Biting Back

“When you were in the States, did you own a dog?"

“Yes.”

“Did you teach it to bite?”

“No, of course not.”  (Well, there was Rusty, the Chihuahua, but I was just a kid.)

“But if you taught your dog to bite, what then?”

“The dog would bite.”

“Here, we teach our children to bite.”

He is a thirty-year-old shopkeeper in the Old City of Jerusalem.  He sports a neatly trimmed goatee that already has specks of gray in the mustache.  He speaks English perfectly, and no wonder, he spent four years at the University of Michigan.  (Our conversation began because he has a Michigan banner in the back of his shop.) He is a Palestinian Christian.  He is pretty much without any hope of any change any time soon.  He has two daughters that he is trying to teach not to bite.

“So what has to happen?” I ask him.

“Many things have to happen,” he said.  “Many,” he said it again, quietly, not quite under his breath.

I waited.

“Our children are not dogs,” he finally said.  “Maybe they will choose not to bite.  And maybe their children will make the same choice.  Maybe a leader will come out of the Jewish world, and another out of the Muslim world, and still another out of the Christian world, and they will lead us to peace.”

We stood in silence.

“Maybe the Wolverines will win a game this season.”

He looked at me like I had just farted in church.  Then he started to laugh. “I like you,” he said.

“I grow on people,” I responded.

“I’ll bet you do,” and we left it at that and talked about something else.

Last week Monday, three home-made rockets fired from Gaza by the Islamic Jihad militants, landed in Sderot, a small Israeli town near the Gaza Strip.  The rockets were fired on the second day of children going back to school.  They were timed to land as the children were walking to school, when they were least protected. The militants who fired the rockets declared them to be pay-back against Israel for the deaths of a number of children killed in Israeli air strikes the previous week.

You bite.  I bite you back.  Who bit first?  Who remembers?  Who cares, really?  It is a dogfight, and neither side feels they can stop biting and still win.  And, of course, winning is everything.  Just ask Lloyd Carr (Michigan coach).

As I was leaving the shop to go over to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Church of the Resurrection for locals), he said, “I’d tell you that Jesus is the solution, but you already know this, right?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“I wonder what that means,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Right,” he responds.

He nods.  I nod back.  He turns to go into his shop.  I walk down the narrow street toward the Church that marks the spot where God pulled off the most marvelous, impossible, unexpected victory in all of human history.  I walk trough the huge wooden doors, stop, smile and quietly say my confessional statement for the day:  “If God could do this ….”