July
1998
Attending
to Pain
Interview with Susan Heckler
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Susan Heckler recently went on
a two and a half week tour of Israel and the areas under the control
of the Palestine Authority with 15 other Jews, two trainers and a film
crew making a documentary of their trip, as part of the Compassionate
Listening Project. This program is run by the Earthstewards Network,
which sponsors individuals working to foster peace in places such as
Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Israel.
Q:
Why did you want to do this?
A: I'd never been to Israel before,
and I felt that was because I was very discouraged and unhappy about
the situation. I didn't want to go as a tourist, and ignore this gaping
wound in the psyche of the world and in the Jewish psyche. To me this
trip presented a responsible way to go and thoughtfully and consciously
look at the issue [of Jewish-Palestinian relations]. It was a fascinating
and intense experience for me as a Jew to be in Israel. Israel is the
most morally complex place I've ever been to.
Q:
What was the itinerary?
A: We were based in Jerusalem, at a
convent called Ecce Homo in the Arab quarter of the old city. Ecce Homo
is on the Via Dolorosa and is one of the Stations of the Cross. I became
friendly with the Christians who ran the convent, and who were curious
about us. When I related some of the experiences we'd had with Palestinians,
the sister in charge said to me, "It means a great deal to us that you're
staying here. We have a lot of Arab staff and we have developed a somewhat
biased view. It's very meaningful to us that you're here, and to hear
about the work you're doing."
On the last day, I went with a volunteer to the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre, because my neighbors in Queens, who are devout
Catholics and who are elderly and ill, asked me to go to the Church
and pray for them. I went in their place, so I did what they would do.
It was interesting because later I thought that people I know would
have found it difficult to accept that I prayed at this church of Jesus.
I gave my own prayer and I gave the prayer I thought they would give.
It was again an experience of trying to be large enough to be beyond
yourself, to take another perspective, to speak to God from beyond the
identity you were born into.
Q: You went to some of the
most difficult places in the area: Hebron and Gaza. What was Hebron
like?
A: In Hebron I stayed in the home of
an upper middle class Palestinian lawyer, his sons, and his wife. While
you see things being built in Hebron, you also see the infrastructure
crumbling. The streets, sidewalks, lampposts, sewers and things we take
for granted were decayed. The decline of services is a point of anger.
The Palestinian Authority in Gaza was given $14 million by the Swedish
government to create a sewage system that had been neglected by the
Israelis, and the people are enraged that money has been squandered.
They say it's gone into the pockets of the people from Tunisia [where
the Palestine Liberation Organization operated in exile]. It's gone
to pay for an insanely large police force. Meanwhile, there are open
sewers in the refugee camps throughout the Palestinian territories,
with all the attendant illnesses. One of the people I spoke to said
to me, "Before we had shit from the Israelis; now we have shit from
the Palestinian Authority and shit from the Israelis." Among Palestinian
territories, Hebron is uniquely troubled. Because of the way it has
been split down the middle, this has enforced a perpetual state of warfare
in the town.
Hebron felt terrible to me: bad, tense
and unhappy. I should say that other people had very different kinds
of stays with people, where everybody was very calm and nothing happened.
With my homestay partner and me, it was quite different. There was a
barrage of anger. It began with, "Why do you do this; why do you do
that?" We were synonymous with Israelis. When we went to Gaza there
was a newspaper article about us that described us as American Israelis.
We just listened and tried to be sympathetic.
Q:
How were you taught to listen compassionately?
A: The training was just to listen.
If you had a reaction, you were to keep it to yourself and deal with
it later. You could reflect back to the person and show that you were
really listening, that you heard what they were saying. The key was
that it was about them, not you. Compassionate listening is not a back
and forth. Compassionate listening is where you attempt to enable the
person to come to a deeper resolution of this feeling; to feel safe
enough with you to get to another level of speaking so they no longer
need to keep up the same quality of defense. We really found that to
be true: there was a shift that could occur, even in a single conversation
with someone, if you really showed that you heard who they were. For
example, in the conversation that first evening, it slowly shifted from
"Why do you do this?" to "Why do they do this?"--which is a little easier
to take.
Q:
What else did they say?
A: They said to me, "I don't know what
you've heard about us in Hebron." I asked them if they would like to
know, and they said they would. I said, "I've heard that terrible things
have happened here and that there's a great deal of pain and that people
hate each other." I put this in a mutual way, and they said, "That's
right." I would try to say things so that inherently there was not a
conflict. During this conversation the father in this family asked his
grandchild, who was about eight, what she knew about the Jews. He would
ask her in Arabic and prompt her and she would say something and he
would translate it.
Q:
What did she say?
A: She said things that one would expect.
They lock up men, they put men in jail, or they shoot at people. But
then she said something that was really more than I could bear, "They
don't believe in God, they take the name of God in vain." This was so
painful for me. I started to cry and said, "I have to say something."
I said, "I need to bless this child, as a Jew. I bless this child as
a Jew that she should grow up and live in peace in the home that she
wants to live in; that she has happiness, that she has the family she
wants; and that she lives with peace, fullness and grace." And we all
said, "Inshallah" [God willing]. It was a slight shift.
Q:
What did the father say when he saw you crying?
A: When I first started to cry, he said,
"We have been weeping for years," as if to say, 'You're tears were nothing.'
When someone is so full and so charged with something there's no room
for anyone else's feelings. The next day, our group was supposed to
rendezvous at the mosque/synagogue known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs
which is the tomb of Abraham and Sarah and Jacob and Leah. This is,
of course, the place where in 1994 Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Muslims
at prayer. It just felt terrible. Now this place is not only the grave
of the ancestors, the patriarchs, it's also supposed to be the grave
of Adam and Eve--the ancestors of all people, the symbol of the unified
source of all human beings. And nothing could feel more separate than
the experience of going there. The feeling of the separation was like
something tangible that you walk through. With both the Jews and the
Arabs of Hebron, there is no middle ground. There's really deep hatred.
I cried in front of the tomb and asked, "What have we done, what have
we done with the legacy?"
That night, when we were with the family sharing the
Ramadan breaking of the fast, I told them about my visit. I think because
of what had gone before, there wasn't a venting, but a real conversation.
We were able to actually exchange. There was room for me to say something
and I was even asked things. I told them that I went to the cave and
that I cried. I said, "It hurts to be here. This place feels so terrible.
How do people stand it?" And they nodded. I said, "Now I understand.
After seeing your incredibly close family I see a way what makes life
bearable."
As I said, other people had much gentler visits. There
was genuine interest in us, and a respectful attitude. But there were
times when I had to have a certain sort of detachment so that I didn't
show that I was taking it personally. Once at the end of a discussion
which had seemed hopeless, my host said, "Thank you very much for listening."
I said something like, "It's important for people to be honest." And
he said, "My sister Susan is always welcome in my home. Feel free to
bring your group tomorrow for Ramadan breakfast." For me, that really
felt like a vindication. People need to know that you can really hear
the most difficult things; that unless you're able to sit and listen
to what was between you they can't talk to you at all. When I left that
family, one of them took a ring that said "Peace" off his hand as a
gift. I said, "If someone asks me if the Palestinians want peace, I'll
show them this ring and I'll say that this was given to me by a Palestinian."
I had an occasion to say that when I left the project and stayed in
the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.
Q:
What was Gaza like?
A: The Israelis have built a long narrow
cement tunnel to control the flow of people at the border so you can't
get a riot and rush of people. It's a security measure, which I can
understand. However, there's a very frightening, dark quality seeing
people walk two at a time through a long cement tunnel. It's depressing.
When we were in Gaza there were reporters who wanted to interview us
because of who we were. This was quite dangerous and the Palestinian
Authority gave us an armed escort the entire time we were in Gaza. Before
I went to Israel I don't believe I'd seen an automatic weapon in my
life. You walk around in Israel and there are soldiers everywhere wearing
rifles and automatic weapons. You go into a pizza place and brush against
someone's weapon. At first this was horrifying to me. I thought, "What
does this do to people? How does this affect you?" If nothing else it
says "Occupation,"--an occupation under which one lives oneself, and
not only other people.
In Gaza, we met with Sheikh Yassin, the
spiritual head of Hamas, who is dying of an irreversible degenerative
disease. That was another very interesting trip. There was a line of
men at the side of the room. There was a very intense quality--a quality
of resolve. It was neither hopelessness nor anger alone. There was a
quality of self-mastery and power that for each man was shaped by his
sense of injustice and rage. Sheikh Yassin talked about his experiences
in prison, about being tortured in prison. I think some people felt
they were being manipulated.
I felt badly for him. I know there are people who say
that he has blood on his hands, and that he's responsible for the death
of many people. And he is. Someone asked me whether I would meet with
Meir Kahane [founder of IsraelÕs extreme-right Kach party, who
was murdered in New York City in 1990]. But there has to be some level
in which no matter what has happened, you have to talk to people, that's
my experience. So I would have met with Meir Kahane--even if he was
alive--though his views fill me with horror in a way that is almost
more disturbing than Sheikh Yassin, because I have some identity with
him.
Q:
What other groups did you meet with?
A: We met with Israeli peace activists,
people who had spent time in prison for refusing to serve in the army,
and people from Peace Now. We met with Yossi Klein, a writer for The
Jerusalem Post, who is a crossover--he voted for Rabin then crossed
over to Netanyahu. The group did a homestay with Jewish settlers as
well. We met with a group called Besod Siach (which means "Across the
Divide") who are primarily right wing settlers. They're working to have
dialogue with left wing Israelis. They expressed willingness to speak
with left wing Israelis-- which I think is an enormous stretch for them--
because they had been horrified by what had happened to Yitzak Rabin.
After the project, I stayed on for a month with Israelis, primarily
religious Jews. We did visit an elderly Jewish couple and that was one
of the most difficult meetings for our group because they were unapologetically
angry, bitter and racist.
Q:
What did they say?
A: All those myths got trotted out.
The land really didn't belong to anyone. There wasn't anyone here. They
talked about how they bought the land, and maybe there was an exchange.
I don't think they were lying. They said they bought it from the person
who actually owned it and those other people [who claimed it] didn't
really own it. They said, they work their land; that not much was being
done on the land. They also said, "I'm not sorry for this," and "We've
been through five wars, we won the wars. Other people win wars, they
take territory, no one asks them to give it back. If England or France
or America took territory and they won it in a war, would someone make
them give it back? I don't think so. Because we won it fair and square."
When we were listening, I thought, "I don't know what
to do with this. How do I relate to this experience? How do I make a
connection with these people?" It was very alienating. The woman told
a story about how her mother had been pregnant during the British mandate
and had gone to a hospital which was attacked by Arabs. Everyone in
the hospital--all the nurses, doctors and patients were massacred. They
talked about the Jews who died in the Holocaust. I said, "I hear you
saying, 'People don't care about Jews. The British said they would watch
out for the Jews, and they didn't.' Your mother was murdered, all her
doctors and nurses were murdered, people said they would watch out for
Jews during the War and they didn't, there was a terrible massacre and
holocaust. 'Non-Jews don't care about Jews, only Jews do.' " And they
said, "Yes, that's right." I said, "It must be very difficult to carry
that feeling." They nodded. And as I said all these words to them I
found a place in myself where I understood those feelings. I found those
feelings in myself and I found that wound. As I talked, they jumped
up and started talking excitedly and anxiously about other things: it
was too much for them.
I don't know if they were changed by my saying that.
I don't know if it made a difference in their experience or if it clarified
anything for them or felt like any kind of comfort. I don't think so:
it was so painful and we didn't have enough time together. But I changed.
I learned something about compassionate listening. I felt that the very
thing that had separated us felt like the point of connection. I continued
to experience that with other people. If I could listen and drop down
inside to a quiet level of experience, I could find their wound inside
me. I felt like we were part of something larger. Their lives were shaped
by that experience, mine was not. While I don't take on their beliefs,
I understand what they are.
Q:
What larger lessons have you drawn from this experience?
A: In everyday life, when people are
clearly polarized, active listening is therapeutic. We live in a time
of so much noise and information. There are so many things we're supposed
to know, so many things going on. There's also a lot of pain in our
own culture about not being heard. The experience really brings up for
me the notion of listening better. What does it mean to listen: to listen
to your friends and lovers, to the earth, to God in this other way?
What does it mean to listen and know that a lot of things are not listened
to. I've noticed the differences between an argument or an unsatisfying
exchange and a very profoundly different exchange. For me, it goes hand
in hand with my meditation practice; to develop the quality of inner
stillness that allows you to listen from another part of your being.
That's what I'm trying to look for now and I find that it requires work
on my part, rather than having the stimulus of this obviously dramatic
situation and the project. I find myself moving to develop that quality
of listening on a regular basis.
Susan Heckler is interested in continuing
the dialogue between Arabs and Jews in New York City. If you are interested
in thoughtful and respectful exchange, write to her c/o Satya. For more
information on the Compassionate Listening Project, contact Leah Green
at P.O. Box 17, Indianola, WA 98342. If you are interested in The Earthstewards
Network and its environmental peace projects, contact: The Earthstewards
Network, P.O. Box 10697, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110. Tel.: 206-842-7986.
Email: lgreeninc.@aol.com.
Resources
The following books were recommended by Susan Heckler
for those interested in compassionate listening and Arab-Israeli coexistence.
The Yellow Wind
by David Grossman (Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1988)
An Israeli writer travels and talks with Palestinians.
How to Be a Help Instead of a Nuisance
by Karen Kissell Wegela. (Shambhala, 1996)
Mindfulness, listening and therapeutic work.
The Leader as Martial Artist: Techniques
and Strategies for Resolving Conflict and Creating Community by
Arnold Mindell (Harper Collins, 1992)
