This is Keith and this is Ben, and this is Main Street Lutherans. Keith is back with us this episode and he did a great job with our interview with Pastor Imad Haddad, who's now a reverend doctor, I believe we can refer to him now as.

I think that is indeed true. Yeah.

Excellent. So, as I promised in our last episode in episode 36, that we would talk about the social message on Israel and the Palestinian conflict, but we sort of feel like we need to do an update on how we felt about that interview in episode 36. So Pastor Imad Haddad from Jordan, pastor at a church that is in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land, that is, or in Jordan and the Holy Land, I believe. But so he was in the United States for a commencement. He received his doctorate, Doctorate of ministry.

From Udea Lutheran Seminary.

Yes.

Which is kind of how loosely how we got connected with him through someone that we know at the center of. I mentioned Martin Otto Zimmen, who was on staff there, and he's the one that. That linked us with Astor Ahad. So that was very much appreciated.

Yes. And I believe, in fact, he is conducting a trip to the. The Holy Land here shortly. So we might. Might be able to find a link for that trip before we publish, hopefully. Yeah, yeah.

So for people that think that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the elca, is a mouthful of word salad, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land is even more. And.

Yes.

Yeah. And it actually has more words in its name than it has congregations.

That's right.

Just six congregations in Jordan, in Jerusalem and in the West Bank. And our guest, Maud, is pastor of one of them in Amman, Jordan.

And that's the only one in Jordan.

Right? Yeah.

So the relationship between the ELCJHL and the ELCA was one of those things that I wanted to learn more about. I think our relationship is mostly through an initiative of the ELCA called samud. And its goals are accompaniment, advocacy and awareness raising. And part of what I find interesting of that is when we talked with the ELCA Youth Gathering folks last year, those are the things that they talked about for the accompaniment day. That's part of the gathering, which is they show the kids how to do accompaniment. So that is going out and doing work with people, advocacy, learning the issues and being able to speak about it, and awareness raising, just becoming aware of different things. And so I found that parallel kind of interesting.

Yeah. And you know, Imad spoke about, you know, his sort of lived experience of that relationship with Samud and The ELCA and their work with the Lutheran Church in, in Jordan, in the Holy Land. And you know, he spoke of it in a, in a fairly kind of a church oriented, you know, congregationally oriented sort of thing. The idea of praying for one another, of visiting and having conversations and, and just, just kind of being aware of what that lived reality is from both of our churches for the sake of the other. I found that to be a really uplifting and helpful thing to hear.

Yes. And the other thing that I wanted to point out with this is that we have a relationship with them through the Lutheran World Federation as well as directly. And I think one of the things that we often forget as American Lutherans is that there are other Lutheran churches in the rest of the world, in Canada, for instance, but again, certainly in Europe, even though, say, in Germany it's been combined a little bit differently. But the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land has relationships with those folks as well. So we're not the only ones in dialogue with those folks and trying to help them out, which I think is an important thing to note, especially in the times that we're in right now.

Yeah, yeah. And Samud, then is our unique ELCA initiative for, for the conducting of that relationship. But right. There are, there are other Lutheran bodies around the world that, that, like you said, are there in relationships with them as well and with one another. Yeah.

Now, as far as, as the interview went, we, we received a little bit of reactions to it. Nothing. All very good, really. What, what were your thoughts? What are your thoughts? A bit out from that, that talk.

Gosh. I would say, you know, just as I've experienced at different points in my life, when I've had the opportunity to really delve into a deep, meaningful conversation with someone from a different culture, from a different part of the world and just hear their perspective and hear both the similarities and the differences, certainly differences in their lived experience, but similarities in, you know, the things that matter to them, the things they worry about, the things they're passionate about. And, you know, there is, there is so much similarity between, you know, in the hour, hour and a half that we were on the zoom call together between myself and Pastor Ahmad and, you know, the things that, that he cares about are very much the same things that I care about. And, and I always appreciate that. It's, it's, it sometimes feels surprising and yet it shouldn't be because, you know, we are all part of the same human family. So that's the first thing that really, that really strikes me the second was then to be able to hear his experience of what this highly contested relationship between Israel and Palestine means for him in his own daily life. Especially when you spoke about travel, when he wants to go back to Benjala to visit his family or they want to come visit him, the process of going through checkpoints and the amount of time involved in that for a trip that without those barriers, and I'm not saying those barriers aren't there for, for good reason at times, but that without those barriers would take two hours at a car and that it can be an all day experience just getting from point A to point B.

And I think a point that jumped out was the humiliation involved.

Yeah, yeah. And the possibility that partway through it's just going to be shut down and you're turned away and you say, no, you can't go today.

Right.

Like, you know, if, if, you know, for someone who lives in our part of the world and let's say they do have a parent who is, you know, I live in York, if, if my, if my mother lived in Philadelphia, it'd be about the same distance. And you know, the idea that I could get partway there and then suddenly learn, no, you can't go through the rest of the way today, you just have to go home and try again tomorrow. That is, that is literally so foreign to our experience as Americans to be somewhat shocking and. Yeah. Then adding on to that, you know, the inconvenience is one thing, but the humiliation involved, you know, having to defend yourself every step of the way, that you have a legitimate reason to be there, that you're not, you know, smuggling contraband, that you're not smuggling weapons, that you're not trying to cause trouble, that you're just going to visit your family. Yeah, that's a shocking piece, I think, for some people to hear about.

Yeah. So what got us into all this was we were considering talking about something much more, I would say, boring really, and basic. And that is a particular ELCA message, a social message on, on Israel and Palestine is how it's referred to. So social message on Israel and Palestine from 1989.

It's one of the oldest social messages we have, given that our denomination was only formed in 1988.

Yeah. And it's very unique among those messages, I think. But it tries to explain what the issues are in 1989 that are preventing peace at that point between the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO and Yasser Arafat and Israel. And it tries to explain those issues. And it's only A few pages. What is it, four pages? Something like that.

Four pages. And they're small pages. They're like booklet size.

Yeah. And the fourth page is how to order it. So it doesn't even.

And the end notes.

That's right. So it's short and in the end, so it tries to explain those issues. And then it asks members of the ELCA to do two things. One of those is to educate ourselves, and the second one is to pray. And I think you made a comment when we started talking about this at first a few weeks ago, that. That it has a very optimistic outlook on what is about to happen.

Yeah. At that point in history, you know, we had not yet come to the Oslo Accords, as Pastor Ahmad mentioned, and it's the document. Sorry, I'm browsing through it at the moment, and it says at one point that pretty much that things are as bad as they could possibly get and they can only get better. And here we go. I'm looking at the third page of the document. If anybody was pulling it up right under article number four. We recognize that resolving such a deep and complex conflict will involve lengthy, sustained negotiations. Yet we are encouraged by the spreading recognition that perpetuation of the status quo will be increasingly detrimental to both sides, as well as to world peace. And then it lists a couple of specific items there to defend that position of cautious optimism. And apart from those specific bullet points that name specific moments in history, the document could very well have been written today. And yet I don't know that anybody is more optimistic about peace coming to this region in 2025 than they were in 1980. And that's what stands out to me in reading this, that there's both a sort of a timelessness to it, and yet the hope that this. I mean, it's not an overly pie in the sky, positive kind of document, but the hope that it references in a couple of places certainly does not seem to have been realized and doesn't seem to. That it's going to be realized anytime soon. That's the part that's a little deflating, I think, in reading it.

Yeah. And it's a bit. Well, we'll add a couple things to this. One is that on the page for it, the ELC suggests reading a different document alongside it as part of it that is called. Well, There was the 2009 ELC strategy on the Middle east labeled Peace Not War, Peace not Walls, which has been now renamed Samud. But I can't find. I haven't been able to find a Copy of that document. I'm including a link to a video that's produced to go along with that, to take a look at. But. So we've issued more stuff about this. But they're not social messages and they're not social statements. They are. And to go back to what we talked about when we first talked about social messages and social statements, Social messages are given to. They're produced by the ELCA churchwide organization, given to the ELCA church council that approves them. And so it does not need approval at the churchwide assembly. So it doesn't have the same standing as the social statements. And the social statements are asked for by the churchwide assembly, which happens every three years. It goes to the ELCA church council to make happen, and then church council asks the churchwide organization to make it. But then three years or six years later, it is approved by the churchwide assembly, if they choose to. So it has more standing. It's been voted on by a greater representation of the church. And so they have two different classifications, but that neither of those things are. I'm looking at the list of social messages. And the one before this one in 1988 was on AIDS, and then in 1990, homelessness, end of life decisions in 1992, community, violence, sexuality, immigration. These are not specific events in particular regions that name people individually and forces. And so this one stands out when it comes to that.

Yeah, it's much more specific in both, you know, kind of scope and the places that it names. And a point in history, too. Yeah. Despite what I said about it being a timeless document.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah. So this one. And I wonder if that is part of the lessons that the church has learned. 1989 is. Well, it's a long time ago. I think maybe we learned a lesson in that, in that the church issuing a message, for that matter, this would still have taken maybe six months to a year, year and a half to have produced. And the message that was probably asked for was different than the one that was needed by the end. And so. But I note that it doesn't ask our political wings, our folks who advocate in Congress or in the state legislatures for particular issues. It doesn't ask our church to make any actual stands in that way, just to pray and to educate ourselves, which sounds like maybe it is lacking in something. There. There is a social message on terrorism that comes later and, you know, that's connected to the 911 attack. And it's really only connection to that is that between these two is that that asks one of the questions that it tries to ask is how do we Lutherans relate to Muslim people? Which would be a question that would come up in a. In a dialogue about Israel and Palestine, but it. It talks about living in an age of terrorism and not so much naming individuals. So.

Right.

So we have one of the longest catechism questions we've had so far from our last episode, which was what are ways to get involved in advocating for justice through the elca? And the answer, of course, was all of the above. And so we highly encourage you to join the ELCA E Advocacy Network and invite local officials to your congregation's ministries and projects. So also if you have a Lutheran State policy, public policy office in your state, you can get involved with that and you can contact the ELC Advocacy advocacy staff when you or a group, especially a youth group, are in Washington, D.C. for a visit. So you can do all that and more. I will also plug that. ELCA Advocacy now has a podcast called hereipod, and it has information about different programs in different areas that they. That we have advocacy for. I just listened to an episode about MMIW missing and murdered indigenous women that is through our. Our Native American program and Vance Black Fox and his. His work there. So, so really good episode. And they've got stuff from Samud and other areas as well. So good podcast. Look it up wherever your podcasts are found.

All right, well, for this episode, our question is a throwback to the last episode in our interview with Mr. Ahmad Haddad. And the question is, what is the meaning of the word samud, which you can find in that episode or on the ELCA's website?

We somehow avoided naming it today.

We did, yeah. Yeah. So what is the meaning of the word samood? Your options are steadfastness, faithfulness, smelling good, or is it an acronym for Special Undertaking for Mid East Unifying Diplomacy? So you can respond to that by email, on social media or to our telephone number, all of which are available in the episode notes. Main Street Lutherans is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben Fot, and the show is produced by Phote Media Productions. You find all our contact information links in a transcript in the episode notes. And until next time, go in peace, serve the Lord.

Thanks be to God.