As I write this piece for the Newsletter, over 4,000 people are known to have been killed in what the United Nations has described as the ‘unprecedented human catastrophe’ that is taking place in Israel and Gaza. By the time you read it, the number will undoubtedly have increased.
Searching for any possibility of hope in this carnage, my thoughts turned to Abraham, who was chosen by God to leave his country and his father’s home for a Promised Land. That place, the land of milk and honey, is the very place that now flows with blood.
Abraham is a patriarch both to Jews (who trace their lineage through Abraham’s younger son Isaac) and to Muslims (who trace theirs through Abraham’s elder son Ishmael). Although Ishmael was the elder son, it was to Isaac that God’s covenant of land and blessings was extended. Ishmael was the unchosen one, sent by Abraham into the wilderness (Genesis 21), symbolising what Meg Warner describes in her book about Abraham as ‘the parting of the ways’ between Judaism and Islam.
In my search for hope in Abraham’s story, I found a subsequent passage in Genesis that had previously escaped my attention. In the Genesis account, Ishmael is not mentioned after he was sent away by his father until, many years later, Abraham died. What we then read in Genesis 25: 9 is that ‘his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah’. Is this an image of two brothers, driven apart through a bitter dispute over land, reconciled in mourning by the grave of their father? Whilst it may give me that glimmer of hope I was searching for, I fear that much more blood may be shed in the Middle East before the call to reconciliation becomes overwhelming. As Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, put it: ‘How many more graves do Isaac and Ishmael have to stand over before they realise they are brothers?’.
Duncan McCall
