From Times OnlineDecember 30, 2007 A Life in the Day: Rabbi Ascherman c/o Times of London

From Times OnlineDecember 30, 2007

A Life in the Day: Rabbi Ascherman
The executive director of the Jerusalem-based Rabbis for Human Rights, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, 48, is a Zionist and humanitarian. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Einat, also a rabbi, and their two children: Adi, 8, and Ayal, 5

My day starts around 5am. By nature I’m a late-night person — I’ll maybe work till 1 or 2 in the morning or later, but I still get up at 5.

The rest of the family are still fast asleep. For breakfast I usually have cereal and milk, and I’ll grab a coffee.

Then around 6am I go and meet the bus taking our volunteers — local Israelis who support our humanitarian cause — to help with the Palestinian olive harvest in the village olive groves on the West Bank. I brief them on the day’s task ahead, and warn them that they may face violence, verbal and physical, so they need to know who to call, how to behave, how to protect themselves, and how to protect the Palestinians they are working with.

After the bus goes off I either go to the office or home and squeeze out half an hour on the computer, until around 7 or 7.30, when I’ll wake up the children. Adi and Ayal may be eight and five, but they’re already teenagers in training. By this time I’ll also be on the phone, putting out fires — maybe the army has not shown up to protect us, as promised. Or perhaps, having agreed to allow us to work at an agreed location, they’re now making problems.

When I look at the suppression of the Palestinian people — the home demolitions, the settler violence — I ask myself: “Is this what Zionism has come to? Is this what we created the state of Israel for? To be demolishing the home of this or that person to whom we never gave a fair chance to build legally?” This is not what Zionism is about. And it is certainly not what Judaism is about. For me, the real Zionism today is creating an Israel that is not only physically strong, but morally strong, and which reaches our highest Jewish values.

So many times I’ve seen Palestinian homes demolished — it’s like a d�jà vu. A 10-year-old sees Israeli forces tear down his home and his parents humiliated in front of his eyes. And the parents turn to me and say: “What do we say to our child when he sees what has just been done and tells us, ‘I want to grow up to become a terrorist’? We want our 10-year-old to know that not every Israeli comes to demolish our homes. We want him to understand that there are Israelis who stand shoulder to shoulder to help us rebuild our houses.”

I often don’t have time for lunch, but if it’s an office day I’ll run across the street and get some rolls and cheese and go back to my desk and eat while I’m on the phone or meeting with people. When I’m out in the olive groves with the volunteers, lunch is sometimes just drinking water. Palestinians are incredibly hospitable, so often they’ll share what little they have with us — humus, cheese, olives, tomatoes, bread... And I have to tell you that no lunch tastes as good as when sitting outdoors and sharing this fellowship, crossing the divides that everyone thinks are uncrossable.

Only I, as an Israeli, can break down the stereotypes so many Palestinians have about Israelis — thereby empowering Palestinian peacemakers to be listened to by their own people. And only Palestinians can empower me to be heard down my street. We are thereby totally interdependent. And almost every day, when I or any of our volunteers are out there in the field, exchanging views with Palestinians and sometimes with settlers — a process I call “the dialogue of the olive groves” — we build bridges of peace between us.

One day when I was out there I met a young man who was taking time off from his normal job to help with the harvest. His day job is being a member of the Palestinian Authority’s Presidential Guard. He was surprised to find himself harvesting Palestinian olives alongside an Israeli rabbi. He said to me: “This makes no sense. Why are you here? Explain this to me.” So I talked to him about the Jewish tradition of justice, of rights, and of helping your neighbour. He replied: “Well, for us Palestinians there is no justice.” We were not far off the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah — lighting one candle of the menorah on the first night, a second on the next night until by the eighth day all the candles are burning. So my reply to him was: “When all is dark you have to start by lighting that first candle.”

Having spent all day in the olive groves, I’ll have a couple of hours’ catch-up to do in the office. At the end of the afternoon everyone else in the office is about to leave, but my day is far from over. The struggle amid all this is to try to get home and spend some time with my children. So I try to get back around 8pm to give them a bath and talk with them a little bit, help put them to bed, say evening prayers with them — and if priorities allow me to do so, fall asleep with them, then get up in the small hours to continue preparations for the day’s work ahead. If I can’t get away to do this, my wife, who is also a rabbi and dean of the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary, puts the children to bed.

I’m so exhausted. I count how many hours I’m going to get to sleep. Will it be four hours, five hours? And I fall asleep thinking we must distinguish between the terrorist coming to murder my children, on the one hand, and the family that simply wants to put a roof over their heads or harvest their olives on the other. And if we can think like that, I believe our world would be so much better.

Interview by Peter Small. Photograph by Heidi Levine




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