Shabbat Shalom, Beth Am Israel.
Shabbat Shalom feels like the ultimate luxury these days. Peace. To live where we live, blessed with a relative ease of day to day life. Fate, circumstance, a decision our families made generations ago (or maybe not so long ago). There is so much upheaval, so much out of balance, it is hard to find places not just of refuge but of comfort, of ‘shalva’ of tranquility.
I lead tefilah several days a week from our Main Sanctuary, and my eyes lock on the “Kidnapped” poster afixed to the chair by the windows. I look at his face as I offer the prayer, “Blessed is God who releases the captives.”
Sigh.
I look inside myself for the face of a nameless Palestinian in Gaza, a child, a mother, a teen, and I am broken. Broken by it all.
I enter Shabbat a bit bruised and beaten up by these last five months, disillusioned, enraged, sad, lost.
But somehow I insist on entering that same Shabbat full of music and song and hope.
Hope? Really?
Yes. Here is some hope, at the Arava Institute in the Southern-most part of the Negev.
The mission of the Arava Institute is:
TO ADVANCE CROSS-BORDER ENVIRONMENTAL COOPERATION IN THE FACE OF POLITICAL CONFLICT.
This is to ensure that:
- The shared environmental resources of the region will be protected from further degradation and loss.
- Scarce environmental resources will no longer be a source of conflict.
- Environmental cooperation will become a model for cross-border cooperation in all other areas of the conflict.
Three recent graduates of the Institute, an Israeli-Jew, a Palestinian, and a Jordanian students, gave a powerful joint graduation speech. Palestinian student Jawdat said:
“Can you believe it? 4 months ago we were complete strangers. I think it takes some guts to choose to come here in the first place. It’s a very complex thing to try and live with our differences, and being willing, open and curious to dedicate our time for this. This time however, not only did we meet our differences through our strengths and pleasant attributes, but we had no choice but to do it whilst facing our greatest fears.”
Friends of the Arava Institute’s Director of Community Relations, Rabbi Michael Cohen, told the students in his address that “real peace is messy, including the very different narratives and different orientations of our internal dialogues we all carry within ourselves. Our work is not to see them in conflict, or to make them go away, but to allow them to be heard like notes in a musical score.”
Shabbat Shalom!
-Hazzan Harold
