Temple Beth Israel, Eugene Oregon

Rabbinical Staff

Learning to Cope: Kol Nidre 5766

By Rabbi Maurice Harris
Oct. 1, 2006

The contemporary philosopher, Sam Keen, writes about a cartoon he once saw that changed his life. The picture was of a bearded prophet on a street corner of a major American city, carrying a sign that read, “The world is not coming to an end. We will have to learn to cope.”

   Boy do we ever need to learn how to cope with each other and with the consequences of our impacts on the natural environment.   The need for us to change how we resolve human conflicts and how we treat the planet is pressing upon us as we collectively stare down the barrel of global warming and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, I think that that funny cartoon may only be half right. We do have to learn to cope, but for the first time in human history, we also are imperiling human civilization’s future.

   Tomorrow Rabbi Yitzhak is going to address climate change and the spiritual and moral imperative it presents to us as Jews. Tonight I’d like to focus on our other great existential threat – war, violence, and the urgent need for a new way of coping with one another.

*   *
   There is a place in the foothills of northwest Virginia where professors and students study the emerging field known as peacebuilding.   It’s called Eastern Mennonite University, or EMU for short, and last June I participated in a week-long seminar as part of their annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute. I wrote a bit about it in the August newsletter, but tonight I’d like to say more.

The Summer Peacebuilding Institute, or SPI, is an intensive program in which students from many religious backgrounds and nationalities investigate the social science of conflict transformation, or, to use the term some in the field are now preferring, peacebuilding – a word that’s so new I had to add it to my Microsoft Word dictionary as I wrote this. The various courses offered at SPI deal with different aspects of violence – from domestic violence to warfare. Students come from literally all over the world. While I was there I talked politics with a priest from the Philippines, shared breakfast with an Iraqi woman, wept with a Laotian who has lost relatives to American cluster bombs from the Vietnam era, and celebrated Shabbat with an Israeli Jew and several American Mennonites. And that only begins a much longer list.

The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at the university sponsors SPI, and I was deeply struck by their core values statement. The first value they list is Shalom/Salaam/Ubuntu – a Hebrew word, an Arabic word, and a Zulu word. The definition they offer for these words is “the awareness of our interconnectedness and the importance of right relationships.” I was impressed that they didn’t simply define shalom as “peace,” as is commonly done.   The word shalom runs much deeper than simply an absence of hostilities. As Rabbi Marcia Prager puts it:
[It] may surprise you is that shalom does not mean “peace” … at least not with the same nuance of meaning as the word “peace” has in English. The word “peace” enters English through the Latin pax. This “pax” was a much-touted goal of the Roman Empire: the Pax Romana, the “Roman Peace.” … Roman military victory brought “peace.” … This military derivation of the word “peace” is demonstrated by our agreement in English speaking countries that the opposite of “peace” is “war.”

The Hebrew word shalom bears astonishingly little resemblance to this kind of “peace.” In order to understand a Hebrew word we must look at the letters of its root, the three-letter core of consonants that is the word’s source. In shalom they are the Hebrew letters, SHIN, MEM, LAMED. This root conveys the meanings of wholeness, completeness, fulfillment, and perfection.

At SPI I discovered an institution where people study current research on which choices, actions, and planning activities tend to lead either to violent outcomes or to peaceful ones, which choices tend to repeat destructive social patterns and which ones build the social infrastructure that creates genuine societal shalom.

   Before I go on, let me say that I’ve fallen victim to my fair share of cynicism over the years about the prospects of human beings creating a much more peaceful and just world. I think I’ve often interpreted the famous verse from Ecclesiastes that states “there is nothing new under the sun” to mean that the location of empires and the sophistication of technologies may change from one era of human history to the next, but the same human foibles are too much for us as a species. Greed, short-sightedness, lust, narcissism, and ignorance reappear in one guise or another and keep the world in a permanently sorry moral state.

   SPI gave me some new cause for hope. I had never before seen the disciplined study of the practical aspects – or as we say in Yiddish, the tachlis – of how peaceful societies work. There’s a need for much more research and study, but already scholars in the field are developing theories based on what they’ve seen work. One of the take away lessons from my small brush with this relatively new field of study was that we have real choices – moral choices of course, those will never go away, but also practical choices about how we organize our towns and our institutions, and these choices can increase or decrease the likelihood that we’ll dwell in peace or in the midst of violence. After SPI, I developed a new take on that verse from Ecclesiastes. “There is nothing new under the sun” now signifies for me the idea that all the tools that we need to solve the puzzle of how to achieve a more peaceful and secure human society are here with us and have always been. We just need to do some homework.

   So what are some of these practical peacebuilding choices? Like many other things in life, the data seems to show that one of the most effective things we can do to build peaceful societies is to prepare and train people for conflicts before they occur. This goes for conflicts between neighbors, neighborhoods, and nations. For example, there are already studies that show that in neighboring towns with a cyclical history of warfare, when community leaders formed local peace-keeping committees that met regularly in order to anticipate potential conflicts and prepare non-violent ways to respond in advance, fewer violent conflicts resulted as compared with other similar trouble spots. Other data seem to show that when local business and union leaders – people who stand to lose a lot from periodic ethnic battles between communities – make up part of peace-keeping committees, they are apparently even more effective. Not so much because of altruism, but because of self-interest being channeled into a well-planned piece of social infrastructure that helps nip emerging violence in the bud.

   This brings me to my next point. A big part of preparing and training for peace involves building infrastructure. This reminds me of the words we sing when we return the Torah to the ark – we sing: d’racheha dar-chey no’am / v’chol niteevo-teha shalom. What we’re saying, broadly, is that the Torah is a tree of life and that her pathways are shalom. It’s interesting to me that the verse doesn’t proclaim that the Torah’s outcome is shalom, but rather that her pathways – the routes of travel within the landscape of Torah, a part of its infrastructure – are shalom. To say it conversely, there is no shalom without an infrastructure of shalom, no peace without a network of institutions, structures, and organized practices that build a society at peace – no peace without peacebuilding.

As the SPI seminar continued, it started seeming more and more common-sensical for every society to have a peacebuilding infrastructure. After all, nobody would build a new town or city without infrastructure to control and minimize fires. Why do we have fire departments, fire drills at schools, smoke detectors, and fire codes? Because there will always be fires, and because fires are too dangerous to take chances with. It’s the same with conflict. What we’ve done to prepare for and control fire can teach us about what we need to do for conflict. Through a multi-layered infrastructure that includes a group of specialized professionals who are entrusted to handle the cases when fire does erupt, as well as a program of education that extends into our schools, our offices, and even our homes, we prevent a huge percentage of fires from ever happening, and we lose fewer lives and suffer less loss as a result of fires. Stop and think about this for a second. This is a remarkable human achievement.

   The bottom line is that we handle fire better than we handle conflict and its potential for violence because we have learned a whole way of thinking about fire. We began learning this way of thinking as small children in school. We train our citizens to think according to certain tested patterns and principles in advance, and then we respond, when needed, based on that training. The theory is that it can be the same with peacebuilding. It’s about learning a different way of thinking, and educating ourselves and our kids according to methods and patterns that work to curb violence.

It’s asking for a massive cultural change, but it’s do-able. Why do I think so? Because peacebuilding is a learnable skills-set that can be built into societies through deliberate choice. And because we’ve already succeeded many times at these kinds of large scale social training and education projects. In addition to the example of fire safety, think about what it took to educate an entire nation in creating our automobile culture. Building millions of miles of roads, training generations of citizens in the traffic laws, developing regulatory bodies to improve the safety of the cars themselves, requiring schools to teach drivers’ ed, testing and re-testing and licensing. Only a few generations ago, no one had even invented the car!   When we want to, we’re capable of massive education for change.

   Because Eastern Mennonite University is a religious institution, its faculty in the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding are especially interested in the role religion plays in violent conflict and in peacebuilding. The Summer Peacebuilding Institute deliberately seeks to bring people of many faiths together to examine why religion plays the role it does in inspiring violence, and how to take advantage of the role it also sometimes plays in creating peace.

   The professor who taught my seminar, which was called, “Religion: Source of Conflict, Resource for Peace,” argued that one of the things religious leaders need to do in order to play a positive role for peacebuilding is to tell the truth about their religions – to own up to the dark side as well as the light. Prof. Ron Kraybill writes that “most people of faith have little awareness of the dimensions of their own traditions that are most commonly used to justify destructive actions and attitudes towards others. … People of faith have an obligation to become informed about the full extent of the damage done in their name. Survival of our world requires ‘an end to assumed innocence’” on the part of religions.

   During the course of the seminar, three presenters – a Christian scholar named Prof. Nancy Heisy, a Muslim Imam named Yahiyah Hendi, and an Orthodox Jewish studies professor named Robb Eisen – analyzed how their religions have been used to justify violence and what tools they offer in the cause of peacebuilding. Prof. Heisy analyzed the history of Christian imperialism and militarism following Constantine and connected it to militant expressions of Christianity today, such as the embrace of the war in Iraq by the Christian right.

Imam Hendi presented and analyzed the major Qu’ranic verses that Osama bin Laden has cited in promoting a violent version of Islam, and described a contest of interpretation taking place within Islamic society in which Imams like him are fighting for traditional readings of the Qu’ran that defy the narrow vision of the modern day extremists. Imam Hendi, by the way, is a Palestinian Muslim who, during the Second Intifada, was one of the first Imams to publish an Islamic legal ruling – a fatwa – prohibiting suicide bombing as contrary to Islam.

And finally there was Professor Eisen. He opened his analysis of Judaism as a source of conflict and of peace by saying, “I’m going to tell you lots of terrible things about Judaism in the next hour. And then I’m going to show you how many of the same texts [that are sources of violence] … [can be] sources of peace. And in the end I hope that you will be very confused.” Ahhhhhhh – Judaism! Entangled, hyper-intellectual, neurotic, self-contradicting - after several days of being the only Jew in the room, Prof. Eisen’s arrival was like mother’s milk!

He then went on to describe how core concepts in Judaism, like chosenness, war, messianism, historical memory, and even monotheism itself have been marshaled in the cause of violence or hatred of the Other. He also shared his ideas about how those concepts have been – and have the potential to be – interpreted and handled so that they act as peacebuilding tools. One thing he said really stuck with me. He told our class: “If you are not prepared to be honest with your own tradition, you are not prepared to be a peacemaker.”

Because the authority granted to religious leaders is so great, the potential is huge for influencing millions of people to harm others in the name of religious piety. As my friend Mark Hurwitt has said, few things are as potentially destructive as masses of people doing the wrong thing while they believe they are doing right. To refer back to Rabbi Yitzhak’s Rosh Hashanah sermon, in which he mentioned our two moral impulses – our yetzer ha-tov, our inclination to do good, and our yetzer ha-ra, our inclination to do evil – religion is the major element of human society that carries with it the potential for people to fall victim to the yetzer ha-ra wearing the clothes of the yetzer ha-tov. The people who crashed the planes into the Twin Towers believed they were doing the right thing. So did the Popes who launched the Crusades. And so did Yigal Amir when he murdered Yitzhak Rabin.

I think we need to not only be honest about our religions, but also about our countries. I’d like to share an example about how that realization dawned on me. When I arrived at SPI, knowing that a very small number of Jews would be there, I expected that I would be constantly aware of my place in the world as a Jew. What surprised me was how much more I learned about myself as an American, and about the shocking amount of power, influence, hope, and disappointment that America generates for people around the world.

There was one conversation I had with a Jordanian man, Omar, which really drove home this point. Over the course of the weekend break in the seminar, Omar traveled with a busload of the foreign students to visit Washington, DC. After their visit, he and I were chatting, and he told me that he had seen something at the Smithsonian Museum of American History that he just couldn’t believe. While exploring the museum’s permanent exhibit on the history of the Vietnam War, he came across a large display about the My Lai massacre of 1968.

“I couldn’t believe that your government had created this public display admitting that your soldiers had committed this hideous war crime,” he told me. “It was right there, for everyone visiting from anywhere in the world to see.” And then a look of such admiration came across his face. “This would never happen in my country. This is true greatness. This is real strength.” While standing at the display, Omar had asked an American woman from EMU why our government would do this. She shrugged and told him that it was because Americans wanted to know the truth. I privately thought to myself that she had given him an answer that judged us too broadly and too kindly, but, at the same time… there was the museum exhibit right before them. Our country’s most impressive moment for Omar may have been a public display of one of our worst sins. What impressed him was what the display said about our values, our commitment to be honest about our dark side and learn from our mistakes, and our trust that we can integrate knowledge about what we did wrong in such a way that we recommit ourselves to our highest ideals. In Judaism we call that t’shuvah .

After SPI, Melissa and I traveled to Israel for most of the month of June, where we bonded with my large, Moroccan-Israeli family. We also spent a day in Bethlehem, in the West Bank, visiting with a Palestinian Muslim man I had met at SPI. Husam Jubran holds a Masters Degree in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University, and upon his return to Bethlehem in 2004, he organized workshops on non-violent resistance and political activism for Palestinians. In 2004 alone over 600 people attended the trainings. In an article about Husam , there’s a poignant story that illustrates how far-reaching habits of violence can be, and how even a little bit of peacebuilding work can start to peel back the layers of violence in our lives. Some of the youth who took the non-violence workshop raised the issue of domestic violence in their lives. One girl told him, “There are problems in the schools with the teachers; sometimes they hit us. Our brothers beat us or force us to serve them tea or clean the house. But we can’t speak freely about these troubles. Even our parents don’t listen to us, about what we need, what we are interested in.”   The non-profit Husam worked for responded by creating a public education campaign about violence against children within Palestinian homes.

After experiencing SPI and Israel this summer, I returned to Eugene inspired to learn more about peacebuilding, about the research and the practical aspects of how it works. I came back with a sense of excitement about the idea that a more peaceful world isn’t just a wish we repeat in our prayers, but that it actually can happen and that we can use some of the same tools we’ve applied to other challenges – like improving medical care or fire safety – to learn how to make a more peaceful world. This is do-able.

I believe most people doubt that it’s do-able, but consider this: people have great faith in our ability to accomplish all kinds of amazing things technologically, medically, and so on. But not morally? Well – Judaism says that isn’t so. Our tradition doesn’t teach that we are doomed to endless moral failure and collective struggle. It teaches that we have choices and that we are capable of learning new patterns of behavior. That’s t’shuvah. Our tradition doesn’t say that we’re trapped by our sinfulness, but rather, as God says to Cain in Genesis, “Sin crouches at the door … but you can be its master.”

And regarding our ability to live a moral life, in Deuteronomy God tells us, “…[it] is not hidden from you, nor is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it, and do it? … Rather this thing is very near to you, in your mouth, and in your heart, that you may do it. … I call heaven and earth to witness this day before you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that both you and your future generations may live.”

   I think our tradition has it right on this point. We can choose blessing and life – we’ve got the tools. Interestingly, the rabbis interpreted part of the passage I just read from Deuteronomy to mean that we – and not God - are now responsible for developing the techniques and the teachings to live rightly. When God says to the people, “It is not in heaven” – lo ba-shamayim hi – the rabbis take this to mean that it’s up to us to take the knowledge and skills we’ve been given and make the crucial moral decisions, and that God has put this responsibility into our hands. The answers are not going to be given to us from heaven. Husam Jubran said something similar about the successes of his peacebuilding work in Palestine: “The ability to put together trainings about facilitation, conflict, nonviolence, peacebuilding, and human rights didn’t come to me from heaven. It came because of the hard work and great courses I had at [Eastern Mennonite University].”   This is as much a problem of research, learning, and practicing new habits as it is a problem of learning to overcome our baser instincts. And it’s urgent that we take action. As Profressor Kraybill told our seminar, “we may have only a few generations to change the way human beings think” in order to prevent our own destruction. I invite you to join me in learning more about peacebuilding, by getting involved with and supporting organizations that seek to build some of the needed infrastructure. In Eugene, Community Mediation Services, CALC – the Community Alliance of Lane County – and the Eugene Middle East Peace Group are good examples. Nationally, Congressman Kucinich’s initiative for establishing a Federal Department of Peace is worth examining. And if you are interested in potentially attending the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, contact me – you don’t have to be clergy to attend, and it can be a wonderfully transformative experience.

   We know we’re facing an environmental ultimatum that’s going to require a shift in our thinking, our infrastructure, and our personal habits. What SPI reminded me of is that, because of the unprecedented scale of the destructive capacity of modern weaponry, we’re also facing a peacebuilding ultimatum. It too is going to require a shift in our thinking, our infrastructure, and our personal habits. Blessing or curse, sink or swim. It’s up to us. Let’s get to work.

G’mar hatimah tovah – may we be inscribed and sealed for a year of peacebuilding.