A Year in Jerusalem
Soon after our El Al 747 touched down in the Holy Land, and after we had successfully negotiated Israel’s tight security controls at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, we found a cab—our third-grader Nick, our first-grader Mary Claire, Paula, and I—for the ride to the apartment we had rented but not yet seen in the neighborhood of Beit HaKerem in Jerusalem. It was the middle of August and very hot. Half way up the 2,474-foot climb to Jerusalem, the cab driver turned to us to apologize. He’d have to shut off the air conditioning or the cab would overheat before making it to the top of the mountains. I looked out at the foothills we wound through. The dry red brown earth was so parched, the rocky outcroppings were so rough and tumble, the scrubby brush appeared so barely alive, the wind was so hot blowing through the cab’s now open windows. The remains of an ancient tank damaged in the 1948 war were still perched on a hillside above the road. Everything seemed impossibly barren and uninviting and uninhabitable. We had been in the Holy Land only a few hours, and I asked myself the question that would plague me, in one form or another, during the entire year we lived in Jerusalem: “Why are they fighting over this place?”
That is an incredibly naïve, innocent, and simplistic question. And it has many important, profound, and far-reaching answers that have been shaped and reshaped by thousands of years of history. But for me, no matter how naïve the question, it began a difficult existential and religious journey. I arrived never having lived in the middle of an armed conflict and never having experienced the life-threatening and heart-breaking devastations that it inflicts. Living in the middle of these devastations changed me. I arrived in the Holy Land with one way of putting the world together, and I left with a completely different way of putting it together. I arrived with one set of resources for facing worst-case scenarios, a set that would fail me during that year. I left with another set of resources, and it is these resources that I still carry with me and return to often.
We arrived at our apartment in Beit HaKerem in West Jerusalem that day in 1989 during the first Intifada, the first major Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank. We knew little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We were Americans who paid little attention to conflicts around the world that didn’t affect us. Paula and I had come to do our academic research on biblical studies at the Albright Institute of Archaeology of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. We were nervous about moving to a country where outbreaks of violence made the newspapers and evening news in the US. So we called people we knew in Jerusalem to ask them if it was safe to bring our family. They all told us to come. Phil King, a professor at Boston College who had done archaeological work in the Holy Land during his entire career, told me, “If you wait for peace, you’ll never go.”
So we left for Jerusalem. To do historical biblical research, not to learn about or to engage the political conflict in any way. Actually, to try to stay as far away from it as possible. But staying away from it was impossible. On our second day in Beit HaKerem, our third-grader Nick and I took the bus downtown to the Tourist Office to get information about seeing Jerusalem’s highlights before the kids were to start school in a few weeks. On the buses back and forth to the Tourist Office, Nick counted twenty-one rifles slung over the shoulders of Israeli soldiers. Their rifles brushed against us when they got on and off the buses. He had the number ready in his head when we got off the bus at our new home in Beit HaKerem. One day months later, after our living within an armed conflict had become “commonplace,” I picked Nick and Mary Claire up after school from the Anglican School on HaNevi’im Street, and we walked to our usual bus stop on Jaffa Road for our ride home. It was cordoned off with yellow police tape. A bomb threat had been reported. We walked down the street to the next bus stop, and we boarded our bus there.
Our apartment in Beit HaKerem was in West Jerusalem, the Israeli side of the city, and the Albright Institute where Paula and I did research was on Salah ed Din Street in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian side of the city. By sheer accident, we had arranged a year for ourselves during which, on most days, we lived on both sides of the city and worked and shopped and rested and played on both sides of the conflict. Each morning our family got on the bus on Herzl Boulevard in Beit HaKerem and got off on Jaffa Road near the Anglican School, where Nick and Mary Claire spent the day. Paula and I dropped them off at their school in West Jerusalem and walked to the Albright Institute in East Jerusalem where we did research. On our way, we would sometimes see Palestinian men, who were walking past us into West Jerusalem to work for the day, stopped on the sidewalk by Israeli soldiers checking their identification. For most Israelis, East Jerusalem was a foreign country. For most Palestinians, West Jerusalem was a foreign country, though many worked there during the day.
At the Albright Institute in East Jerusalem, where the staff was largely Palestinian, we heard stories about the toll of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian areas in the West Bank. I heard the following story from Said Frej, a Palestinian who was head of maintenance at the Albright Institute. I no longer remember the date, or the name of the boy, or the name of the town where it happened. One night, while this Palestinian family was asleep in their home, Israeli soldiers broke down the front door, roused them from their sleep, and searched their house for any evidence of anti-Israeli activities. I do not even remember whether any member of the family was taken away that night, as often happened. What I do remember is that the boy, perhaps 10 or 11, was so traumatized by the soldiers that he could no longer cope. He was receiving psychiatric care in a local hospital. One brief, violent episode, and a boy’s life would never be the same.
If you follow the news from Israel and Palestine, you will know that violent events like this still happen every day. It is the kind of thing that happens in wars, and so it is not unheard of or unthinkable. But it undermined the view of the world I had brought to Jerusalem. The crisis for me was that I could not find God anywhere in the story of this wounded little boy. I was unable to explain this boy’s trauma as some part of a larger divine plan, which I had always believed in. I could not conceive of a God with any shred of goodness being willing to tolerate such innocent suffering, even in the face of some greater purpose or plan. Such a God would not even be as good as an ordinary human parent. No responsible parent would tolerate such a thing. Nor could I explain the soldiers and the power of the state they wielded in this home invasion as part of a larger divine plan. I had lost, like the biblical Job, any sight of God in these experiences and, consequently, any confidence in God’s just administration of the world’s affairs.
This brief episode finally destroyed the resources I had always fallen back on, the faith in a God in control, the confidence that behind the worst-case scenarios we all face in one way or another there is a divine plan that makes sense. This view of the world, this theology, the one I had brought with me to Jerusalem, is likened by Thornton Wilder to a tapestry. The underside of the tapestry, the side we see from earth, is a chaotic and meaningless jumble of threads. The topside, the side God sees, is an intricate mosaic in which everything is beautiful and ordered and sensible.[1] This is an attractive and powerful theology. I can say from my experience teaching the book of Job in seminary classes for many years that this is the theology most people hang on to for dear life. Giving up the idea that God is in control of the world is unimaginable. And many in the classes I have taught who hold onto this theology, this resource for worst-case scenarios, have gone through much darker valleys than I have. But I had now lost this theological bedrock. Life and our year in Jerusalem had been chipping away at it. And this brief episode finally destroyed it.
What was left for me to hang onto? All I could see was state power. The state would stop at nothing to survive. I decided that survival is the fundamental truth of the world. States wield power to survive. All states. This is their purpose. I realized that my own state, the United States, had wielded power for centuries, power to destroy indigenous peoples, power to enslave African peoples, power to occupy Central American countries, power to prop up dictators around the world—all in the interests of ensuring the survival of the United States and those who governed it. This is the way of states in the world. There is nothing moral here. Might makes right. And I had simply now seen this up close. So close that I couldn’t avoid the truth of it anymore.
The year we lived in Jerusalem, after we started hearing stories about the suffering of the occupied Palestinian people, I wrestled with a particularly unique and local form of this crisis. How could the Jews, a people who had experienced the greatest of sufferings in the death camps of the Holocaust—a genocide so unimaginable—cause so much suffering to another people? How could they mistreat the Palestinians they now occupied so badly that the occupied Palestinians could compare them to the Jews’ recent executioners, the Nazis, painting swastikas on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem? How could those who know oppression in its worst form become oppressors? If the Jews, who had experienced the worst that humans could bring against them, could not find a way to build a moral state practicing humanitarian principles, a state in which one could see God at least in some small way bringing order and meaning to the world, who could?
As I was wrestling with this question, I came to understand more acutely the fear that led to the State of Israel and to the occupation. Fear of extinction, that a Holocaust-like event could happen again. When you visit Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center just off of Herzl Boulevard in West Jerusalem, you begin by walking through the horrific and heartbreaking exhibits of the death camps under the Hitler regime in Christian Germany. And you end by walking through exhibits of the great movement of Jews to the Holy Land after World War II and the establishment there of the modern State of Israel, the State of Israel as a safe haven for the Jews whose very existence had been threatened in Christian Europe.
Two thousand years of life in Christian nations had taught the Jews in diaspora that they were never safe. Pogroms, persecution, ghettos, marginalization, and second-class status had been their common experience and constant fear. Even during eras of good relations and cultural respect from their Christian hosts, the question remained: what would happen when a Pharaoh arose who didn’t know Joseph? What would happen when the tide turned against them again? What would they do when their very existence was again threatened? How would they survive the next time their Christian masters came after them? The State of Israel was a new answer. A few liberal Jewish friends, who are exceedingly critical of Israel’s policies and its occupation of Palestine, have told me that, if worse comes to worst, if even the US should turn against them, they would have a safe haven in Israel.
The power, reach, and violence of the Christian state, a state rising out of my own Christian tradition, came home to me on one of the first sightseeing opportunities our family undertook in those first days after we arrived. It was a walk around the top of the Old City walls, and excursion recommended in the brochures Nick and I gathered on our first bus trip to the Tourist Office. On our walk, just above the Damascus Gate on the north wall of the old city, we found a plaque that reads, “Here the crusaders breached the city wall on 15 July 1099 AD.” They then massacred the entire population. In this episode, Christian state power struck against the Muslim rulers of Jerusalem in the eleventh century. It revealed the power and violence of the Christian state. And it showed me in the stones beneath my feet the precarious existence of any non-Christians within that state. In our own day, the Holocaust had proved it.
To survive, the Jews would have to use the same force of the state that Christians had used against them. The leaders of modern Israel have always believed this. Their army is sworn in on the top of Masada, the great mountain fortress overlooking the Dead Sea on the eastern edge of the Judean Desert, where the last survivors of the Jewish revolt against Rome, according to tradition, committed suicide in 74 CE rather than submit to Roman armies besieging them. On the top of Masada, Israeli soldiers swear to protect their country at all costs. Israel has developed a potent arsenal of nuclear weapons to use if their survival is ever threatened. It pursues ruthless policies as the occupier of Palestine to thwart any threat to its own safety. In other words, Israel has acquired, with potent US backing, the power of all states. And, like all states, including the US, it will use that power in any way necessary in order to survive. There is no big divine plan here. There is no morality and ethics. There is only state power. There are only states fighting at all costs to survive.
In what I have just said, I am not singling Israel out, since I see equally self-interested and violent policies and practices in Christian Europe and the United States, my own country. Nor am I giving Israel a pass. What I am doing is writing about the personal religious journey I took in Jerusalem. This revolution in my own religious thinking took place within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it could have happened anywhere in the face of brutal state power. For me, it happened in the holiest city in the world, a city holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
What happens happens, I decided, because states wield power in their own self interests, not because a great and benevolent divine power is assembling a plan in which all will work out as it should for the greater good. State power and its violence wreak havoc daily and leave human and environmental debris in their wake. And, in the big picture, this is chaotic and meaningless and terrible and senseless. This was the destination to which my existential journey in the world’s holiest city had led me. To the unholiest of conclusions about the world. To the absence of any spiritual resources for dealing with worst-case scenarios like the one in which I was living. To the absence of any resources at all. I had lost my religious bedrock.
But then.
Then I also began to encounter and consider experiences that didn’t fit this meaningless landscape, episodes that challenged the dark world I had just discovered. These were events that were out of place in the smarter, pragmatic, hardheaded, and valueless view of the world I had newly constructed, the world of absolute state power. In these events, people put their own lives at risk not to protect state power, not to ensure their own survival, but to protect others against the merciless execution of state power.
One such episode, which occurred in Jerusalem eight years after we left, is a vivid example. Not long after Jeff Halper, an Israeli activist, helped found the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), he received a call from a Palestinian friend, Arabiya Shawamreh, that the Israeli army had, without warning, assembled outside her family’s home in Anata, a village on the northeast border of Jerusalem. He rushed over to their home, and when the D-9 Caterpillar Bulldozer moved in to destroy it, he instinctively threw himself in front of the bulldozer to stop the demolition, as he has done many times since. Soldiers dragged him and Salim, Arabiya’s husband, away at gunpoint. Later Jeff Halper noticed that the tear gas canisters used to flush out Salim, Arabiya, and their six children, rendering Arabiya unconscious, were made in the Federal Laboratories in Philadelphia marked “For Outdoor Use Only.”[2]
Demolishing Palestinian homes is a common tactic of the Israeli army in occupied territories. During our first few weeks in the Holy Land, Kent and Linda Stuckey, at that time the directors of the social services work of the Mennonite Central Committee in the occupied territories, drove us down to visit a family in the Jordan Valley near Jericho, a family for whom they were providing assistance. This particular family’s son had been picked up without evidence and accused of bombing an Israeli bus near Jericho. As a result, the family’s home had been demolished. Its ruins lay nearby the little wooden table where they served us tea and biscuits under the sky. One morning months later at the Albright Institute, we were told that one of its Palestinian staff had returned home the evening before only to find his son’s home completely gone. It had been demolished without warning because he had failed to obtain the proper permit, a permit that was nearly impossible to obtain under occupation. During the year we lived in Jerusalem, 436 Palestinian homes in the occupied territories were destroyed.[3]
According to my new view of the world determined by state power, Jeff Halper should never have done what he did. He should never have risked death resisting home demolition. If state power indeed rules the world, if might always makes right, as I had decided, we should all have learned that by now, and, in our own self-interests, aligned ourselves with the state and its power, not against it. The only way to flourish in a world run by state power is to work with it. It’s the only way to ensure one’s own survival, success, and well-being. What possible reason could one have for opposing it?
Yet Jeff Halper did. And he and his coworkers at ICAHD have continued to do it. This was a mystery to me. Where did this resistance come from? Especially if the houses were still destroyed? Especially if one might lose one’s own life for it? And the thing is, Jeff Halper and his coworkers are not the only ones who did, who do, and who will continue to oppose state power deployed in the service of self-interested survival alone. The year we lived in Jerusalem, we learned not only about the absolute reach of state power, but we learned also about many individuals who resisted it and the immoral use of it. They acted without any self-interest at all. Without survival in mind. With only the care of their fellow human beings in mind.
We learned about Peace Now, a movement begun nine years before we arrived in Jerusalem by Israeli reserve army officers, which, as I write this essay, is working to halt the eviction of a Palestinian family from their home in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. We learned about Yesh Gvul, an organization of Israeli combat veterans who have refused to serve in the occupied territories. Thirteen years after we left Jerusalem, on March 16, 2003 during the second Palestinian Intifada, we read in our newspapers that Rachel Corrie, a member of the International Solidarity Movement, was crushed to death by an Israeli Defense Forces armored bulldozer as she stood in front of a Palestinian home in the southern Gaza Strip to prevent the Israeli army from demolishing it.
We learned to know Naim Ateek, a Palestinian Priest in the Episcopal Church of Jerusalem. During the year we lived in Jerusalem, he shaped the idea for Sabeel, a grassroots Christian ecumenical movement working with Palestinians who suffer under oppression, violence, injustice, and discrimination. Many of our friends that year in Jerusalem were participants in non-government organizations, church denominations, and United Nations agencies, who worked to support those injured by state power and violence. They all, in one way or another, chose to resist.
The year we lived in Jerusalem, Bishop Desmond Tutu, at the invitation of the Anglican Church in the Holy Land, visited for Christmas. He wanted to visit the land in which his own religious faith was born. And as a leader of Black South Africans under apartheid, he came to express his solidarity with Palestinians under occupation. On Christmas Eve, we boarded buses chartered by St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem to travel the few miles to Bethlehem to hear Bishop Tutu give the Christmas Eve sermon at Shepherds Field, the traditional site of the angels’ appearance. That evening, Shepherds Field and the roads to it were lined by armed Israeli soldiers on road embankments and on the roofs of adjacent houses. So many Palestinians thronged the field we couldn’t get close enough to hear Bishop Tutu preach. But at Christmas morning worship, we heard Bishop Tutu preach the sermon at St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem. As he spoke against dehumanizing violence and for freedom and justice, he repeated over and over, “You know, I’m talking about South Africa, right?” Bishop Tutu in his own country faced the ruthlessness of state power and the worst of worst-case scenarios. Yet he resisted it in Cape Town and in Jerusalem with unrestrained joy and exuberance for life. His sermon was filled with hope and enthusiasm. He mystified me. After the sermon, he spoke to and shook hands with our third-grader Nick and our first-grader Mary Claire with the warmth and happiness of their own grandparents.
So now I had to account not only for the absolute reach of state power, but also for this irrational resistance to it. I had to account for the fact that, in spite of the absolute reach of its power, the state couldn’t stamp out its opposition. It would try every time. And it would do everything it could to succeed. But it couldn’t. Why? With all of its ideology and guns and promises of well-being and survival, it could not wipe out resistance when its policies became repressive. Resistance that refused to let go of the good and the moral. What was this wellspring of good in the world that state power couldn’t reach? Why did it keep reappearing in unlikely places? How could it not be defeated with the absolute power wielded by the state? Where did it come from? What was it?
Perhaps this was God. The powerful mysterious force in the world I had once connected with control. What suddenly became just as real to me in this new world of state power that I had discovered was the constant eruption of resistance to it, a resistance that nearly always meant self-sacrifice and that had nothing to gain but a slightly better world with a little more compassion in it. If state power determines everything, if it has all the guns and all the authority, if might makes right, how could it not stamp out these annoying constant small protests against it? How could it not convince everyone that resistance was not in their self-interest and ultimately futile? How could it not completely do away with these eruptions of ethical action? It should be able to. It held all the cards. Or did it?
Now I began to realize that small acts of resistance to dehumanizing acts of the state happening around me that year in Jerusalem were as real as the state itself. They always have been and they always will be. Something, something in the universe is as tenacious about justice as the state is about injustice. What is the source of this tenacious resistance that demands self-sacrifice? How would you identify it? What would you call it? Could you call this impulse to do the right thing in all places and at all times God? But this is not the all-powerful God who determines everything, the God in control that I had brought with me to Jerusalem. This is the tenacious God who resists the violence and injustices of the state. It is not the God who is winning. It is the God who will never lose. Who will never be defeated. Who will always resist. Who is present whenever and wherever anyone does the right thing.
Archibald MacLeish says that we have to choose between the all-powerful God and the all-good God, because we can’t have it both ways. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play J.B., a twentieth century adaptation of the biblical Job, the circus vendor Nickles looks down from his ladder on the world and says, “If God is God, he is not good;/If God is good, he is not God.”[4] Each time the members of my seminary class and I read MacLeish’s play in our course on the Book of Job, we are asked to choose. Do we believe that “God is God,” that is, all powerful, for whom somehow the state and its violent power are ultimately part of God’s control and design, a God who cannot therefore be good? Or, do we believe that “God is good,” a God for whom state power is not part of God’s design and control, but who is present every time anyone resists the dehumanizing violence of the state? During my year in Jerusalem, I abandoned the God in control, and I came to believe in the God who is good.
Then I made another discovery, a discovery that goes to the very heart of my own Christian faith, a discovery about the resurrection. I am a very rational person, if you haven’t already guessed that by the intellectual way in which I have been describing my Jerusalem journey. Things have to be real, and they have to make sense. I’m not fond of paradox. And for me, the resurrection at the very center of Christian faith didn’t seem real. I came to believe it didn’t really happen. And so I found the apostle Paul’s claim a real problem: “If Christ hasn’t been raised, then our preaching is useless and your faith is also useless” (I Corinthians 15:14). Paul was essentially telling me, or so I understood him to be, that if I didn’t believe in the literal physical resurrection of Jesus—and I didn’t—that I might as well not be a Christian.
But then, while living and thinking through all of this in Jerusalem, in the very place where the resurrection happened, or didn’t happen as Paul thought it did, it hit me. It didn’t matter. Jesus’ physical resurrection from the dead didn’t matter. It was not the point. What mattered was that he had lived out a small but vivid and powerful resistance to earthly power. What mattered was that the Roman state couldn’t stop him, even by crucifying him. What mattered was that he came back. In his followers. In their experience, their joy, their energy, their vision, their commitment to truth, their love for the oppressed he loved, their caring for the people he cared for, their resistance to the violence of state power he resisted, and their willingness to lay down their lives for their vision, as he did. So many early martyrs. The resurrection is, I came to believe, the Christian way of asserting the truth of the God who won’t be stamped out. Whom the state can’t eliminate, no matter how hard it tries. Who keeps us alive when all seems lost.
The resurrection is simply the Christian way of saying this. And it is only one way of saying this. Rabbi Harold Kushner puts what I am trying to say here in his own Jewish language in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, a book we read every time I teach the Book of Job at McCormick Theological Seminary. Though I read his book eight years after we returned from Jerusalem, he articulates what happened to me in Jerusalem as well as anyone I have read or spoken to:
Life is not fair. . ..
Some people see life’s unfairness and decide, ‘There is no God; the world is nothing but chaos.’
Others see the same unfairness and ask themselves, ‘Where do I get my sense of what is fair and unfair? Where do I get my sense of outrage and indignation, my instinctive response of sympathy when I read in the paper about a total stranger who has been hurt by life? Don’t I get those things from God? . . . Our responding to life’s unfairness with sympathy and with righteous indignation, God’s compassion and God’s anger working through us, may be the surest proof of all of God’s reality. . ..
Only the voice of religion, when it frees itself from the need to defend and justify God for all that happens, can say to the afflicted person, ‘You are a good person, and you deserve better. Let me come and sit with you so that you will know that you are not alone.’”[5]
This unexpected, ridiculously underdog, undefeatable rising up of the good against all odds is now the resource I fall back on in the face of worst-case scenarios. I don’t underestimate the frightful power of true evil in the world, in human hearts, and in ruthless states. In fact, I am now more horrified by it than ever. But I am also more profoundly aware of the tenacious strength of good, how it won’t die, how it keeps rising up. And that is where I look for resources. It is how I keep believing and how I maintain courage and how I go on living in a very cruel world.
As I now put words to my journey in Jerusalem, I am reading 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, the memoir of Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist and activist now exiled from his country because of his resistance to totalitarian state power. He has felt as forcefully as anyone the merciless power of the state under the Chinese Communist Party. “Facing a nonviolent opposition,” he writes, “a totalitarian regime will not retreat a single step; instead it will always display its essential nature, retaliating with brute force, whatever the cost in human lives and human liberty.”[6]
Yet Ai Weiwei relates his experience as a boy of 10, at a time of great danger, when he felt a sudden uprising in himself against the abuses of state power. His father, the famous Chinese poet, Ai Qing, and his family had been exiled to Shihezi in the remote northwestern region of Xinjiang, the region of the Uyghur people now suffering severe human rights abuses by the Chinese government. While Ai Weiwei and his family were in exile in Shihezi, members of the Red Guard invaded their home, seizing all of Ai Qing’s manuscripts while looking for anything they could use to defame and destroy him. Realizing that his beautiful and precious collection of literature and art could be considered subversive and put them all in danger, Ai Qing decided to burn all of his books to save his family. Ai Weiwei remembers standing beside his father next to a bonfire they built outside their home, tearing out pages of his father’s books on art and philosophy and tossing them into the flames. “At the moment they turned to ash, a strange force took hold of me,” he remembers. “From then on, that force would gradually extend its command of my body and mind, until it matured into a form that even the strongest enemy would find intimidating. It was a commitment to reason, to a sense of beauty—these things are unbending, uncompromising, and any effort to suppress them is bound to provoke resistance.”[7]
It is this upswell of resistance to inhumanity in all of its forms of state power that has given life and sustenance to the artistic and political life of Ai Weiwei since. And, in unexpected and surprising and inspiring ways, it keeps doing that in the world over and over and over.
[1] As told by Harold Kushner in When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Avon Books, 1981), 17-18.
[2] Jeff Halper, An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 18-21.
[3] Halper, An Israeli in Palestine, 301.
[4] Archibald MacLeish, J.B. A Play in Verse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 11.
[5] Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, 142-43.
[6] Ai Weiwei, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows (New York: Random House, 2021), 145-46.
[7] Ai Weiwei, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, 132-133.
Dr. Theodore Hiebert
