JustASC

First stop at Capernaum

As a 20-something living in Israel, I paid a lot of attention to cafes, falafel stands, and 20-something women (whether they paid attention to me is another story). When I went back to live there as a family man in my 30s, I paid a lot of attention to playgrounds and ice cream stands, and when I saw a 20-something women my only thought was whether she babysat.

Israel isn’t the only place where foreground becomes background, and vice versa, depending on who you are, what you believe, and where you are in life. But few places change so drastically depending on what the visitor brings to the country.

I am realizing this yet again as an observer on an interfaith mission to Israel sponsored by the Newark Interfaith Coalition for Hope & Peace. The organizers include Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, and the Waris Cultural Research and Development Center, a mosque in Irvington. The 33 participants include Jews, Muslims and Christians; white folks and black folks; suburbanites and city-dwellers; first-timers to Israel and jaded returnees like me. In just two days in the North, where Israeli Arabs form a majority and the Jesus story often speaks louder than the Jewish one, I’ve already seen an Israel that I have overlooked on previous trips. Again and again I am reminded that what is foreground for one group is background for another.

That sunk in before the trip even got under way, when, leaving the plane, our group emerged into a similarly sleepy Ben-Gurion Airport. Most of us breezed through passport control and customs, ready to board the tour bus. But two of the young Muslim women with us were held back by security. And held back. Nearly three hours of anxious waiting later, they emerged from wherever they’d been held for questioning, greeted by a group flush with relief, embarrassment, and sympathy.

I’m willing and able to defend the Israeli security protocol that flagged the two travelers, but the incident showed me from the outset how the experience of Israel can be very different for different groups.

Irvington Imam W. Deen Shareef reads a passage from the Koran about Mary at the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth

A few hours later we were in Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, where Christians believe that Jesus preached and even stayed in the home of Peter and other apostles. The Rev. Bob Morris, executive director of the Interweave spirituality center in Summit, joked that “Jesus slept here,” but he wasn’t really joking. The extensive archaeological finds at the site line up nicely with the New Testament accounts. “This is the real thing,” said Morris, reminding a Jewish listener that Israel is Christian history, and its Christian sites are neither religious abstractions nor roadside attractions.

The next day we visited Tsippori, a site with a similarly strong historical resonance for Jews. It’s where Judah HaNasi helped compile the Mishna and where, as Rabbi Marc Rosenstein of Hebrew Union College in Israel told us, Jews fashioned a workable arrangement with the Romans – a compromise that worked until it didn’t. The group sat in a circle beneath a tree, singing a wordless niggun and then listening to Imam W. Deen Shareef of the Waris mosque talk about Abraham’s importance for Jews, Christians and Muslims. The Rt. Rev. Mark Beckwith of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark added that when the Nazareth of Jesus’ day was a hilltop backwater, Tsippori (Sephoris in the Christian tradition) was the Roman capital of the Galilee. The disparity, and the decadence, “radicalized him,” said Beckwith. “It inspired him to build bridges between the rich and the poor, between one hill and the other.”

But some bridges couldn’t be built so easily, not in the first two-days of a week-long interfaith trip anyway. In two separate conversations it became clear that there were divergent views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some members of the group sparred gently over terminology and responsibility for the fate of Palestinian refugees and the social and economic gaps among Israeli Arabs.

Farthi Mashood of NIF's Shatil office in Haifa

My foreground and background shifted abruptly in these exchanges. In discussing Israel with Jews, as I do in these pages every week, I am often the liberal in the room, urging Israel to address its civil rights challenges and celebrating the work of coexistence champions like the New Israel Fund and its grantees. But when Fathi Marshood, the Arab-Israeli co-director of NIF’s Shatil office in Haifa, began to catalogue the discrimination faced by Arab municipalities, I found myself anxious to defend Israel to those in the room for whom Israel’s failings are not just the foreground, but the entire picture.

Of course, I couldn’t know that for sure, having met most of my fellow travelers only 48 hours before. And by Tuesday night’s debriefing session, there seemed hope that those bridges could be built after all. One of the Muslim women spoke movingly about the picture we presented to the Israelis and tourists who saw us: whites and blacks, kippah-wearing Jews and Muslims in head scarfs and kufis, walking, laughing, and singing together. “We’re a picture of unity in a land that’s divided,” she said.

It’s enough to make you imagine a merging of foreground and background, and a frame within which the distinctions matter less and less.