For the past ten years or so, I have been very involved in working toward peaceful resolutions and reconciliation in the Middle East. My interest and efforts in this area led to a joint effort of the Chapman University Department of Peace Studies and the Albert Schweitzer Institute in the establishment of interfaith trips to Israel and the West Bank. As the appointed coordinator of this endeavor, I was in charge of planning and organizing the itinerary and generally making sure everything went as planned.
As every traveler knows, events often do not happen exactly as planned—yet the unplanned changes and resulting adaptations often result in a much more meaningful and enlightening experience, as long as one just goes with the flow. This truth really struck home during one of the interfaith trips I coordinated in the summer of 1999, and resulted in a paradigm switch for me personally and in the way I have come to understand notions of justice and dignity.
On this particular trip, everything seemed to be going wrong right at the outset. Personalities didn’t seem to mesh; some participants were already not on speaking terms before they’d even boarded the plane. I could see I’d be providing a lot of counseling and mediating on the road, and this was a group without a single Israeli or Palestinian member. I had to keep reminding myself of some advice my mother used to offer when things began badly: “It’s good to get the bad feelings out at the beginning of a journey.” Well, I sure hoped she was right, because I wasn’t sanguine about my ability to cope with some of these people for another sixteen days.
I had arranged for the group to have a tour of the underground city of Jerusalem—ancient tunnels, and so forth. This tour sometimes has to be booked two years in advance. Because my son Ryan is a licensed archeologist with the Israeli Antiquities Authority, he was in a position to pull some strings and I managed to secure tickets for what I thought was a 7 p.m. reservation for the day our group arrived in Israel. I couldn’t believe our good fortune. We landed at 3 a.m. and checked into our Jerusalem hotel around 4:30 a.m., only to discover that our tickets were not for 7 that evening, but rather 7 that same morning. After twenty hours en route, would the group be in shape to climb around the caverns of the underground city immediately on arrival? I doubted it, but put it to them anyway, hoping no one would kill the messenger. In fact, nearly everyone was very accommodating, and glad just to have the opportunity to see something they knew would be a rare treat. The few who complained were told they could sleep in, instead. But in the end, everyone decided to go.
