The Jewish Naqba

Memorializing catastrophe is not an exclusively Arab tradition. The Jewish term for catastrophe is hurban, which means destruction. The hurban of Jewish history includes not just the destruction of the two Temples but the loss of Jewish sovereignty and dispersion over the world. The imprint of hurban in Jewish thought and feeling is so powerful that Jews remember the hurban even on happy occasions. The groom breaks a glass at the conclusion of a wedding ceremony in memory of the destruction, called in Hebrew zeicher la-hurban. Jews also once had the tradition of waking up at midnight to recite prayers and pour out their hearts in memory of the hurban. As a youth, I sometimes followed this tradition and woke up at midnight to mourn the Temples. The word for midnight in Hebrew is hatzot, which means broken in half, or separated and crossed, as day is by night, life by death, joy by sorrow, the present by the past. The word hurban is harsh, irrational, mystical, almost absurd.

As a graduate student at Harvard University, I once attended a dinner at a House Master’s apartment in which the only other guests were the famous literary critic Lionel Trilling and his wife Diana. Lionel claimed that Judaism was a rational religion, following Maimonides. I objected to the idea and said that religion by definition was irrational. It required a belief in an unknowable God whose rules we must follow like sheep, including the commandment in the early biblical days to annihilate all the other nations living in Canaan at the time, to utterly reject their way of life and instead become a holy people — which amounts to genocide. I felt that there had to be a saving grace in this commandment, that God was challenging us to disobey. Although we were God’s slaves, we had the right and responsibility to disobey. The Lord was our therapist. In fact, in ancient Israelite history the relationship of Israel with the surrounding peoples was not genocidal. David’s loyal soldier who married Bathsheba was a Hittite. Of course, the story is ugly. David impregnates the beautiful Bathsheba and marries her after her Hittite husband’s death in battle. The Bible is quite grim, hardly rational. Its pages are full of more curses than blessings. In fact, absurd as it sounds, the Jewish Messiah derives from a tainted lineage; the Davidic line includes marriages that disobey Biblical commandments. Belief in such a Messiah embraces the Latin article of faith attributed to the third century Church father Tertullian, “Credo quia absurdum est.” (I believe because it is absurd.)

I became a writer who treats reality as a passage to something beyond reality. I accept the tradition of the absurd. When my writing teacher at Harvard, John Hawkes, invited me to become a member of his aesthetic mantra of anti-realism, I resisted since I needed reality to reach something else, magical realism, and magic is the critical word. Which brings me back to the crisis in the Mideast.

The solution to the conflict between Israel and today’s Arabs lies in the word magic. Naqba (catastrophe) and hurban (destruction) could magically bring Jews and Arabs together in a paradoxical intimacy of mutual suffering. Both people have long memories.

At present, the Arab naqba, namely Israel’s victory over the Arab armies in 1947-48 in Mandate Palestine, prevents Palestinians from accepting Israel’s existence. But this problem could become the solution if Israel and its neighbors acknowledged and honored their reciprocal agonies and stories of grief as the way toward a future growth and stability.

As a Fulbright in 1995-96, I attempted to launch a Mideast region-wide writing workshop called “Celebrating Differences” linking Arab and Jewish youth in a live, interactive, cross-cultural writing class that would allow the participants to share their stories in written form, subsequently read aloud and discussed. I managed to conduct only one session for Arab and Jewish students in Israel linked via satellite with their counterparts in America (specifically Massachusetts) under the auspices of the Massachusetts Corporation for Educational Telecommunications. A high school principal in Jordan was interested in having his students join the class, as was a member of the cultural department of the P.L.O. regarding students in the West Bank. But I could not gain the financial support of the Israeli government or the Open University to include the participation of Jordan and the P.L.O.

The session was very moving. All the participants were engaged. I asked them to write for several minutes about a moment in their lives when they felt different, either for good or for bad. One Arab girl from the village Jesh up north wrote that she felt different after her father was murdered; she almost fainted as she read her piece. The students seated around her immediately jumped up to support her physically and emotionally. Another Arab girl wrote about how different she felt when she was the only person frisked as she boarded a bus.

Unfortunately, the value of such a writing workshop was not appreciated by government officials, including the governments of America, Canada, Germany, the European Union, as well as non-governmental organizations in Europe, all of whom informed me that they would only support economical projects, not educational projects.

But education is the key. Arab naqba and Jewish hurban are twin members of the same family and category of existence. Economic projects will not bridge the difference between modes of commemoration of suffering. Only education can accomplish this goal.

Here is an excerpt from an interview (“Bridging Differences”) which appeared in The Israel Fulbrighter back in 1996.

Dr. Simckes has been conducting televised writing workshops in the US for the past three years and now he wants to develop a region-wide interactive video writing workshop based in Israel.

The live video conference broadcast on February 27 was preceded by extensive     preparation, in the course of which Dr. Simckes made several on-site visits to Nazareth, Beit Hagefen and Jesh to select the participants. He chose students who were most comfortable with writing on the spot spontaneously for 2-3 minutes, with reading aloud   and with handling his guidelines about critiquing the writing of the other participants. “Which means,” according to him, “not simply to yell at each other, or disagree, but to find what was strong and interesting in somebody else’s piece before you indicated what      bothered you.”

Although Seymour Simckes is fluent in Hebrew and is studying Arabic, he  decided to use English as the medium of his workshops. He explained: “In the Arab-Jewish context, English serves as a diffuser of power. It interrupts the implication of power through language. Both the Arab and the Israeli students have to give up their   native language. Politically, English is a bridge language. It permits the groups to have a  certain geographic distance from each other and still communicate. So private space is not invaded, and they can hear each other. But they learn to pay attention to each other in ways that are potentially safer and more intimate.”

Seymour Simckes thinks the ability to listen is a critical skill. He tries to develop it through his writing workshops. “What I feel is the great crisis in this area is people talking at each other,” he said. “There is not enough experience in listening to each other. There is too much ‘either/or’ mentality. Either I am right and you are wrong, or vice versa. So that fundamentally two sides seem to be vying for the attention of a third party to get the approval and confirmation that one side, their side, is right. And my goal through these exercises and through the technology of distance learning is to encourage the notion that both sides are right. That both sides can hear each other. That if they can hear each other, they become a community.

I now invite, again, all governments of the Mideast region to establish a live, interactive writing workshop that benefits all parties. It is not too late.