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I want to tell you all a story.
Once upon a time there was a Jewish woman in her thirties who went in
search of her roots in Israel. She had heard about a holy man who
lived in Jerusalem and, being a life-long spiritual seeker, she
decided to pay her respects to him while she was there. Little did she
know that his home was in the Palestinian territories and that in fact
this holy man was a Sufi shaykh. Naively she had assumed he was a
Buddhist monk or some such spiritual teacher from an eastern
tradition. She did not realize that this man was a Muslim until the
cab driver crossed the invisible line and drove more deeply into the
West Bank. Her Jewish ancestry began to rise up with fear and
trepidation about where she was heading. But upon arrival at this
teacher’s home, she was immediately embraced by the family and deeply
touched by the loving warmth of the people towards her. She was also
quite shocked. Many of her stereotypical ideas began to drop away
quite rapidly as the family and community welcomed her with open arms
and sincerity.
As she began to talk with this man, she realized that he was deeply
dedicated to trying use his role as spiritual leader of the community
to try to facilitate greater coexistence with the Jewish population.
This was in 1994, shortly after the Oslo agreements were signed and
there was great optimism in the air. The political and community will
towards peace was at its highest.
This was the beginning of a 7-year journey of living frequently among
the Palestinian people in order to learn the ways of Sufism, the
mystical tradition of Islam. It was also the beginning of living the
paradoxical and complex life of being a dedicated Jew while studying a
tradition rooted in the Muslim faith. In addition, this Sufi teacher
was not only a mystic, but he was an imam at al-aqsa mosque in east
Jerusalem and the spiritual leader for most of the east Jerusalem
community. He too lead a paradoxical life, preaching traditional Islam
during the Friday juma’a prayer at the mosque while teaching small
groups of people at his zawiyyah or retreat house about the inner ways
of a mystical path. The very nature of his multiple hats and ability
to be with many different kinds of people was a learning in itself.
As you have probably already guessed, this little fairy tale is a
slice from my own life story. It is the tale of religious shuttle
diplomacy that lasted until the second intifada, when the political,
religious, and cultural landscape had drastically changed from the
years before. But in those years I learned much about the clash of
cultures, the teachings of Islam and the terrible stereotypes that
have pervaded in the west. The need for deeper understanding between
two faiths rooted in the same prophet Abraham was striking. Jews and
Muslims are literally brothers and sisters to each other. The Sufis
believe that the mystical teachings were given orally to Isaac for the
Jewish community and to Ishmael for the Muslim community. Even within
the biblical story, the brothers return at the end of Abraham’s life
to bury their deceased father and after years of estrangement there is
reconciliation. This is the metaphor for our time.
I am a psychologist by profession, but this experience led me to begin
specializing in conflict resolution and trauma recovery work, as I was
also, tragically, present at the Ben Yehuda bombings in 1995. Looking
back, it was the end of the honeymoon period of the peace process. To
experience first hand both the fear of the Israeli community and the
incredible despair and oppression of the Palestinian people was, for
me, life-changing.
Maybe it was my upbringing, and maybe it is just in my nature, but I
always tend to see the truth in both sides. Nowhere was that more
apparent than in Israel/Palestine. Both communities have cause for
malice and anger towards the other. Both have been deeply traumatized.
During the time I was there so frequently, I had the privilege of
living with the family of this Palestinian imam for months at a time,
a rare opportunity to witness and even partake in an Islamic lifestyle
from the inside…and this despite the fact that I was a devoted Jew and
clearly reiterated that numerous times. (It was within this community
that I was given the name Shems, a nickname that has remained with me
to this day as I try to embody coexistence in my own life.) Back then,
I was not in search of conversion to Islam, and yet I wanted to
understand it. Over the course of several years, I learned Arabic, I
studied the quran, I learned salat, the daily prayer and even learned
how to sing the athan, the exquisitely beautiful call to prayer. On
Fridays I would often sit in the women’s section at the dome of the
rock listening to the jutba, the sermon and watch as 2 or 300,000
people lowered themselves as one body with their forehead to the
ground. Then I would walk through the narrow cobblestone streets of
the old city to the Jewish side and do my own religious practice at
the western wall, welcoming in the shabbas at sunset, listening to the
Hasidim shout the name of God and pray and dance as the sunk sank into
the desert. Those Fridays were some of the most exquisitely touching
and profound days of my life. My Palestinian family knew all of this
and I was repeatedly stunned by the openness and welcome I received,
at least in the beginning. After a few years of studying with this
teacher, he made me his muqaddam, or spiritual representative, here in
the U.S., and I opened a zawiyyah of my own on the east coast where
people of all traditions could come and study the Sufi way of life.
But as I listened to the Friday sermons at the mosque, over the years
the rhetoric became more and more extreme, as did the public opinion
within the Jewish community. Anyone who was there could have predicted
the second intifida. It was in the making for several years before it
actually happened.
As the political climate began to change, it became apparent that I
was no longer going to be able to enjoy having a foot in both worlds.
It was becoming dangerous for me, but more importantly, dangerous for
my Palestinian host family to have a Jewish person living among them.
The political and religious ideology was becoming more and more
extreme, and the split between to two communities became cavernous.
Muslims were targeted for humiliation within their own community if
they were seen being kind to westerners and especially Jews.
Everything has a cycle. The tide goes in and the tide goes out. It was
becoming apparent to me in early 2000 that the tide was going out and
I could no longer continue to live the life I had been living. I
resolved to return to the united states and do everything possible to
educate the Jews in my own community about the Islam that I had
experienced, to try to dispel the ignorance and stereotypes that were
instilling fear and hatred, waiting for the time when I could return
to the holy land again.
The 9/11 happened. I witnessed from my apartment in New York as the
city slowly began to feel just like Jerusalem, and wondered if some of
my time there was in preparation for this. Sadly the west became even
more hateful and ignorant about Islam, often grouping the entire
community into an extremist frame.
What I remembered often during that time is that with the Sufi
tradition, the inner meaning of jihad has nothing to do with battle
against another human being. It is about the willingness to struggle
with the demons inside, to work with the hidden unconscious agenda
that creates suffering and pain, to quell the nafs or the lower self
shadow. This is what my Sufi teacher taught, and yet I do not often
hear that concept discussed in public. If we are ever to have true
peace, we must deal with the shadow aspects of our respective
communities. Carl Jung said that:
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious.
For the Muslim world, the shadow aspect is the victim. For the Jewish
community, our shadow is the oppressor. We must be courageously
willing to walk into those less than wonderful places within ourselves
and integrate them, heal them, call them back from their split off
place so that we can put our arm around them rather than have them be
acted out in the world. Within Islam there is great emphasis on the
concept of surrender. In its deepest meaning, it is about surrendering
to the Divine, but it is often perverted into the concept of surrender
to the spiritual leader. The rectification of these distortions can
only come from the spiritual leaders themselves. Within the Jewish
community, there is a generational history of oppression. Now that we
actually have a homeland and the oppression is lifting, the side that
wants retribution is only logically going to rear its ugly head. We
want someone else to feel what we have felt for centuries. These are
not popular character traits, I understand. But only by looking at
them, acknowledging them, and working with them, can we then come into
a balance which allows the other to exist even while they are
different.
And difference in culture is another contributing factor. Human nature
tends to fear anything that is different from us. Until we understand
it.
Let me be very psychological for a moment. Our great psychological
researchers on early childhood development have repeatedly proven that
language informs and shapes thinking. If just for a moment we look
simply at the language of Arabic and the language of Hebrew, the
cultural differences are even manifested in the language and letters
themselves. Arabic is circular and flowing. Hebrew is straight and
linear, much more similar in its appearance to the languages of the
west. Both are rooted in the Aramaic language of using 3-letter root
words. But each language infers very different ways of thinking.
The Arabic culture places great value on relationship, hospitality,
politeness and connection. The Jewish culture values intelligence,
accomplishment, and academic study. Neither is right or wrong, good or
bad, just different. In the Arabic culture, to come in with an agenda
to be reviewed and finished in 15 minutes is completely impolite.
There must be tea and conversation and connection first. As a new york
minute Jew, I initially found this frustrating. As I relaxed into it,
I began to feel a sense of nourishment at a level I had never
experienced before. My soul was being healed by this initially
frustrating cultural difference. Being siblings by ancestry, in my
mind each culture has missing pieces of the other, though many would
be loathe to admit it.
Please do not mistake this as a simplistic view. I truly understand
that this is a very, very complex situation with many subtleties and
nuances which no one person has the answer to. But what I do believe
is that by educating ourselves a bit more about the culture, we might
find that some of our deepest held beliefs may be in error. For
example in Islam there is a concept called adab. Badly translated it
means politeness and respect and much much more. There is no
equivalent for this word in English because adab is not just about
being nice. It is about a deep internal understand and respect for the
beauty and decency of every living person without hierarchy. It is
about seeing the light in the soul beyond the personality, It is about
treating no one else, regardless of their station in life, as second
class or less than. The Palestinian people have been treated as second
class in the same way the Jews were for centuries, the slaves were for
centuries, the way any disenfranchised group has been treated. And
yet, with one simple change of perspective, by having adab, we make a
connection that lasts a lifetime. This relates to another stereotype I
must address. I have so often heard than the Muslim and Arabic people
cannot be trusted. I am embarrassed to even speak this stereotype and
I apologize to those of you who are of Arabic descent. In reality, is
there anyone among us who can be trusted 100% of the time? I don’t
think so. But more importantly this stereotype comes from another
cultural misunderstanding. Within the culture, as part of adab, it is
considered an insult of the worst kind to say no to another person. In
our nation and community where we talk about boundaries and setting
limits and permission to say no, this concept can give us a brain
cramp. But within that cultural system there is a definite way to say
no. One sends a third party. One says yes in the moment, and then
sends a third party to say thank you very much but so and so is just
not able right now to accommodate you due to his busy schedule. To us
this sounds indirect, and manipulative. But we are Americans. How
could we possible understand this? Alternatively if we are willing to
put down our own ideas and enter into the culture, we have a different
experience. Rather than taking the immediate affirmative response as
the final answer, we sit and wait a bit. We wait to see if a third
party arrives. It usually does not take too long. But we understand
that person who says yes immediately is not necessarily trying to
cheat us, they are trying to respect us and not insult us.
On a larger scale, there is the issue of separation of church and
state, a dearly held democratic value in the west. In the Middle East,
there is no such thing. The very religion of Islam was founded by a
man who was both the political and religious leader of the people. And
while religion is often the barrier to peace, it can also be the most
potent source of real coexistence and peace for any culture. This
cannot be more true than within the faiths of Judaism and Islam,
religions which have their roots in the same man, the prophet Abraham,
and which have become warring brothers rather than family members who
have their disagreements.
As Americans most of us believe in the separation of church and state.
Yet to impose this idea in the holy land or the Middle Eastern culture
is naïve at best. Within that culture religion IS politics. The
religious leaders are often the political leaders as well. They shape
and form the philosophy and opinions of an entire community. Rather
than insisting on imposing our own ideas of how a culture should be
structured, why not enter into it to understand it. In this case, we
must be willing to enter into the religion and understand it. For
example, the global extremism we have see in recent years is born out
of a movement which began almost 20 years ago, long before 9/11 or
7/7, a utopian vision of an Islamic theocracy spread throughout the
entire world. It is what I believe to be a distorted human
interpretation of what the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, taught
during his lifetime. And I have found in my discussions that it is not
the perspective of the majority of Muslims. But nature abhors a vacuum
and so often the vacuum is filled by the loudest voice. Yet my own
experience in the holy land showed me that most of the Palestinian
people, the silent majority, want this all to end. They are tired of
the fighting and the struggle. They just want to be able to go to work
and have a normal family life and have the rights of decency in a
society, like their garbage being picked up and their electricity
being on. People often say, leave religion and politics out of the
peace process. But how could that possibly happen? I believe that if
atrocities have happened in the name of religion over the decades,
even the centuries really, then religion must also be a true source of
reconciliation as well. There is an old saying: Everything with a
front has a back. In the world of psychology we speak about the
unconscious motives and drives that are hidden inside. But what we
have seen in the west is the back side of Islam. So too everything
with a back has a front. The Islamic community has the right to be
known for its sweetness and beauty, which tragically, we have rarely
had the chance to experience in the west.
Within the small world of clinical practice, unless you are a Muslim,
you are not likely to have a Muslim arrive in your office anyhow.
Because within the tradition, it is culturally more important to go to
the local shaykh or imam or community for help. Once again, we are
back to the issue of religion. If nothing else, I leave you with this
idea to ponder on. If you are a peace-loving individual, as I am, or a
true American who believes in the separation of church and state,
which I also do, perhaps our own ideas about what is right for
ourselves is interfering with what might be right for another. We all
know what comes out of the imposition of one person or one community’s
ideas onto another group. It has never in the history of mankind
worked in the long term, despite temporary gains. For me, the solution
lies in educating ourselves and the world around us, letting everyone
believe whatever they wish so long as there is no harm to others, and
support in any way the provision of resources so that others can have
a happy and fulfilling life. Terrorism is not born out of wealth and
abundant family and work lives. It is born out of lack. Lack of hope,
lack of support, lack of work, lack of just about everything. When you
have nothing to lose, losing your life in return for the promise of
eternal heaven is not such a bad proposition. People must have
something to live for, not something to die for. And we have so much
of that in the west. Every time I travel, I become aware of the
abundant life I live in New York. Right down to having my lights on
consistently, regular internet access, and my garbage collected on a
regular basis. My message to you is, regardless of your religion
beliefs, your ethnicity or political ideas, why not take some time to
understand a little more about a different community, an unknown
other? And I implore you to have the courage when you hear a
stereotype being spoken about the Islamic religion, to educate those
around you. Help whatever community you are a part of to look at the
shadow side of their beliefs. Another key to coexistence lies in
addressing our shadow and educating ourselves about the unknown
‘other.’ Only then will we live side by side without having to kill
off what we perceive as the evil thing outside of ourselves. The old
cartoon says, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
In closing I would like to read you a poem by a Sufi poet who lived in
the 1300’s. His work is as relevant now as it was 700 years ago. It is
called Becoming Human.
BECOMING HUMAN
Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about "His great visions of
God" he felt he was having. He asked me for confirmation, saying, "Are
these wondrous dreams true?" I replied, "How many goats do you have?"
He looked surprised and said, "I am speaking of sublime visions And
you ask about goats!" And I spoke again saying, "Yes brother, how many
do you have?" "Well, Hafiz, I have sixty-two," he said. I then asked,
"How many rose bushes are in your garden, how many children do you
have, are your parents still alive, and do you feed the birds in
winter?" And to all he replied. Then I said, "You asked me if I
thought your visions were true, I would say that they were if they
make you become more human, more kind and tolerant, more generous, to
every creature and plant that you know."
Thank you.
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