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Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies

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The Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies at Tantur, where nine Notre Dame undergraduates participated last spring in the University's semester-long Jerusalem program, is uniquely situated. The birthplace of Jesus is within a comfortable walking distance. The site of his death, burial and rising is a longer, but by no means difficult hike away. "Tantur" is an Arabic word meaning hilltop, and the view from the Institute includes the jumble of church spires and mosque minarets rising above the towns of Bethlehem, Beit Sahur and Beit Jala, the blue and white Star-of-David flags that fly above the Israeli settlement of Gilo, the ziggurat shape of the Herodium mountain, and, on particularly clear days, the Dead Sea.

Tantur's buildings and gardens, designed by Frank Montana, former chair of the Architecture Department, overspread the hilltop campus, which is girdled by a stone wall. From Tantur's rooftop, it is easy to envision the fortifications of the Crusader garrison that policed the Bethlehem area from this high ground during the 12th century. In the remote parts of the campus, Bedouin shepherds often graze their herds on the stiff grass that sprouts among the rocks and windblown litter; on still days, a pungency of sheep dung and urine mingles almost agreeably with the scents of the rose garden and apricot blossoms.

The Tantur campus straddles a frontier, and the geopolitical anomalies of the place are impossible to miss. There is no other place in the Holy Land like it. Walk out the south gate of the campus wall, and you cross an imaginary line, drawn by diplomats during the Oslo peace talks, into one of the many fragments of Palestine. Walk out the front gate, and you are in Israel. Within a few hundred feet of the south gate, at the entrance of Rachel's Tomb, is an Israeli checkpoint staffed by adolescent soldiers. A few hundred feet further down the road into Bethlehem, the flags, uniforms and arms of the Palestinian National Authority assert a competing sovereignty. Foot and vehicle traffic moves sluggishly, and for the most part unremarkably, but whenever the Israeli government wishes to do so as it did on Easter morning last year it orders the Rachel's Tomb checkpoint closed. If you are a Palestinian employed outside Bethlehem, as most of Bethlehem's citizens are, you miss work and lose wages that day. Even when the checkpoint is open, the exhaustive vehicle searches and documentation checks (Palestinians are required by Israelis to carry and account for much official identification) can take hours. Hundreds of Bethlehem residents avoid this daily abuse by hopping over the campus wall, walking across the Tantur property to the front gate and catching a bus or taxi going north on Hebron Road to Jerusalem. Occasionally, those who take this risk are arrested and/or beaten up by the uniformed Israeli teenagers.

Among such unlucky pedestrians are Bethlehem University students, with whom the Notre Dame students go to class. Among the truculent soldiers are young men and women who intend, after finishing their two years of compulsory military service, to enroll at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which the Notre Dame students also attend. "Obviously, this is a terribly conflicted place, but just by being here, just by being students, being people, and being friends, our students are, in a small but significant way, contributing to the peace process," says Rev. David Burrell, CSC, director of the Jerusalem program.

Sheila McCarthy, then a sophomore, tells of an encounter she had last March, 1999, on Purim, with an Israeli soldier about her age. Purim, the feast day recounted in the Book of Esther, celebrates the wiliness and courage of the Jewish queen who outwitted and destroyed her Persian captors. It is also the anniversary of the murder of 29 unarmed Moslem worshipers by Baruch Goldstein, an American-born, off-duty Israeli soldier, at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Tensions run high on Purim. A government-ordered closure had once again turned Bethlehem into a ghetto, and the young Israeli was pursuing and arresting escaping Palestinian residents when McCarthy met him on the Tantur grounds. After a perfunctory interrogation had satisfied him that she presented no threat to state security, they began to chat. "He hated the army and couldn't wait to finish his military service," she remembers. "At one point he even admitted that he didn't really agree with what he was being ordered to do and considered it unjust. So we had a really strange conversation about the implications of doing something you don't believe in."

To describe a strange conversation between a Notre Dame undergraduate and an Israeli conscript as a significant contribution to the peace process may seem melodramatic, but in the atrocious social and strategic arrangements currently afflicting the Holy Land, even such barely perceptible moral exchanges between individuals suggest a sort of capillary movement of human decency through daunting political impediments. Here every encounter is necessarily profound, which may be why Rev. E. William Beauchamp, CSC, Notre Dame's executive vice president and a member of the Ecumenical Institute's administrative board, recently called Tantur "the most powerful of all Notre Dame's overseas programs."

The program's power derives from other sources as well. In addition to courses at Bethlehem and Hebrew Universities, its rigorous academic schedule includes rudimentary instruction in Arabic and Hebrew and occasionally incorporates the lectures, seminars and field trips arranged for the Ecumenical Institute's senior scholars and residents. Priests, religious, lay ministers and academics from many countries and denominations predominate in the Tantur community and mealtimes can take on a nearly monastic gentility. A few of the Notre Dame students affectionately joke that this generational interaction can be as challenging as the more predictable culture shock they experience as young North Americans arriving for the first time in the Middle East.

And the culture shock is considerable. In every guestroom at Tantur, for example, there is a pamphlet entitled "Community Household Guidelines," which features information about telephone calls, bus and taxi fares, mealtimes, laundry facilities, the pronunciation of various polite phrases in Hebrew and Arabic, and this admonition: "Women on buses and in service-taxis should avoid talking to, even smiling at, any male. It is neither the custom here, nor expected and will be misunderstood."

Even as they defer to an unfamiliar code of manners, the students gain an impressive network of new friendships and catch a unique glimpse of ordinary life in an apocalyptic neighborhood. Laura Segura spoke of three stages in her accommodation to an atypical semester of studies. "At the first stage, everything was strange and new and fascinating," she said. "Not just the people and customs, but even the litter we'd find ourselves picking up around the place. At the second stage, we'd become used to a much different pace and way of life. And at the third stage it hit me when we were on a packed bus going into Beit Sahur we were shocked by the fact that we'd grown used to all this!" Segura, now a junior, and her Tantur classmates encountered quite a bit of "all this." Much as their classmates in northern Indiana are drawn to community service work in South Bend's northeast neighborhood, Notre Dame students at Tantur find themselves involved in community service in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Segura and Susan Barclay '99, for example, volunteered at the Lutheran School in Beit Sahur, teaching an English class once a week. Barclay also taught a ceramics class there on Saturdays, and Segura designed a brochure for the nearby Arab Women's Union, which wanted to advertise a recently established hostel. They also have taken part in the Palestinian-Israeli dialogues sponsored by the Rapprochement Center in Beit Sahur, where they served as tutors of English, the neutral language in which the participants prefer to express their often adversarial positions.

Nor were Segura and Barclay alone in such off campus involvements: Sheila McCarthy taught violin, Elizabeth Kovacich was a classroom aide, and both assisted in English classes at an elementary school in East Jerusalem whose students are mostly poor or refugee children. Sophia Santos and Nathaniel Marx assisted in English classes at an elementary school in Beit Sahur. Cordelia Nance helped assemble a computer database for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residence Rights, a community organization that publishes information about refugees and protests the dispossession of Palestinians from their homes. Matthew McGarry worked on a brochure for the "Bethlehem 2000" project, a municipal effort to prepare the town for the thousands of international tourists expected during the millennial year.

The principal source of the Tantur program's power is, of course, the Holy Land itself, burnished by the fervor of monotheistic faith, explosive with contradictory certitudes and washed by the blood of martyrs and murderers alike. In the Old City of Jerusalem, the pilgrims surging toward the Western Wall or the Al Aqsa Mosque or the Church of the Holy Sepulcher encounter aggressive merchants, desperate beggars, carnival barkers, pickpockets, street urchins, con artists, frightened young soldiers with submachine guns, bullying clerics, and officious custodians. Amplified Arabic music blares from the loudspeakers of record shops and competes with the call to prayer arising from the mosques of the Moslem Quarter, and the narrow streets and alleys are redolent with spices, incense, narghile tobacco, Turkish coffee, engine exhaust fumes and the blood of freshly slaughtered meat. Jerusalem is a city with its own distinctive and variegated life, and a Christian pilgrim may find it difficult to resist the thought that its ambiance was precisely this noisy, turbulent, unpredictable, and fascinating when Jesus wandered away from his parents in a crowd, or cured a paralyzed man at the pool of Bethesda, or was tortured in the streets and killed outside the walls. To watch an ill-tempered crowd gather quickly and menacingly around a squad of Israeli soldiers involved in the questionable arrest of a Palestinian teenager is to learn something about the volatile atmosphere of Roman occupation and urban unrest in which Jesus' public ministry came to catastrophe and triumph.

Contemporary history in the Holy Land begins three millennia ago, and theology is anything but abstract. It is a commonplace that international study programs expand a student's imaginative horizons, but long familiar scriptural passages do, in fact, invite a second and more attentive look when a native for whom English is a third or fourth language tells a visitor, "This is Cana, the town where Jesus makes his first surprise." Or when the Western Wall of the Temple swarms with weeping and davening men. Or when a cook in a restaurant beside the Sea of Tiberias or Galilee serves Jewish and Christian patrons the same sort of fish Peter, Andrew, James and Jesus caught and grilled and ate, and then takes a break to pray, prostrating himself toward Mecca. During one excursion north into the Galilee region, the Notre Dame students picnicked on the Mount of the Beatitudes and read aloud the Sermon on the Mount as they reclined on the slope overlooking the Sea of Galilee (or Tiberias) and the sites of Jesus' public ministry.

For the Notre Dame students at Tantur, theological discourse became particularly acute during the last Easter of the millennium. The Catholic celebration of Holy Week in 1999 coincided with the Jewish celebration of Pesach (Passover) and the Moslem feast of Eid al-Adha, which concludes the pilgrimage to Mecca and commemorates Abraham's willingness to obey God by sacrificing his son. On Holy Saturday night, Jeremy Posner and his family, Jerusalem residents who had hosted a few of the Notre Dame students at their Pesach Seder meal a couple of nights earlier, joined them for the Easter Vigil Mass at the Ecce Homo Convent. Walking down from Damascus Gate to the Via Dolorosa, jostled by Palestinian housewives rushing from the souks to their homes in the Moslem Quarter, Michael John Myette and Matthew McGarry fell into an enthusiastic discussion with the Posners about the profound similarities (and radical differences) between the seder and the Mass. The high terrace of the convent where they ignited the Pascal fire commanded an awesome view of the entire Old City, and the full moon illuminated the surrounding Judaean hills, including the Mount of Olives, where most of the Notre Dame students intended to camp before an ecumenical sunrise service on Easter morning.

While Notre Dame's international study programs have become increasingly visible in recent years and in fact are a multimillion-dollar component of the current Generations campaign international interests and commitments were intrinsic to the University from the very beginning, when an astonishing number of frequent flier miles might have accrued to its peripatetic founder Father Edward Sorin, had he not been encumbered by mid-19th century modes of transportation. Institutional roots in Le Mans and Rome, Father John Zahm's travels with Theodore Roosevelt in South America, the influx of European scholar refugees before and during World War Two, and Father Hesburgh's legendary globetrotting have all contributed to the distinctive notions of international study characterizing Notre Dame's satellite campuses in England, Ireland, Australia, France, Spain, Italy and other countries. If Tantur seems to stand apart from and above these better known and more heavily subscribed programs, it is because students attracted from a Catholic university to the Holy Land and the central shrines of Christendom participate in the ancient tradition of pilgrimage, and it is a commonplace of faith that pilgrims are people who do not so much pass through a place as allow a place to pass through them.

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