Letters - 24 November 2023
From Mental health to Peace
Mental health
The trustees of the Quaker Mental Health Fund have asked me to say how pleased they were to see the piece by Mary Woodward (‘Taking care’) in your 3 November issue.
It sounds as though Mary’s experience, and that of the friend she told about our grants, was as good as we could have hoped for.
As the Quaker charity focused on grants to promote and protect mental health, we also fund Quaker-led projects where more people, and not only Quakers, can be supported.
Quaker Voices on Mental Health (now a Quaker Recognised Body in its own right) is such a recipient of grants.
Our new website is nearly ready, so it will soon be possible to apply for grants for individuals and for projects by filling in forms online which we hope will streamline the process for applicants and those who help others to make an application.
We reiterate Mary’s words: ‘Do please bear in mind that help exists. It’s not a sign of weakness to ask for it. You don’t have to suffer alone.’
Alison Hay
Clerk to the Quaker Mental Health Fund
White poppies
White and red wreaths were laid at our local peace statue, in the memorial gardens.
Solidarity was expressed with people touched by war, the UK, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine and elsewhere.
Common cause was made with the traditional services for veterans and those marching for a ceasefire in Gaza, as a necessary but insufficient step towards a lasting just peace. All were acting for peace, in their own way.
Wearing a white poppy represents three things: remembrance of all those who’ve died; rejection of war as a means of solving problems; and ‘Never again’, for anyone.
‘Never again’ is particularly poignant as thousands are being killed in Gaza, and millions around the world are lobbying, marching, and protesting to stop the slaughter.
Those millions have realised that they cannot stand by and do nothing while hospitals are bombed, cities are turned to rubble, and innocent Palestinians and Israelis are murdered.
Two mutually-traumatised populations in a cycle of revenge and more revenge are clearly not safe, and will not be until the cycle of violence is ended.
Lesley Grahame
Use of Quaker money
I belong to a reasonably wealthy Local Meeting. I proposed that we should donate £1,000 of our money to the British Red Cross Gaza Appeal, but was told that charity law prevents us from doing so.
Can it be correct that Quaker Meetings are prevented from donating their money to a humanitarian appeal by another charity? Can anyone give clarification about this? It seems quite wrong to me.
Name and Meeting supplied
Institutional antisemitism?
A recent letter in the Friend claims that Quakers’ desire to place the recent events in Israel and Gaza in a historical context makes us institutionally antisemitic and contradicts our Peace Testimony. I think the opposite is the case. Our requirement to answer that of God in everyone, to try to understand the circumstances that lead to violence and conflict, seems to me to be central to the Quaker way.
The letter in question accuses Quakers’ approach to this conflict as rooted in seeing Jews as rich, powerful and their own worst enemies. As a Jew who has been to the West Bank with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, I have never heard any criticism or negative characterisations of Jews by Quakers. I have only heard concern about breaches of international law on the part of the government of Israel and crimes perpetrated by violent Israeli settlers.
And, as for Jews not counting, I have participated in dialogue between Quakers and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which have always been carried out with respect. To see criticism of the Israeli state as synonymous with denigration of all Jews is wide of the mark.
Sue Beardon
Old tropes
Tim Robertson’s accusation (3 November) that Britain Yearly Meeting’s (BYM) statement of 11 October on Israel-Palestine reveals the Society’s antisemitism needs to be understood, but it should not be excused. Understanding is absolutely not the same as condoning or excusing.
I have eighteenth-century ancestors who ran slave ships. At that time many well-meaning folk failed to see the contradiction between loving one’s neighbour and enslaving them. I understand the fact that such an attitude was easier to accept then than now, but I continue to condemn that action.
I would be very surprised if Tim himself never sought to understand the causes of things he may condemn. Take, for example, the case of a woman in a relationship with a man who controls her movements, her contacts, her financial resources and her body, and has done so for years and years. If she kills him, as some do, society is now rightly minded to take the dehumanising experience she has suffered into account, at least to an extent.
That could be an allegory for Israel-Palestine, of course. Except that the husband in this case is not killed, however fearful we must understand the Israeli people are. And, in their case, the husband enjoys the political, economic, and military backing of most of the most powerful peoples of the world.
No, BYM’s statement is absolutely true to the longstanding Quaker advice to look for the causes of social evils, and, of course, conflicts. Many faith groups and other organisations have restricted themselves to calls for peace. I am profoundly grateful to have spent my entire life in a community which understands that there is always a history to be understood, as our statement demonstrates. Antisemitic, absolutely not. And let’s not diminish the power of what antisemitism truly means.
Jonathan Dale
Israelophobia and Quakers
Thank you, Tim Robertson (3 November), for saying what has to be said. I have often made myself unpopular in various circles by pointing out that when gay people call out homophobia, we believe them; when black people call out racism, we believe them; but when Jewish people call out antisemitism, we find reasons for not believing them.
Further, not only could the reference to the ‘context’ be interpreted as justifying Hamas’ attack on civilians, it also ignores the other ‘context’ – the centuries and centuries of persecution experienced by Jews who had been expelled from the homeland to which they have always yearned to return.
We need to be open to understanding this pain too, and to do the work which is necessary to help us get rid of our institutionalised bias.
Barbara Forbes
Peace
I have recently been given a copy of the booklet The Quaker peace testimony. I deduce that this was issued in 2010, so perhaps my comments are no longer apposite.
The starting point in the booklet is the statement by twelve Quakers to Charles II made in 1660. In a way I think that is a false starting point. The twelve Quakers surely had as their starting point Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:38-44), where Jesus tells listeners that they must forget the way of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that they should ‘love our enemies’, and that they should ‘turn the other cheek’.
Even the page in the booklet headed ‘The spiritual basis of our peace testimony’ says nothing about where the 1660 Quakers were coming from. Are we now ashamed or frightened of quoting the words of Jesus? A lot of mainstream Christians have found the teachings of Jesus inconvenient and too difficult – from the Crusaders to the Russian Orthodox Church now.
Quakers in 1660 were different: they believed what Jesus had taught. It’s good to recognise what they did, but it would have been better if the booklet had recognised what their spiritual basis was.
Ian K Watson
Comments
Please login to add a comment
