A ND Alumna's Journey in the Holy Land: Feat. Alexandra Mauritsen

In this episode of Jerusalem Talks, Avraham (Avrum) Burg sits down with Alexandra (Ali) Mauritsen, a Notre Dame alumna who spent a year working with the children of refugees and migrant workers at The Saint Rachel Center in Jerusalem. Together they discuss Ali’s diverse background, world travels, and early encounters with global health care systems that encouraged her to pursue a career in medicine. They also talk about Ali’s relationship with her faith, exploring how her Catholic upbringing influenced her philosophy on life. Finally, they reflect on Ali’s transformative visits to the Holy Land, her evolving understanding of the mosaic of identities in the Holy Land,  and her belief in the power of compassion and trust in the abundance of God.

With gratitude to the production team - Daniel Schwake, Gabriel Mitchell, and Avrum Burg - as well as Eli Krogmann and David Turjman for making this season of Jerusalem Talks possible.

Transcript

Jerusalem Talks ND

Season 2 Episode 9

Host: Avraham Burg
Featured Guest: Alexandra Mauritsen

Avraham Burg: Peace on you Ali. How are you? 

Alexandra Mauritsen:  I'm doing very well. How are you, Avrum?

Avraham Burg: Well, I'm fine. I'm in my little home in my tortured land. And you are where?

Alexandra Mauritsen: I am right now. I'm in the library at Creighton University, where I am a medical student.

Avraham Burg: That's for you a kind of solid place being a nomad, right?

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes.

Avraham Burg: Tell me, tell me the places you've been briefly in the last five years.

Alexandra Mauritsen: All over the world.

Avraham Burg: Of course you are the world globetrotter, right?

Alexandra Mauritsen: OK, yes.

Alexandra Mauritsen: In the last five years I have been to Rwanda, to Israel, to London and France, and to Ecuador. 

Avraham Burg: Mexico?

Alexandra Mauritsen:  To the Dominican Republic and various states in the US. 

Avraham Burg: Why do you travel so much? 

Alexandra Mauritsen: The first reason is that my mom is from Burundi and so my grandmother lives in Rwanda. 

Avraham Burg: Let's say Burundi, Rwanda. These are the two 90s tortured conflictual region  of Africa, which we have Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, Burundi, it's in Uganda, of course, all around beautiful hills country.

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes, Rwanda is the land of 1000 hills, 

Avraham Burg: 1000 hills. And that was tortured by massacre and tribal conflict between the Hutu and the Tutsi. And she is what she is?

Alexandra Mauritsen: She's Tutsi. 

Avraham Burg: Tutsi and she ran away from the massacre of the 90s. How did she end up in America? 

Alexandra Mauritsen: She actually my when she married my dad, she came to the US after they got married, but they got married in 1994 in December. So they were in Burundi during the height of the conflict. 

Alexandra Mauritsen: But now Rwanda is a glorious, gloriously beautiful country that at least where I where my grandmother is in Kigali is beautiful and very well, very well.

Avraham Burg:  My son Natan volunteered for a very long time in a war orphan village post trauma people who suffered loss from both tribes and he says it's a beautiful country. So I read somewhere you wrote somewhere you wrote. Let me read it. I loved it. “My mom is from Africa, my father from Montana. Many of my classmates share my latte colored skin and dark curly hair”. OK, I don't show you dark curly hair. What is this description? What is there? It's it sounded to me like an ID, like an identity. 

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes, I grew up in southeastern New Mexico, where the culture, the people are either like they could be from Texas or they're Hispanic. So many people have direct relatives who came from Mexico or their parents are the ones that came from Mexico. And so for the people who are not the from Texas, who aren't the Cowboys, although there are some Mexican cowboys too. There were a lot of Hispanics. And so I wasn't out of place as far as… there were back up. There are very very few black people in this town. It's mostly either Hispanic or white and so… 

Avraham Burg: How your mom from Rwanda ends up next door to Texas.  How does it happen?

Avraham Burg: Did she just marry somebody from Montana?

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes, and he my dad is a geophysicist and he works for oil and gas and this part of New Mexico is part of what's called the Permian Basin, which is a very big oil producer.

Avraham Burg: Oh yeah. 

Avraham Burg: OK. So mom and dad meet and you and you are there and you grow up in an environment which is natural for you. I mean you're right something which is nowadays america, with the tribal polarization  and the skin color profiling, etcetera is not so intuitive, you said only later “I discovered that” discovered what?

Alexandra Mauritsen:  I later I discovered that when people who look like me or color like me or darker that they people look around and count how many other how many other colored people are in the room. And that never occurred to me to do. So that was because especially I didn't discover this until I went to a university that is predominantly white, but to me it was the most diverse place I'd ever been as far as the variety of places that people come from and therefore the way that the way people.

Avraham Burg: So earlier I asked why did you travel so much? You traveled to Africa to mom's to mom's family. OK, you traveled to Latin America because you traveled to Middle East because you traveled to India because… why you travel so much? 

Alexandra Mauritsen: So the first part where I was leaving with that my mom is from Burundi is that having a an international parent shrinks the world. So it also meant that travel was really important for my parents. So very young we traveled and so it was always I never thought of a life different like every opportunity to go travel was one that I was excited about. I think that the sense of mission in… my sense of mission in places outside of the US began particularly with a… well, first with my mom. I think that's really the core but as a concrete experience, when I was about 15, I went to India in Ahmedabad, which is in the state of Gujarat, which is on the West Coast of India. And there I shadowed doctors in one of their big university hospitals. And that was a very important experience for my wanting to become a physician, which I'd also wanted to do for a long time. But this was the first sort of Hitkashmut

Avraham Burg: Materialization 

Alexandra Mauritsen:  like the first time that it was in just 

Avraham Burg: to tell our audience that you when you are lost of words in English you use Hebrew come to the lingual enrich enrichment later.

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes.

Avraham Burg: So you felt the fulfillment.

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes.

Avraham Burg: OK.

Alexandra Mauritsen: And it was there that it was a very formative experience because as we were walking to the hospital from where we were staying to the hospital, we would walk across a highway and then we would walk alongside the highway to the hospital. It wasn't very far, but it was very humid and we came in the summer, which was the rainy season if I remember correctly. In any case, after it had rained one day we were walking and there were lots of big puddles. And by this time we already knew that malaria was a big problem. And it suddenly just smacked me upside the head that it's no wonder that malaria was a problem because there were lots of puddles and that's where mosquitoes like to breed. And I realized then that the medical system, which was faced with this heavy burden of malaria, was facing a problem whose source was upstream of the medical system. In this case it was an infrastructural issue, like if there were a more effective drainage system, that would be a problem that could be largely taken care of. So I decided then that I was going to study engineering in as my undergraduate degree, because in the US you get a bachelor's before going to medical school because I was intent on getting a ..on acquiring another set of skills and another perspective that would enable me to identify and at least understand, but also hopefully be able to contribute to the solution of the upstream, of the upstream source of the medical problems that I would be seeing as a physician. 

Avraham Burg: So, we have the physician, the engineer or the scientist, let's put it like this. And you and you mentioned the word mission, which is not a random word. It's a word loaded, loaded with faith and history and significance. Talk to me about the term mission, not the word, the concepts. What is the mission for you?

Alexandra Mauritsen: Mission. My mission is expressed very well in the part of Catholic social teaching that is a preferential option for the poor. And so my question, the question I'm continue asking is OK, So what does that actually look like? What does that mean for the way? 

Avraham Burg: No, no, don't be an engineer with me. Don't go to the practical element too fast. Sorry for the word, but I want to understand the spirituality or the human spirit behind the mission. How to do a mission. You have an Excel and you wake up in the morning and you have a to-do list and you do this and you do that and by the end of the day, either you accomplished or you did not. But what's behind it? What is the wind in the sail?

Alexandra Mauritsen: I'm glad you we backed up because that's there's no mission without this part. That is… the heart of the mission is that it's such an astounding reality that I am loved by God and that he cares about every literally everything. Like there's nothing, nothing he does not care about in my life.

 Avraham Burg: Its a he? 

Alexandra Mauritsen: I will use he because that's the terminology that I am familiar with. Although though I don't think that God is a male except God in the second person of the trinity, who is Jesus Christ, 

Avraham Burg: OK 

Alexandra Mauritsen: So, and that is such a glorious reality that it bursts forth like it can't help but be shared and the…

Avraham Burg:  Which means that divinity is too big to be contained in one person only your container is too small for your feelings? 

Alexandra Mauritsen: That is one aspect, but I think that the 

Avraham Burg: It's the popcorn, it's the popcorn effect pop pop pop  and it goes out. 

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes, 

Avraham Burg: Share it to spread it around. You grew up in a religious house? 

Alexandra Mauritsen: I did. I yes….My mom grew up Catholic. She's very faithful. My dad converted actually when I was 7 and…

 Avraham Burg: from? 

Alexandra Mauritsen: from Lutheranism. 

Avraham Burg: OK, interesting. 

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes. And I'm very grateful for the combination of the two because my dad Is similar to myself in that his head leaves his heart. So he had to be convinced of the rationality and the reasonableness of the Catholic faith before he entered it. Hence, it was 11 years after my parents were married that he became Catholic. It was quite some time and. So i also grew up hearing catholic answers is a great

Avraham Burg:  So you went through the motions. You went by. I mean, you heard the process, the conversion process.

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes, exactly. And I heard the questions and the answers that people ask regarding Catholic faith.

Avraham Burg: Give me one… Give me a question you remember that imprint on you.

Alexandra Mauritsen: One question that's very common is the scripture and tradition that the that both with capital capital S capital T that the Catholic Church has a very strong sense that the church itself is still functioning as God's living word. And that's what big T tradition means. And that's critical for understanding what scripture means for the actually this morning I read from Matthew's Gospel. The section that the little part that struck me was that not not even the dot of the I will pass away of the law until all has been fulfilled. And anyone who teaches to disregard this, this, the law is the least in the kingdom of heaven. But anyone who teaches to keep them will be great in the kingdom of heaven. And this is troubling to me because I don't keep many of the laws that Jesus would have been referring to in this in the sense of.

Avraham Burg:  But it's interesting that in a very one will say American, one will say Western, one will say Protestant way You take upon yourself as a Catholic the responsibility to interpret the meaning of the Holy Scripture for yourself. I mean without the buffers of the establishment above you without the official interpretation. It's a very very interesting individualization of the one or the interpretation of the one, the writing for the many. 

Alexandra Mauritsen: Well, that's that's exactly the question I'm asking is because I have these questions that I'm asking what does this mean? But I'm also in dialogue with the fact that the church has no ,as made no, and actually it's in Acts as well, that there's no like we can eat pork there. And so that's actually a perfect example. Let's go with the pork example.

Avraham Burg: I'm a vegan for me, a pork and a monkey and a cow  It's all the same. I understand. 

Alexandra Mauritsen: I'm also for the most part vegetarian so I understand. But in the sense that it's allowed. I'm also in dialogue with the church that the church does not does not say we can't eat pork. So something is going on here and for me the final word is the church because I am one person with very limited knowledge and the church is many people who many praying people for many thousands of years and with the promise of the Holy Spirit.

Avraham Burg: So we have the transcendental existence and we have the engineer reality that solves. I mean the India gave you upstream before stream and I understand why you've been to Africa. It's part of going for roots, it's part for going to understand the… to comprehend the origin of mom. Why did you come to the Holy Land ? Where did you come? What did you do here?

Alexandra Mauritsen: The very first time I was in the Holy Land was in 2018. And my Nana, my dad's mom, has been I think when we went, it was her seventh time she 

Avraham Burg: As a pilgrim? 

Alexandra Mauritsen: As a pilgrim, and it was her dream to take her two sons and their families. So that dream came true in 2018. The 12 of us were there for 12 days.

Avraham Burg:  12 of you?

Alexandra Mauritsen: 12, yes. My 2 grandparents and then my uncle's family, him, my aunt and their three kids. And then my family, my parents and myself and my brothers.Two brothers. So the 12 of us, I was absolutely captivated.

Avraham Burg: By? 

Alexandra Mauritsen: And for a long time I could not quite describe what it was that captivated me, but I realized it was the sense of reality, a sense of closeness of reality, that there were layers of rationalization that were stripped away because the realities of life and death were so proximal. 

Avraham Burg: I want to understand coming 12 people from North America, that most of you, I mean for many of you, for some of you, it's the first time visiting this place, this place, which was the destiny of prayers, that was the landscape of the of the of the Bible and the New Testament. Was the motherland of Jesus, of the redeemer. And it was in a way a virtual reality, a spiritual, religious. I mean the Holy Land, heaven, hell. I mean, these are not real places. But you take a plane and you land, it's like taking a plane to heaven or to the opposite of it. So it's the first time you meet the reality of the utopian. What happens there with this, this interaction when you first meet it's a real thing. What is it? How do you, how do you touch down from the hate of the spirituality and prayers to the pragmatism of heat, traffic jams, shouting is different language, price of bread or whatever?

Alexandra Mauritsen: It was a healthy dose. This first trip was a very healthy dose of… I don't want to say practicality in encounter with Scripture. What I mean by this is that David hid in Ein Gedi and that's a real place and you can still, you can still play in the waterfalls and that oddities like I'm thinking of an example. What I'm going for is that there are things in scripture that make sense because they were practical, because that was what you that was what you did. 

Avraham Burg: So you come for the first time to a place like this, that for now the human system running it is not Christian. The conflict is between 2 national communities, the Israeli and the Palestinians, you can say two religions, I mean to satellites of religions, of peripheries of religion, Judaism and Islamic in the conflict. And you come as a Christian, as a faithful Catholic. You came to the State of Israel or you came to the Holy Land, psychologically speaking.

Alexandra Mauritsen: Frankly, I don't think I made a distinction.

Avraham Burg: OK, fair enough.

Alexandra Mauritsen: However, I would definitely say, particularly the first time in 2018. I equated the State of Israel with the Holy Land, more or less. That definitely changed. But at that time, Israel, the State of Israel and the people of Israel and the Holy Land were pretty much the same thing in my head.

Avraham Burg:  And now, I mean, when you came later and you stayed longer, what happened to this acquaintance of yours? Getting to know the reality better? There was a little bit of distance between the two entities, the State of Israel and the Terra Santa or it's still the same?

Alexandra Mauritsen: It is not the same.

Avraham Burg: In what sense? Where is the petition line?

Alexandra Mauritsen: First I realized that the Holy Land, in the sense of the place where the patriarchs and the prophets and Jesus Christ and his apostles lived and worked, is much bigger than the territory of the State of Israel. So there was a broadening of what the Holy Land means in my understanding. I think the larger difference in my heart that went on was distinguishing the state of Israel, as its current reality, and the people of Israel, the Jewish people. When I learned what it means to love a place, like I love Israel, I love the state of Israel and I'm glad that it exists. And at the same time, I can't stand the things that it does that are not right. Like I was working with people who are in a very compromising position because of policies of the State of Israel. And somehow that's also not the it's not, it's related to, but it's not the Jewish people who I can also.

Avraham Burg: Is it because? I try, I'm not at all sure. OK, it's a conversation. So I hear you and I try to comprehend. Is it because that part of the behaviors of humans on the surface of the Holy Land is very unchristian, with no mercy and no and no and no grace and no, no sympathy and empathy for the other? Is that something that troubles you?

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes.

Avraham Burg: The reality is not Christian. Whatever it is, I don't know if it's Jewish. I'm not at all sure it's Muslim. Christian, it is not.

Alexandra Mauritsen: I would agree. I'm inclined to think that it's not more Christians and Jews and Muslims and people without a religion have denounced actions on both sides, both things done to the State of Israel and things done by the State of Israel. So I am inclined to think that there's something very intrinsic about our recognition of what is good and evil, but, that being said, it's still not Christian.

Avraham Burg: Now you've been to the place, you've been to the holy sites of Bethlehem, the Church of Nativity, and you've been to Nazareth Annunciation. You've been to the mountains, to the Jordan Valley. You've been to all the places which are significant for your tradition and heritage and faith. You know the weather, you know the people, you know the taste of the water, you know the color of the land, you know, you know everything about a place. You even sow the blood of the people because you were volunteer at our local Magen David, which is the equivalent of the Red Cross. Do you understand why Christianity, the way it was formed or molded, happened rather here than any other place? Many times I ask myself, imagine Moses would have discovered Canada instead of Canaan. OK, it's different landscape, different intuition, different everything, different tastes. Jesus Christ and his teaching and his students and pupils and followers Came from this exact little piece of land and launched this global faith and system. Now that you know them both, do you understand the connection between the two?

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes, in a couple of ways. First, there is really this little area is very much a crossroads of the world. It has been historically and even now Jerusalem is incredibly international. You could find any language you wanted if you searched a little bit and you wouldn't have to search very long probably. The other the 2nd way that in your comparison with Canada that I was thinking of is when I was little we used, we would live, we lived in a house and I would go outside of the house and I would look at it and I would try and understand how it was that our long hallway and my bedroom and my parents bedroom and the bathroom and the kitchen could fit inside the house. It just seems to me so much bigger on the inside than it was when I looked at it from the outside. And that is what Israel feels like to me is it's little.

Avraham Burg: Little from the outside…

Alexandra Mauritsen: Little from the outside and it's humongous from the inside. We, a friend of mine, we did a hike in oh Wadi Kelt, I think.

Avraham Burg:  Yeah.

Alexandra Mauritsen: And you look at the Judean Desert and it's huge.

Alexandra Mauritsen: It's just so… you feel  completely swallowed.

Avraham Burg: You still, I mean up until the day with modernity and roads and cars and you name it, you still feel the isolationism and the and the tranquility of the desert like the time of John the Baptist to walk the place like the time of of Jesus Christ who came along the Jordan Valley. And then and  then…. I mean you still feel the aura and the atmosphere of I would say archaic existence.

Alexandra Mauritsen: A what existence?

Avraham Burg: Archaic.

Alexandra Mauritsen: Oh, OK,

Avraham Burg: Right?

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes.

Avraham Burg: Very ancient, very slow in a sense. And it's 10 minutes drive from the centers of modernity. So here is the traveler who's been to all over the place and every place you go you try to learn the language. OK? I mean languages and places are almost synonymous for you, right?

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes 

Avraham Burg: French speaking for a cousin, Spanish speaking for the people in your parish, Hebrew speaking for your Co-volunteers, etcetera. OK. There is only one language you didn't tell me you studied and you learned. And this is the Kirundi. That's the language of your grandma. She dances in Kirundi. She chants in Kirundi. That's the language of Burundi or of the tribes over there, right? Why this is a language you didn't try to acquire?

Alexandra Mauritsen: It's one of the deep pains in my heart that I don't speak French and Kirundi because those are the languages that my mom and her family speak. The family situation was such that she wasn't able to teach us, my brothers and I, when we were growing up and we did not spend a lot of time with my mom's side of the family. She was the first of her siblings to come to the US. So there was it's hard to get to, It's hard to get to Africa. The first time I went was when I was 8 years old and we all went my our whole family and my also my uncle, my dad's brother,  my grandparents. And that was the first time that I had met, well, actually my grandmother Mamakuru had spent some time in the US, but it was before I remember. So the first time I ever remember meeting Mamamakuru, my mom's mother, is when we went to Burundi for the first time in 2008. and then it wasn't until 2019 that we returned. In that time though, my mom had siblings that came to the US. Having my mom come made it easier for them to come as well. And things also were such in Burundi that they were able they were also fleeing. So the moral of that story is I just had not, I didn't know my mom's side. And it wasn't until being in college and learning, learning other languages that I realized that I really, really, I really want to be able to speak the language of my mom's family. But I also realized that right now is not the moment yet.

Avraham Burg: because You're in a medical school  and you decided to go to a specific school. 

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes.

Avraham Burg: OK, again, religion pops up. OK, pops up and you go to something…., right?

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes.

Avraham Burg:   Why

Alexandra Mauritsen:…Creighton University is a Jesuit university. I actually this. I have a history. I went to a public school, so I was not attached. A public high school is what I mean.  I wasn't attached at all when I was applying to undergraduate school to going to Catholic University, and it was by the grace of God that I ended up at one and I'm one of the best decisions I've ever made where I realized how grateful I was that I wasn't having to fight a cultural and moral cultural and moral values battles that I would have almost certainly had to face in it at an at a secular university. And I grew a lot in my faith at Notre Dame, that's where I went for undergrad. And recognizing this, I decided that going to as I was applying to medical schools that although once again it was not, it was not a make or break, I also recognized the beautiful growth that had come from being at a Catholic university and that I thrived in that environment. So I made sure that I applied to a few Catholic universities as well as secular medical schools. What caught me about Creighton, though was a particular program It's called the Arrupe Global Scholars. Arrupe is the name of The Jesuit Superior General, I think in the early 1900s, named Pedro Arrupe. He was from Latin America and he thought it was a tragedy that Jesuit schools were educating bad people, like bad people on a global scale. And that was an indication of a state of Jesuit education that was simply not acceptable. So he went, his mission was to reignite the values, the underpinnings of Jesuit education.

Avraham Burg: Tell me something. I mean, I understand. I understand. I understand. As much as I'm not coming from the same, from the same upbringing, I can understand the drive and I can understand the need to have a more than just mechanical skill of cutting bones or stitching wounds or whatever. But what does that mean? Becoming a partner to the creator over malfunctions, creations. You can understand the conversation here is a question about the process, not about the outcome. Academia is about doubts. Science is about doubting everything. Maybe I can do it better, make it do it differently. Maybe the whole paradigm should be replaced by a different axiom or whatever. Faith and religion is not about doubt, it's about certainty. Can you teach science with religious tools?

41.29-41.433 (trim)

Alexandra Mauritsen: I don't think that there-- I think that this doubt of science understood in a religious perspective is that, is not that we're doubting reality. It's actually that we're discovering what reality is. And also, this is, we're not just discovering, we are creating. So in the, it's a actually kind of a wrestling question as a training, a physician who's in training is we have excellent drugs and devices and surgical techniques that don't only fix, so to speak, but they can create a whole new, a whole new person. And I don't mean that like building a cyborg. I mean that more in the sense of when you're sick and you become well, wow, the world is a beautiful place. 

Avraham Burg: OK, one day…

Alexandra Mauritsen:  That is a change. 

Avraham Burg:  Ok. one day in 3,4,5 years time, your doctor, Ali, OK? Coming with all the layers of your identity. The religious, the lingual, the cultural, the origin, the roots, the dreams, the faith, the doubts. And you are going now to heal the world. What do you want to heal first?

Alexandra Mauritsen: I want to heal first, despair. Because to return to this preferential option for the poor, what that means now, now the engineer practical, what that means for my mission is that as a physician, I want to go find the people who are farthest from a medical center and who are the sickest. This maybe sick is not quite the right word, but who need most the hope that they are loved. And as a physician that love is particularly expressed in we have I can help the pain of the body, but in the pain of the body I can show that God loves you and you in particular.

Avraham Burg: Me. From all people.

Alexandra Mauritsen: You in particular, Avrum. 

Avraham Burg: OK, OK

Alexandra Mauritsen: And that's my mission that God loves you.

Avraham Burg: And when you come with this God love, the love of God in you and you spoke later about how it loads you like. I mean, you're flooded like a popcorn, OK? And you have to share the you have to share it. And you will come back. I know you will come back to the Holy Land, Israel, Palestine, with all of this conflict. And imagine you can heal parts of the place. What do you heal at the Holy Land today? What is the medicine we're missing? What's the malady that we are having?

Alexandra Mauritsen: The malady, I think there's a fear that there won't be enough. Another way to say that is lack of trust in the abundance of God, especially. 

Avraham Burg: Don't you feel there is too much God here? Too much gods? 

Alexandra Mauritsen: Too much ideas of God, maybe. But I don't think that I never had the sense that someone else's, even just to say someone else's idea of God was the source of strife, at least on the level of the kind of interactions that you have each day, which is different from the kind of interactions that you have at the state level or organizational. But I was at a Shabbat dinner actually, and our hostess she said where there is love, there's room on the edge of a knife, OK.

 Avraham Burg:  Ok

Alexandra Mauritsen: And that's a particularly striking example for. For Israel, we're talking about it's like my house when I was little, like it's so small, but somehow on the inside it's very big and the real conflicts in Israel are surrounding like the encroaching upon Palestinian territory and concerns trying to give incentives for people to move to the Negev because there's more room and So there's there's like genuine literal space issues, but I think that the that the fear that there won't be enough for everyone is at the heart of maybe not at the heart because there's a long history of deep conflict, but it's one of the things that I feel personally is something that I struggle with to trust in the abundance of God that is also at play in the conflicts in Israel and also particularly with the people that I was working with who are not wanted by the State of Israel. So that is what I would go.

Avraham Burg: ….The political asylum seekers, the foreign workers, the all of these people. I mean the immigrants. 

Alexandra Mauritsen: Yes, but immigrants, not not the kind of immigrants who make aliyah.

Avraham Burg: No, not these who come through the open gate of repatriation of Jews, but those we define in America, illegal immigrants, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, this kind of people, the society does not like so much. Let's go back. Let's end up with something that both of us love so much. OK, Running. What is it in your life? This meditation, this routine, every day, every road. Every. What is running into your composition?

Alexandra Mauritsen: Running for me is most of all a striving for greatness in the midst of something that is hard.

 Avraham Burg: ok 

Alexandra Mauritsen: And I actually don't like to think that I'm working out. I like to think that I'm training and that's there… There's a distinct difference between working out and training in that training has an end and a goal and it's something to strive towards. And this striving, I struggled a lot with how like what? What does striving? Because in a lot of ways running is sometimes feel selfish cause you just go a lot of time, most of the time, I'm by myself. So I wonder a lot what is the.. can running be some way eternal? And so I often pray during runs.

Avraham Burg:  Physically it's a different exercise than kneeling in the aisle in the church. But mentally or spiritually, it's the same. It's monotonous. It is repetitive. It has its own inner rhythm, tempo, or it's the same thing every day. So in a way, it's like a prayer, you know the ritual. You wear a special outfit for this worship. You have a high priest. You have a role models, you have a path, you have a destiny. You have to work out for it. It's not easy to elevate yourself from novice to a better, to a better running being or better faithful being or for any better human being. So in a way, running, at least for me, and I had a feeling reading about you and off you. But for you, it's also, it's part of the path. It's part of the road. It's not alien to the rest of your exploration. It's actually built in into it. 

Alexandra Mauritsen: I think you're exactly right. It's the guardian of discipline, actually. 

Avraham Burg: Fantastic. I mean, it's funny because I have a feeling that you are the mother of all guardians of all disciplines, but nonetheless, if you need another guardian and be the running, so be it. When is the next time you come to visit us at the Holy Land? 

Alexandra Mauritsen:  I don't know. I was there a month ago, a little more than a month ago for a few weeks. And so that was exactly a year. I was a few weeks short of exactly a year when I left, and I arrived exactly on the day that I left and completed my year.

Avraham Burg: So next time you are coming, we get together and we run across the Holy Land. 

Alexandra Mauritsen:  Oh, I would love it.

Avraham Burg: That will be fantastic. Ali, so many things. So many thanks, so many more things. I wanted to talk with you, but we shall have more time in the future. Study. And come and hit and heal us.

Alexandra Mauritsen:  Yeah. Thank you. 

Avraham Burg: Thank you very much, my dear.

Alexandra Mauritsen:  Thank you.

Avraham Burg:It was a pleasure.

Alexandra Mauritsen:  Likewise.