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Israel - The Frontline Is Everywhere, page 3
by Lloyd Howell
Tears
There is the side of Israel/Palestine that is a land of tears. Tears come easy and for so many reasons. I had my share of them when in Israel. It is said in the Christian Bible that Jesus [Yeshua ben Joseph] anguished in prayer over Jerusalem. There it says he yearned to gather the people under his wings as a hen would gather her chicks. No doubt he, and many prophets before him, shed tears in not being able to do so.
One day our team went with Ibrahim, a Palestinian man from the Mount of Olives, to visit an orphanage there. The side of the Mount on which the orphanage stood had the most splendid view of the city of Jerusalem. As we entered the compound I noticed a statue of Jesus to my left, about eight feet tall with arms raised to Heaven in prayer. I felt a strong and immediate need to pray at the statue, which was somewhat surprising due to my Protestant sensibilities which normally steer me away from statues, icons and religious paraphernalia. However I followed the nun inside and planned to return later.
After tea and some story telling we found ourselves outside admiring the grounds and the view. Somehow the subject of the statue arose. The nun recounted that the statue had been brought to her school in the first place because its former location had become problematic as vandals had broken its fingertips and slashed its face across the chin. She consented to take the statue and had a place of honor prepared to receive it; several stairs leading up to a flat area had been constructed adjacent to the orphanage and the statue rightfully placed in the center facing out over Jerusalem.
Sometime thereafter, and I can’t remember if it was a year or some months, the nun recounted that there arose a stir. It appeared that there were those who had begun to take offense at the statue’s presence. Somehow it came to be known that the tiny figure on that distant Mount of Olives’ hilltop was a statue of Jesus standing in prayer over the city of Jerusalem! There were those who could not tolerate the statue and the statement it seemed to make. Their indignant outcry reached up to the highest levels of the local government.
Strings were pulled and as a result one day city officials showed up on the doorstep of the orphanage with a bulldozer and according to the nun asked which should she preferred to have removed, the statue or the school? She could not answer. The statue was then uprooted from its central location, in the process suffering breakage in the lower part, and placed to the side of the property next to a wall where it could not be readily seen from beyond the property and then turned to face away from Jerusalem.
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