Extending Arms
and Hearts
Vanessa. Sasson
tricycle
A teacher is impelled by a student's troubles to confront the human
suffering in the Middle East.
A few years ago, near my office at Marianopolis
College in Montreal, a colleague called out and asked me to mediate
in an argument he was having with a student about the Middle East.
I was running late, so, with a burst of laughter, I spontaneously
answered, "They are all crazy over there! That is all you need to
know."
Those words have haunted me ever since, both because
of their flippancy and because I meant them. I did not have time to
enter a discussion then, and I was—to an extent—just kidding. But I
did believe, although I never admitted it, that everyone in the
Middle East was crazy, that it was that simple.
There is something deeply troubling about this view,
and I've heard it voiced often. For many of us, the Middle East is
a land of insanity. We watch the news and can barely wrap our minds
around the images bombarding us. We hear of suicide bombers. We see
sobbing Israelis searching the streets for the remains of those
they have lost. We hear of the Palestinian water crisis while
watching Israelis water their luscious mango trees. We see militant
Palestinians chanting at the camera and Israeli soldiers, faces
frozen, wielding their weapons. We see so many crying mothers,
hardened fathers, children on the front lines. We see bombs falling
in Lebanon. Again. It is no wonder most of us simplistically choose
a side or cut ourselves off from it by concluding that they are all
equally insane.
I've been thinking lately about a dear student of
mine from a few years back. Ahmed (I've given him a pseudonym) was
a Palestinian Muslim living in the Diaspora. He, too, was in pain,
confused, enraged. He belonged to a community that was suffering,
but he lived far from it. Guilt plagued him. He wanted to express
his solidarity with his suffering brothers and sisters. He wanted
to do so all the more because he was living here in comfort, far
from the turmoil: his pain and anger were transparent. His wasn't
the kind of anger that seethes beneath the surface, but an open
anger, an open confusion, an open quest for identity.
For some reason Ahmed sought me out. He took my
religion courses and frequently visited my office. He knew of my
Arabic-Jewish heritage, and he knew of my Buddhist practice and
faith. He didn't spare me his anger, however. During the wave of
suicide bombings in 2002, for instance, he ran into to my office
after an attack and asked in angry glee, "Did you see that? Wasn't
that great?"
Ahmed was goading me, eager to draw me into a fight.
But I wasn't taking the bait. After one particularly gruesome
attack—more than a dozen killed and hundreds injured—I knew enough
to expect him bright and early the next day. Sure enough, he
appeared, exclaiming triumphantly, "That was a good one, wasn't it?
We really got a lot of them this time!" I looked at him quietly and
asked, "What exactly is it that you're looking for, Ahmed? What
kind of a reaction do you want? Why do you keep doing this?" He
didn't have an answer, but I could see that he was tormented. He
made a point of coming to see me at these times. Had he been truly
hateful, he would have spent his energies elsewhere. But I knew he
was looking for something, so I waited.
Eventually, Ahmed took a Buddhism course with me.
Halfway through the term, he appeared at my door and asked, "To
practice compassion the way the Buddhists do, what would I have to
do?"
We had been discussing the monastic precepts, the
first of which is to avoid harming all living beings. I had given
the students an assignment on the precepts, and Ahmed was genuinely
trying to understand what they meant and how he might implement
them. I suggested that, for starters, he not celebrate violence. If
he wanted to go a step further, he might even consider apologizing
to some of the students he had fought with—verbally and
physically—about the Middle East. Ahmed said he couldn't possibly
do it. His honor was at stake, along with his pride and his
standing with his community. Besides, it wasn't his fault alone.
He'd been provoked, taunted, pushed around by the Jewish kids. Why
should he apologize?
A few days later I heard Ahmed was wandering the
school looking for students he had fought with. Apparently, he was
making amends. He even posted a letter on the "Jewish side" of the
cafeteria—a public apology. He did not expect any apologies in
return. A few days later, he showed up at my door. Neither of us
said anything, but I certainly smiled.
I HAVEN'T SEEN Ahmed much since he graduated. I
hear from him every once in a while, or I am given his regards
through a friend. He is an engineer now, working hard, and
successful. He remains involved in the Palestinian struggle for
independence, and, so I am told, he refers to me as the teacher who
made him apologize. That always makes me laugh.
Ahmed was written off by many students and teachers
during his time at college. He was a troublemaker, bringing the
chaos and pain of the Middle East into our backyard in a way that
made many nervous. Concordia University, only a few blocks from our
campus, had been experiencing quite a bit of turmoil centered on
the Middle East, and nobody wanted that turmoil to
spread.
The fear we had of students like Ahmed laid bare our
collective aversion to anything too difficult, complicated, or
painful. We wanted his raw suffering to go away. Would it not be so
much nicer if all our students were happy? But life isn't that way.
As the First Noble Truth so emphatically declares, life is
suffering. People in Israel, in Palestine, and throughout the
Middle East are openly suffering. It would be nice if they were all
happy, but they are not. It would be nice if we could make sense of
it all, but most of us cannot. It would be nice if we could at
least take sides in good conscience, but most of us cannot do that
either.
The Middle East is the perfect teaching ground. It
points its fingers at us and asks, "Can you handle this? Can you
look at me and see me as I am? Can you take in my suffering? How
good is your bodhisattva vow when you see me?"
When we talk of the bodhisattva vow in Buddhism, we
talk about extending our arms and our hearts outward, about
reaching out to the whole world and embracing all, without
exception. We talk about truly seeing the ones standing before us
and loving them deeply, just as they are, with their many faults.
The challenge the Middle East presents us with is the very same
challenge presented by Shantideva some thirteen hundred years ago:
Can you be a bodhisattva? Can you love everyone and not become
suffocated by the pain? When I flippantly disregard the Middle East
and all of its pain, I am only revealing my personal limitations. I
am telling others, and myself, that it is too much for me, that my
arms are not yet wide enough to provide for all.
A recent visit to Israel/Palestine opened my heart
in ways I did not anticipate. I looked around and saw suffering
much more than ever before. I cried daily, and I continue to cry
every time I think about it seriously. But the tears don't scare
me. They are freeing up space in me, so that I may be capable of
taking in even more.
I heard a lovely Sufi story during my stay. God sent
an angel down on earth and asked it to return with the most
precious thing in the world. The angel descended and returned with
jewels, silks, books, art—in short, everything that we naturally
associate with man-made beauty—but none of these was right. So the
angel descended again, and this time returned with one solitary and
delicate human tear. God looked at it and smiled. It was what He
was looking for.