[Oe List ...] 5/07/09, Spong: Israel: A Secular Sate Erected on a Religious Base

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May 7, 2009


Israel: A Secular State Erected on a Religious Base




In 1976 as a young bishop ordained to that office less than six months, I made my first trip to Israel. It was part of a three-stop tour designed to gain perspective on the role of religion in that Cold War world. I went first to Geneva, the headquarters of the Protestant World Council of Churches; then to Rome, the center of Catholic Christianity; and finally to Israel/Palestine, the land out of which Judaism, Christianity and Islam all flowed. At that time both the magic of the Holy Land and its tragic history entered my active imagination. Neither has yet departed. 


That first visit to Israel came when Israel was only 25 years old. In that short period of time the Israelis had engaged in a series of wars for survival: the War of Independence in 1948, the Suez War in 1956, the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In 1976, fear was high and security was tight. The future seemed anything but sure. 


The Jewish population contained many Holocaust survivors and relatives of Holocaust survivors. Burned into their consciousnesses was the horror of having absorbed almost alone the Nazi inspired murderous attempt at genocide. After that nothing would now deter them. This passion, fed by the stories of the heroes from the Warsaw ghetto revolt, combined with the determined oratory of the Zionist movement to create a Jewish drive to establish a homeland to which persecuted Jews could always come and
 find peace and security. 

This Jewish drive was aided by Western guilt as the enormity of the Holocaust began to enter Western consciousness. While Nazi Germany had been the epicenter of this killing hostility, anti-Semitism had always been part of the Christian West and it left few nations with clear consciences. Poland, a nation that suffered deeply in World War II, was nonetheless stained by its active involvement in the Holocaust, as were Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Italy, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, Austria and Yugoslavia. Even in defeat, France, Denmark, Norway and Holland also had had elements in their populations that sought favor with their Nazi conquerors by cooperating in the frenzy that marked Jews for extermination. 

Pope Pius XII had offered no public opposition to the Holocaust and, according to one Catholic author, historian and researcher, had actually assented to the Holocaust and was in fact "Hitler's Pope." In any event, he had little moral authority left and thus offered no leadership. 

The Western democracies, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, had not performed much better. Anti-Semitism was deep enough in each of these countries to mute any efforts to bring pressure on Nazi Germany that might have ameliorated this darkest of all chapters in Western history. All three had refused to open their doors to most Jewish refugees and even resisted Jewish pleas to bomb the rail lines leading to the crematoriums in Treblinka, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. With innocence so hard to establi
sh, Western guilt clearly played a major role in establishing an independent Israel in the land its citizens called Palestine. 

Of course, the Jewish people, who had long inhabited that part of the world, had a claim to their homeland. The Jewish view, however, that God had promised this land to their descendants forever was little more than biblical fundamentalism at its very worst. That part of the world had also always been home to people other than the Jews and they all made similar claims to the ownership of that land. The Bible not only recognizes their presence, but names them: the Amorites, the Edomites, the Amalekites, the Moabites, the Canaanites and the Philistines. Indeed so deep was the relationship between these last mentioned Philistines, who were also known as "the Palesti," that the name Palestine stamped their presence in that land as more dominant than that of the Jews. The Jewish assertion made in the Bible to justify their invasion of Canaan under Joshua was strange indeed. The Jews had lived as an underclass in Egypt for some 400 years before the Exodus, yet their claim to the land they were intent upon conquering was that some 600 years before God had promised it to their founding patriarch, Abraham. That argument clearly had little credibility among those who had lived in this land for at least 30 generations. This bridge-land between the world's two oldest civilizations, Egypt and Mesopotamia, had been home to many people for literally centuries. 

These historical facts, however,=2
0did not temper the Western diplomats, drunk as they were with the power of their victory in World War II, from imposing the State of Israel on the residents of Palestine. The little inhabited island of Madagascar had actually been offered as the new Jewish homeland, but when that solution was rejected by the Zionists, it was dropped. Acting under the provisions of the Balfour Declaration of 1918, the nation of Israel was established and with Western military and economic aid managed to defend itself and expand its borders at the expense of the Palestinians and Arabs who still lived there. This "diplomatic" solution would inevitably heighten tensions, build hatred, encourage instability and foster war. The task of lessening these tensions and thus building a lasting peace in the Middle East has eluded the abilities of every president of the United States since Harry S. Truman. 

No matter how unwise or unjust these decisions surely were, history does not stand still, nor does it have a reverse gear. That is true everywhere we look. In 1492 white Europeans began to take the new world of the Americas from the native populations who had lived here for centuries. The descendents of these settlers have expressed no willingness to give it back. In the 1840's the United States defeated Mexico in a war and took as booty the states of Arizona, New Mexico and California. No American politician suggests today that this land should be returned. Other nations like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia have come on and of
f the maps of Europe for centuries as the result of war and diplomacy. History is filled with diplomatic and human ineptitude, but that does not abrogate the fact that history always starts from where it is, not from how it got to be that way. Today the fact of history is that Israel is established and it is not going away. A second fact is that those refugee camps of displaced Palestinians, which have now been in existence since 1948 awaiting a return to their homes and villages in what is now Israel, are surely delusional. There is no realistic hope of their ever being restored. 

These immutable realities were abundantly clear to me when I returned just this past April both to Israel and to the West Bank. Israel is today a vital, technologically advanced nation. It has built modern cities in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem while simultaneously preserving the ancient ruins and sacred places in the religious history of the three Abrahamic faiths. Jewish military power is real, organized and efficient on land, sea and air. Every Jewish citizen at age 18 goes into the military for two to three years of training and active service. After this term is served all males are placed in military reserves, subject to call up until they pass their 40th birthday. Israel's military hardware is state of the art and, while it is outnumbered in the surrounding sea of Palestinian and Arab people, most military analysts believe that its armed forces could defeat every other nation in the Middle East, individually=2
0or collectively. Israel also quite obviously lives under the American atomic shield. So two things remain unalterably true: the first is that Israel is going to survive; the second is that the Palestinians are not going away. The question is, then, how can this dispute be turned into a settlement that has justice for all? 

That is the dream and the hope of those who propose a two-state solution, both independent and living side by side in peace and prosperity. For that solution to work, however, a number of things are required. The Palestinians and Israeli Arabs will have to accept the reality of Israel's presence. The sign of that acceptance will be the disappearance of the rhetoric about annihilating the Jews, the cessation of those acts of terror that accompany such rhetoric, and surrendering the illusion that the defeat of the Jews is actually possible. No trust can be built and thus no peace established if continuous, spasmodic acts of violence, suicide bombings and missile strikes from some protected area like Gaza or Syria continue to be employed as bargaining chips. These acts only serve to push the survival buttons in Israel to such high levels that the dehumanization of the non-Jewish population will continue with walls, disruptions, searches and the violations of their human dignity, both economically and politically. Those violations must also cease, for no people can live either behind walls or in fear that their freedom will be abrogated at the will or whim of their neighbors. Is such a mutual20interruption of this cycle of violence possible? It must be. There is surely no problem of human making that cannot be resolved in acts of human remaking. Trust, however, is never achieved in fear. The Holocaust is still uppermost in the minds of the Jews. The Jewish treatment of the Palestinians, however, continues to violate everything that reflects the glory of Israel: its commitment to human rights, its exhortation in the Ten Commandments to remember the years of their own slavery and thus to enable them to "welcome the stranger." No nation can finally endure when it violates its own core principles. 

Edgar Bronfman, the American head of the Hillel foundation, has written in his recent book, Hope, Not Fear: A Path to Jewish Renaissance, that the way the Jews in the future can live out their vocation as "the chosen people" is to identify themselves with and come to the aid of all those who have suffered in the way the Jews have suffered, through discrimination, prejudice, economic marginalization, military defeat and persecution. That is the "messianic principle" to which Jews are called by their God and by their history. If that commitment is accepted, it will place the Palestinians at the heart of the Jewish concern. These avowed enemies of the Jews are the ones to whom this messianic vocation must be exercised. Their ability to live into this vocation may well determine the peace of the world. I recommend it. 

–John Shelby Spong




Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong


0ADear Pastor, (who asked to be kept anonymous) writes: writes:

I struggle with reconciling my "personal" experience of God when I can no longer hold to a personal God. How do you, or would you, help a member of a congregation you are serving understand the dichotomy of progressive religion?

Dear A minister in the Deep South

Thank you for your question. I know the mindset of the state and community in which you live and work and I know the struggle that goes on in many clergy between their integrity and their desire not to offend the common wisdom of the world in which they live. 

The first thing you need to do is to recognize that for most people religion is not a search for truth, but a search for security. Security is not well served by opening up questions for which there are no answers. You must begin by accepting people where they are. A good pastor, however, does not leave them there forever, for that means they will never grow. 

I would avoid a frontal assault on religious ignorance from the pulpit. Remember that a sermon in church does not offer people time to process or space to disagree. They cannot talk back and so they must absorb, resist or close their minds. 

There are other activities that do not have these shortcomings. Study groups, where the standard is that there is no such thing as a "dumb question," allow dialogue and growth to take place. A book study group allows the author of the book to be the one raising the issues and thus allows t
he minister to facilitate the discussion. In newsletters to their congregations I think clergy should write think pieces that invite dialogue and that say, "Tell me what you think of these ideas." People will actually read such pieces and they can be the means for opening up deep conversations and significant personal interaction. 

Of course, when we say God is personal, we are not describing God; we are describing our experience of God. Since we are persons, we can receive the transcendent power of life, love and being only as "personal." There is nothing wrong with that. To move from these to a statement about what God's being actually is, however, is more than any of us should claim. 

I have never known an honest and open theological attempt to probe the mystery of God to be destructive. 

I wish you well in your ministry.

– John Shelby Spong







 

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