Dheishe left me wondering where the church was.  Here we were, in the very city where God put on flesh to make Himself tangibly known to humanity.  As we made our way from Dheishe to the Church of the Nativity, I wondered if, like 2000 years ago, there was no room for Jesus here.  Where was God today?

The ancient monstrosity that is the Church of the Nativity accompanied by the long train of tour buses carrying Christians to the site added significant weight to my struggle.  Here was the church: we were tourists intoxicated by a desire to see where God incarnated once upon a time.  The church was so fixated on the ancient narrative that we were blind to the contemporary one.

“God, incarnate again through people!” I prayed as I called my friend who lives in Bethlehem.  Deciding not to enter Nativity, I chose, instead, to sip coffee with her and to meet some of her friends.

“How’s your head?” was her opening question.

Silence was my response as I watched tour guides compete for the attention of tour group after tour group.

Slowly, I began to articulate the messy, complicated couple of days that I had just lived.  As I began to speak of the injustices of Dheishe, my friend’s phone rang.  She answered, looked directly behind me and started laughing.  I turned to see a young Palestinian man on his phone speaking emphatically to Christy.  His name was Sa’id.  He had been eavesdropping on our conversation and wanted to know if he could sit in our circle.

“Please!” I said, longing to develop friendships and to sort through both my internal mess and the mess of this place.

As Sa’id pulled his chair next to mine, I asked him to tell me his story.  He began by pulling a green ID card from his pocket.  It was the Israeli issued, Palestinian ID card.

“This,” he began, “gives me permission to feel free to stay right where I am.”

He pretended to tear it and then pretended to throw it.

“I hate this thing!” he said through gritted teeth.  “I would destroy it if I could, but I cannot.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because if ever I am found without it by Israeli defenders, they will send me to prison.”

“Where was your family from?” I asked.

“Tekoa.” he said.  “Once it was my family’s land.  Now it is a Settlement.”

“How did that happen?”

“What do you mean, ‘How did that happen?'” he spat.  “They came in with government papers and took it.”

“Was there a fight?”

Two tongue clicks communicated much: there had been no fight.  What could they have done against the guns, tanks, and bulldozers of the Israelis?

Changing the subject, I asked, “Did you know that one of the prophets from my Scriptures came from Tekoa?”

“Amos!” he replied with pride.

“Do you know what God said to Israel through Amos?” I asked.

“Tell me.” He leaned in, obviously interested.

“Amos was a shepherd whom God invited to share God’s heart with Israel’s leaders.” I began.  “He started by speaking of all of Israel’s enemies, identifying all that Israel’s enemies had done to them, and explaining what God would do to the enemies of Israel…Israel celebrated the words of Amos.”

Sa’id interrupted: “I do not like this man, Amos.”

“There’s more to the story.” I said, taking a sip of my Arabic coffee.  “As Israel’s leaders celebrated, Amos had one more thing to say: ‘Israel, you are guilty of the same kinds of injustice against your enemies…you will reap what you sow.'”

Silence.

Sa’id broke the silence: “I like this man Amos.  He encourages Israel to be pro-people.”

“I like Amos too.” I said, “but I like his pro-people God even more.”

In that moment, some of my internal mess dissipated.  If the church is God’s ongoing presence in the unique soil of the here and now, then our role is to be pro-people activists.  Our work is to be the practitioners who make the compassion and justice of God real and who encourage others to do the same.  Our work is to make the thoughts, words, and actions of Jesus real in the everyday.

In that moment, I also recognized that to be pro-Israel means that we encourage them to be pro-people.  That is, we must push Israel into just practices with the Palestinian.

Within five minutes of conversation with an Israeli Jew, you will discover how many family members she lost in the Holocaust.  I did not hear a number lower than 70%.  Unimaginable stories of horrific loss and/or miraculous escape or survival are ingrained in the national psyche of the Israeli people.  Informed by the stories of their grandparents and great grandparents, they live with societal PTSD.

Within five minutes of conversation with a Palestinian, you will learn how many of her family members have been or are currently political prisoners in Israeli detention camps.  Today, there are 12,000 Palestinians in such camps.  Further, you will hear stories of the village that was once hers, past livelihoods that are no more, life in occupied territory, and how many times she, personally, has been held at gun point by Israeli troopers.  Informed by their own stories, the Palestinian people live with societal PTSD.

For the Israeli Jew, the story of their people begins not in Genesis, but in the death camps of WWII. 

For the Palestinian, the story begins not in ancient times, but in 1948.

The Israeli national slogan is “Never Again!”

The Palestinian national slogan is “Your Holocaust created our Catastrophe!”

The Palestinian cannot touch the pain of the Israeli Jew because, if she does, she fears her validation will cause the Jews to justify their acts of injustice against her people.

The Israeli Jew cannot touch the pain of the Palestinian because, if she does, she fears that the Palestinian will either hold her to just practices or take advantage of her lowered defenses.

The Jew and the Palestinian are locked in a Vicious Dance which keeps them focused on the past.

In the twilight hours and in the wake of Yad Vashem, our learning community found ourselves circled up in an upscale West Jerusalem park.  Diverse narrations of people’s experiences and new understandings of the Holocaust slowly emerged as words were hard to find.

A lull that had grown into a prolonged silence was interrupted at last by the family story of our Israeli tour guide.  90% of her bloodline was murdered in the Holocaust, but her four Polish grandparents survived.

This woman had become my friend so I listened with tears in my eyes to the horrors of the minuscule details that she was able to share with us.  I understood unlike I had ever before why her grandfather would, at each birthday, raise a glass in vocal defiance of the enemies of Israel.  Lost in the memories of a dehumanizing time, he would exclaim “Never again!”… and the rest of the family would echo, “Never again!”

Violence had been done to my perspective of human beings on this day.  At Yad Vashem, I was confronted with the reality of hatred, injustice, violence, and silence.  It seemed as though everything beautiful about life and humanity had been stripped away.  I needed a reminder of hope, of new life, of beauty, of relationship.

Just then, I watched as a bride walked with confidence into the middle of our circle with her photographer in tow.

“May I dance in your circle?” she asked.

“Please!” I said not knowing or caring if she was Israeli or Palestinian.

As she danced in our circle, we celebrated her life.

Every Holocaust Museum tells a specific story.  For example, the Museum in Washington D.C. tells of the horrors of the death camps, but ends with the American liberation.  One way of reading this story is that the Nazis did this horrific thing and we (the American Liberators) ended it.  In large part this is true.

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem tells a different story.

To begin, the facility itself is an amazing structure.  The building is shaped like a massive three-dimensional triangle that literally cuts right through a hillside.  The top of the triangle is transparent, freeing ambient light to illuminate the main corridor that lies beneath.  A massive panoramic window on the far side of the museum draws each guest close: illuminated by light, we walk through the land toward the light.

The curators of Yad Vashem have done an amazing job of helping its visitors understand both the global tragedy and also the personal terror of the Holocaust.  For example…

I found myself standing in the middle of the first exhibit before I realized it.  I stood in the main corridor gazing toward the panoramic window at the end when I looked to my right and left.  As I did, I recognized that I stood between two massive pictures, each a different picture of the same gruesome massacre.

A layer of logs and a layer of Jews…A layer of logs and a layer of Jews…A layer of logs and a layer of Jews…ten to fifteen layers thick…all of them dead and partially burnt.

These pictures were taken by a liberator as smoke continued to rise from the worst bonfire I’d ever seen.  You see, just before the camp was liberated, the Nazis laid down a layer of logs and then a layer of Jews, executed them with a bullet in the back of their heads, laid down another layer of logs and did it over and over and over…it was their final attempt to exterminate as many Jews as they possibly could and to destroy the evidence with fire before the liberators arrived.  The fire never really caught, so what remained on that day will forever be seared into my memory and the memories of thousands of visitors a day who visit Yad Vashem.

Directly beneath the pictures lay a glass display with the things that the liberators found in the pockets of the people in the pile.  Charred pocket watches, wedding rings, ID cards, drawings of “home”, maps of the death camp, letters to loved ones.  As I processed what it was that I as seeing, I understood that these objects were the very things that individuals had held on to in an effort to remain sane and to hold on to hope for a better day.  What’s more, I understood unlike I ever had before, that the Holocaust was deeply personal: real people killed real people.

As I began to weave my way through Yad Vashem I quickly understood the story of this particular museum…it was a story that is not often told on this side of the world.

The story goes like this:

In the Holocaust, the whole world tried to kill us.

One display in particular opened my eyes to the global scale of the Holocaust.  On a wall in a room was a massive map of Europe and Asia.  Red dots marked not tens…not hundreds…but thousands of death camps.  On the opposite wall were listed the names of specific countries under which were listed the names of the death camps in each country complete with the number of people who were killed in each camp.  Next to each country name was a large number that depicted the total number of people killed in that country during the Holocaust.

As Americans, we hear about the four or five major death camps.  We don’t necessarily hear about the thousands of them all over Europe and Asia.  It wasn’t just the Germans who tried to exterminate the Jews…it really was a global effort…and it was nearly successful.

…but the story continues:

In the Holocaust, the whole world tried to kill us.
In the Holocaust, Christians tried to kill us. 

The following display emphasized that the majority of the Nazi regime were Lutheran…they were Christians.  In their story, the Jews understand that Christians sought to exterminate Jews and that the American Christians stood by silently.

One quote (Christian to Jew) paralyzed me: “We cannot help you…you killed Christ.”

From that moment forward, the story becomes incredibly personal.  I read post cards scribbled in a panic from a cattle car.  One such post card was written by a young mother whose baby boy had just been ripped out of her arms.  Finding herself packed into a cattle car, separated from her infant child for the first time in her life, I could hear her screaming out:

“Richard…O my Richard!  Has anyone seen my Richard?  God save my Richard!”

Yad Vashem unofficially ends in a circular room that is forty feet tall, floor to ceiling.  I entered into the space on a platform that suspended me at twenty feet; from my vantage point I could look up and I could look down.  The walls of the space, floor to ceiling, are lined with bookshelves on which sit binders containing the names and personal information of the 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.  To this day, they continue to the search for every last name.

In the Holocaust, the whole world tried to kill us.
In the Holocaust, Christians tried to kill us. 
We survived…

From this room, the official end of Yad Vashem drew me: the panoramic window.  The view of “the land” was stunning.  The story continued:

In the Holocaust, the whole world tried to kill us.
In the Holocaust, Christians tried to kill us. 
We survived…and the land is rightfully ours.

As I exited, I watched as a platoon of young Jewish defenders who had just made their way through the museum.  As I listened to their impassioned commander, a question grew loud in my mind:

Why is it that I have never heard a contemporary Jew refer to God as the God who delivered them from the Holocaust?

In my understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures, it seems as though Israel always identified God by what He had done.  For example, God was not just named “God”, He was named “God who rescued us from Egypt.”  My experience of Yad Vashem concluding with the sight of kids with guns left me wondering if contemporary Jews saw God as the God who had delivered them or if they saw God as the God who had abandoned them.

Kids with guns chanting the national slogan, “Never again!” seemed to answer the question.

It seems as though they believe that God had not delivered them, but that God had abandoned them.  And if God had abandoned them, then they weren’t rescued from the Holocaust: they survived.  And because they survived, the land through which Yad Vashem cuts through was rightfully theirs.  What’s more, it seems as though they believe that the land is going to stay theirs not because they put their faith and trust in their God but because they put guns in the arms of indoctrinated kids.

In the Holocaust, the whole world tried to kill us.
In the Holocaust, Christians tried to kill us. 
We survived…and the land is rightfully ours.
God cannot be trusted so we will trust ourselves.