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Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Sometimes Speechless
Dear friends,
Please excuse the lack of a GODcast recording again this week. This is not a trend! What it is is a combination of summer vacations and a sermon-less picnic in the park this Sunday. Shoulda been there... great fun singing old-fashioned church songs and uncovering covered dishes.
_______________
My Jewish friend's e-mails these past few weeks vibrate with outrage. His repeated messages, about Israel's absolute right to defend its own existence, absolutely pulse with the pain of his own lifelong experience of antisemitic assaults. Both violently direct and sneakily covert.
I can find no words to reply that will not sound to him utterly hollow or, worse by far, uncaring and uninformed -- to say nothing of antisemitic.
So I simply shut my mouth.
Like biblical Job, who railed on and on about divine justice, until he finally heard from the Divine Mouth itself what real justice is. Then he sat still in front of God, hands over his mouth like that famous monkey -- "Speak no evil." In Job's case, that meant, "Don't you dare say even one word; it's doomed to be evil compared to God's Own Truth!" (See Job 42:1-6)
Here I sat, then, as day after day the rockets' red glare spotlighted ever more destruction of people, places, and things in Israel and in Lebanon. Speechless. Powerless to say one word that seemed to make any sense -- to me, let alone to my Jewish friend.
Almost five years ago another friend asked me, within a week of 9/11's horrors, "Jack, what if we just did nothing in retaliation?"
Several decades ago Golda Meir told Israel's enemies, in as many words, "I can forgive you for turning your young men into murderers, but I will never be able to forgive you for turning our young men into killers!"
I'm stuck someplace between those two poles -- "Let's do nothing!" vs. "Look what you made us do!"
My dilemma stems from the obvious fact that the human psyche inevitably distinguishes Us from Them. Red states, blue states. Liberals, conservatives. Zionists, antisemites. Catholics, Presbyterians. Uh oh, then we count more than a dozen American varieties of Presbyterian denominations. Always and ever, us (good) vs. them (bad). World without end, amen and ptooey.
Michael Berg decided to resist all that. Enough's enough, he said. In 2004 his son Nick's beheading in Iraq by Islamic terrorists was broadcast around the world. The San Francisco Chronicle reported two Sundays ago that Mike Berg committed himself to forgive everybody who had a part in his son's horrible, undeserved death. That's it. No vengeance, no retaliation, no appeal for worldwide indignation. Just... forgiveness.
Gandhi once said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
Long before that, Jesus said, "Turn the other cheek."
Now I say, "If only." Then I cover my mouth all over again.
posted by Jack Buckley at
2:40 PM
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