“You have to love the neighbor,” says the Orthodox Jewish rabbi, quoting from Leviticus in the Torah. “And the Palestines are my neighbors.”
Rabbi Menachem Froman, with a long white beard flowing directly down from the temples of his bald head, makes this declaration in the new documentary film, “A Third Way,” to be screened Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Greenfield Garden Cinemas. The screening, sponsored by the Israel Dialogue Project of Greenfield’s Temple Israel will include an appearance by and talkback with the film’s director, Harvey Stein.
Froman moved to the West Bank settlement of Tekoa in 1973 — the same year as Israel’s Yom Kippur War — after completing his studies, expecting to learn Arabic and live in peace with his Arab neighbors, and he eventually became chief rabbi.
“Our goal is to foster a civil dialogue around Israel-Palestine, in an environment of safety and ideas, to tell true stories about what’s going on over there,” said Temple Israel’s Rabbi Andrea Cohen-Kiener, who took part in her Compassionate Listening trip to work with Palestinians and Israelis shortly after becoming spiritual leader here last fall. Cohen-Kiener, who has led groups for the Compassionate Listening Project to help all sides in the conflict listen one another, has begun compassionate listening training in the community as well here, giving the Greenfield temple’s Israel Dialogue Project the impetus to re-establish itself after a brief hiatus.
“Israel is a real core identity piece for lot of American Jews, pretty much everyone, who grew up at the end of the Holocaust and around the establishment of the Israeli state out of that trauma,” she explained. “By and large, it’s hard to talk about because people are afraid, on both sides. On both sides, people feel ‘the way you’re doing this is making us less safe: the way you’re defending Israel all time’ or ‘you’re being too trusting and weak and not driving a hard bargain, and being naive.’”
The rabbi said the difficulty in all situations is the set of assumptions and different perspectives we all bring to looking at issues, and the fears that people are dealing with. The Compassionate Listening approach — listening without judgment, reflecting back to make sure the complexities of what’s being said are fully heard and understood but never argued with — aims “to touch the common human feeling, and then you can find an affinity, a wish for things to be well. It’s a way to raise empathy, but safety has to be part of it.”
So with as simple a teaching as “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” Rabbi Froman — who died of cancer three years ago, as the film was being made — works at bringing together the diverse community of Tekoa through ongoing dialogue and compassion.
In one scene of the film, he invokes a gesture of the 19th-century Hasidic teacher, Nachman of Breslav, instructing a gathering, “Take your left land, and take your right hand, and keep in mind all the opposing forces, and slowly they clash and clash, until the coming together turns into a joyous clapping by everyone.”
Ziad Sabatin, a Palestinian living in the occupied territories tells the camera that his hope is to do away with the fear that exists between people. “The best way … is meeting.”
And sitting around at a meal after Froman’s death, his widow, Hadassah, tells her neighbors how he used to say, “Settlers and people who live on the ground here are the fingers that touch one another, and the ones who can make peace.”
Richard Witty of Greenfield, a longtime friend of Stein’s and who is hosting the director on this part of his tour with the film, said the film is provides a close-up view of the possibilities suggested by the friendship brought about by Froman and his neighbors.
“The film is about people that have concluded that ‘enough is enough.’ … ‘We are here together whether we chose that or not. It is obvious that you have a human side, and now you must see that we have a human side.’”
There is more than just the concept of co-existence as talk here, says Witty, who has visited the region several times. There are cross-cultural economic cooperatives being formed, as well as efforts to create joint mediation and even discussion of nongovernmental joint administration.
And yet, for both sides, he says, “The terror is real.”
And in the random violence that does continue, Froman’s own pregnant daughter-in-law was stabbed in January by a Palestinian teenager. But Hadassah Froman urged calm, telling reporters, “My life’s work is near-daily contact with the Palestinian public,” calling for Israel to “embrace” that part of the Palestinian populace that seeks coexistence.
On the Web: www.youtu.be/4NxEZT8EjBU