Exodus 33.12-23, Matthew 22.15-22
The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 22 October 2023, Austwick, Clapham
The Book of Exodus is, on the one hand, the story of the release of a captive people, their journey to a land of safety and security; it also describes the shaping of a toxic nationalism, of how a people came to see themselves chosen above all others to inhabit a particular piece of land in an occupied area. It is at times about God’s guidance and provision. And, as in today’s strange dialogue between him and Moses, it is also about the elusiveness of God, his seeming absence at times of crisis.
We are reading Exodus at a time of elevated crisis in the Middle East; and in a conflict driven by religious ideologies of different kinds - Zionism and Islamism clashing - all these themes of Exodus are right there on the surface: Can the scared and suffering ones make it over the border? Which of the warring factions will win control of the land? And where is God to be found in this struggle?
It is all taking place a long way from here; but in another sense it couldn’t be closer; for the Christian Church is the ‘Israel of God’; [1] we identify with Her closely; on some meaningful level the actions and the fate of the people of Israel are inseparable from our own. Though troubled and concerned, we may feel powerless to do anything about what’s happening in the Middle East. But how we respond to it, and how we choose to live towards our neighbours in our place, in our time, we trust is part of the kingdom of God which embraces us all.
Last week I briefly described a man called Rami Elhanan. Today let me tell you more of his story. [2] Now seventy-three years old, a professional man, the seventh generation of a Jerusalem family, in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, Rami, a young reserve soldier, one day set out in a company with 11 tanks which returned with only 3 tanks. “There, in the Sinai sands, I lost some of my very best friends,” he says. “I came out of this war an angry and embittered, cynical and furious young man. Determined to cut myself off from any sort of involvement, I built me a life: studies, family, career.”
A decade later, on Yom Kippur evening 1983, a sweet new baby girl was born in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem to Rami and his wife Nurit. They named her Smadar, from the Song of Solomon, meaning ‘The Grape of the Vine’. He said of her, “She was a very vivid, smiling, happy, full of life and active young girl who joined our calm, happy family.”
That was until, on the 4th September 1997, Smadar and her friends went to Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem to buy school books. There, they met their death, killed by two Palestinian suicide bombers who murdered five people that day, among them three little girls aged 14. Rami remembers “running crazily through the streets, going from one police station to the next, one hospital to the next, until eventually, much later in that long accursed night, you find yourself in the morgue and this terrible … sight that you will never, ever, be able to blot out.”
On the following Sunday the funeral was held in Kibbutz Nachshon, on a hill outside Jerusalem. Smadar was buried next to her late grandfather ‘Matti’ Peled, a well-known Israeli public figure who was, at various periods of his life, a Major General in the Israel Defence Forces, head of Arabic Language and Literature at Tel Aviv University, a respected member of the Knesset and a radical peace activist, a leading proponent of Israeli dialogue with the PLO and of complete withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. [3] “The enemies of peace murdered his granddaughter.” Rami said.
After the time of mourning, came a time of challenge for Rami. “Now,” he says, “you must marshal your strength, get up, face yourself in the mirror and decide: what … do you do with the rest of your life when suddenly you have become a completely different person, and all your previous priorities have dissipated in a trance and it's as though they never existed?
“And really there are only two options to choose from, only one of two paths to tread: the first is the obvious one, the automatic, and the immediate. When someone murders your 14 year old little daughter, the one and only thing you have in your head is unlimited anger and an urge for revenge that is stronger than death. This is a natural feeling, it's only human. Most people feel that way, it's understandable, it's clear and predictable. However, we are human beings and not animals. We have a head on our shoulders and inside that head we have a brain and when the first madness of anger passes, you begin to ask yourself penetrating questions: if I kill someone in revenge, will that bring my baby back to me? And if I cause someone pain, will that ease my own pain? And the answer is absolutely "No". Then, during a long and slow, difficult and painful process you gradually reach the other road, and you try to understand: what occurred here? What can drive someone to such anger and despair as to be willing to blow himself up together with little girls? And most important: what can you, personally, do to prevent this intolerable suffering from others…”
Almost a year later Rami met a man called Yitzchak Frankenthal. He told Rami about his son Arik, kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 1994, and that he had established an organisation of people who lost children in the conflict but nevertheless want peace. Rami became angry with him. He asked: “How dare you enter the home of people who have just lost a child and talk to them about peace?” Frankenthal, not offended, but “with great calm and patience”, invited Rami to attend a meeting to see for himself. And, partly from politeness and partly from curiosity, Rami agreed.
When he arrived at that first meeting he saw holocaust survivors, bereaved Jewish parents, and also what he calls “an amazing spectacle”, something completely new to him. He saw bereaved Palestinian families: Arab men, women and children, coming towards him, greeting him for peace, hugging him and crying with him. He says, “I distinctly remember a respectable elderly woman dressed entirely in black and on her breast a locket with a picture of a kid, about six years old…”
“I am not religious - quite the opposite,” Rami says, “and so I am at a loss to explain the change I underwent at that moment. But one thing became as clear to me as the sun at noon: from that day on in 1998, I got a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Since that day on I have dedicated my life to one thing only: to shout in a loud voice, to all who are prepared to listen, and also to those whose ears are blocked: This is not our destiny! It is not a decree of fate that cannot be changed! Nowhere is it written that we must continue dying and sacrificing our children forever and forever in this difficult horrible holy land. We can - and once and for all must - stop this crazy vicious circle of violence, murder and retaliation, revenge and punishment. This never-ending cycle, with no purpose. With no winners and only with losers.”
Is there any prospect of a win-win solution to this, and every other, seemingly lose-lose situation in our conflicted world? Jesus absolutely thought so: Jesus championed the win-win solution when he said, ‘Give the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and God the things that are God’s’. [3]
New occasions teach new duties, [4] and it is our task, all of us, with Rami, his fellow activists for reconciliation, and all the bereaved, to work out, in this world of conflict, what our duties are.
Notes
[1] Galatians 6.16. As discussed in my previous sermon, Is this your God, O Israel?, 15 October 2023.
[2] The story of Rami Elhanan which follows is an edited version of Rami Elhanan, Replacing Pain with Hope, The Parents Circle Families Forum: Personal Stories, 1 January 2006. Previously included in my sermon, Even now in Palestine, imagine a debt-free world, Somerset, 17 September 2017.
[3] John Davies, A win-win answer to a lose-lose question. Somerset, 19 October 2014. Based on a sermon of the same title by Paul J. Nuechterlein, delivered at Our Savior's Lutheran, Racine, WI, October 20, 2002.
[4] New occasions teach new duties: a line from The Present Crisis, a poem by James Russell Lowell. Quoted in Water Brueggemann, Chosen? Reading the Bible Amid the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
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