by Bruce Feiler
At this point, a thin man with blue Dockers and a blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt stepped into the center of the circle. The leader—a preacher, a rabbi, a guru?—filled a Dannon strawberry yogurt carton with bottled water and held it in his right hand as if he were about to pitch a baseball side-armed. He rested his left hand on the thin man’s head, said a quick prayer, and with a swell of force that seemed to draw strength from the three thousand years of history beneath his feet, slammed the carton into the man’s abdomen, creating a powerful splash, eliciting deep, mournful moans from the small congregation, and from the man himself, prompting a gasping cry: “Torah! Torah! Hallelujah!! Praise, Jesus. I am found!”
At first tentative, but fascinated, I watched from the narrow walkway. Within minutes, though, one of the women approached me. “I don’t know who you are,” she said. “But God has sent you.” She invited me to join them. I asked what religion this ceremony was. “We’re all believers,” she said. “He who accepts the Messiah is circumcised in the heart.” The man being blessed, John Powell, stepped forward and explained. He was an American, a Gentile, he said. He had found Jesus Christ as his savior when he was eighteen and for years studied the Bible and spread the word of God. In his twenties he found a passage in Second Corinthians, which indicated to him that the Church had become too removed from its Jewish roots and had forgotten the meaning of the seven feasts, the seven pieces of furniture in the Temple, the seven days of Creation. “The Spirit gives life through symbols,” he said. He vowed to return to the Old Testament and moved to Kissimmee, Florida, near Disney World, to start a new mission.
As he was preparing to move, a friend in Massachusetts had a vision of him peering into a well. “This well was not being used,” he said, “but I put a bucket in and pulled out fresh water, pure water. The people gathered around thought they had seen a miracle.” He turned to John 4, where Jesus comes upon Jacob’s well near Shechem, and decided to come to Israel. After arriving, he learned that visiting Shechem would be unsafe. “The Lord took me back to Genesis,” he said. “To chapter 26, where Isaac builds a well in Beer-sheba. It’s the same well that Abraham had dug, though it had been filled in by the Philistines. And I realized: This was the well that was not being used. I saw the connection. I felt the spiritual pull between my work and Beer-sheba.” With some friends he met in Jerusalem, he decided to come here and sanctify his vision.
At this point John’s wife, Starr, joined him in the center. She was wearing a peach-colored turtleneck. The leader, Luke, began to fill the yogurt cup with water. John was concerned that the cup had become dented and used his finger to unpucker the dent to ensure that his wife had the same amount of water. Once again Luke cocked his arm, summoned the Lord, and slammed the cup into Starr’s stomach, lifting her off the ground in the process. Then he flung water onto her face. It was chilly atop the tel, the breeze was blowing. But it didn’t matter. Starr was crying now, as was half the group. “From this day forth you will come out of the Land of Israel,” Luke said. A woman, Barb, stepped forward with a talit made of white silk with blue stripes. Thirteen-year-old boys receive these shawls when they become men, she explained. She wrapped it around John’s shoulders and recited the Wayfarer’s Prayer, the same one I heard on the bus to Hebron. When she finished she asked John if he owned a talit. He shook his head. “Well, you do now,” she said. John leapt like a boy. “Wow!” he said. “Glory be! Somebody asked me the other day if I wanted to buy one, and I didn’t know which one was right. Thank you. Hallelujah! Praise Jesus.”
Barb and several others then proceeded to turn the talit into a wedding canopy and invited John and Starr to repeat their vows. The entire episode was astounding not only in its raw emotion, but also in its pandemic religious inclusion—part baptism, part Bar Mitzvah, part wedding, part rebirth. I was struck by the idea that John and I, from different backgrounds, had come to this place for the same reason: It was in the Bible, the patriarchs had passed here, there was meaning in this soil.
After the ceremony, Barb retrieved a tiny vial of margarine-colored oil. She dabbed some on John’s forehead, then Starr’s. It smelled of lilac. “Father, we come to you in the name of Jesus,” Barb said, crying. “You can put some right on my eyelids,” John said, but she resisted. “I don’t know what’s in this, so I better not.” “No, I beseech you,” he said, and she obeyed. Finally, in her emotion, Barb fell to her knees. John and Starr were wearing sandals, and Barb began reenacting the last moments of Jesus’ life, spreading oil on John’s toes. A general sobbing ensued, and husband and wife collapsed to the sandy ground in a giant exhale of prayer, now, at last, reconnected to the dust of eternity, which more than water, oil, or the sound of the shofar, had the ability to give them purpose to their lives. “God bless,” they muttered. “God bless. God bless.”
We left Beer-sheba a few minutes later and turned west for the hour-long drive toward Gerar, our last stop of the day. Heading now along the border of the Negev I began to realize how markedly the light shifts in Israel. In the north, which is hilly, the light is often refracted by a natural filter of trees, lakes, mist, and flowers. In the central mountains, with its mix of settlements, highways, and factories, the sun is brighter. In the south, with its open, sandy plains, the light is despotic. On this day, the sun was so big and relentless it threatened to burn a path right through our skin.
Perhaps because of this change in climate, the cities along the desert edge often feel like outposts, bulwarks against the wilderness. Gerar, in particular, feels this way: Canaan’s last stand. Identified with Tel Haror, near Gaza, Gerar has a certain middling stature: It’s bigger than Beer-sheba, smaller than Hatzor. Not a major city, but not a minor one, either. One archaeologist I know calls it Tel Mechukmak, Hebrew slang for ugly-duckling tel. In antiquity, Gerar was a place for wandering pastoralists to test their strength. For the patriarchs, camping beside Gerar was like opening out of town, a warm-up for the major leagues.
At first glance, the site doesn’t help its own cause. For starters, it’s difficult to find. There is no public face, no welcome center, no buses filled with schoolkids. Even Avner had to double- and triple-check his map. It’s also hillier than many tels, and more relaxed. In the 1950s the Jewish National Fund, not realizing the mound was an ancient site, covered it with eucalyptus trees, giving it the feel of a city park. The lower area is even decked out with playground equipment. We parked and hiked to an abandoned mosque in the upper city, draped in green and white banners. Many Islamic countries use green in their flags, Avner noted—Libya, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia—because to bedouin of the desert, green symbolizes life.
On the lower level we roamed the city’s elaborate earthen ramparts, which were designed to make attackers believe the city was stronger than it actually was. The reason for the deception is that around 1800 B.C.E. so many pastoralists were flocking to Gerar that the city was no longer able to contain them and the ramparts were designed to keep them away. It’s this background that the patriarchal stories reflect.
Gerar is first mentioned in Genesis 20, when Abraham has his encounter with Abimelech. It pops up later in a similar role with Isaac. Following the death of Sarah, Abraham instructs his servant to travel back to Harran to get a wife for his son. Abraham makes the servant swear not to take a wife for Isaac “from the daughters of the Canaanites.” The servant does as instructed, and soon arrives at a well in Harran, where he meets Rebekah, a beautiful maiden and a virgin, who he decides is perfect. The servant returns to Rebekah’s house and meets Laban, who consents to his sister’s betrothal, saying, “The matter was decreed by the Lord.”
Back in the Negev, Rebekah meets Isaac for the first time, and the two marry. “Isaac loved her,” the text says, “and thus found comfort after his mother’s death.” At this point, Abraham, now 175 years old, dies and is buried in the Cave of the Patriarchs. Though he had six children from a subsequent wife, as well as Ishmael, Abraham wills all he owns to Isaac. Most important, Isaa
c inherits Abraham’s most precious possession, the covenant from God that says the family’s descendants will someday rule Canaan.
Like his father, though, Isaac is initially unable to conceive an heir. Rebekah is barren. Isaac pleads with the Lord on her behalf, and she conceives twins, Esau and Jacob, who struggle inside her. The issue of lineage, which was already clouded by the split with Ishmael, now seems more dicey than ever. “Two nations are in your womb,” God explains, “two separate people shall issue from your body; one people shall be mightier than the other, and the older shall serve the younger.” Once again, the younger son, in this case, Jacob, is tapped for posterity. Unlike Isaac, who earns his status by virtue of being born to Abraham’s wife, Jacob earns his by force. There’s almost something proto-Darwinian in this dictate: The stronger will inherit the land.
This theme of the patriarchs’ growing strength is echoed in the story of Isaac in Gerar, which begins in Genesis 26. A famine strikes Canaan, and God tells Isaac not to go to Egypt, as his father had done, but to stay in Gerar. In another echo of Abraham, the men of Gerar ask about Isaac’s wife. Isaac, fearing that the beauty of his wife will endanger her, says Rebekah is his sister. Once again, Abimelech realizes the ruse and warns his men not to touch her. Isaac and his family then settle in the area and begin to cultivate. “And the man became great, and grew more and more until he became very great,” the text says. “And he had possessions of flocks, and possessions of herds, and a great household; and the Philistines envied him.”
Though the use of the Philistines here refers to a later population and is considered an anachronism, everything else is accurate, Avner said. “There are fields,” he noted. “Though we’re on the edge of the Negev, there is arable land.”
What happens next, though, is crucial. Responding to the envy of his people, Abimelech asks Isaac to leave Gerar: “Go away from us, for you have become mightier than we!” Isaac flees to Beer-sheba, and Abimelech eventually sues for peace.
“So let me get this straight,” I said. We had sought relief on a shady spot on the embankment and were sitting under a willow tree. “Abraham is not threatening to Abimelech in Genesis 20. He shows up; he’s a big leader. He’s strong enough for Abimelech to take him seriously.”
“Right.”
“But Abraham is not a danger.”
“Correct.”
“Abimelech invites him to live wherever he wants. But by the time Isaac comes, in Genesis 26, something has happened to make him threatening.”
“Okay . . .”
“But what happened to make him threatening?” I asked.
“It says Isaac became ‘bigger and bigger.’ ”
“And what about Jacob?”
“He never spent much time in this area. He mostly lived in the north, near Hatzor.”
“What’s the significance of that?”
“Well, Hatzor was the strongest city,” Avner said. “He must have felt pretty strong to go there.”
“And maybe that’s the point,” I said. “There’s this whole geopolitical side of the story. This one man, Abraham, is in the process of becoming a people. By putting him peacefully in Gerar, then putting Isaac here as a threat, then moving Jacob to Hatzor. The Bible offers clues about their rise to power.”
“But remember, it’s still the power of God.”
“But the will of God cannot be implemented unless his chosen people are strong enough to implement it, which they won’t be until after Moses. That’s the whole point of the Exodus, isn’t it? The people weren’t spiritually ready to conquer Canaan. So it’s not just power, it’s enlightened power. And that process takes a big leap forward here, in Gerar.”
We sat quietly for a few minutes absorbing the exchange. I felt an exhilaration—and a security—I hadn’t felt before in our conversations, a feeling that I was more connected to the soil. Minutes later (though it seemed like an hour), Avner touched me on the shoulder. “Shall we go?” Walking back toward the car, I felt the shock of return, as if waking from a daydream. The absence of any people—any development—had made it so easy to disappear into the past that I hadn’t even realized it was happening. Was this evidence that I was finding it easier to enter the stories? Sitting at the site, I had no armor of distance to separate me from the text. Even the minor events that take place in Gerar had revealed another layer of meaning. It was as if the places, not just the characters, wanted to speak:“See, we could feel the Israelites growing. We could tell by the size of their flocks, by how much food they ate, how much water they drank. We knew sooner than any person.” The land, as I was seeing, has its own story to tell. All you had to do was put your ear to the ground, and listen.
A few days later, Avner and I met at dawn for one encounter I had looked forward to since we began: following the path that Abraham took the morning he went to sacrifice Isaac, an event referred to in Hebrew as akedah, the binding. The sun was barely visible through the haze above the Mount of Olives when we arrived at the Promenade in West Jerusalem overlooking the Old City. It was here, more than a year earlier, that I had first considered retracing the Bible. Since Abraham and Isaac would have passed this spot on their way north from Beer-sheba to Mount Moriah, an event described in Genesis 22, we decided to walk the several miles from here to what sits on Moriah today, the Temple Mount.
The Promenade was almost deserted on this morning, except for a few strollers. Part of no-man’s-land between 1948 and 1967, the site is now a popular park, landscaped with ferns, pines, rosemary, and sage. Lovers gather here at night, kite fliers in the afternoon. A few joggers passed us in a blur. “How do they find the time for that?” Avner wondered, rubbing his Buddha belly.
We zipped up our knapsacks and set off down the slope. Jerusalem is a geographic anomaly in the Middle East, a hilly, tree-shrouded city in the central elevations of Palestine that became holy three thousand years ago and remains holy for a third of the world. As a Jewish sage put it in the first century C.E., “The world is like a human eye. The white is the ocean that girds the earth, the iris is the earth upon which we dwell, the pupil is Jerusalem, and the image therein is the Temple of the Lord.” Jerusalem today has some of the best traits of other cities—hills like Rome, stone like Athens; some of the worst traits of others—traffic like Bangkok, cramped housing like Tokyo; and light like no other place on earth. In the mornings and evenings Jerusalem is bathed in the most incandescent sunlight, an effusion of gold dust that flirts with the pink highlights of Jerusalem stone, winks off the polished roof of the Dome of the Rock, and seduces anyone within its gaze. If sunlight has rejuvenating qualities, Jerusalemites probably benefit most. Of course, they need it more than most, since the City of David and Solomon is also the place of Mohammed’s ascension to heaven and the site of Jesus’ resurrection—all of which make one of the world’s most beautiful cities also one of its most uptight.
For natives, Jerusalem never loses its embrace. Avner was born into a line stretching back to the early nineteenth century. His mother, Leah, was what Avner called a “Mayflower Israeli,” one of the earliest Jewish families. Avner’s father, Yair, was born in Tel Aviv and grew up in the Galilee, near Tel Dan. As a sixteen-year-old boy, Yair went to work in the Dead Sea mineral plants and secretly traveled on weekends by bicycle throughout Jordan (then called Transjordan) buying up weapons once used by Lawrence of Arabia for use in the Jewish defense movement. When he later moved to Jerusalem during the War of Independence, he was issued a rifle with a broken handle inscribed with an English name. He recognized it as one of the weapons he had procured. “These were weapons the Arabs used to gain independence from the Turks,” he recalled later when I went to visit him in his nursing home. “Now the Jews were using them to gain independence from the Arabs.”
Yair was a jolly, voluble man, with a belly considerably larger than his son’s and a twinkle just as bright. He had written several volumes of memoirs and favored an expansive, at times commanding, conversational style that may have contri
buted to his son’s considerable learning, but probably encouraged his diffidence as well. Yair left the army in 1954 and began working as an electrical engineer. He and his wife already had two children: Avner, born in 1944, and Noa, born in 1949. Avner was a bright kid, a math and astronomy whiz, who never did his homework and was expelled from the most prestigious school in town. “He didn’t finish one book,” Yair said. “But he did well on exams!” On weekends, Yair would lead Avner and Noa on biblical tours of the city. “But I didn’t need to carry the text,” Yair said. “When I wanted to quote something, I knew it by heart. Every single word. I didn’t have to look it up, as you do.”
For all his love of the Bible, Yair Goren was passionately antireligious. He was the charter member of a group called the League for the Prevention of Religious Coercion, which was designed to preserve the rights of secular Israelis to eat nonkosher meat and drive on Shabbat. Avner, though, had other ideas; he felt drawn to the tradition. “I thought it was a part of me,” he said. “I wanted to know more.” When Avner announced his desire to have a Bar Mitzvah, Yair tried to dissuade him. On the day of the event, his mother attended proudly; his father stayed at home. “Didn’t anyone tell him he should go?” I asked Avner. “Oh, no,” he said. “My father’s very stubborn. I’m nothing compared to him.”
I asked Yair why such an antireligious man felt so attached to the Bible. “When I was about twelve years old, I loved, simply loved, literature,” he said. “And I used to read poetry. One day I read a passage from Isaiah, chapter 5.” He began quoting from memory. “Now let me sing to my Beloved a song of my Beloved regarding His vineyard: My Beloved has a vineyard on a very fruitful hill. He dug it up and cleared out its stones, and planted it with the choicest vines” The quote continued for another three verses. “It was wonderful,” Yair noted, “simply wonderful! And ever since then, near my bed, was the Bible.”