Living in two-civilization houses
Rabbi Margaret
Most of you know my house. But I wonder how many of you knew it before Mickey and I bought it? It was hand-built by Harriet Bye and her then-husband in 1971. It had and still has some excellent vintage hippie architectural touches: a couple of hexagonal windows, a telephone pole as a support stanchion, two-by-fours laid on end to form the ceiling of the bedroom and the floor of the loft above. That little peaked arch into the kitchen —the house ended there, with a pair of sliding doors into the back yard. The original kitchen was a countertop underneath the window that has the pink and gold stained glass border. There was a sink there and a little stove. The room was dark wood-paneled, and there had been a fire in there, so much of the front wall was blackened. The yard was quite overgrown — so much so that when we took down a big rockrose we found a swing set buried in the branches. More interestingly, for some years after we moved in, whenever we would dig in the yard we would unearth stuff — toys, a ball, a spoon, one time a plaster buddha. When we bought it, the house was half the size it is now. We built on the present kitchen and bedroom, in the style of many Mendo houses — the original half charming old hippie handcraft, the add-on all square angles, formica and sheetrock walls.
Now let me introduce you to the house I lived in during my first year of rabbinical school, at #4 Rechov David Marcus in Jerusalem. I had a little studio flat on the top floor of a lovely four-story building near the Montefiore windmill. At least the bottom two stories were lovely — they were a stately Ottoman-era house with arched windows and a beautiful old door. Two stories had been added on more recently — they were plain block with functional and charmless metal window frames, obviously added on since 1948 in the more modern idiom of the state of Israel. I wish I had photos of this house. I looked on Google Earth, and there it is — but you can’t really get how surprising it is to see the plain, functional new layer built right on top of the beautiful old one.
I think of that house now and then. My landlords, who occupied the rest of the fourth story and rented me the studio, were the Broidos. Ephraim Broido emigrated from Bialystock to then-Palestine in 1935 during the Second Yishuv, when many European Jews were immigrating to Israel. Mar Broido was a linguist, and he sat on the special committee that was formed to create new vocabulary to fill out a Hebrew language that hadn’t, until then, been spoken in 2000 years. This committee was trying to keep English and German from completely overtaking ancient Hebrew. So, for one example I remember, the committee had to come up with a word for electricity — a term that wasn’t much needed in the first century CE. To keep people from reflexively saying ha-electricity, they came up with the word chashmal — lightning. And so you would go to the misrad he-chashmal — the lightning office — to pay your electric bill. The Broidos were an elegant and refined family. I was a little intimidated by them, though they were always impeccably kind and courteous to me, their feral little 22-year old tenant.
All the residents of 4 Rechov Marcus were Jewish. But someone must have lived in the old Turkish mansion before the Yishuv, before the Jews came in numbers to settle in Jerusalem. I used to think about those four stories and wonder, where do the descendants of the lower half live now? How did they happen to leave? What would happen if they came back and tried to reclaim the bottom half of the house?
I think sometimes of the young family that lived in our house in Albion before we bought it and displaced them. Their family broke apart, as I understand it, though they still live in our community and seem to be doing well enough all these years later.
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Our little aliyah zeroes in on one of the most painful paragraphs in all of Torah:
וַיְדַבֵּ֧ר יְהֹוָ֛ה אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֖ה בְּעַֽרְבֹ֣ת מוֹאָ֑ב עַל־יַרְדֵּ֥ן יְרֵח֖וֹ לֵאמֹֽר׃
In the steppes of Moab, at the Jordan near Jericho, יהוה spoke to Moses, saying:
דַּבֵּר֙ אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל וְאָמַרְתָּ֖ אֲלֵהֶ֑ם כִּ֥י אַתֶּ֛ם עֹבְרִ֥ים אֶת־הַיַּרְדֵּ֖ן אֶל־אֶ֥רֶץ כְּנָֽעַן׃
Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan,
וְה֨וֹרַשְׁתֶּ֜ם אֶת־כׇּל־יֹשְׁבֵ֤י הָאָ֙רֶץ֙ מִפְּנֵיכֶ֔ם וְאִ֨בַּדְתֶּ֔ם אֵ֖ת כׇּל־מַשְׂכִּיֹּתָ֑ם וְאֵ֨ת כׇּל־צַלְמֵ֤י מַסֵּֽכֹתָם֙ תְּאַבֵּ֔דוּ וְאֵ֥ת כׇּל־בָּמוֹתָ֖ם תַּשְׁמִֽידוּ׃
you shall dispossess all the inhabitants of the land; you shall destroy all their figured objects; you shall destroy all their molten images, and you shall demolish all their cult places.
And you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have assigned the land to you to possess.
You shall apportion the land among yourselves by lot, clan by clan: with larger groups increase the share, with smaller groups reduce the share. Wherever the lot falls for it, that shall be its location. You shall have your portions according to your ancestral tribes.
But if you do not dispossess the inhabitants of the land, those whom you allow to remain shall be stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land in which you live; so that I will do to you what I planned to do to them.
You shall dispossess all the inhabitants of the land — There is a debate between Rashi and Ramban about the grammar of “v’horashtem — “you shall dispossess.” Rashi says this verb is in the common “kal” declension — simple declarative: “you will dispossess.” Ramban says the verb is in the pi’el form — a stronger verb form that links the action forcefully to its object: “you shall surely dispossess THEM.” Interestingly neither commentator reads the verb as being a command — YIRSHU otam — “Dispossess them.” Maybe, I try to imagine, this is just reporting, not commanding: “You will dispossess, you will destroy, you will demolish, you will take possession, you will apportion among yourselves…” “This is what will happen. This is what you will do…” Just a fact.
I want this distinction to be important. I don’t want God to command our ancestors to dispossess and destroy the indigenous people of the land. So I try to continue reading in this way, as a simple report: You will do these things. V’im lo horishu et yoshvei ha-aretz… and if you DON’T dispossess the inhabitants of the land, those whom you allow to remain shall be stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land in which you live… I am still trying to read this as reportage: “And, by the way, if you don’t manage to do this then certain things will happen…”
But here’s an interesting thing: when the Israelites entered Canaan it seems they didn’t totally dispossess it. Back in Exodus (23:29-30) God says, “I will not drive them out before you in a single year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply to your hurt. I will drive them out before you little by little, until you have increased and possess the land.” The Israelites were a small people; the land was large. It was necessary to commit ecocide as well as genocide. This takes time.
This plan for gradual conquest is contested elsewhere — in Deuteronomy (9:3) God promises: “Know then this day that none other than the LORD your God is crossing at your head, a devouring fire; it is He who will wipe them out. He will subdue them before you, that you may quickly dispossess and destroy them, as the LORD has promised you.”
Ahhh, so maybe v’horashtem is a promise, not a command. Yes, don’t worry, you will dispossess them.
It’s unclear even in the book of Joshua, which recounts the advance of the Israelites into Canaan, whether the conquest was actually total or not. In one place we are told (11:23) “Joshua conquered the whole country, just as HASHEM had promised Moses; and Joshua assigned it to Israel to share according to their tribal divisions.”
But a little further on, when Joshua is bidding farewell to the people we are told that “Joshua was now old, advanced in years. HASHEM said to him, “You have grown old, you are advanced in years, and very much of the land still remains to be occupied.”
Bible scholars of course suggest that these contradictions emerge from different layers of the text. And that is probably technically true. But I have another thought, one that goes back to my own experiences living in two-civilization houses. And that is: it is simply impossible to totally dispossess earlier inhabitants. They come back — in swing sets and spoons dug up in the garden, in Palestinians agitating to return to the homes from which many were driven by the Naqba and elsewise.
Let’s think for a minute about the name Canaan itself. Canaan was the son of Ham, the grandson of Noah. You may remember that after Noah returned to dry land post-flood he got drunk and fell asleep. “Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers who were outside…(Gen. 9:22) “Noah awoke from his drunken stupor and learned what his youngest son (Ham) had done to him. So he said, “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” (9:24-25)
Whatever was done to Noah — and this, like so much in Torah, is ambiguous and contested — it was done by Ham. Yet it is Canaan, the next generation, who is cursed. It is Canaan who keeps reappearing in every generation, the indigenous inhabitant of the land, who makes total dispossession and annihilation so challenging. It is Canaan, the land, the people, that were to be dispossessed by the invading Israelites.
It is impossible to completely dispossess and disappear a people, however violently one might try. As I was writing this I was thinking of the terrible evidence turning up these days of indigenous children in this country and in Canada, stolen away to boarding schools, who died of overwork and torture and disease and were buried in unmarked graves. These days their bones are returning.
In 2007 I spent a couple of days with the Christian Peacemakers Team in Hebron. CPT — now called the Community Peacemakers Team — is this remarkable group emerging out of the Mennonite church, who form households in troubled and violent places in the world and simply be there, long-term, encouraging local peacemakers, bearing witness. CPT has communities in Syria, in Colombia, on the US/Mexican border and in Palestine, maybe a few other places as well. They are quiet, brave people who, in the words of one CPT member I met, “go towards trouble rather than away from it.”
At the CPT house in Hebron I met Dianne Roe, one of the staff members, who — in addition to all the regular activities of the group, like accompanying schoolchildren past taunting settlers and soldiers every morning, was doing a very beautiful little side project, so tiny and so modest as to be almost invisible. Directly across the street from the CPT house is a tall, handsome stone home, maybe four stories tall, with a lovely wrought iron balcony a couple stories up above the elegant front door. This house has historically belonged to the Shaheen family, an old Arab family. I believe it was empty when I was there. In the 1920s the Shaheens had a large Jewish family living in their house as tenants. The Jewish tenants were named the Mizrahis. It seems that back around the turn of the last century Jews and Arabs lived for the most part peaceably as neighbors, and sometimes as landlords and tenants, in Hebron.
But there were upheavals which broke up these periods of peace. In 1929 there was a terrible pogrom led by Arabs — not Hebron residents but Arabs from elsewhere — against the Hebron Jews. Either 67 or 69 Jews were murdered. As the story goes, when the marauders came to the Shaheen house the Shaheen sons tried to block the door to save the Mizrahis inside. But the assailants were strong and broke through them. At which point the hajjah — the old matriarch of the Shaheen family — went up to the balcony, took off her head covering and shook out her hair in front of the invaders — a shandeh, a shocking immodesty on her part — and she shouted down, “I swear that there are no Jews here!” The attackers were so horrified by the sight of the old, uncovered woman that they fled, and the Mizrahis were saved.
Seventy-some years later Dianne Roe was quietly reaching out to the survivors and the offspring of both the Shaheen and Mizrahi families, introducing them to each other if they hadn’t met, then helping them to stay connected. When I was there Rajah Shaheen came by the CPT house so Dianne could introduce me to him. He was a handsome, serious middle-aged man in a suit and tie. A couple weeks later I met Dianne in West Jerusalem to go pay a visit to Meir Mizrahi, one of the sons of the Mizrahi family. At that time, as now, Palestinians in the territories couldn’t go to West Jerusalem. But Mr. Shaheen had sent a big jerrycan of local olive oil as a gift to Mr. Mizrahi along with his greetings, which Dianne and I conveyed. I asked her: was she planning to write a book? Make a film? Do an exhibit? Didn’t she want to get this beautiful story out to the world? She wasn’t exactly averse to someone doing this (and I think at some point a documentary film was made.) But she wasn’t interested in making it happen either. She just wanted these two families to keep knowing each other.
You can’t completely annihilate another people. They come back, sometimes generations later. In 1929 Arabs imposed terror on the Jews of Hebron. Since 1967 Jews have terrorized Palestinians there. It is true that in most cases those who weren’t completely eradicated come back as a thorn in the eye, as a threat and a source of injury to their conquerers. It is true that after conquest hatred most often reverberates through the generations.
Tareq Baconi wrote a powerful op ed piece in the New York Times last week in the aftermath of the latest Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp. Baconi writes:
Residents of the Jenin camp, some of whom had fled from their homes in what is now Israel in 1948, are refugees once again. And some of the toddlers who were in the camp in 2002 [when the Israeli army under Ariel Sharon attacked Jenin] are now the young men of the Palestinian resistance. As the history of other struggles against apartheid and colonial violence have taught us, today’s children will no doubt take up arms to resist such domination in the future, until these structures of control are dismantled.
I don’t know when, if ever, the structures of control will be dismantled. But I think that there might be other possibilities, tiny possibilities, almost invisible possibilities. I think of Dianne Roe going back and forth between Shaheens and Mizrahis seventy years after a terrible event, bringing gifts of olive oil and greetings across separation walls and checkpoints and traumas. It’s not even hope that is offered by this beautiful story. It is too small, too irreproducible to offer any kind of a blueprint. It can’t be scaled up. It is too modest, too tender, too unique. But it does offer beauty. And in a hurting world that is not nothing.