Today is the 8th Anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Sept 11th, 2001. Since that day, while the world has seen a lot of violence, some of it connected in one way or another to that terrible morning. But since that day, the world has also seen a lot of goodness. All over the world, courageous people have stood up against the forces of hate and destruction, from the Muslim-Jewish Peace Walk to the peaceful protests in Iran and the No Mas FARC movement in Colombia and the brave women from Women’s Synergy for Victims of Sexual Violence in the eastern Congo. In is important on our day of national grief, to remember that there is more good than evil in this world and there is a lot we can do to support the good. March, donate, speak out, write, advocate, volunteer. We are far from helpless.

Ken Bacon, a personal hero of mine, has passed away.

As the President of Refugees International, he was a tireless voice for the dispossed and a passionate (and effective) defender of vulernable people around the globe. He also gave me my first chance to travel to a refugee camp and to work with war-affected children. I am one of countless young people whose idealism he supported, and I will always be grateful to him for believing in me.

RIP Ken. You will be missed.

Sadly, it might work.

The one thing we can be sure of is that Iran, which has survived stand-offs and open warfare with several nations in the 30 years since its revolution, while developing technologically and economically, is a nation that is very shrewd about self-preservation. The mullahs may be distasteful theocrats, many of whom are corrupt, many more of whom suffer from a virulent strain of religious chauvenism and, some of whom are indeed anti-Semities. Some of them are also real scholars. Some of them are thoughtful, intelligent men who genuinely want what is best for their people and for God’s creation as they understand it. I have sat down with Mullahs in Iran who are not merely tolerant of diverse religious and political views, but respectful of them (including Jews and humane supporters of Israel). The Iranian regime is not a monolith, though it tries to present itself as one. With a massive population of young people who long for more freedoms and for long lives, I don’t see the apocalyptic strain having much currency in Iranian politics, especially in an election year. I do, however, see it quite a bit in the right-wing of Israeli society. The continued settlement of the West Bank and the support of the most extreme religious settlers by some elements in the Israeli government  has endangered Israeli democracy far more than Iran. In fact, it looks a lot like Iran, with the more extreme elements of both societies providing aid and comfort to those who seek violent conflict in the Middle East. In Iran there has been more open support for Hamas and Hezbollah, the former of which does have genocide as its goal, but there is little sunlight between the ideas of Hamas and the ideas of Israel’s Kach party and its descendants.

But these elements are not the mainstream of either society, and it is wrong to characterize all of Iran as mad Mullahs, just as it is wrong to characterize all of Israel by the Hebron settlers. Of course, policy and politics in both countries needs to account for those elements, but those calculations are part of their bid for survival, not their attempt to martyr themselves on a national level. Just as the courageous young Israelis who serve in the IDF (and the few who refuse to do so) are all struggling for the physical and spiritual survival of their nation and their families–their conception of the good life–so are the young people in Iran. Writing them off in favor of the “mad mullahs” theory writes off a valuable solution to this problem.

Far more accurate than Bibi’s terrifying prognastications and fear-mongering, however, is a little bit of game theory (which is also gaining currency among US officers in Afghanistan ). Have a look at this model of what Iran is likely to do vis a vis its Nuclear Program and its apocalyptic leaders from Bruce Bueno de Mesquita of NYU. Unlike knee-jerk fear and political expediency, this theory at least takes actual societal data into account and has a far better success record than PM Netanyahu. He’d do well to study it. Because it states that, by 2011, the apocalyptic trend in Iran is likley to lose major influence, the moneyed-class is likely to see an ascendency in power, and the nuclear program is extremely likely to tend toward civilian purposes. He’s not basing this on make-believe; he’s got the math to back it up. It may not be correct, but it should not be ignored.

I do see a glimmer of hope here. If anyone is capable of confronting these settlers and those in the government who provide them with all this material support, it is the new right-wing government of Netanyahu. If they can find the moral courage to stand up to the extremists within their own camp, they might be able to make more progress than a left/center government, which would struggle to be taken seriously by the fringe elements who build these outposts.  Perhaps there’s hope for Israel to live up to its Jewish name, rather than strive for mere survival, if they can stop supporting the ideology of warring tribes so popular in ancient times. The fate of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah is not one that should be repeated, but one that becomes more possible with every outpost built.

And of course, we cannot forget that there are also many Palestinian voices calling for nonviolence. These messages must be spread, as must the peace messages from the American Jewish community and the peace groups in Israel. The interfaith peace movement is perhaps the best hope for countering the rise in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiments around the world. People of faith are going to have to come together to counter the people who seek to destroy. In all of this conflict, interfaith statements have been sadly lacking.

Yet, until it can be asserted that efforts from Canada’s Jews have translated into measurable improvement in the lives of Darfuris and helped accelerate and boost the inadequate efforts by our government to end the genocide, we have not done enough. Taking minimal action to placate our collective guilt as a community of genocide survivors is of no comfort to those in Darfur who are praying that they, too, will be a genocide survivor instead of a statistic…In the Majdanek concentration camp there is a giant dome. Underneath it, in plain sight, are the ashes of tens of thousands of Jews. On top of the dome, there is an inscription that reads: “Let our fate be a warning to you.”

For the past six years, we have squandered their warning. Oh, how we have failed them.

While I disagree with his notion that “more so than for anyone else, genocide is a problem for Jews,” I fully agree that Jewish history and Jewish survival have valuable lessons to teach the world about social justice and about standing up to mass murder and genocide. I do agree that Jewish history demands that Jews fight to prevent the fate of European Jewry from befalling any people, and that, so far, we have failed miserably. There are many active Jewish leaders, spiritual and secular, working to end genocide, working for human rights and justice, working for peace and to repair the world, but these efforst pale in comparison to the effort put in by powerful Jewish organizations with massive political clout and funding on behalf of Israel. Israel is a state with a military, quite capable of defending itself, as we have seen. Regardless of where one stands on the question of Palestinian rights and Zionism, it is impossible to say that the citizens of Sderot are in more desperate straits than the people of Darfur (I hesitate to use the word citizen, because it implies some form of rights and protections afforded by a government–their government seeks to kill them).

Where are our millions of dollars for Darfur? Where are the statements from AIPAC? Rabbis from coast to coast decry the genocide in Darfur from the bima, and yet so many more cry out for our aid to Israel. I understand there is a fear, born of the Holocaust and of Munich and of the Intifada that if Israel does not have the full throated support of world Jewry, there will be another genocide against the Jews. This is a terrifying hypothetical, but it is just that–a hypothetical. There are very real genocides going on at this moment. In fearing only for our own survival, we squander the lessons our survival has for the world, and the power our success has given us. Are we a light unto the nations, yet? We still could be. We must make the statement “Never Again” apply not only to Jews, but to everyone.

“The only small chance for peace today is the same chance that existed before the Gaza invasion: The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United States and, mainly, Israel, must help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah, prepare the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza, vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West Bank as an alternative to the squalid vision of Hassan Nasrallah and Nizar Rayyan.”–Jeffrey Goldberg, NYTimes, 1/13/09

A small bit of sanity in an insane time. Goldberg observes in this OpEd that Hamas cannot be bombed out of existence. They are based on an unforgiving ideologly that thrives on violence. One can only hope to undermine them by strengthening real Palestinian governance and freedoms, showing that the path of cooperation leads to justice. This demands, rather than hard military actions, hard political actions. An immediate end to new settlement and an elimination of most of the old ones in the West Bank, restitution for the homes lost in 1948, and a real commitment to coexistence on equal terms. This won’t be easy, but the current war will not only not defeat Hamas, it will strengthen them in the long term, as Goldberg notes.

Terrorism works because its very cruelty demands a cruel response, forcing the the stronger actor to reveal its power and confirm the worst about itself, which then feeds right back in to the call for resistence…in the form of more terrorism. The images of suffering in Gaza are part of that campaign. They confirm the worst about Israel in the eyes of many viewers, validating the Hamas claims that Israel is a brutal regime. But Israel cannot ignore the rocket attacks on its civilians either, and so the cycle goes on and on. Terror, response, revulsion, which justifies more terror. Some step of this cycle has to be broken, and Hamas is not going to do it, though many Palestinian civilians might, if they are so empowered. Israel can break the cycle, though it hasn’t done so yet.

The Talmud teaches that peace is the highest value, but also that there can be no peace without justice. I disagree. Justice for the people of the West Bank won’t bring an immediate peace to the beleagured citizens of Israel, but it is a vital first step and one that only Israel can take. It is not giving in to terrorism to respond to violence with reconciliation, but breaking the very back of the terrorist to ignore their invitation to violence. “We had no choice,” is not a foreign policy that can lead anywhere, nor is it a moral calculation of any value. It’s simply part of the cycle that extremisits on all sides want to maintain. Israel has got to step in front of this cycle, disrupt the pattern, and pray (sorry, but it might just come down to that), that the better angels of the Palestinian people are also heeded once they have the chance to be heard through the Wall and over the rockets.

The Saddleback Church, Warren’s magachurch in California, changed their FAQ page recently to remove much of the controversial material. Thanks to web archving, however, it is not lost.  The following is from a page captured on 12/24/2008, and it should send a chill up the spine of any person who believes in a pluralistic society.

5.  What does it mean to be a chosen people?
Question: Our small group met last night and we had a question we thought maybe you would help us clarify. If the Jews are God’s chosen people and they follow the laws as handed down to Moses, yet they do not accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah, how then can they be saved and ensure their place in heaven?

Answer: When you think about how those who have a Jewish heritage come to salvation, the best answer is in looking at the first followers of Jesus. The first disciples were all Jewish men, but their salvation came through their relationship with Christ, not their Jewish background. The same is true of the Apostle Paul and every other Jew who came to Christ in the New Testament. The truth of the Bible is, we all come to salvation in the same way … through our faith in Christ.

When God calls the Jews his chosen people it does not mean that they are all automatically chosen for salvation. It means that they were chosen to be the nation that would follow him and teach others what it meant to follow him. That is why Jesus went to the Jewish people first when he came to this earth. Through the Jewish people (Jesus himself was a Jew), he brought the blessing of salvation to the world.

Of course, today there are not as great a number of Jewish believers in Jesus as we would expect. If they are God’s chosen people, why  aren’t more choosing faith in him? The Bible tells us in Romans 11 that there will be a day when this will change – a day when there will be a great revival of faith in God through Jesus among the Jewish people. Obviously, this is a day that we, as believers in Christ, want to pray for!

(emphasis added)

Yikes. I believe, as the mystic Rumi wrote, “Sunlight looks slightly different on this wall than it does on that wall. and a lot different on this other one, but it is still one light.”

There are many paths to holiness. Many of them aren’t even religious. Recognizing the shared blessings of the human imagination, recognizing that humanity has thousands of answers to those fundamental questions–what does it meant to be human? how do I live a moral life–is the most precious realization knowledge of each other can give us. We must not merely tolerate  other belief systems while we pray for their disappearance–be they Jewish, Christian, Inuit, Muslim, secular humanism, and so on…we must respect them. Respecting a cultural or a belief system does not include praying for that belief system or that culture to vanish in favor of yours. It means listening and learning; it means becoming a student of that system and finding the shared points. Warren does this in his public life, to some extent, but as many of his statements show, he still harbors a hope that all other ideas of the good and just life will vanish in favor of his own.

I believe strongly that God gave us the gift of imagination so that we could find our own paths to goodness, justice, peace, and love in our way, even without a belief in God. To claim a monopoly of righteousness is the hallmark of the fundamentalist, and a idea, I fear, that Pastor Warren embraces, even if he no longer likes to advertise it.

But there are alternatives to the extremism of fundamentalists, be they the militant cult of Hamas or the falsely benign strain of Evangelicals in America.

I’d love to present an alternate view, and call everyone’s attention to the work of Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, author of “You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right:Finding Faith Without Fanaticism,” a former West Bank settler, who works very hard to expand understanding among people. His interview on NPR about Gaza and Bernard Madoff is clear headed and inspiring. I especially like the point he makes about affirming the experiences of those with whom we disagree:

“So, I think the first thing to do is start listening, as much as we insist on talking in these conflicts, and the second is to realize there is always some part of even your most hated enemies’ experience that you can affirm, and when those two things are in place, you can, step by step, begin to return from sanity to a tragic situation.”

Important lessons for a dangerous time. I hope that Pastor Warren is having a change of heart, rather than just a chance of publicity. Time will tell.

Noah Millman, on The American Scene,  has written a clear headed and depressing assessment of the situation. Certainly worth reading. Until Israel ends the occupation and Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist, I see little hope here. Thank God for Seeds of Peace.