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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