Living in tension.
A world of contrasting images, colours, contours and senses surrounds us. Set in opposition they show difference, between good/evil, light/darkness, love/fear. The experience of many through time and in place, is that allies and adversaries exist side-by-side, visible and invisible. Benevolent and malign forces can be seen at play in nature, through history and in the intriguing world of espionage. Do truth and deception exist and are the old descriptors of body, soul and spirit still relevant?
Multiculturalism and dialogue.
“It’ll feel like a foreign country!” was my mother’s comment, when I went to visit her from university, in 1979. She was living in the London Borough of Hounslow at the time, with its 80% ethnic minority population. Having been married and lived in India in her early twenties, she loved the cosmopolitan mix of Asian faces, clothes and shops. The smells, bells, colours and conversations of the High Street transported the beholder to the many countries from which fellow citizens had come, through the nearby access point of Heathrow Airport. I was to spend 6 years in this environment, living in its vibrancy, rubbing shoulders with its diverse cultures and growing to love the closeness of its communities.
Enemies and espionage.
Who would have imagined that when a wealthy Argentinian businessman, Kamel Amin Thaabet, made a gift of eucalyptus trees to the Syrian army on the Golan Heights, providing shade for soldiers, he was in fact an Israeli spy working for Mossad. He had infiltrated into the Syrian political and military hierarchy before eventually being uncovered and executed in 1965. Several years later during the Six-Day War those same trees provided the Israelis with markers, identifying the Syrian dug-outs and contributing to them being routed in a matter of days!
Enemies are a fact of life, they come from within and without, they are visible and invisible, operating in all domains of life. Whilst further articles will follow, for now, what about spies?
When the Rabbis Cry!
The present war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is more deadly than a very similar conflict that arose in 2008. Both conflicts inflamed opponents of Israel around the Middle East including Yemen. Attacks against Jews in 2008-2009 in Yemen forced the wholesale evacuation of the Jews to two principal destinations: New York and Tel Aviv.
One morning in 2009 I switched on Radio 4’s Today programme and found myself listening to an interview with a few elderly Yemeni rabbis weeping over the loss of their Jewish congregations. It was a moving interview and proved to be the final straw in motivating me to write a book about the Middle East.
Inter-faith dialogue.
In trying to enlarge upon a diverse multi-layered transcendent world there also needs to be a language of ‘taxonomy’. As the plants and animals of the earth are classified into families, genus and species, so a multi-faith context would benefit from classifying deities, by origin, narrative, lineage and covenants. Similarities and distinctives need to be drawn out, if the complexities of inter-faith and inter-disciplinary dialogues are to be grasped ingenuously.