My Extra Innings Ramadan
Ramadan ended yesterday. Today the Muslim world celebrates its equivalent of Christmas, Eid, and self-imposed famine becomes unrestrained feasting. Well, I've still got a bad case of the Ramadan Blues and I'm not in any hurry to join the festivities.
Maybe it is the fact that nearly 300 Palestinians, all of them presumably Muslims, died during this holy month from the kind of violence I expect in North Philidelphia but not in an occupied land supposedly governed by the brutality-tempering Geneva Conventions. Those laws require occupier to treat the occupied with dignity and respect. Hah! Don't make me laugh--or cry. Why, I ask myself, are the Israelis behaving so shamefully?
I asked that question to Uncle Ramadan this morning. He was packing to leave my house and I suddenly didn't want him to go. He paused in his packing and told me the following:
"They say that the extreme misery and poverty of the refugee camps in which they grew up shaped the Taliban ethos and moral code. Because they only knew extreme want as children, they reduced Afghanistan to the cultural equivalent of a refugee camp. Home unsweet home.
"Well, Israel is similar. As occupiers, they are trapped in freeze frames and playbacks of the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz and can extend nothing more to the Palestinians than what was refused them during the Holocaust. They are acting like their occupiers. So they are capable only of a governance based on torment. Thye cannot, or will not, break the cycle of trauma that is the only remembrance they know. Thye have no Ramadan. Nor, I'm afraid, Yom Kippur."
Could you stay a little longer? I asked Uncle Ramadan. "There are others, you know," he quoted from "Field of Dreams." What kind of others? "Gandhi types who want to continue the fast as if it will sap strength from oppressors as well as starve those who fast from their own rage at iniquity," Uncle Ramadan answered. "There are millions of homes where I have been asked to linger."
While Uncle Ramadan unpacks, I thought I'd tell you I'm postponging Eid and continuing a personal vigil-fast for those in Palestine who cannot resume a normal fullness of life today. And I am going to pray that God's mercy and compassion (what Muslims call His Rahmat) become a contagion among mankind, an Avian flu of goodness dropping from every Golgotha sky in the world. I want every free man to be stricken with pity for those who live in bondage, for those who live in brutal thrall to regimes based on religion, ideology, ethnicity, tribalism, unforiven pasts--or whatever fear and arrogance makes men think of themselves as masters over others.
Second, I am continuing the Ramadan fast because I also want to prevent myself from doing mental harm to those who treat others inhumanely. I am now what AIPAC members would call "hostile to Israel." That hostility must cease if I am to hope for, let alone preach, peace. But I am also pledging myself to witness and sharing of that witness with others to awaken conscience among Jews and Chrisitians as well as awareness of the intolerable suffering that has been inflicted on Palestine. This circle--one of injustice and karmic relay from Nazis to Jews to Arabs--cannot go unbroken.
Ramadan offers both a weakening and strengthening emptiness in which those chains cannot be forged, in which the habits of thought that sustain cruelty cannot continue--so that the sustaining resonance of God's love is all there is: our primal residue rediscovered in sharing. Ramadan is the only hope I have of starving my own demons and beasts to death and surviving that old uncontrolled composite of habits called David Federman. The God in me asks the God in you to pause before the resumption of normal life today to pray for those who are not allowed the lifting of the brute, blanket Ramadan of imposed deprivation.
In the name of this private Ramadan I ask you to consider conducting the fast one more day or longer outside the pale of a religious observance and in the name of the instinctive kindness that is the lasting gift of Ramadan. I ask you to stand on Sinai and be fed only by the light of God and the wisdom into which it metabolizes. I ask the fast to proclaim Allhamdulilah!
Maybe it is the fact that nearly 300 Palestinians, all of them presumably Muslims, died during this holy month from the kind of violence I expect in North Philidelphia but not in an occupied land supposedly governed by the brutality-tempering Geneva Conventions. Those laws require occupier to treat the occupied with dignity and respect. Hah! Don't make me laugh--or cry. Why, I ask myself, are the Israelis behaving so shamefully?
I asked that question to Uncle Ramadan this morning. He was packing to leave my house and I suddenly didn't want him to go. He paused in his packing and told me the following:
"They say that the extreme misery and poverty of the refugee camps in which they grew up shaped the Taliban ethos and moral code. Because they only knew extreme want as children, they reduced Afghanistan to the cultural equivalent of a refugee camp. Home unsweet home.
"Well, Israel is similar. As occupiers, they are trapped in freeze frames and playbacks of the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz and can extend nothing more to the Palestinians than what was refused them during the Holocaust. They are acting like their occupiers. So they are capable only of a governance based on torment. Thye cannot, or will not, break the cycle of trauma that is the only remembrance they know. Thye have no Ramadan. Nor, I'm afraid, Yom Kippur."
Could you stay a little longer? I asked Uncle Ramadan. "There are others, you know," he quoted from "Field of Dreams." What kind of others? "Gandhi types who want to continue the fast as if it will sap strength from oppressors as well as starve those who fast from their own rage at iniquity," Uncle Ramadan answered. "There are millions of homes where I have been asked to linger."
While Uncle Ramadan unpacks, I thought I'd tell you I'm postponging Eid and continuing a personal vigil-fast for those in Palestine who cannot resume a normal fullness of life today. And I am going to pray that God's mercy and compassion (what Muslims call His Rahmat) become a contagion among mankind, an Avian flu of goodness dropping from every Golgotha sky in the world. I want every free man to be stricken with pity for those who live in bondage, for those who live in brutal thrall to regimes based on religion, ideology, ethnicity, tribalism, unforiven pasts--or whatever fear and arrogance makes men think of themselves as masters over others.
Second, I am continuing the Ramadan fast because I also want to prevent myself from doing mental harm to those who treat others inhumanely. I am now what AIPAC members would call "hostile to Israel." That hostility must cease if I am to hope for, let alone preach, peace. But I am also pledging myself to witness and sharing of that witness with others to awaken conscience among Jews and Chrisitians as well as awareness of the intolerable suffering that has been inflicted on Palestine. This circle--one of injustice and karmic relay from Nazis to Jews to Arabs--cannot go unbroken.
Ramadan offers both a weakening and strengthening emptiness in which those chains cannot be forged, in which the habits of thought that sustain cruelty cannot continue--so that the sustaining resonance of God's love is all there is: our primal residue rediscovered in sharing. Ramadan is the only hope I have of starving my own demons and beasts to death and surviving that old uncontrolled composite of habits called David Federman. The God in me asks the God in you to pause before the resumption of normal life today to pray for those who are not allowed the lifting of the brute, blanket Ramadan of imposed deprivation.
In the name of this private Ramadan I ask you to consider conducting the fast one more day or longer outside the pale of a religious observance and in the name of the instinctive kindness that is the lasting gift of Ramadan. I ask you to stand on Sinai and be fed only by the light of God and the wisdom into which it metabolizes. I ask the fast to proclaim Allhamdulilah!
posted by David Federman @ 3:34 AM
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