11 November: Armistice and Remembrance
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 11 Nov 2024
René Wadlow – TRANSCEND Media Service
“If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.”
— Rudyard Kipling, Epitaphs on the War 1914-1918
During the opening years of the First World War, there was an outburst in all the belligerent countries of a nationalistic war literature and war art. This nationalistic war writing gave place after two years of fighting to poems, novels, and painting of a very different kind. In this new phase, war was represented realistically and evaluated as criminal. A whole literature crystallized around peace-making institutions such as the proposed League of Nations.
Today, the images of war in the Middle East and Ukraine have not led to new creative literature nor to proposals for peace-making institutions and processes. However, the need for dialogue among Jewish Israelis and Palestinians has led to a reading of Martin Buber (1878 -1965). At the heart of Buber’s thought was the idea of dialogue – the idea that what maters is not understanding God in abstract terms but rather entering into a relationship with him.
What twentieth-century Judaism needed was to find inspiration in the times when the divine spoke directly to the people. In his view, there were three such crucial moments. One was the age of the Biblical prophets who preached divine justice against the background of the powerful. A second period was the birth of Hasidism in the eighteenth century which used a democratic mysticism to rest authority away from Judaism’s learned elite.
The third of Buber’s Jewish inspirations is the teaching of Jesus. Jesus was a quintessentially Jewish teacher whose teaching is that God’s will is to be realized within the world. The world is holy because that is where we encounter God.
After 1938 when Buber moved to Jerusalem, he argued that Palestine should be a bi-national state shared by Arabs and Jews.
Today, many of the earlier avenues of discussions in the Middle East have been destroyed or made very difficult. We must help rebuild worldwide such avenues of communication through art and literature–a goal as we reach 11 November.
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René Wadlow is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. He is President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation and problem-solving in economic and social issues, and editor of Transnational Perspectives.
Tags: Anti-war, Gaza, Genocide, Israel, Literature, Martin Buber, Palestine, Peace, Peacebuilding, Russia, Ukraine, WWI, Warfare, West Bank
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 11 Nov 2024.
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