Won't you be my neighbour?

This morning, our first morning in Edinburgh, we went to church service at St. Giles Cathedral. Fourteenth century and incredibly imposing, it was very different from the modern church we normally attend. We kept seeing a man standing to the side of the congregation, before realizing that it was a statue of John Knox, looking as Calvinistically dour as ever. The day ended up being filled with references to the various wars between Scotland and the "auld enemy" England, especially as we toured Edinburgh Castle. This, together with the fact that I have been studying the British Civil Wars in detail, made St. Giles a particularly appropriate place to start our visit. The Lonely Planet Pocket Edinburgh (Travel Guide) informs me that the cathedral's "proudest moment came in 1637 when a woman called Jenny Geddes, incensed at the king's attempts to impose bishops on Scotland, hurled her stool at the dean and ignited a riot whose aftermath led to the signing of the National Covenant at Greyfriars the following year." The service varied from what we are used to in several ways, not least because we have spent over a year at Providence Presbyterian Church trying to remember to ask forgiveness for our debts, but here in the "Mother Church of Prebyterianism" we asked forgiveness for our trespasses.

Also known as the High Kirk of Edinburgh, it is the Mother Church of Presbyterianism. (www.stgilescathedral.org.uk) John Knox

After the opening hymn, the minister — today the Very Reverend Dr. Finlay A.J. Macdonald — gave The Bidding. He opened by recounting how strange he found it, when a child, to see grown ups cry because they were happy. He was used to crying when sad, but the concept that one could cry in response to almost any emotion was unknown to the child.
Eventually he would understand the "tears of a clown." And so the Rev. Macdonald acknowledged the passing of Robin Williams. He noted how often it is the depressive who makes the best comedian, and Robin Williams was both to the extreme.
The discussion of weeping for joy was relevant to both readings. From the Old Testament, we heard the story of Joseph's reunion with his brothers, and from the New Testament the story of the Prodigal son. In both cases there was copious joyful weeping at the reconciliation.

It was from the Old Testament reading that Rev. Macdonald drew his sermon. He spoke of the terrible conflicts occurring in Gaza and Iraq: conflicts that seem to have been going on forever, dying down for a while, then flaring back up. He covered the history of the Jewish people, very briefly, from Abraham's move to Canaan, which might be called the first establishment of a state of Israel, to the modern day.
Rev. Macdonald described his meetings with various prominent figures connected with the crisis in Gaza. In particular, he recounted his meeting with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. (Meeting Muftis would appear to be something of a habit for Rev. Macdonald, who has also used fiction (perhaps more clearly) to illustrate his interfaith ideals.) The Grand Mufti described the time before the establishment of Israel, when Muslim, Christian, and Jew lived side by side in peace, looking out for their neighbours regardless of religion. That changed in 1948 with the formation of the Jewish State of Israel. Now, Arabs were clearly established as a lesser class of citizen. Indeed, the Mufti's own aunt, who had been out of the country at the time, was told that she would not be readmitted unless she could demonstrate that she had done something of benefit to Jews. Fortunately, she had wet-nursed a Jewish neighbour's infant, and so was allowed back into what she had previously though of as her country.
What Rev. Macdonald was describing was a cultural condition about which I have read frequently. Michael Gorkin describes it excellently in Days of Honey, Days of Onion, The Story of a Palestinian Family in Israel, which I read several years ago. I have also just finished reading Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited. Thurman vividly describes the state of the Jewish people under the Roman occupation. He elucidates the fear and anger that would have inhabited every Jewish heart, as they realize that a Roman could easily kill them with complete impunity. They were powerless. They could not depend on the law, because the law was Roman.
Thurman could sympathize with the Jewish plight because he had experienced a very similar imbalance of power growing up black in the first half of the 20^th century. It is exactly this feeling of powerlessness, of not being able to expect any support from the justice system, that was behind the powerful public reaction to the murder of Trayvon Martin, and more recently of Michael Brown. In its first appearance, the shooting of Trayvon Martin looked like a return to the days where a white man could shoot a black man dead, tell the police "he threatened me," and that would be the end of it. The fact that George Zimmerman is technically Hispanic rather than a member of the white majority was not important. The whole incident smelled of a member of the powerful social group almost randomly killing a member of the powerless group with no repercussions. It was the inaction of the police that gave the incident significance, not the actions of the individuals involved.
Ironically, the Roman occupation was not the only time the Jews experienced being a powerless subjugated group. It had happened before, when Joseph brought his people to Egypt to survive the seven years of famine, the circumstances described in today's Old Testament reading. They would become a slave people to the Egyptions, a powerless group subject to the whims of their Egyptian masters and neighbours. Finally, Moses would fix the situation by taking his people away, after demonstrating to Pharaoh the fact that the Jewish people were actually just as powerful as the Egyptians, through the power of their God. This might be seen as the second establishment of a state of Israel, as the Jews took back their homeland by slaughtering the current inhabitants.
Relations with their neighbours were never good, and on at least one other occasion the Jewish people were taken from their land, and subsequently allowed to return. Finally, the Romans destroyed the Temple and Israel in 70 AD in response to a failed rebellion.
So began the diaspora, the dispersal of the Jewish people to other nations, where almost invariably they were regarded as second-class citizens, abetted by their determination, codified in their religious traditions, not to assimilate, but to remain a people apart from their non-Jewish neighbours.
So persecution continued. I have a saying: "there is no us without a them." A major part of the identification of a clan group is to be clear about who is excluded from the group, and to emphasize those aspects of the prohibited group that mark them as inferior. It helps to have a clear visual cue that a person is from the excluded group. In Shakespeare's day, this was the red cap Jews were required to wear, the fore-runner of Hitler's yellow star. Of course, black people are born with their mark of subjugation all over their skin.
It is possible for members of the weaker group to try to hide their group identity, to try to pass as not being from the despised group. This was the basis of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Of course this option is rarely available to black people (although there are accounts of black children trying to scrub their skin white in order to ascend above their despised status). Occasionally, a person of mixed parentage has been able to "pass for white." Note that it is an indication of the inferior status of the black person in our society that one is considered black if one has any discernible black heritage. It does not have to be so: there are areas of South America where the reverse is true — one is considered black only if one has no discernible white heritage.
It can be even more difficult, and indeed controversial, to define group membership. For example, is a transgender woman to be accepted as a woman? Michelle Goldberg, in a recent article in The New Yorker, examines this issue. A radical sect of feminists will not accept transgender women as equal partners in the fight for equality, on the basis that the latter group had a choice to become a woman. Those born into womanhood were subjugated to a second-class existence without choice.
This argument ignores the fact that one does not have a choice in one's self-identity. It is psychologically damaging to think of one-self as, say, a woman, but be perceived and expected to behave, as a man. This was the problem with Don't Ask, Don't Tell. For a homosexual or transgender person to have to live his life presenting himself as something he is not — to live a lie — is to deny his very self. It sends the clear message that what he is is valueless; thus he must instead portray himself as something that he is not.
The option to blend in to the dominant group is not even always available, as for the black person. Additionally, when the dominant group is using the inferior group to focus hatred and blame, as the Third Reich did with the Jews (and homosexuals and gypsies), they will go to great lengths to root out and expose imposters. This is another way of making clear to the weaker group the inferiority of their position.
It is common practice for the powerful group to reinforce the separation of the powerless group by finding, which most often means fabricating, reasons for the powerful to fear and despise the weak. Examples abound: the myth that Jews steal unbaptized babies to use their blood in religious rites; the myth of the over-sexed black male who will rape an innocent white girl given the slightest opportunity (as so ably described by Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird); the myth that the homosexual will seek every opportunity to force himself sexually on straight men.
We see similar mechanisms being used even today to focus blame on certain disadvantaged groups, such as immigrants from South and Central America, and welfare recipients. Ignoring all evidence, we portray these groups as full of criminals (in the case of immigrants, violent criminals) who are leaching off the hard-earned beneficence of the rest of "us." Creating fear of, and thus hatred for, some conveniently weak group is a well-practised, and (unfortunately) very effective method for uniting the "in" group, and deflecting attention away from the failures of one's own leaders.
In her book The Teacher Wars, Dana Goldstein notes that throughout history, discussions of education in the U.S. have been framed in terms of moral panic. Noah Berlatsky explains the term moral panic in his review of The Teacher Wars in The Atlantic, quoting Goldstein, as occurring when "policymakers and the media focus on a single class of people ... as emblems of a large, complex social problem." Berlatsky goes on to argue that moral panics not only demonize a group, they actually create the group. He cites as examples the moral panics in the '80s and '90s around poverty, which led to the creation of the "welfare mother." (And this was even before Fox News became such a powerhouse!) After the 11 September, 2001 attacks, Islam began to be viewed as a "dangerous identity and a problem to be studied, controlled, and policed. The control and policing is important. Moral panics create identities in order to regulate them."
The problem in all of this is our insistence on pigeon-holing people into groups. It is a heuristic that has been selected for by evolutions, because it allows us rapidly to assess a new person using intuition (or System 1 thought, in the terms of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow). By rapidly assigning a person to a group, we can (unconsciously) make assumptions about them and their potential actions without having to exert the conscious effort to know and understand the person. Seeing a young man in a sleeveless shirt with tattoos on his arms and neck, for example, most of us will almost unavoidably assign him to the group Gang Member, and assess him as a threat. George Zimmerman did the same with Trayvon Martin: seeing a young black male in a hoodie. In contrast, most of us seeing a person in a policeman's uniform will, again unconsciously, assess him as a friend and protector (although the young black male is more likely, in contrast, to see him as a threat). This is a fact that can be exploited by criminals.
We all assign people to groups like this. It is uncontrollable.

A while ago, during one of my many long sojourns in an airport, I sat on a bench behind a young, very overweight couple. I found, unbidden, the categorizations flooding into my mind: lazy, uneducated, lacking in self-control. I have a bias about overweight people. It is easy for me to ignore my own lack of self-control (especially for gummi bears) in order to deride others for their supposed lack. But as I sat and listened to their conversation (it's what I do in airports — a result of 24 years practice as a professional eavesdropper as a submariner) I learned more about them. As they chatted excitedly about science fiction and Dungeons & Dragons, I welcomed them instead as fellow members of my own group: Nerds!
Which introduces another point: we work hard to assign ourselves to groups — yes, the Hogwarts Sorting Hat is alive and well in the real world. (I am in Ravenclaw, in case you wondered.) We join fraternities, sororities, professional organizations, even gangs as a way to belong to a group. We even declare allegiance to sports teams for this purpose. Often, we choose groups to join in order to establish prestige. For example, a friend of mine is anxious to let it be known that he is a frequent visitor to the various airline VIP lounges. Similarly, in our society, being seen to be Christian can be a way to gain prestige by being in the "in" group.
But this was not the case at the time of Jesus, a fact that it is easy to forget given the modern position of Christians as the dominant group. In biblical times, to be seen to be a follower of Jesus of Nazareth was to be denigrated as a trouble-maker, intent on overturning the very comfortable position of privilege that had been obtained by the Pharisees and Sadducees. Marcus Borg describes this situation vividly in The Last Week. It is also easy to forget the position of the Samaritans in society at the time. We have come to know only The Good Samaritan, and so being identified today as a samaritan is a compliment. The primary definition in most dictionaries is a charitable or helpful person. But in the days of Christ, they were looked down on as heretics.
The parable of The Good Samaritan, however, is where Jesus provides us the answer to the problems we have been discussing. In Luke 10, starting at verse 25, a lawyer tries to test Jesus by asking "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Like any good Jewish arguer, Jesus answers the question with a question (or two): "what is written in the law? What do you read there?" There follows perhaps the most succinct statement of righteous living (which is also found stated by Jesus in Matthew 22:37-40 and Mark 12:29-31): "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." (Bible quotes are taken from the NSRV.) And this, at least in Luke, from the lips of a lawyer! [Here, of course, I vilify the group "lawyers."]
(There is a shorter statement of righteous living, from Rabbi Hillel the Elder: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is explanation; go and read it." Interestingly, Rabbi Hillel was a contemporary of Jesus, living roughly 30 BCE to 10 CE.)
But the lawyer was not done. They never are. Now the crux of the question: I have to love my neighbour, but "who is my neighbor?" In other words, which people should I include in this group that we are going to call "my neighbours" whom I am compelled to love? There follows, in verses 30 through 37, the parable of the Good Samaritan.The meaning is clear: Every person is your neighbour. "Go and [show mercy like the Samaritan in the story]" is what Jesus instructs the lawyer to do. The answer is to stop seeing people as Samaritan or Jew, as Palestinian or Israeli, as Black or White, as homosexual or heterosexual, as Yankee or Rebel, as Roundhead or Cavalier, as Hindu or Moslem, as True American or Immigrant Hispanic, even [gasp!] as Republican or Democrat. Instead, we should view each person as both a unique individual, and as a fellow member of the human race — in other words, as our neighbour.
It is easy to hate a group, because when we identify people as belonging to a group, all we see is the group identity. For example, when we think of a homosexual, it is easy to see only the sexuality, from which it is a small leap to assume that a homosexual is nothing but his homosexuality. This explains why a homosexual will, in our minds, be constantly trying to force himself sexually onto whatever male is within reach. But it is not so easy to hate an individual. People who have a close acquaintance who is homosexual also tend to be more tolerant of homosexuality. They are able to see the person, not just the group identity.
Now, finally, I understand the power of Mr. Rogers' message. A Presbyterian minister, Fred Rogers was anxious to convey to the children in  his audience that they were accepted just the way they are. They did not need to deny any aspect of themselves to be welcome and loved.
This is a message we need to learn again as adults. We are wired to put people in groups unconsciously. But by working to be aware of this instinct, and by expending the considerable effort necessary to overcome it and instead see people only as themselves, we can actually live a happier, less fearful life.

So now, finally fully understanding what it is that I am asking, I say to you:

Won't you be my neighbour?