Day 5: Standing in Discomfort

My legs are so sore from my hike down the mountain of Masada yesterday. I can only imagine what the Jews and Romans must have felt like. Today, we started off by listening to a speaker share with us the importance of perspective when looking at museums. In this case in particular she was talking about the Holocaust museum. We spent the first half of the morning visiting Yad Vashem, which is the Holocaust Museum here in Israel. If you have ever been to the Museum of Tolerance in LA or the Holocaust Museum in DC, you might understand the challenge that perspective brings to viewing the Holocaust, especially the importance of Yad Vashem. What our speaker shared with us was how each of the American museums views the Holocaust from an American perspective. When you visit Yad Vashem, you see the Holocaust through the eyes of Israelis, through the Jewish community that sprung out after the Holocaust. It is never a comfortable thing to share in the experience of pain from the Holocaust, but it is important. Our job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. If we ever find ourselves slipping into comfort, we may find ourselves forgetting the important things we have learned. It is a difficult place to sit in discomfort for that long, but it is what motivates us towards change, and to make sure things like the Holocaust do not continue to happen. My thoughts as I walked through the museum today were of pain and challenge for all of the genocides and mass killings that have happened post-Holocaust. The situations that are happening in Darfur and the Congo, in Sudan and in Iraq, are clear examples that we have grown comfortable, and are willing to turn our eyes from what might be painful to look at. These atrocities continue as long as people let them. A quote that stood out to me today while at the museum was, “A country is not what it does, it is what it tolerates” – Kurt Cholsky, German Essayist.

What evils do you allow to happen around you? What role do you play in stopping or perpetuating the issues of Genocide in our world?

On our way out of Jerusalem, we stopped by to learn a little about the Israeli Supreme Court. We then made our way up north towards Galilee, along the Jordan Rift Valley, driving through the West Bank, at times write along the walls that have been put up between Israel and Palestine. These walls were put up after the second Intifada to help prevent suicide bombers from entering Israeli communities. They have been left up ever since, and continue to be a very controversial issue here in the country. I cannot pretend that I know enough about them to tell you what I think, because after many of the speakers we have heard, I have learned that I know very little about the situation here, and I need to learn more before I pass judgment. What I can say is that looking at these walls remind me very much of the Peace Walls I experienced while in Northern Ireland that were put up between the Protestant and Catholic communities, to keep people from hurting one another. It also reminds me of the wall along the border of Mexico, which has worked at keeping immigration from Mexico into the US down. In the end walls are walls, and will keep us from one another, will keep us from seeing eye to eye, and unless we make a point to move beyond comfort we won’t be able to make progress on bringing those walls down.

We continued our way along the Jordan River, and made a stop at a Kibbutz. A kibbutz is a collective community that is established as an attempt at utopian society, where all is shared, and all receive the same, as much as one needs. It’s an amazing attempt at socialist living, but as we learned today, it has experienced its challenges with sustaining its way of life, from where it started in its precepts during the 1920’ until now. Kibbutzim (plural for Kibbutz) started as agriculturally based societies, where every aspect of life was taken care of by the community, food and clothing, hospitals and Education. This worked out for a while, but recently the impracticality of socialism has begun to set in, with the youth of the Kibbutz wanting to move out, not enjoying the lifestyle, because they want more. The Kibbutzim have begun making changes and taking steps away from their socialist ways, to now adopting capitalistic ways. The way the guy showing us around told explained it was as an evolution of the Kibbutz movement, because if it does not evolve it will perish. He also said that some Kibbutz communities have been able to maintain their socialist ways, but mostly because they have the money to support it. I wonder if it is possible to have your cake and eat it too. It is difficult to say what will become of the Kibbutz, but for now, we are staying at one, which has developed a very nice hotel. So, perhaps I can share more with you after spending more time at one.

Thank you for taking the time to read, I would love to hear what you think, so please if you can leave a comment I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts.