By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO–As a matter of halacha, Rabbi Victoria Armour-Hileman was always Jewish, as she was born to a Jewish mother But growing up, she followed the ways of her Irish Catholic father, attending Catholic parochial schools, and even working for six years in Hong Kong and Thailand as a Maryknoll Lay Missioner, helping refugees respectively from Vietnam and Myanmar (Burma).
Armour-Hileman, who served Feb. 28 through March 2 as the scholar-in-residence at Temple Emanu-El here, told an interviewer that her encounter with the Mon people of Myanmar put her on a journey that led to her learning more about her mother’s religion, and eventually to becoming a rabbi.
She explained that many of the Mon, having fled Myanmar’s military dictatorship, lived in difficult conditions in camps on Thailand’s side of the border, to which they were confined. In these camps, she said, “the medical care was very, very limited; so what my job was, was to accompany the refugees and find them doctors (in other parts of Thailand) who would be willing to treat them, even though it was illegal to do so, because they were illegally there.” To get the patients to the medical care they needed, Armour-Hileman often worked in concert with Buddhist Monks , who themselves were members of the Mon people. This chapter of her life is told in her book, Singing To the Dead: A Missioner’s Life Among Refugees From Burma, published by the University of Georgia Press.
A subsequent chapter of Armour-Hileman’s life was her journey leading to her embrace of her mother’s Judaism. It began with her drawing inspiration from the Mon people.
Despite their difficult circumstances, the Mon “were able to make community with each other,” Armour-Hileman recalled. “Part of the way that they survived emotionally was that they were so attached to being a people. Their sense of community, living for each other, and engaging each other was so strong and striking, and it really left me feeling an emptiness in my own life.
“I thought, ‘Their culture may disappear. If you take away all the hardships, small cultures are disappearing. So is there a responsibility that you have if you are born into a minority culture? Do you have a responsibility to keep that torch alive in the world — a world that is eating little cultures?'”
To these self-searching questions, she added another. “Is there meaning and purpose in living with and for a people that maybe I was cheating myself of by not thinking about what it meant to have been born Jewish?”
The questions led to study, which eventually led to commitment to Judaism, and later to ordination in the Reform movement.
Her rabbinical career took her to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, a university which has a student body that Armour-Hileman estimates is approximately one-third Jewish. As associate dean of religious life, the Reform rabbi served as a chaplain on the staff of Emory University. During her tenure in that position, Israel conducted Operation Cast Lead, the war in Gaza in which Israel retaliated for the seemingly unceasing rocket attacks that had been launched from Gaza under its Hamas rulers.
The war in Gaza and its aftermath prompted rhetorical turmoil on numerous U.S. college campuses, including Emory. “It was so extreme and so anti-Israel,” the rabbi recalled. “It was always phrased as if it were pro-Palestinian, but really it was anti-Israel from my perspective.”
She said students on each side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were “expert in delegitimizing each other, using half-truths , and there was breaking rules on both sides. It was very tense, and for young people it is very interesting to get into that high energy feeling you get when you are all hepped up on something.”
However, said the rabbi, “people who didn’t have a passionate commitment to one side or the other didn’t feel that they could ask an open, honest question. If they were Jewish, but they wanted to ask critical questions about Israel, they felt that was emotionally dangerous territory to be in. If they were on the other side, and wanted to ask, ‘well hasn’t Israel done these good things?’ they felt their group was protecting its position and not making it a safe place for people to ask open questions.”
The rabbi said she won consent from the provost of Emory University to develop a program to get past the rhetoric and to encourage students, faculty and staff to really talk to each other, “trying to get at deeper truths, and helping each other to be more accurate about it.”
As part of this program, Armour-Hileman, who today teaches creative writing at Emory University, tried to get students to focus on trigger words and phrases that cause people to have emotional reactions and thereby preclude calm, considered discussion.
One of these phrases is “occupied territories,” a phrase that gets used by Palestinians and their supporters not only to describe the territories that came under Israeli rule following the Six-Day War (West Bank, Golan, and Gaza), but also “slide over into basically implying that the Jews don’t have the right to have a Jewish state in that area.”
“Apartheid” is another such word, she said. Emory University has a partnership relationship with the nearby Carter Center, headed by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. One of Carter’s books about the Middle East was titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, a title which Armour-Hileman says “creates a cognitive connection between Israel and South Africa. We think of the apartheid government of South Africa as not only having been evil but having been an illegitimate government, and so without ever saying so, it implies there is no place for a Jewish state.
“That is the kind of language that is so unhelpful and so unfair,” she said. She said the problem she has with former President Carter is that “when you are in a position, a really public role, you have to be really careful not to use language that people will (use) to illegitimize one side or another. I do not think he has been as careful with many of the things that he has said about Israel as he should have been.”
Another word, she said is “terrorism,” which is often used by Jews “to sweep aside any kind of narrative of pain” on the part of the Palestinians.
Emory University, she said, had a long-standing program called ‘Transforming Community,’ which originally focused on racial relations between African-Americans and Caucasians. Armour-Hileman created under these auspices a similar project called “Beyond Debate” to create a mechanism for the campus community to get beyond formal debates and to really talk with each other.
Her objective, she said,was to show that people can “have a conversation that continues the relationship even when we are in conflict with each other. We started bringing in people, all sitting around at an increasingly large table , talking about this problem. How can we as a community start learning civil discourse, and shouldn’t that be what faculty is about, rather than saying you should think this or that?”
The result was a program of dialogues which she coordinated. “People really felt they had a breakthrough some times in those conversations,” she said, “because when you face another person and stop making it a war of rhetoric and instead say, ‘The reason why I am saying this is that this is my history, this is where I come from, this is the thing that I need you to listen to if we are going to have a relationship at all’ and at the same time they were willing to listen to the other side.”
From such listening, she suggested, participants may be able to come up with a better idea. “I don’t think there is any way to move forward either in making campuses better places or the world a better place, unless we are able to get a more accurate understanding of what the real situation is. Each side is only giving tiny slivers of truth and leaving out a whole history. I think this is very problematic.”
While the program still has its informal echoes on the Emory University campus today, she said, budget problems reduced the money available to its parent program, effectively ending “Beyond Debate.”
*
Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com
*
San Diego Jewish World seeks sponsorships to be placed, as this notice is, just below articles that appear on our site. This is an ideal opportunity for your corporate message or to personally remember a loved one’s contributions to our community. To inquire, call editor Donald H. Harrison at (619) 265-0808 or contact him via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com