Over the hundreds of interviews that I’ve done for Israel from the Inside since we launched it in 2021, I’ve met fascinating people, been inspired by extraordinary stories and have learned an enormous amount. Still, though, until I interviewed Rabbi Hanan Schlessinger, I had never had the experience of interviewing someone, closing the interview, clicking on “Stop Recording” and then … just sitting there in perfect silence, looking at the other person for what seemed an eternity.
When Rabbi Schlessinger finished speaking, neither of us uttered a word. Even now, what he said continues to reverberate in my mind, and I hope that it will do the same for you.
As I mentioned yesterday, one of the questions that has lodged itself in my mind is that of what I would call “Jewish religiosity with moderation at its heart.” By that I don’t mean this movement or that movement, or this way of Jewish life or that way of Jewish life, this mode of practice or that mode of practice. Rather, the question that I've been thinking about quite a bit is “What would it take for the fundamental pulse of traditional Judaism in Israel to be one of acceptance, of embrace, of tolerance, of love?”
That that description does not characterize Israel’s religious establishment is, I think, a proposition that scarcely needs defending. That it also does not characterize wide swathes of “religious” Israelis (it’s true of “non-religious” Israelis as well, of course) is also sadly not really up for debate.
What would it take to transform the pulse of Jewish religious life from what it is to something very different? Is it possible? Buried inside those questions are issues that are relevant not only to Judaism and not only to Israel, and there is a vast, vast literature on religion, moderation, tolerance, the tendency for religious passion to produce extremism, and much more. That’s far beyond the pale of our focus here.
So what we’re doing periodically on Israel from the Inside is to speak with people who do represent a Judaism of tolerance, of embrace, of love. We’re trying to hear from them how they got to where they are, who influenced them religiously, how it feels for them to be part of the wider religious picture in Israel, what they think we might do to create more people like them.
As noted yesterday, we’re doing a “mini-series” on that subject this week, and will continue with more in the future. Yesterday, we heard from Rabbi Na’ama Levitz Applbaum, and today we hear from Rabbi Hanan Schlessinger, an Orthodox rabbi who lives over the Green Line who has views that made me think even more. I hope his words will do the same for many of our listeners.
Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger is an Orthodox rabbi, teacher, and co-founder of Roots/Shorashim/Judur, a movement fostering understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. Originally from New York, he moved to Israel at 20 and has lived in Alon Shvut for four decades. His work in interfaith dialogue, especially during his years in Dallas, transformed his approach to peacebuilding. Today, he advocates for recognizing both Israeli and Palestinian narratives. He and his wife Ayala have four children and eleven grandchildren.
To learn more about Roots (Shorashim), click HERE.
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.
In this day and age, I think it's particularly important, not only to our minds, but especially to our souls, to hear from people whose engagement with Israel and whose belief in the future of Israeli society is such that it takes us out of the pathways that we usually think in, whether because the subject matter is different or the orientation is different, or the soulfulness is different. I know that I, living here and being somewhere between sad and distraught, somewhere along that line, moving backwards and forwards over that continuum over the last year and a half, have found my encounters with people who are doing something very different, something very positive, something very forward-looking, deeply healing for my soul. And I, therefore, was delighted that today's guest, Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, who is the head of the North American Outreach Division of Roots, and he'll tell us more specifically about the work that he does and so forth.
Roots, "Shorashim," is in an organization that I've known about for years. We had a student here at Shalem who was very involved with it. I met the Muslim founder of it a number of years ago, and Rabbi Schlesinger has since then gotten very, very involved. But before we get to Roots, and before we talk about what it's doing, and before we talk about what the current war has done to shape its work and the thinkers of its leaders, I wanted to ask Rabbi Schlesinger, beyond thanking him for being with us today, to begin by telling us the story of his journey from Long Island to Shorashim, Roots. He lives in Alon Shvut, which is not too far from Efrat. If those of you who know Efrat, it's south, southwest, more or less, of Jerusalem. When there's no traffic, it's a 20-minute drive. When there is traffic, it's a two-hour drive, depending on the traffic in the tunnels. So he lives in an area that is commonly associated with people being to the political right. It's certainly not true of everyone. We've had other people on the podcast who come from that part of the country who are also not there.
But he is a person who stands for his own views and who I think represents something really important for all of us to hear. So, Rabbi Schlesinger, first of all, Thank you very much for taking the time. Tell us a little bit about the journey from Long Island, that I think it's Texas, where the major transformations take place to the Gush, to Alon Shvut, to work with Shorashim Roots.
How long do you have? Five hours? Okay. Thank you for having me. I was born in New York on Long Island to a secular, assimilated Jewish family. I got a Jewish education Reform afternoon school from the third grade. I was bar mitzvah-ed. I wasn't connected in any sense at all, really, to my Jewish heritage. Until the end of eighth grade, I joined Young Judea, Zionist youth movement.
Yes, so did I. Look at that. We're the two that drank the Kool-Aid. There's actually a lot of people from my Young Judea year on the southeast who got here. But anyway, go ahead.
So I joined Young Judea totally for social reasons. I was in love with the girl who is the president. And I, like you said, drank the Kool-Aid. I became a very fervent Zionist. I came to Israel during the summer after 10th grade with Young Judea, and then I went on the Young Judea year course after high school. And in the process of becoming a Zionist, I began to develop a sense that Zionism was the second or third story of a Jewish identity, and the foundation was or had to be Jewish history, Jewish connection to the land. It had to be more that it had to be something metaphysical, something that was obligating me to take upon this Jewish identity, this Jewish journey. If I'm going to leave my home, leave my parents, leave what was dreamed for me to be a good Jewish doctor and to go to make the desert bloom in some kibbutz, that would be a pretty good reason for it. So I wanted to do it. I wanted to make aliyah. I wanted to...
But politics alone wasn't going to capture it. It needed to be politics plus something, higher, deeper, wider.
Yes, exactly. So I began at the end of high school last year to look into, to learn a little bit about the religious Judaism. I got connected to Marty Cheson, who was a leader in Young Judea, who had himself become religious. I think I did some type of Shabbaton with him. And I began to observe Shabbat, then went on Year Course and began to observe more mitzvot to become religious. But I want to make it so clear it wasn't out of a belief in God. It was out of a search for the foundation for my Zionist belief. And I remember saying to myself and saying to others, 20 years later, 30 years later, 40 years later, did I find God? No. Yes, maybe. But I found a framework that gave me meaning for life.
We're going to fast forward in a second, and you become an Orthodox rabbi, but I want to talk about then Texas, and then whatever. But it's fascinating that you say that about God. I don't think we were going to talk about God so much in this conversation. But since you raise God, do you think that it's the lack of theological certainty in some way that gives you a nimbleness to engage with different kinds of communities? Do you think that theological certitude makes it more difficult to engage with Christians as you are doing in the States and Muslims as you're doing here? Or is that just irrelevant?
Thank you very, very much for the question. And when this podcast ends, I'm going to go home and think about it more. I've thought about that a little bit, and I don't have a full answer. But the very fact that I don't have a full answer means there may be something to what you are bringing up. Thank you.
Well, my pleasure. It always gets me to think when people come in and talk even a tiny bit about their own searches. And I was also struck, and I just want to reiterate it again for our listeners, that there are a lot of us here who, whatever our views are, left, center, right, it doesn't make any difference, believe that sustaining the passion for this place in purely political terms is almost impossible. I certainly believe it's impossible because you say, okay, it's important for the future of the Jewish people, but the why does the Jewish people matter. We've been around for a very long time. Okay, we have something to say. The rest of the world needs to hear. That's true. What is it? Then the conversation gets very quiet. And I agree with you. I think that many of the people who have become the most passionate engagers with Israel, whether they live in Israel, they live outside, come from a place, it doesn't necessarily have to be God or theology, but they come from some metaphysical spot, which is a kind of a stereo. There's the political side as the left speaker, and the metaphysical side as the right and they get braided together.
You eventually go on, you become an Orthodox rabbi. I want to talk specifically about the time when you begin to move out of what I would guess I call a Jewish cocoon, which any rabbi in America could easily find themselves in because you're an educator, you're highly in demand, you're working with lots of different Jewish communities. Then something happens that gets you to put your toes in the water of a very different way of engaging with other religious communities. Tell us what that was.
Okay, so I made Aliyah when I was about 20, 21. Very quickly, I came to a Alon Shvut, to Gush Etzion, I've been living there since about 1980. I learned in the Yeshiva, Yeshivat Har Etzion, altogether for about 10 years. I did Hester. But I was never fully part of the mainstream religious Zionist movement. Number one, I followed my teachers, Rav Amital and Rav Lichtenstein.
Who were the two chief leaders, intellectual powers behind the Yeshiva in Gush Etzion.
And they were not in the mainstream of religious Zionism. They were in the middle, moderate, some would even call them left. They were in favor of Oslo, for example.
They were free thinkers, I think more than anything. They were free thinkers. They had a PhD in literature from Harvard, if I'm not mistaken. English literature. So in addition to being a world-renowned scholar, he had a whole other secular intellectual world. They were just free thinkers. They didn't tow anybody's line. Yeah.
I was part of Meymad. I was part of Oz v'Shalom.
These are all political parties and movements that people may not remember anymore that were there trying to move things forward on the peace front.
So the point there is I was never in the right wing mainstream of the settler movement, but I was a settler. I was part of the society in Alon Shvut. And then What happened is that I went on shlichut. I went as an emissary of Yeshiva University, actually, 2005 to Dallas, Texas, to be the Rosh Kollel of a religious scientist kollel, the head, the educational head. And I got involved with Christian Zionists. I greatly respected their support of Israel. They were raising a lot of money for the state of Israel. I wanted to help them. I was open to reaching out and seeing who they are. I worked with an organization founded by Pastor John Hagee with other organizations. And through meeting them on the Zionist issue, we got to talk about theology. I'm interested in theology, philosophy. And through that, I got involved in meeting other Christians who weren't Zionists, liberal Christians. And I got to meet Muslim leaders. And I was so fascinated by meeting people of faith who had a different faith than I did. I felt it was expanding me. It was making me more human. It was expanding me, is the word.
So I helped to found an organization called Faiths and Conversations. We did lots and lots of interfaith dialogs. I got very close to some Christian and Muslim clergymen, and I discovered that there was depth and beauty to Christianity. I'd never thought about that before. As a teacher of Judaism, Christianity has always been a foil for me, what we don't believe in. I really didn't know what they believe in, but I thought I knew. And then I began to see, wow, they have this deep, deep, meaningful theology that's far beyond what I usually see in Judaism. I wanted to explore it. I felt it was just making me a better human being and a better Jew, talking and learning and being expanded. So when I came back home to Israel, this was 2013, I wanted to found an organization of interfaith dialog in Gush Etzion, where I live, Alon Shvut, the other settlements, just like I had in Dallas. So I began to meet primarily Christian clergymen. And then a certain point, I realized I was barking up the wrong tree because like we say in Hebrew, the asimon dropped. I realized I had a moment of understanding that, well, in America, we, Jews, Christians, and Muslims speak the same language.
We're in the same civic sphere. We go to the same supermarkets. We vote in the same elections. We have this common ground that allows us to talk about our differences of religion. But here in Israel, I don't have any of that common ground with the people I'm reaching out to, the Christian and Muslim clergymen. So I said, wait a second, before you try to meet clergymen, try to meet men. Just get to know the people. And I realized I don't know any Palestinians. I don't know anyone is not Jewish.
By the way, I just want to point out, I hate to interrupt, but I just want to point out that when my kids were in high school, I won't say which one, but one of my kids was in high school table, and he had a friend over for Shabbat lunch. There's a bunch of people around the Shabbat table. It's usually a big gathering. We happened to have that week, this goes back a long, long time. This kid is in his late 30s now. We had a person that I had met through work who was a Muslim for Shabbat lunch also. And after this person left, my son's friend said, Wow, I never met an Arab before. There was an Arab that cleans the stairwell in our apartment, and I've interacted with them at the pharmacy or whatever. But I've never actually sat in a social setting with an Arab. This was a 17, I think, year old Israeli kid, raised here from birth and in a fairly open part of Israeli society. And when he said that, I was like, wow, we're in a lot of trouble in a lot of different kinds of ways. And so you're saying the same thing. We don't go to the same supermarket. We were literally, except for a little bit down in the circle there in the Gush, where I think some Palestinians do go to Rami Levy. I think that particular supermarket is frequented by Jews and Muslims, but there are very few of them. And certainly, socially, we're separated, and neighborhoods or cities-wise, we're separated. I think your point is so well taken. You can't really live in most American neighborhoods. There's a few exceptions, but you can't live in most American neighborhoods and not know Christian people. You can't work in most American places and not know Christian people. But you could live your whole life in Israel as a Jew, even as a non-cloistered Jew, and basically never encounter an Arab in a meaningful way.
And I just want to emphasize, it's not only that I hadn't met Palestinians, but secondly, that I didn't have the cognition that I'd never met one.
That's super important. How did you go about meeting them? What do you do?
Here's the next story that brought me to meet my Palestine neighbors. I hosted in Gush Etzion two Evangelical pastors supporters of Israel, who had been friends of mine from my days in Dallas. They asked me to show them around, and I had a sense that they felt that they were experiencing through me the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Yes, it says in Isaiah, it says in Jeremiah that the Israelites, the sons and daughters of God, will return home one day, and they were living it through me. So I showed them around. I brought them to Bat Ayin, to the ancient mikvah there. I brought them to Derech Avot, the patriarch's way, where you have mikvaot, ritual baths, from 2000 years ago. We drove around, and I saw a hitchhiker on the side of the road, a young man. I picked them up together with two pastors in the car. Then another hitchhiker. So we're driving with the two pastors and the two hitchhikers. The two young men ask out of the car. I dropped them off. We started to drive again. And then the pastor from Texas, whose name was Bob Roberts, said, Hanan, wow, you taught us a lesson in Jewish ethics. That was great. You picked up hitchhikers. No one does that in Texas. So I said to him, Bob, it's not just me. Around here we all pick up hitchhikers. We have a common vision. We trust each other. And I do my best, just like everyone else, to pick up every person who puts finger for a ride. And by the time I finished that sentence, I realized that I was lying. I was lying to Bob and to Kevin. Even worse, I was lying to myself. I said that I pick up every person, and I believe that I pick up every person. But no, I only pick up Jews. I'd never picked a Palestine in my life. And I'm not now, and I wasn't then, apologizing for not picking up Palestinians, but just it dawned on me.
You don't even think about it.
I guess they don't exist for me. I guess they're not human. They're not on the radar screen. And I got into a theological moral discussion with my two friends, and I came to the conclusion pretty quickly that I have some type of moral blemish, at least moral blindness. The Palestinians aren't human beings in my eyes. They're like the gray drab scenery that pass in the background of the movie, the Jewish movie, but they're not part of the plot. You ignore them. So I I took upon myself at that point in the car to do what I could do to turn the Palestinians to human beings in my eyes. And clearly, the way to do that is to meet them. I began this journey to meet my Palestine neighbors.
And just to give our people a little sense of geography, you live in Alon Shvut. You are surrounded by Palestinians. I mean, the map there has Alon Shvut, it has Elazar, it has Efrat, north and south. But the vast majority of the map in that area, if you look at Google Maps or whatever, it's lots and lots of Palestinian villages in the area. So just people need to understand. You don't have to go very far. They're right around the corner.
It's so good you mentioned the map. So I'm going to fast forward a little bit, but I'll get back to where I was. Map. So today, I know you look at the maps that our local Israeli Regional Council, the municipal government, puts out, and the maps only have the Jewish settlements. The Palestinian towns and villages are not there. That means literally the Palestinians are invisible. You really don't see them on the map. But the truth is, just like you said, we're surrounded by Palestinians. Now, I live in Alon Shvut. We're about 3,000, 4,000 people. Since I've been Alon Shvut, and for decades and centuries before that, there's been right there a five-minute walk from my front door, a little Palestine hamlet called Khirbat Shakeria. Back in those days, we're describing 11 years ago, I'd never been in Khirbat Shakeria.
Even though it was a five-minute walk.
Five-minute walk. I didn't know anyone who lived there. I didn't know anyone who knew anyone who lived there. How am I going to meet my Palestine neighbors? It's a different world. And again, to give background, we live right next to each other, the Jews and the Palestinians, but we have different educational systems, different legal systems, different cultures, different economics, different health systemsnd, and different citizenship, right? Transportation, so everything is separate.
Right. They have their own cabs. Just so everybody understand, they have their own cabs with the green license plates. We have our cabs with the yellow license plates. Everything's different.
So I won't tell all the stories of how I finally got this meeting, but I got an invitation to meet my Palestine neighbors. And now we're going back in time to the last Wednesday of January 2014. I have a map and I know when to go there. I get up from the sofa. I'm sitting in my living room. I walked to the front door, put my hand on the door knob, open the door, and put one foot over the threshold. My wife calls behind me, Where are you going? And I said, I'm going to meet Palestinians. And all hell broke loose. She screamed, What do you mean meet Palestinians? They'll kill you. And I came back in and I approached my wife and I saw the terror in her eyes. She begged me not to go. I told her I had to do this. Walked back to the door, put this time two feet over the threshold, closed the door behind me, and I so vividly remember saying to myself at that moment, Perhaps she's right. Perhaps they'll kill me. I was really afraid. My heart was pounding.
We're always afraid. We are. We just are. You have to admit it.
I walked about 25 minutes through the fields and orchards around my home, and I got to where I'm supposed to go. So it's a Palestinian farmstead surrounded by a stone fence. There are other Palestinian farms in the area. Again, I'm really afraid. I walk inside and I saw something I've never, ever seen in my life. I saw 15 Israelis, some of them my neighbors, and 15 Palestinians doing the absolute strangest thing. They were talking to each other, and that doesn't happen. So there's two over here, there's three over here, there's a group of four. And then I saw this Palestinian woman standing alone. And I approach her, she's in brown from head to toe, and her face is visible. She's clearly an observant Muslim. And I said, Hello, in English. She said hello back to me. We talk for a minute. And then I said to her, I can't believe I'm talking to you. And she responded, I can't believe I'm talking to you because we don't talk to Israeli settlers. I had no idea why she said that, but in any case, she was willing to keep talking. But the conversation didn't go on long because her son walked over and she introduced me.
She said his name as Yazin. He's 17 years old. So Yazin and I shake hands. We start to talk, and I see he's wearing a jacket. And on the jacket are three words in English, "Seeds of Peace." Seeds of Peace. I had no idea what Seeds of Peace is. No idea. But I saw that word peace, and that confused me because Yazin is a Palestinian. Why would you wear a jacket with the word peace on it? It doesn't compute. So half jokingly, I said to Yazin, What's this Seeds of Peace thing? And I was half expecting to say, I don't know, someone gave me the jacket. But instead, he told me it's the name of a summer camp in Maine, USA. He went to the camp the past summer, had a great time there, met Israeli kids, he said they're friends on Facebook now. And he said he was so affected by meeting Israelis that now he wants to spend some of his life building bridges of peace between our two peoples. And I remember listening to him and not knowing if I can believe what he's saying because it contradicted everything that I thought to be true. And today, looking back, you can say that Yazin and his mother Sadiya were the first two Palestinians that began the process of unsettling me.
Unsettling the settler.
Unsettling the settler. I I was very unsettled. The conversation was cut short with him because his father walked over. Jamal and I shake hands. And there's no way in the world I can describe what I was feeling when I shook hands with Jamal because he is swarthy. He was missing a tooth or two. He looked to me so dangerous. He looked to me so Palestinian. I'm talking about my prejudices. Yeah, of course. It was really challenging just to be together with him. He asked me, Where are you from? I said, I'm from Alon Shvut. Where are you from Jamal? Bait Ummar. He says those two words, Beit Ummar, and I had half of a heart attack. He's from Beit Ummar? The wife, the kid, they're from Beit Ummar? Because in my eyes, Beit Ummar is a den of terrorists. So Beit Ummar is a Palestinian city of about 23,000 Palestinians. It's like a 10-minute drive south of where I live today. It's on the main road. I used to live in a settlement called Karmei Tzur, which is literally bordering Bet Ummar.
My wife used to say when our kids were growing up, lived in Karmei Tzur, when she got really angry at the kids, she said, Go to Bet Ummar, go to hell. And now I'm meeting someone from hell. How could it be? How could it be? Before that, when I used to live in Karmei Tzur, I had rocks thrown at myself, my wife and kids in the car. The car is shaking. The windshield is breaking. When screaming, I had a friend, Dr. Shmuli Gili coming Hadassah Hospital, where he worked, was coming home late one night. He got gunned down there. That's the people in Beit Ummar. I'm talking to this guy? So he starts telling me the story of his life, at least how he got to this gathering, Israeli and Palestinians. And he said that in Beit Ummar, Hanan, you know, there's no Jews. Okay. But he said there are Jewish soldiers who guard the entrance to the city, and they make life miserable. Thus, we hate them. And by extension, we hate all Jews. Who in Bet Ummar? Why not ever meet a Jew over a cup of coffee? Certainly not me, Jamal said. But he had, he said, this friend who lived in Jericho, Palestinian friend many years ago.
And he said, Jamal, I go to these dialog sessions of Israelis and Palestinians. Why don't you come along sometime? And Jamal told me, I said to my friend, I'm never, ever coming with you. That's only for the weak people that trade as a proud Palestinian does not go to meet the enemy. But somehow every month, this friend is trying to convince him. And eventually Jamal tagged along. They sat in a circle in Jericho, Israelis and Palestinians. Jamal said to me, I didn't participate. I sat in the corner, but I listened to them. And at one point after the meeting was over, he said, one of the Israeli men starts to walk towards him to say hello. And Jamal said, I was really uptight. Why is he walking towards me? Why is he coming near me? And then he came right up to me, forced me to shake his hand. It was really uncomfortable. He asked me questions. I had no choice but to answer. And after this very uncomfortable conversation, Jamal said, I ran to the bathroom to wash the filth off my hand from touching a Jew, and I was never to come back to this cursed place.
And he went home, told his wife the terrible experience he had there. And she said, It was a big mistake to go, never go back. Of course, I never tell anyone in Beit Ummar that we were there. But the friend had other plans, and I really don't know Jamal didn't tell me. The next month, perhaps a month later, Jamal and his wife found themselves back in that circle in Jericho. And then another time and another time. And they became members of that group, Jamal told me. And he said, Hanan, where I thought there was only an enemy, I discovered a human being who turned out to be a partner, and that changed me. And I remember looking at Jamal and hearing him say those words, and it can't be. How could someone who looks like him say those words? A peace activist, but he's a Palestinian. And just like I didn't know if I can believe his son, when his son told me, Seeds for Peace, I am totally disoriented listening to Jamal. And I'm falling apart. My world is falling apart.
Then he tells me another story. He said, Hanan, you know, there's lots of little kids in Beit Ummar. I know. He says, Five years old, eight years old. Okay. When they see someone who looks like you, Hanan, they start to cry. And I said to him, Why did they start to cry? And Jamal thought that I was kidding with him. He believe that I don't understand why they start to cry. And he got a little bit flustered. Then he looked at my tzitzit, and he pointed at my beard, and the kippah, and he said, that's why they start to cry, because the people who look like you, they walk into Beit Ummar with their machine guns, and he does guns with his two fingers, and they shoot the kids. So I thought that that was a blood libel. By the way, parenthetically, today it's true. I thought it was a blood libel. What are you talking about? He's an anti-Semite, and I'm being filled with rage inside. I'm about to lash out at him. And then I realized, before I said a word, that this is a moment of blessing. It's the first time in my life that I'm able to see myself from another's perspective. And I realized that I have to listen.
And I decided consciously to hold back my rage and just try and hold the moment. And I'm looking at him not knowing what to say. And then I have a vision in my mind's eye of my son-in-law and my daughter, his wife and their kids, on a family outing, a tiyul in the fields. And I see that my son-in-law is carrying a pistol. And I remember that all the 20, 30, 40-year-old Jewish men carry pistols.
And it suddenly dawned on me that that's what those little kids are afraid of, those guns. And I said to Jamal, Well, what do you want? We carry guns because we're afraid of you. Then he said to me, No, you can't be afraid of us because we're afraid of you. And I was completely gone. What's happening? They're afraid of us? Why are they afraid of us? We're peace-loving people. And I was so confused. I remember just walking away from Jamal, not not knowing where I am, what's happening. So we met a lot of other people that day. Yossi Klein Halevi was there, by the way.
A good friend. He's been on the podcast many times.
Yeah. And as the sun was about to go down, we sat in a circle, 15 Israelis and 15 Palestinians. And Ali Abu Awwad, who was the convener of that get-together and the owner of the land we were sitting on, Ali gets up to talk in perfect Hebrew that it turns out he learned for many years in Israeli jail.
His mother was in jail, too.
Yes. In another two minutes, I'll say something about that. And Ali said, My name is Ali Abu Awwad. Thank you for coming to my family's land. We're from a proud Palestinian family for generations We lived in Kubaiba. I said to myself, What's Kubaiba? Then in 1948, there was a war, and we had to leave our village. Later, he said, The Israelis turned Kubaiba into Lechish, and I know where Lechish is. He said, The clan scattered, the Abu Awwad clan. Some of us came to Beit Ummar. We've been living there since '48. For 19 years, we lived under Jordanian occupation. Then in 1967, he said, The Jews came back during the war. And since then, we live under the rigors and the suffering, the difficulty of the Israeli occupation. And he said those two words Israeli occupation, and I lost it. What's Israeli occupation? I said to myself, What is he talking about? Where's an Israeli occupation? It was the first of my life, you may not believe me, first of my life, that I heard a human being use those two words in my presence. I'd read the newspaper. I heard that in the UN, they're always condemning the Israeli occupation, but I had never stopped to think where this could be.
Because when I drive on the roads of Samaria, when I walk in the fields of Judea, I don't see occupation. I see the return of the Jewish people to our ancient homeland after 2,000 years of exile. How could this be occupation? What is he talking about? And then he describes what it means to live under occupation, the difficulty. He talked about the First Intifada. He said his mother was an organizer, giving out pamphlets, organizing strikes. He said that the soldiers, that means my soldiers, came to the house in the middle of the night and threatened her. Stop or else we'll do something. And the second time when she didn't stop, they beat her up in front of his eyes. And the third time, they took her to jail. And she was sentenced, he said, to six years in Israeli prison. And then he grew up the next year without a mother. He described what it means to grow up without a mother. And then the next year, he was taken to jail. He said he was tried in the military court and sentenced to 10 years and not told the charges in the secret trial against him.
And I went to him, Ali, you're a liar. That can't be. We don't do things like that. But I didn't get up to scream at him because he wasn't giving a political lecture. He was just telling the story of his life very, very calmly. And I went home that day. I'm out of adjectives. Challenged, unsettled, confused. I remember pacing back and forth in my study, trying to parse what I heard from Ali, what I heard from Jamal, what I heard from the others. It just doesn't fit with everything I know. It can't be. But that's their life, they said. I remember getting nauseous and feeling actually that I have to bend down and pick my stomach up and put it back in because everything is churning inside. I felt like it couldn't continue with my life. The solution is not going to come from books. I have to meet more of these people. And I went back to the same place. I met all those Palestinians that day. And Ali was there with his donkey, and we sat around the campfire. And basically, I asked him a few questions, and he just talked. And Jamal came.
Shaul Judelman was there. And then, we were two Israelis and two Palestinians, and then three, and three, and five, and five. And we began basically to meet pretty often, once a week to the wee hours of the night. Elias Cohen, another name you might know, Myron Joshua, Ziyad Zabatin from the Palestinian side. We grew and we grew. The group grew. What we did would not be properly described with the word dialog. What we did is we told stories and we listened to stories. We didn't argue. We didn't respond. We just listened. And I remember the contorted faces of Palestinians listening to Israeli Jews and contorted faces of Jews listening to Palestinians. You hear their stories of history, of connection to the land, of identity that contradict your stories. It can't be true, but that's their experience. So you listen until it hurts, and then you listen some more, and you go home and you stew over it. You try and see, could there be any truth in what they're saying? You come back the next week and ask them questions. They say more, then it becomes your to talk. We listen until it hurts, and we listen some more, and we became transformed.
I'll just describe, and you can edit it out later if you need to. One thing that happened is Ali said that most Palestinians, not me, he said, but most Palestinians go to sleep at night dreaming that the Jews will disappear tomorrow because they know the Jews don't belong. The Jews are colonial occupiers. They're foreigners. Like the French were thrown out of Algeria, so the Palestinians will throw the Jews out. And when we heard Ali admit that, we Jews, it was really, really hard. And then I remember realizing one day that most of us Israelis go to sleep at night with the same dream. We'll wake up tomorrow. The Palestinians won't be here because we know they don't belong. We told that to the Palestinians. And they said, But we have no other place to go. And we said to them, We also have no other place to go. I want to try and just sit in this moment. What happens when you fully absorb the understanding that the other side really thinks they belong in this land and they're really not going anywhere? When you really absorb that, It fries your brain. You have to rethink everything that you knew about the past and about the present, and especially the future.
Because we all live in this fantasy that one day we will be here without them. And it's not going to happen. And that causes you to begin to re-understand who you are, not just who they are, but re-understand who you are. Another story or composite of stories. It became clear that most Israelis and most Palestinians, including us in the meetings, we have constructed our identities upon the erasure of the other side's identity. We are certain that we know who they are, and we can tell them who they are. The Palestinians, very, very good-naturedly and well-intentioned, will say, Judaism, I greatly respect it. The Quran respects Judaism. But of course, it's a religion. You don't need land. Why are you here? Go back to Russia. And Israelis, of course, always say to Palestinians, Palestinian, you know there's no such thing. You're making it up. You know that, don't you? You're just Arabs. There never was a Palestine state. So why don't you go back to Saudi Arabia? But when you listen to other side stories, of identity, again and again, you realize you know nothing about who they are.
It's ridiculous to think you can tell them who they are. You have to listen and let them tell who they are, and they may listen when you tell who you are. And it turns out that they think about themselves, things that contradict what we think about them, and they think about us, things that contradict what we think about ourselves. But there is truth in both what they think about themselves and what they think about us. And this brings us to what Ali called from the beginning, we have to fit two truths into one heart. We have to fit two truths into one heart. That's the way to fit two peoples into one land. And later, I realized that this is very similar to what my friend and colleague and mentor, Brad Hirschfeld, used as a title of his book, You don't have to be wrong for me to be right. We spend our time thinking this is a zero-sum game. We're right and they're wrong. And if it would be that they were right, then we'd be wrong. So we better spend a lot of energy proving that they're wrong. But it doesn't work like that.
Our identity, and I'm talking for myself as a Jew or Zionist, deeply connected to the land, it's true. It's glorious. It's legitimate. But it doesn't mean that Palestine identity in connection to the land and history is any less true or any less legitimate or any less glorious. And in this process of fitting two truths into one heart, what you do, and what I hope I've done, is expand myself, expand my identity. And I want to make it very clear that what this means is that what we do in Roots, and I didn't say the word Roots yet, but that's the organization we created. What we do is certainly we engage in humanizing the other. There, just like any good peaceful organization does. But it can't stop there. The Palestinians are not just human beings. They are Palestinians. And we, Jewish Israelis, are not just human We are Israeli Jews. We are Zionists. We believe in who we are. And therefore, the work of moving towards a peace settlement is not just about humanizing the other side. It's also a second story, which is what I've come to call identity reconciliation. Expanding your identity, not abandoning it or discarding it. Expanding it to include the recognition of, again, the truth and the belonging of the other side. Should I go on or is it enough?
Well, it's never going to be enough because I'm fascinated and I'm deeply moved. There are some things that you said that I find unbearably painful because in talking about what you would call your own narrowness of perspective, I've had those moments also, and I think I'm probably much more narrow now than you because I don't do this nearly as much as you do. You made a off-handed comment before about Jamal said that the kids are scared because the people with the kippot and the tzitzit come in and shoot the kids. And you said very under your breath, well, now it's actually true.
Yes, I said that.
And it is true. It brings me to tears. But we all know what's happening. The left knows what's happening. The center knows what's happening. The right know what's happening. The Jews know what's happening. The Palestinians know what's happening. The international community knows what's happening. Bibi knows it's happening, and Lapid knows what's happening. There are settlers on the West Bank who are literally doing what Jamal's kids are afraid of. And no Israeli government, not a right-wing government, not a centrist government, and not a left-wing government, has really ever put the brakes on that. They've tried here and there feebly. But when you said that, you said, Well, and it's actually true now, that broke my heart also. So the answer to your question is no, it's not enough because it'll never be enough. I would love to listen to this for hours, but we have to have some misgeret, framework, here. Here's what I would like to do. I want to have you tell us a bit about Shorashim, what it does, how it functions, what are the programs, and so forth, because as you and I both know, there was a student here at Shalem who's now a very beloved graduate who's very involved in Shorashim.
I have friends from LA who are very involved in Shorashim as lay people, and I know Ali Abu Awwad. And so I know something about it, but I think it's very important for our listeners to hear about it. And then I want to ask you, the last 18 months. We're not at war with the Palestinians near where you live, but we are at war with the Palestinians in some tragic, horrifying way. And I would like to hear a little bit about the degree to which what's happened in the last 18 months has either... Because I genuinely don't know the answer to this. This is not anything rhetorical. Has it energized the work that you're all doing? Has it made the conversation more difficult but more necessary? So what happens? Are people pulling away? Are you less hopeful? Are you more hopeful? So Shorashim, and then the last 18 months.
Shorashim- which means roots, in Arabic is judur, in English, Roots, is the Israeli-Palestinian Grassroots Initiative for Understanding Nonviolence and Transformation. We never intended to create Roots. Roots created itself, you could say. Looking back, we call that meeting I described on Ali's land, the Knesset Yisud, how do you say, the founding meeting of Roots. So it turned out to be retrospectively. We have created the only joint Israeli-Palestinian Community Center in the whole West Bank in all Judea and Samaria, and that's the land that I was describing. We call it the Dignity Center, Merkaz Karama. Merkaz is the Hebrew word for center, and karama is dignity in Arabic, the Dignity Center. And until October 7th, we had activities there bringing together local Israelis and local Palestinians, as well as internationals, almost every day, other than Friday and Shabbat.
And a lot of work with youth, right? I mean, there were a lot of high school kids.
So briefly, I'll say we had a group of little kids, 5 to 10 years old, that met twice a month. Songs. Everything is Israeli and Palestinians together. Song, dance, arts, and crafts, hearing the other's language, feeling the other's bodies, the other's smells. We had 14 different groups of photography workshops of middle school kids, Israeli and Palestinians. And I think for five years, we had our Israeli-Palestinian high school youth movement, 15 kids from each side, Israeli and Palestinians, all local, meeting together twice a month. We also had, from the very beginning, for 10 years, we had our day camp in the summer, 80 kids, Israelis and Palestinians. We've had photography workshops for women every summer, two different groups. We had our interfaith dialog groups, three different interfaith dialog groups, Muslims and Jews, another group, Muslims and Christians. We had a leaders group, lay people. We had monthly lectures.
How many people were involved in this world?
It's very hard to answer. Probably, let's say, 2,000, 3,000 Israeli Jews had been to three of our programs, a little bit more Palestinians, 4,000, perhaps. And then we founded two other branches. We also have a branch In addition to what I'm describing, the Dignity Center in Gush Etzion, we have a branch in the Jordan Valley, a branch in the Shomron. We have a very, very small branch in the southern Hebron Hills. So altogether, there were thousands of people on each side who have been transformed to a a certain degree. Very few have gone the full nine yards, have gone crazy like me. But certainly there's 50 or 60 or 100 whose lives have been completely transformed, and thousands have been partially transformed to see the beauty and the meaning not only of their identity, but of the other side. In addition to that, we host mechinot, the Israeli gap year programs. We host about 50 mechinot a year who to see our center and to hear an Israeli and a Palestinian representative talk about our works. For most of these really high school graduates who come, let's say for 99%, it's the first time they met a Palestinian.
For 80%, the first time they met a settler. And now they're meeting the two of them together talking with dignity and with respect. We have lots of stories of people who've told us, young people, two and three and four years later, how their army service and the rest of their lives were changed. Okay, so those are, let's say, the activities of Roots. We also, in addition to the mechinot, the gap year programs, we were hosting 200 to 300 groups from around the world every year, whether it's student groups, Jewish student groups, whether it's interfaith groups, whether it's pastors and imams and rabbis from the UK, whether it's parliamentarians from Germany or Australia, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We also have done at this point about 27, 28 speaking tours of myself and one of my Palestine partners in the US, in the UK, in Germany, in Switzerland. And then October 7th. The work was shut down the first few weeks after October 7th. The staff stayed in contact by telephone, virtually. The staff began to meet in person, I don't know, two, three months after the war began. I remember one day I took my car to Bethlehem, and I couldn't go in because the army had put up these earthen barriers, and I wanted to meet my Palestine partner. He couldn't come out because earthen barriers. So he parked his car on his side of the earthen barrier. I parked mine on the Israeli side, and he climbed over, and he sat in car for three hours and we talked. That was really surrealistic. The people to people work was suspended for a number of months and then gradually began to come back on a very low flame.
Why was it suspended? I can think of a lot of reasons.
Yes, I'll say two. Number one, from the beginning of the war, to a certain degree, to this very day, the Palestinian villages from which come the members of Roots are under full or partial military closure until this very day.
So they can't get out.
Can't get out. They can't come.
Even though just to make everybody understand, they had nothing to do with October 7th.
Of course. Until this point, Beit Ummar, 23,000 people, has all its roads closed with a metal gate with a lock, and the army only opens it during certain hours in the daytime. To this very day, since the war began, if you have a relative outside of Beit Ummar, if you have a doctor's appointment, if you have university studies, if you have a job, commerce, everything has been disrupted. So that's number one. People just couldn't come. And people from Bethlehem could come. There were barriers, but less than today. I think they've mostly been removed, but they're afraid, deathly afraid to come. The second reason that our activities were and are curtailed is because of the closing of the hearts on both sides. The trauma, the fear. This was always there, but now it's just been exacerbated. And yes, in reference to something you said a few minutes ago, yes, there are Israelis and there are Palestinians who did come to Roots activities before October 7th. And today they tell us they can't. They're unable.
Emotionally?
Emotionally. I'll give you one example. My daughter, who lives in Efrat, just a 10 minute drive from Alon Shvut. Almost since the beginning, she sent her two kids to the Roots summer camp. I remember every year, her kids, my grandchildren, sharing me on in the Roots Run for Reconciliation that we did every year. And this past summer, we did the summer camp. We did. But I asked her about my grandchildren coming, and she said, I can't. I don't have room in my heart for it. And it's not something that people can explain.
We all know people like that. I mean, many of us are people like that, but we all know people who were very open and hopeful, who just literally say... When a person lives in my building, he's a Reform rabbi, a dear person who was interviewed by The Forward, by Jodi Rudoren, who since left The Forward to go back to the New York Times. But at this point, she was still the editor-in-chief of The Forward, and she got to know him very well when she lived in Israel with her family for a couple of years when she was working for the Times. She came to Israel, I don't know, half a year into the war, and he was a big peace guy. In fact, the first time I was ever in his living room, there was a picture of him and Arafat on the living room wall. That picture disappeared after the Second Intifada started. But nonetheless, he was really the real deal in terms of he really believed that It could be done. She asked him, Well, are you involved in any rapprochement? Are you doing any dialog? And his answer, I remember, I read it. I didn't hear it, but I read it, but it hit me so hard. And these were his exact words, "I'm ashamed ashamed of how much my heart has shrunk". So he's ashamed of it, but his heart has shrunk. And your daughter said it in different words. People in my family feel it. People in my work feel it. My friends, we are ashamed of it to a certain extent, but our hearts have shrunk. Not yours necessarily.
You've given me hope by saying that people are ashamed of it. Okay, so that's an opening.
Yeah, I think that shame actually can be a very motivating thing in human life. I mean, very often, shame is part of repentance. You can't really do Yom Kippur seriously and not feel some shame during the day. If you've gone the 25 hours and you haven't felt shame, you probably haven't done the work. And shame is part of therapy, and shame is part of mindfulness, and shame is part of just being a human being. So yeah, maybe the shame is a positive thing. Is it picking up the work of Roots, of Shorashim?
Yes. As the months have gone by... Well, let me add one other thing. I said that Palestinians couldn't access activities. I said that hearts were closed. There's another reason why we curtailed the activities after October 7th, and that's because we did not want to, and I don't know how to say this in English, we didn't want to publicize activity and do activities that would make Israelis think that we don't live in reality. How do you say that?
I guess, really.
We didn't want...
Everybody to think you've lost your minds.
Yeah. Because Roots is an organization, and this is something that differentiates us from other peace organizations, we work with the non-convinced. We don't preach to the choir. We're the only organization that is actually trying to work with those who define themselves as right wing, as settlers. We're focused in the West Bank, in Samaria, in the settlements. So we don't want to do anything that makes it appear to our constituency that we've lost our minds, even though we believe deeply in what we're doing. But now we have gradually ramped up things, not like it was before the war. We just finished before Passover, a listening circles. We put out publicity, and we found about 35 Israelis and 35 Palestinians that are willing to join this program once a week. For six weeks. Four Israelis, four Palestinians, plus an Israeli moderator, and a Palestinian moderator, and a translator, just listening, telling stories and listening. And now that it's over, we have very, very touching feedback. And we're beginning the program again, another round. The interfaith dialog has begun again a little bit. Right after the war began, 10 months later, we didn't do the summer camp that summer. But the next summer, that was like seven months ago, we did the summer camp on a small flame.
I guess you're planning to do it again this summer.
You know what? We have to see. We have to see. I want to. It's not that far off.
Just a couple of months away.
Thank you for reminding me. We're putting off the decision because it's really hard. Will the Palestinians be able to come? Will the roads be open? Will hearts be closed? And will our constituencies think, you're crazy. And if we ever thought to come through, it's we're not going to come now. If we see you're doing a summer camp in the middle of a war. There's a lot to navigate here. Okay, get me back on track. You asked me some other questions.
No, you're very much on track. Let's just begin to close by talking about the future. We talked about the past and your past and how you got to where you are. You talked about more recent past, about the work of Shorashim, Roots, and then the more immediate past with the last 18 months of the war. Let's talk about the future and just talk about Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger. Let's not talk about Roots now, or Shorashim, or organizations, just you and your soul. Where's your soul relative to where it was 24 months ago as you think about the future of this place?
I usually speak the truth, so I will. I'm ashamed of the Jewish people. Parenthetically, I'll say I think the Palestinians have to be ashamed of the Palestinian people, but that's their business. My business is my people. I'm ashamed of the Jewish people, and I'm ashamed of Torah. My mentor, Rabbi Brad Hirschfeld, says something very true, I believe, which is that religion is as religion does. Don't tell me that Torah is beautiful and meaningful and true, just the Jewish people are ruining it. No. If those who practice Torah, if those who have a beard and a kippah and tzitzit like me, act like many of them, I think the majority are acting now, towards Palestinians and saying the things they're saying, I'm deeply, deeply disappointed and I'm ashamed. One of the reasons why I started to walk around with my tzitzit tucked into my pants and not outside is because I don't want to look like those Jews who are harassing and hurting and killing Palestinians. So I'm in spiritual crisis. But in relationship to my hopes for the future in our relationships with the Palestinians, nothing has changed.
Nothing has changed. I know that there has to be a solution that is based on recognition of both sides' historical connection to the whole land from the river to the sea. And of course, that is based upon the recognition that both sides are a people, the Palestinians are a people. The Jews are a people. Both sides want to, need to, express that peoplehood through a certain degree of self-determination. Both peoples are deeply connected to the whole land from the river to the sea. We have to find a solution that recognizes that. So my vision for the future has not changed. And I know for certain that eventually there'll be a solution, a peaceful solution of reconciliation. I don't know if it will take 500 years or just 50 years. I think it's possible, not probable, but possible it'll happen tomorrow. There could be elections in Israel and a new leader. There could be a grand plan in the Middle East with Saudi Arabia and normalization and some degree of Palestinian statehood or autonomy could have happened under Biden. It could happen under Trump. You never know. Again, it's not probable, but it's possible. And if it's possible, then I have an obligation.
I have responsibility to do my best to make it possible. And I know that if I take responsibility and I continue to do what I'm doing and do more of it, that will bring that possibility a little bit closer to realization, and it will create hope among 5, and 10, 100, and 1,000, and 10,000 other people. And when you take responsibility and create hope, that hope that you pass on to others brings them to take responsibility, and that can create more hope and more responsibility. So I know that I could do something, and therefore, I have an obligation to do it.
I think all of us who are listening to you have an obligation also. And it is no matter where we are in the religious spectrum, No matter where we are in the political spectrum, you're an Orthodox rabbi, you're a settler, you're a peace activist. There's got to be parts of that that make our heart for almost everybody listening to this. But the result of listening to you is that we have to understand our responsibility, too. Our responsibility is to listen to you very carefully, very openly, and maybe more than once. This is a world that we don't often hear from. And in these days in which any ray of light is a blessing in a world of darkness, you've given us much more than one ray. So on behalf of everybody who has just listened to you and who will undoubtedly be thinking about what you said for many days and weeks to come, Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, thank you very, very much for your time. But even more than that, thank you very, very much for your soul and for being who you are.
Thank you.
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