Many people have asked me - as a Jewish believer in Jesus - to share publicly how I feel and what I think about what is happening in Israel and Palestine. I’ve resisted. It’s too difficult on many different levels. Instead, I want to share with you a life-changing moment from my last trip to the Holy Land...
I didn’t understand a single word Ibrahim* was saying. Even so, I listened to him share earnestly in his native Arabic with the Palestinian young adults who filled the room. With each of his words, my heart pounded harder. Because, while I may not have understood Ibrahim’s words, I knew what was coming. Finally, I heard him say my name, and then “Yahud.” At the Arabic word for Jew, all twenty-something heads turned as one, eyes locked on me.
We’d all just spent a week together, ministering to Arab Christian youth and families side-by-side at a retreat center in the West Bank. We’d shared laughter and music and food and Jesus. But the gulf between Jews and Palestinians is deep and wide, as you well know. Which is why, in the month leading up to that week of camp in 2018, Ibrahim and Omar (ministry staff who we know and love) decided we should keep my heritage under wraps during camp. I’d been thinking the same thing. Everyone agreed it would be too distracting. After all, we were coming together to share the love of Jesus with families living in the West Bank, not to workshop a turbulent cultural divide.
But now, camp was over. And Ibrahim had decided that the time was right to let them know. Right then and there in our post-camp leader meeting. Giving me about a thirty-second heads up. And so, there we were: a roomful of Palestinian Jesus followers, a handful of American Jesus followers, and me, the Jewish Jesus follower.
If you’re American, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. We all love Jesus, right? But in that sliver of terrain that is the Holy Land, people aren’t ever separated from their heritage. Really, in a very profound way, these Palestinian peers recognized me more clearly than either my American Jewish community or my American Christian community do – both of which often see my Jewishness as my background – as my past – not as my enduring identity. Yes, I love Jesus, but I am still a Jew – in my eyes and in theirs. (No different from Jesus’ disciples!)
And so I trembled in those frozen moments in the wake of Ibrahim’s words. Would they distrust all of their time with me? Would the leaders erase the memory of me toting children on my hip and braiding beautiful hair and holding little hands on the way to dinner? Would the women shut out the memory of our shared shrieks of laughter during field games? Would they all discard the fellowship of our songs and prayers? Would they hate me?
No, they would not, did not. Instead, this group of people who’d been born and raised inside the confines of Palestine, under the watch of Israel, rose from their chairs and gathered around me. And laid their hands upon me to pray over this Jesus-following Jewish girl – in Arabic. And to pray for my whole family – while my husband and children and father-in-law bowed their heads, too.
In real time and in real flesh, we were living out the reality of Ephesians 2:14.
For He is our peace, who made both groups one and tore down the dividing wall of hostility.
The Gospel we’d been sharing all week with others was now on full, glorious display within us and among us.
The next morning over breakfast – our last meal together – I was asked to share my faith story. Bridges were being built in that place, in those days. And they have continued that work in the years since, even through troubled times like these.
And so, in these fraught days of 2023, I don’t have a political or military solution to share with you. But this is something I do know. The world tells us that in order to love one, we must hate the other. That in order to honor one people’s suffering, we must minimize the suffering of the other. But that is not the way of Jesus. On the Cross, He bore the suffering of all, and destroyed the barriers of hostility between all. And that is the cross I want to carry, come what may.
*Names have been changed for security and safety.
