According to the scholars, the context of Isaiah's words was the Jewish return to a homeland after years in exile in Babylon. The heart longs for home and all that home means—familiarity, safety, rest, comfort, freedom from fear, and belonging.
The prophet's words have framed the millennia-long desire of exiled Jews—those who mourn in Zion—to return home.
Christians have traditionally used the prophet's words in the season of Advent to express longing for the coming of God—mystically the heart's true home. All people long for freedom from oppression, liberty, comfort, and gladness. Advent (the four weeks before Christmas) is a yearly opportunity to long with those who long for a homeland.
During this semester I have been working with my son Ben on a short book looking at lessons for Gaza from Northern Ireland, and the process of peace. Ben is a historian with expertise in the end of the British Empire, and I have worked in the philosophy of peace and conflict. Between us, we wanted to look at how the peace process in Northern Ireland might be a model for the peace process in Israel/Palestine.
As part of my research I have had opportunity to read and consider the complexities of the situation in the Middle East, especially that in greater Israel. I have been deeply moved by the longing of the Jewish people for a homeland, after suffering centuries of pogroms in Europe that culminated in the Holocaust. I have read of the early Jewish settlers in Palestine, clinging to the land, trying to make a living, creating beauty in the desert. I have read of their anguish and fear, rooted in the fact that so many seem bent on their eviction from the land, if not their destruction. I have been amazed at the tenacity of the Jewish people in the face of huge obstacles to create a homeland.
I have read, too, of the longing in the Palestinian people for a homeland—a land that was theirs but from which they have been evicted or else confined as in a prison, with the loss of freedom and a myriad of restrictions. I have also read of the literal imprisonment and torture of even young Palestinian boys. The continuing conflict in the Gaza Strip is heart-breaking.
The prophet Isaiah's words of comfort and gladness for the oppressed, and those without a home, found resonance with generations of European Jewish people who had known oppression, captivity, mourning, and ashes. Can Palestinians—who today know oppression, captivity, mourning, and ashes—find hope in those same words?
A tragedy of history is that, too often, when one finds a home one loses a home. What if the prophet's words were not on behalf of one at the expense of the other? What if we learn to share our home with other's whose home it is also?
Of the many books I have studied (and if you have time to read only one) I commend Ari Shavit's My Promised Land. Shavit is an Israeli journalist who writes with deep empathy for both Palestinians and Israelis. It is a profound read.
Whether Ben and I have anything useful to say will have to wait for the publication of the book in the new year.
With longing, and in hope for, "home,"
+Ab. Andy