Searching for Home in All the Right Places

by Elie Nijm

This past December, my family and I decided to make a visit to our parents and family “back home” to the old country. We anguished over the decision for more than one reason. Not only were we taking a risk with our physical lives given the immense political and military tension inside and outside Israel, but also “going back home” was always a tumultuous emotional experience that sparked off a lot of memories and threw us back into the eye of the cyclone of our definition of who we truly were. It may sound strange to those uninitiated into the mysteries of Middle East politics that questioning the true identity, and thus the legitimate residence of those known as Christian Arabs, has always been a point of contention and confusion to those directly involved. And so, in order to give you perspective on my experiences during this last trip, I ask you to indulge me as I share some of my history. Hopefully the process will help both you and me gain a greater understanding of who we are and help us inch our way to more deeply actualize our True Nature.

Human beings define themselves by their past and present: their family and family name, their clan, culture, place, history and time. Having been born and raised in a Christian Arab family in Israel, the question of my true identity was always a puzzle to me. As a child, my identity was quite “flexible,” often determined by the ever-shifting emotional and socio-political currents of the Middle East without much emotional distress to me. This flexibility served me well until I came of age and began to experience confusion, shame and pain. These feelings came from being seen by the Jewish community as only an Arab and by the Moslem community as only a Christian. To those swept by Arab nationalism of the early sixties, I was a Palestinian, to Jews in Israel who were looking for allies, I was an Israeli Christian. And to a small but vocal group, I was really a Phoenician! To my parents, I was Lebanese, since we are Christian Maronites whose historical roots go back in time to the mountains of Lebanon. This confusion not only entitled me to discrimination and abuse from all camps, but also to inner pain from not being able to define myself in any concrete fashion. The Jew and the Moslem knew what they were and were willing to die for it. I never was convinced of being truly anything nor was I willing to make the necessary sacrifices that came from being somebody—like going to war or dying for a piece of land. For a long time in my youth, I envied both parties. The feeling of being a hypocrite, always driven by the need to protect myself from outside insult and inner confusion, was a source of immense inner pain.

In my teenage years, my need to develop a sense of identity forced itself on me with tremendous pressure. The question of my true identity – and consequently my true place under the sun — could no longer be evaded. For the major part of my youth, home, identity, family, and culture were all hopelessly intertwined in a mesh of confusing emotions.

In high school, I remember feeling a glimmer of hope that my existential perplexity might finally be resolved. My catechism nun declared one day that we all have a soul down deep inside of us, the seat of our “real nature.” Voila! There was no need to worry anymore about who I was on the surface. This “surface” was ever-shifting anyway, and why stay there when I could have the real thing? Here was an idea that transcended all national, religious, and clannish boundaries—I wished all parties involved in the Middle East conflict as well as my family would discover this truth! Perhaps what each one of us was and where we came from didn’t matter after all.

I tried to share this with my family only to be quickly dismissed. My mother reminded me we were already Christians. “This “new idea” is nothing new,” she said. “It is a given fact that we all have a soul. What are you talking about?”

“But what about the deeper implications of the idea?” I persisted.

“Foolish thinking!” she retorted.

It didn’t take long for my sense of relief to evaporate—the idea of a soul crumbled like a deck of cards. There were too many unresolved questions about this mysterious soul residing inside of me. If it was more real than me, how come I didn’t know about it before? Why did I need somebody else to tell me about the real me? There were many “friendly altercations” between the nun and me.

“Are you telling me that my feelings, my thoughts, my actions, are all supposed to serve another part of me that I cannot see, smell, touch or even experience?” I asked with frustration that reached a boiling point.

“Yes,” she snapped angrily. “And you should not think too much about this but accept it by faith.”

“Sister,” I replied with a sense of ridicule she did not appreciate, “that is the quickest way to make me schizophrenic!”

To make a long story short, this nun, in utter frustration, declared one day to the class that Elie Nijm was doomed to hell for his heretical ideas. This same nun had declared days earlier that boys and girls who even fantasize about sex are doomed to go to hell. To be honest, I really was not too worried!

But I was still intrigued by this question of what made me fundamentally different from others. We moved to a new house in the early ’60s and had a Romanian Jewish family for neighbors. Friends gave us the customary warnings—about US being Arabs and THEM being Jews. But the forced proximity between our two families made us closer than we could have anticipated. We began to like them and they began to like us. My mother and our Romanian Jewish mother became so intimate that they cried on each other’s shoulders, discussing children, food, and husbands, in that order. But my mother continued to remind me that down deep, somewhere in the dark recesses of our souls, we were different.

I was not so much alarmed by these warnings as I was driven deeper to discover this mysterious thing that made us so different. As far as I could tell, this Jewish mother was not so different than my own mother, and the glances I secretly shared with her daughter who was my age were not so fundamentally different from her glances towards me. Our neighbors were as attached to their domicile as we were to ours. We laughed at the same jokes and equally feared the drums of war and destruction. In the ’67 war, we even ran together to the shelter, helping each other and holding hands. At that moment, I clearly recall how I felt not just terror and fear of annihilation, but also joy that came when all boundaries disappeared into thin air. The Jewish mother held me as if I were her own, and at that very moment she truly was my mother.

The war of ’67 between the Jews and the Arabs transformed my yearning to know my true self into an obsession. How could human beings slaughter each other and cause so much misery over “home,” over a piece of land? Over some real but mysterious “ethnic self”? That essential part of our nature that makes us so different must be, by necessity – looking at the evidence of the privation and endless suffering of war – real! Human beings couldn’t be that stupid or foolish. If they were willing to die for something, it had to be true, didn’t it?

And so, one day when the money in my pocket reached the arbitrary cut off point of $600, I decided the time was ripe to move to America. After all, America was the place where discoveries happened. I couldn’t anticipate the real price I would pay for this journey. At the time it was a well known fact that anybody could go to America and build a “new home” there. Besides, I thought my quest to discover the true nature of myself could only be achieved in a place where a modicum of freedom and tolerance existed. The culture and religions of the Middle East were too saddled with the weight of the past to allow room for such discoveries. To my dismay, my feelings towards the home I ran away from became more intense rather than less. In the long ensuing years it took to adjust to American culture, I was torn apart by my attachments to my two homes. When I went “back home” for a visit, my emotions always pulled me to my home in America. And when I was in America, my thoughts too often drifted to the home, neighborhood, friends, and family members of my childhood years. For a long time I felt doomed to be forever torn between two worlds, never finding a true resting place. My sense of identity paralleled my feelings about my true home and remained forever-shifting, like a boat at the mercy of the winds. One moment I was strictly “Arab,” another moment I was a “Christian Arab,” while at other moments I was only an “Israeli.” I adapted myself to the perceived identity of the questioner and sought to reduce embarrassment, shame, or rejection for not being what the questioner thought I should be. In those early long years, I was still caught up in the fantasy of a true home yet to be realized and the emotional tax I paid became more burdensome.

This new place where I was seeking to build a new foundation seemed even more complex than the one I just left behind. It was not part of the deal to exchange shame for guilt, a leisurely walk to the market for a traffic jam, the certainty of tradition for the ever-changing social currents and fads as well as the astronomical amount of information that keeps compounding by the minute, social conformity for loneliness and isolation, and a more simple way of life for a lifestyle that is infinitely more complex.

Slowly, but surely, over many moons, a more subtle and faint process took shape in the deeper recesses of my heart. I saw that beneath the surface appearance of diversity, human beings everywhere yearned for a more genuine place under the sun. It was a consolation to realize that even those who defined themselves in more concrete and traditional terms were really seeking something more authentic. Like many of my contemporaries in the ’70s and ’80s, I hopped from one new age ‘movement’ to another, only to be disappointed when I subjected the proclaimed ideals to the microscope of self-honesty and reason. Living in a culture that constantly redefined and emphasized the idea of self helped me shift and focus my quest more to the question of who I truly was – truly, in the deepest sense of the word. This question gripped me by the jugular vein and would not let go. Thanks to Zen, the rug was totally pulled out from under my feet. For a long time, I knew for certain who I was not, but I could not honestly respond who I was, even if my life depended on it.

My motivation for “going home” this December was twofold. On the one hand, I wanted to do my duty to my ailing mother and perhaps bid her farewell, conveying my gratitude for her long life of sacrifices. On the other hand, I was keenly aware of the need to bid farewell to my history, to a part of my past that no longer felt connected to my present. It was a severing that was inevitable, though painful. Since moving to the U.S., each trip home had cut one more strand in the umbilical cord. With each amputation of a part of a self that had been hemorrhaging for a long time, feelings of relief and grief followed.

I conveyed my farewell and thanks to my mother, but how could I say good-bye to my past? I found there really was no need to make any special effort. Sitting back and quietly observing the ingrained mental habits, the fear that paralyzed, the pettiness that poisoned, the sand castles built on the shores of illusion, and the self-inflicted hell that is vociferously created by the very people who so doggedly try to escape it, all were enough to make me gladly give up my “association” and identity to all of the parties involved. More than ever, I felt the need to remove the shackles of this particular history and to shield not only myself, but my son as well, from this tragic heritage. Shadows from my past paraded themselves in front of me and time dissolved the boundaries. My mother, my sister, my niece and nephews and their spouses, my friends and everyone I met was drowning in this quagmire. Indeed, time stood still—the Ghost of Christmas Past thrived in this part of the world where Future Ghosts were created daily. The misery of the children of men finds its greatest heritage in the “holy land,” where the currents of ignorance, greed, and blind passions cast a dark cloud over the lives of many generations. In the Holy Land, as everywhere else, the microcosm reflects the macrocosm. Both are intertwined, and at the family, as well as the national, level the individual is caught up in a predicament from which there is no escape as long as the world is divided into parts and each self continues to be defined as a distinct and separate entity. To kill or be killed for a piece of land, the same piece of land from which both parties emerged and which will bury both of them, to grab what belongs to others in order to increase the fleeting sense of the security of a deluded self, to blow one’s self up and destroy the lives of innocent human beings, or to engage in heated passionate debates that do nothing other than add psychological pollution to a land already saturated with it—all continue to tear at the fabric of life. And human life is frivolously wasted.

As I listened to my mother and sister for the umpteenth time about their physical and psychological ailments, and to my nephews about how shitty life is in Israel for the Arabs, and to both Jews and Arabs engaged in totally fruitless political debates that inflame passions and trample on reason, I was plunged back into the eye of the cyclone. In the midst of this madness, I could not nor did I have the desire to separate myself from it all. The pain in the Middle East became mine. Like a ray of light passing through a prism and showing its colors, only to disappear into the endless void, this suffering – everybody’s suffering – went through me and showed its full spectrum. There was nothing to say, nothing to do, other than what must be done. Like time itself, I could dispassionately watch and just make sure I did not contribute to the human tragedy. To quote from a not-so-flattering historical personality, “I came, I saw, I cried.” There was no longer a need to identify or disidentify, just simple uncomplicated being.

I am often asked my opinion about what is going on “back home.” The questioner ascribes to me a level of expertise about the incomprehensible politics of my country of origin that fortunately I have never earned. I reckon the questioner is also searching for meaning in the irrational human behavior of violence and injustice. Deeper still, both the questioner and I, and perhaps all sentient beings, are searching ultimately to grasp and actualize the meaning of our lives.

Luckily I no longer feel the need to be saddled with expert opinions about the Middle East, or for that matter about many other subjects. As for my “home,” these days I feel a great deal of affinity with turtles. I carry my home on my own back wherever I go. Eating, sleeping, walking, visiting, exploring, working—home is always “here.” The sun shines the same in the place of my birth as it does across seven continents. The trees and wind speak the same language I heard in my childhood as they do today in the place of my sunset years. The earth continues to patiently carry me with the same tenderness and gentleness wherever I go as she did when I was first born. I cannot help but recall the words of Dogen: “I came to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.” And by the same token, wherever my home is, there is my family, too. Many times during my recent trip, I wished I could be a big mother hen sheltering her little chicks under her wings, protecting them from themselves. However, I did not find too many people who felt they needed sheltering, not the least from themselves. Feelings of compassion often felt like an orphan child walking down a one way street with a dead end, even though in a deeper sense I knew the street was not really one way and the dead end part was but a mirage.

I find solace in a Chinese story I heard many years ago. In this story, in a drought-stricken village in China, the inhabitants called upon a sage with a reputation for being able to bring about rain. When the sage arrived, he asked to be left alone in a hut. Three days later, much needed rain came.

“How did you do that?” he was asked.

“I did nothing,” he replied. “I just sat and made myself in tune with the Tao.”

Perhaps this is all I can do right now—in spite of not having a reputation for bringing about rain. Yet I hope that rain may come soon to the Middle East, to my family, and to sentient beings in the ten directions.


(The following poem was used by Elie during a sesshin encouragement talk.)

I appeared I know
not how, but
here I am!
I saw a road
ahead of me, and so
I walked.

And I will continue
to walk, freely or
against my will.

How did I come,
How did I perceive
my road, I don’t know

Am I new or am I
old in this existence

Am I free to roam
or am I a prisoner
in chains

Am I the master
of my destiny
or is my life
determined for me

I deeply wish I
could know, but
I don’t know.

And my road is
no ordinary road.

is it long or short?

Am I rising or
am I tumbling into
the abyss

Am I the one
walking on the road
or is the road
moving under my
feet?

Or perhaps both of us are
standing still and fate is
moving? I don’t know.

-Elia Abu Madi