What Sounds a Diaspora Make?
Great is thy name, my Lord I mention your name with pure heart, thou Lord of all worlds; Blessed and Holy thy name my Lord, the High the mighty, king of worlds of Sublime Light, whose power is infinite thou, the brilliant and the inexhaustible Light.
From the a-Ginza Raba, The Great Treasure, a book of the Mandaean Sebians
The ecology of religion appears much less resilient than nature's vast ecosystem. In those complex ecosystems throughout the world various species die out silently, their passing camouflage by the very web that shielded them for centuries. Other species hunker down waiting for the right time to regenerate and flourish when the environment becomes more inviting. Or they adapt into a new species and the branch off into a new story.
But when the last believer dies, so does the faith. The living faith becomes a story about believers who once thrived, but are no more. In time it becomes the stuff of historians. Perhaps a footnote for a while. Finally, the faith is deposited in an archive in a vast library and forgotten. Perhaps the sound a dying faith makes is the sound of a book closing for the last time.
In a generation or two we may witness such a death, we may hear such a sound - when and if the last Mandaean dies in isolation and obscurity. But that need not happen, if action is taken now.
Mandaeans, or Gnostics as we have come to call them in the west, are a small religious sect that has lived for countless generations in Iraq. They are neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Moslem. Their faith and rituals do dip into the various tributaries of the old biblical traditions, but they are often considered not "people of the book", which threatens their annihilation today more than ever. Mandaeans have a particular reverence for John the Baptist, who they believe is one of their great teachers, and baptism itself is the central, recurrent rite - the healing nature of water is their currency.
They speak a dialect of Aramaic - the same language that Jesus, John the Baptist and other Jews of that day spoke. Although they have lived in Iraq since long before there was an Iraq, they still think of the Holy Land as their homeland.
For many generations the Mandaeans carved out a life in Iraq that was not easy, but it worked well enough. They are pacifists, and as such, they prohibit self-defense, which denied them a safe enclave. In harmony with their relationship to nature and water, the Mandaeans do not believe it is possible to "own land". As a people, they are noted for their remarkable thirst for knowledge and the art of jewelry making, especially gifted in their skills with gold.
Their lives were particularly difficult under Saddam. They, like many other religious sects, were not spared the hostility and brutality of that regime. But still, they did have a life; they sustained their communities, continued to practice their faith clandestinely. They may not have thrived during that regime, but they were able to be together. All that changed when our administration introduced shock and awe into Iraq, when we toppled the regime, and opened the floodgates of intolerance and bigotry - floodgates that had kept that torrent from consuming the country.
As in any war in the midst of unspeakable suffering, it was the most vulnerable who suffered most. And the Mandaeans were some of the most vulnerable.
The Current State of Affairs
There was a time when their numbers in Iraq reached as high as sixty thousand. Today, they number perhaps less than three thousand. Over twelve thousand are refugees - many stranded in Syria, and Jordan. Here and there they find themselves, unable to work, they often are living on what little money they were able to garner from the sale of the gold they would have used to create beautiful works of art. The scattering of Mandaeans in the past four years has brought this unique and ancient ethno-religion to the brink of extinction, since micro-communities have been created across the globe rather than larger, viable communities in one or two central countries of refuge.
Through the years, a small community has made it into the United States.
The reason that so few have been able to emigrate to our country is still unclear. Perhaps it is just the incredibly inhuman ways of the bureaucracy. Perhaps it lies in the relative safety of saying no to those who wish to come here. More likely though, is that the voice of this faith is already becoming muted - that in the course of their Diaspora they are already beginning to become invisible. Maybe we are beginning to see a book closing and will soon hear the sound as well.
And then again, perhaps not. Perhaps these peaceful and productive people will find a new home in America. Perhaps we as a people will begin to see that we are obliged to own what we have broken. Obliged to make whole what we have torn apart. Perhaps it is time to help sustain these people, allow them to keep their books open, and their culture nourished with more peaceful waters.
Links to Learning
For more information about Mandaeans and their plight go to these links below:Professor Nathaniel Deutsch from Swarthmore College wrote an op-ed piece for the NYT.
American Public Medium's, The Story, highlighted one particular Mandaean.
Swarthmore College's War News Radio has an insightful piece here that includes an interview with Professor Deutsch.
