On a day-to-day basis my biggest struggle – if I’m finding it hard to find the words – is over whether I need to wait for inspiration to come, or whether I’m just being lazy and underprepared. Whether I’m letting fear or procrastination stop me. The Quaker method has a lot to say to that. You know, you wait in silence and if it doesn’t come then it doesn’t come. But also you have to be disciplined, and prepared, for that to work

https://thefriend.org/article/my-ministry-is-the-jokes-and-kittens

One might call this whole episode the triumph of Waspy good intentions over Jewish common sense… But of course Quaker schools—and Quaker camps, like the one I once attended, and Quaker meetinghouses—are, these days, pretty Jewish places. The Times article has a burlesque feel, with a bunch of Jewish students and alumni performing in Quaker-face.

He also makes interesting points about the cultures of Jewish humor (“We Jews survive because of Hitler jokes”) and that of Friends:

The Quaker practice of silent worship can disposes its practitioners against the loud, bawdy, contentious discourse that infuses Jewish culture. I’m not making claims about individual Quakers—I can introduce you to perfectly hilarious Quakers, some of whom interrupt even more than I do—but at their institutions, the values that come to the fore are Gene Sharp not Gene Wilder. In their earnestness, Quaker schools are David Brooks not Mel Brooks. You get the idea.

I’m always a bit unsure how seriously to take cultural Quaker stereotypes as motivating forces in pieces like these. I wonder how many Friends actually work or study at a Manhattan Quaker school. A more generic headmaster fear-of-conflict seems as likely a cause as anything to do with silent worship. Then too, we don’t know what other issues might be at play below the surface of privacy and confidentiality. But the Friends Seminary incident seems as good a marker as anything else of the complicated dynamics within Friends schools today.

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/258394/jewish-teacher-fired-from-quaker-school-for-making-nazi-joke

The NYYM Friends who have shared their stories herein are farmers, chaplains, hydrogeologists, shepherds, mystics, homesteaders, local government officials, naturalists, professors, and Master Gardeners. They till the soil, herd the sheep, insulate walls, minister unto many, commune with nature, educate, and model resilience in Ithaca, Brooklyn, Clinton, East Chatham, and Seneca Castle in New York, and in Highland Park and Montclair in New Jersey.

I still have to go through them myself. Some that look particularly interesting are Susanna Mattingly’s Quakers and Climate Change:

This is a spiritual call as well as a material one, to act not out of fear or through accusation, but with hope and love. We recognize sustainability and care for the earth are integral to our faith and our Quaker testimonies as we strive to live in right relationship with all creation. As a community, we can make a meaningful contribution to stabilizing the climate and building resilience.

Christopher Sammond’s “Our Generation’s ‘Lamb’s War’ “:

As I have held questions about how to respond to the divisiveness, the fear mongering, the racism, and the tsunami of lies and half-truths characterizing our nation’s political life at this time, I have been clearly and deeply called to go deep, and to join the many, many people of faith who are seeking to bring about the necessary shift in culture, a shift in spiritual consciousness, which is necessary if we are to survive as a species. And, like my Quaker forebears, I know that work to begin within myself.

That one finally becomes the thing he violently fights is a fact that Hitler understood, in 1933, when he said, “The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.” It would be a tragic thing indeed if we Americans were stripped of our freedom by a foreign and aggressive power; it is all the more tragic that we gradually and somewhat unknowingly give up our freedoms, one after another, in the pursuit of that force which we claim will guard our liberty.

— Bayard Rustin [Source]

So as Quakers committed to peace and engagement with all people, what should we take from this conversation? First, we should recognize that Palestinians and Israelis are getting together and cooperating but on their own terms. One of the key problems with many past people-to-people programs is that they were initiated and led by outside actors who imposed their own goals and terms on interactions. The normalization framework pushed forward by Palestinians is a reassertion of ownership of the terms of interaction by those most impacted by the systematic injustice of Israel’s occupation and inequality.

I’ve wondered how the paradox of normalization plays into some of the issues that seem to regularly stymie Quaker process. From my introductory Friends Journal column:

 As Friends, our first instinct has been to think of conflicts as misunderstandings: if only everyone got to know each other better, love and cooperation would replace fear and confusion. It’s a charming and sometimes true sentiment, but many Palestinian activists charge that this process ignores power differentials and “normalizes” the status quo.

(if you have thoughts, feel leave them in the comments or reply to the daily email).

When Dialogue Stands in the Way of Peace — Friends Journal

People-to-people programs can cause harm when they don’t address structural issues.

Friends Journal

I never had much expectation that the trial of Trayvon Martin’s killer would find him guilty. A good team of lawyers can conjure up reasonable doubt over most anything. As as Alafair Burke writes on Huffington, much of what Zimmerman did was protected by Florida’s insanely-crazy “stand your ground” laws.

But even without that, high-profile court cases get so politicized so quickly that they rarely provide any kind of catharsis, let alone justice, when stacked against hundreds of years of racial injustices. And just as Zimmerman’s judgement was colored by his racial history and biases, so too are ours: our opinions about what happened that evening in Sanford, Florida, are much more a reaction to where we fall in the continuums of privileges than we might care to admit.

Privilege is unearned opportunities conferred by how closely we fit a particular stereotype. When I was in my early 20s, I was once pulled over by a policeman when I was driving aimlessly through a sleepy town at 3 am (no good story I’m afraid: I was simply bored, with insomnia). He visibly eased up when he saw I was white, and he got almost avuncular a minute later when he saw the Irish name on my drivers license. I know that almost-forgettable instant could have played out quite differently if I had been black, with a Muslim name, perhaps, and a chip on my shoulder because this was the fifth time that month I had gotten detained for no good reason.

No matter what I do to educate myself, I will always be George Zimmerman to (many) strangers on the street, just as Trayvon Martin will always be a suspicious house burgler for being a black stranger in a hoodie.

The work that needs to be done–or continued, for we need to remember the many times people have done the right thing–couldn’t be answered by a criminal trial anyway. What’s needed is the education of society at large.

One step is all of the conversations taking place on Facebook and around water coolers this week. Let’s talk about the fears that subconsciously drive us. For Zimmerman’s gun was only one of the triggers that killed Martin. It was fear that gave us Sanford’s gated community and its town watch, along with our nation’s permissive gun laws and draconian legal concepts like “standing one’s ground.” It was that potent mix of suspicion that set in motion a situation that left a seventeen year old kid with a pocketful of Skittles lying dead face down in the grass.

Can we learn to understand the ways we live in fear? Can we get to know one another more deeply in that place that breaks down the gates in our hearts?