by Justin Bartkus ’10, ’12 M.T.S. 

In January of 2017, I arrived for a two-month stay in Jerusalem. The previous May, I had completed my final semester of coursework in Notre Dame’s Ph.D. program in theology. By that point, I was totally burned out—physically and emotionally—but also, and even more painfully, in despair over the direction of my life. After immersing myself in an academic lifestyle, I was searching for something more human. For too long my identity and sense of worth had been tied up in establishing my mastery of nineteenth-century philosophers or fine distinctions of Thomistic quaestiones. Trying to soar above my own humanity had been draining.

It is ironic that I sought direction and peace by going to one of the most politically complicated places on earth. The story of Israel and Palestine is a chaotic tangle of identities—vying claims over rights, mutual recriminations, and decades’ worth of propaganda and misinformation coloring the views of each side. Sussing out the truth here is never easy.

Yet, from the standpoint of faith—Christian, Jewish, or Muslim—God’s presence has inhabited this land in a special way. Christians go so far as to say that God is not simply in this place, but is also of it, a flesh-and-blood inhabitant of the land, who trekked its hills, floated upon its waters, and endured the changing of its seasons. I indeed found God in this land.

***

The sun set over our shoulders, shedding its last rays on the Sea of Galilee and filling us with a burst of exhilaration. Our hiking party—myself and four spunky Notre Dame undergraduates from the Jerusalem Global Gateway—was nearing the end of its fourth and final day on the long trek from Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown, to Capernaum, hometown of the Apostle Peter. We had begun the day near the summit of Mount Arbel, to the west of the Sea of Galilee. Descending through thorny ravines, we had picked our way over paths muddied by early spring rains. Persisting on handfuls of dried dates and peanut butter sandwiches, we had trekked through what felt like ten consecutive miles of mud before stepping onto the beach of the Sea of Galilee.

But we had a problem. Our evening lodgings on the Mount of the Beatitudes were still a five-kilometer hike up the seacoast, almost entirely uphill. Bus service had shut down, and we were fast running out of daylight. As our dilemma dawned upon us, our excitement gave way to panic. Going on foot was out of the question, as the muddy paths were unnavigable at night. Uber certainly didn’t operate here, and no one had the cell phone data necessary to look up a cab.

And then, a last-ditch idea: the guidebook. The book provided phone numbers of taxi services for Galilee. But our hope turned once again to worry as we struck out with each call: no answer, no answer, wrong number, invalid number—apparently the guidebook was woefully out of date.

Finally, I tried the very last number on the list. A guy picked up. We seemed to have reached him on his personal number. “Are you a cab driver?” I asked. “Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s right, that’s me. Where can I pick you up?”

Thirty minutes later, we checked into the guesthouse at the Mount of the Beatitudes. Dried mud trailed us every step we took, but the receptionist swallowed hard and led us to our rooms. At dinner, we asked for a second portion of everything. The wait staff laughed at our ravenous appetites and brought enough food to feed two tables. As we departed the dining room, having polished off our dessert of ice cream sandwiches, we continued to scatter dried mud everywhere. But the hospitality that welcomed us overlooked our unseemliness.

***

At its heart, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is a dispute over the territory called “Palestine.” The term was first used by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE to designate the strip of land south of modern-day Syria and north of Egypt.

Most Palestinians are Arabs, tracing their presence in the land back at least as far as the 600s AD, if not earlier. They consider Palestine their ancestral home, and it is hard to argue with them, as their presence in the land has continued unbroken for over 1400 years.

Israeli claims to the land derive from the Hebrews’ conquest of the land related in the Jewish Bible. “Zionism,” as this ideology is called, is a response to the discrimination Jews suffered in their millennia of diaspora, grimly punctuated by the Holocaust. In the turmoil of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many Jews throughout the world looked to Mount Zion as a rallying point for gathering their people into a place they could justifiably call home.

In 1947, after World War II, the United Nations wanted to provide that homeland to the traumatized and decimated European Jews. So the U.N. divided Palestine, creating the modern nation of Israel on one side of the border and the Palestinian Territories or “West Bank” on the other, with the Old City of Jerusalem and its sacred sites under special international jurisdiction. The compromise didn’t take. After seizing the Old City of Jerusalem in 1947, Israel waged a war to gain more ground in the Palestinian Territories. In 1949, the UN helped to renegotiate a new boundary, known as the Green Line. After the “Six-Day War” in 1967, Israel pushed over the Green Line to establish a military occupation of the Palestinian Territories that has continued to today.

Israelis justify controversial military moves in the name of security, citing continued attacks on Israel’s right to exist and Arab violence. On the other hand, the Israeli occupation of Palestine oppresses Palestinians and depresses the Palestinian economy—foreign aid accounts for 30% of Palestine’s GDP. It is nearly impossible to envision a peaceful and equitable division of land between the Israeli state and a prospective Palestinian state.

***

Tariq was sucking wind, exasperated. He dribbled around me and tossed the ball at the roof. His attempt was no good. As the ball rolled off the corrugated metal surface, I jumped to grab it and pulled down the rebound. Even at the age of twenty-nine, I was shamelessly proud I could hold my own against a teenager.

We were in Bethlehem, the place of Jesus’ birth, playing pick-up basketball in Tariq’s driveway—a raised concrete slab laid atop a platform on a hillside.

Bethlehem is a Palestinian city, separated from Jerusalem by a massive barrier of concrete and barbed wire. The wall visually reinforces the divergent fortunes of the two territories: Israeli roads are smoothly paved, its public transit clean and efficient. On the Palestinian side of the wall, trash piles and cinderblock buildings litter the visual landscape.

Nonetheless, there I was in Bethlehem, hooping away with Tariq with a wooden plank for a “hoop.” Tariq was about 16, your average teenager: good-natured, interested in sports and getting his selfie angles right. I had made friends with Tariq’s father, a streetwise and wizened Palestinian Christian man. Upon hearing that I was passionate about basketball, he had invited me to their modest home for pickup basketball, tea, and dessert. It was a quintessential act of Middle Eastern hospitality.

Later that evening, as I breezed through the wall’s checkpoint back to the Jerusalem side with the ease that is the privilege of an American passport, I wondered what would become of Tariq. He epitomized youthful innocence, full of smiles and hope. But would this conflict and that wall embitter him in the years to come? Would Tariq remain the angel of hospitality and welcome that he had been to me?

***

The land of Israel-Palestine, despite its troubles, and the people in it—those who visit it, who inhabit it, who drive taxis in it—taught me an indispensable lesson: truth lies in the relational rhythms of vulnerability and hospitality rather than in the predictable back-and-forth of ideology, conflict, and stagnant forms of identity.

Vulnerability and hospitality are necessary everywhere, not only in the Holy Land. As we approach these high holy days of Triduum, centering on the breaking and rising of Christ’s body, shared at a common table, let us seek to imitate Christ in a new way. Jesus’ broken body is the essence of vulnerability; the pardon he offers to his persecutors after his resurrection, the essence of hospitality. Let us hold onto our own ideas and identities more loosely, that we might enter more deeply with the Body of Christ into the fleshly experiences of vulnerability and hospitality. Even amidst outer and inner turmoil, the most direct path to God is found not in bypassing our vulnerable humanity in favor of some more “pristine” identity based in our achievements or superiority, but in consciously saying “yes” to our weakness, our dirtiness, even to the injustices that we suffer This “yes” allows us to caress these same wounds when we encounter them in others. In walking this path of vulnerable hospitality, we follow the God who stooped down and washed his friends’ feet, who wept over Lazarus, and who accepted hospitality from all who welcomed him.

Image Credits: 

Northern Lights 119, “Separation Wall” via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Renée Roden, Jesus Trail.

Government Press Office, “Arab People Fleeing” via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Montecruz Foto, “Israeli West Bank barrier” via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)