Blessed be the Father who has made us able to share the lot of God’s holy people and with them to inherit the light. Because that is what He has done. It is He who has rescued us from the ruling force of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of the Son that He loves, and in Him we enjoy our freedom, the forgiveness of sin. (Col. 1:12–14)
CONGREGATION. (Canticle) Who speaks of the power of the Lord let him sing his praise to Him.
DANIEL. May the Lord our God have mercy on His people and his creation. Spread over us the tabernacle of your peace and let all your children live in peace. Look down upon the Christian community and direct us by your spirit and gather us from the four corners of the earth into the kingdom which you have prepared for your children. Lord, hear this prayer, and remember … (here are added particular prayers and names of people).
CONGREGATION. Hear our voice and save us.
DANIEL. Through Jesus we were named God’s children and we all say together: Our Father … (standing, as witnessed by the Didache).
DANIEL. The peace of the Lord be with you all!
(Bow, greeting)
DANIEL. May God show kindness and bless us, and make His face shine on us.
CONGREGATION.Then the earth will acknowledge your ways, and all nations your power to save. (Psalm 67:1–2)
(Bow, greeting)
Blessing of Aaron (or Thessalonians 3:16 etc.)
39. November 1990, Freiburg
F
INAL TALK
BY
B
ROTHER
D
ANIEL
S
TEIN TO SCHOOLCHILDREN
Since 1959 I have been living in Israel. It is a great joy to live in that country. It is the land of our Master, who walked the length and breadth of it. I, too, have walked almost all the length and breadth of it because it is not that large, our country. Even though there are modern cities and research centers, medical clinics and atomic energy in Israel, even tanks and planes—everything a modern state is expected to have—you can still walk through the countryside. In Central Europe you can no longer just go for a walk in the forest. Everything is fenced off, every scrap of land is spoken for, but in Israel there is still a lot of dry, empty, hilly land and there are deserted places where you can walk along a path and meet nobody. The scenery has not changed since the Master walked here. Perhaps that is what is so attractive about these places, especially in Galilee. Our land evokes love and it evokes hatred but it leaves nobody indifferent, not even those who do not acknowledge the existence of God the Creator. Since childhood I have been aware of the presence of a divine power which preserves our world, and when that feeling weakened I was given proof which confirmed that man is not alone in the world. We sometimes long for proof of the existence of God and it is something that even great philosophers have investigated. Not only St. Augustine, but also Kant.
In Israel there are places which testify to this themselves, for example, the banks of Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee as it is called in the New Testament. The harbor there is in the same place and there are the same reeds by the bank, the same rocks on the shore. This is the place from where the boat with the Master set off and the place where he proclaimed the Beatitudes, where five thousand people, almost half the population of this region, spread over the mountain where the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves took place. The very land here testifies. It is amazing that little Lake Kinneret in a remote province in the outer reaches of the ecumene should become known to the whole world. It was from this place that two millennia ago the news went out to the world that all people, the bad, the irrational, the wicked, the foolish, and also those who have no belief in the Redeemer at all, are forgiven because the best of all people, the true Son of God, took their sins upon himself. He said that today people are free from sin and confirmed that the Spirit of God can exist in a person if only that person so wishes.
I know several dozen people who have come to Israel for a week and stayed for the whole of their lives. There is a Japanese man who came on a tourist trip twenty years ago and never left. Today he conducts tourist trips for his compatriots. I know a Dutchman who, from the bottom of Lake Kinneret, salvaged exactly the kind of boat the Apostle Peter had. The Dutchman spent ten years restoring it, saved it from beetles and worms which attacked it, and to this day he lives on the bank of the lake next to this boat. I know several Germans who have been unable to leave our country because they have come to love it so much.
This is a land of living history which continues to be measured on a biblical scale. What is happening in it today could perfectly well be written in the Bible. The history of humanity is concentrated in this place. It is not chance that something explosive occurred here which changed the consciousness of the world, or at least of the European and Arab worlds. From here, from within a very small people, there emerged a great teacher, Yeshua. He spoke a language that a modern Israeli could understand. He lived in this culture, wore the same clothes, ate the same food, observed all the customs of the Jewish religion, which he practiced. His first disciples were in a sense Judaean Protestants. Christianity, a word that the first disciples of Jesus, his twelve apostles, never heard, began as reformed Judaism. Only a century later did it break its umbilical cord and go out into the world of Greece, Rome, and Asia Minor. The Jerusalem community of the followers of Yeshua, headed by the Apostle James, existed for several decades. It was this community which was the mother Church of all later Christian communities, and it was in its language—Ancient Hebrew with an admixture of Aramaic—that the paschal meeting of the Master with his disciples took place which in the Christian world is known as the Last Supper.
On the Cross of Yeshua the inscription INRI—Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudorum—was written in three languages, Ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. For the first one hundred years, Christians celebrated their liturgy in Ancient Hebrew and today, in Israel, we are again conducting services in this ancient, original Christian language, the language the Master spoke.
When I came to Israel, it was important for me to understand what our Master believed. The more I immersed myself in study of that time, the more clearly I saw that Jesus was a real Judean who called in his sermons for observance of the ten commandments, but considered that mere observance was not enough, that love is the only response man can make to God, and that the most important thing in human behavior is not to do evil to another, to show sympathy and compassion. The Master called for an expansion of love. He did not hand down any new dogmas, and the novelty of his teaching is that he placed Love above the Law. The longer I live in the world the more obvious I find that truth.
Thank you for your patience and for listening to me so attentively.
I will be happy to answer any questions you may have.
ELKE RAUSCHE. What is your most terrible memory of the war years? And what is your most joyful?
DANIEL STEIN. In the course of many long years I have been guilty of a lot of wrong and foolish actions. There is one act I have been grieving over my whole life and it is also my most terrible memory. One time there came a phone call to the police station and we were informed that partisans had attacked two German soldiers inspecting a telephone line. One was killed but the other managed to escape. As he escaped, he noticed that people working in the fields were showing someone the direction in which he had run. After he returned to his unit they phoned and informed us about the incident. We were ordered to exact retribution from the village. That meant they would shoot one in every ten inhabitants and burn the village to the ground. Large forces were assembled, subdivisions of the German army and gendarmerie, some two hundred fifty soldiers and policemen. The village was surrounded, the houses were searched, everybody was driven out into the fields. Of two hundred people twenty were to be selected to be shot.