Letters - 12 October 2018
From atonement to faithful lives
Atonement
I fasted on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). This year my thoughts are with Muhammad Abu Khamash, a policeman living in Deir al-Balah in Gaza, who today, and every day for the rest of his life, will wake up again to the incomprehensible fact that his pregnant wife Inas and baby daughter Bayan are dead – blown to pieces by an Israeli missile in the middle of the night while they were asleep. Muhammad Abu Khamash himself was somehow blown clear by the explosion but suffered serious injuries and was in a coma for four days. Only after he regained consciousness did he learn of his loss.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) claimed they were aiming at a Hamas target nearby, but neighbours say no such target existed. In the period from Operation Cast Lead in 2009 up until 30 June this year, twelve Israeli children were killed by Palestinians, and 740 Palestinian children were killed by Israeli security forces (figures from B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories). This figure does not include those Palestinians who died after the Israeli authorities delayed their access to medical treatment, or any children who have been killed since the end of May. There is much to atone for.
Stevie Krayer
Polyamory
I, too, find the idea of ‘polyamory’, among happily married couples, distinctly odd (3 and 24 August). Despite the terminology, ‘polyamory’ does not seem, to me, to be primarily about love (in the sense of great affection), but about that widespread but coarse dysphemism ‘having sex’ (coition).
Similarly, in the couplings ‘erotic love’, ‘carnal love’, ‘physical love’, ‘sexual love’ and even ‘genital love’ – the common term ‘love’ conveys nothing whatever. Further, P for ‘Polyamory’ has yet to figure in the top ten among LGBTQQIAAP (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Allies, Asexual and Pansexual)!
Indeed, the commonest euphemism of all, ‘making love’, is highly misleading, particularly among teenagers. (Its ‘archaic’ – yet still more fitting – sense was ‘courting’.) However enjoyable, coition rarely – if ever – engenders love. Thus, apart from the first in his quartet, I am hardly enamoured of C S Lewis’s The Four Loves – ‘Affection’, ‘Friendship’, ‘Eros’ and ‘Charity’.
Philip Kestelman
Guidance
I’ve just caught up with John Anderson’s witty article on ‘God bothering’ (31 August). Having taught consensus decision-making (yes, I know that’s not what we do) in business and voluntary organisations for some time, I really wouldn’t recommend voting, especially when we are trying to be more inclusive. It is a sure-fire way to lose fringe members of the organisation.
I think clerks could help an over-extended deity by refusing to accept ‘trivial’ agenda items that don’t really need divine guidance, such as, notoriously, how to arrange the chairs, rota for flower arrangers, and anything that can be left to the ongoing guidance of the Spirit.
Jan Shimmin
Faithful lives
My thanks to Janet Scott for her article ‘Faithful lives’ (28 September) in which she included A J Manasseh, my grandfather. Her report refers to his work in the first world war period.
Doctor Antonius Manasseh, known as Tanius, was medically trained in Leeds and joined the Society of Friends there. He met his future wife Henrietta Benington, in London. Henrietta (Hetty) was a member of a Quaker family descended from the Wilsons of High Wray, at Hawkshead, which shared responsibility for the earliest days of Colthouse Meeting in the mid-seventeenth century.
Tanius and Hetty were married in the Friends’ Meeting House in Brummana in 1899 and I have the marriage certificate. Tanius carried out his medical work in what is now Lebanon until his death in1929.
Anthony Wilson Manasseh
Comments
Like Stevie Krayer I grieve for Muhammad Abu Khamash, but as a policeman in Gaza he is part of Hamas, which is internationally recognised as a terrorist organisation and makes no secret of its commitment to the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. The Israeli government rightly sees Hamas as an existential threat though that does not justify its wholly disproportionate response to the provocative demonstrations at its borders (which have also been internationally condemned). The best way that Muhammad Abu Khamash and indeed Quakers can serve the memory of his late wife is to press Hamas to recognise Israel, stop its rocket-firing campaigns and to enter into meaningful peace talks. However, this may be risky for Muhammad as Gaza is not a place where freedom of expression is treated as a right – unlike Israel.
By frankem51 on 13th October 2018 - 14:23
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