The Human Cohesion Project — 7 Apr 2023
Rukmini Iyer
Leadership Facilitator & Coach | Peacebuilder | Board Member | Vital Voices Fellow | Rotary Peace Fellow | Ashoka Changemakers Awardee
Originally published at Medium
Only about three times in a century do Passover, the Holy Week and Ramadan come together. This year has had a bonanza of religious confluences already with several other faiths also observing celebrations during the same time period. However, during what could have been a deeply connecting event, particularly for the Abrahamic faiths, Jerusalem is boiling, yet again.?Daliah Lavi’s song, ‘Jerusalem’?comes to mind:
Where the mothers of sons never cease their weeping
Where the fathers of faith in the ground lie sleeping
Where the seeds of time have a whirlwind reaping
Oh Jerusalem is.
Where the cobblestones
Wet with the blood of ages
Hear the echo of wheels turning history’s pages
Where the cries of fools stilled the words of sages
Oh Jerusalem is.
‘Neath an olive tree branch anyone can listen
To the song of songs as the green leaves glisten.
Then a summer rain falls and the raindrops christen
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What Jerusalem is.
And the river runs on and the world keeps turning
And the water’s cold
Though the sands are burning
And the mountains know while we still are learning
What Jerusalem is.
Oh
When will tomorrow’s sons
Tomorrow’s daughters
Never taste of the bread cast upon the waters
And put down the sword that performed the slaughters
Where Jerusalem is?
It is Good Friday. While the Quran (4:157) is often interpreted to deny the crucifixion of the Christ and instead assert that he ascended alive into heaven, another way of interpreting it also about Islam acknowledging the evolved consciousness of Prophet Isa (Jesus): so evolved, that he consciously existed beyond the ephemeral physical self, and therefore, his perpetrators were deluding themselves when they believed they could punish him. While our lived experience of trauma can steer us to look for differences, transgressions and separations between faiths (and other aspects of life), we always have access to our freewill, if we so choose, to respond to trauma by looking for connectors instead of dividers, and in the process, open up spaces for dialogue.
Ramadan Kareem. May we have the will to heal.