Lightly edited copy of a blast email Debi and I sent out to members of our congregation, Peace Lutheran Church of Springfield, in advance of the fifth meeting an adult faith formation book study, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson. We call the group Sundays@6, and it meets over Zoom Sunday evenings at 6 p.m. I archive these emails here so I can find them later if I need them. Link HERE for an explanation of why I use the blog as an electronic filing cabinet.
Hello everyone!
A handout is attached for our next session of Sundays@6, Sunday, Oct. 22, at 6 p.m. As always, we’ll meet over Zoom and will be online from 5:45 to chat and work out technical glitches.
We’re taking the liberty of doing something just a little different this week. As promised, we’ll be discussing Chapters 14-18 in Section 4 of Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” which is titled “The Tentacles of Caste” and outlines how pervasive race-based caste is in American life. (We read and discussed the first part of Section 4 last week.)
But we’re also slipping in a couple of videos we hope everyone will get a chance to watch. As we were reading this week’s chapters in “Caste,” and watching the news coverage of the war that has broken out between Israel and Hamas, we’ve been forcefully reminded of a trip to the Holy Land we took in 2012. While there, we encountered what can only be described as a rather rigid caste system in Israel and Palestine (otherwise known as the Occupied Territories).
The videos – entitled “How Israeli Apartheid Destroyed My Hometown” and “Why Are Palestinian Christians Leaving Jesus’ Birthplace?” – vividly detail this caste-based apartheid system that Israel has imposed on the Palestinians. While we are in no way condoning the actions of Hamas, we think it is important that people in the U.S. learn about the Palestinian side of the story, which often is downplayed or even ignored by the media in this country. As a result, many Americans don’t even know what’s going on.
So we thought the group this week might discuss our thoughts about the videos along with our thoughts about Part 4 of “Caste.”
In Section 4 of “Caste,” Wilkerson explores how caste forms our ideas and attitudes in daily life – often without our realizing it – and gives those of us in the dominant caste a sense of entitlement:
“It’s a form of status hyper-vigilance, the entitlement of the dominant caste to step in and assert itself whenever it chooses, to monitor or dismiss those deemed beneath them as they see fit […] but knowing without thinking that you are one up from another based on rules not set down in paper but reinforced in most every commercial, television show, or billboard, from boardrooms to newsrooms to gated subdivisions to who gets killed first in the first half hour of a movie.” (21)
Compare what Joel Carmel, a peace activist and former Israeli Defence Forces soldier interviewed by Dena Takruri of al-Jazeera (link below), says about the Israeli occupation of Hebron in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank:
“When you consider [IDF soldiers] grew up in Israeli society and they have the education and media and a political system, [with] all of those elements telling them that Arabs are scary, you know, Palestinians are bad, and then they get an opportunity. When they are in the army and they have power in their hands, it’s not surprising that they use it.” (5:20-6:18)
Carmel escorted Palestinian-American journalist Dena Takruri last year on a tour of Hebron, for a feature story called “How Israeli Apartheid Destroyed My Hometown.” Her account is personal, and she doesn’t explain the Israeli rationale for its military presence in Hebron. (The city has suffered sporadic violence between extremist Jewish settlers and Palestinian militants over the years, and it was divided into Jewish and Arab zones when the IDF clamped down in the 1990s; the two groups are excluded from each other’s zones. See Wikipedia pages linked below.) Instead, Takruri contrasts Hebron today with her father’s memories before occupation. She isn’t trying for an objective geopolitical analysis, although she strikes us as being very professional; she’s telling her family’s story and giving us a glimpse of what it feels like to be in a subordinate caste.
We believe the result looks not only like apartheid in South Africa but also Jim Crow as Isabel Wilkerson explains it in “Caste.” The hypervigilance, the almost instinctive sense that lower-caste people are “scary” and “bad,” the segregated streets, the squabbling kids throwing rocks at each other, all the unexamined little (and big) things that make up microaggressions – even the Israeli settlements resemble nothing else in America as much as our gated, restricted communities. Hebron is an extreme case, largely because of its history of violence, and the IDF wasn’t as omnipresent in the parts of the West Bank we visited 10 years ago. But the consequences, no doubt largely unintended, were all too familiar.
In addition to the al-Jazeera video on Hebron, we’re linking to Dena Takruri’s al-Jazeera program on Bethlehem. In it she interviews the Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, pastor at Christmas Lutheran Church (Weinachskirche), founded by 19th-century German missionaries in Bethlehem, and includes footage from services. (Debi and I attended services there in 2012, and I blogged about it HERE.)
The video “Why Are Palestinian Christians Leaving Jesus’ Birthplace?” focuses on how the caste-based apartheid affects residents of Bethlehem. Bethlehem is a World Heritage Site and a world-class tourist destination, at least when the checkpoints in the “separation wall” between the Occupied Territories and Israel proper aren’t closed for security reasons. When we visited the city, with our American passports in the security of a sponsored tour group, the effects of occupation seemed less intrusive; but Arab Christians need special permits to worship at the religious shrines 5.5 miles away in Jerusalem (approximately the distance from downtown Springfield to the Bradfordton grain elevator on Ill. 97). Often the permits are not available, we were told by people we met at Christmas Lutheran Church.
As we met with both Jewish and Palestinian advocacy groups, toured the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial and learned about the work of NGOs in the Occupied Territories, we encountered a palpable sense of loss, anger and grief on all sides. We also came away with a profound sympathy for all the people we met.
The handout for Week 5, which focuses on chapters 14-18 in Wilkerson’s “Caste,” is attached as a Microsoft Word Document. Links to the videos are included below, at the conclusion of this email.
We’re also linking below to a couple of local organizations we discussed last week. The Faith Coalition for the Common Good in Springfield is a coalition of faith communities, community organizations and individuals working collaboratively for racial equity, civic engagement, a fair economy and participatory decision-making. Springfield’s Ministerial Alliance, is an interracial not-for-profit with origins in the Black church and the local civil rights movement. The Alliance, according to its home page, brings together “Churches, Pastors, Ministers, and Laypersons of various Churches and Ministries […] to work together in unity to advance the Kingdom of God in Springfield, Illinois.”
Our discussions this fall started out great, and they’ve been getting better and better every week! Let’s keep thinking – and talking – about what we can do as church. We are reminded of a quote – a paraphrase, really – from the Talmud: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” Pete first saw it on social media in 2018, when an anti-Semite killed 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and shared it to his blog. (It’s linked below, worth reading not so much for Pete’s musings as the quote from Rabbi Tarfon he tracked down in Pirkei Avot [sayings of the fathers] in an online Talmud. It seems especially timely now.)
As always, we’ll meet over Zoom. A link will be available Friday in Peace Lutheran’s online newsletter, News You Can Use. You can also join the session by using this link, meeting ID and passcode:
[redacted]
If for some reason you can’t get this link or the one in the newsletter to work, you can reach us at.
– Debi and Pete
Links and Further Reading
How Israeli Apartheid Destroyed My Hometown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEdGcej-6D0&t=7s
Why Are Palestinian Christians Leaving Jesus’ Birthplace? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa6igKc1M9s
Faith Coalition for the Common Good: https://faithcoalition-il.org/
Ministerial Alliance of Springfield and Vicinity: https://springfieldministerialalliance.com/
Pete’s blog article: https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2021/10/29/talmudic-paraphrase-hits-home/
Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebron and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dena_Takruri
[Published Oct. 22, 2023]
Ordinary Time 
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
I’ll probably post this.
I’m already unsure who said it…?? Good writings you two.
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It’s from the Talmud, a paraphrase of something that a guy named Rabbi Tarfon said at the end of the first century. He fled Jerusalem when the Roman army destroyed the Temple there in 70 CE, so he knew something about hard times — it’s one of my very favorite quotes.
I wrote more about it than anybody would ever want to know here. https://wordpress.com/post/ordinaryzenlutheran.com/11935
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