Hands

You wouldn’t know it from the photo, but the girl and guy above don’t care for each other much. The scene is the West Bank village of Bil’in, and the protestor (probably from Europe or the U.S.) is trying to take a shield away from an Israeli soldier. The picture almost seems gentle, and so it is not representative of what was actually happening. On the other hand, it reminds me of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” and so maybe it actually is representative of what was happening. What do the Sistine Chapel and the outskirts of a Palestinian village have in common? They are places where hands create.

Speaking of hands, just a few miles from Bil’in and many centuries earlier we’re told that Jesus, during a confrontation of his own, used his hands to create. Face to face with religious leaders and an adulterous woman they had cornered, Jesus listened as they said, “In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

What the men said was true; the law commanded that a stone, perhaps many stones, fly at this woman until she was a bloody corpse. In response Jesus bent down and used his finger to write in the earth. Straightening up a moment later he said to the leaders something like, “If any of you have lived a pure life, go ahead and hurl a rock at her.” He then bent back down and continued writing. We’re never told what he wrote, but when one by one the religious leaders had walked off and only he and the woman remained, he asked the woman, “Has no one condemned you?” No one had, and so Jesus continued, “Neither do I. Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Throughout the ages and in every place, the movements of hands—and sometimes their stillness—have left lines in sand, in history, and on people’s faces. Like the soldier and the protestor, or Jesus and the adulterer, all of us are participants in an ongoing creation, which is to say that there is a little Michelangelo in all of us. Or maybe there is a lot?

In any case, our hands create, and they are at their best when connected to a mind and heart that cares. Just ask a 2,000-year-old adulterer.

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For an image of a man throwing a stone, this one a Palestinian in the village of Bil'in, click on "Anger"

These are the hands of Abdullah Sharqawi, a Palestinian farmer in the West Bank village of Aboud.  Sharqawi is also Roman Catholic (almost half of Aboud’s 2200 people are Christian).  In late 2006 I spoke with both Sharqawi and his priest, Father Aridah, and learned that Sharqawi was losing much of his land to Israel’s controversial separation barrier, and how some of his olive trees had recently been uprooted and taken to Israel.  Sharqawi was struggling to cope.  With tears in his eyes, he told the priest, “My father said a family can afford to lose a son, but nobody can afford to lose his land.  Tell me, what am I to do?”

The words, Father Aridah explained, were not meant to devalue the life of a son; they were meant to emphasize the crucial role land plays in Palestinian life and culture.  “Some olive trees in Aboud are 1000 years old,” the priest said.  “Family identity is connected to the care and cultivation of these fields.”  In other words, the loss of a child may be tragic, but the loss of one’s land is worse, for it is the loss of a family’s heritage, sustenance, identity, and hope.

In visiting a village like Aboud, you speak with distraught farmers who watch powerlessly as bulldozers rip through their land, and you know these mammoth machines are driven by people and guarded by armed men who at the end of the day will return to homes unconnected to the land they maul and confiscate.  And then later, in reading The Grapes of Wrath and seeing how the Joads relate to the loss of their Oklahoma fields, you think the Joads and the people of Aboud would have something in common.  Here is an excerpt from Steinbeck’s excellent book, in which the displaced Joads reflect on the foreign machinery and people who have taken their land and made them homeless:

All this is easy and efficient.  So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation.  And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation.  For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land.  Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water no calcium.  He is all these, but he is much, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis.  The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.  But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself.  When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.