My original plan was to preach a sermon this morning titled "The Fate of Pleasure." It is a sermon I will preach sometime, but not this morning. The headlines have intervened. As you doubtless know, this has been an extraordinary week in Serbia and in Israel. The regime of Slobodan Milosevic, the last of the hard-line Communist dictators in Eastern Europe, has finally given way. For the long-suffering people of Yugoslavia, the past few days have been a time of celebration and hope. Writ large upon their faces has been the profound joy of experiencing the truth of those simple words you and I know so well, yet whose import we often take for granted: freedom, liberty, democracy.
The situation in Israel has been more difficult to watch and harder to assess. There is much to be troubled about: Ariel Sharon's intentionally provocative visit to a Muslim holy site, the suspiciously well-organized Palestinian reaction, the seemingly indiscriminate response of the Israeli military. The morning papers today report that protests and violence have spread to Arab capitals throughout the region, the UN Security Council has condemned the use of force by the Israeli military as excessive, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Yassir Arafat to stop the violence. Not since the Oslo peace efforts began in seven years ago has the region seen such widespread turmoil, nor have Arab leaders and Muslim protesters been as openly polarized against Israel and the peace process. It all seems spectacularly unnecessary: Sharon's visit, the generations-long cycles of hatred and animosity, the bloodshed that leaves even young children with bullet-riddled bodies.
It has been painful to watch the violence and difficult to comprehend the apparent recklessness with which both sides have escalated the conflict. As the events of the week unfolded, I found my mind almost inexplicably returning time and again to a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, titled "The Fish."
I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen--the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not to return my stare.--It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip--if you could call it a lip--grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared and victory filled up that little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels--until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
Why did this poem keep running through my head? In part because the image of the fish makes me picture Yassir Arafat: an estimable quarry, now battle-weary and scarred, with a five-haired beard of wisdom hanging from his aching jaw. One could also say Barak and Arafat each has their hooks set deep into the flesh of the other, and each also feels the agony of being at least partly at the other's mercy. But something deeper is at work in the poem, a sense that there are moments in life when a person or situation can be inexplicably transformed, moments when nothing changes but everything is different. Call it what you like--inspiration, revelation--it's a tipping toward the light whence comes honesty and respect, maybe even a shared victory. Mostly what I have wanted over the past few days is for there to be a tipping toward the light in the Middle East.
It will not be easy. As Thomas Friedman points out in Friday's New York Times, the events of this week have presented Arafat with a telling dilemma. Arafat must decide whether his political future--not to mention the future of the Palestinians--lies in a mutually destructive battle against Ariel Sharon and the Israeli hard-liners, or a potentially transformative alliance with Prime Minister Barak. The irony is that both Barak and Sharon need Arafat's cooperation in order to succeed politically. The onus is now on Arafat to choose his partner.
Friedman reminds us that Ariel Sharon has often relied on mutual fear and hatred between the Israelis and Palestinians to propel his career, because that's when he thrives politically. His recent visit to the Temple Mount is true to form, which is why Arafat's call for an international investigation into the matter seems almost pointless. What will the investigation discover--that Sharon despises the Palestinians? We already know that. What we don't know is whether Arafat will choose Sharon to be his partner in forging a policy of mutually assured destructiveness.
Or will Arafat's partner in the future be Prime Minister Barak? He too is a relatively known quantity. As Friedman puts it, Barak "has put on the table a proposal for turning 92 percent of the West Bank into a Palestinian state. He has offered a legitimate proposal for dealing with the Palestinian refugees, with both compensation and some right of return. He has offered Palestinian sovereignty over the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem, and even some form of UN administration over what the Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call the Haram esh-Sharif." Is this a perfect solution from the Palestinian point of view? Of course not. But it's a serious proposal that begs for a serious counteroffer. Will Arafat take up this partnership and move with Barak toward negotiating a lasting peace for the region? Or will he remain locked in the hard-line orbit of Sharon? That is the dilemma facing Arafat.
For his part, Prime Minister Barak has a different challenge, in many ways more theological than political. It has to do with the tension between the reality of Israel as a nation in the usual sense, and the ideal of Israel as a nation of God's chosen people. Both the political reality and the religious ideal are vital ingredients in Israel's long-term prosperity. Barak's challenge is to make decisions that enable Israel to thrive politically, without compromising Israel's religious identity and integrity. In other words, he cannot pit the God of the Jews against the God of the Muslims. Nor can he ultimately deny the Palestinians their own national consciousness and their own desire for self-determination
Rabbi David Hartmann, in his 1990 book titled Conflicting Visions: Spiritual Possibilities of Modern Israel, put the dilemma this way:
There are two options. We can recognize [the Palestinians'] fundamental human desire and seek to accommodate it, while at the same time building safeguards so as not to weaken our own national security, or we can create a society that rules by force and intimidation over a million and a half vehemently resentful people. Even if arguments could be found that this form of rule is militarily and politically feasible, it would inevitably undermine the moral and religious significance of our national renaissance. During two thousand years of wandering and waiting, we never imagined a Jewish nation that would find itself obliged to suppress and humiliate an entire people.
If we are seriously concerned with the holiness of Israel and with God's indwelling in the land, then it is imperative that we ask what will happen to the moral character of the nation, what will become of our Judaic heritage if we dispossess or subjugate a vast population? How can we observe the Sabbath, whereby Jews bear witness to God as Creator of the universe, yet at the same time forget that Palestinians are human beings created in the image of God? How can we educate our children to imitate God's love for all creatures yet deny political freedom and national dignity to an entire people?
The answer, of course, is that the Jews ultimately cannot. And during those moments when they seem to come perilously close, something inside us is deeply shaken. If ever there were a people whose experience of horrible suffering and devastating loss might give them the wisdom and patience to break the cycle of oppression, it would seem to be the Jews. If they are not able to break the cycle, then there seems little hope for those who have suffered much less.
Even so, the debacle in the Middle East will be tough to resolve, especially now that so many Palestinians are dead, and Joseph's Tomb has been destroyed, and anti-Israel sentiment has been inflamed in Arab capitals throughout the region. Both Barak and Arafat now have ample justification for acting badly. Yet their fates are inextricably intertwined, as are the destinies of the Palestinians and the Jews. What I hope is that somewhere in this struggle will come a tipping toward the light, a transforming moment of honesty and respect that will enable both leaders and both sides to see things in a new light. Nothing will change--the issues will remain thorny, the path to peace hard to find--but somehow everything will be different.
The question is whether they--and we, in our own lives--are open to those moments of inspiration, of revelation. It is often more comfortable for us to remain locked in well-worn patterns of acrimony and conflict than it is to open ourselves to new ways of perceiving. And if we do come to see things in a different light, do we act in a different way? As Maimonides reminds us, we do have a choice in the matter.
We have been given free will. Any person can become as righteous as Moses or as wicked as Jereboam. We ourselves decide whether to make ourselves learned or ignorant, compassionate or cruel, generous or miserly. No one forces us, no one decides for us, no one drags us along one path or the other; we ourselves, by our own volition, choose our own way.
Arafat and Barak each have choices to make, and so do we. When opportunities for openness and honesty come our way, what will we decide? Which way will we choose? Copyright AllSouls 2000.