“Witness in Lebanon with Hezbollah”: review
Posted by: adonis49 on: May 22, 2009
“A Witness in Lebanon with Hezbollah” by Thierry Levy-Tadjine; (May 22, 2009)
The French small book “Temoin au Liban avec le Hezbollah” is of 128 pages and published by “L’ harmattan”; ISBN: 978-2-296-06619-9. The book is of six chapters and a prologue: 1) Receiving before giving, 2) Jew in one way and pro Hezbollah, 3) My brethren the Shias, 4) Testimony of a war (2006), 5) The Lowest (God), and 6) expectancy and the dialogue.
Thierry Levy-Thadjine is French; his grand father was Jewish and was incarcerated during the Nazi period. Thierry father was baptized Catholic and married a French Catholic woman. Thierry married a first time with a Moroccan woman (thus Tadjine) and then studied economics and economic managements of enterprises. By the age of 40 Thierry came to Lebanon to teach and settled since 2004 and then married a Shiaa woman from Sarafand.
Thierry guiding verses are the stories of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well and Jesus walking with the brothers Emmaus after his resurrection. Jesus joins the two disciples to their hometown and the brothers did not recognize Jesus because he was supposed to be dead. As Jesus breaks the bread in the manner he did during the Last Supper the disciples open large eyes of recognition and Jesus disappear; the disciples believes in Jesus’ resurrection though he is absent and testify to the other disciples. Ernst Bloch in his three volumes “The Expectation Principle” is Thierry’s theologian mentor with the definition of “God present under the sign of absence”.
Thierry blame most of the Christians who volunteer to educate the less fortunate (of other religious denominations) but never take the time to understand and listen first to their plight and their feedback. They believe that they are much better off morally and culturally and fail to befriend the ones they had the opportunity to encounter. Thus, by failing to receive first they fail to communicate and do proper jobs.
Thierry realized that the Moslem Shias and the Catholic Church have many similarities: first, they are both willing to interpret the verses of the Books and encourage rational interpretations that bring communities together; second, they both believe in “God present in the sign of absence”; and third, they have a structured hierarchy and the clerics study long years to become eligible for preaching and serving their communities. The Moslem Sunnis and the Protestants are similar because they read the Books literally and have no strong and cohesive structures.
(I have written on those similarities and differences in many of my posts. In fact, on one hand the Prophet Mohammad could not withstand a centralized religious structure or intermediaries between the believers and God simply because he was a disciple of his elder cousin Warkat who was the patriarch of a “heretic” Christian sect in Mecca the “Ebionites”. At the period, Byzantium persecuted any Christian sect that refused to obey the Byzantium brand of Catholicism. On the other hand, the prophet encouraged interpretation and the responsibility of the rational mind to learning and acquiring knowledge. The Prophet Mohammad left no instructions on successions or organization of the Moslems after his death, though he had plenty of occasions to set down his will if he wished. Apparently, only in the last two centuries did the Shias structure their theology after the Persia Safavid Empire ruled Iran; before that, the Shias in Lebanon were the most unorganized religious sect and were constantly persecuted by the ruling Sunnis.)
Thierry refused to be evacuated by the French during the July war of 2006 and witnessed the atrocities of the war and he testified to the resistance of Hezbollah as a national resistance against the Israeli invasions and occupations of Lebanon.
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