It’s not my area of competence. It’s important to know what you don’t know.
I worked with engineers and designers. From textiles to biotech, they were specialists in various aspects of factory design: electrical, civil, structural, process, instrumentation, equipment specification, process piping, and more. I might think I knew the answer to, say, a particular electrical question, but knew to ask the engineer whose job it was to know. If I guessed and guessed wrong, that mistake was on me. If I asked the person whose job it was to know and they gave the wrong answer, that was on him or her. That’s how you stay out of court.
A more concise example: Having an M.D. doesn’t make you a brain surgeon.
That is why I have avoided commenting on the violence in Israel. Not my area of competence.
Former megachurch pastor John Pavlovitz has the same problem. When someone asked him, he knew he was not up to the speaking to an issue “so sprawling and complicated and layered with time and history” as the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.
“Then I saw her,” he writes.
Pavlovitz writes:
Here’s what I know to be true: a world where a ten-year old girl is experiencing this kind of persistent trauma, in what should be the most joyous, most wide-open, most weightless time in her life—isn’t a world any of us should feel comfortable living in. It isn’t a fate we should accept. It isn’t a reality we should be able to abide.
So what does that mean for you and for me?
It means that rather than lament all that we don’t understand, we should read and listen, so that we understand more today than we did yesterday.
It means we allow ourselves to sit with the discomfort of facing the realities happening half a world away, because children there are as worth our discomfort as much as children here are.
It means we speak from the deepest recesses of our hearts about the human toll of conflicts we can’t fathom, and we endure the knee-jerk responses and angry outbursts from people around us who likely don’t know any more than we do but who have been weaned on the same hatred we see oceans away.
It means we defend humanity wherever it is threatened and assailed and destroyed.
In moments like these, people want you to pick a side because that’s how most people’s minds work. They need a hard and fast litmus test position so that can sum you up and decide whether they are for you or against you, whether you are good or evil. But that kind of all-or-nothing extremism seems to be what has fueled and perpetuated the conflicts were watching right now.
So, with all that I don’t know and all I can’t understand and with all the nuances that escape me, here’s the side I’m on:
I’m on the side of ten-year old girls and boys wherever they live and whoever they’ve been raised by and whatever God they pray to and whatever pigmentation their faces carry. I am for disparate humanity being treated with equal reverence without caveat or condition and I am against powerful people who dehumanize the powerless for political gain.
Good for him. That about sums it up. Plus disgust with the bad faith of people with God on their side flinging explosives at civilians on either side of the border.