Patriarchs of Jerusalem Call for Day of Prayer and Penance as Hostage Exchange Offer Made

The chorus in Roy Acuff’s 1938 song “Wreck on the Highway” runs, “I didn’t hear nobody pray, dear brother. I didn’t hear nobody pray. I heard the crash and the highway but, I didn’t hear nobody pray.”

The bloody crash of religions, cultures, and political ambitions in that most uncivil of civil wars going on within Israel today certainly merits a day of prayer and fasting. That is what the Emergency Committee of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem, a group representing various Christian leaders in the Holy Land, has called for on Oct. 17

Is it reasonable to believe prayer can make a difference in this small patch of land, no bigger than the state of Vermont? Is peace even a possibility in a region where Jews, Muslims, and Christians have tried and failed to live together in peace since the days Christ walked this land?

All the blood and ink spilled over the issue of peace in the holy land by journalists and arms merchants, militarists and terrorists, and politicians and diplomats has left that elusive goal as far off as it ever has been since the founding of Israel following the 1948 war.

One of the Don Quixotes entering the lists in the call for peace is the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, an Italian by birth, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa. He said a few days ago he would be willing to offer himself as a hostage in exchange for the release of the hostages held by Hamas. It is doubtful anyone will take him up on this. Right now, Hamas is seeking to exchange these hostages for prisoners held by Israel while Israel is committed to a siege of Gaza until they are released. It is all a deadly game in which human beings are the bargaining chips.

Pizzaballa said if people can go to their churches to pray, that would be the ideal. But he recognized that with the current state of military lockdown, families and groups may simply need to gather together to pray as best they can at home or in small groups. In the Latin tradition, fasting means eating only one main meal, with two other smaller meals not equal to that meal, and abstinence means not eating meat for the day.

But whether it is sackcloth and ashes or whatever kind are sacrifice your tradition favors, the patriarchs are hoping that people around the world will call on God in prayer. Moved by this outpouring of love and sacrifice, it is hoped the hearts of all parties will be softened.

Is there any better way ordinary people can intervene to de-escalate the eye-for-an-eye, war-crime-for-a-war crime mentality that could potentially destroy the entire nation and drag the world into war?

The patriarchs point out that the current crisis also has the potential to unleash a humanitarian avalanche of death and destruction. Gaza is a city of 2 million in an area about twice the size of Washington, D.C. Before the Hamas attack, it had electricity for 4 to 8 hours daily. With Israeli forces now cutting off all food, water, and electricity and blowing up thousands of buildings as they prepare to invade, churches are being overrun with refugees. So far, the civilian death toll is somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 souls on each side, with 7,000 wounded on all sides. The patriarchs, in their statement, estimate there may currently be as many as 400,000 refugees.

Related: Iran Warns Israel of a ‘Huge Earthquake’ If It Attacks Gaza

While the Geneva Convention may forbid attacks on civilian objects and the Hague is currently weighing war crimes charges against Russia for knocking out electricity in Ukraine’s second-largest city, in the tiny confines of Israel, civilians and infrastructure are in the thick of the fighting. Hamas’s slaughter of young people at a concert outraged the world, but unless the war is stopped, the war crimes courts may have their hands full in the wake of a tit-for-tat slaughter that could leave a civilian death toll far higher than that of the military combatants on both sides.

With Iran, the United States (which could make the U.S. homeland a target as well), and Hezbollah in Syria poised to get into the fight, if ever there was a time to unleash the power of prayer for peace, it is now.