Spirit and Story Archive

Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

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Acts of God

By Vanessa L. Ochs

Standing in front of the Mount Zion Hotel in Jerusalem last week, I watched the few other hotel guests getting onto their tour bus. They were Christian tourists from all over the United States and Australia, some wearing T-shirts that announced “I was baptized in the river Jordan,” many with hats that said “Bible Lands Tours.” I asked my husband Peter why he thought Christian tourists were still coming to Israel, whereas Jewish tourists—with the exception of people with family living or studying in Israel and a few people on “Missions”—were visibly absent. “How come Christians have the kind of faith that allows them to think that God will protect them from danger in the Holy Land while they’re on pilgrimage, whereas American Jews don’t tend to think God performs such services for them?”

Not missing a beat, as if this were some old Catskill comedy routine, Peter answered, “American Jews DO believe God protects them. They believe God protects them by giving them the sense to stay home and to keep far away from danger.”

I can’t say for sure what it is I do or don’t believe about God’s involvement in my personal life and, in particular, about God’s involvement in my travel plans when I go to Israel. Probably, if I were pressed to say something, I’d take Harold Kushner’s position and say that my God, while great and powerful, does not have control over planes that fall from the air or buses that explode—whether or not the very good and the very innocent people on them might, as a consequence, die. That’s my rational response. But I wonder: if I didn’t believe, on some level, that I could count on some divine protection, would my husband and I have ever left our children behind in America and traveled to a conference in any country other than Israel that was under a U.S. State Department travelers’ warning? Would I have gotten on the plane without the few dollars in my wallet that my Jewish students had given to me for tzedakah, dollars that made me their shaliach mitzvah, their agent to do a good deed, a task that would endow me with divine traveler’s insurance?

The entire week we were in Jerusalem I gave little conscious thought to danger or God’s capacity to protect, aside from keeping my promise to my daughters that we would avoid taking city buses and, when we could, would avoid crowded public places. In my daily prayers, I did not hear myself saying, “Oh God—let me get to where I am going and back in one piece!” Rather, I could hear that my internal “prayer track” was set to its usual Jerusalem “station”—with my words alternating between “Please sustain this rebuilt Jerusalem” and “ Oseh shalom bimromav…Please make peace for all who share this holy place.”

It is only since I have returned home that I have become absorbed by thoughts of terror and, even then, the violent scenarios come to me only in sleep, in troubled dreams. Each night, there are endless scenarios of terrorists, bombings, robberies, and hostage crises. The plots are so intricate and the scenes so violent that I think I have perhaps missed my calling: I should have become a writer of the very crime, espionage or war movies I claim not to be able to follow. I awake each morning exhausted and nervously drained, like someone who ought to be going to crisis intervention counseling instead of to work.

A week has gone by, and I have still not been able to push these thoughts of terror away, to suppress the already suppressed.

I did, in fact, witness violence in Jerusalem, but it was not the kind you’d have predicted from the newspapers or TV news, and I think it is that scene of violence that still haunts me. It happened like this: My husband and I had been invited to the Shalom Hartman Center, along with other Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians from Israel and abroad, to study our different sacred texts concerning sacred time. Given the current political situation, I thought the conference—planned months ago—might be cancelled, or that the Muslims, both those living inside and outside of Israel, would find it too difficult to come. But everyone was there, and I felt amazingly privileged. I was able to spend a week fighting—and I mean really fighting—over the meanings and interpretations of sacred texts with sharp scholars of different faiths—and then, we Jews, Christians and Muslims would call a truce, and eat, drink wine and laugh together, or board a bus together, two by two, like school children on a field trip, to visit the Holy Sepulcher.

Each day, we met in smaller groups, hevruta groups we called them, to study the passages of Torah, New Testament, and Koran we were assigned, and then we’d return to the larger group for discussion. My hevruta group, like all the others, had representatives of different faith traditions: we were two Jews, two Catholics, and two Muslims. The two Muslims explained to us that they were not religious. “What do you mean?” asked Rabbi David Hartman, the other Jew in my group. The Muslim woman explained that because she wears pants and does not cover her head, she is considered non-religious by the Muslim religious authorities. Despite this, she still prays daily, wrapping herself modestly when she does this. “I pray to my God” was how she put it. She reads Koran with veneration, and though her chic blue jeans might appear to say otherwise, she is most traditional in her beliefs about propriety in relationships between women and men.

“So you are religious” Rabbi Hartman told her, and through his eyes, over the days we were to spend together, she was able to see that, in fact, she might really be able to call herself a religious woman, despite the way it is narrowly defined in her community. She was enchanted by the irony: it took a rabbi to convince her she was a religious Muslim!

Always the Jewish feminist activist, always the cheerleader of leaderless havurot, I temporarily forgot that what works in one religious culture rarely translates into another. I took this opportunity of her enlightenment, her “witnessing,” to gush forth with every strategy I could think of for ways that she could enhance her sense of legitimate religiosity-- small cell groups of like minded people, praying and studying Koran together in homes.

Both Muslims in our group listened politely to my naïve suggestions and to those of others, and then explained that the situation of a Muslim woman who wanted to claim a liberal sense of religiosity was not comparable to the situations we knew in our own faiths. The reaction would be violent. “Violent?” we asked, wanting to understand. “Like Salman Rushdie, with death threats?” No, not like that, but violent. We left it at that, thinking we might eventually understand what now eluded us.

Still in our small group, Rabbi Hartman asked the Muslim woman if she could chant for us the text of Koran we had been studying. Given that there were two anthropologists in the group, Dr. Ali Qleibo of Al Quds University and myself, we had spoken so much about the performance of a sacred text being as important as the meaning of its words that this request made sense. The Muslim woman explained that while she was not well trained in chanting Koran, she had taught herself to do so. Asking for Allah’s mercy before beginning to chant, she sang the words for us and, in her singing, as these things tend to happen, the text and her own piety became accessible to us in new and powerful ways. You could dismiss our experience and say it was just one of those very happy interfaith dialogue moments, but all the other members of the hevruta—Father David Neuhouse, the writer James Carroll, Qleibo, Hartman and myself— felt it was something else, something grand and delicate all at the same time. It was a moment of sacred time shared, a precious alternative to the “dialogue” of stones and bullets (as David Hartman put it) taking place as close to us as Gilo.

Which explains why, at the final study session of all the people at the conference, one member of our hevruta proposed that the Muslim woman chant Koran for everyone, so all could experience the precious moment of our hevruta. A touching thought, but this turned out to be a very, very bad idea, one that could work only in a messianic age or at the “It’s a Small, Small World” pavilion at Disney World.

Though the Muslim woman was nervous to chant in this large group, she still agreed to do so, and she concentrated fiercely and summoned up her courage. She was interrupted time and again by one Muslim religious leader who corrected her pronunciation of words. Nearly in tears, she stopped, saying she could no longer go on. An argument between different Muslims erupted: her reading in less than perfect style was a desecration of holy text, an affront to God! No--her reading was fully appropriate in this setting as it was not a religious ceremony, but a learning experience for us all! The group’s moderator interceded: she should be allowed to complete her chanting, and she did this. It was not perfect; you didn’t need to know Arabic to know this. But in other ways, it was most perfect.

Then another negotiation was brought to the table—though we had gone far over the allotted time for our session, a Muslim religious leader should now be allowed to chant Koran. It was meant, we could all tell, as a peace-keeping gesture. And so one of the sheiks present chanted. I am sure this man’s rendition was perfect. But watching the stunned face of the Muslim woman, I saw her being defaced, undone, disappeared. I felt as if I were watching a rape, and could do nothing but stare. I understood that this was the kind of violence my hevruta group had failed to understand. Now it was clear, too clear. In many ways, it spoke to me clearly across the boundaries of culture: this was the same kind of violence I have experienced as a member of the International Committee of Women of the Wall, violence against women committed by ultra-orthodox Jewish men who hold the sanctity of certain customs over the spiritual equality and integrity of women.

When the session was over, I rushed over to hug the Muslim woman before she left quickly—she would not stay for our final dinner together. I embraced her, and whispered in her ear that she was a hero, a leader for all Muslim women like herself, women who were deeply religious, but whose piety was not only dismissed, but whose very sense of being was trampled upon. My words were all very poetic, but the fact remained: I had sat there while this woman was being injured, and I had done nothing to protect her. Doing so, at the time, seemed as impossible as running between the Israeli soldiers and the Palestinians in the midst of the current confrontations and yelling, “You stop this right now!” or saying in the unnaturally calm voice of a kindergarten teacher, “Now now, we’re not being nice, are we?”

As my bad dreams are starting to abate, I am beginning to grasp how I experience divine protection, or lack thereof. I suppose I believe God does bear witness to violence. I believe God is shocked. But aside from responding with comfort after the deed is done, God perhaps can do no more than watch the violent scenario play itself out.

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