Day 5: Hospitality at Taybeh
We set out by bus from Bethlehem, northeast toward Taybeh, a Palestinian Christian town about twenty kilometers away. There we planned to join two busloads of workers from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, members of Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli social-justice organization. We would help farmers near Taybeh harvest their olive crops. Each year, armed Zionist settlers will likely block Palestinians from reaching their groves. If a crop is not harvested, the authorities will say that the land is not being used, and will confiscate it, and give it to the settlers. One farmer there, a deacon at St George’s Roman Catholic Church in Taybeh, said he hadn’t been allowed to harvest for three years.
House of Parables at St. George’s Roman Catholic Church, Taybeh
Part way there, our leader from Sabeel got a call on his cell from the Rabbis. Israeli soldiers had stopped their buses ahead of us, decreeing that the farms we were going to were now a closed military zone. The Rabbis chose another farm. Our bus too turned that way. We were all stopped again. We drove on into Taybeh itself, and twice more had to U-turn and try another route. It seemed that the so-called military zone was now defined as anywhere the harvesters might try to go. The West Bank is under total martial law. There would be no Taybeh olives harvested that day. Not for Palestinians.
This is daily life in the West Bank.
The most lovable feature of Palestinian culture is hospitality. When we finally reached Taybeh and St. George’s Church, congregants invited the discouraged would-be harvesters to rest. They served us coffee in their lounge. We visited their sanctuary. There together we sang “Amazing Grace.”
Next door is their House of Parables. This is a 350-year-old stone house, a family residence till the 1970s, built partly underground and carved out of the stone, as houses there have been since before the time of Jesus. There the congregants have put traditional furnishings, as were used in Jesus’ time—pottery urns for water and wine, a leather churn for milk, woven baskets, a wooden bowl, a grinding stone. And there’s a manger, because the people lived together with their animals, for safety and for warmth. The manger is carved from the rock. They have lit it with a simple bulb.
The stable where Jesus was born, they say, would have been some hospitable family’s home, a home just like this.
In the West Bank, you may have a plan, and then it falls apart. But the Spirit will show itself some other way.
*About the author
Bill Butt is retired after writing for CBC Television, teaching at Western University in London, Ontario, and thirteen years as Overseas Personnel for the United Church of Canada, based primarily in Angola and Mozambique. He is a member of the CFOS Communications Committee. Along with a dozen other Canadians, he participated in a Solidarity Pilgrimage, November 11-21, 2024, hosted by Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. Each day of the pilgrimage, he wrote about his experience.