47. On the road to Jericho, 1998

In which a story is told.

It's an ancient story. But 2,000 years later, who is who? Is the past even past?

Eleanor

When we stop for lunch the group spreads out in clusters, ungainly and indelicate among the dainty drifts of spring wildflowers. Out come thermoses and water bottles, sandwiches and hummus, fresh fruit and veggies. Some spread out clothes and picnic; others perch on rocks and snack; others lean back on boulders, tip hats forward and doze in the crisp sun.

We’re a larger group than the usual Sunday walkers today. For this special excursion, a walk on the old Roman road from Jerusalem to Jericho, Jerry has opened up the hike to others.

“Father Jerry,” someone asks after a while, “so would this also be the road in the Good Samaritan story?”

“Yes,” Jerry answers in his broad Irish brogue. “You can see how the landscape lends itself to ambushes and attacks, there are so many places to hide. In Jesus’s time the Roman road was also called ‘The Way of the Blood’. It was notorious for being dangerous.”

“What’s the Good Samaritan story?” someone else asks, from behind me.

Jerry looks at Nigel, sitting next to him, “Would you do us the honors, Nigel?”

“Sure,” Nigel drawls lightly in his American accent. A hand comes up behind his ear, and scratches lightly, while he thinks. “It’s one of the parables that Jesus tells. One day when Jesus was teaching, a lawyer among the crowd asked him ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus asked him, ‘What does the law say?’ ‘That one must love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, and love your neighbor as yourself,’ replied the lawyer,” Nigel intones with a hint of an eye roll. He’s playing with us—he knows this phrase has got to be grooved into our brains—those of us who are Christian, at least.

“‘That’s right,’ said Jesus,” Nigel continues, “But the lawyer being a lawyer though,” and there are chuckles among the group who know the parable, “wasn’t satisfied that was specific enough. ‘Who is my neighbor?’ he asked Jesus. And Jesus answered by telling the story of the Good Samaritan.

“One day there was a Jewish man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho,” Nigel pauses and gestures back towards where we have been walking, “on this road.” What was once the road is now rugged terrain, covered with spring’s soft green fuzz. But every now and then the actual road is visible. Jerry has stopped in various places throughout the morning, explaining construction techniques and Roman road technology. For its time it was incredibly sophisticated.

But I turn my attention back to Nigel and the story he is telling. While I know it well, it’s interesting to hear how Nigel is telling it.

“And he was attacked by robbers, stripped of all his possessions and left naked and half dead on the side of the road,” Nigel looks around and points to a large boulder next to the trail, “over there.” We all turn to look. It's as if I really can see a naked man, crumpled and beaten, bloodied and bruised, at the base of the boulder. I shudder.

“Sometime later a Jewish priest passed by, saw the man, but instead of helping him, he just moved to the other side of the road and kept on going.” Again Nigel gestures with his hand, indicating how the priest just wanted to get away from this uncomfortable sight.

Here, in this land, I now have an understanding of exactly how and why this happens. It had always puzzled me before. I see it and live it, everyday. It’s exactly how I’ve come to expect an Israeli to see a Palestinian. Or rather not see. Israel will not see the suffering of its occupation. Even the staff in Tel Aviv doubt it. Other than Hettie, and very occasionally the Ambassador, they never even come to the West Bank or Gaza to see what life here is actually like, while Francois and I are always in and out of Israel.

“Then later,” Nigel continues, “a Levite, a higher level of Jewish priest, passed by. Same thing. He saw the man, moved to the other side of the road, and kept on going.”

Something else strikes me now. While I’ve heard the parable many times growing up, I’d never really considered until now what it must be like to actually witness a human body in such a state. I can feel the oppositional pull of wanting to help, and fearing to help. It’s deeply uncomfortable to see the fragility of the human body. And being here, in the actual landscape of the story, and in a land so pregnant with violence all the time, I feel the fear of making oneself a target by coming too close.

“Some hours later a Samaritan passed by. The Samaritans were despised enemies of the Jews. But this Samaritan saw the man, tended to him, put him on his donkey, and brought him the rest of the way to Jericho,” Nigel gestures towards the horizon, below which Jericho lies, “where he took him to a hotel and instructed the owner, let’s call her Val” and Nigel winks towards Val, the owner of the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, “to look after the man. And he pre-paid her for her hospitality.

“Jesus concluded the parable by asking the lawyer, ‘Who was the neighbor?’ ‘The Samaritan,’ the lawyer replied in a sulk. ‘Go do likewise,’ Jesus instructed him.

Nigel pauses, then concludes, “And that’s the parable of the Good Samaritan.”

We sit in silence. Flies and bees buzz, but no-one moves. Hearing this story, here, in the actual landscape in which it is set—it takes on a whole new meaning than hearing it in church, or reading it in the Bible. We all seem to be reflecting on it anew.

Finally someone breaks the stillness. “Who were the Samaritans, and why were they and the Jewish people enemies?”

“Ah,” Jerry says, “good question. Without a straightforward answer.”

He pauses, clears his throat and adjusts his back against rock. “In 7th century B.C.E, there were several Israelite kingdoms in this area. There was the northern Kingdom of Samaria—roughly the northern West Bank, centered around Nablus, and part of the Galilee and northern Israel; and the southern Kingdom of Judea, roughly the southern West Bank, centered on Jerusalem and extending south to Beersheba and parts of southern Israel.” He shifts slightly again, as he settles into professorial mode. We are all his attentive students, from the most senior Ambassador, to the most junior aide, the most hardened war correspondent to the most idealistic NGO volunteer.

“The Assyrians conquered most of Samaria in the 720s B.C.E., and as was their standard policy with defeated peoples, they deported tens of thousands of people from Samaria to other parts of the Assyrian empire, and relocated other peoples from other parts of the Empire into Samaria. They did this forced intermixing as a way to control conquered peoples.”

Even Jerry in professorial mode is still fascinating to listen to. His Irish lilt, for one thing. His erudition and clarity of expression, for another. I notice how Jerry doesn’t um, or ah, or anything. He’s just direct and to the point, the master of his subject. And his bright blue eyes, while serious, are sharp. He’s in his element and clearly enjoying himself, with an audience at his feet. So this is what a perambulating PhD seminar looks and sounds like.

“The religious practices of the mixed people in Samaria,” Jerry continues, “started to diverge from those of Judea, and by the 4th century B.C.E. there was a complete schism between the two. By the time of Jesus, the two saw each other as enemies, and certainly to the Jews of Judea there was no such thing as a ‘Good Samaritan’. You know, the usual othering of ‘the enemy’ so that you are justified in not extending to them the same level of human kindness as you do to ‘your people’.” Jerry’s face is neutral, but there’s a strange mix of both sadness and hardness to his tone. Jerry rarely makes political comments, and certainly never in public. I wonder what he’s really thinking.

“That’s part of why the parable is so interesting: Jesus was very intentionally making it clear that a neighbor is not someone who looks like you or prays like you, but simply someone who acts with compassion and humanity—even if they are supposedly your enemy. You could argue he was ultimately killed for the radicalness of that view, for his insistence on loving your neighbor, no matter who they may be.”

I rest my head on my knees, and wrap my arms around my legs, rapt. I’m oblivious to the sharp pebbles pressing through my hiking pants.

“If the Samaritan had not saved the Jewish man, he would likely have died over there,” and Jerry points to the boulder Nigel had pointed out earlier, “while his own people walked by, more concerned with religious purity than with human kindness.”

Jerry goes silent. After a moment there’s a collective shifting and adjusting, as we become aware again of hard ground pressing into soft skin, the buzzing of flies, the warmth of the spring sun, and the current-day reality of this land and its peoples. This land can be so beautiful, I think, like now in the spring. And it can be so brutal. At the same exact time.

In the lingering silence, I look around me: where we’ve walked from, where we’re walking to, and the ghost of that broken and beaten man against that rock being gently picked up and placed on a donkey. The ancient past and the present blur into one. The past is never dead. Sitting here on a crisp spring day in 1998, on a two thousand year old Roman road, the past is very, very present.

“There’s still a tiny Samaritan community—some in Nablus, some in Israel,” Nigel’s quiet voice is the first to break the silence this time, his face somber. “We went to visit the community in Nablus. Many Samaritans there see themselves as Palestinian, not Israeli, even though they also have Israeli citizenship. It’s complicated.”

“Not really,” someone behind me mutters. “Samaritan Palestinians, Arab Israelis, Jewish Iranians: faith and ethnicity not lining up with borders is nothing new.”

“Sounds like Jesus was the first person to describe what we today would call the bystander effect,” says someone I recognize from the American Consulate General.

“What’s the bystander effect?” someone else asks.

“The idea that bystanders—those who witness or observe—someone else being hurt, don’t intervene, or stop to help them, or call for help. It was described by some psychologists after the murder of, I forget her name—”

”Kitty Genovese,” says Nigel softly.

“Right, Kitty Genovese, in New York City in the 1960s. She was stabbed to death right outside her apartment. It was witnessed by dozens of people, but no one intervened, or called the police.”

We all go quiet again, the spring air suddenly chill. We are all bystanders here, I think. Except for the Israelis and Palestinians.

“Right,” says Jerry, breaking the silence. “Time to move on. We still have a ways to go.”

Soon we are moving once more. I fall towards the back of the group, appreciating the silence and space to think. The lunch time conversation keeps replaying in my head: how the peoples of this region just don’t fall—have never fallen—into the neat buckets idealogues want to put them in. How one, in its hurt, has turned to hating the other. And that even that is nothing new.

From a different country, but a not too different context, come Alan Paton’s words in Cry the Beloved Country, a book Mum required us to read in Standard Eight. “I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we have turned to hating.” I fear that we’re already past that point here. Too many young Palestinians are already being radicalized by the ongoing Israeli occupation. Resistance is used to justify more repression, which grows more resistance, and around and around we go. The Oslo accords were supposed to break the cycle and bring peace; but all they seem to have brought is more settlements and more restrictions, the noose of occupation and control tightening and tightening. Wissam was saying just yesterday how before the Oslo accords Palestinians could drive all over the West Bank, even go to Jaffa or Haifa, without crossing a single check-point, while now the check-points and the settlers-only roads keep on proliferating, along with the settlements. The two go hand in hand.

But then it’s also personal. Have I been a Good Samaritan or a priest or Levite? I know I want to say I’ve helped more than looked away, but how true is that really? Take Becca for instance. How is it possible that someone, who was so intimately familiar to me and my family, was essentially still a stranger about whom I know little? Once I really came to understand what it meant to be a domestic servant in South Africa, how Becca had left behind her own young children in Mamelodi to work for Mum and Dad and care for Tig and I, what did I do to try to change the situation? By that time Becca was just a part of our lives—it was inconceivable that she wouldn’t be there. She wasn’t family, but she was more present in Tig’s and my life than our grandparents in Natal. And even with her retirement, the idea that Mum could cope without a maid now, especially with Henry, is preposterous. The older and bigger he gets, the less Mum has the physical strength to manage him. So of course Mum and Dad still have a maid.

My thoughts turn to my non-white St Anne’s classmates. Some of the Indian girls used to invite us to their homes in Laudium, but I don’t remember any of the black girls doing that. Or was I just not asked? Did I really have any idea of the reality of their lives? They shared very little. I did know from Mphiso that the reason she was a boarder rather than a day-girl was because it wasn’t safe for her to travel to and from Mamelodi to a “white school”. Her parents were seen as collaborators and sell-outs, using their wealth to buy a place in white South Africa.

Have I been just a bystander to my classmates, to Becca?

It’s a discomforting thought.

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Bonus Material

• Father Jerrry and the Road to Jericho: photos

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