A Match Made in Heaven

by Zev Chafets

  “You writing from personal experience?” I asked, expecting a giggle. Instead she nodded solemnly, took back the paper, and folded it away. The devil was no laughing matter.

  Christians profess to believe in sin, of course, but sins come in different guises. Mainstream Protestants tend to locate sin in the moral malfeasance of others—slaveholders, colonialists, capitalists, settlers, oil barons, and the Bush administration. Evangelicals look inward. The sins are theirs, personally owned and operated and, in a perverse way, cherished. After all, the bigger the sin, the bigger the salvation.

  Nobody in our group wanted to be caught without a sinful past. Even pretty Beth Jones confessed to me that she was “wild” in high school. Bob, the ex-cop, confided that he had been “rough on the streets.” And then there was Gayle, the woman with the star of David on her blouse who had bought the huge shofar from the Aramaic-speaking shopkeeper in Jerusalem. She had sharp features and a strong New England accent, and she had been eying me throughout the trip. Finally, coming down the Carmel mountain range, near the spot where the prophet Elijah smote the false priests of Baal, she got up her nerve and sat next to me. “I’d like to tell you my story,” she said. “I’ve been through the muck and mire.”

  She looked commandingly at my notebook, which I dutifully opened. “Start with the facts,” she said. “My dad was Jewish. My mom was a Protestant. His family never really accepted her, even though she converted to Judaism and kept a kosher home. There was bad blood. My father was in medical school, and he was beloved by his parents. They were very Orthodox and they couldn’t believe he had married a shiksa.

  “When I was a little girl my father ran away, just disappeared. And as I grew up, I was wild. Boys? Yeah, I was crazy for boys. And booze. You name it. I mean, I had no identity, no self-respect. Who was I? A Jew? My mother didn’t practice Judaism after my father left. A Christian? She never took me to church. I was nothing. But even then, even when I was drinking and running wild, I knew there was a God.

  “I yearned for my father. At nineteen I married a man because he looked like my father’s picture. We had a son, but my husband beat me and abused me and we split up. I was in sin up to my eyeballs. Sin was my escape. I didn’t care about anything really. We were on welfare. We lived in a slum. Then one day, a fire burned us out. A family took us in for a few days, but they didn’t really want us, and they asked us to leave.

  “I was out on the street with my son, and I had a visitation from the Lord. He said, ‘Come unto me, just as you are.’

  “It opened my eyes,” she said, opening hers to demonstrate. “I went off welfare and walked with God.”

  Suddenly, things began to fall into place. Her Jewish grandparents died and she reconciled with her father’s aunts. She met a fine Christian man, married him, and prospered. And then, after forty-three years, she found her father.

  “He had become a Baptist minister and he was living in West Virginia with a wife I didn’t care for and seven kids. Here we were, all those years later, reunited. That’s why I can say that I truly walk with God. That’s why I’m blessed to be able to give thousands of dollars to Israel. And that’s why I wear this Jewish star, as a reminder of where I was and who I truly am.”

  ONE OF THE highlights of every pilgrimage is the chance to get baptized in the Jordan River. Israel has established a more or less official site (the Jordanians have a competing spot on the other bank). Next to it is a tourist complex run by Kibbutz Kinneret, whose Eastern European socialist-atheist founders would have been amazed by the vast gift store of Christian knickknacks being hawked by their grandchildren.

  It was a chilly day, and not everyone wanted to get dunked in the cold river water. Only ten of the pilgrims, wearing bathing suits under rented white robes, went down to the baptismal pool. As they were taking their places, an Israeli guide called out to Mark in Hebrew. “You got a priest with you? I have some people here who want to get baptized, but they don’t have a priest.” He gestured to a small group of men and women in colorful native robes. One couple wore baptismal gowns.

  “Where are they from?” hollered Mark.

  “Tahiti. Catholics. What are yours?”

  “Evangelicals. You better check with yours that a Protestant minister is okay.”

  “It’ll be fine, don’t worry,” said the other guide. “Just don’t mention it.”

  George Mamo and Pastor Jerry performed the ceremony, holding each person by the arms and lowering him or her backward into the water. When the Tahitian couple’s turn came, their friends sang a beautifully complex, presumably Catholic, anthem, accompanied by loud amens from our group. Then everyone dried off and went to the gift shop to buy souvenirs. As we were leaving, Don Cobble said good-bye in Tahitian.

  ON THE WAY to our hotel in Tiberias, Linda the theologian sat with me. “I’ve always been uncomfortable with displays of religious emotion,” she said quietly. “Perhaps it’s my Scandinavian temperament. But you know, ever since I became an evangelical Christian I’ve been, well, uncomfortable I guess is the right word.

  “Like John Kerry,” I said. “Another New Englander who doesn’t wear his religion on his sleeve.”

  Linda smiled. “He did say that, didn’t he? Well, I can understand him. But, then, there are surprises. You can surprise yourself. I live in Florida now. During the last hurricane I was alone in the house, desperately trying to close the shutters. I realized that I had underestimated the sheer strength of the wind. I was frightened that the storm would blow the windows in. And suddenly, to my own great amazement, I found myself talking to Jesus. Talking in tongues.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Does that shock you?”

  “No,” I lied. Linda was the voice of sophisticated academic evangelical Christianity, my partner in dispassion. Talking in tongues, a feature of charismatic Pentecostalism of the Pat Robertson variety, is considered eccentric and perhaps heretical by some fundamentalists. Many Baptists even regard it as a satanic practice.

  “Actually, it’s more a way of channeling spirituality than anything else,” Linda said. “You don’t intellectualize your prayers by verbalizing them, you simply allow them to flow through you, and they express themselves in a language you may not understand but that is consonant with your innermost feelings.”

  “Like a mantra?”

  “Perhaps. I’m not certain that would be an exact analogy. Would you like to hear how it sounds?”

  I nodded. I had heard people speaking in tongues in Pentecostal churches before—fervent semishouts and unintelligible grunts and moans. But Linda spoke in tongues as she spoke in English, softly and fluently, her quiet blue eyes focused on mine. She could have been telling me a story in Swedish. When she was finished she paused and looked at me evenly.

  “Do you know what you just said?” I asked.

  “Not in words, no. And not really emotionally this time, either. I just wanted you to hear how it sounds.”

  THERE WAS A health spa at our hotel in Tiberias and we all gravitated to it. It featured stationary bikes, an artificial waterfall, a swimming pool, and a hot tub, where I found myself sitting with Giggles, Beth, and her mother. Me and three born-again women, in modest bathing suits, sharing a soak.

  Beth reminisced about hot tubs past, when she was one of the popular chicks in her Kalamazoo high school. Her mom recalled those days with a proud smile. She herself hadn’t been an evangelical back then. In fact, she said, after her divorce there had been a time…

  “I’m celibate,” said Giggles suddenly, and giggled. The comment was unprompted but not inappropriate. During the trip I hadn’t heard so much as a crude word or a suggestive remark, but sex, I realized, had been a constant undercurrent. Most of the personal stories began with confessions of wild youthful behavior, and no one, people emphasized, was ever really out of the grasp of evil. I had encouraged these reminiscences with my questions. Giggles was letting me know she was aware that Satan comes in many forms, maybe even a bearded J
ew in a Galilee hot tub.

  NEXT DAY AT lunch, in a fish restaurant on the eastern bank of the Sea of Galilee, I sat with Linda, Pastor Beth and her mother, and Catfish.

  “Zev and I discussed speaking in tongues yesterday,” said Linda in the tone of a teacher introducing a seminar topic. The floor was now open for discussion.

  “Never happened to me,” said Catfish.

  Beth said, “I speak in tongues. Not necessarily in church on Sunday, we don’t have that kind of congregation. But sometimes—do you know if the word shem has a meaning?”

  “It’s one of the ways to refer to God in Hebrew,” I said.

  “I knew it! When I was in college I started to hear three words in my head. Does kadeesh mean anything? Or hodiyah?”

  “Kadeesh has to do with holiness,” I said. “Hodiyah is thanksgiving.”

  “I knew it, I just knew it!” said Beth. “Those words kept coming to my mind and they were the words I used when I first spoke in tongues!”

  I must have looked skeptical because she said, “Not everything can be explained logically. I mean, have you heard about Reverend Kim Clements from South Africa? He prophesized the flood in New Orleans. And he’s not a whacko. I mean, some Baptists think prophecy is weirdness, but the proof is in the pudding.”

  “There’s been a lot of talk lately about a Lutheran minister in Indonesia who’s had a lot of success raising the dead,” said Beth’s mom in her Bacall baritone.

  “I’ve heard that,” said Linda. “He’s said to be a very straightforward person. I also heard a story about a man in Africa whose brother died, he’d been dead for two days, and there was a preacher nearby who could supposedly raise the dead. So the man put his brother on the back of a flatbed truck and drove him to the preacher. The preacher said the man should put his hands on his brother’s ill place, and when he did, the brother came back to life.”

  “Well,” I said. I had made it a practice not to argue with anyone during this trip or anywhere else during my time with evangelicals. I wanted to know what they thought, not convince them of anything. But this seemed a bit much. Linda saw skepticism and, to buttress her story, said, “That preacher lives in Florida now.”

  There was a long silence. Then Catfish said, “I got to get that guy’s name.”

  “You’d think that a man like that would be famous,” I said.

  Linda fixed me with her mild blue eyes and said, “People are afraid of this subject. They simply don’t want to know. I mean, I can see that it’s hard to believe, but there are just so many testimonies.”

  MIGDAL HAEMEK IS a rundown little town in the Galilee, a place settled by successive waves of Jewish immigrants and lived in by those too poor or too lazy to move someplace better. It is also the home of Yitzhak Grossman, an Orthodox rabbi who runs a town within the town for six thousand Israeli orphans and unwanted children. The Migdal Or Boys and Girls Village is a major recipient of evangelical contributions, and we visited to see how the money was being spent.

  Grossman is a tall, thin, imposing figure with a white beard and a piercing gaze. Dressed in his long black coat and broad-brimmed black hat, he looked like a Jewish Wyatt Earp. In his younger days he earned fame as the “disco rabbi,” one of the few Israeli clerics willing to venture into forbidden secular nightspots to make contact with kids. Eventually he broadened his outreach to prisoners. Now, a lot of his rehabilitated former charges belong to his eight-hundred-member staff, which includes teachers, councilors, coaches, adoptive parents, and even a full-time marital matchmaker.

  Before we arrived, Mark had briefed the group on protocol, warning the women not to touch Rabbi Grossman physically. “It’s just not done,” he explained. “It’s a matter of female impurity, menstrual and so forth.”

  “When we visited Africa, the women had to wrap their legs for some of the tribal leaders,” said the airline plumber.

  Rabbi Grossman speaks English with a thick accent, in which boys are boy-es and girls girlies. The pilgrims listened to him intently, and Grossman was perfectly at home with them. Unlike many of his ultra-pious colleagues, he knows the evangelical world well and has appeared on TV with John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and other televangelists.

  As we moved around Migdal Or we were welcomed with songs and ceremonies. Little kids in skullcaps bowed as they crossed Grossman’s path. Teenagers paused for a word with him, sometimes kissing his hand. He led us through the village for more than an hour, winding up in the communal dining room for lunch and entertainment.

  The fare was institutional and strictly kosher—overcooked chicken and soggy side dishes. Beth, sitting nearby, wondered if she could get a glass of milk. “Not here,” I said.

  “Don’t Jews drink milk?”

  “Not with meat.”

  “Why not?”

  I couldn’t resist. “It’s forbidden,” I told her solemnly. “In the Bible.”

  After lunch Rabbi Grossman brought in the boys’ choir, a dozen or so preteens in matching vest-and-slack outfits, microphone headsets over their black silk yarmulkes. Music blared from large speakers and the boys began singing and moving, choreographed as the Jackson 5, Hebrew psalms set to a disco beat. The pilgrims clapped along with enthusiasm as Grossman looked on, beaming.

  The dining hall and the entire campus are strewn with photos of Rabbi Grossman posing with the great Orthodox rabbis of Israel. Many of these rabbis have never met a Christian in their lives and don’t want to. Grossman, who has turned down the job of chief rabbi, provides the evangelicals with an important religious and political imprimatur in Israel. If these Christians are kosher enough for him, they are sufficiently kosher for a whole lot of other rabbis with short budgets and high aspirations.

  On the way back to the bus Jack, the lone Catholic, approached Rabbi Grossman. “Will you bless me, Rabbi?” he said.

  Grossman smiled and placed his hands on Jack’s head. “Help the boyes and the girlies and you will be blessed,” he said.

  ON THE WAY to the Mount of Beatitudes I fell into a discussion with several of the women about a previously taboo subject—my ultimate destination. I raised the issue myself, bluntly. “Do you think I’m going to hell?” I asked.

  The women looked at one another and bit their lips. Finally Pastor Beth said that she hoped everyone would ultimately go to heaven.

  “Even if they don’t accept Jesus?”

  Again they exchanged glances. They had an American horror of being rude but they couldn’t lie. “We don’t want you to go to hell,” Linda said in her kindly way. “It’s not up to us, it’s up to God. But here on earth we truly love you. Why not judge us by our fruits?”

  “Because a lot of Christian fruits have been bitter,” I said. “The Crusades, the Inquisition…”

  Beth said, “But it’s different now. That’s all changed.” Evangelicals don’t deny history. Some believe they need to atone for it. But that isn’t their primary motive in loving Jews and supporting Israel. They believe the Jews are God’s people. They can’t change that any more than they can change the rest of God’s plan.

  That evening at dusk we took a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee aboard the model of a fishing ship from the time of Jesus. The sun was setting as we sailed toward Tiberias. The captain, a rough-looking Israeli in a T-shirt and jeans, flipped on a sound system especially programmed for evangelicals, and Mahalia Jackson’s voice boomed across the water: “He’s got the whole world in his hands.”

  “Come on, everybody, clap your hands!” shouted Madeline Cohen, our peppery Israeli travel agent. Some of the women rose and began doing an approximation of the hora while the men watched bashfully.

  “Something faster,” Madeline called out to the captain in Hebrew. “They want to dance.”

  “Okay, okay,” the captain said and switched to Israeli Euro-pop dance tunes.

  “Dance, dance!” yelled Madeline Cohen.

  Catfish came up to me. “I’m just a dumb redneck, I know that, but I saw the sun come up over the
sea this morning and a little poem came to me, about the love of God. Can I read it to you?”

  I nodded. He took a neatly folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket and began to recite:

  As I came to the motherland

  My heart was hard and sad.

  But as I walked where Jesus walked

  I started to understand

  Why people have always fought

  For this beautiful and wonderful land.

  And now I find myself not sleeping at night

  Now wondering about my sins

  So from this land of the holy

  I got down on my knees

  To ask the good lord for forgiveness

  Of my wicked and evil deeds

  And now I found myself crying

  As the lord was crying for this land.

  And so another day has come and gone

  As I travel through this land.

  I found my heart happy

  As I was praising this holy land.

  And now my journey is ending

  As my heart is changing again

  I found myself grieving

  For this great and holy land.

  But as I make this promise

  That I will return again

  And those who hear these words

  May we meet in peace

  In this wonderful and holy land.

  A few months after the trip, I spoke with Catfish on the phone. He was in Port Lucie, still installing air conditioners, but he had a new avocation. “I’ve set up a foundation,” he said. “I’m calling it the Sea of Galilee Foundation. I’m putting up a website and I’m going to sell the picture I took of the sun going up over the Galilee and copies of my poem. I’ll keep ten percent, and the rest goes to Rabbi Grossman’s orphans and an orphanage here in America. The way I figure it, even if I only keep ten percent? It’s like Jesus is letting me win the lottery.”