Unbalanced consideration

Pope Francis and Rabbi Bergman - march 2013

Those who honour me with reading me regularly know my concern for the situation in the Middle East, especially for the peace and security of Israel and, more widely, the importance that the Jewish people has for me.

On several occasions, alone or with friends, I was prompted to react about unfair or deceptive statements toward Israel, especially when they came from people referring to the church or to Christian organizations. The awareness of the heavy burden that weighs on the Church because of injustices, humiliations and persecutions carried out against Jews in her name for centuries, was a decisive reason for my commitment – modest but determined – on this topic.

I am convinced that, today, this heavy historical responsibility must awaken Christians to vigilance against anything that could lead to anti-Judaism and, a fortiori, of anti-Semitism. Since, for half a century, the Church is firmly committed to ending what Jules Isaac called the "teaching of contempt", Christians can and must do so with renewed determination.

Since Vatican II, many documents, pronouncements, symbolic gestures, on behalf of Church leaders, have clearly shown that the two main grievances which maintained the Christian anti-Judaism, namely the theory of "deicide" and the "theology of the substitution" are unfounded. Furthermore, authorized voices in the Church recognized that Judaism retains its own mission, as a testimony of God's faithfulness to His promise and His alliance. If these major advances seem irreversible, they have not, so far, been fully assumed by all Christians, and the exploitation of the Arab-Israeli conflict offers to those who have not cleared their anti-Judaism a "comfortable" alibi. That is why vigilance remains essential.

Of course, we can expect the Jewish side to welcome these decisive changes in the attitude of the Church and, indeed, many Jewish voices hailed this opening. There is still some way to go however. Once bitten, twice shy, says popular wisdom, and such a recent shift of the Church towards the Jews is not likely to instantly erase the disastrous image she has built up in their memory through the centuries. I just experienced it painfully, here's how.

A few weeks ago, reading a blog, I had the attention drawn by a polemical text. It questioned the sincerity of Christians who show a willingness to dialogue with Jews. I posted a comment regretting this suspicious attitude. The moderator of the blog, a Jew, obviously very educated and intelligent, replied by advancing some relevant arguments. A lively but respectful dialogue was then formed, through the Internet. But, after a few exchanges, the mood began to change. I had just answered favourably to the proposal of my correspondent to be associated with an initiative that he wanted to undertake towards a bishop and, the next day, he published an article in which, to my surprise, he invoked a sentence quoted from an encyclical of Pius XII to affirm that the church had not given up the theology of substitution. Indeed, according to my opinion, Pius XII had used inappropriate words when he spoke of "abolition of the Old Law". I replied that this encyclical and this sentence, secondary with regard to the overall document, were not "infallible" as my opponent asserted it. It was of no use, he came there to accuse me of lying, what, for me, ended the debate.

On the content, I can only maintain my position. I had moreover answered my interlocutor by stating what a friend, a professor of theology, had written to me confirming my statements: the encyclical in question is by no means a text boasting about "infallibility" as it was defined by Council Vatican I. Besides that, a few days ago, I made the effort to question another theologian, without referring to the controversy. I got the same answer. He wrote: "Infallibility defined by Vatican I applies only on very strict conditions, and the pope has never used this power, except to define the Assumption in 1950. An encyclical belongs to the ordinary Magisterium of the Church (even not extraordinary!, So certainly not in the infallible Magisterium)."

But if I have nothing to regret on the content, it is not the case for the form. With hindsight, it seems to me that I did not take enough account of the heightened sensitivity of my interlocutor and of the distrust, fuelled by negative experiences, that asseverations of friendship from Christians arouse in him. I allowed myself to use of a polemic tone that could hurt him, and I regretted it ...

What is the lesson of all this? In the same way that there is no symmetry between the situation of Christianity in relation to Judaism (the first one being entirely "dependent" of the second), there is also no symmetry between the attitude of openness and respect that Jews are entitled to expect from the Christians and the one that Christians hope to meet with the Jews towards them. Let us accept to show patience to them. In any case, it will be without proportion with that which they had, against their will, to demonstrate to us.

Fiodor

When a book hides another one

I once read Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, but I would probably never have thought of reading his Typhoon, if Christian Bobin, in one of his last books, “L’homme-joie”, had not given an arresting echo of it.

Bobin is a compulsive reader. Fortunately for us, he is also a prolific writer. Because, for him, the world as we experience it – overwhelmed, hyper-connected, stressed – is unbearable. He desires – he even needs – the invisible world, that books, music, love, prayer… allow us to approach. “To write, says Bobin, is like drawing a door on an impassable wall, and then opening it”.

“L’homme-joie” is enchanting. At one point, it makes reference to Typhoon in a chapter entitled “La gueule du lion” (The Lion’s Mouth). Bobin first lays his cards on the table: “My idea of life is a book, and my idea of a book is a draught of ice-cold water like the one coming out of the mouth of a lion fountain on a mountain road in the Juras, one summer. I was in one of these joyful penal colonies that one calls ‘summer camp’. I was left there for centuries, integrated into a small troop of singing killers, my peers, when in the middle of a forced march under a broiling sun there appeared the fountain belching out its foam of light. I rushed under the lion's mouth, opened my own and swallowed an ocean of cold water. The water rushed into my body right up to the heart where it extinguished the fire of abandonment that ravaged it. Decades later, I still remember the mystical comfort given by that icy water. Whenever I open a book, I look for the lion's mouth.”

Then, almost without transition, off he goes. “Three days and three nights aboard this old tub tortured by the storm (...) Three days and three nights on this boat, to feel my heart sinking into my chest, to slide into the abyss of a fear with black eyes…” And we, readers, we are embarked as he is, feeling “Tons of black water exploding in the hold of the brain, the end of plans and dreams…” The chapter then ends then abruptly: “ – What’s wrong with you? – Nothing, I just finished reading Conrad’s Typhoon. It took me three days and three nights to read it. – Is it good? – I cannot answer your question. A book is light or it is nothing at all. It’s task is to switch on some light in the palaces of our desert brains. Writing knows more than death, I'm sure. I paid the price to learn this, three days, three nights”.

So, what about Typhoon? There is, of course, the masterful writing of an author who, for nearly twenty years was at first a sailor. The descriptions of the raging nature of the China Sea, are breathtaking, realistic and poetic at the same time. “The wind had thrown its weight on the ship, trying to pin her down amongst the seas. They made a clean breach over her, as over a deep-swimming log; and the gathered weight of crashes menaced monstrously from afar. The breakers flung out of the night with a ghostly light on their crests – the light of sea-foam that in a ferocious, boiling-up pale flash showed upon the slender body of the ship the toppling rush, the downfall, and the seething mad scurry of each wave...”

But the most impressive aspect is elsewhere, in the heart, the body and the soul of some of the characters in the story. It is there that the storm brings out the very depths of their personality, their humanity. There is Jukes, the chief mate, a quibbler, reluctantly obeying what seems to him unreasonable. And Mr. Rout, the chief engineer, experienced, unwavering in his duty. “He moved, climbing high up, disappearing low down, with a restless, purposeful industry, and when he stood still, holding the guard-rail in front of the starting-gear, he would keep glancing to the right at the steam-gauge, at the water-gauge, fixed upon the white wall in the light of a swaying lamp.” And, finally, Captain MacWhirr, in whom some critics have seen Conrad’s self-portrait. A taciturn, placid, apparently insignificant man: “Captain MacWhirr, of the steamer Nan-Shan, had a physiognomy that, in the order of material appearances, was the exact counterpart of his mind: it presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity; it had no pronounced characteristics whatever; it was simply ordinary, irresponsive, and unruffled…”

But this man, strong-minded and unresponsive to the arguments of his chief mate – who suggested avoiding the typhoon by modifying the ship's course – shows a quiet courage and remarkable determination. When he gives Jukes the order to face up to the wind, whatever happens, because “They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind”, the mate, for a long time puzzled and irritated by what he took to be unconsciousness on the part of the Captain, rediscovers, at the height of the storm, the self-assurance that he had lost: “Yes, sir, said Jukes, with a flutter of the heart (…) For some reason Jukes experienced an access of confidence, a sensation that came from outside like a warm breath, and made him feel equal to every demand. The distant muttering of the darkness stole into his ears. He noted it unmoved, out of that sudden belief in himself, as a man safe in a shirt of mail would watch a point”.

Besides his composure and his tenacity, which eventually save the ship, MacWhirr shows his humanity and his sense of justice. Coolies housed in the steerage during the crossing, fought, at the height of the storm, to recover a few dollars that had escaped from their trunks, shaken loose and broken open by the waves' battering. The Captain had sent the crew to seize all the money and to lock up the coolies. When calm was restored, it was time to gather them and to return their money to them. In a letter sent to a friend after the events, Jukes writes: “– I wish, said I, you would let us throw the whole lot of these dollars down to them and leave them to fight it out amongst themselves, while we get a rest. – Now you talk wild, Jukes, says he, looking up in his slow way that makes you ache all over, somehow. We must plan out something that would be fair to all parties”. And MacWhirr unimpressed by the danger, moves forward bare hands to the coolies and, with quiet authority, distributes to them what they deserve. Jukes explains: “It seems that after he had done his thinking he made that Bun Hin's fellow go down and explain to them the only way they could get their money back. He told me afterwards that, all the coolies having worked in the same place and for the same length of time, he reckoned he would be doing the fair thing by them as near as possible if he shared all the cash we had picked up equally among the lot…”

By his courage, his determination and his sense of justice, this apparently “ordinary and irresponsive” Captain held on to the light of hope throughout the storm. Christian Bobin writes: “Nothing more than a ring of black water around the ship on which I had embarked without knowing why (...) And inside the black mass, in its gaping maw, the yellow dot of trust (…) So we had to embrace the fear with furious eyes, to love it like good bread, to continue crossing, to lose ground, to lose heart and to continue anyway, to see the iron filings sky, to see the stars fall like dirty gold dust, and hear then, at this very moment, at the height of the disaster, we needed to hear the sweet, peaceful and confident voice, the light yellow voice that promised to bring the ship to port”. That “light yellow of trust” certainly evokes captain MacWhirr, according to the description made by Conrad: “His hair was fair and extremely fine (…) The hair of his face, on the contrary, carroty and flaming, resembled a growth of copper wire clipped short to the line of the lip; while, no matter how close he shaved, fiery metallic gleams passed, when he moved his head, over the surface of his cheeks”.

Blessed is he who discovers, in the dark moments of his life, this “yellow dot of trust”. Isn’t it true that a good man can change the course of history?

Fiodor

Gentle and compassionate Sonia

Alexei Alexeievitch Harlamoff (1840-1925) – Girl with a red scarf

At the end of last year – with the figure of Makar Dolgoruky – I opened what could be a gallery of characters from Dostoevsky evoking the deified humanity. It's time to continue, because there is work to be done...

Today, I would like to evoke Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov, or Sonia, the young woman who is going to lead Raskolnikov, the murderer of Crime and Punishment, on the path of redemption.

Sonia is a young girl with a childish aspect. “She had a thin, very thin, pale little face, rather irregular and angular, with a sharp little nose and chin. She could not have been called pretty, but her blue eyes were so clear, and when they lighted up, there was such a kindliness and simplicity in her expression that one could not help being attracted. Her face, and her whole figure indeed, had another peculiar characteristic. In spite of her eighteen years, she looked almost a little girl, almost a child. And in some of her gestures, this childishness seemed almost absurd” (III, iv) ⁽¹⁾.

Her father, Semyon Zakharytch Marmeladov, a former state employee, inveterate alcoholic fallen into the worst of decays, wastes the scarce resources of his family: his second wife, Katerina Ivanovna and the three children born of this marriage, Polya, Kolya and Lyda. It is to bring to them some money that Sonia is engaged in prostitution. But beyond her sordid everyday life, she preserves a pure heart and she is livened up by a simple but profound Christian faith. Raskolnikov does not manage to understand how she can bear that situation: “What held her up? surely not depravity? All that infamy had obviously only touched her mechanically, not one drop of real depravity had penetrated to her heart…” (IV, iv).

But what impresses most is her strength of mind and her self-abnegation. She gives herself entirely for her loved ones. After the murder, in a bout of fever and frenzy, Raskolnikov mumbles: “Sonia! Poor gentle things, with gentle eyes… Dear women! Why don’t they weep? Why don’t they moan? They give up everything… their eyes are soft and gentle… Sonia, Sonia! Gentle Sonia!” (III, vi).

Sonia cannot imagine that the depreciation on which she agrees for herself can impose upon others. When Rodia Raskolnikov comes to speak about the girl Polya, Sonia’s half-sister, suggesting that she too will be forced into prostitution, she reacts strongly: “– It will be the same with Polenka, no doubt, he said suddenly. – No, no! It can’t be, no! Sonia cried aloud in desperation, as though she had been stabbed. God would not allow anything so awful!” As he does it on several occasions, Dostoevsky introduces – here briefly – doubt and temptation against faith. Rodia answers indeed: “– He lets others come to it. – No, no! God will protect her, God! She repeated beside herself. – But, perhaps, there is no God at all, Raskolnikov answered with a sort of malignance, laughed and looked at her. Sonia’s face suddenly changed; a tremor passed over it. She looked at him with unutterable reproach, tried to say something, but could not speak…” (IV, iv).

Actually, it is faith that allows Sonia to stand firm. Rodia is still unable to understand it, and he looks at her in a condescending and mocking way: “– So you pray God a great deal, Sonia? he asked her. Sonia did not speak; he stood beside her waiting for an answer. – What should I be without God? she whispered rapidly, forcibly, glancing at him with suddenly flashing eyes, and squeezing his hand. ‘Ah, so that is it!’ he thought. – And what does God do for you? he asked, probing her further. Sonia was silent a long while, as though she could not answer. Her weak chest kept heaving with emotion. – Be silent! Don’t ask! You don’t deserve! she cried suddenly, looking sternly and wrathfully at him. ‘That’s it, that’s it’ he repeated to himself. – He does everything, she whispered quickly, looking down again” (IV, iv).

Later, Rodia notices a book lying on the table, a New Testament. Despite Sonia’s reluctance: “– What for? You don’t believe?...”, Raskolnikov insists so that she reads the passage of the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John.  With excitement, but inwardly convinced that she had to read: “– He, too, will hear, he, too, will believe, yes, yes! At once, now”, Sonia runs and reads the whole passage. Then: “– That is all about the raising of Lazarus, she whispered severely and abruptly, and turning away she stood motionless, not daring to raise her eyes to him. She still trembled feverishly. The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book” (IV, iv). In a footnote, the translator of the French version rightly points out that, by saying “That is all about the raising of Lazarus”, Sonia means that this chapter of the Gospel story is completed, but also that everything (that is the entire novel, the entire life) is only about one thing: resurrection.

It is indeed to a resurrection that Sonia is going to lead Raskolnikov. It is to her that he will first confess his crime. The reaction of the girl is amazing: “– What have you done, what have you done to yourself? she said in despair, and, jumping up, she flung herself on his neck, threw her arms round him, and held him tightly (...) There is no one, no one in the whole world now so unhappy as you!, she cried…” The path of the redemption opens for Rodia: “A feeling long unfamiliar to him flooded his heart and softened it at once. He did not struggle against it. Two tears started into his eyes and hung on his eyelashes.” (V, iv).

Raskolnikov is still reluctant to surrender to the police, but Sonia has these powerful words: “– Go at once, this very minute, stand at the cross-roads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled and then bow down to all the world and say to all men aloud, ‘I am a murderer!’ Then God will send you life again.” After much hesitation and questions Rodia is finally ready to give up himself. “– Will you come and see me in prison when I am there? – Oh, I will, I will (...) – Have you a cross on you?, she asked, as though suddenly thinking of it. He did not at first understand the question. No, of course not. Here, take this one (…) Take it... it's mine! It's mine, you know, she begged him. We will go to suffer together, and together we will bear our cross! (…) – Not now, Sonia. Better later, he added to comfort her. – Yes, yes, better, she repeated with conviction, when you go to meet your suffering, then put it on. You will come to me, I'll put it on you, we will pray and go together.” (V, iv).

This dialogue is like a prelude to the genuinely Christlike attitude of Sonia accompanying Rodia in the penal colony, in Siberia. Very concretely, she bears his cross to lead him up to the end of salvation. And remarkably, this attitude produces a saving effect on other convicts: “And when she visited Raskolnikov at work, or met a party of the prisoners on the road, they all took off their hats to her. ‘Little mother Sofya Semyonovna, you are our dear, good little mother’, coarse branded criminals said to that frail little creature. She would smile and bow to them and everyone was delighted when she smiled. (Epilogue, ii).

Rodia himself, who had withdrawn into himself for a long time, is eventually touched by Sonia's love. The last lines of the novel evoke this transformation: “… that is the beginning of a new story, the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life.” (Epilogue, ii). Sonia, the wretched girl, degraded but inhabited by a divine love, has been the instrument of a resurrection. That is all about the raising of Raskolnikov…

Fiodor (the other one…)

(1) All the quotations from Crime and Punishment are from the English translation by Constance Garnett on http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2554/pg2554.txt

The numbers in brackets refer to Part and chapter.

Three stones…

This text was sent to me by "someone whom I know well"... A man already in his "third age". He evokes some striking moments of the trip he has done in Israel, together with a younger colleague.

This journey was for me a pilgrimage, for a double motive, given my roots: Jewish and Christian. As for the first, four or five years ago I discovered some cousins on my father's side living in Israel, of whom I had never heard, until then. Here is not the place to talk about the moving meeting with them and their offspring.

There is no way, either, to describe all the moments of an incredibly rich and diverse journey. The Old City of Jerusalem, Mount of Olives, Yad Vashem, Masada and Qumran, Bethlehem, Galilee, etc., leave intense memories in the mind and heart of the one who, like me, visits this country "flowing with milk and honey" for the first time. But if I had to remember the moments that marked me the most, the most symbolic moments, I would retain three stones.

The first stone is one of these massive blocks that constitute the Kotel, the Western Wall of the Temple. When we went there, on a Thursday morning, the atmosphere was very joyful; it was the day when many young people celebrate their "Bar Mitzvah". I approached the wall and, like many others, I put my forehead on the stone. A powerful emotion invaded me. It was like a pent up piece of my family history coming back to the surface: my paternal grandparents and their children, all of them annihilated one day in1942. And then, all the generations that preceded them, who had turned – one way or another – towards that place, dreaming: "Next year in Jerusalem"...

wo days later, I put my forehead on another stone, that of the Holy Sepulchre. Despite the onrush of the crowd, the long wait before entering the narrow sanctuary, the pressure of the guards asking the pilgrims to proceed, I was able to fill the tomb left empty by the Risen One with all the situations and all the people that had been referred to me or that I carried in my heart. The human pettiness of this place, where the various Christian denominations barely tolerate each other and jealously guard their territory, could not darken the burning memory of the One who "emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave ..." (Phil 2, 7).

The third stone, with sharp angles, had the size of an apple. I did not put my forehead on it, but my forehead indeed was its target ... With my companion, we walked quietly along the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem between the Damascus Gate and New Gate. It was 4:30 pm. A hundred yards away, I saw four or five boys throwing stones to the ground with great force. Jokingly, I said to my companion: "They are preparing stones to snipe at people." I did not suspect that, a few seconds later, they would, indeed, begin to throw them at us, shouting "Allahu akbar! "... Still, we wore neither kippa nor black hat nor curls, nor pectoral cross ... The  rocks of these fellows were thrown powerfully and accurately. We found our salvation in flight.

He who has sent me this testimony did not draw a conclusion. He simply leaves us with a question, something that is never comfortable ...

Anyway, I wish you a Happy Easter. Hag Pessah Sameah.

Fiodor

As if he saw Him who is invisible…

Life of Pi was a bestseller. I did not read it. But I recently saw the film adapted from the novel by Ang Lee, the Taiwanese American director. This film won the 2013 Oscar for the best director. It is a wonderful movie. Breath-taking images: a feast for "optical gluttons" of my kind. A beautiful story, more complex than it seems at first sight: an enigma rather than a "message".

What is the plot of the movie? Pi Patel – his full first name, suggested by his uncle, crazy admirer of Parisian swimming pools, is Piscine Molitor… Pi, thus, is the son of the manager of a zoo in Pondicherry, India. The situation in the country forces the family into exile in Canada. They board a cargo ship, with a lot of the animals from the zoo. During a violent storm, the boat sinks. Pi finds himself in the middle of the ocean in a lifeboat, together with the ship's cook, a brute – played, with all the necessary vulgarity, by Depardieu – who had offended his father who asked for a vegetarian meal. Also in the boat are a young Japanese Buddhist injured during the wreck, who had tried to calm things down during the quarrel, and the mother of Pi. The cook terrorizes them and eventually kills the young Japanese and Pi's mom. Pi tries to protect her, without success, but he manages to kill the murderer.

But the film does not show all this. We learn it only at the end, while Pi Patel, years later, tells his story to a reporter who came to interview him. What the film shows us is what lies behind the scenes: what happens in the mind and heart of Pi. And this terrible experience is represented by animals, supposed to have boarded the boat during the wreck. There is a wounded zebra, who represents the young Buddhist, and a sweet female orangutan, who is the mother of Pi, and then a disgusting laughing hyena: the killer cook. And what about Pi? He is present under his usual appearance of a young athletic Indian, but also – and this is probably the key of the riddle – under that of a beautiful Bengal tiger. Pi, as a child, was fascinated by this tiger called Richard Parker.

It is only at the end of the movie that the mystery gets clearer. Pi, of whom the first moments of the film highlight the sweetness and spiritual thirst, had to find within himself the strength and cruelty of a tiger to kill the hyena, the disgusting killer cook. We witness, moreover, a slow process of domestication – or rather taming – of the tiger by the young Pi Patel. Stranded on a Mexican beach, exhausted, Pi sees the tiger Richard Parker, exhausted and emaciated too, disappear into the foliage of the forest bordering the seaside. He has now overcome the violent side of himself, which saved his life...

Beyond the beautiful entertainment of the movie, it is possible to discern a very profound and important teaching: by choosing not to stress the "outside" events, the film gives evidence that the most important realities are invisible. If the filmmaker, as the novelist, had merely decided to show the killings that took place on the boat, we would have witnessed a cruel, but rather trite, news item. By showing us – in the form of a parable – the storm that rages inside Pi, he reveals to us the mysteries of the human heart.

This is a lesson to be learned: if we want to understand the truth of the world, the truth of the events, the truth of our own lives, we have to cross the boundaries of the visible. So many people today – and this is probably often my case – have our noses "stuck in the mud." They see world events as an absurd and cruel drama, and their lives as a painful test. Nevertheless, as Christian Bobin writes: "A few seconds, isn’t it, are enough to live forever. ‘We feel and know that we are eternal’: this thought of Spinoza has the sweetness of a child sleeping in the back of a car. You and me, we have a ‘Roi Soleil’ (Sun King) sitting on his red throne in the large room of our heart. And sometimes, for a few seconds, this king, this joy-man, comes down from his throne and takes a few steps into the street. It's as simple as that." (Christian Bobin, L’homme-joie, Ed. L’Iconoclaste, 2012, p. 16-17).

Fiodor

Did you mean Palestine?

While the prospects for peace in the Middle East are bleak, it is not forbidden to hope nor especially trying to "take the place of the others" - the protagonists of the conflict - and strive to understand their point of view. Today, this approach is widely adopted in most western countries, but the only "other" who is entitled to this compassionate understanding is the "Palestinian people", presented as the victim of the Israeli intransigence and oppression, or even the indiscriminate and murderous brutality of the "Zionists."

The "Palestinian" national identity is of recent origin. It was only after the Six-Day War of 1967 that the Arabs of Palestine began to claim a national specificity, whose emergence was cleverly brought about by the Arab countries. It was for them a good excuse, a fixation abscess, to divert the frustrations of their enslaved peoples on "the Zionist enemy". But let us admit - why not? - that there are grounds for a Palestinian national aspiration and it deserves to be supported by all, including Israeli citizens. Still this aspiration has to become a reality on a sound and healthy basis. However, a lasting myth exists on the matter - accommodatingly echoed by many of our media - asserting that Jews have no historical ties with Palestine, sot that, ultimately, they have no right to be there… After all, Arafat did not hesitate to claim that no Jewish Temple ever existed in Jerusalem. And today, it is fashionable to say that Jesus was a Palestinian...

No lasting peace can be built without a serious consideration of History and, if necessary, an acknowledgement of the harm inflicted by each other. On this plan, several Israeli historians have gone very far – sometimes too far. The so-called "new historians" have denounced, sometimes in a totally inequitable way, the excesses committed by the Jews during the historical process that led to the founding of the State of Israel. We always wait for a similar effort on the Arab side.

Yet, there are irrefutable historical documents. This is the case of an amazing book published in the early 18th century by a Dutch philologist and geographer: Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata, a work written in 1695, the result of a thorough exploration of Palestine by Hadrian Reland. This scholar - he masters the Latin, Greek and Hebrew - is the son of a Protestant minister. His purpose is to identify and record all the places of the Middle East whose name appears in the Bible and the Mishnah (a collection of ancient rabbinic comments upon which the Talmud is based). [It is not sure that Reland went himself on the spot; he presumably used information collected by travellers or published in various books. Anyway, it seems that his work is quite reliable].

With remarkable scientific reliability, Reland mentions the Hebrew name of more than 2000 locations (towns, villages, localities), referring to the verses of the Bible or the Mishnah where the name appears. He completes the information with the old Latin or Greek name, where they exist. But Reland does not stick to this toponymical survey, he also works as a geographer, is interested in the populations of the region and tries to make their census. The data so collected are impressive and go widely against the current assertions of Palestinian nationalists.

I repeat, in this respect, some of the data presented in an article published in 2009 by Raphael Aouate about Reland’s book.

* First observation of Reland: at the end of the 17th century, the region is sparsely populated, even almost deserted. The majority of the population is concentrated in the cities of Jerusalem, Acre (Akko), Tsfat (Safed), Yafo, Tveria (Tiberias) and Aza (Gaza).

* Second general observation: the population of the region consists mainly of Jews, some Christians and few Muslims, mostly Bedouins.

* The vast majority of towns and villages bear a Hebrew name, some a Greek or Latin name. Practically none of the cities that today have an Arabic name - Haifa, Yafo, Nablus (Shehem), Gaza or Jenin - possessed it at the time. No trace of the name Al Quds for Jerusalem, or Al Halil for Hebron... Ramallah is called Beteïle (Bethel), etc.

* Most cities were inhabited by Jews, except Nablus (Shehem) which had 120 people from a Muslim family, the Natashe, and 70 Samaritans. Nazareth is fully Christian. Jerusalem has more than 5000 inhabitants, almost all Jews, some Christians. Gaza has barely more than 550 people, half Jews, Christians for the rest. Tiberias and Safed are entirely Jewish.

To these data of the late 17th century, I think it useful to add another, which goes in the same direction and that is just as compelling. In the Grand Dictionnaire Larousse du XIXe siècle published in 1875, we read, about "Jerusalem": "City of Asiatic Turkey, capital of Judea, chief town of a sanjak of the pashalik of Saïda. The population can hardly be estimated at more than 18,000 or 20,000 inhabitants: 8,000 Jews, 5,000 Muslims, 3,000 Greeks, 1500 Latins, 1000 Armenians, 100-200 Syrians and Copts." And we know that, in 1899, Jerusalem has 70 000 inhabitants, including 45,000 Jews.

In fact, as several historians noted it, it is especially in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, by the immigration from nearby Arab territories, that the Arabic population of Palestine considerably increased. And these historians consider that the immigration in question was widely aroused by the economic development that followed the settlement of Jewish immigrants in Palestine.

To say all this, it is not to deny the suffering of the Palestinian populations, but it is to remind that if this region – which the Roman Empire called Palestine – can, justly, offer them a territory, it is, to say the least, also the case for the Jewish people. Résolution181 of the United Nations of November, 1947 said nothing else. When will the Arab world accept to share this land? (Knowing that they already obtained - it is Jordan - 80 % of the territory of the Mandatory Palestine)

Fiodor

Seemliness

Makar Ivanovitch, drawing by Dostoevsky
(Manuscript of The Adolescent)

Those of you who have the patience to read me regularly have already met with Makar Ivanovich Dolgoruky, the putative father of Arkadi, the hero of The Adolescent. I have, here and there, briefly evoked this bright figure, a humble servant whose master, the aristocrat Versilov abducted (he prefers to say “acquired”) the wife a few days after his marriage.

Arkadi has practically never seen the one whose name he bears. After years of wandering, the man, old and sick, is now hosted in the house of Versilov, his former master, where also live Arkadi and his mother. After several days of high fever, during which he even lost consciousness, Arkadi’s attention is attracted by a discreet noise coming from next room.

“On the fourth day of consciousness I was lying in my bed at three o’clock in the afternoon, and there was no one with me. (…) Suddenly, in the midst of the profound stillness, I clearly distinguished the words: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon us’. The words were pronounced in a half-whisper, and were followed by a deep-drawn sigh, and then everything was still again.” ⁽¹⁾

This is the voice of the old Makar. Sofia Andreevna the wife who was abducted of him, accommodated him in her room, akin to that of Arkadi. The words heard by Arkadi are those of the “Jesus Prayer”, a short and repetitive prayer which, in the spiritual tradition of the East, is as popular as the rosary in the West. The famous Stories of a Russian Pilgrim, an anonymous work from the mid-19th century, helped to make it known.

Intrigued, Arkadi goes to the nearby room, opens the door and remains motionless on the threshold. “There was sitting there a very grey-headed old man, with a big and very white beard, and it was clear that he had been sitting there for a long time. He was not sitting on the bed but on mother’s little bench, resting his back against the bed. He held himself so upright, however, that he hardly seemed to need a support for his back, though he was evidently ill (…) He did not stir on seeing me, he looked intently at me in silence, just as I did at him, the only difference being that I stared at him with the greatest astonishment, and he looked at me without the slightest. Scrutinizing me, on the contrary, from head to foot during those five or ten seconds of silence, he suddenly smiled and even laughed a gentle noiseless laugh, and though the laugh was soon over, traces of its serene gaiety remained upon his face and above all in his eyes, which were very blue, luminous and large, though they were surrounded by innumerable wrinkles, and the eyelids were swollen and drooping. This laugh of his was what had most effect on me”.

After a long digression on laughter, which is “as a rule something vulgar, something as it were degrading”, Arkadi concludes: “… a laughing child (…) is a sunbeam from paradise, it is a revelation from the future, when man will become at last as pure and simple-hearted as a child. And, indeed, there was something childlike and incredibly attractive in the momentary laughter of this old man.”

In fact, the old Makar is one of those “absolute children” described by Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. The next part of the meeting with Arkady makes it clear. The teenager is sitting near the old man: “– I know you, you are Makar Ivanovitch. – Yes, darling. It’s very good that you are up. You are young, it is good for you. The old monk looks towards the grave, but the young must live (…) Ach, it’s bad for a sick monk, he sighed; the soul hangs by a thread it seems, yet it still holds on, and still is glad of the light; and it seems, if all life were to begin over again the soul would not shrink even from that (…) the old monk should take leave with blissful resignation (...)A monk must be content at all times, and ought to die in the full light of his understanding, in holy peace and blessedness, filled full with days, yearning for his last hour, and rejoicing when he is gathered as the ear of wheat to the sheaf, and has fulfilled his mystery.”

With his unpolished language – that the writer tries hard to restore – the old Makar expresses a disproportionate wisdom compared to the learned verbosity of many philosophers or theologians.

The young Arkadi, down from his bookish education and with the fashionable scepticism of the youth, gently mocks the piety of the old man Makar who questions him: “– Do you pray at night? – No, I regard it as an empty ceremony (…) – You’re wrong, my dear, not to pray; it is a good thing, it cheers the heart before sleep, and rising up from sleep and awakening in the night...” Makar tells then Arkadi an experience of plenitude which he lived during a pilgrimage. “– I waked up early in the morning when all was still sleeping and the dear sun had not yet peeped out from behind the forest. I lifted up my head, dear, I gazed about me and sighed. Everywhere beauty passing all utterance! All was still, the air was light; the grass grows – Grow, grass of God, the bird sings – Sing, bird of God, the babe cries in the woman’s arms – God be with you, little man; grow and be happy, little babe! And it seemed that only then for the first time in my life I took it all in… I lay down again, I slept so sweetly. Life is sweet, dear! If I were better, I should like to go out again in the spring. And that it’s a mystery makes it only the better; it fills the heart with awe and wonder and that awe maketh glad the heart (…) Do not repine, young man; it is even more beautiful because it is a mystery, he added fervently”.

Boy playing balalayka. Anonymous Russian painting

Makar is a deified man. He is ripe for the Kingdom about which we are told that we shall not enter if we do not “become like children” (cf. Mat 18, 3). He has this cleansed and restored glance, which sees people and things in their original goodness and beauty. Arkadi understands it, when thoughtfully taking back the last words of Makar: “ ’It’s the more beautiful for being a mystery…’ I will remember those words. You express yourself very inaccurately, but I understand you... It strikes me that you understand and know a great deal more than you can express.”

The meeting of the old man Makar will deeply impress and transform Arkadi. He who thought of having a “soul of spider”, aspires from now on to the “seemliness” – clarity of soul – about which the old man spoke to him. “The longing for ‘seemliness’ was still there, of course, and very intense, but how it could be linked with other longings of a very different sort is a mystery to me. It always has been a mystery, and I have marvelled a thousand times at that faculty in man (and in the Russian, I believe, more especially) of cherishing in his soul his loftiest ideal side by side with the most abject baseness, and all quite sincerely.” With this last reflection, Arkadi expresses one of the fundamental themes of Dostoevsky's thought, to whom no character is ever completely good or completely bad. Is it not also the case for each of us? Let us have the lucidity to recognize it...

For us who, so often, flounder through the gloom, shall we find a pressing call, in the words of the old man Makar? As Arkadi, let us be attracted by him: “What attracted one first of all, as I have observed already, was his extraordinary pure-heartedness and his freedom from amour-propre; one felt instinctively that he had an almost sinless heart. He had ‘gaiety’ of heart, and therefore ‘seemliness’.” Why not to aspire, us too, to this clarity of soul which transfigures the old man Makar?

Fiodor (the other one)

(1) Quotations are from an English translation by Constance Garnett: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/dostoyevsky/d72r/index.html