Rabbi Arthur Waskow 7/28/2004

I have just (7/27/04) returned from three weeks in Israel, where I could taste sweet Torah-study at a leading center, and walk streets that mixed sweet sounds of children chattering Hebrew with the bitter sense of caution about buses and coffee houses that might be bombed.

And I went with Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) to visit some Palestinian neighborhoods where the Separation Wall is being built in such a way that it divides children from their schools, families from their cemeteries, sick people from their hospitals, farmers from their fields. And to visit neighborhoods where homes are being demolished on administrative (not security) grounds.

On one of those visits, I noticed a little boy about six years old in a bright red shirt. He was playing with some friends in the background as the neighborhood "mayor" talked to us in Arabic and Hebrew, and Rabbi Arik Ascherman of RHR translated into English.

We were standing in the foundations of a home that had been destroyed because it had no building permit. None of the homes in the neighborhood had a permit. The neighborhood was inside the City of Jerusalem as it had been defined by the Knesset's law of annexation after the 1967 war. But no one in the municipal government had ever created a zoning plan for this Palestinian neighborhood. So without an urban plan to say where homes can be built, they can be built nowhere.

But people need homes, and their children need homes. So families sell jewelry cherished for many generations, they save money from the sale of olive oil whatever it takes to invest in building homes. Even without a permit.

That is what Ahmed had done. But he had no permit, and the Israeli authorities had come and bulldozed his home. When Rabbi Ascherman had responded to his cry of despair by stepping in front of the bulldozer, Arik had been arrested and charged with interfering with the police.

(His trial will convene on September 21, shortly before the fast of Yom Kippur when we will read Isaiahs call, speaking for God: "When you see the homeless, bring them to your house; the naked, clothe them; the hungry, feed them: THAT is the fast that I, God, desire.")

So Arik will stand trial. The court has already ruled irrelevant his plea of justification by reason of nonviolently defending justice. But Ahmed has no home, and no money left to rebuild one.

One member of RHR handed us visitors a set of photographs of Ahmed's home as it had looked, inside and out, before it was destroyed. The set of photos was being passed around the circle.

As I listened to the Mayor and to Arik, I lost track of the photos, and when I glanced up again, I saw them in the hands of the little boy in the red shirt. He was looking intently through them, and then he gave them to another little boy and talked with him as they looked together at the photos.

I thought I knew what was happening, but to make sure I asked a friend to ask Ahmed: "Who is the little boy in the red shirt?"

He answered, "My son. Yusuf, my son."

Yes. The little boy in the red short Yusuf ibn Ahmed — was showing his friend the photos of his family's house, because the house itself no longer existed to show him.

I felt my heart break once again, as it has several times on this journey and on others I have made to Israel and to Palestine.

I explained to the group what I had been watching. I began to cry. The Mayor turned to Arik and said, "These tears remind us: We are all flesh and blood, all human beings. Among us, among Jews and Palestinians, there are always some who know and who remember: We are all human beings. I beg you: When you go to your own homes, remember."

Was this the most terrible event that has happened during these years in the Land between the Jordan and the Sea? No, of course not. Some little boys have seen their parents, not their homes, blown to shreds by a bomb. Some have themselves been blown to shreds. Some of these have been Israeli Jewish children, some Palestinian children. Some have been the victims of deliberate attack; some, the "collateral damage" of an attack aimed at someone else. But their blood and flesh upon the streets could not distinguish. It knew only that we are indeed all flesh and blood.

And there are homeless Israeli Jewish children now, too. Not because a bulldozer has shattered their home, but because new governmental budgets, in order to pay for such bulldozers, tanks, roads, settlements, walls, have cut to shreds the safety net that assured the poor a home.

The little boy in the red shirt has many sisters and brothers whom he has not met.

This very week, Jews have been remembering that thousands of years ago the bulldozers of Rome and before that of Babylon smashed our Holy House, the Home where we most cherished the Presence of the Holy One, the Temple in Jerusalem.

We bewailed the story of our suffering by chanting in a haunting, broken melody the Book of Lamentations — in Hebrew, "Eicha."

When I explained to the group of visitors what I had seen in the boy with the bright red shirt, seeing not only him but also all these other suffering children, I ended with the word ripped out of me: "Eichaaaaaaaaa!"

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Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center with headquarters in Philadelphia, and the author of many books of Jewish and spiritual renewal.