By Jerry LaMartina / Contributing Writer
Alan Edelman first got involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement in the 1970s and has visited Israel 38 times.
When he was in Israel for his junior year of college, Edelman met with Palestinians for the first time and learned “another narrative,” one he hadn’t been taught: When Israel became a state in 1948, Palestinians became homeless and lost their opportunity to have their own state.
“Ever since I learned that, I wanted to expose members of the Jewish community, who by and large don’t know that narrative, to that narrative,” he said. “But because professionally I always worked for (Jewish) organizations for whom that would have been a little sensitive politically, not until my retirement did I have the opportunity to fulfill this dream.”
His 38th trip to Israel brought something new and fulfilled that dream: A group of 25 Jews, Christians and Muslims traveled to Israel from Feb. 17 to Feb. 27 of this year on a trip called “Seeking Peace in the Footsteps of Our Ancestors: An Interfaith Peace Pilgrimage to the Holy Land.”
“This one was like no other because every other (trip) was just Jewish people, and to have this experience with people I have come to love and study with and talk to from two different faiths was just incredible,” he said.
Edelman is a local Jewish educator and former director of engagement and leadership development at the Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City. He has led seminars on trips to Israel for students, teachers, emerging leaders and Federation leaders. He is the Jewish director on the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council. He lives in Leawood and is a member of Congregation Beth Shalom.
He organized the pilgrimage with Inas Younis, a Muslim, and Matthew Silvers, a Christian. They returned from Israel with greater understanding of each other’s faiths and the complexities and common ground in the region’s longstanding conflict. They also returned with renewed hope for finding a peaceful resolution and with increased determination to work toward that goal.
Younis was born in Mosul, Iraq, and immigrated to the United States when she was 9 years old. She is co-founder of the first chapter of the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom in Kansas City. She participates in the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative, a program designed to build relationships between North American Muslim and Jewish communities.
Silvers is a pastor at Lee’s Summit Christian Church and a member of the group People of Faith for Peace. He is a director-at-large on the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council.
Edelman got the idea for the pilgrimage about three years ago after Silvers said his congregants wanted “to do something a little different” on a trip to Israel. Edelman, Silvers and Younis got together about a year ago and started planning the pilgrimage. Younis said the pilgrimage was a natural progression from conversations they had been having about relations between Muslims and Jews, “but even more appealing was as it relates to Muslim, Jewish and Christian relations. I think the Christian narrative often gets sidelined.”
Ann Hayles, a member of Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Lee’s Summit and a member of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph’s Ecumenical and Interreligious Commission, joined the group on the pilgrimage. She had visited Israel 10 years ago. She said it was important to her to make the pilgrimage with people she had already built relationships with “who could challenge me with love and in love” and to whom “I could say my truth.”
“We’ve learned that (there are) many truths in this thing,” she said. “We learned over there that our experience of relationship (was) important in the discussion and that the people on the ground over there said exactly the same thing and also said how difficult it was, that building relationships among such disparate people with such disparate stories is an art and a science.
“After studying the situation for 15 years, I thought it should be easy and fast,” she said. “Now I see that the people who are doing really good work over there are doing very slow work, conscientious and educated work. … But it’s risky and it’s easy to misstep.”
Edelman, Hayles and Younis all spoke of grassroots organizations in Israel working for peace as the best road to achieving that goal.
“It may take 25 to 50 years for these grassroots organizations,” Edelman said. “People become leaders.”
Younis described such efforts as “faith-based activism,” which was partly the inspiration for the group. It was important for the group to meet with grassroots organizations “in the midst of one of the world’s most challenging conflicts.”
“We couldn’t have found a better platform for us to challenge even our own assumptions about peacebuilding and faith,” she said. “We had no delusions of grandeur. It was about our own education and an opportunity to uplift the voices of those people on the ground who are actually doing real peace work.”
Edelman said that most of the people on the pilgrimage were inspired by the people living there who were talking with people whose beliefs were opposite to theirs.
“(Palestinian activists) were not afraid to go meet with Jewish settlers who believed that this is their land (and) that God gave them this land and they’re not leaving,” he said. “They don’t believe that the Palestinians are a people. But this didn’t stop (the Palestinian activists).”
The group followed a tightly packed itinerary throughout the trip, which included several days in Jerusalem. Younis called Jerusalem “the quintessential interfaith city in the world” because of its history and diversity.
She described visiting the Holy Church of the Sepulchre. The church’s caretaker, who was Muslim, brought her a candle, took her to Jesus’ tomb and said, “Pray to Jesus.” She said to him, “I’m Muslim.” A priest in Greek Orthodox garb was there and overheard them. He said, “Muslim, Jewish, Christian — we are all one God. Pray! Pray!”
“That moment sort of encapsulated the trip for me in a lot of ways because, at the end of the day, we were all praying together, … worshipping together,” Younis said. “We’re all in communion together with the one God that we all share.”
Edelman, Younis and Hayles are planning a reunion, possibly next month, of those who made the pilgrimage. And they’re thinking about ways to involve more people in interfaith peace efforts.
Younis said a local high school student who was working on a project about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict recently asked her, “How can you find an objective truth to anything involving the conflict?” Her answer spoke to the power of stories.
“Truth has to be couched in a story to be understood,” she said. “That’s one of the things I learned on this trip. Facts are meaningless unless they are selectively woven into the fabric of the sum narrative. This conflict in particular is so heavily grounded in religious theology that it cannot be resolved except by expanding the plot of the very religious narratives that have inspired it in the first place.
“It’s not enough for us to just have a generic peace plan in mind,” she said. “We really … have to touch on the narratives that have inspired it to begin with and find a way to expand on those narratives as a way of bringing people together.”
