“I’ll be home for Christmas,” the old song opens, and finishes “if only in my dreams.” In between the beginning and end, the lyrics describe a peopled place, with weather and vegetation we have to go away to get, sitting here on the Valley floor. Maybe the Sierra. Maybe Dunsmuir, on the toes of Mt. Shasta. Maybe Michigan.
The imagination is a wonderful place. You can find yourself winging home in a
song. And for most of us, “home” has
geographic coordinates, a place on the map.
Thanks to that Mother, Change, we may not actually want to go there
anymore, but the homing instinct mentally remains to that place we once called home.
Do the people of Israel feel that
way about Jerusalem? As the site of the
Holy City in the Bible, the three thousand years of history as the center of
the faith that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed over the
weekend, meeting in France with its new President Macron, it’s easy to feel
compassion for the Israelites. Our
President has given them a great big Christmas present: home.
In “their” land.
Unfortunately, they are not the only
ones to feel that Jerusalem is home.
That city is still the center of faith for the Palestinians and other
Muslims, in that region and beyond. It
is also home for Armenian Christians, as my friend Caitlin Croughan reminded me
on the phone Sunday. She visited Jerusalem
last year and brought me an Armenian cross from their quarter of town.
She also raised an important point
about political states and religious nations.
Our forefathers and mothers built America on the principle of separating
politics from religion as a way of protecting religious freedom. We believe in that. Many nation-states do not. Israel appears to be one of them. That’s their business, but it surely is not
ours.
So why did our fearless leader hand
them this gift? Cait thinks it was
actually a gift to Mike Pence and his fundamentalist followers. Something to do with the Book of Revelations,
apparently, which is strikingly clear to some about the meaning of the
preceding 65 Books. I’m not a scholar of
Scripture, so I can’t help you out there.
What little I do know about the
Bible concerns land, particularly the notion of the Promised Land. It’s a big topic that was opened by Walter
Brueggemann in the late 1970’s, and has continued scantily into the present. The main concept Brueggemann uncovered (for
me) is the idea of Covenant. The land
was promised to the Israelites as part of the covenant with their God. It was a gift, the gift of sustenance and
placedness, but it was His half of the bargain.
Israel’s half, in return for abundance and security, was to love their
God with all their strength, soul and might and to keep His commandments, which
unfortunately have been broken century after century (especially in the West
Bank and Gaza most recently.)
Does Netanyahu remember the
teachings about Exile? How the Jews lost
Jerusalem over and over again, and why? More
importantly for the current news, however, is this question: does Donald Trump even know?
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Trudy
Wischemann is a native Washingtonian who stays home for Christmas in
Lindsay. You can send her your
home-based dreams c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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