That is my great worry and, I suspect, that deep down it is for most people.
If you think that Death of a Nightingale is only about special educational needs you may be surprised that I am asking that question here.
But Death of a Nightingale has a subplot. It features a music lesson that highlights the importance of music to children with special needs and it explores the way in which music can contribute to interfaith dialogue.
The Prologue to the play also contributes to that dialogue. It is because of what it says about interfaith dialogue that gives it its relevance to Gaza.
In a conflict that doesn’t just go back to the arrival of Hamas on the scene in Gaza, doesn’t just go back to the creation of Israel by the UN in 1948 but resonates with wars of religion over three Millennia right back to Biblical days, a conflict that has at its core an argument about land rights in a land that everyone describes as Holy, maybe an interfaith dialogue is where a resolution to the problem has to start alongside any political dialogue.
This is much more constructive than self righteous well wishers sitting comfortably in their very detached houses pronouncing on how Israel can get its security or Palestinians can secure a state of their own, wringing their hands in despair at every use of force. They disapprove of rockets fired out of Gaza; they deplore Israel’s use of force as disproportionate; they call for an end to the blockade, and they get all worked up when a few people die. They forget that civilians always die in wars until they find a way of stopping them altogether, and an effective humanitarian blockade is probably the least worst way of fighting someone who wants to destroy you.
They forget how Britain dealt with V1 Doodlebugs and V2 rockets bringing death and destruction to homes in London and South East England at the end of World War II. Winston Churchill sent 1,000 bomber raids over German cities. They forget Dresden. Churchill would, I suspect, have given short shrift to anyone calling for an independent international enquiry at the time.
The truth of the matter is this. With the Holocaust still vivid in its collective memory, recollecting sins of omission and not just sins of commission by Nazi Germany, Israel will trust no-one but itself to defend itself against any new little Hitlers whose declared objective is to destroy it, and it will do whatever it deems necessary to do so. Think otherwise at your peril.
But the Palestinians also have needs to be met, and the conflict will continue until people tire of war, tire too of being used as pawns in other people’s power games and find a way to resolve it … or until they blow themselves up; until they beat swords into ploughshares or use them against each other until they run out of swords.
Only when you “pool” sovereignty – state or nation – do you really end war. Over 600,000 died in the American Civil War in the 19th Century learning this lesson, and many civilians with them. Millions have died in Europe learning the same lesson, soldiers and civilians.
I was myself reminded of the cost of that lesson to Europe only a few weeks ago. I made my first visit to the Normandy beaches in France, the location of the D Day landings in 1944. I visited the killing ground that was Omaha beach. I went to Arromanches. I stood in a 360 degree cinema there. As the camera lens ranged over the war cemetery – tragically just one of many in Europe – thousands and thousands of graves – all of them marking in perpetuity young premature deaths, I suddenly found myself weeping uncontrollably. I couldn’t even speak. I couldn’t believe myself. It brought it home to me that they had all sacrificed their lives so that I and other could live. War is a nasty business whichever side you’re on.
The residents of the Holy Land have to learn something even more difficult. They have to learn to “pool” faith, to share their belief in one God, while still keeping their own individual way of expressing it.
Don’t say pooling faith can’t happen. They said that about national sovereignty In Europe. It can happen. It actually started with Spinoza! It is happening now. The Alexandria Declaration. The Jerusalem Foundation. HaEmek Medical Center serving Jews and Arabs. its guiding philosophy ‘Coexistence Through Medicine’, Daniel Barenboim’s East West Divan Orchestra. The Dignity of Difference by the Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks. Some people – Israelis and Arabs – are building bridges as well as fences.
I make the Prologue to Death of a Nightingale my personal contribution.
The Prologue
A number of years ago I heard the following proposition which I endorse here. If there is one God, it shouldn’t be outrageous to suggest that for the billions of people on this planet there are many paths to him or to her, just different routes up the same mountain, and that each one is equally valid and each one blessed. The Matterhorn above Zermatt in Switzerland looks quite unlike Monte Cervino in Italy, but it is the same mountain.
The strength of individual belief underpins the validity of one – it does not undermine the validity of another. It also underpins its integrity. No single way is exclusive, although Judaism, Christianity and Islam all find words to suggest that theirs is. If they have that belief, isn’t it time for them to shed it? A compassionate God – or Allah the All-Merciful – in
his wisdom must be allowed some continuing discretion as to whom he admits into his divine presence – now mustn’t he?
I cannot believe that God has favourites among his children. There has been and still is too much suffering caused by those who have believed this. We are dealing here with the Infinite. There is no edge to the universe. The concept of God should reflect that. I am happy to echo here sentiments that others, much more learned than me, have expressed,most recently Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks (now Lord Sacks) in his book, The Dignity of Difference.
God is not One but, if n stands for infinity, One to the power of n. That is a thought to unite all those who believe in a supreme deity. In the name of humanity they should rejoice in sharing it. The Alexandria Declaration of the three Faiths was a real start. It needs to continue.
Monotheism stems from tribes in the desert that couldn’t live in harmony then any more than they would appear to be able to do so today. The Holy Land is an unholy mess. Jerusalem is not a city of peace. But those tribes produced Holy texts, the Torah, the Bible and the Koran. Beautiful documents. There is an exhibition of them in the British Library as I write. Incredible wisdom in their day, but they contain militant passages right for their day, but out of synch in our global world. They were written when the sun went round the earth, not the other way round, and when bullocks and goats were sacrificed upon an altar. They predate Copernicus, never mind the Hubble telescope and all the scientific discoveries of our times. Furthermore there are some things we are not given to know for sure or at all, and so many things scientists do not know even now.
So give Holy texts the respect they deserve, but not now an unquestioning literal obedience if that denies to God’s presence compassion, and if it denies to people of other faiths or no faith at all their common humanity. We will need all the help Holy texts can give us if we are to contain HIV Aids and confront the effects of climate change on our psyche, never mind on our landscape and on our financial resources.
So I say where I stand. We should see ourselves as partners on Planet Earth, not rivals, as bringing forth the blessing of tranquillity, not the curse of violence, and the gift of sacred beauty, not the ugly face of conflict. How can you educate a multi-ethnic society in any other way?
People should not just come together in prayer only when they mourn their dead in war
This is where you can begin.
22 The Alexandria Declaration January 2002
Delegates:
o Bishop of Jerusalem, The Rt. Rev. Riah Abu El Assal
o His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey
o His Eminence Sheikh Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, Cairo, Egypt
o Sephardi Chief Rabbi Bakshi-Doron
o Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel, Rabbi Michael Melchior
o Rabbi of Tekoa, Rabbi Menachem Froman
o International Director of Interreligious Affairs, American Jewish
Committee, Rabbi David Rosen
o Rabbi of Savyon, Rabbi David Brodman
o Rabbi of Maalot Dafna, Rabbi Yitzak Ralbag
o Chief Justice of the Sharia Courts, Sheikh Taisir Tamimi
o Minister of State for the PA, Sheikh Tal El Sider
o Mufti of the Armed Forces, Sheikh Abdelsalam Abu Schkedem
o Mufti of Bethlehm, Sheikh Mohammed Taweel
o Representative of the Greek Patriarch, Archibishop Aristichos
o Latin Patriarch, His Beatitude Michel Sabbah
o Melkite Archbishop, Archbishop Boutrous Mu’alem
o Representative of the Armenian Patriarch, Archbishop Chinchinian
In the name of God who is Almighty, Merciful and Compassionate, we, who have gathered as religious leaders from the Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities, pray for true peace in Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and declare our commitment to ending the violence and bloodshed that denies the right of life and dignity.
According to our faith traditions, killing innocent in the name of God is a desecration of His Holy Name, and defames religion in the world. The violence in the Holy Land is an evil which must be opposed by all people of good faith. We seek to live together as neighbours respecting the integrity of each other’s historical and religious inheritance. We call upon all to oppose incitement, hatred and misrepresentation of the other.
The Dignity of Difference by Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks
Page 55 (2nd edition) “The radical transcendence of God in the Hebrew Bible means that the Infinite lies beyond our finite understanding. God communicates in human language, but there are dimensions of the divine that must forever elude us.
As Jews we believe that God has made a covenant with a singular people, but that does not exclude the possibility of other peoples, cultures and faiths finding their own relationship with God within the shared frame of the Noahide laws.
These laws constitute, as it were, the depth grammar of the human experience of the divine: of what it is to see the world as God’s work and humanity as God’s image.
God is God of all humanity, but between Babel and the end of days no single faith is the faith of all humanity. Such a narrative would lead us to respect the search for God in people of other faiths and reconcile the particularity of cultures with the universality of the human condition.”
If you really want to help to secure a long lasting settlement in the Middle East you should start echoing these voices, not leave them soundlessly echoing in a wilderness of silence.
Just think about it. If those who are guided by their faith started to acknowledge that in a global world their God can no longer be a tribal God, no longer God belonging exclusively to them, the whole nature and dynamic of that political dialogue changes and must be all the better for it. Failing that, Armageddon? Needs must.
Let those who believe in God give God a chance to heal.
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