It has been almost a month since my blog postings from the Holy Land. The passage of so much time has diminished my ability to tap into the intense energy of that extraordinary and exceedingly complex place, but I will try. Now, during this week of Passover, I find myself reflecting back upon our 10-day interfaith endeavor in Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel. As often happens, not surprisingly since Jesus was crucified at Passover, this week of the Jewish Passover coincides with the Christian Holy Week that culminates today in Easter.
My husband and I were part of an interfaith group of 27 people who traveled to Israel this past February. Our group, led by Rabbi Mitchell, “Mitch,” Hurvitz of Temple Sholom and the Reverend Jim Lemler of Christ Church, was almost evenly divided between Christians and Jews and included 10 children and teenagers. We prayed together as we visited both Jewish and Christian sites.
Rabbi Mitch Hurvitz and the Reverend Jim Lemler at Talpiot with Jerusalem in Background
We shared many beautiful moments and were fortunate to have an outstanding guide, David Keren of the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center for Conservative Judaism.
All my blogging from Israel was descriptive in nature, with little personal reflection or analysis. I just described what we did each day, getting more and more behind as the days went by. There was so much I left out. I take the time now, during Passover, on this Easter Day, to record some retrospective thoughts and more personal reflections as I include places we visited that I did not have time to write about in earlier blog postings.
As I wrote in my first blog posting from Israel, we arrived in Jerusalem on a Friday afternoon and went directly to the lookout point in the Talpiot neighborhood of the city, a spot with a panoramic view of the Kidron Valley and Jerusalem’s Old City. It was an hour before sunset. Shabbat was at hand. We gathered in a circle and prayed together as we would many more times over the next 10 days.
We spent Shabbat in Jerusalem where, in the afternoon, we walked the stations of the cross in reverse order, beginning at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which is generally accepted as marking the place of Jesus’s crucifixion. Here, while the Reverend Lemler led us in prayer that was focused on sharing and learning, the bells of the Holy Sepulchre began a loud, incessant ringing, heralding the procession of the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem that takes place every Saturday afternoon. With the pealing of the church bells, Rabbi Mitch remarked upon Jerusalem’s “cacophony of sounds” where church bells ring while the chants of the muezzin from the minarets blend with the Hebrew sounds of Jewish prayer. We recalled the start of Shabbat on Friday night at the Western Wall where throngs of Jewish worshippers welcomed the Sabbath Queen in joyous song and dance at the Kotel.
The need for reconciliation and healing was a theme that defined much of our prayer during our time together in the Holy Land, as if our coming together in this interfaith endeavor could play some small part in the larger task of tikkun olam, the repair of the world.
There is so much to repair and so many wounds to heal.
View of Tel Aviv from Old City of Jaffa
Our interfaith experience that began with the welcoming of Shabbat in Jerusalem ended a week later in Tel Aviv with Havdalah, the ritual that separates Shabbat’s sacred space in time from the rest of the week. Shabbat in Tel Aviv is very different from Shabbat in Jerusalem. The two cities are worlds apart. Tel Aviv, a modern European-style city founded 101 years ago by secular Zionists, is culturally far removed from the ancient city of Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, where Jewish, Christian and Moslem passions converge, the religious tension is palpable. By contrast, Tel Aviv is a completely secular city.
My husband and I spent part of Shabbat afternoon on the promenade that runs along the Mediterranean to the Old City of Jaffa. It was a beautiful day, warm and sunny, the temperature well into the ’80′s.
People were out strolling, running, rollerblading, walking dogs, pushing baby carriages, biking, talking on cell phones in many languages – Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian, French, Spanish. All manner of dress could be seen – Palestinian women with scarves covering their hair, some older women in long black dresses, Israelis and tourists in shorts, or blue jeans, an occasional skirt. A few men and boys wore yarmulkes, most were without. Noticeably absent were so-called “Black Hats,” also referred to as “ultra-orthodox” religious Jews. This is in sharp contrast to Jerusalem, with its large religiously observant population.
The normalcy of the Tel Aviv promenade on a sunny Shabbat afternoon belies the many divisions and tensions that beset this land. Not far from where my husband and I were sitting were the remains of the Dolphinarium beachfront discotheque where 21 teenagers were killed and 132 injured in a Hamas suicide bombing 9 years earlier, on June 1, 2001, a Friday night. It was in the face of increased suicide attacks such as these during the Second Intifada that Israeli plans to fence off the West Bank took shape. Construction of the ‘security fence’ began in 2002, with the first phase completed in 2003. Without a doubt, this ‘security fence’ has made life much safer within Israel in recent years, while also making the West Bank and the more than 2 million Palestinians who live there more remote. The West Bank, its Palestinian population, as well as its more than 250,000 Jewish settlers, are far removed from the everyday life of the average secular Israeli.
But is this safety that the ‘security fence’ provides a true security? How can this unilateral separation lead to a long term solution? Indeed, the prospect of a true and lasting peace remains elusive.
In 2004, I accompanied my journalist husband on an assignment to Israel. I took notes for him during interviews for a story about the fence. I remember a professor at Haifa University, a demographer, talking about the importance of this fence, or “wall” as he referred to it. It should be “a wall so high that even eagles would not dream to fly over,” is the quote I have in my notes. This may reflect the view of many secular Israelis that Israel should detach from the West Bank and wall out the Palestinians for self preservation, not only from a security point of view, but also from a demographic one. This is Israel’s dilemma: how does it remain both a Jewish state and a democracy. This is the most compelling argument for a two-state solution.
At the same time, reflecting yet another of the many divisions in Israeli society, there are those, particularly religious Jews and Jewish settlers, who oppose the fence and any two-state solution. There are those who believe that Israel must never give up the West Bank because it is an essential part of God’s promise to the Jewish people, Judaea and Samaria, the land promised to Abraham and his descendants. There are many holy Jewish sites on the West Bank such as the tombs of the Matriarchs and Patriarchs in Hebron, Joseph’s tomb in Nablus and Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem.
Although I have seen many parts of the security fence in different places in Israel during other visits, I had not yet seen the barrier in Bethlehem. This was our interfaith group’s only encounter with the fence, in this case truly a wall. It is one that approaches the professor’s description of a wall “so high that even eagles would not dream to fly over.”
Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem
“Jerusalem – Bethlehem, Love and Peace” is what it says on a mural painted on the Israeli side of the prison-like security wall that separates the West Bank from Israel at Bethlehem. The words are attributed to the Israeli Ministry of Tourism. The graffiti on the Palestinian side have a different message, with Israel depicted as the Bird of Terror: “To Exist, To Resist,” “Viva Palestina Libre,” “Fresh Jewce Says this Wall Sucks.”
Our visit to Bethlehem, birthplace of King David and of Jesus, on the Sunday after our Shabbat in Jerusalem was profoundly disturbing to me. I was remembering Bethlehem from an interfaith trip 20 years earlier when there was no wall. Although that was during the First Intifada, by comparison to what would later transpire, things were fairly peaceful at that time. While there were demonstrations, rock throwing and strikes during the First Intifada, none of which I saw during the interfaith trip 20 years ago, there had as yet been no suicide bombings. The first such bombing was still 4 years away.
In Bethlehem, we visited the Church of the Nativity as I had 20 years earlier when the Christians in that interfaith group sang “O Little Town of Bethlehem” in the church, which has Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Armenian sections. It is built on the site of what was supposedly the manger where Jesus was born. This is one of the many Christian sites identified by the Emperor Constantine’s mother, Helena, during her visit to the Holy Land in the 4th century. Our guide was a Christian Palestinian, increasingly a minority group among Palestinians in Bethlehem and the West Bank as Christians continue to leave in the face of Moslem dominance.
On the trip to Bethlehem 20 years ago, we also visited Rachel’s Tomb, then a peaceful place in Bethlehem, a small building by the roadside. Some of us prayed there.
We did not go to Rachel’s Tomb on this visit. Rachel’s Tomb is no longer accessible from Bethlehem. Our Palestinian guide pointed out that it is on the other side of the separation wall that surrounds Bethlehem. In response to the escalating terrorism of the Second Intifada, it has been carved away from Bethlehem and turned into a fortress, with access restricted to tourists entering directly from Israel.
The visit to Bethlehem brought home to me how much worse the situation has become with the passing of 20 years, and how far we appear to be from any true and lasting peace. I came away from Bethlehem with a sense of the hopeless.
But now, during Passover, this festival of our Jewish freedom, when we remember our redemption from slavery in Egypt and the promise of a land of our own, I reflect on the meaning of Passover in today’s world as I recall our interfaith endeavor during this most recent trip to the promised land. Passover speaks to us of hope as Easter, with the resurrection’s promise of redemption, does for Christians.
We must never lose sight of this hope. The new Yad Va Shem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, a living memory to those days of deepest despair for Jews, is built like a tent with the richness of Jewish life before the Holocaust on display at one end and the hope for the future at the other. From the dark depths of displays depicting the horrors of the Holocaust, the visitor to the museum comes to the light that is an opening for the future with a beautiful view of the Land of Israel from the balcony at the end
View of the Land of Israel from Yad Va Shem, from the Balcony at the End of the Holocaust Museum
of the exhibit, the Land that was born anew from the ashes of the Holocaust.
This Passover, on this Easter Day for Christians, I recall our interfaith endeavor last month with its hope for tikkun olam, the healing of the world. I recall Jerusalem’s “cacophony of sound” that Rabbi Mitch took note of in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I feel the intensity of the “City of Peace.” Sacred to Jews, Christians and Moslems, Jerusalem is a tinderbox ever ready to ignite into holy fire, yet ever holding out that promise of peace.
I recall the hopeful words with which the Passover Seder ends: “Next Year in Jerusalem.”
