Monday, June 3, 2019

Saint of the Month: Khader El-Yateem


Reverend Khader El-Yateem.jpg
The time was a little after 11 pm. The place was the neuro-ICU at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania on a summer night in 1995. I was just finishing praying for a patient at end-of-life when Grace, my neighbor and an ICU nurse, grabbed my arm. “Owen, I’m off shift now. Will you come downstairs and stand with me while I wait for Khader? I don’t want to stand outside by myself.”

I certainly couldn’t blame her. The streets of West Philly are no place for a pretty Palestinian-American woman to be loitering at a quarter to midnight. I told her I’d be delighted to wait with her. “Great!” she said. “You can see Rowan!”

We only waited a few minutes when Grace’s husband, my seminary neighbor Khader El-Yateem, rolled up in the family car, the couple’s year-old daughter, Rowan, asleep in the car seat behind him. Khader grinned at me with a look which, if I didn’t know he was a Lutheran seminarian, I’d swear bordered on the satanic. “So, Owen,” he said, “how do you like CPE? Are you having fun yet?”

“Fun? Fun..?!” I replied, not—as you can tell—without sarcasm. “I’ve been in this hospital since eight this morning and I won’t get to go home ‘til five tomorrow afternoon. Yeah. I’m having a blast!”

 “Good!” replied Khader “I knew you’d like it.” And off the El-Yateem family drove into the sweltering night, and I returned to my duties as an on-call chaplain at a busy city medical center.

All Lutheran seminarians are required to do three months of institutional chaplaincy between their first and second years of course work. This is called CPE—Clinical Pastoral Education, or, as some call it, Cruel Perverted Experience. The theory is that 500 or more hours spent with the sick, the dying, the frightened, and the bereaved is good preparation for parish ministry. I believe it is. Some, however, found it to be nothing short of Purgatory. Khader loathed the insistence on self-evaluation which was such an integral part of the CPE program. Arab men are passionate, but they hate to talk about their passion. Khader took a devilish delight in any discomfort I, as an underclassman, might be experiencing in this grueling ordeal which he had completed the previous summer.

When I remember Khader, I always think of his smile and ebullient sense of humor. The El-Yateem family lived one floor below me in a 19th century home converted into student housing. The three families living at 32 East Gowen Avenue often gathered in each other’s homes for game or movie nights. Khader was always the life of the party. I remember him leading a trivia game, prefacing each question with, “People of God! Are you listening? Are you ready?” He was particularly pleased to host a movie night when the chosen film was Lawrence of Arabia. In one scene, Peter O’Toole stands in full Bedouin robes and slings the end of his burnoose over his shoulder with heroic panache. “You see..?” Khader said, smiling, “This is the PRIDE!”

Khader also explained after we had seen the film that the war over water was just as important to the life of the Middle East as the war over oil—perhaps more so. I had never met a Palestinian before, and I really had no idea about life in Israel/Palestine. The Jewish people are the heroes of two-thirds of the Christian Bible, so I had never given any thought to how the Israeli government treated Palestinians. I recall Khader telling me, “You know, Americans think of Palestinians only as Muslim terrorists. You don’t remember that many of us are Christians…LUTHERANS..! We just want to live in peace.”

It was Khader who made me question the unquestioning loyalty American foreign policy has always seemed to display toward the government of Israel. What Khader did not tell me—and what I never knew until reading an article about him in the April 2019 issue of Living Lutheran—was that he had been arrested by Israeli soldiers when he was young and imprisoned, questioned, and tortured for 54 days before being released with no explanation for his arrest ever being given him. His ordeal, however, made him more committed to non-violence.

For 22 years, Khader served as pastor of Salam Arabic Lutheran Church in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. He became the bridge which united Bay Ridge’s Arab-American population with the NYPD. He was a co-founder of the Bay Ridge Unity Task Force, an inter-religious organization combating discrimination. (He also launched an unsuccessful campaign for the New York City Council in 2018.) He was deeply rooted in the community, and was a natural to cross the culture canyon, being both a Christian and an Arab.

I remember calling Khader after I took my call in Philadelphia. At the time, he lamented that congregants were stealing Salam Arabic’s Bibles. We joked that theft of the Bible might not actually be a sin, but I told him I’d pass the hat at Faith Lutheran to purchase more copies of the Bible in Arabic. In exchange, Khader wrote my congregation a lovely thank-you letter praising their new pastor.

I spoke with him only once after that, in the aftermath of 9/11. I called to ask if he and the people of Salam were okay. I remember the matter-of-fact tone of his voice when he replied, “We are under police protection.”

The conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is, for many Americans, I suspect, little more than an arcane blip on the evening news. I believe the right-wing’s slavish devotion to Israel has less to do with Judaism and democracy than it has to do with the doctrine of many Evangelical Christians who see an apocalyptic and prophetic significance in Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem. In my opinion, this doctrine is, at the least, poor Biblical scholarship. At the most it is a dangerous heresy which disregards the rights of thousands of human beings. I am grateful to Khader for putting a human face on this situation, and I pray that he will continue in his mission to bring people together and enhance our understanding of one another.

If you want to learn more about this remarkable Christian, you can read this article by clicking on Khader.

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