Photos of our Tisha Ba'av action mentioned in this report: http://community.webshots.com/album/552838558jiEfjj It is said in the Quran that when the prophet Mohammad began to disturb the status quo by working for economic and social justice, many wealthy people tried to get in his way.
There is one story I have heard a couple different ways in the past week, so apologies if I do not portray it entirely accurately (I have not read it).
One way I heard the story is that there was a woman who did whatever she could to stop Mohammad from what he was doing, and that she literally stopped him on the road by building a roadblock out of wood.
The other way I heard it is that a group of people was building a fire that they intended to throw Mohammad in, and that this woman was mainly responsible for gathering the wood to keep the fire going.
Either way, they call her “hamelet ilkhasheb,” or “the wood carrier.”
Last week when Condoleezza Rice came to town, an Arabic news station announced, “The wood carrier has arrived.” She is trying to block all roads to peace and justice, my friends tell me. She is adding wood (and oil) to the fire, opposing a cease fire in Lebanon, my friends tell me. So the name is apt.
Yesterday I felt a bit like a wood carrier myself, although the purpose of my wood carrying was to disturb the status quo, rather than to maintain it. Yesterday was Tisha Ba’av, the Jewish holiday of mourning. It is supposedly the anniversary of the destruction of both the first and second temple, as well as the crushing of the Bar Kochba revolt against Roman occupation. The holiday has come to encompass not only these events, but everything bad that has ever happened to Jewish people. It is, traditionally, a day of mourning for Jews who have died.
A group of five U.S. Jewish people took the responsibility to mourn seriously and extended it to mourn for the people who are dying today as well. We made a flyer/sticker saying “Today we mourn exile, persecution, destruction, and occupation for all people,” followed by a list of dates: destructions of the temples; crushing of the resistance against Roman occupation; expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain; the Nazi holocaust; the Nakba (“catastrophe”) of 1948 for the Palestinian people; the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem; the Israeli invasion into Lebanon in 1982; the Israeli massacre of civilians in Qana, Lebanon in 1996; the beginning of the construction of the Annexation Wall; Israeli re-occupation of Palestinian cities; and the current Israeli invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, as well as the continuation of policies of occupation, destruction, and murder in the West Bank. There was a photograph of this week’s massacre in Qana on the flyer, as well as a call for Israel and U.S. to respect international law and human rights for all people.
Three of us made our way to the old city of Jerusalem, more heavily policed yesterday than most days. The road to the Kotel, thought to be the outer wall surrounding the temple from 2,000 years ago, was packed with people. We handed flyers to people along the way, and hung stickers up on our way into the old city. We tried to cover every place we saw “Arabs out” or “Death to Arabs” but there were too many, we only had 40 stickers, and we wanted to save a few for later.
We arrived at the Kotel, a place I had a fraught relationship with even before I began to question Zionism. The dividing wall between men and women had been extended all the way through the plaza for the day, as they were expecting so many people. The women’s side was packed, since it’s only about 15% of the whole area. The men have more room to pray on the other side. People were crying, praying, leaning on the wall, placing their prayers into its cracks. I peeled a sticker off its backing and approached the Kotel. I took my glasses off, just in case I were to get attacked. I waited a few minutes before I found a place to squeeze in and touch the wall. I said the beginning of the Mourners’ Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and placed the sticker on the wall. The woman to my right glanced over, but everyone seemed too caught up in their own prayers to notice me. I walked away slowly and another woman quickly took my open spot, put her arm on the wall over the sticker seemingly without noticing it, and prayed. For just a few minutes, the sticker became part of the Kotel, part of the scene. Mourning for all death and not only Jewish death.
We returned to the plaza and hung a few more stickers. People began to notice, began to read. A few people approached us asking if we were Jewish and why we were not ashamed of ourselves for being traitors to our people. Others read it and moved on. One group of Canadian women loved it and chatted with us for a few minutes. It turns out they are on a CPT (Christian Peacemaker Teams) delegation.
After the stickers were mostly gone, we began to flyer, thinking our work was mostly done. “Do you read English?” I would ask people, and then hand them the flyer. We were almost out of the plaza when a woman approached us and began to yell about her friends who are soldiers and have died in Lebanon in the past few days. Another woman began to yell about how she hasn’t been to her home in the north for more than a week because of fear from Hizbollah rockets. I listened to these women, to both their suffering and to the hateful venom that was coming from them about Arab people in general, and I did not feel hatred in response. I am not usually above hatred or violence in my heart, and these women were saying much more racist and hateful things than I have heard in a long time, but for some reason I felt only sadness and even pity. And a sense of righteousness. Every time one of them would say, “This is not the time or place to mourn others. We can only afford to mourn our ‘brothers’ right now,” I knew that we were doing the right thing. That this was exactly the time and place to mourn everyone because what sense does it make to mourn the soldiers who died trying to occupy southern Lebanon without mourning the people they killed in the process or the context surrounding the situation? It seems quite clear that if Israel stops sending soldiers to Lebanon, they won’t be dying there. But I didn’t say this. Out of respect for the women’s actual suffering, I did not say this. I simply said that we think it is important to mourn all people who are dying.
There were political arguments, there were discussions of facts, but not as much as I would expect. More than this was an expression of suffering and stories of pain. We got people to feel, and judging by the number of spectators and people who came up asking for a flyer because they wanted to see what the commotion was all about, we got people to think as well. To some degree, we stopped people from going about their normal business. To some degree, we added wood to a fire that needed stoking.
We left the Kotel area, borrowed a prayer book from one of the hundreds of people who were entering or exiting the Kotel, and said the Mourner’s Kaddish. Our wood carrying for the day was finished.
