August 20, 2015

August 20, 2015

Before noon

The Bridge has already connected both shores. The curtain woven during the last few days hangs spread out among the trees at the gates of the amphitheatre. The scenography is almost ready.

The Saturday Mystery Play is approaching.

Just two days left.

The morning workshop in the tent by the lake is a meeting with Gwen. Yesterday she talked about Colombia and the Community of Peace, today she begins with a simple question. About food. What tastes best? What is your favourite dish?

Simple thing, but how much emotion. Someone will talk about tomato soup, another one about Silesian dumplings. The stories include humus and falafel, Norwegian cheese and Ukrainian pancakes. And people who prepare those dishes. Krzysztof remembers: The kulebyak that my mother made brings her memory. Though she died a long time ago, whenever I eat something that at least to some degree tastes like this dish, I feel as if she came to me, to take care of me, to hug me.

Martin, a newcomer (related to the Slot Art Festival, came here with others, like Paweł and Andrzej) feels alike. He speaks not about dishes, but people who prepared them for him or shared with him. The experience of a common meal.

The conversation takes a long time, it triggers memories. But before the group continues until lunch, Gwen suggests another exercise.

- Stand in a circle, hold each other's hands, close your eyes and put your trust in the leader. Surrender to what is going to happen.

Gwen breaks the chain of hands, moves the workshop participants around and builds a new circle. It gets entangled. - Open your eyes - she orders.

The group accepts what has happened to them with a surprise. Some stand on a completely different part of the pier, imprisoned in the chains of clasped hands, turned away.

- Without talking, try to get back to the previous setting.

They try. They look for an alternative way of communication. They are confused. But then, after a while they create two circles free form any entanglements.

Long afterwards they talk about how they felt and how they managed to find a solution. - It's a great exercise to see how it feels to be part of a conflict, shifted around like a piece of furniture, without a right to say anything - someone says. - And it is great to see how to find a language for communication, to find new tools and consequently a solution. - A bit like in Zimbardo's experiment, I had to find the strength to overcome the inertia - says Marcin.

The rest of the day is spent on talking about conflict and possibilities of its solution. Everyone who knows this issue from his/her work, has his/her own definition. Also here, in this borderland, it is still a current problem.

Evening

Shortly after dark, a choir performs on the riverbank. It is a rehearsal before the climax evening. The first one. Never before has the entire Village heard the results of work, meetings, workshops to find a form suiting the sounds rising from the throats. And souls.

"Even if there were no other shore ..." - they begin their song. And they are enchanting. Groups stuck to the slopes of the amphitheatre listen to the song and music. And just a few days earlier, the choir director said: I don't know if anything could come out of it. I'm it doing for the first time.

The song does not cease. „Verbovaya doschechka, hodyt po niy Nastochka…” This Ukrainian song opened the next meeting.  And then there was the Hebrew one. „Kol ha’olam kulo, gesher tsar me’od…”

And then comes Yaarah Bar-On's voice.

She is the rector of Oranim Academic College of Education, a teacher training college in northern Israel, a gateway to Galilee. 3000 prospective teachers studying here come from different backgrounds, social and ethnic groups: Arabs, Jews, Druze, and immigrants from Africa, mainly Ethiopians.

This one is the last tale before the Invisible Bridge.

Krzysztof: - Yaarah is a historian, she writes books focusing on themes connected with women, their heritage and history. One of her books is titled Jewish Witch. But what is really important for us, from the perspective of our work, is the fact that she comes from Galilee, the land with a very characteristic borderland property: a melting pot of different human stories and fates. Her school teaches how to live in such a pot on the bordelands.

- Can we stop at that moment? - timidly suggests Yaarah, a little ashamed of her role. - I'll try to be brief and then let my work be discussed later. I'm very much interested what you may say. Please ask.

And, timidly still, she begins with a few words about herself. -  I was born in a kibbutz in the Negev desert. I spent there my first 18 years, then I moved to Tel Aviv and live there to this day. During my work as a historian, I noticed that I'm better at management of academic institutions and that is mainly what I do. Though I still teach, I primarily devote my time to creating a vision of development of educational institutions. The school where I have worked for over two years - Oranim - has meant for me coming a kind of a full circle, because this school has its roots in the kibbutz movement that I left.

Later, she told us about a broken bridge she has experienced relatively recently. - The story begins in April. A few days after the Passover, a very important feast commemorating the exodus from Egypt, we have a day  commemorating the Holocaust, and then later the Memorial Day dedicated to fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism. And also, to complicate things completely - there is the Independence Day. It is an extremely nervous time in Israel, holidays, commemoration, remembrance of the Holocaust, a lot of emotion here simmering and going out. Also,  you must know that what the Jews are celebrating is for Arabs a memory of defeat. This year's celebrations were particularly difficult because a year ago we had the war in Gaza. And to make matters worse it was also the time of elections, early elections, won by the right-wing parties. My school is perceived as leftist as it originated in the kibbutz movement, with socialist roots. Another thing you need also to know in order to understand the situation:  in Israel, there are about 20 percent of Arabs (including the Druze, Palestinians, Christians and Muslims), a similar percentage of Orthodox and rightist Jews, almost as many ultra-orthodox Jews and roughly the same number of people with their roots in the East or Eastern Europe, generally sympathetic to the right-wing parties. And this structure is fully reflected in our school. We have arrived in our story at the point of the Memorial Day - each of those groups waiting to see things happen. I was proud when I became the rector of the Oranim, because in Israel there are two places that function like bubbles - Tel Aviv and our school, oases, living a kind of a sheltered life, detached from politics and conflicts. Until this year's celebrations. On that day in Oranim, each group had the freedom to express themselves and propose some events, performance, speech - on an equal footing and the way they wished.

And there comes this music from the loudspeakers:

„Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks”

- Masters of war. This song shows how students dealt with the task. They chose this song, none other. I want you to listen to it.

Bob Dylan wrote it in May 1963. It is a protest song against sending Americans to the war in Vietnam.

- And exactly these words - says Yaarah - the students chose  to say what they think about what happened in Gaza a year ago. Immediately after the presentation a war started between those from the right and left! Internet roared, I did not sleep a few nights, I was the victim of personal attacks, they wished me dead, and government authorities - and our school is subsidized - were not happy, either. But no one really listened to the song, nor reflected on its message! We had to deal somehow with this conflict. We invited all students: from right and left, all under one tent, like the one you have here and we tried to talk to them about what happened in various circles. People from outside of the school also came, they wanted to engage in the dialogue, because they felt that something important was happening here. I do not want to report the whole discussion, but the conclusions from it are unfortunately sad. It turned out that we were not really as we had previously thought, a place for everyone. Not for those who are descendants of the founders of this country, and who today have right-wing views. Because us, "the more important ones", "the smarter ones," the leftist school founders and its avant-garde tried to educate them how to live and they found it unbearable. Our 'leftism' was intrusive -  not open. One Sephardic girl, from an Orthodox family, told me: "I do not believe there will be peace in Israel." She said it out loud for the first time, she hadn't dared earlier, because she had felt she had no right to such an opinion, because Oranim was not open to such voices. It showed me how long the road ahead of us is going to be before we create the space in which this and other voices can have the right to sound ..

Gwen joined in the discussion. - What you said is very important. I'm from London where we like to talk and think about multilateralism: that everything is ok, that we all love each other and there are no conflicts. It's a pipe dream, and we all know how difficult coexistence can be. It is good that you told us about the problems that arise in the process of building multicultural communities. How difficult this road can be and how much has to be done, day after day, to ease tensions that are unfortunately unavoidable.

- And again we have an evening when we stand on the steep shore - sums up Krzysztof. Another difficult borderland and a broken bridge we must face.