I remember — And here's why

When I was in fifth grade, circa 2000, I remember listening to a Sunday School teacher at my church (not my Sunday School teacher) telling us all about how Jesus would be coming back any day now, because of the internet. Her argument, as far as I remember it, was that Jesus had been waiting until his name had been spread to the ends of the earth, and with the internet, it was only a matter of time before every single person on earth had heard of Jesus. When that happened, we were assured, Jesus would return to us on the plains of Meggido. In Israel.

When I was a freshman in high school, circa 2004, I remember sitting in the band practice rooms reading a well-worn copy of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind. I knew my grandmother had the rest of the series so far at her house, mostly in glossy hardcover, and I was curious. I knew that our country was at war, of course, but it didn’t feel like a war to me. It wasn’t an important war, not like the one that opened the Left Behind series. In Israel.

My senior year of high school, circa 2007, I remember receiving a gift made of olive wood from the holy land. I remember turning it over, feeling the stirrings of longing, or loneliness, maybe, that feeling of wanting to go home to a place you’ve never been. But this was real. This wood was from a real place, a place I could maybe go one day. This was the place in the Bible, the place that all those little towns of Bethlehem in the US were named after. Israel.

I remember flipping to the world news section of any newspaper I got my hands on (usually the Charlotte Observer) throughout my childhood and into young adulthood. More often than not, there was an update about rocket fire in Israel. I watched these updates with the attention of Nostradamus.

I didn’t meet a Jewish person or a Muslim until I went to college. Anti-semitism had ended after World War II, of course (I knew that from the Holocaust fiction books that I inhaled at every opportunity), and so I treated my new Jewish friend just like I would any other Christian, and was secretly proud of how I was expanding my horizons. And of course, I was more enlightened than those post-9/11 Islamophobic folks I left back home, so I was able to have a deep religious conversation with the Muslim astronomy student who came on the trip out to Green Bank in the summer of 2008 to get a crash course in radio astronomy. We sat in the van and talked about Mary and Jesus and what our respective faiths taught us about the end of the world.

I took an Intro to Modern Islamic Civilizations class with Omid Safi in 2010 as a part of my religious studies minor, and I read a book by a Jewish man about the war in Palestine. I struggled to keep the dates straight in my head— Israel was “created” in 1948? But what about the Israel that I knew, the Israel of Jacob and David and Jesus? (I had taken a Hebrew Bible class, so I knew about the Babylonian Exile and the return under the Persian Empire, but I hadn’t quite gotten to the Romans and what they did to the second Temple.) Surely the land had lain empty, waiting for its people to come back? And I had heard of the Six-Day War (it was mentioned in Left Behind), but I thought that had mostly settled things. What was this Intifada?

I lived in the Grimes dorm on Carolina’s campus that year, my junior year of college, and my roommate and I had a white board on our door and a mirror covered in sticky notes where we recorded the quotes too personal or too niche to put on facebook. For most of the year, we had a drawing of Benny, the Hebrew Bible professor, complete with bowtie, and his famous quote, “It’s a lie!” (Benny knew his audience and challenged a lot of Bible Belt assumptions in his class.) But the post-it notes reflect the deeper change that was happening inside my conscience. Amid the stress of college and the world-shattering facts of the Israel-Palestine conflict, I had said, and my friends had recorded, “I wish we could go live in peace and harmony with the Palestinians.”

I had read The Diary of Anne Frank in middle school. The Holocaust was real to me in a deep and mysterious way that I’m still trying to parse. But now I was having the same feelings about Gaza that I had had about Auschwitz: sorrow that would drag me down to the ground, a desperate desire to find some good in the situation, a sense of horror at the unending injustice of the world. How could this happen in Israel?

I can’t capture the entirety of what I’ve learned about Israel and Palestine in a post like this. I would need to explain what I’ve learned about empires throughout history, the odd mirror of my Evangelicalism in America class in college, the words I learned in seminary to help name the seismic shifts in my thinking and feeling, and more, and more, and more. I would need to tell stories that I’m truly ashamed of and would honestly probably reveal more areas of growth than I want to cop to. I’m not an expert in Judaism or Islam or the political power dynamics of the region and I will never claim to be, no matter how many papers I’ve read or takes I’ve consumed. I simply can’t write the explainer post we all want that will usher in a new age of peace in the Middle East.

But I can hold up a mirror for us Christians in the United States. Warts and all, I can do that.

Maybe you see yourself in some of my experiences. Maybe you’ve read Revelation more than any other book of the Bible, as I have, and maybe you see some of the signs of the end times in our world today. If so, you’re in good company: the United States has had more than its fair share of apocalyptic movements and prophets. It lives deep inside those of us whose ancestors came here from Europe, especially those first English settlers. There is to this day a part of me who feels marathana in my bones.

Maybe your first introduction to Islam was 9/11, as I think mine was. Maybe you grew up hearing that Islam was an inherently violent faith and that the never-ending war in Israel was because of this. Maybe you get nervous when your gas station attendant is wearing a turban. Maybe you shudder when you pass a mosque.

Maybe you think that one of the best things we ever did as a country was fight the Nazis in WWII. We liberated concentration camps! We saved the Jews! And maybe the Holocaust scares you as much as it scares me. Maybe you think it’s a nightmare that these people who went through so much under Hitler are now having to fight for their homes again in Israel. Maybe you wonder why the Arab world hates Israel so much.

My friends, I am here to tell you that even though I’ve had some of these same thoughts, feelings, and questions, the truth is, there are no simple answers here. If Jesus was going to come back because of a war in Israel, he would have done it already. That doesn’t appear to be his criteria. And no matter what arguments you’ve seen, Islam isn’t an inherently violent religion, no more than Christianity is. You’ve got to root that fear out of yourself. (And that gas station attendant is probably a Sikh.) And as bad as the Holocaust is (and it’s bad), the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 is a longer story than you’ve probably been told. The land wasn’t empty. If it had been, there would be no need for the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan. On top of all of this (and this might be the hardest point for us to stomach), the war in Israel and Palestine continues because of US involvement in the conflict, and that involvement is driven, in part if not in whole, by Christians in the US who vote for leaders who favor Israel because we think, on some level, that the existence (and expansion) of the modern state of Israel will bring Jesus back. Israel is not our holy land playground. The Palestinian people are not our enemies.

As Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has said, a lot of things are true. (If you haven’t read the piece I linked there yet, it’s a great place to start.) And again, I don’t have the solution. But I know that I believe this, again from Rabbi Ruttenberg: “At the end of the day, everyone must be safe, free and allowed to flourish, because everyone is holy, created in the image of the divine.” Stop the bombings, stop the attacks, allow aid to come in, and address the root reasons why Hamas exists in the first place.

Ceasefire in Palestine.