A Marae, a Waiata and an Unexpected Lesson in Unity

I’m of a certain age that a particular cohort of Kiwi artists takes me back to days of warm summers, marginally street-safe old vehicles and Lion Brown out of 750 millilitre glass bottles. One of those artists is Jenny Morris, and one of my favourite songs of hers has a line that has always resonated with me. In it, Morris croons, “Aotearoa, you’re drivin’ me crazy, you keep seein’ other people’s messes, and you think that there’s a mess here too.” The song is, in my mind, a plaintive wail to focus not on our problems but on all the good things that exist.

I was thinking recently about Jenny Morris and that song from my youth. The context was a meeting between different faith groups in New Zealand and, in particular, a coming together of some members of the Muslim community alongside their Jewish compatriots. The particular setting and events around it are irrelevant, so rather than dwell on those, I’ll write about the experience and one particular moment from that meeting.

As the event occurred on a marae, the attendees followed protocol and started with a mihi whakatau. As part of that, the Jewish group that I was a member of began singing our waiata. We sang “Haveinu Shalom Aleichem”, an admittedly slightly kitschy Hebrew folk song that translates roughly as “we bring peace upon you”. As I said, it was a somewhat kitschy choice, but needs must, and many readers will have shared the experience of having to grasp for a waiata that everyone in the group knows and can sing.

Anyway, as we finished, one of the Muslim leaders expressed the view that his contingent singing a waiata was wholly unnecessary, given the fact that “shalom aleichem”, the Hebrew words for “peace be upon you”, are almost indistinguishable from the Arabic words “salaam aleikum”, which mean exactly the same thing.

It was a throwaway comment, but one that I found both confronting and moving. We live in a world in which individuals are increasingly defined by their differences and, even worse, those differences are taken to identify the entirety of the individual. It’s George Bush’s “you’re either with us or against us” writ large. A situation where the opinion an individual holds about one distinct topic area comes to define that person entirely. It’s something that I, as someone who is a secular Jew and who supports the existence of the State of Israel, have faced increasingly over the past two years. Notwithstanding that I have very real issues with the conduct of the Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank, many people suggest that simply by recognising Israel’s right to exist, I am therefore a total supporter of everything that particular nation does.

The words of the imam I spent the day with reminded me that, in actuality, things are far more complex and nuanced than that. Muslims and Jews, for example, share a common origin. Alongside our Christian friends, we follow religions that trace their lineage to Abraham. In the case of Muslims and Jews, we pray, assuming we pray at all, in languages that share very close ties. When we pray, we face in a similar direction, and the religious laws that govern our day-to-day activities do not take much squinting to look remarkably alike.

And yet, increasingly, we define ourselves, our faith and our communities by the differences of opinion that we have, no matter how small a proportion of our total worldview those opinions might actually cover.

There are some lessons in here for society as a whole as we try to navigate an increasingly polarised, disharmonic and fractured world. Vaccine supporter or sceptic? Fan of the current coalition or opposed? A proponent of taxation reform or not? A supporter of the welfare state or opposed to it?

All of these are very real issues that most people reading this will have a perspective on. And yet we love our children, we worry about the future of our families, our nation and our planet. We want better for ourselves and those we love. Those fundamentally human traits are common and far more important than a viewpoint about a specific social or political situation.

It took a few wise words from an Imam to make me think not about our differences but about the things we share. Those wise words are increasingly critical for us to reflect upon as members of a society struggling to work through some very significant issues.