c. 2003 Religion News Service
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. _ So this rabbi and this Baptist pastor from Alabama were walking in downtown Hanoi, and they kept seeing motorbikes carrying cages full of dogs on their way to be slaughtered for someone’s supper.
No joke.
“In Vietnam, they believe it’s good luck to eat dog at the end of the month,” said Temple Emanu-El Rabbi Jonathan Miller.
Miller and Southside Baptist Church Pastor Steve Jones took a summer sabbatical to Vietnam and Cambodia together. “It’s rare that when clergy take a sabbatical, they go with another clergy, even rarer clergy of another faith,” said Miller.
Some of what they saw on the trip gave them nightmares. And they also learned to see puppies through another culture’s eyes.
“We got to focus on lives lived so differently than we could ever imagine,” Miller said. It also gave them insight into suffering and how people deal with it, in their past and present.
Miller and Jones have been friends now for several years. During Temple Emanu-El’s recent renovation project, the Jewish Reform congregation held its worship services in Southside Baptist Church. The pastor and the rabbi bonded.
Miller and Jones wanted to see how the Vietnamese and Cambodians have dealt with issues of conflict and reconciliation, so they spent three weeks traveling through those formerly war-torn countries.
In Cambodia, they visited the killing fields, where the Khmer Rouge murdered civilians and buried them in mass graves in the 1970s. “They killed 1.75 million people, about a quarter of the population, in four years in ways that were brutal and nobody understands,” Miller said.
After visiting a shrine with pictures of victims and shelves of stacked skulls excavated from the mass graves, both of them had nightmares. “We were just kind of overwhelmed,” Jones said.
In speaking with the Cambodian people, they sensed a reluctance to discuss the torture and mass killings overseen by Pol Pot.
“There was an underlying fear and depression because of the genocide,” Jones said.
“Nobody talks about it,” Miller said. “You’d think everybody would talk about it.”
In Vietnam, the people have reconciled with Americans over the U.S. war which left millions of Vietnamese dead, they said. “They call it the American War; like any war, it happened and they’ve moved beyond it,” Jones said.
“In school, they are taught that the Americans are not your enemies _ extend your hand in friendship,” Miller said.
Though it’s a Communist country, the busy streets are bustling with capitalism, they said.
“People were kind, generous and gracious,” Jones said.
“You felt you were on an adventure every day,” Miller said. “Crossing the street was an adventure with all those motorbikes.”
Their adventures included a chat with a Cambodian monk, who seemed perplexed by the rabbi. “He didn’t even know what Judaism was,” Miller said. They met the Roman Catholic archbishop of Hanoi, Methodist missionaries who run a school in Cambodia and toured a military museum with a former North Vietnamese soldier who had fought against and killed U.S. soldiers.
Cambodia seems to have haunted them.
“In Cambodia, you don’t know what’s simmering underneath,” Miller said. “They suffer a lot and they suffer in silence. It’s not good to suffer in silence.”
“There can’t be any forgiveness because there hasn’t been justice,” Jones said. “They can’t get beyond the horror of it. They will not talk about it. They’ll have to someday.”
DEA END GARRISON