This journey from Sejny to the far south, from the arrival in Tel Aviv, brought us to the north of Israel, up there. We travelled "up our hearts", as we say in Poland proposing a toast meaning something more than the mere "Cheers!". That's how you go up the river, against the currents of life necessities and particular interest, towards what is elementary, i.e. intimately interpersonal and compassionate towards the Other. We have been hosted by your families, organizations and institutions of your local communities, by your schools and colleges, on various ethnic and religious islands of your borderland, on the broken bridges of Rosh ha-Nikra and in the circle of joint discussion of various leaders of the social and cultural life, as well as during the Sabbath supper where we sang songs of different cultures, languages and generations. We were on the shores of the sea (some even beneath its waves ...) in mountain caves, in your olive groves and gardens, markets and heritage places. We experienced the space stretched between the safety shelter in one part of the house, and a terrace open to the entire multicultural area in the other. We experienced your borderlines, fears as well as the determination for your dreams and real needs of the people be given concrete shapes. We experienced all this as much as it was only possible in such a short time, but you really did a lot to make our perception of your "small homeland" neither one-sided nor superficial. Sometimes, we conducted workshops, lectures or presentations of our work, but in fact, we participated in the invaluable to us workshop of the unusual borderland built by your common Galilee, and the lesson you gave us will remain with us forever.
Seen from a distance, through the prism of contemporary media or various kinds of ideologues, your place of living seems to be separated, deeply divided, conflicting, with no possibility of any good solution, deprived of hope. But once you reverse this perspective, as if looking through a reversed telescope, applying the zooming in option for our view of the world, then instead of the characteristic for it scattering, always susceptible to abstract concepts, you will be able to draw your attention to the very fabric of life, the smallest of its symptoms, rooted in real time and place, between actual people - and everything will seem to look different. And this we were able to experience thanks to you.
Who knows, perhaps, the act of reversing the perspective of the world view may hide one of the secrets of the art of bridge building. In this craft, one cannot falsify or manipulate, any false gesture or poisoned grain - whether it refers to wrong building material or bad intentions - can cause the collapse of the whole, arranged meticulously year by year, structure. The history of opening of bridges knows a lot of examples of builders who were dead scared of this moment of trial, when the bridge was to be crossed for the first time: they would flee, commit suicide, offer sacrifices, make confessions of their whole life, not quite sure if they managed to achieve a harmonious balance of all the elements of the building. Neimar, the name we apply to the master of this craft, is in fact an architect of the community, one who can find correspondences and consonances between sometimes very different particles, able to skillfully fit them together, constantly thinking about the whole and keeping in mind that "the devil is in the detail." Therefore, this close-up perspective is so important in the process of creating a community of the bridge: to focus on what is authentic and hidden in the depths, single and comprehensive, smallest and true. What I am telling you here was taught to us by our mentor, Czesław Miłosz, Polish poet and Nobel Prize laureate, who in a letter to Borderland wrote about the dangerous trend taking possession of modern man, consisting in "replacing all things concrete, every detail, with the so-called idées générales, as a matter of fact, specialty of French intellectuals. But we know how many vital matters, conflicts, and complications are obscured by easily accepted generalizations. Borderland [...] deals with things that in our part of Europe are particular, concrete, and at the same time life-giving".
The journey and your hospitality caused the change of the perspective. Hospitality became polyphonic. Talks were sometimes very intimate, in the kitchen or at bedtime, and sometimes more formal, but only a little bit, like during the visit of the Polish ambassador or at the working table of meetings and presentations. Stories came from different sides: Maalot, Tarshiha, M. Hil, Kfar Vradim, Yanuh, Mi’ilja, also Pkiyn and Lochamej HaGeta'ot, and more from Naharyia, Akko… Spoke both the living and the dead. Concerned about the future, they became archaeologists of memory. Languages, fates, professions, generations, cultures and worldviews overlapped. Boundaries and divisions running different than demarcation lines between peoples and religions manifested themselves. And all that within our "small homeland". Borderland knows no external borders, but boundaries running within the community of different people. Neimar's hard work consists also in the fact that nothing and no one is allowed to be left outside, excluded, missed or forgotten, no matter how much eliminating the things that bother or hurt us was to make our life "easier". A musician building an orchestra will choose its members from those who have a musical ear and talent. One that cannot keep the tone, must go. Neimar cannot afford such a comfort and should beware of the temptation of elitism. His art relies on finding fulfilment in the situation posed before him by life here and now, in a concrete environment and with concrete people. He must be a man able to encompass with his wide arms the entirety with all its possible diversity. Only then, the things which are particular and concrete, even if hurting to the bone, will be encompassed inside, communally shared and simultaneously life-giving. Things left to themselves, pushed outside the circle of the things we call ours, will always turn against us.
Coming close to the very fabric of life, thanks to the trust you placed in us, became deeper daily. This always carries in itself the risk of perceiving the darker sides of reality, that usually remain hidden. We learned then, how far the missiles fired from Lebanon can go, and about the yield they already reaped, and how to protect yourself against gas weapons, also against lack of water, which is increasingly threatening people in the era of global warming. We would find that the Kibbutz of Ghetto Fighters was established on the site of a liquidated Arab village. We found many traces of broken bridges. We were told about the inequalities in the right to acquire land and settle. Visiting Pkyin we realized that beside the Jews who used to continuously inhabit the place from the time before the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and created a good, neighborly community with the Druze and people of other ethnicities and religions, there are new Jewish settlers to whom this tradition is alien. You could go on and cite other similar examples of conflict situations, traumatic memories and not at all irrational fears. Being aware of it made us, however, better appreciate and more deeply respect all that you managed to achieve and still manage to build jointly. Your Galilee is developing literally before our eyes, with its momentum of investment, ecological and anti-exclusion sensitivity, awareness of the importance of education and culture for social change and human capital. Worthy of admiration are civic initiatives, care for beauty and tidiness of the environment, concern for management of the leisure time for the elderly, for active life of the physically disadvantaged, and for organic work towards social integration. Above all, however, you were able to show us how the different worlds of your multicultural community interweave; intrinsically linked, they interact like a system of connected vessels. This is something that cannot be seen in full from a distance, nor apprehended by any ideology that feeds on division and confrontation. For you, certainly, bridge is no abstraction. It offers a support for both fullness of the spiritual life and life’s praxis.
The Community of the Bridge is something that does not sound familiar today, essentially going against the tide of the modern mainstream. After all, in an era of growing insecurity, the crisis of the multi-culti, neighborly wars and climate change, and also caused by them new waves of migration, we care more about the community of our own family circle, our own home and our own river bank, where we need to defend our own identity and the continuity of our heritage. But, it is in your Galilee, as in other borderlands of the world, the most salient becomes the fact that such entrenchment on only one side of the river is not likely solve anything in the long run. It so happens in our life that half a sense of security, half of our own truth and half of our homeland, similarly to the pursuit of our goals stopped mid-way, is enough to fill us with joy because we have already managed so much, or gone so far. But, there comes a time when a pursuit turns out to be a halt, and the partial becomes an acute shortage. Then comes the time for reflection and action related to the art of bridge building.
No one else but you perceived in our work, in the very philosophy and practice of Borderland, something that could be useful exactly today in Galilee, and that could supplement or become included in the rich spectrum of your activity. We, on the other hand, perceived that equally important to bestowing trust on your guests, or perhaps, practically, even more difficult, is putting trust in yourself, the belief that you are able to face the challenge of your effort. The thing is to establish an individual neimar workshop concentrating on exploration and dissemination of the art of bridge building, devoting yourself to the service of the dialogue and meeting with the Other. Like in other fields, also here you can discover and develop in yourself some sort of hearing, intuition or genius which, in this case, is the skill of listening to the other, intuition of empathy and the genius of building the connective tissue. Nobody but you can be better aware of the fact that to achieve anything in this craft takes more than a one-time event or a short project. A bridge does not only rise above the river but is also immersed in it. One of the most difficult features of the craft is to release a stream of long duration: gathering at its base the deposit of the organic essence of everyday action that establishes the ethos of the borderland.
Extraordinary and memorable was our meeting in Galilee. Words can't describe how thankful we are. Toda raba, shukran jazīlan, thank you very much... More importantly, who should we be thankful to? The Bridge Community? Does it exist in Galilee? This letter tells you about how we would answer the question. But, the most important is your answer. We, people of the borderlands, felt there at home, and it is not a common thing in this world with a multitude of broken bridges. We would like you to make you feel at home when you come to visit us. And, we would like to build "The Invisible Bridge" together. The rest is action.
Keep strong!
Krzysztof Czyżewski and the Borderland team