A One-Word Prayer

Some fragmented thoughts on an ancient prophet's anguished cry, violence in the Holy Land, a Palestinian poet, and faithful, active waiting

Saturday, October 21
Grand Rapids, Mich.

There’s a prayer tucked within a prayer in the Book of Habakkuk that I’ve been contemplating. It’s remarkably brief, just one word.

“Violence!”

Observation and lament, protest and provocation: This one-word prayer does so many things at once. It names hurt. It expresses ideals, because it suggests that the world ought not to be this way. It voices a kind of humility, a clear-eyed, heavy-hearted understanding that the situation has spun far beyond what Habakkuk or his people can handle on their own.

“Violence!”

I say that the prayer is tucked within a prayer because Habakkuk is recounting a prayer that has already been sent upward, a prayer that seems to have gone unanswered. Here’s the context: “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you, ‘Violence!’ and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble?”

“Habakkuk and God,” from the Bible of the Monastery of Santa Maria de Alcobaça, c. 1220. From the National Library of Portugal

Both the shorter prayer and longer one feel remarkably, unfortunately timeless. It’s at once dispiriting to see how things have not changed so much and encouraging to have the consolation of a faithfully lamenting prophet who wondered about God’s goodness and questioned God’s seeming inaction. How boldly he blames God! God must know there is so much wrongdoing in the world. How bluntly he makes his complaint! God surely could—should!—do something to stop all this.

As I think of the Israeli families that lost dear ones in Hamas’s brutal attacks as well as the ones that are still waiting for news of those taken captive, and as I remember of the Palestinian families in Gaza that are grieving their murdered even as they fear for their own lives, Habakkuk’s prayer seems apt. As I consider all the ordinary people who want nothing more than to love one another into flourishing, and as I ponder the warmongering and the death-dealing of the regimes under which they live, Habakkuk’s prayer feels right. As I listen to the voices of Palestinian people, who ask if their stories matter and who continue to endure an unjust occupation, and as I hear the voices of Jewish kinfolk, who cry out to be heard and who carry generations of trauma, Habakkuk’s prayer echoes in my heart. As I wrestle with the hatred that humanity so often expresses, now with ever more sophisticated technology, not just in that little sliver of land along the Mediterranean but in so many other places even further from the headlines, Habakkuk’s prayer churns in my gut.

“Violence!”

I’ve been reading some of the writing of the late poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose tender, heart-wrenching meditations on exile and longing made him something of an unofficial Palestinian poet laureate. Darwish lived the beauty and the complexity of his homeland. He was born in the village of al-Birwa, a community of olive and barley farmers where goats outnumbered people two to one. When Darwish was 7, the State of Israel was established. Shortly afterward, Israeli forces captured al-Birwa, all of its residents fled, and a kibbutz was built in its place.

Darwish later moved to Haifa. By his late teens, he had published his first book of poetry. Even then, he wrote about the exile’s longing. The heart is a strange thing: At 22, he fell in love with a Jewish woman, a relationship he commemorated in his poem “Rita and the Rifle”: “And we made promises/ Over the most beautiful of cups/ And we burned in the wine of our lips/ And we were born again.” 

As fierce and unsparing an advocate of Palestinian pride and nationhood as Darwish was, he also insistently identified the humanity in those whom he saw as colonizers of his homeland. In “A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies,” he writes: “He dreams of white lilies, an olive branch, her breasts in evening blossom./ He dreams of a bird, he tells me, of lemon flowers.” (Years later, that Israeli soldier was identified as Shlomo Sand, a friend of Darwish’s who later became a prominent historian.)

There is, throughout Darwish’s work, a constant whisper that wonders what might have been, that asks what could have been possible, that sometimes still glimpses the hope of something beyond war. I keep coming back to a short section of “As He Walks Away,” a poem that is a remarkable, deeply humane reflection on the presence of an enemy soldier in the home of people who have been forced to flee: “Our flutes would have played a duet/ if it weren’t for the gun.”

“Violence!”

After accusing God of failing to listen, after claiming that God has neglected to save, Habakkuk goes further: He claims that God grabs him by face and turns him toward woe. “Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble?” he says. It’s as if Habakkuk were enjoying an ancient version of a summer beach read, which God rudely wrested from his hands, and pointed him instead toward the woes of the world. How dare you, God? How could you interrupt my bliss by forcing me to face the reality of evil?

A picture of Jerusalem I took during a visit in the spring of 2016. Whenever I look at it, I think of Jesus looking out over the city in sorrow and longing: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

I felt that way in particular last weekend, when explosions devastated Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, a venerable institution that has been providing care and fostering healing since 1882. Founded by Anglicans, then run by Southern Baptists for decades before returning to Anglican stewardship, this hospital is especially dear to my heart. I’ve supported its efforts for years, following the work of its doctors and nurses, who have labored under harsh conditions amidst unspeakable suffering. Days later, officials in Gaza are still blaming the Israeli military, and Israeli officials are still blaming militants in Gaza: Which side is responsible for this tragedy? Who has blood on their hands? Risky as it feels to say this, there is plenty of blame to go around, and the ones who continue to suffer are the civilians. Anyway, I’m not sure that these questions matter as much as this one: Who is willing to forge a difficult peace?

As I wrestled with Habakkuk, I came across a sermon that the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, one of my most cherished teachers, preached a decade ago. “God makes the prophet look and see. See and envision. That is part of the calling. Opening our eyes and having God open them even further for you,” she said. “Seeing the world as it really is in all of its ugliness and brokenness. We can’t look away. Our very gaze is prophetic.”

Much as we might like to turn away, to bear witness to the brutality of our world is an act of faith. To name evil for what it is—cruel, barbaric, inhumane—is to express our belief in something better. To say that something is wrong is to make a claim for what is right. To declare injustice is to testify that justice is possible, that justice is necessary, that justice can still somehow be embodied.

“Violence!” 

After he makes his complaint, Habakkuk says that he is ready to wait: “I will stand at my watchpost and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what God will say to me and what God will answer concerning my complaint.” To my 21st century ears, the militarized language feels uncomfortable. Yet what I appreciate, what I hear in his words, is profound attentiveness. His is not a passive waiting, not a sense of sitting on his prayerful hands. Instead, what I hear—what I want to hear, if I’m honest—is an active wrestling, a vigilant waiting: I will do what I can do, but this feels beyond me.

“We, like Habakkuk, may not live to see the complete transformation of the world for which we ache and long, work and pray,” Gafney said in her sermon. “Yet we will live, sometimes in full sight of the hurt and the horror. How are we to live in this reeling, sin-drunk broken world? Faithfully.”

“Peace Window,” Marc Chagall, 1964, stained glass, from the United Nations

Faithfulness will manifest in similar but different ways for each of us: Some of us will call our legislators, urging them to do what they can to effect a ceasefire. Some of us will support aid organizations that are working to bring just a little balm amidst searing pain. Some of us will amplify voices of peacemaking and love, hoping that they break through the raging noise. Some of us will have hard conversations, far from the performative clamor of social media. Some of us will wrestle, individually and collectively, with how to stand up against the actions we find sinful without dehumanizing the perpetrators of those acts. Some of us will do the necessary work of examining and repenting of the politics and the theologies that have caused harm rather than healing. Some of us will educate ourselves and others, humbly admitting what we don’t know so that we can learn and grow. Some of us will put the story of Israel and Palestine into the broader context of an ailing world, remembering too the deadly conflicts and conflagrations that are likewise destroying cultures and peoples and lives elsewhere. Some of us will gather in the shared space of feeling helpless and overwhelmed, giving voice once again to the ultimate empowerment of love.

All these things can be faithful. All these things can be good. All these things are needed. All these things will be done imperfectly. All these things will feel as if they are not enough.

“Violence!” 

Habakkuk cried out in clear-eyed faith, because he refused to look away. He did so in remarkable trust, because he was convinced that death and destruction would not be the end of the story. He did so in hope, because he believed in his heart of hearts that there must be a better way.

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My apologies for being late with my letter to you this week. I didn’t want to add to the noise. I’ve been struggling with the fear of saying the wrong thing. I’m uncomfortable with many of the false binaries as well as the wildly broad brushstrokes with which entire people groups have been painted. If you’re in a similar place, my gentle counsel is to persevere not around but through it, grounding yourself constantly in the love in which each and every one of us was created. 

Of course we’ll make mistakes, and we might say the wrong thing, and we might be misunderstood, and we might feel hapless. We are human. But it is our very shared humanity that will compel us to extend grace and to enter into risky vulnerability, and it will be worth it, if it is for the sake of love.

Other things I’ve been reading and contemplating:

*Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, author of the Substack newsletter Life Is a Sacred Text, is another of my most trusted teachers. Last week, she wrote, “We can refuse to root for the safety and lives and rights of human beings like they are sports teams. In which there are winners and losers. In which safety is a finite resource that must be hoarded.” Amen!

*Specifically for Christians in North America and Europe: The leaders of a number of prominent, respected Palestinian Christian organizations, including Bethlehem Bible College and Dar al-Kalima University, issued an open letter to Western Christians yesterday calling for repentance. Their letter reads, in part, “While we recognize the numerous voices that have spoken and continue to speak for the cause of truth and justice in our land, we write to challenge western theologians and church leaders who have voiced uncritical support for Israel and to call them to repent and change. Sadly, the actions and double standards of some Christian leaders have gravely hurt their Christian witness and have severely distorted their moral judgment with regards to the situation in our land.”

*Earlier today, I read a beautiful portrait in The New York Times about the friendship between Aziza Hasan and Andrea Hodos, two women living in Los Angeles who have deep roots in Israel and Palestine. Hasan is a faithful Muslim, Hodos a devout Jew. ““Navigating through a world of opposite views is how it has always been for me,” Hasan says. “The work is gut-wrenching and difficult, but I keep coming back because it is so important to my core.” (The link should give you free access, even if you don’t have a Times subscription.)

*The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a moving essay by Ziv Stahl, who was visiting a kibbutz where she was born and reared when Hamas attacked. I have no need of revenge, nothing will return those who are gone—my sister-in-law Mira; Tal from my class (the “Shaked” group); Bilha, my mother’s childhood best friend, and her grandson and her son in law; Livnat and Aviv, whose parents were our neighbors forever, and their children; Michal, who was my counselor as a teen and her son; Liron’s sister Smadar and her husband; Eli, Avner’s father; and hundreds of others,” she writes. “Indiscriminate bombing in Gaza and the killing of civilians uninvolved with these horrible crimes are no solution. Rather, this is the surest way to prolong the violence, terror, sorrow, and bereavement.”

*On Instagram, I’ve been following a number of Gaza-based photojournalists, including Mohammed Jadallah Salem (@mohammedsalem85), who works for Reuters, and Mohammed Zaanoun (@m.z.gaza). 

One last thought: I’ve seen a few people post, whether on Facebook or Instagram or elsewhere, some confession of feeling guilty at doing fun things or being on vacation or eating a beautiful meal while all this is unfolding in Israel and Palestine. This is such an interesting dynamic to me, not least because, as I’ve alluded to above, there have been and still are other wars and long-running genocides happening in other places, often with much less coverage. 

Flowers I cut in our community-garden plot earlier this week. I did not expect to be able to gather beauties like these in mid-October

We absolutely ought to pay attention to the sorrows of the world, grieve them, lift them up in prayer, and do what we can to help where we can. But we also need to remind ourselves of goodness; we also need to cultivate joy; and we also need to find ways to kindle our hope, none of which need be the same as blithe ignorance or harmful neglect. We can do two things at once. We can be grateful for the beauty we glimpse around us while also working for peace to spread. We can decry injustice and hatred while nurturing goodness and delight. Our performative woe does nothing to end suffering elsewhere.

I’m so glad we can stumble through all this together, and I’ll try to write again soon.

Much love,
Jeff