Seminary killings: no one’s hands are clean.

March 10, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

One thing I thought I had de facto given up for Lent was blogging. I am overwhelmed with stuff to do, and the extra time for my own reflection has gotten the short end of the deal.

But when I read one of the headlines last Friday which touched a nerve very close to home, I paused to reflect quite a bit. The headline in the Los Angeles Times was the horrifying news that a Palestinian from East Jerusalem entered a Jewish yeshiva (seminary) with an assault rifle and a handgun, and took the lives of eight teenage seminarians before being shot dead by an off-duty army officer and a theological student. Nine more people were also wounded, according to the BBC story.

I still fondly remember my own seminary days, and especially the Library which was really a place of refuge for me as I tried to figure myself out at the age of 22.

According to Haaretz, the seminary’s library floor was covered in blood. Although no one group took credit for the attack at first, Hamas called it heroic and later “flip-flopped.” I call it demonic. This was no suicide killer who could think of himself as a martyr, but he has made defenseless Jewish teenage students into martyrs.

But no one’s hands are clean. We are living in a world grown far more cruel in which every conflict quickly becomes total war. Palestinians see Jewish seminaries of hotbeds of training for the Zionist settlement movement which continues to invade Palestinian territories and make it less and less viable for Palestinians to have a homeland. What do I know? Maybe the Palestinians are right— that theological schools are training grounds of the enemy.

Have we forgotten that the Taliban also operates schools — theological schools for Islam — which the Bush administration identified as the training grounds for terrorists. During the anti-war days in the Vietnam era, American colleges were idealistic hotbeds of resistance. Today’s students in America are far too young to remember the American students who were shot dead by America troops on the campus of Kent State in Ohio. Their martyrdom briefly galvanized the theological schools in Berkeley, and our agitation helped to at least suspend classes for several days in a gesture of shock and remembrance.

I do not doubt there are Westerners or Americans who if it were possible would take violence into Islamic schools with the intention to kill the youth who are studying the Koran. We cannot say, “What is wrong with them?” without also saying “What is wrong with us… the human race?

It seems that every insight leads to a counter-insight, and every point of view to an opposing point of view.  We so quickly divide all reality into “us” and “them.” And once we have “them” defined, it doesn’t take much of a stretch to have “them” in our gun-sights. The Nixon administration so completely and successfully polarized America, that it was no big stretch for the Ohio National Guard troops to see Kent State students as “them,” just as Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s had identified other Americans as “them”—communists and their sympathizers, “pinkos” and perverts.

I do not have a paranoid personality, but at times I suspect— if the present federal Administration were to remain in power much longer—they would eventually come for me, because the cruelty, immorality, greed and dishonesty which has taken over America since 2001 has politicized me as well. I now see too many fellow human beings as “them.” And I confess that my unspoken retort (until this paragraph) is that “they started it”: the fundagelicals, talk-show hosts, defense contractors, Bible-belters, and right-wing politicians (especially those who say thing like “I am not gay” [meaning: “I am not like them“]).

It is my Lenten confession that I too have a lot of trouble seeing every human being as “us” and not writing off the ones I cannot stand as “them.”

I went to the Lutheran seminary in Berkeley, where there was a consortium of schools under the umbrella of the Graduate Theological Union:  six Protestant seminaries and three Catholic ones. We took classes from any of the nine schools as we saw fit.

Wouldn’t it be magnificent if in the aftermath of this terrible bloodshed, in an international city like Jerusalem, there could be a consortium of theological schools, on adjoining campuses, for Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu and other theological students? It would be a powerful witness to all faiths and all the world that we are all “us” and that we have much to learn from one another.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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