Students to Travel to Israel ‘Seeking the Peace of Jerusalem’
The group of Christian students plans to visit holy sites, practicing ‘faithful listening’ amid the Middle East Conflict

By James Todd

Thursday, Dec. 2, 2004 -- This semester, a group of Christian Duke students has been meeting to learn about and discuss the conflict in the Middle East, in preparation for a December pilgrimage to Israel and its territories.

"You’ll see that the Jordan River is more a state of mind than a body of water," Rabbi Steve Sager told the students at one of their recent weekly meetings. And Jerusalem, he said, is a place where foreigners come to "go home."

On this mid-November night, the group had gathered at the home of The Rev. Anne Hodges-Copple, the Episcopal chaplain at Duke, for a meal and discussion.

Sager’s primer on approaching the Holy Land was just one more step in a journey that 10 students from various traditions -- Episcopal, Methodist, AME Zion, Presbyterian, Baptist and others -- have been taking, as part of a yearlong program run through the Episcopal Center at Duke.

From Dec. 29 to Jan. 10, the group will travel to St. George’s College Jerusalem, a continuing education center of the Anglican Communion, of which The Episcopal Church is a part. From there, the group will journey to holy and historic sites -- Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, Bethlehem and possibly Hebron, among others -- as part of an effort to study, reflect and reach out to residents of Israel and its territories.

Sager, a visiting lecturer at Duke’s Divinity School, urged the students to seek out not only ancient sites in the Holy Land, but common people with opinions about the contemporary conflicts.

"There’s a bigger conversation going on here, and CNN isn’t covering it," he said. "If you come back clearer [about the conflicts], you’ve not been paying attention."

While the title of the journey sounds ambitious -- "Seeking the Peace of Jerusalem: Reconciliation for the Children of Abraham" -- its organizers and participants say the aim is not to "undo the knots of history," but to practice "faithful listening."

"People ask me, ’What are you going to be doing?’" said senior Mel Baars, one of the students going on the trip. "And I’m like, ’Talking to people."

"It’s kind of like a mission trip, but we’re not going to be building homes."

The group’s mission has already intersected with developments on campus and in the wider world.

Most of the students attended events during Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM) conference, held at Duke in October. The events they attended included those that were part of the conference, as well as related events planned by such groups as the Joint Israel Initiative.

"We had been contemplating this trip for so long and suddenly the whole campus had their opinions," said Maddie Dewar, a junior majoring in public policy. The strong, sometimes strident, opinions she heard during the conference contrasted with the group’s slow, reflective discernment process, she said.

The controversy surrounding the conference only strengthened junior Jonathan Fisher’s commitment to the trip. "This is in my backyard -- I need to learn what is going on over there," he remembers thinking.

The campus debates raised a question for senior Terry Love, a religion and economics major considering ordination: "If there’s such polarization here, how are we going to go (to Israel), and -- Bam! -- fix this?"

Another development is putting the group closer to the center of the ongoing Middle East conflict: After the death of Chairman Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority has scheduled elections to replace him on Jan. 9, the group’s second-to-last day in the region.

Some group members see providence in the fact that their trip comes at a time of intense debate about the Middle East, both on campus and abroad. All sense adventure.

"It’s part of the theme of this trip that we don’t know what’s coming tomorrow," said Claire Dietrich, a junior and student organizer for the group.

Hodges-Copple said the genesis of the trip goes back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the Episcopal Center agreed to host a talk by three Middle Eastern women representing the three major faiths of the region. Since then, the center and its Episcopal Student Fellowship have sponsored or attended lectures by Jews, Christians and Muslims from Jerusalem, the West Bank, England and the United States -- including a pair of speakers with opposing views on Christian Zionism.

The trip to Israel is only the midpoint in the group’s journey. Upon returning, they will continue meeting to find ways to turn their faithful listening into faithful speaking.

"We cannot know prior to our trip what ideas and models for peacemaking will unfold," Hodges-Copple wrote in the proposal for the program. But afterwards, "we hope to create alliances with Jewish and Muslim students for more dialogue about the religious as well as political components for a just and lasting peace in Palestine/Israel."

The trip is officially being sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina and not Duke because the university, based on a State Department advisory, is not currently sponsoring travel to Israel.

Hodges-Copple said she recognizes the trip involves some risks absent in other study abroad programs, but trusts the experience of St. George’s College’s staff and her colleague Donna Hicks, who has participated in peace delegations to Israel.

"Christians take risks," Hodges-Copple said, "but we don’t call it ‘risk,’ we call it ‘steps of faith.’"