‘We have No Hope for Us and Our Children’

If This is Happening to Some of Us, It will Ultimately Happen to All of Us

One of the biggest lies demagogues tell is that if one group is destroyed or eliminated, the rest of us will be safe, when the reverse is true. Pastor Martin Niemöller demonstrated this vividly in his famous poem, “First They Came”…. As a health professional who sees everyone as a human being first—and cannot see them otherwise in my professional role—all I see is that dangerous leaders are making our world vastly unsafe for our species’ continued survival. A Trump-emboldened demagogue, Benjamin Netanyahu, is now ready to blow up the world if it keeps himself out of prison (and gets Donald Trump reelected and out of prison, too). This is the disorder against which the people are fighting, and we are all united, more than we know.

The above newspaper illustrates our common humanity: it comes to me via a Jewish friend, who is sending me an article about his Muslim friend, who is visiting with his Christian friends in Germany. The rest is an excerpt from a translation of the article:

The Middle East is a powder keg.  And not just since October 7, 2023.  But since that fateful day, the situation has continued to deteriorate, with little hope of peace soon.  The recent visit of the Palestinian Mohammad Fararja (42 years old) from a refugee camp near Bethlehem in the West Bank to the Spindler family in Hausmoning/Teisendorf offered an opportunity to learn something about his living situation and that of the people there….

Thanks to his proximity to the Lutheran church, Mohammed Fararja is one of the “privileged” Palestinians, because he (still) has a regular, albeit small, income and good friends, such as the Spindler family, who support him….

Mohammed Fararja speaks at candlelight vespers in Hausmoning-Deacon: “Today Cain kills Abel every day in wars around the world”….

He had come to Germany from Schnelsen near Hamburg at the invitation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church and on the instructions of the Lutheran Bishop of Palestine Sini Asar.

He was to report on the situation of the Lutheran community in Bejala, not far from Bethlehem, after the events of October 7, 2023 in Palestine.  Fararja has been working for this institution since 2003.  Einrichroes Prod was assistant to the manager of the guesthouse “Abraham’s Inn” for ten years.  As an orphan he was in the children’s home of the Lutheran community of Bejala, attended school there and studied hotel management for two years.  Now he lives with his wife and his three sons in the Diheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem.

Mohammed Fararja is a Muslim, but describes himself as a “Lutheran Muslim.” That is also what his friends and colleagues in the Lutheran community call him, he says with a smile.  I am a Muslim, but I like to pray with Christians.  We all pray to one God, because we are all children of Abraham,” said the guest at the beginning of the candlelight vespers.

Deacon Georg Spindler also emphasized this in his introduction.  He recalled the Christian services in the 4th and 5th centuries in the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, where people prayed all night, until sunrise.  The candlelight vespers in the Hausmoning chapel were based on the service form of the old church, with incense offerings, candlelight, singing and personal prayers for peace in the world.  The vespers were based on the story of Cain and Abel, which can be found in both the Old Testament and the Koran….

The story of Cain and Abel is at the beginning of the holy scriptures and tells of the first killing of a person by another, said Deacon Spindler.  But it is more relevant today than ever, because today Cain kills Abel every day in wars, raids, in the womb, in violent crimes or private disputes.  The question of why is difficult to answer, because murder, wars, expulsion or acts of revenge are not ways to move humanity forward, but they also harm the aggressors.  Whenever Cain kills Abel, he destroys himself, his soul, his heart, his humanity, Spindler continued….

After the candlelight vespers, Barbara and Georg Spindler invited all visitors to a meal with Arabic specialties.  Many people in the cozy group had one or two questions for the Jewish Muslim, who had also briefly come to Teisendorf to see his friends in Hausmoning after his trip through Germany with stops in Bergisch-Gladbach and Cologne.  On Monday he traveled back to Deheishe.  For a Palestinian from Bethlehem, that is a long way via the airport in Amman (Jordan), two borders and four checkpoints back to the hopeless life of the world.

After a brief pause, everyone laid their heart under the symbolic tree of Abraham, under which the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions are united.  At the end of the celebration, the tree of the three monotheistic religions was decorated with felt leaves to the refugee camp.

(Caption under a photo: “The dry tree of the three religions, Israelites, Muslims and Christians, is made green with leaves”)

This is an archetypal struggle for humanity right now, as it concerns the battle between health and disease, survival and total demise. The U.S. presidential election has now reached a point where it is no longer a choice between one political ideology or another, but the very continuation of our electoral system, as well as of all humankind. Similarly, just as atomic scientists have once spoken up about the dangers of nuclear war, health professionals must now speak up to declare that the recent explosions of war are an insanity that is incompatible with life. We must all collectively mobilize everything we have to counter it, for ourselves and our current and future children, as this is the only path to sanity.