Only in?

Fortunately two months in Australia, where tea is taken religiously between 6:30 and 7:30pm, did not wipe out my conditioning for a more humane dinner hour (sorry Kay). Ten o’clock is mealtime at Crown Park.

Here in Israel, however, ten is early. Most restaurants, outside of hotels, don’t have full wait and kitchen staff on before 11pm. Symphony, opera, and theatre performances don’t start until 8:30. And if you want to go to a bar and not be the only person at it, don’t plan to go before 1 am. I’m definitely too old to be doing bars!

Eating alone, as many of us know, is the least pleasant aspect of traveling, or of being at home. I must say, however, that Israel is one of the easiest places I’ve been in to eat out alone. Israelis are very social, Palestinians even more so. If you are alone, it will not be for long as you are easily and readily drawn into conversation and fellowship with those around you. What a gift.

Tonight I ate at a little local establishment. Next to me were four soldiers grabbing a bite before heading back into the bitter (it is only 10°s tonight) Jerusalem night. It wasn’t long before we were exchanging remarks and nattering. It was obvious that they were having a problem with their guns – they kept slipping off of their chairs. Avi asks if they may put them on my chair which is only holding my sweater and bag. Sure. Of course.

But then I had to look at these four automatic weapons sitting opposite me. Even Art, major ticked with me, isn't this imposing.

Carol asked last week if one ever gets used to this armed presence. I sent her this surrep- titiously taken shot (I mean photo) in my local grocery store the other day.

The answer to Carol is, “No.”

At least we North American’s don’t get used to this. We have been so sheltered from a reality that most of the rest of the world lives with that we have created our own reality. I’m not sure which is real.

The guys were great. We shared lots of laughs, especially at my lack of anything but badly mangled Hebrew. And I had nothing to fear. After all, two of the soldiers still had rather nasty looking hand guns strapped to their hips . . .

Post Election

Tuesday’s Israeli elections managed to pull a few surprises out of the ballot box.

While, as predicted, the centrist Kadima party won the most seats – 28 out of the 120 in the Knesset – the right-winged Likud Party, which has had a domineering presence in this country for over thirty years, was reduced to fifth party status, taking only 11 seats. As one commentator wrote, the results are a stinging rejection of Netanyahu - the politician and the ideology. (Horovitz, "Analysis"

Twelve of the thirty-one parties vying for seats met the 2% threshold for inclusion in the Knesset. Left of centre Labour takes 20 seats, the “Pensioners” party surprising everyone by going from no seats to seven. Israel has a nation-wide proportional electoral system in which one votes for a party, not a candidate. The seats are then distributed amongst the parties according to the proportion of the popular vote they garnered.

While Likud has been dealt what some describe as a “death blow”, hard-lined nationalist sentiment has not. Shas and Israel Beitenu took third and fourth seat counts.

The challenge now is for Prime Minister elect, Ehud Olmert, to assemble at least sixty-one Members of the Knesset into a coalition agreed upon pursuing his intention to unilaterally set final borders for the State of Israel by the time of the next election in 2010

The Election

Welcome to the regular Israeli readers this blog has picked up! Thank you for your hospitality while I am in your country.

Israel is in the midst of an election campaign. Tuesday the 28th is Election Day.

There are 31 parties vying for the 120 seats in the Knesset, the national legislature. The three primary parties are the right wing Likud, the left wing Labour and the centrist Kadima. Someone described Israeli politics as one of the purest forms of democracy. In deed, this may be so, but as with so many things, the purist form is seldom the cleanest or the most efficient!

If you have gotten used to Canadian political mach- inations – she was Conservative now she’s Liberal, he was with the Liberals yesterday but today he is with the Conservatives, he was an NDP premier now he’s leader of . . . – you’ll have no problem here. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, incapacitated in January by a devastating stroke, was elected in 2003 as leader of the right wing Likud Party. It is a hard-edged, take-no-prisoners Mike-Harris kind of party. Sharon became frustrated with party members when many would not support his plan to withdraw from Gaza so he formed what is now the centrist, and leading, Kadima Party. Acting as Prime Minister, and leading Kadima in this election, is Ehud Olmert. He is not known for his charisma so the political strategy seems to be to keep him seen to be governing rather than out knocking on doors. It is a strategy that would appear to be working. Kadima is well ahead of Likud and Labour in the polls and expected to take a third of the seats.

Leading Likud, Sharon’s former party, is its former leader and a former Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s been unable to establish any traction and his party is running a distant third in the polls.

The Labour Party formed the government for the first 29 years of Israel’s modern life. Arguing for a bilateral peace settlement with the Palestinians and withdrawal from West Bank territories, it has been a large political force but has not been able to garner enough political support to accomplish its policies.

In many respects Sharon pulled a classic Canadian Liberal move when he pulled Labour’s defining plank out from under it to form Kadima. In this election Olmert has pledged to unilaterally withdraw from large sections of the West Bank (Palestinian territories taken by Israel in 1967), maintain specific settlements and land, and complete the massive concrete security fence to define a permanent border.

While in Canada the norm is for one party to hold a majority of seats in the House of Commons, here the norm is coalition government. I mentioned earlier that Kadima is predicted to take a third of the seats. In order to govern it will have to curry support from a coalition of the other 30 parties in the Knesset. Oddly, a portion of this support will actually come from far right wing parties who will exchange hard-edged policies for a seat at the cabinet table.

Because civic life here is entirely conducted in Hebrew, it is not easy for me to get a sense of this campaign. Local news and radio shows, posters and banners are all in Hebrew. The English language papers do not offer a full-flavoured commentary on the issues. An Op-Ed piece in this weekend's Jerusalem Post does offer some interesting analyses of a wider emerging trend in Israeli politics ( "An Israel Transformed"). and our Globe and Mail posted online Sunday an insightful article on the campaign (“Israel braces for crucial vote”). In conversation with Jewish Israelis, however, I hear an enormous apathy. There is a deep fatigue at the on-going violence and threat of violence and a certain resignation that no party has the political will or capital to change it. Predictions are that this election will have an historic low voter turn out. Arab Israelis and Palestinians I talk to despair that Israel will ever concede any of their economic, military, or territorial dominance and that the cycle of violence and discrimination will only continue.

The introduction of the new Palestinian government of Hamas makes for an interesting side story but it does not seem to have had much impact upon this election. While most Jewish Israelis I talk to understandably rail against this party which refuses to acknowledge that Israel has a place in the Mideast, they have also had to say that it was democratically elected and the development of democratic institutions in the Palestinian territories is, ultimately, the route to peace in the Mideast.

As a visitor, the most visible sign of this election is the heightened security presence. While residents and security forces are always vigilant, they are especially so now. Two major bombings were thwarted last week. Going into a popular club Thursday evening I was subjected not just to the regular look in my bag and wave of the metal detecting wand, but a thorough search, pat down, and request for ID. Land borders have been closed or severely restricted, resulting in my decision to cancel a planned trip to Egypt. There is a sense that collectively everyone is holding their breath, hoping and praying that March 28th comes and goes without violence.

Sheep Alert!

This for St. Mark's folk --

-- for all your talk about sheep, and the choir no doubt rehearsing "All In An April's Evening", sheeping here in this land is a dangerous profession . . . .

Be nice to your sheep, where e're they bahhh . . .

City Hall Square

Toronto architect Jack Diamond, who has designed the new Four Season's Opera House in Toronto, designed the Jerusalem City Hall on the seam between East and West Jerusalem.

Magic

I found my way up to the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre today. The Ethiopian Coptics camp up there. I've been looking for the access to it since I arrived. "Follow the signs to 'Mike's Internet Café"' someone told me. Right.

Well, he was.

On my way there I got tangled up in a group of Italian Christians doing the stations of the cross with a great deal of passion.. Desperate to get away from them I slipped into Queen Helen Coptic Orthodox Church. Through the chapel and down a precarious, narrow, and low set of steps there is a cistern that reputedly was discovered by Queen Helen, Emperor Constantine's mother, in the 4th century of this Common Era.

I slipped the priest ten shekels and went down.

There was a group of "mystics" from a kibbutz there. They were singing Hebrew folk songs, laughing, splashing in the water, dancing, harmonizing. The acoustics were extraordinary. Their energy and joy were contagious as they generously included me.

The songs gave way to one sounding a mantra. Everyone went quiet, then, one after another, joined him, then breaking into harmony. This went on for minutes, the reverberations moving into and out of the curves and indentations of the cistern and off of the water.

Magic.

A single voice then began the most haunting Hebrew song.

The other voices fell away and this amazing voice, and its emotion, filled the cavern.

As he ended his voice just hung there, only slowly fading, being replaced by the sound of dripping water.

When I opened my eyes everyone was standing motionless, arms uplifted, as if in a trance.

Without another sound the group made their way up the steps and out.

I was left there alone, the water dripping the only sound.

Awesome.

Street Art

Street art on Rundle Mall in Adelaide, Australia . . .

Shalom. Salam. Peace.

I attended St. Andrews Presbyterian Church Sunday morning. St. Andrew's was founded in 1927 as a Scottish Protestant religious presence in Jerusalem. It served the sizeable Scottish population -- mostly soldiers, civil administrators, and members of the Palestine Police -- until the end of the British Mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. With Israeli domination of Jerusalem after the Six Day War in 1967, St. Andrew's focused its ministry on welcoming and encouraging Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. In more recent years it has added to this mission outreach to Palestinian citizens.

Reaching deep into the well of discretion and tact, let me say only that the service stirred little in me. There were several bus loads of pilgrims in attendance. Each was named, stood, and applauded, gifts were presented and applauded. We sang a hymn from their new hymnbook that the minister liked so much he had us sing it a second time:

Grace is when God gives us what we don't deserve.
Grace is when God gives us what we don't deserve.
He does it because he loves us.
He does it because he loves us.
Grace is when God gives us what we don't deserve.

Second verse much like the first . . .

Mercy is when God doesn't give us what we deserve . . .

I checked the credits, surprised that my mother wasn't the author . . . (sorry, Mom!)

Clearly in Scotland God is still a Father and we are all men.

It took a latté and a double espresso in the German Colony after the service to calm my frayed nerves.


In the evening I went into the old city for an ecumenical lenten service at the German Church of the Redeemer. It was beautiful. A simple liturgy by candle light with Taizé music, simply, quietly sung repetitive choruses interspersed with readings of scripture and silence. The birds, invigorated by spring, cavorted in the cloister, their song filling the vaulted stone ceiling of the chapel.

At one point during silence the Muslim call to prayer echoed across the top of the city. The liturgist and organist both held the silence and let the call hang in the air. Later as we quietly sang the Agnus Dei, the cadence and rhythm of our singing seemed to melt into the cadence and rhythm of the Muslim prayers as if one prayer.

Shalom. Salam. Peace.

Conditioning

It is hard to unlearn near death lessons. My close encounter with an Australian BMW erased a life-time of conditioning and replaced it with the simple instinct to always look right before stepping off the curb.

Here in Israel, however, cars drive on the right side of the street. I need to relearn old habits: look left !

Speaking of left and right, both Hebrew and Arabic are read and written from right to left. Books open from left to right. I watched a woman ahead of me at the check out signing her credit card receipt, backwards. I had to restrain myself from intervening! It just didn’t seem right!

Condi- tioning. Important life lesson. Especially when trying to understand the complexity of cultures and traditions so different lived in such proximity.

Dignity in Difference

The differences between East and West Jerusalem are stark. West, Jewish, Jerusalem is not unlike the cities that we know. It is very much a Western city with an order and sensibility that is familiar. People dress and look like people on the streets of Toronto.

Unlike what we are used to, however, is the presence of security forces. They are omnipresent and visible. Police and military vehicles patrol the streets. Most every shop and restaurant has a guard at the door armed with a metal detector. All bags are checked before you enter. One gets used to standing in line for a bus or a coffee, the semi- automatic weapon of the soldier, usually just a kid, in front of you bumping into your nose. Teenagers who should be text messaging and preparing for tonight's party are instead in brown fatigues, back pack slung over their shoulder along with their automatic weapon. Military service is mandatory.

In East, Arab, Jerusalem it is different. Largely the buildings are older and in poor repair, evidence of a depressed economy and a repressed people. Trade commonly takes place right on the street. At Nablus Road and Sultan Suleiman goods are piled right on the sidewalk. Streets are crowded, sidewalks narrow, cars in rough condition. There is a weariness and a wariness about the people.

Here the military presence is not teenagers lining up for coffee with guns and backpacks slung over their shoulders, it is armored vehicles, often with the side door open and older, hardened, heavily armed soldiers glaring as they scan the streets. In West Jerusalem the feeling is that one is “being protected”. In East Jerusalem the feeling is more that one is the aggressor being controlled and “protected from”. A spirit of defiance hangs heavy in the air, especially among the women and the teenagers. Anger seems close to the surface, even as you sense an enormous leavening of patience.

“The Seam” is the dividing line between East and West. Historically it has been the seam between the old city and the new, between east and west, between religious and secular neighbourhoods.

The Museum on the Seam "link" is in Tourjemon House which was once a battle post on the front line, still scarred by bullet and mortar damage. It would become a centre for peace and tolerance. The Museum continues this mission with contemporary art exhibits that deal with different aspects of the socio-political realities of an increasingly pluralistic world in increasingly complex times.

The current show, Dead End, explores the deadly reality that turns violence into the language of every day life, threatening the very existence of human society.

The images displayed are stark. At times they are shockingly disgusting. The caption under one photograph of Palestinian children in a refugee camp reads: “What do you want to be IF you grow up?” Strangely, the images are not discouraging or depressing. As the text for the exhibit reads, the emphasis is upon "the red lines we have traversed, the borders we have crossed and calls on all of us to become involved and committed in mending our path.”

It is a powerful and positive challenge for this international week of church action for peace in Palestine and Israel. It offers strong motivation to find ways to soften the lines of division that are so stark between East and West. It is a compelling call to all of us to move beyond existing separately, as we so often do in Toronto, as the “Curtain” Israel is constructing to divide it from the portions of the West Bank that it doesn’t want is intended to accomplish, to living within “healthy and proper society . . . based on mutual compromise and mutual respect and tolerance . . . upon the free exchange of opinions even if this opinion offends some.”

I think it was Friedrich Schleiermacher, an eighteenth century Reformed minister and founder of our modern theological thought, who first developed the idea that all thought, and even religious thought, originates in our experience, the context of our origins. Conditioning.

The challenge for us is to allow the “other” to be “other”, not needing them to become “us”. To do otherwise is to do violence to them.

Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congre- gations of Britain and the Common- wealth, in his book The Dignity of Difference, comes to the same conclusion. Our dignity is in our difference, not in our lowest common denominator of commonality.

What are your thoughts and reflections? How can we meet the challenge of living respectfully with our differences, whether in Toronto, Adelaide, southern Alberta, Texas, Nova Scotia or Jerusalem?

Psalm 122

I rejoiced with those who said to me, “Let us go to the house of God!”
Our feet are standing in your gates, O Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is built like a city that is closely compacted together. That is where the tribes go up, the tribes of God, to praise the name of God according to the statute given to the people. There the thrones for judgment stand, the thrones of the house of David.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: “May those who love you be secure. May there be peace within your walls and security within your citadels.”

For the sake of my brothers and sisters and friends, I will say, “Peace be within you.” For the sake of the house of our God, I will seek your prosperity.

Full moon over the Western Wall

Service of Prayer for Peace in Palestine and Israel

This is the week of International Church Action for Peace in Palestine and Israel. An ecumenical service of prayer was held Sunday afternoon at the Benedictine St. Stephen's Basilica on Nablus Road in East Jerusalem. The readings, in Arabic and English, were Micah 6: 6 -8, Psalm 121, Philippians 4: 6 - 9, and Matthew 5: 1 - 12.

The Prayer of Penitence spoken by all echoed the sense in the Hindu tradition that the divine will is for balance. When that balance is distrupted, life itself is disrupted:

God, so much conflict is within ourselves.
Our Jealousy, our pride, our passion, our power-seeking and our greed
all disturb the balance of life and undermine the harmony of society.

Forgive us.

Lead us by your Spirit
that in our lives love may go hand in hand with peace
so filling our community with joy.


And this prayer, spoken at the close of the service launched the week of International Church Action for Peace in Palestine and Israel:

Holy Spirit, give us thet spiritual fruit of peace;
the peace that cares for the wellbeing of the people;
the peace that rebukes injustice and violence;
the peace that seeks freedom for all;
the peace that heals the hurts of the past;
the peace that enables for today and releases the potential for tomorrow;
the peace that is new life in Christ.

Amen.

"Our feet are standing in your gates, O Jerusalem." (Psalm 122: 2)

Yes, I have arrived, moved in, and, this afternoon, tired, the wind coming up, fog blowing in (fog? from where?), and the light fading, my heart was warmed at the thought of "coming home." Still feel, however, like I'm in some thing of a space warp, twisting Balinese Hinduism, Israeli Judaism, and Arab Islam into the space of a couple days.

This morning I went into the Old City, through the Jaffa Gate. What a rush.

While I spent most of my day lost (I have since bought a compass), I found my first destination with no problem -- a small recessed roof area in the grounds of the Porat Yosef Yeshiva overlooking the Western Wall and up to the Dome of the Rock. I spent a fair piece of time here just soaking up the view and convincing myself that I am here.
It was noon time and the 8 and 9 year old kids at the yeshiva school were kicking a soccer ball around (watched carefully by two armed school guards). At one point a number of them ran over to the railing to have a spitting contest, stealing each other's yamlkes and tugging prayer strings. Kids, regardless of where they are!

From here I went back down to the streets and was almost immediately lost in the maze of twisting, narrow passages. I stopped for coffee in one of those covered, cobblestone Roman-era streets -- thick, sweet, and with fresh basil! I discovered a good use for cigarettes -- offer them to old Arab men. Instant friends. They talked nonstop, weaving tales of God knows what. I didn't understand a word of it, just nodded and sipped my coffee.

Later, somewhere in the Muslim Quarter, I passed a small hole in the wall (literally) outside of which an old man was cooking kebabs. The smell was awesome.

Several steps away I turned and went back.

I gestured to my nose saying it smelt good. In Arabic he invited me into his restaurant, a small space half the size of my office, where I was immediately welcomed by half a dozen men sitting at one of the two tables. One of the men spoke English.

More coffee, declarations that this was the best restaurant in all of Jerusalem and the best kebabs in all of the Arab world and it wasn't long before a huge plate full of lamb kebabs, onions and tomatoes were on the table along with pita, humus, yogurt and spices. What a feast as we all dug in with our hands!

"What do you think of our politics?" I froze, stifled a choke, my life passing before my mind's eye. "A mess," I said. "What is the solution?" Well, did I get a crash course in Middle East politics! More kebabs. More coffee.

I left with a half dozen new friends and an invitation to come back tomorrow. I think the invitation had more to do with me picking up the "tab" -- 50 shekels well spent.

It is good to be here.

Enroute, again

Next stop is Jerusalem, via Denpasar, Singapore, Frankfurt, and Tel Aviv. Two days of travel . . .

Images of Bali, Indonesia

A Royal Pengabenan

Sadly, a member of the royal family of the Kingdom of Ubud died two weeks ago. His funeral procession and cremation were held Wednesday. Cremated with him were the remains of a lesser royal who died more than a year ago.

What a remarkable experience.

By noon the streets were crammed with people – Balinese and tourist. Children were every where, running, playing, darting in and out of the crowd, laughing. Death rituals in Bali are not acts of grief but of celebration. Their sense is that the body is but a temporary shell containing the soul and anchoring it to earth. A microcosm of the universe, it is made up of the same five elements:
air, earth, fire, water, and space. The series of ceremonies called pengabenan returns the body to the larger whole.

The procession was led by dozens of percussionists with gongs, symbols, and drums. The reverberations penetrate one’s body. Two life-sized bull sarcophagi, each ridden by a family member and carried on bamboo pallets by dozens of men, follow. They are tossed, dived, turned amid shrieks of glee from the children. The purpose is to confuse the spirits so that they can’t find their way home and haunt the family! There are sprints and sudden stops, water fights and more tossing and turning. It is a wild ride for the bulls, their riders, and, more importantly, the spirits of the deceased!

The bodies, in white cloth covered wooden caskets, are carried more respectfully in large, ornately decorated towers. The nine roofs of each tower indicate the exalted position of the senior royal.


The Royal Temple is several kilometers down the road. Once we arrive there the bulls are moved to a large, raised platform. The backs are lifted off and the bodies, removed from the caskets, are lifted roughly into the bulls. A long parade of offerings are received by the priest and placed in the sarcophagi with copious amounts of holy water. The backs are replaced, green banana tree trunks are put in place to contain the fire, and kerosene-soaked faggots are piled under. With a burning torch the priests sets them alight.

They burn fiercely, but it still takes some time to reduce all to ash. I am told that the ashes will be carefully gathered up and scattered in the river to be carried to the sea where the spirit’s impurities will fall as sediment.

The cycle of physical life is now complete. The five elements of the body have been returned to the larger whole from which they came.