Staying Awake

Reflections by David Wellman
From Tel Aviv, Sunday, November 6

I love the Qur'an for many reasons, one of them being because it contains stories that include members of all three Abrahamic traditions - sometimes even together. Sura 18 or Sura al-Khaf (The Cave) is one such example. It includes the account of The Seven Sleepers, which is drawn from a story that originally was about a group of Christians who go to sleep in a cave in 3rd century Turkey, during the time of Rome's persecution of Christians.

Graffiti in Jaffo

The seven young believers go to sleep while being protected by the khidr - a  dog who lies across the mouth of the cave. The khidr is an angel of God in disguise or a trickster figure depending on which interpretation you prefer. What really matters is that God offers spiritual protection to the community of believers who find themselves in dangerous and frightening circumstances.

The sleepers remain asleep for two centuries, and finally wake up to a world where it is now safe to be a Christian, Rome having adopted Christianity and abandoned the persecution of Christians.

In the Qur'an, this Christian story becomes one about Muslims, but the story is the same. Here is what the Qur'an describes in ayat 18:18: "And you would have thought them awake when they were asleep. And we turned them on their right and on their left sides, and their dog stretching forth his forelegs across the entrance of the cave. Had you looked at them, you would certainly have turned back from them in flight, and would certainly have been filled with awe of them."

My midrash on this passage is this: we are spiritually protected by God - all of us - when we live our lives as communities of believers. Such communities, I am convinced, become even stronger when they contain believers from more than one tradition.

Of course, the sleepers in the cave must eventually wake up, and that is what we as a group of Jews, Christians and Muslims did in a profound and arresting way when we visited Hebron.

A very wise woman once told me that when we wake up, it is often in the middle of a train wreck, and in waking up we are presented with two clear choices: we can either stand transfixed and mesmerized by the wreck - it's dimensions, it's horror and it's subsequent seductiveness - or we can choose to stay awake and keep moving as we become agents of change in the world - and as a result of our service, in our own lives. But we can't do any of this if we don't choose to stay awake once we've woken up.

Palestinian youth singing their hearts out!

Augustine of Hippo wrote that the life of the believer is one of a long process of healing. In Hebron we saw what comes of living in shadow: a shadow that contains delusions based on false narratives and a collective  unwillingness to wake up from an ongoing and unfolding nightmare of hate, fear, guilt and retribution. It is a cycle that will persist unless it is powerfully interrupted, either by the sleepers themselves or by others who can see through shadow.

How are we to best be agents of healing in the world? Through what means can we wake up to the fact that our own healing is contingent on our willingness to be agents of healing in the lives of others? This is my prayer: Dear God, teach us how to be agents of such healing!

One of my greatest heroes is the German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered in the Flossenburg concentration camp for helping Jews to escape Germany and for establishing an underground set of seminaries to train ministers who could be respected in a post-war Germany. Bonhoeffer's christology (the way a theologian describes who and what Jesus is) is my absolute favorite. He said it was what Jesus did and not what he ontologically was that most distinguished him. Bonhoeffer described Jesus simply as "the man for others," who revealed himself to his neighbors as an audacious risk taker on behalf of those who lived on the underside.  As a result, Jesus became the most profound type of fearless healer.

I believe that our group is also distinguished by what we do together, as we intentionally redefine what it means to live, eat and pray together as Jews, Christians and Muslims. By going to Hebron as a united group, I am convinced that we became agents of healing in the lives of those we met, even if our own feelings of fear, discomfort, regret and guilt prevented us from fully "seeing" what in fact we we were actually doing in that moment. We need only have interrupted the perceptions of one person in the entire city to be agents of transformation. Whether that came for someone in meeting their first female Rabbi, or for others in meeting their first progressive Jew who opposed the occupation, or for others to simply see Jews, Christians and Muslims who love each other and who are visiting the Holy Land together with a common purpose, it really doesn't matter. We, when we act together, become the most powerful fact on the ground of all.

Judaism teaches that a mitzvah can be defined in three different ways: 1. As a moral deed performed as a religious duty, or 2. As an act of human kindness, or 3. As a fulfillment of God's commandments. Talmudic Rabbis are divided into two camps with regards to mitzvot. While some seek the purpose of mitzvot, others do not question them. We who have made this trip are lucky, because we know the purpose of our actions: to be agents of transformation in our own lives and as a result in the lives of others.

Over the course of these two weeks, we have experienced what scholars of religion agree are the three stages of pilgrimage across the traditions: separation, liminality and reintegration. We made the conscious decision to be separated from the familiar when we left for our respective airports. Along the road we became what medieval folks call "Communitas," or a community of people who become community "on the way," and who are spiritually and physically protected as a result of our membership in the group.

It is thus together that we entered the second stage of pilgrimage, liminality, a place of "in betweenness" where we have one foot planted in the world of the familiar and the other in a completely different world. This is where our heads, hearts and souls stand beneath the limen of the doorway between the two worlds. This is the place where we become the most capable of connecting with the Divine, and as a result open ourselves to transformation. In my estimation, the city of Hebron was that limen for us. It is where we became Communitas, and it was where we were confronted with the train wreck we can either choose to be transfixed by and lament or seek to transform.

Gitanjali Lori Rivera and Jamie Michaels in Tsfat

Now it is to each of us to choose how we intend to negotiate the third stage of our pilgrimage: reintegration. As we return to our respective homes, how will we consciously choose to integrate what we've learned into the place we began?

I know that for myself, my ability to do this work is made possible by having had the privilege of becoming a member of a new minyan I now pray with - a minyan which has different requirements than it's more well known counterpart. This is a minyan that cannot pray without the presence of women and men, and it is a gathering of believers whose power is only accessible through the combined presence of people of all three Abrahamic traditions. Together we pray with all our bodies, honoring the gifts of all our traditions. It is through this minyan that I have seen a new Jerusalem, one which stands in love and in defiance of shadow. This is the city where I want to live.