What Is, Home.

As I have been home for almost two weeks now and have neglected to write anything, I will briefly be brief: I am home. I am alive. I am well.

I feel as if I ought to have a post full of post-travel angst, bemoaning the fact that it is impossible to answer the question "how was it," as if the person asking really cared (5% of all cases care, the rest are compelled by your absence to ask it). I have created a 30 second soundbite of the last month of my life, filled with deep sighs and "oh, it was incredible. A real life changer." If you want to hear it, let me know. Otherwise...? Well, you'll never know. Unless, of course, you want to know, and have at least an hour in which to go about knowing. So, enough said. I am home, my heart has grown and been battered about, but I am whole and more Me than ever.

The being home though has been delightful this last week and a half, as all of my best friends were in town for Kevin and Sarah Graham's wedding. The first of us guys to go the way of the dodo. It was, more or less, three straight days of revelry, my house being turned into a dormitory for the out-of-towners. I couldn't have been more happy. Literally, I'm not just saying that.

You see, I've realized something. There are two kinds of jealousy: there is the envy-green, sapping kind that will leave you withered in an attempt to live someone else's life, because yours is quite simply too dull or painful. You are with your friends, coveting the things they have, the experiences they get to participate in, the places where they live, the people they have who love them, and you begin to dislike them because it seems life has dealt them a better hand. I don't recommend going about life in this manner. But, I think there is a second kind of jealousy, a whole one. One where you go to your friend's wedding and see the love he has with his new wife, and you are jealous not because it is something you can't have but because it is something beautiful enough to desire more than anything. You welcome home a friend who has been away for a year and you hear all of the crazy adventures he has had, you watch as all of your other friends crowd about to hug him and to celebrate him, and you are not jealous because you are no longer the center of attention or because you seem less interesting standing next to him, but because you love him so much and are so happy for the experiences that he has had that you want nothing more than to tell him so. Is this even jealousy still? I'm not sure. It seems like it, but in the end, it leaves one full, struggling to suppress outright laughter. It is reaching a place where you think, "oh, it's as good as that is it? Well, I'd rather someone be experiencing that than no one." And you are happy in that thought alone, that someone you love has found something worth celebrating.

In the end, this is a summary of my trip, and of my weeks at home. I am in love with so many things, and jealous of so many more. I only thank God that it is the kind of jealousy that gives and gives and gives. As I said, I am whole, and more Me than ever.

Photos: West Bank field trip

For Milad, Forever Ago

It is Tuesday, July 5th. Three days after Saturday the 3rd. And yet it feels like an eternity since I spent the day with Milad and his wife Manar, wandering about the West Bank. It is a lifetime removed and a world apart. But here is my best attempt to recollect a day in the life of a Palestinian:

I met Milad on either the first or second day post arrival in Jerusalem, as he was a waiter at the hotel where we were staying. Everyone who works in the old city seems to be Palestinian. And within days, they all feel like life-long friends. Over the course of three weeks, well, Milad was family. At nights he would sit with us on the roof of the hotel, having a smoke and telling us about his home, his family, his faith. There was no pretentiousness, only a desire to share life. And so it was that I, along with a few others, were invited to spend a Saturday with Milad in his home, the West Bank.

Milad met us in Bethany, after a 30 minute bus ride from Jerusalem. It is a town coated in barbed wire and concrete walls, seemingly always under either construction or destruction. Our first stop was at the day school Milad, his brothers, and father had started for peace and reconciliation between Palestine and Israel. The place, in itself, is a miracle. In a place of such oppression and rampant hatred, this man and his family have fought to teach children peace. To teach them the very opposite of what they, by nature, are born into. Twelve to fourteen hour work days at a hotel in a city not his own, a city where his wife is not allowed except twice a year on Christmas and Easter simply because she was born in Bethlehem, a city that takes Milad sometimes 3 or more hours to get home from because of the Israeli checkpoints, a city in a country where he is not welcome, and all for the sake of Saturday. For the sake of coming to his school and teaching children whose lives are constricted to the few acres of concrete called home that there is peace to be had. Forgiveness to be given. In the face of a concrete wall 9 meters high that forms their prison, these children sang and danced for us, practicing their english phrases, and giggling with the simple pleasure of a high five from some blonde-haired and blue-eyed foreigner, come to hear their stories.

After, we were joined by Milad's wife Manar, who volunteers daily at the school. She took us to her family home, amidst the crowded streets of Bethlehem in a fifth story flat. Despite the fact that the water in their town had been shut off for 12 days (a common and unannounced occurrence in the West Bank), Manar's mother had cooked us a full Arab lunch. Pita bread, cucumbers stuffed with rice, meat wrapped in grape leaves, almond rice, chicken, vegetables, fresh fruit, the food kept coming out from the kitchen and I kept eating. It is quite improbable that one can get a full understanding of the meal, but simply take my word: it was astounding. By far the best meal I had eaten in my three week tour of Israel.

A visit to Milad and Manar's home, some Arabic coffee, a few minutes looking at their wedding photos, and we were on our way again, this time to find a place to sit and talk. And since we were in the Middle East, we found a hookah bar (I should say tent, to be exact) and settled into the couches. The conversation we had was varied, and almost impossible to relate. It ranged from life stories, to silly questions of what we wanted to be when we were little. Milad had wanted to be a hero.

The last part of our day is hardest to relate, because it is the most filled with emotion. We said goodbye to Manar, and Milad drove with us to the check point between Palestine and Israel, the only thing standing between us and our bus home. Walking in the shadow of the graffiti covered wall, we experienced what Milad experiences every day of his life. Except, we didn't. Because when the six of us Americans walked through the beeping metal detector and held up our passports to the two Israeli guards in the glass booth behind it, they did not so much as look up. It was as if we didn't exist, as if the fairness of our skin and the emblem on our passports were enough to merit a wave of the hand and not a second thought. But when Milad went through, it was different. Immediately. After three times through the metal detector, each one resulting in a loud beeping and a subsequent removal of the offensive article, belt then shoes, Milad was called over to the booth. After a few sentences of Hebrew, not understood, the young women asked Milad in English if he had ever done this before. He said yes, almost every day. Then shouldn't he, the guard jabbed, know how to do it properly by now? Milad said he didn't quite understand. After two more trips through, his documents were demanded, produced, and examined. Finding all in order, the guard finally waved disdainfully and we were through.

As he put his belt and shoes on, Milad simply shook his head. They are stupid, he said, but I forgive them. Nothing more, no rationale. Just that simple sentence. It is a sentence that Milad must repeat every day, because his is a daily humiliation and a daily forgiveness.

Goodbye was not an easy word to say. As Milad stood with tears in his eyes, thanking us for sharing in his life, I couldn't help but realize the irony of it all. This man, thanking me, after he had spent a day feeding me, showing me his home, and sharing his heart and life. For three weeks I had been in Israel, and in one day I had been shown more than could be understood. It may be that I will not see Milad again in this life. But it does not matter, for he has forever changed my life, and is more than family.

I am not sure if he knows it, but Milad already is a hero.

The Inevitable Israeli/Palestinian Discussion: My Take

(Photos: An abandoned playground in Samaria)

The world will break into your home and leave your ideals shattered and lying at the doorstep. For in the end, when you actually stop and think about it, we are people. Does that seem too simple? It is. The World is a people. It is a geographical shuffling and dealing out of humanity, humanity that creates countries and cities and towns and neighborhoods and homes. But in the end, the individual unit is a person, the building blocks of the universe as we know it. And it is easy to say this, because I am an individual and you, reading this, are an individual, and through that we acknowledge our humanness. But we seem to think as everyone else, every not-us, as being collective. We label them liberal or conservative, religious or atheist, Palestinian or Israeli, hippy-granola-humanitarian-tree-hugger or red-blooded-shotgun-wielding-big-game-hunter. But in that we lump together people just as unsettled and un-label-able as ourselves. We reserve individuality for our personal self and feel perfectly comfortable packaging and selling the rest of the world Costco style in large boxes with excess saran wrap.

A friend of mine just came back from a conversation with an Orthodox Jew. They met at a shop in the Old City of Jerusalem and talked for 2 hours, everything from religion to politics to surfing to pregnant wives. And here’s the thing: what my friend realized is that the man he just had coffee with is a person. Read that last sentence again. Profound? Probably not, but just chew on it. Sure, he knew before his mind registered it that the man across from him was a human on a general, anthropological level, as if realizing that the world is made up of people is an epiphany. But what I don’t know if he realized is that he is a person, an individual, an entity that cannot be lumped together with anything else and sold as a set because it is incomprehensible and incompatible with anything outside of itself.

And the rub of it all is that once we realize this, once we acknowledge the peopleness of the world, it becomes quite the untidy mess. No longer can we, my friend and I, be true American Patriots by blindly backing the nation of Israel and its war against Palestine, because we have been here, we have driven through the check points to Bethlehem and the West Bank, we have eaten meals with Milar and Josef and their families and we have come to know them and love them. But we cannot flip the bird to the conservative man and give in to the temporarily trendy pull of siding with those downtrodden and oppressed by “Western Enlightenment Modernity,” because we have conversed with the Orthodox Jews over coffee, we have seen the desire of an old Samaritan man begging for peace in his homeland, we have been to the Holocaust Museum to be forever haunted by a world inexplicable.

Thus is the humanity of it all. If we had not sat with people from both sides, if we had not shared life and its grief with the individuals who have lived out the tragedy of it, then we could carry on with our tidy packaging and labeling of idealized products. But that cannot be. I cannot choose one side or the other, because to do so would be to deny the realness, the reality, the personhood of someone I know, and know to be an individual. This is not to say there is no right and no wrong. Amongst the entire rainbow grey of the world, there are things in black and white. But it is to say this: know that the world is made of people. Know those people. Don’t box them up, do not pretend to know their heart because of a name defining their ethnicity. Simply sit, and be with them. Acknowledge the beauty of their personhood, and grieve with them because of it. Only when we realize that our ideals, our world issues, handle the fate of people can we come to the drawing board and begin to create a map with any accuracy. Choose right over wrong, justice over injustice, good over evil. But be slow. And do it with a heavy heart.