Healing Words
by John Graham-Pole I’ve been reflecting on words I rarely heard during my fifty-plus years of medical practice. Words I
by Dorothy Agnes Lander
For the past 25 years, I (Dorothy Agnes Lander) have been writing letters to Letitia Youmans (1822-1896), foremother in the Canadian Sunday School movement, which peaked in the 19th century continuing well into the 20th century.
My letters all begin “Dear Letitia” and close with the sign off “Your sister in the work,” in the manner of suffragettes and temperance activists in the first wave of the modern women’s movement. I planned my latest letter to Letitia as a Chanukah-Christmas message of Peace on Earth through the lens of Palestine. As I began to pen it on the first day of Hanukkah, I learned of the horrific terrorist attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia, killing at least 15 people and injuring 40. How could this not factor into my letter to Letitia?
Some background to our correspondence and our resumés before I share my letter with you about the humanitarian catastrophe in Palestine and the biblical/historical sources for understanding the conflict. Letitia and I grounded our letter-writing bond in the immersive Sunday School Bible studies in the Protestant tradition of John Wesley Methodism experienced a century apart. We both knew of Palestine as the generic name for the Holy Land in the Middle East, but not the place name that inflames the airwaves and social media in 2025. We offer two artifacts that explain our mutual interest in Bible studies: my 1958 Bible School certificate signed by the minister and my mother-teacher when I was 11 years old, and Letitia’s 1893 autobiography Campaign Echoes, written when she was 66, at the request of the Provincial Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Ontario.
Over the years, our correspondence evolved with my research into the power of art to advocate for women and children. Even as I rebelled against the white supremacy and patriarchy embedded in church-based Christianity, I came to emulate the multiple non-violent art forms that Letitia, her WCTU sisters, and her youth Band of Hope offered to combat gender-based violence: marching with banners; singing hymns outside saloons; chanting their motto “Agitate, Educate, Legislate”; and yes, writing letters.
Before I share my letter to Letitia, I will set out our personal histories in which Palestine figures.
My childhood immersion in Bible studies introduced me to Abraham as the patriarch and father of monotheism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and as a revered figure in the three faiths and their holy books. Abraham is a foundational figure in the Torah, through which God initiated a special covenant and the father of Isaac, grandfather to Jacob. I learned this genealogy in the book of Genesis. In the Quran, Abraham (or Ibrahim as he was called) is a prophet who builds the Kaaba with his son Ishmael in Mecca. Isaac and Ishmael are half-brothers. In Genesis, Hagar is represented as Sarah’s Egyptian handmaid, given to Abraham to bear a son (Ishmael) as he had no children with Sarah. Many years later, when Abraham was one hundred years old (Genesis 21: 5-7 in the King James Bible), Sarah gave birth to Isaac. Breastfeeding was a taboo subject in 1950s Sunday School, but I present the reference to 90-year-old Sarah who “should have given children suck” as one of many examples where I was expected to suspend disbelief and not ask!!
Palestine, the land of Canaan where Abraham lived, was not so-called by the three faiths in their holy books; yet the name appears as early as the mid-12th century BC in Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions and in the 5th-century BC works of Greek historian Herodotus. 19th century Europeans revived it, recognizing that in 2nd century CE the Roman province Judaea was renamed Syria Palaestina. The name stuck until May 1948 when the Jewish state of Israel was declared – the year after I was born. In my Sunday School classes, Palestine remained as the name for the Holy Land, yet it appears only once in the Bible in the King James version.
Dorothy Agnes Lander, born 1947.
Letitia Creighton Youmans, 1827-1896.
December 14, 2025
Dear Letitia:
I’m writing to you on the first day of Hanukkah, sometimes called the festival of lights, as the lighting of the menorah for eight days commemorates the re-dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem after a group of Jewish warriors defeated the occupying Greek armies. The festival celebrates the triumph of light over darkness and spirituality over materiality symbolized by the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days. We don’t often point out that Jesus was not Christian but Jewish; we know from our Bible studies (Matthew 2:2) that the Wise Men presented Jesus Christ as the King of the Jews and of all Creation. Hanukkah was first celebrated in 164 BC so is it possible that Jesus got to light the menorah? A lovely image, eh?
I set out today to write you about Palestine, the Holy Land you and I knew from our Bible studies. It is now a war zone, and the site of intentional genocide and starvation of the Arab Peoples in the region. For you and me, Letitia, with our long exposure to Sunday School, we know that the faith traditions of Judaism and Islam trace their ancestry to two Semite half-brothers, Isaac and Ishmael. You would be horrified to learn that in the 1940s, the nationalist movement of “white” European Christians (known as Nazis) to eradicate Jewish peoples—a genocide referred to as the Holocaust—was at the centre of a world war. And then, brace yourself, my dear, on the first day of Hanukkah as I began to pen this letter to you, the news broke that two gunmen—father and son— killed 15 people and injured 40 at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia. A less publicized story is of Ahmed al-Ahmed, a Syrian Muslim father of two, the hero who tackled one of the attackers, preventing further massacre of his fellow citizens of Australia. Newspapers (and other media that arrived long after your lifetime in the 19th century) presented the massacre as anti-Semitism.
Hmmm, I notice that nowadays the “S” in Semitism is not usually capitalized, perhaps to bury that ancestral history? Journalists today rarely mention that the Israelites and the Ishmaelites are both Semites from the bloodline of Abraham. The term Semite does not appear in the Bible but is the name for the descendants of Noah’s son Shem (Gen. 9.18-Gen.9.19) that is, Semitic peoples like Hebrews, Assyrians and Arabs. It also identifies ancient peoples whose languages are related: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. So how, you might ask, is it that the Israeli forces blocking humanitarian aid and food supplies to the Ishmaelites in Gaza are not presented as anti-Semitic? Both Jews and Arabs have deep and ancient roots in the Holy Land and determining exactly who has the ancestral and genetic rights to the land and citizenship does nothing to advance peace—just the opposite. This violent obsession with contested territorial borders and blood quantum has fostered race-based humanitarian catastrophes and world wars. Does it remind you of moral philosopher Thomas Aquinas’ question: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
You would not have had a Jewish child in your Band of Hope or in your school in the 1850s and 1860s when you were a teacher in Picton, Prince Edward County, but my mother, also a teacher, did in the 1970s. She did not have a Muslim student in all of her years of teaching. But when my Mom was an elementary school teacher at Bewdley School in your birth county (Northumberland) in the early 1970s, Leanna Brodie was her sole Jewish student. As part of the Christmas concert, Mom had Leanna engage her classmates in lighting the menorah and learning the history behind it. Leanna went on to become a well-known playwright, librettist and actor, now based in Montreal. One of her plays Schoolhouse is dedicated to her country schoolteachers, my mother at Bewdley School and my Aunt Flo at Plainville School. In another play, The Book of Esther, Esther is not Jewish as you might expect, but rather the rebel daughter of conservative-Christian parents confronting the rigidity of their beliefs.
The terrorist attacks on Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East calls on all of us around the world in this Christmas season to pray for Peace on Earth, whatever prayer means to each of us. You know from my previous letters that I have been following your footsteps, including to Palestine Park on Lake Chautauqua; this model of the Holy Land was installed for the first Sunday School Assembly that you attended in 1874, which was also the founding moment for Chautauqua Institute.
You would be as distressed as I am that the structures and plaques with evocative place names and Bible verses (like Bethlehem, Capernaum, Bethany, Jerusalem) that you see on the map have been neglected and are largely in ruins. Today the Park serves mostly as a picnic site and family playground, not the instructional living map that you experienced in 1874, or even that my husband and I experienced 26 years ago in 1999. It may be “instructional” to have the model of Jericho “tumbling down” but not the other landmarks. In contrast, the Mount of Olives is receiving an upgrade but critics claim that the purpose of augmenting this 3000-year-old Jewish cemetery is to push out Arab neighbours. Meanwhile, I’ve read that Jacob’s Well, where Jesus talked with the Samaritan woman (John 4:5-7) continues to flow.
The Guide Book for a Walking Tour of Palestine Park, which we were given in 1999, is careful to “note that we have not attempted to relate any of the locations to current events. The text is written from a Biblical perspective.”The Guide Book refers to Gaza “as one of the most ‘fought for’ cities of the world.” Today’s humanitarian catastrophe reinforces this reputation. In Sept. 2025, the Save the Children organization reported that at least one Palestinian child has been killed every hour by Israeli forces in Gaza over nearly 23 months of war, with the number of children killed now surpassing 20,000. According to the Ministry of Health, at least 132,000 children aged under five face the risk of death from acute malnutrition, and at least 135 children have already starved to death, 20 of them since famine was declared on 22 August.
How is it that the foundational commandment “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” in both the New and Old Testament has been utterly discarded? You tell of the “oriental guide in Arab costume” leading the pilgrimage in 1874, surely a symbolic marker of the Abrahamic religions living side-by-side in harmony in Palestine. He pointed to “the place where Moses went up into the mount to get a view of the promised land. … As we stood on the shore and glanced across the narrow lake to the beautiful landscape beyond, many an eye was suffused with tears, while the grand old hymn was sung:
‘On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand
And cast a wistful eye,
To Canaan’s fair and happy land,
Where my possessions lie.’”
As you sang that hymn, did you for a moment imagine that “The Promised Land” was the God-given inheritance for Israel to the exclusion of all others of non-Jewish faith? Today, a Jewish-centric interpretation of your experience with the Arab interpreter might be that he was rightly positioned on Jordan’s stormy Islamic-centric banks across from the Promised Land.
In 1878, building on the popularity of the Palestine Park at Chautauqua, the Round Lake Camp-Meeting Association at Round Lake, Saratoga, New York constructed their own topographical representation of the land of Palestine, complete with a model of the City of Jerusalem. Perhaps you attended the camp meeting in July 1886? Peter von Finkelstein, a native of Jerusalem (with surely a Jewish name) dressed as a Mohammedan muezzin, cried the hour of prayer from the bell-tower of the auditorium to inaugurate the “Orient Day” services of praise and prayer, which embraced the reading of the Holy Scriptures in English, Arabic, Urdu, Hindoostanee, and other languages, and also the singing of hymns in several languages.
My cherished friend and adult education research advisor, Professor J. E. (Teddy) Thomas, at the University of Nottingham (1995 to 1997) is Welsh and a keen scholar of English imperialism, which includes Wales itself. His historical research gives voice to the dispossessed and counters Christian nationalism and claims of anti-Semitism, by exposing the truth and injustice of outsiders taking over land and plundering resources, whether in Africa, Canada, America, or Palestine. In his testimonial for my decolonizing memoir “ReReading Catharine Parr Traill” (who BTW also lived in Hamilton Township in the 1840s), he wrote: “Nobody has a monopoly when it comes to imperialism and colonizing. The behaviour of the Israelis towards the Palestinians is classic, although an important difference is that we [Europeans] are sort of sorry, whereas the Israelis are nothing of the sort.” (I introduced you to the acronym BTW in an earlier letter.)
Teddy didn’t live to see his last book published in 2023: The Grandest Larceny: The Foundation of Israel. Here Teddy challenges the common assumption that Israel was founded to right an historical wrong: https://www.fonthill.media/products/larceny He argues that when the British “gave” Palestine to the Jews by the Balfour Declaration (1918), it represented “the handing over of a country by a country who did not own it, to a third which had only mythical claims to it,” and as a result “the region has been plagued by wars, deaths and a refugee problem of millions.” In May 2025, in the spirit of peace, Ireland (another country colonized by the British) formally recognized the State of Palestine as a sovereign and independent state and agreed to establish full diplomatic relations between Dublin and Ramallah, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all Israeli hostages, and unhindered access for humanitarian aid. If your father John Creighton, who spent most of his childhood and youth in the city of Dublin, were alive today, he would be raising the Palestinian flag on your log cabin in Baltimore.
I will close my letter to you, dear Letitia, with a hopeful example of the power of art to highlight the Abrahamic faiths living together in harmony. In the 2024 rendition of the Nativity Scene for a Vatican exhibition, Baby Jesus is wearing a keffiyeh, a black-and-white scarf symbolizing Palestinian heritage and resilience.
In December 2024, Pope Francis attended the opening of Nativity of Bethlehem 2024 in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The scene designed by Johny Andonia and Faten Nastas Mitwasi, two Palestinian artists from Bethlehem, featured a kneeling Mary and standing Joseph with Jesus swaddled in a keffiyeh. Jesus lay below a circular mother-of-pearl starburst symbolizing the Star of Bethlehem, inscribed with the words “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill to all people” in Latin and Arabic. In the 19th-century camp meetings at Palestine Park, surely this would have been celebrated, but in 2024, in response to a flood of outrage, the keffiyeh-swaddled Baby Jesus was removed from the Vatican’s exhibition.
Peace on Earth
Goodwill to all People
Your sister in the work
Dorothy
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