June 3, 2008

Dear Friends and Family,

In March when we were home in the States for a short period, we noticed on the television in California, there were advertisements inviting people to come to Israel to celebrate with them their 60 years of statehood, and to see all the great things they have accomplished as a country since Ben Gurion declared it a Jewish State in 1948. The ad showed beautiful photos of sparkling water, stretches of white sandy beaches, towering monuments and modern skyscrapers, and pastoral expanses of national parks.

Palestinian refugee camp, 1948.

For many of us who live in the region, this advertisement causes a great deal of sadness and despair, because as Isaac Newton observed in his third law of motion, “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Granted, some would even argue that the “equal reaction” part of his clause doesn’t really do justice to the full Israeli-Palestinian history, as Palestinians mark Gurion’s declaration as Nakba (or “catastrophe”), generating the diaspora of an estimated 700,000 people, razing to the ground 418 villages, and causing untold death and destruction. One people’s jubilation becomes another’s misery.

Yet not all people are equally reactionary. Some can take two negative experiences and turn them into a positive from which we can discover hope and inspiration. 

Dalia Landau (right) with friend Marcia Holman. Photo by Mark Holman.

If you’re looking for a great book, pick up The Lemon Tree, by Sandy Tolan, who recounts the events that brought two unlikely families together in discovery and healing. Dalia Landau (a friend of ours) is an Ashkenazi Jew who with her family, was driven from Bulgaria when she was a baby. Arriving in Ramla, her family moved into a furnished house that they were told had been inhabited by a Palestinian family that fled in the tumult of 1948, “like cowards, with their soup still steaming on the table.” Dalia could never understand why anyone would abandon such a beautiful house, despite the stories she’d heard.

Then one day, when the three Khairis brothers appeared on her door step, she came face to face with the reason. Asking her if they might look inside, one of the brothers, Bashir, was overwhelmed with grief and yearning as he stepped inside his former home. In the corner stood the piano his father had given to his mother on their wedding day, and outside stood the lemon tree his father had planted, deeply rooted, enduring and producing succulent fruit, despite all that had occurred in his family’s absence. Overcome with emotion, he wept.

Once the residence of Dalia Landau, the Open House is now a school for Palestinian and Israeli children. Photo by Mark Holman

This meeting began communications between the two families. Struck by what they learned of one another, they eventually turned the house into a school that would welcome both Jewish and Palestinian children called Open House. There’s lots of information about it at the Open House Web site.

We can never celebrate life at another’s expense, as the opposite and equal reaction will come to haunt us. We should instead channel our energies toward peaceful co-existence that will benefit both. Keeping this in mind we pray:

Yarabba ssalami amter alyna ssalam,
Yarabba ssalami imla’qulubana salam
(God of peace, rain peace upon us,
fill our hearts with peace.)

Yarabba ssalami amter alyna ssalam,
Yarabba ssalami im’nah biladan ssalam
(God of peace, rain peace upon us,
give our land peace.)

Grace and Peace,

The Finseths

The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 328