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There's an old proverb that says, "Hope deferred makes the heart sick."
You got that right.
My dad recommended a book to me that I immediately went out and bought.
The book is called My Promised Land by Ari Shavit and tells the story of the Jew's return to Palestine in the 1890s as they mingled with Arabs who already lived there, their backing by the British to establish colonies amidst the Arabs in the 1920s, their growing assertiveness and power leading them to become a recognized nation in the 1940s and the history of the tension right up until today.
Shavit is a moderate Israeli journalist. The book is really well written, well thought out, clear eyed, even handed in its criticisms of both Israelis and Arabs and is interesting and eye opening.
I devoured the first 100 pages.
And then something happened to me. I found myself less enthused...getting tired. I slowed my pace. I was reading it less. There were longer intervals between reads and when I read it I read it for shorter durations.
Finally, after drudging on into the 1940s...at page...154...I stopped. I just couldn't go on. I needed a break. Already there had been so much death and carnage on both sides that I was sick.
Every page was another attack one way or the other. Every page was justified murder. Innocents slaughtered, innocents uprooted and sent packing, these sad parades of the disenfranchised. Every page had children dying.
On every page the voices of reason on both sides were being overwhelmed and snuffed out by twisted logic.
And then suddenly I realized something: This book cannot end well. I mean, I knew the ending.
The ending of this book is like the beginning and the middle only with modern weapons.
There is no hope in this book because the end of this book is what we see today.
That realization was depressing.
I was reading a book with zero hope.
I had entered Bunyan's "slough of despond," this quicksand of bleakness. And I wanted out.
Recycled promises for 120 years now. Recycled logic and justifications. Recycled violence that I can't even fit inside my head. Fits and starts and attempts without the moral courage to see them through.
So I was done.
The human heart feeds on hope and it starves when hope is unavailable.
When promises are made and hope runs high only to be dashed again and again and again...people slow...come to a stop...and quit.
There needs to be credibility in hope. Real hope needs to be raised on prior realized hope. Where there has been no realized hope based on promises made, there can be no hope because the promises themselves become poison-they become lies.
And a lie can never produce...hope.
I will probably come back and slug it out with this book at some point. It is interesting, to be sure.
But for now some good fiction might be just the thing.
After all, a sick heart needs time to mend.
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