|
A Gift in Wartime
Chapter 16 of The Anatomy of Peace
By The Arbinger Institute
Editor’s note: The Anatomy of
Peace, an important new book by the writers of Leadership
and Self-Deception, shows us the cause of human conflict so that
we can learn to live in peace. Look for the continuation next Monday.
“So, how was everyone’s evening?” Avi
asked with a big smile once the group had seated themselves in the
room.
Lou looked around at them and was surprised
to discover that he felt at home in the room, as if among friends.
Yes, that is what they have become, he thought. Pettis,
the fellow vet and clear-minded student. Elizabeth,
the high-minded Brit with subtle humor and surprising self-honesty.
Ria and Miguel, the oddly matched couple
with an ongoing battle over the dishes. Jenny’s quiet and timid parents, Carl and Teri. Even Gwyn, Lou’s blustery counterpart, who had accused Lou of being
racist. Lou started chuckling at the realization that
he was even glad to see Gwyn.
“Lou, what’s so funny?” Avi
asked.
“Oh nothing,” he smiled. “It’s just good to
see everyone this morning, that’s all.”
“Even me?” Gwyn asked with a wry smile.
“Especially you, Gwyn,” Lou
laughed.
In the comfort of the moment it was
easy to forget how much had changed since the morning before.
“So how do we get out of the box?”
Avi asked rhetorically. “How can our hearts
turn from war to peace? That is the question for today.”
“Good, because I sure want the answer,”
Lou said.
“Actually, Lou, you have already lived
the answer,” Avi replied.
“No, I don’t think so,” Lou smirked.
“Sure you have. Just compare how you
are seeing and feeling about everyone here today to how you were
seeing and feeling about them yesterday morning.”
It was as if someone suddenly turned
on a bank of lights Lou had grown accustomed to seeing without.
His thoughts and feelings about this room and the people in it had
changed. He could see it. But how?
>Lou verbalized his internal question:
“You’re right. Things seem different to me this morning. But why?”
he asked. “How?”
“Do you mind if I tell you a story?”
Avi asked.
“Please.”
“Do you remember my stuttering and
my suicide attempts?”
Lou and the rest nodded.
“I’d like to tell you what happened.
To do that, I need to go back to 1973.”
Avi started pacing across the front
of the room. “I celebrated my fifteenth birthday on October 5, 1973,”
he began. “The next day was Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement,
the holiest day on the Hebrew calendar. It’s a day of prayer and
fasting in Israel,
a day when everyone — even Israel’s
defense forces — gather home or in their synagogues in religious
observance.
“Egypt
and Syria launched
a surprise attack that day at precisely 2:00 p.m. — Egypt
from the south and Syria
from the north. I’ll never forget the piercing shriek of sirens
that called the reservists from their worship and into uniform.
My father, himself a reservist, raced from our Tel Aviv home within
minutes. His unit was mobilized to the north, to fight back the
Syrians along the Golan Heights.
“That was the last time I ever saw
him.”
Avi paused
for a moment, and then continued. “As a young boy raised
on the David-and-Goliath-like tales of the Six Day War, I expected
him home within the week. But he was killed in a mortar attack three
days later — one of many casualties in a place aptly called the
Valley of Tears.
“My best friend was an Israeli Arab
named Hamish. His father and mine worked at the same company. We
met at an event the company threw for employee families. He lived
in Jaffa, not too far from
my home on the south side of Tel Aviv. We managed to get together
as often as we could.
“Of all the children I associated with
in my youth, Hamish was the only one who never made fun of my stutter.
It wasn’t just that he never made outward fun of me, it was that
I knew he never thought ill of me inwardly either. After all, what
were a few garbled words between friends?
“When Hamish heard about my father,
he came to grieve with me. But angrily I sent him away. I’ll never
forget the scene: Hamish, his head bowed reverently at my door while
I forced out a string of butchered obscenities and blamed him for
my father’s death. I blamed him, my best friend, my
playmate from my youth. He killed my father — he and those who believed
and looked like him. That is what I said.
“I shook in rage as he, still bowing,
retreated from my doorstep, turned silently away, and then walked
forlornly down the street and out of my life.
“Two of the most important people in
my life were suddenly gone — one a Jew, taken out by an Arab’s weapon,
and another an Arab, banished by the verbal bullets of a Jew.
“There was another casualty, of course.
As we’ve learned, such a turn from the humanity of another requires
extensive justification. I began to exterminate in my mind a whole
portion of the human race. Arabs were blood suckers, cowards, thieves,
murderers — mere dogs who rightfully deserved death and were let
to live only by the good graces of the Israeli people.
“What I didn’t realize until years
later was that whenever I dehumanize another, I necessarily dehumanize
all that is human — including myself. What began as a hate for Arabs, developed into a hate
for any Jews who refused to share my hate for Arabs, and nearly
ended with a level of self-loathing that left me in a pool of blood
on a bathroom floor in Tempe,
Arizona.
“But that’s how I met Yusuf.
“My mother, frightened by the depths
I sank to after my father’s death, sent me to the United
States in the summer of 1974 to live with her
brother. It was here that I learned to hate two other groups: First,
the religious Jews, represented by my observant uncle, who insisted
on looking to God when it was obvious that God, if there was one,
was looking the other way; and second, the affluent Americans with
all their toys and commercial gadgets, who looked askance at the
stuttering teenager who was forced to wear a kippah, or skullcap.
“I wrestled with my stuttering as an
act of survival and self-defense and finally was able to gain a
kind of conscious control over it by the time I enrolled at Arizona
State University.
But I was alone — cut off from the humanity that walked and talked
and drove by me on every side. I was a solitary human soul.
“You might think that that would have
paid off in good grades,” he chuckled, breaking some of the tension
of his story, “giving me plenty of time to study. But like many
who are lonely, I was more preoccupied with others than were those
who lived to socialize. You see, I was never really alone, even
when I had physically separated myself from others because internally
I was thinking about my father, my people, the Arabs, and Hamish.
Everyone I hated was always with me, even when I was alone. They
had to be, for I had to remember what and why I hated in order to
remind myself to stay away from them.
“After my second suicide attempt and
a brief stay in the hospital, I was released to ponder my future.
At the time it seemed bleak. I had been placed on probation after
my first year at ASU, and my second-year grades were even worse.
I expected to be expelled. One day in early May, I received a letter
from the provost’s office — my expulsion notice.
“Or so I thought. In reality, it was
a final, merciful lifeline. I was being invited to enroll in a forty-day
survival program being run by one of the university’s faculty —
an Arab by the name of Yusuf al-Falah.” He extended his
arm toward Yusuf, who nodded ever so slightly
in response.
“Which of course meant that I wasn’t
going to do it,” Avi continued. “I would sooner be expelled than be forced
to spend forty days and nights with a hate monger, which is what
I, as a hate monger myself, assumed he must be. And I told my mother
as much, who by then had moved to the States herself.
“‘You will enroll in this program,
Avi,’ she scolded me, ‘or you will no
longer be my son. And don’t think I don’t mean it,’ she continued.
‘You’ve twice already tried to remove yourself from my life, and something in you stole the boy I once knew some four
years ago anyway. So I will make it easy on you, Avi:
if you turn from this opportunity — this gift you do not deserve
— because of some blind grudge you hold toward someone you have
never met, then you will not be my son. You certainly would be no
son of your father.’”
Avi paused
in his telling to take in a deep breath. “And so I went,” he said.
“I went to live with my enemy.”
The group waited for him to continue.
“So what happened?” Gwyn asked.
“Would you mind?” Yusuf
asked permission of Avi.
“No, not at all,” Avi
said. “Please.”
Yusuf walked
to the front of the room. “To give you a feeling for what happened,
perhaps it would help to tell you about something that happened
here yesterday — with Carl and Teri’s daughter, Jenny.”
Jenny! Lou thought to himself.
He couldn’t believe he’d let her slip from his mind.
“Carl, Teri,” Yusuf
asked, “would you mind if I shared with the group how you brought Jenny
here?”
Carl fidgeted beneath the attention
that suddenly came his way but said, “That would be fine.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes, go ahead.”
“Teri?”
“Sure, it’s fine.”
“Okay then,” Yusuf
began, turning to the rest of the group. “When Jenny climbed in
her parents’ car yesterday morning, she didn’t know she was being
transported to a treatment program. Now you know we don’t recommend
that, but it happens. Jenny’s brother was in the car as well. He
held Jenny so she wouldn’t bolt from the moving vehicle when her
parents broke the news.
“You of course saw the state Jenny
was in after she got out of her brother’s clutches and bolted across
the street. You may not have noticed that she was without shoes.
That may not seem vital at 9:00 a.m. But it’s a different story
when the Arizona sun begins
to heat the city pavement, I can assure you. Even in April.
“As I mentioned yesterday afternoon,
Jenny ran shortly after we began our session, and two of our young
people set off after her. What I’d like to tell you about is what
happened over the next few hours as they followed her.”
“Few hours?” Lou asked.
“Yes.
“The young people who followed her
are named Mei Li and Mike. They were each once students in our program
but now work with us. Mei Li is twenty, and Mike, twenty-two.
“In fact, they are with us this morning,”
he said, extending his hand toward the back of the room.
The group whirled their heads around.
Mei Li and Mike, each of them comfortable
in worn khakis and T-shirts, smiled back at them. Mike slipped the
bandanna from his head and tipped it, like ball players tip their
caps. Mei Li waved sheepishly.
"Would you mind coming up and sharing
what happened yesterday?” Yusuf asked.
They smiled and nodded and walked to
the front.
“Well,” Mike began, “Jenny took off
running about fifteen minutes after you came into the building.
She had a few blocks head start when Mei Li and I took off after
her. We called to Jenny as we caught up, but she yelled at us, and
started screaming about how her parents had betrayed her.
“Sorry,” he said to Carl and Teri,
when he realized what he had said. He winced slightly and ducked
his head in apology.
Carl shook his head and waved the concern
away with a perfunctory flick of his wrist. “Don’t worry about it,”
he said.
“Jenny was crying,” Mei Li chimed in.
“Nothing we said helped; maybe made it worse even. She began running
faster and jumping walls trying to ditch us.”
“She runs steeplechase,” her mother
offered, almost in apology.
“Figures,” Mei Li laughed. “We did
our best to keep up, though.”
“And to keep up a conversation,” Mike
added. “We continued that way — jogging after her and trying to
talk — for quite awhile. But then Mei Li noticed something.”
“What?” Teri asked.
“That Jenny’s feet were bleeding. So
we asked her if it would be okay if we called someone to bring some
shoes.”
“And?” Teri
asked.
Mike shook his head. “She wouldn’t
have any of it.”
Teri sighed.
“But then Mei Li sat down,” Mike continued,
“and began removing her own shoes. ‘Take mine then, Jenny,’ she
said. ‘Your feet are beat up; mine are fine. Please.’ But Jenny
called her something I’d rather not repeat and kept running.”
Jenny’s father, Carl, shook his head
in resignation.
>“Didn’t matter though,” Mike continued.
“Mei Li took off her shoes anyway.”
Teri and Carl looked at them inquiringly.
“Mike did the same,” Mei Li added.
“Dropped down on the spot and took his shoes off too. Then we tried
to catch up to her.”
“Barefoot?” Lou asked.
“Yes,” Mei Li answered.
"For how long?”
“Oh,” she said, “another three hours
or so.”
“Three hours! Barefoot
on the pavement? In Phoenix?”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
“That is the question,” Yusuf
jumped in. “And I bet at the time Mei Li and Mike couldn’t have
even articulated the reason. They just knew it was the thing to
do.”
“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Lou
retorted. “She didn’t want their shoes. All they did was beat themselves
up.”
“Actually, Lou,” Yusuf
responded, “it makes the deepest sense in the world. And while they
certainly inconvenienced themselves, their act accomplished something
of great importance.”
“Then what?
What did it accomplish?”
“What indeed.”
Copyright © 2006 by The Arbinger
Institute
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including
photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods,
without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in
the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain
other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission
requests, write to the publisher, addressed "Attention: Permissions
Coordinator," at this address: www.bkconnection.com.
Click
here to sign up for Meridian's FREE email updates.
© 2006 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
|
