During a month’s stay in Israel and Palestine ten years ago I kept a journal. In it I recorded this story by Daniel Rossing, who had worked in the Israeli government Department of Religious Affairs:
“A Romanian Orthodox church in Mea Shearim was being restored. A wealthy couple gave money for two crosses to be replaced, one on the dome and one on the tower. The Orthodox Jewish institution across the street was outraged, and demanded their removal, as they looked down on them in direct line of sight towards Temple Mount. I told them repeatedly that the Romanians refused to take down the crosses. Still they kept up their demands, until I offered them a compromise solution – that the crosses be rotated through ninety degrees. The Jews agreed to this and the dispute was settled. The Romanians have their crosses, but to the Jews they appear as flag poles.
Everywhere consists of a number of somewheres. Perhaps the Middle East needs more betweens and less somewheres, more compromises and less positions, more traveling and less arriving, more attempts to live with the differences and less attempts to remove those differences.”
I believe that’s increasingly true for all of us.
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1 comment:
Excellent stuff. And what a clever compromise with the crosses. How crafty!
I increasingly find living in the "betweens" is quite a happy place to be. Apart from anything else it gives me a wider circle of friends than if I lived solely "somewhere". On the other hand I sometimes feel like I'm either two faced or else the double minded man (well, woman anyway) James refers to, unstable in all I do!
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