Rwanda
Friday night, December 29, 2017
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
I do not consider myself a big worrier. I’m generally optimistic, and take the position that even if things are going to turn out badly, worrying about it ahead of time is not going to make much difference.
But I have to admit that traveling to Rwanda did arouse some anxiety for me. I think it started with my visit to the travel doctor, who when she heard where I was traveling, seemed just a little too cheerful as she shared with me: “Well, the good news is that once you have all of the vaccines you need for this trip, you are set for life, and you can travel pretty much anywhere!” I left with live yellow fever virus pumping through my body and a pillbox with live typhoid vaccine, which I would start taking in a few days and a prescription for anti-malarial pills and an antibiotic in case of travelers’ diarrhea.
And here is the thing about the yellow fever vaccine. It is recommended for travelers from the age of 9 months up to 59 years. But I just turned 60! The doctor was very clear that because I am in such good health, I should go ahead and take the vaccine. But I just had not prepared myself mentally for taking all this live disease into my body.
I’m not a worrier, but my trip to Africa last month stretched me.....first those vaccines, then the long, long plane journey, the warnings against drinking the water, and against eating any questionable food. Walking down the street and seeing everyone looking at me, the white man, obviously American. And always in the back of my mind, the history of Rwanda, where less than twenty-five years ago, one million people were brutally massacred in just one hundred days.
I was only there for five days, but in that short time I took in so many sights, and experiences, and conversations that it will take me many months to process it all. Tonight I want to focus on one aspect of the trip, the question that felt like it was all around me, all the time, and that is “how are the people of Rwanda making sense of their past? How are they remembering and how are they thinking about the genocide, and how are they trying to heal themselves?”
For those here tonight who are wondering if this relates to this week’s Torah portion, it does. In this portion, Joseph says that he forgives his brothers, who twenty-five years earlier had nearly killed him, and had sold him into slavery. Now all these years later he says that he forgives them, but it is very unclear how deep the forgiveness goes. Near the end of the portion, his brothers say to each other: “Perhaps Joseph still hates us, and will take revenge upon us when our father dies.” The problem of whether forgiveness is ever really possible, for an act of violence and cruelty, has been with us forever....that question is alive in our Torah portion....and it is alive in Rwanda today.
It is also alive, by the way, here in the United States, as we grapple with our own past: much healing work still remains from two hundred years of brutal enslavement of black Africans, and from the virtual extermination of the first Americans, including the Chumash people, who lived right here between our beloved mountains and ocean for over ten thousand years before our very recent arrival.
So I went to Rwanda to join a wedding celebration, and to see an awe-inspiring school which we at CBB have helped to create. But I also went to learn first-hand how a people who has just experienced a genocide are healing from their past.
First I have to say a word here about the Ubumwe Center. The Ubumwe Center is a community center offering job skills training to people with a wide range of disabilities, many stemming from the genocide. It is also a school of 500 children, from preschool up through sixth grade, which is founded on a philosophy of full inclusion of children with every kind of disability. This place, the realization of the dream of two young men, Zacharie Dusingizimana and Frederick Ndabaramiye, is manifestly a response to the genocide of 1994. The Ubumwe Center is a miraculous embodiment of hope and love and possibility, born out of the ashes of the genocide. The Ubumwe Center is a statement by these two men, and now by the 70 people on their staff, and by the 500 students learning there, and their families, that Rwanda is born again. Brand new. As Zacharie said to me: “Since 1994, everything is new. Everything is different.” It is impossible to spend time at the Ubumwe Center and not to feel immense hope for Rwanda, and in fact for all of us....I have returned determined to make THIS place, CBB, completely inclusive and accessible for people with every kind of disability. If they can do it in Gisenyi Rwanda, then we have no excuse not to do the same here in Santa Barbara.
Everywhere I went, I was greeted warmly. I did not know whether or not it is acceptable to bring up the subject of history. But every time I met someone over the age of twenty-five, I was haunted by the question: “what was this person’s experience in 1994?” At first I would ask very tentatively “I know that this is extremely personal, but may I ask you about your experience in the genocide?” And universally, the reply came: “you can ask me anything.” I asked Zacharie and his wife Ushimwe, who suffered so much: “I walk down the street, not knowing who here was a victim, and who was a perpetrator. But you do know. How do you live side by side with people who were doing the killing?”
Here is what I heard:
1. Since the genocide, we are all Rwandans. We do not want to live in hate, so we have to find another way.
2. Many people choose to live far away from where they lived during the genocide. So they do not have to see every day the people who did terrible things to their own family.
3. There is still hatred...in many places. Families who will not allow their daughters to marry sons from a family that they know perpetrated the genocide.
4. I learned about the Gacaca courts, an old Rwandan custom, from before colonial times, in which an entire community would gather after a crime to listen to the victim, to the perpetrator, to the witnesses, and to allow the perpetrator to express remorse. Gacaca comes from an old Rwandan word meaning “grass so soft that you would want to gather and sit on it.” After the genocide, the Rwandan judicial system was in ruins; huge numbers of judges and lawyers had been massacred. And over 100,000 individuals were in prison...accused of participation in the genocide. So the new government brought back the old gacaca court system, on a mass scale, as a way of addressing the vast number of cases requiring some kind of rapid resolution. It was terribly imperfect, but in the words of Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame, gacaca was Rwanda’s attempt to find an African solution to an African problem.
On my second to last day in Rwanda, I did forget for most of one day about the genocide, as I sat and watched and reveled in Frederick’s wedding. I was prompted to make the trip because Frederick invite me to attend...and I thought I would never have a better reason to go to Rwanda. The wedding included drama, and singing and dancing, and lots of humor and laughter. And when it was over, I realized that I had forgotten about the genocide for an entire day. And it occurred to me that here too was an experience of Rwanda reborn.
The bride Godelise is a stunningly beautiful woman, and she has fallen in love with Frederick, an inspiring, talented, God-filled man. His hands are gone, but he is a whole person. And in coming together they are rebuilding their country.
Before concluding I want to share just one last important conversation I had, on my plane from Rwanda to Istanbul, the first leg of my long trip home. I was sitting next to a smiling young European woman, and we began to chat about our trips. I explained that I am a rabbi, and about the wedding, and the Ubumwe Center. She is German, and had been traveling with a group of friends around Rwanda, visiting innovative schools. They had not been to Ubumwe, but of course she was interested to hear about it. Then she added, “I am also very taken with the process of reconciliation that they have established after the genocide. Because, she said, of course we Germans are struggling with our own past.” We discussed the gacaca courts a little bit, and how it was designed to enable people to live together again, side by side, with those who had killed their families. And she said, “it is harder for us in Germany, because we killed almost all of you.”
She said it with tenderness and determination, with deep remorse, and with immense courage to speak the truth. In all my life, I had never had a German look me in the eye and say, “we killed you.” In that moment, I felt something heal within me. As they say in South Africa: “revealing is healing.”
Shabbat Shalom.