by Marilyn Silverstein
NJJN Bureau Chief/PMB

May 06, 2008

Rabbi Sandy Roth is back from a nine-day interfaith pilgrimage to the Palestinian territories and Israel — a trip designed to promote “compassionate listening” to voices on all sides of the Middle East conflict.

Organized by Compassionate Listening Project, a United States-based nonprofit seeking a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the trip included visits with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad; Daniel Seaman, the director of Israel’s Government Press Office; and a range of activists from both sides of the conflict.

“It was an intense trip, to put it mildly,” Roth said as she sat in a meeting room at her synagogue, Kehilat HaNahar, the Little Shul by the River in New Hope, Pa. With her was congregant Larry Snider of Bensalem, Pa., who coordinated the Delaware Valley Interfaith Compassionate Listening Delegation to the Middle East.

“It was a trip for growth, and it was transformative for me — powerfully transformative and challenging,” the rabbi said. “I came back still as Jewish as ever, still as committed to Israel as ever. But clear to me is the fact that I can’t sit complacently by and not get involved. I need to be a peacemaker.

“I got a clarity in my position that I’ll now feel safer to speak out about,” she said, “even though there are those who will call me anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian — which I’m not. I’m pro…”

“Peace,” interjected Snider.

“Yes,” Roth replied. “I’m for the values in Judaism that teach us to recognize the image of God in all human beings. I’m in a very raw place as a result of this trip.”

The trip, which ran from March 24 through April 1, was led by Leah Green, founder and director of the Compassionate Listening Project. The group, based in Indianola, Wash., offers training in peacemaking and reconciliation.

Participating in the 20-member mission were a number of clergy members, including two Quakers, two Catholic Sisters of Mercy, two Muslim imams, a Presbyterian, a Methodist, a Buddhist, a Unitarian, and a minister from the Church of Christ, as well as two Muslim community leaders and several peace activists.

Roth, a Reconstructionist, was the only congregational rabbi on the mission. The three other Jewish participants were Rabbi George Stern, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Neighborhood Interfaith Movement; Jerry Schenkman of Newtown, Pa., a board member of the Peace Center in Langhorne, Pa.; and Snider, who is the founder of New Hope for Peace, a Jewish/Muslim/Christian dialogue group, and a member of the Greater Bucks County Peace Circle.

The people they encountered on the trip included Jews and Arabs from the political right, left, and in-between — including peace activists and hard-liners on both sides. (see box.) Some of these encounters were inspiring, others frustrating, the rabbi said.

“The job was to listen compassionately — to listen with an open heart,” Roth said, “trying not to see through the lens of our own core wounds and to ask the right questions, which is key. That was our goal and our challenge, individually and personally.”

Because an interfaith group was involved, Snider said, the journey took place on two levels.

“One level was to do the tour,” he said. “There was the journey we all were on. On another level, there was the idea of three faiths, of having them go through this together.

“The idea was just to put these interfaith people together and to let them know each other as people over time,” he said. “That’s really a piece of the process of getting toward peace — getting beyond the barriers.”

The trip also challenged some of the participants with the painful experience of having to hide their identity, Roth said.

“There were places where I could be a Jew but I couldn’t be a rabbi, places where I couldn’t be a Jew or a rabbi, places where the Muslims couldn’t be Muslim,” she said. “There was a lesbian on the trip, and there were many places where she couldn’t be out.”

A particularly raw day began at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, and moved on to Bethlehem, one of the places where Roth felt she could not reveal her identity as a Jew. There, the mission participants met with two members of the Bethlehem City Council — Zoughbi Zoughbi, founder and director of Wi’am, the Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center; and Sala Shouky, a member of Hamas.

“I was fine with doing it, but I didn’t like [Shouky] at all,” Roth said. “These were politicians. They used the word ‘peace’ in their story, but they don’t know what peace means. For them, peace means continuing to blame Israel. It was pretty interesting, and it reinforced for me why I think Hamas can’t continue to be in power.”

From there, the group went on to Hebron, where they met with the Palestinian governor, with members of the Palestinian Peace Society, and with leaders of the Al-Arroub refugee camp.

The society members “really want peace,” Roth said. “They want a future. They don’t want to be losing their children and living in such circumstances.”

But the meeting with the refugee leaders was “horrible for a lot of reasons,” she said.

“They were anti-Semitic, racist, hostile,” she said. “They want peace on their terms. They’re stuck where they are, and they choose to stay stuck to make a political statement. After a while, I had to leave. I couldn’t listen compassionately. I couldn’t listen at all, I was so raw.”

“The Compassionate Listening Project is a mixed blessing,” said Snider, who participated in another mission sponsored by the agency in 2001. “It takes you where you couldn’t go otherwise, but it’s painful — and it’s painful in ways I couldn’t escape from the first trip I took.”

One antidote to those painful experiences, Roth and Snider agreed, was meeting with the “inspirational” Rabbi Menachem Froman, the leader of the Tekoa settlement on the West Bank who is known for promoting peace based on interreligious dialogue. Another was visiting Kibbutz Kfar Hanasi overlooking the Galilee, where they met three women involved in bringing teenage Israeli and Palestinian girls to the Creativity for Peace Camp in Santa Fe, NM.

The 20 members of the mission, who have already scheduled a retreat together, hope to continue their dialogue and to work together as they speak about their experiences to their individual communities, Snider said.

“We could share, we could learn from each other, and then we could share what we learned in an ongoing conversation with the public about the Middle East, about peacemaking, and about the value of listening,” he said.

Roth and Snider are available for speaking engagements about their mission. For information, call the rabbi at 215-794-2557.

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Mission highlights

The Delaware Valley Interfaith Compassionate Listening mission to the Middle East began at Ecce Homo, the convent of the Sisters of Zion in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, and included stops at Abu Dis,

Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, and the Israeli-Arab village of Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salaam (Oasis of Peace). Among those the participants met were:

• Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority
• Daniel Seaman, director of Israel’s Government Press Office
• Israeli and Palestinian members of the Bereaved Parents Circle
• Mohammed Essawi, director of the Al-Qasemi College in the Arab-Israeli village of Baqa al-Gharbiyeh
• Representatives from B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
• Amos Asa-El, former executive editor of The Jerusalem Post
• Suleiman Al-Hamri, founder of Combatants for Peace in Beit Jala on the West Bank
• David Wilder, spokesman for the Jewish community of Hebron
• Holocaust survivor Esther Golan

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