When I was ten, eleven, twelve, my best friend was a girl named Fran. We were Catholic school classmates. Fran had curly blonde hair and clear blue eyes and an even, sweet temperament. She and I spent many hours together, walking about our small town, going to the library on Saturday afternoon, riding bikes, ice skating. We shared our dreams for the future, and confided many secrets.
During that time, there was a divorce in my family. In a small town in the 1950’s, that was a scandal. This one was very public, very messy. Sorrow was driven deeper by shame. With the unconscious cruelty of the righteous, the nun who was our teacher took this to be a teachable moment, presenting a lesson on the sanctity of marriage and the mortal sinfulness of divorce. As her lesson unfolded, I was in an agony of shame. I leaned across the aisle to Fran, sitting next to me, and whispered “I feel so embarrassed!” She turned her face fully to me, her clear eyes soft, and said simply, “Why?” There was compassion in that “why?” — a kind of absolution, telling me there was nothing to be ashamed of. Her word lifted a burden that I did not need to carry.
A few months later, we decided to become blood sisters, following a ritual we’d read about in a Nancy Drew story. We pricked our ‘heart’ fingers, the fingers that one day would wear wedding bands, then pressed them together, mingling our blood. This was a friendship to keep.
So it has been. Although in the years that followed, she settled down in our hometown, and I moved as far away as I could, still, when I go back there to visit, I love to hear all about her children, and now her grandchildren, and I tell her about my dear ones, and what I’ve been doing. We will be friends for all our lives.
The first reading this morning taken from the book of Genesis is a story about how the Most High God made a covenant in blood with Abram and his descendents forever. “On that day the Most High God made a covenant with Abram, saying ‘To your descendents I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates...’” The covenant was ritualized through a blood ceremony. Picture it: the one life of an animal was cut into two, and the fire that passed between the severed halves sealed the two into a new unity. The ceremony has a dream quality; but its meaning is real: this covenant is forever.
Was this event ‘history’? No, it is not the kind of history that is known through eyewitness accounts, and by corroborating evidence in other sources. Sacred scripture is the only place this story appears. So it is not history in the ordinary sense. Rather, it is a genre that historians of religion call ‘myth’ in the deep broad sense: a story of the origin of a people. Myth in this sense reveals ‘who we are, where we came from, and how we are to live.’ It tells the meaning that underwrites facts. Myth in this sense is not less than history. On the contrary, it makes history.
The LORD said to Abram Look toward the stars and count them, if you are able to count so high. So shall your descendents be!
Who are the descendents of Abram, promised in his nighttime vision?
Abraham’s progeny are vast in number. Jews, of course, whose presence and influence in Western culture and history is of incalculable importance; they are Abram’s direct descendents. And we Christians, who are grafted into the covenant through the blood of the Lamb, count ourselves Abram’s kin, too. But there are others. Muslims also claim the promise given to Abram, through his firstborn son, Ishmael, his child by Hagar, who was surrogate mother for Abraham’s wife Sarah, before Sarah gave birth to Isaac.
In the passage from the Gospel of Luke read this morning, we hear our blood brother Jesus lamenting over Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, he cried, how often have I longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were not willing!
De profundus — his lamentation is a cry ‘out of the depths’ of the soul. Can that depth of prophetic outcry be heard now?
I think I hear it resonate in a speech by David Grossman, an award winning Israeli novelist who lives near Jerusalem, at the Rabin memorial ceremony in Tel Aviv last November, in the presence of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and other national leaders. David Grossman’s son Uri, a young Israeli soldier, was among those killed in the war on Lebanon last summer. Out of the depths, David Grossman addressed his lamentation and appeal to the assembled leaders of his nation. I quote from his speech, translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman, and reprinted in The New York Review of Books, January 2007:
“At the annual memorial ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin, we pause to remember the man, and the leader. We also look at ourselves, at Israeli society, at its leadership, at the state of the national spirit, at the state of the peace process, and at our place, as individuals, within these great national developments.
“This year, it is not easy to look at ourselves.
“We had a war. Israel brandished its huge military biceps, but its reach proved all too short, and brittle. We realized that our military might alone cannot, when push comes to shove, defend us. In particular, we discovered that Israel faces a profound crisis, much more profound than we imagined, in almost every part of our collective lives.
“I speak here, this evening, as one whose love for this land is tough and complicated, but nevertheless unequivocal. And as one for whom the land has become, to my misfortune, a covenant of blood. I am a man entirely without religious faith, but nevertheless, for me, the establishment, and very existence of the state of Israel is something of a miracle that happened to us as a people — a political, national, human miracle. I never forget that, even for a single moment. Even when many things in the reality of our lives enrage and depress me, even when the miracle disintegrates into tiny fragments of routine and wretchedness, of corruption and cynicism, even when the country looks like a bad parody of that miracle, I remember the miracle always.
“That sentiment lies at the foundation of what I will say tonight.
“‘See, land, that we were most wasteful,’ the poet Shaul Tchnernichowski wrote in 1938. He grieved that in the bosom of the earth, in the land of Israel, we have interred, time after time, young people in the prime of their lives. The death of young people is a horrible, outrageous waste. But no less horrible is the feeling that the state of Israel has, for many years now, criminally wasted not only the lives of its sons and daughters, but also the miracle that occurred here — the great and rare opportunity that history granted it, the opportunity to create an enlightened, properly functioning democratic state that would act in accordance with Jewish and universal values. A country that would be a national home and refuge, but not only a refuge. It would also be a place that gives new meaning to Jewish existence. A country in which an important, essential part of its Jewish identity, of its Jewish ethos, would be full equality and respect for its non-Jewish citizens.
“Look what happened...
“One of the harsh things that this last war sharpened for us was the feeling that in these times there is no king in Israel. That our leadership is hollow, both our political and military leadership. I am not speaking now of the obvious fiascos in the conduct of the war, or of the way the rear echelons of the army was left to its own devices. Nor am I speaking of our current corruption scandals, great and small. My intention is to make it clear that the people who today lead Israel are unable to connect Israelis with their identity, and certainly not with the healthy, sustaining, inspiring parts of Jewish identity. I mean those parts of identity and memory and values that can give us strength and hope, that can serve as antidotes to the attenuation of mutual responsibility and of our connection to the land, that can grant meaning to our exhausting, desperate struggle for survival...
“Every thinking person in Israel — and, I will add, in Palestine as well — knows today precisely the outline of a possible solution to the conflict between the two peoples. All thinking people, in Israel and in Palestine, know deep in their hearts the difference between, on the one hand, their dreams and wishes, and on the other, what they can get at the end of the negotiations. Those who don’t know that, whether Jews or Arabs, are already not part of the dialogue. Such people are trapped in their hermetic fanaticism, so they are not partners. Let’s look for a minute at our potential partners. The Palestinians have placed Hamas in their leadership, and Hamas refuses to negotiate with us, refuses even to recognize us. What can we do in such a situation? What more can we do? Tighten the noose even more? Continue to kill hundreds of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the great majority of them innocent civilians, like us?
“Appeal to the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert. Appeal to them over Hamas’s head. Appeal to the moderates among them, to those who, like you and me, oppose Hamas and its ideology. Appeal to the Palestinian people. Speak to their deepest wound, acknowledge their unending suffering. You won’t lose anything, and Israel’s position in any future negotiation will not be compromised. But hearts will open a bit to each other, and that opening has great power. Simple human compassion has the power of a force of nature, precisely in a situation of stagnation and hostility.
“Look at them, just once, not through a rifle’s sights and not through a roadblock. You will see a people no less tortured than we are. A conquered, persecuted, hopeless people. Of course the Palestinians are also guilty of the dead end we’ve reached. Of course they bear part of the blame for the failure of the peace process. But look at them for a moment in a different way. Not just at their extremists. Not just at those who have an alliance of mutual interest with our own extremists. Look at the great majority of this wretched nation, whose fate is bound up with ours, like it or not.
“Go to the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert. Don’t look for reasons not to talk to them…Talk to them. Make them an offer that their moderates can accept (there are far more of them than the media shows us). Make them an offer, so that they will have to decide whether to accept it or instead remain hostages to fanatical Islam. Go to them with the boldest, most serious plan that Israel is able to put forward. A plan that all Israelis and Palestinians with eyes in their heads will know is the limit of refusal and concession, ours and theirs. If you hesitate, we’ll soon be longing for the days when Palestinian terrorism was an amateur affair. We will pound ourselves on our heads and shout, why did we not use all our flexibility, all our Israeli creativity, to extricate our enemy from the trap in which he ensnared himself?...
“Of course not everything depends on what we do. There are great and strong forces acting in this region and in the world, and some of them, like Iran, like radical Islam, wish us ill. Nevertheless, so much does depend on what we do, and what we will be. The differences between right and left are not that great today. The decisive majority of Israel’s citizens now understand — of course, some of them without enthusiasm — what the shape of a peaceful solution will look like. Most of us understand that the land will be divided, that there will be a Palestinian state. Why, then, do we continue to sap ourselves with the internal bickering that has gone on now for almost forty years? Why does our political leadership continue to reflect the positions of the extremists and not of the majority? After all, we’ll be much better off if we reach this national consensus on our own, before circumstances — external pressures, or a new Palestinian uprising, or another war — force us to do so. If we do it, we will save ourselves years of erosion and error, years in which we will shout again and again, ‘See, land, that we were most wasteful.’
“From where I stand at this moment, I request, call out to all those listening — to young people who came back from the war, who know that they are the ones who will have to pay the price of the next war; to Jewish and Arab citizens; to the people of the right and the people of the left: stop for a moment. Look over the edge of the abyss, and consider how close we are to losing what we have created here. Ask yourselves if the time has not arrived for us to come to our senses, to break out of our paralysis, to demand for ourselves, finally, the lives that we deserve to live.”
There is a story of an old Hasidic rabbi who asked his pupils how they could tell when the night had ended and the day had begun, for that is the time for certain holy prayers.
“Is it,” proposed one student, “when you can see an animal in the distance and tell whether it is a sheep or a dog?” “No,” answered the Rabbi. “Is it when you can clearly see the lines on the palm of your own hand?” “Is it when you can look at a tree in the distance and tell if it is a fig or a pear tree?” “No” answered the Rabbi each time. “Then when is it?” the pupils demanded.
The Rabbi answered: “It is when you can look on the face of any man or woman and see that they are your sister or brother. Until then, it is the night.”
Jesus taught: Blessed are the peacemakers; they shall be called sons and daughters of God. In the end, it is compassion, not blood, that can save.