Taking the Time to Make a Difference

She said she was the great-granddaughter of William Cooper. I apologized, and admitted I did not know who he was. That was the beginning of a most unusual encounter, and it took place at a chance meeting in a hotel lounge in Jerusalem.

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Our group of a dozen friends had been visiting holy places, praying and pushing our way through a day of pilgrimage. Despite some extra barricades and increased military security on the eve of Israeli Memorial Day, we managed to reach our last stop, the Church of All Nations next to the Garden of Gethsemane. After some quiet moments in the church and time to visit the olive grove nearby, we returned to our hotel. In the lounge before dinner, our group was near another cluster of people. We were to leave Jerusalem the next day. They had just arrived. “Where did you come from?” I asked. “Australia,” said a woman. “Why did you come to Jerusalem?” “I’m the great-granddaughter of William Cooper,” she explained. People in Australia, I thought, might know this Willam Cooper. But I was lost. “He is being honored by the State of Israel tomorrow, because of what he did in support of the Jewish people,” she said. Then she introduced me to her brother, who came to sit with our group and to tell us the story.

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William Cooper was an Aborigine born in the middle of the nineteenth century. He learned to read, and he studied the indigenous rights movements in North America and in other parts of the world. He was an activist for human rights. He helped establish the Australian Aborigines League and tried to get Aboriginal representation in the Australian parliament. His efforts were rejected by the government, and even by some of his own people, according to his great-grandson. William Cooper continued protesting the injustice of the Australian treatment of its indigenous people right up until his death in 1941, according to Wikipedia. A major success was the establishment of a National Aborigines Day, first celebrated in 1940. But the reason he was honored in Israel had to do with the horrific events of Nov. 9, 1938 — Kristallnacht, when hundreds of Jews were murdered throughout Germany, all the synagogues were destroyed, thousands of Jewish stores were burned and 30,000 German Jews were sent to concentration camps. While little was said or done in most of the world, William Cooper would not let that atrocity go unnoticed. On Dec. 6, 1938, Cooper led a delegation from the Australian Aborigines League to the German consulate in Melbourne, carrying a petition calling for an end to the “cruel persecution” of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany. Cooper, then aged 77, and his delegation, were denied entry to the building. The Martyrs’ Forest in Jerusalem has six million trees planted in memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. To mark the seventieth anniversary of Cooper's brave act, 70 eucalyptus trees were planted there in his honor. Eight of Cooper's descendants – the group in our hotel — poured water on the trees taken from a river in the region of Cooper’s birth, and they sprinkled earth from their native land around the plants.

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Take the time to experience the blessings of chance conversations. We would never have learned of such courage and conviction, if we had rushed to the end of the day, or stayed only within the circle of our own friends and companions. When you are searching for the holy, you never know where you will find it. Take the time to learn more about the struggles of the indigenous people of our own country or elsewhere — and stand up for their rights. Take time to learn about Martin Luther King or Oscar Romero or Nelson Mandela or William Cooper. Let it make a difference in your life.

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