WALLS IN THE DESERT: ARE THEY WORTHY OF OUR FAITH?
Huffington Post
July 20 2010
Ben Daniel.Presbyterian minister; author, ‘Neighbor: Christian
Encounters with “Illegal” Immigration’
It’s nighttime in Jerusalem, the Holy City, the monotheistic hub of
Abrahamic traditions, the very footstool of the Divine, and, as I am
still a little bit jetlagged, I go out for a stroll in the cool of the
evening. I’m staying on the Mount of Olives at a hotel that is several
high seasons past its sell-by date. The toilet doesn’t always flush;
the carpet is torn and stained; but what the establishment lacks in
amenities it more than compensates for in location.
The view out the front of the hotel is breathtaking; indeed, it may be
entirely unrivaled for someone like me, a person of faith fascinated
by the interplay between religious traditions. From my room I look
past ancient Jewish cemeteries, out over the Garden of Gethsemane and
the Kidron Valley to the Crusader-built walls of the Old City. If
my room were across the hall, I’d have an uninhibited view of the
Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque. For Muslims Jerusalem is, after
Mecca and Medina, Islam’s third most important city. For Jews, it is
the center of the religious universe, and for Christians, Jerusalem
is holy because of its significance in the story of crucifixion and
resurrection. Everybody wants a piece of Jerusalem.
I spend most of the day down in the Old City’s warren of streets. The
place bustles with locals, tourists, and pilgrims, Jews, Muslims,
and Christians. Aggressive shopkeepers sell everything from religious
trinkets to tailored suits. The smells are wonderful, the colors are
startling, and as far as I can tell, people are getting along with
each other.
I’m not naive. I know that deep and complicated disagreements permeate
Jerusalem’s past, present, and future, but as one Armenian shopkeeper
tells me after I compliment him on the broadly interfaith character of
the merchandise in his store (he is selling icons, menorahs, stoles,
and keffiyehs), “If you are from Jerusalem, you respect everyone. We
grow up together and we are friends. Sometimes the politicians make
trouble, and the press likes to write about the bad stuff, but here
we are like family.”
Those are hopeful words, and I mull over them in my head as I walk in
the gardens behind my hotel. From here, during the day, a person can
look out over the Kidron Valley as it wends its way into the Judean
desert. The vista is spectacular, but it’s bisected by the ugliness
of a wall that snakes its way through the landscape, separating Israel
proper from the West Bank and the people who live there.
A warm, gentle wind is blowing up off the Dead Sea, and I find myself
wondering why humans put such faith in walls.
Last summer I visited another desert wall, the one that stretches,
almost without interruption, across the U.S.-Mexico border between
San Ysidro, California and just west of El Paso, Texas, where the
Rio Grande begins the work of demarcating the frontier along the
southwest flank of the Lone Star State. They’re not so dissimilar,
these barriers. Both walls were built on land appropriated by military
might. Both walls were built to control the movements of people who
had lived on the land and had moved freely through the geography
of the place long before the current topography became a political
reality. And in both places the walls were built in the name of
national security. In Israel, as in the United States, pundits have
proclaimed the walls to be a success, but I believe that all depends
upon how one defines success.
There are practical problems with walls. No wall can be built higher
than even the crudest of improvised rockets can fly, nor deep enough
to stop a tunnel. Nothing built by one pair of hands can escape
destruction by the hands of another, and the walls that humans do not
destroy are breached, over time, by the forces of nature. The sands
of the desert shift. The water that flows down wadis and arroyos will
move anything that blocks its course. Walls are insanely expensive
to maintain.
The spiritual questions posed by claims of the walls’ success also are
problematic: are walls worthy of the faith we put in them? Will they
bring us peace? Do they make a positive contribution to common good?
Do they in fact make us better neighbors?
If I were looking for success, searching for what it looks like
when people live in healthy communities, I’d forget the wall in the
Judean desert and look to Jerusalem’s Old City, where people must live
peaceably if they will live together at all, or I’d look to some of
the smaller border towns I’ve visited where people tell me life was
better when walls didn’t separate families and communities. Before
the wall was built in the Sonora desert, there was less crime, greater
prosperity, and no one died of thirst and exposure out in the remote
desert while trying to come north.
The walls in the Judean and Sonoran deserts both were built after an
influx of new people migrated into a place and felt a need to control
those already living there. Such migration is part of the human story.
As long as there have been people, some of those people have moved
and settled down in places where they were not born, and when new
people move in, conflicts erupt — often violently. It is a drama
as old as the myths that define us. Cain settled down and became a
farmer. His brother Abel chose the nomadic life of a shepherd. Things
didn’t work out between them, but our past doesn’t have to determine
our future. I have to believe that humans are capable of living next
to one another without building barriers.
As I breathe in the holiness of the desert air and make my way to bed,
Robert Frost’s famous words come to me:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall That sends the
frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The hopeful part of me thinks that “something” just may be the Spirit
of God.
From: A. Papazian