My Birthday Toast to My Palestinian Arabic Teacher Ruba Jafer

For my Arabic teacher’s birthday, I wrote her a short letter of appreciation and hope.

Ruba, when we met for our first class, gave me a taste of what I would soon discover to be her unique version of a charm offensive. “My friends,” she told me, “say you are famous. But I’ve never heard of you.” And there it was, her characteristic brutal honestly, whether I wanted it or not. This was followed by unsolicited fashion advice consisting of letting me know that my baggy Brooks Brothers suits made me look fat on the screen and Ruba’s peculiar system of classroom incentivization. When I am distracted or unprepared she admonishes me by saying “If you don’t focus, I’m not going to charge you.”

Now, I must commiserate with Ruba’s understandable exasperation at my propensity to be overly gregarious in the Pastry Room with whoever happens to occupy the table next to us. Once, when I told her I could only do two rather than the usual three hours on a Tuesday, she texted me, and I quote, “I can’t guarantee you will learn anything in two hours minus the time you socialize so we’ll have to do Wednesday.” And when some poor Chilean woman was pouring her heart out to me in the Pastry Room, where admittedly we should have been working on Arabic, about the Pinochet dictatorship, which had disappeared her father, Ruba, growing increasingly impatient, finally blurted out, “he is paying me by the hour.”

And then there was our laborious preparation for my talk in Arabic in Cairo. On the eve of my departure, I told Ruba I was going to do a final write up of the talk in Arabic. “No, you’re not,” she said abruptly. “You are going to use the text I wrote.”

“Why?” I asked. “You don’t trust me to write it in Arabic?”

She put her thumb and index finger together to form a zero.

During the encampment at Princeton, Ruba and Amy spent long days, often late into the night, feeding, supporting, encouraging and ministering these students, our nation’s conscience. I knew Ruba was a good person. But at the encampment, I saw she was a beautiful person.

Now there are days this genocide, for both us, is hard to bear. The images, the callous indifference to the suffering, the sheer scale of the destruction and mass murder, the lies told to sustain it. And the children. The children. The children. There have been moments, overcome in the middle of class, I have stopped, buried by head in my hands and wept. And then I feel Ruba grip my arm.

“Chris,” she says. “You are so strong.”

Of course, like all of us, I am shattered, broken into a million pieces, walking that fine tightrope above the abyss of despair. But each week I am here with Ruba, part of my absurd resistance, conjugating my verbs, struggling with the vocabulary words she has written out on colored index cards, including “Zionist enemy,” stumbling my way through Arabic texts, planning, soon, to return to Gaza with enough Arabic to at least be polite, at least offer my condolences and sympathy, to tell these stories.

There is, amid it all, a strange kind of comfort I find in my weekly classes with Ruba, a wounded healer. As much therapy as pedagogy. An affirmation that, no matter what happens we must go on, we must go on, we must always resist.

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