Jerusalem

We arrived in Jerusalem Wednesday afternoon, 24 hours after leaving our home in South Dakota. It was an overwhelming experience for me to drive from the airport in Tel Aviv up into the hill country where Jerusalem is located. I had no idea about the ruggedness of the countryside here in Palestine! I had always imagined it to be a more gentle landscape. We joined our Christian Peacemaker Team delegation and found our rooms at Al Hashimi Hostel in Old Jerusalem. The picture, if I can get it on, was taken from the roof of our hotel with the Dome of the Rock in the center of the picture and the Mount of Olives on the horizon. (So far, my attempts to download this picture from my computer onto this blog aren't working.)

Thursday we spent the day visiting different groups working for peace in Israel and Palestine: Rabbis for Human Rights in the morning, and Israeli Campaign Against Home Demolitions in the afternoon. In the afternoon visit, we were taken throughout East Jerusalem to see the expansion of Israeli settlements which are being built, like so many American suburban communities, throughout these desert hills. Quite apart from being quite unsustainable in this desert land, and quite apart from the water being taken from Palestinians to sustain the lush landscaped greenery of these "suburbs," the Israeli settlements are effectively cutting off the possibility of a viable Palestinian nation in the West Bank by dividing it in two, and removing it from its logical capital in East Jerusalem.

It was so significant for me to experience this setting. It is more different than I could possibly have imagined. The Old City where we stayed is all Palestinian, with narrow winding streets that reminded us a lot of Greece. I had the contradictory impression of everything being very very big and many on what at the same time is such a small country. In East Jerusalem the horizon was Jordan across the Jordan River, and Jerusalem is just 40 minute drive from Tel Aviv on the Meditarranean coast. Such a small land, so many diverse people, such high hills and deep valleys! What a lovely place, and what a crossroads of the world through all these centuries. The contrast between old and new is so striking.

Today we went to Hebron through Bethlehem and are staying with the CPT team in Hebron. The drive again reminded Loretta and me so much of Crete, with vineyards on all the steep hillsides, olive groves, sheep and donkeys and small tractors all over. I have a whole number of new impressions today from our walk through Hebron led by the CPTers here, but I'll stop with these initial reflections on our first day in this land where God invited His people to live and model a different way of life together here on earth.

Roy

We're off!!

Ready or not, our flight leaves tomorrow morning for Tel Aviv, Israel, via Sioux Falls, Chicago, and Frankfurt, Germany. Loretta and I are still working to get things down to size, traveling with a suitcase, a large and small backpack, and some carry one items for the next two months. Though we still have anxieties, we are eager to meet our ten companions for the next two weeks or so who will be joining us on our Christian Peacemaker Team delegation. We have felt very busy the past ten days getting ready for this experience.
I was so encouraged last evening when I attended Will Ortman and Tim Eisenbeis' program at the North Church on "Who will feed the future?", the challenges and opportunities facing rural communities like ours in the light of the peak in petroleum production and global climate change. I toohave been realizing in recent months the extent to which these two realities are going to impact our own lives as well as the global community of life. What it means for communities like ours, as Tim and Will pointed out, is that we will have a major role to play in helping our society transition to a post-petroleum age, and that will mean growth for communities like ours!
I also feel keenly our own culpability in these two realities by our trip overseas. I have long sensed that this trip may well be the last major trip of our lives, simply because of our own limited resources. Indeed, it is only thanks to the Salem Mennonite Church and the grant from Lilly Endowment that I and my family can make this trip!! However, I am troubled also by the way in which resources are consumed by international travel, and the impacts of such travel on the poor of the world as it contributes to global warming.
I don't think this spells the end of human journeying. Humans, as individuals and as groups, have been wandering to and fro upon the earth for millenia, long before the era of cheap fossil fuel, and humans will continue to journey here and there. But the days of cheap and easy travel are about over, and future travel will need to be much more intentional and careful. In that spirit, we want to be as intentional as we can about this trip. We hope we have planned stays long enough in Israel/Palestine and in Greece that relationships can be formed, and that we can come to good understandings about how life is for people in these places. We are more than tourists with this trip. We intend to travel with the purpose of extending God's reign of justice and peace, of building bridges of understanding and reconciliation among diverse people, and of learning how the experience of other people might enlighten and enrich our own setting.
Never having visited Israel/Palestine or even having had much of a desire to do so in the past, I am now very eager to see this land that plays such a crucial role in our salvation history, as the crossroads place between the great civilizations of the world where God called people of faith to sojourn as light to the nations. I am intrigued by the realization in recent reading that the people who live in this land, the Israelis and the Palestinians, are both a very mixed people ethnically, religiously, and racially. The blood of countless invasions and countless emigrations flows through the veins of these two nationalities, so that it seems that in some way these two peoples have come to represent the whole of humanity in our struggle to live peaceably together in a sustainable way here upon God's good earth.
So, now it is time to see this land for ourselves! Please pray for us, and for all the people we encounter in these next weeks, that what we and they experience will contribute to a peaceful and sustainable life together here on earth, and that it will justify the negative effects of such a convenient global voyage.
We wish ourselves (since most of you don't know Greek), kalo taxidhi, a good journey! See you in two months! Roy