Yitzhak Rabin. He had led the Labor party to victory in the June, 1992, elections and the nation toward phased negotiations with the Palestinians. The centerpiece of these negotiations was the principle, "land for peace." In exchange for a Palestinian rejection of violence as a means of diplomacy and recognition of the State of Israel, the government of Rabin agreed to the creation of the "Palestinian Authority," that is, limittd sovereignty in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. The resistance to negotiations was intense. Some Israelis distrusted the Palestinians. Their fears were forcefully expressed by General Rafael Eytan, "The mentality of those who call themselves Arabs is based on the Koran . The Koran preaches the law of the sword. Infidels have the choice between conversion and death. This is the Koran's definition of peace. Thus, according to the Koran, there can only be peace with a non-Muslim if he becomes a Muslim or if he dies." David Wilder, a community spokesman for the Jewish enclave in Hebron, drew the inevitable conclusion from this understanding of the so-called Arab mentality: "Israel has to make sure it is in as strong a position as possible. The Arab mentality understands strength and takes advantage of weakness." Other Israelis believed the land itself was a non-negotiable gift of God, first promised to Abraham and miraculously restored in the 1967 war. Their feelings were summarized in the words of Rabbi Haim Druckman: "Just as it is forbidden to give up one letter from the Torah, it is forbidden to make concessions on the Land of Israel." In the hearts of many Israelis, fear of the Arab and anxiety over the land hardened into hatred for Rabin. Aharon Domb, spokesman for the Council of Jewish Settlements in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza District, warned Rabin in a letter written on May 13, 1994, that people were despairing of his policies and 87 plotting violence, "To my sorrow, I have been hearing recently that the one solution ... is assassination . ... We must do all we can to prevent this. We for our part, are doing all we can, but I see it as proper to warn you, and to say that if you continue with your sharp statements you will bear 'indirect responsibility' for such evil action on the part of an individual as an outcome of your policy." On September 13, 1995, Moshe Feiglin, leader of Zo Artzeinu (This is our land) said that his group planned to hold the government responsible "for its crime against security and Judaism." Standing outside Rabin's residence on the eve of Yorn Kippur, a rabbi, whose name was not reported, read out this curse in Aramaic from the practical Kabbalah: "And on him, Yitzhak son of Rosa, known as Rabin we have permission.
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