Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  So how big an accomplishment was this? To answer that question I went to a skyscraper in downtown Tel Aviv to meet Ben-Gurion’s onetime chief aide-de-camp and one of the most recognized Jews in the world. Shimon Peres was not as colorful as his mentor, nor as voluble. He was a technocrat to Ben-Gurion’s pioneer, the coolheaded number cruncher to the impulsive entrepreneur. Peres never developed the personal connection with the public that Ben-Gurion had. Four times he ran for prime minister; four times he failed to win. The two terms he served in the role were under less-than-glorious circumstances. First, in 1984, in a power-sharing arrangement with right-wing leader Yitzhak Shamir;and second, in 1995, following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

  What Peres did have was a deep intellect, and a sharply analytical mind. For years he ran the country’s clandestine program to develop nuclear weapons, and in 1993 he spearheaded the secret talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization that led to the Oslo Peace Accords, an accomplishment for which he, Rabin, and Arafat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

  I first had the idea of meeting Peres when I learned that he had led a three-week espionage mission to scout out the Negev in 1944 that had remarkable similarities to the spying episode described in Numbers 13–14, in which Moses sends a team of a dozen Israelites to survey the Promised Land. Peres’s expedition involved fourteen men who ventured south on camelback from Beer-sheba toward Eilat with the goal of plotting the land, then under British control, for an eventual takeover by the Jewish state. At the time, Jews were forbidden to travel in the Negev; they were also forbidden to carry arms, which the group had brought along, hidden in large canteens. “A tale of fourteen youngsters who longed to dip their toes in the waters of the Red Sea” is what Peres had said at the outset of the trip.

  But they never made it that far. After twenty-two days, and only twenty kilometers from the gulf, the group was surrounded by British and Arab soldiers, arrested, and carted back to Beer-sheba, where they were thrown into jail. Peres was sentenced to a month behind bars. One day during the expedition, the Polish-born Peres, who at the time was still called Shimon Persky, spotted a large bird’s nest in a tree. Shinnying up to see the nest, he disturbed a large eagle, which took flight. “That’s a peres,” the ornithologist in the group declared, using the modern Hebrew name for eagle that had been borrowed from Leviticus 11. “An immediate consensus evolved that as my ‘Diaspora-sounding’ name Persky was close to the name of this bird,” Peres wrote in his memoirs, “I ought to adopt it henceforth as my new, Hebraicized name.” (As it happens, the peres actually appears in Leviticus on a list of birds—including vultures, kites, falcons, ravens, ostriches, seagulls, hawks, cormorants, owls, pelicans, buzzards, storks, hoopoes, and herons—that the Bible says are not to be eaten. No reason is given, though interpreters later concluded that these were all birds of prey, and thus unclean.)

  When I met Peres in his office, in a meeting arranged through one of Avner’s friends, he was mostly dismissive of the event. “Yes, it was daring,” he admitted. The maps, he said, were later used by the army during the War of Independence. But what Peres most wanted to talk about was Ben-Gurion and how he changed the role of the Bible in contemporary Jewish life.

  The foyer to Peres’s office suite was heavily guarded and extensively decorated with mementos from his travels. On the wall was a large photograph of Peres signing the Peace Accords on the grounds of the White House, as well as a bronze dove and a quote from Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” Over the copy machine was a photograph of Peres and Ben-Gurion, in which the protégé was a full head taller than his mentor.

  Peres’s private office was sunny and lined with books. There was an air of importance in the room, but it was tinged with melancholy, sort of like a musty beachside hotel. Peres, in his late seventies, was dressed in white trousers and a pink Oxford-cloth shirt with silver cuff links. On his desk was a stack of books in English, including two by Carlos Fuentes and one on Israel and the bomb. His shelves were filled with pictures, including one with him and Hillary Clinton. Next to it was a bulb-headed doll of Ben-Gurion that reminded me of a dashboard icon. I began by asking how much credit he thought Ben-Gurion deserved for making the connection between Israel and the Bible.

  “I would give him the lion’s share,” Peres said. His voice was deep, but so soft it was almost impossible to hear. Not a muscle in his face moved when he spoke. Twice I had to move my chair closer to his desk, until, by the end of our talk, I was practically leaning over into his lap. He spoke perfect English, in perfect sentences, with a deep Polish accent despite six decades in the Middle East.

  “First, there was a great deal of shame that had developed among Jews in the Diaspora,” he continued. “The exile had introduced some unwelcome insecurities. His goal, intellectually and historically, was to bring back the Bible, instead of concentrating so much on the Talmud,” which had become the dominant text in Judaism by the Middle Ages by compiling commentaries on the Bible and other aspects of Jewish law. “On the other hand,” he continued, “there was a great debate going on about social democracy, communism, and the Soviet Union. He drew a line against that kind of talk and said our social orientation should be from the Bible, not from Marx, not from Lenin, not from Trotsky.”

  So what social message did Ben-Gurion draw from the Bible?

  “It was a double-edged combination,” he said. “He believed that what was unique about Jewish life was that in addition to the historical side—the kings, priests, and officers—we had the prophets. The prophets represented the moral side of our story. The Bible is history, and the prophets are vision, and it’s combined. So intellectually, you have double the standing.”

  “Was this view somehow in the background,” I asked, “or did you practice it every day?”

  “First of all, Ben-Gurion never gave a speech without quoting the Bible. Secondly, at his home, he had sessions every Saturday and Sunday reading the Bible. Thirdly, he organized what he called the Bible Puzzle, an annual national quiz on Independence Day that continues today. Finally, he just talked about it all the time. When he developed a theory about the Exodus, he held a press conference!”

  “Were there people who resisted?”

  “There were two camps who opposed him. One was the religious parties, who were very mad with him for downgrading the Mishnah and the Talmud. The other was the Socialists, who were unhappy that he downgraded socialism.”

  We started talking about the Negev, and I asked him if he would describe himself as a desert person like Ben-Gurion.

  “Yeah, I spent some time down there,” he said dismissively. “But basically, I would describe myself as future-oriented. I think the desert presents an offer for the future. It’s an opportunity to take the sand from the land, the salt from the water, the wilds from the people.”

  “But I thought that view was no longer in favor now. People down there now say, ‘Let’s respect the desert. Let’s keep the desert as a desert.’ ”

  “It’s fashion,” he said. “They want to keep the environment, but there are two problems. One is how to keep the air; the other how to keep the land. It’s a contradiction. Because for clean air maybe you need more trees, which destroy the desert. Most of the people in the desert care more about tomatoes than people.”

  “So in the future, do you see the desert as green or brown?” I asked.

  “Green, green!” he said. “Who wants to live on sand? The desert should be full of trees, leaves, plants.”

  In a way it was touching to hear the prodigy defending the dream, but Peres, on this matter, seemed out of touch, and a bit uncomfortable. Sensing my time was coming to a close, I brought the conversation back to the Bible and mentioned that in the country today one didn’t hear politicians quoting the text.

  “Today politicians are victims of television, instead of being s
tudents of the Bible,” he said, in what was no doubt a reference to his defeat by Benjamin Netanyahu, a master communicator, in the 1996 race for prime minister. “Everybody wants to be a star: his face, his show, his sound bites. But there is a world behind the televisions. There is a world that lasts forever.”

  “Now that Israel is mostly secular, do you think the Bible can survive the onslaught of television?”

  “Yes,” he said emphatically, and for the first time all morning he showed some passion. “The Egyptians have the pyramids; we have the Bible. The pyramids are getting old, they’re suffering from neglect. Our monuments are words, not bricks. And words last longer.”

  A few days later, I met up with Avner to discuss the conversations I had been having. One view came across loudly: The Bible is alive and well in Israel, the uncredited national anthem. But there seemed to be confusion about what role the desert should play in this vision. Why did some people want to eliminate it, and others want to embrace it? When I asked Avner this question, he popped open his cellular phone, hit one of his speed-dial entries, and whispered a few words to the person on the other end. “I’ll pick you up at seven tomorrow morning,” he said.

  We drove southwest from Jerusalem, past Hebron and Beer-sheba, to a mostly unsettled corner of the Negev, not far from the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip, where we met another of Avner’s circle of desert missionaries. Rami Haruvi was taller than Ofer, more kempt than Avner. Dressed in a neatly pressed mustard shirt, he looked like a retired basketball player trying to make a bid for middle-aged modeling. He was also, like his friends, a talker. Early on he told me that after his wife got cancer he went to see a therapist. “The first thing I told him was that when I visit I want to be his last client of the day, because once I start talking, it’s hard for me to stop.”

  Rami met us in an abandoned, two-story concrete building on the outskirts of Kibbutz Be-eri. He had spread out a table with an elaborate breakfast, including rolls, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, tea with mint, and coffee with cardamom. “Kibbutzniks know how to eat breakfast,” Avner said. Rami’s father helped start this kibbutz in 1946. “When he came here, there was nothing, nothing,” Rami said. “Imagine a convoy of immigrants from Tel Aviv, with Jews from Venezuela, Africa, Europe. After an hour they came here and had to make a home for themselves.” Within two years they had built a small community. When war broke out and the Egyptian Army came sweeping up from the south, they quickly erected this building for safety.

  “I once asked my father, ‘What did you think at this moment?’ ” Rami said. “‘You, alone, with your body, with thirty people here, with a few pistols. Not even one cannon.’ And my father said, ‘We believed.’ ”

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “They were blessed,” Rami said. “They defeated the Egyptians. The Negev was included in Israel. And Kibbutz Be-eri went on to become one of the most successful in the country.”

  After breakfast we went out and began exploring the area, visiting a series of abandoned Ottoman factories, British sulfur mines, and Israeli Army barracks that testify to the area’s many changeovers during the wars of the twentieth century. This part of the Near East has always been something of a strategic nexus: Just to the north are the habitable central hills; just to the east and south is the desert; just to the west is the sea. Gaza, the city that controls this hub, has been one of the most important urban areas in the world for five thousand years.

  At one point Rami led me into a network of concrete bunkers, dating from the early twentieth century. “Now you are exactly like someone named Archibald Murray,” Rami said.

  “I always wanted to be like Archibald Murray,” I replied. “Who is he?”

  “Archibald Murray was here in 1917, during the First World War. The British were trying to take Palestine from the Turks. They came from the south, from Egypt, and wanted to go to Jerusalem. To do so, they had to cross this area. It took them three months to come all the way from the Suez Canal to here. They built a train. They built a road. They built a pipe. They brought water all the way from the Nile, because they needed steam for the train and water for thousands of horses. In three months! But they had to get through Gaza, which was controlled by the Turks. And one famous general helped them do that. Do you know which one?”

  “Allenby?”

  “Ah, you made a mistake.”

  “Archibald Murray!”

  He grinned.

  “But I’ve never heard of him,” I pleaded.

  “That’s the point,” Rami said. “One of them is famous, one of them is not. General Murray got the British Army here in three months from Egypt, but then they bogged down for eight months. Twice they attacked Gaza, and twice they were defeated, despite using tanks and gas shells. Over eleven thousand British soldiers died. Finally, General Allenby arrived and hatched a plan. The British dropped cigarettes on Gaza with propaganda on the packages. The Turks said, ‘Who cares about the propaganda, we want the cigarettes!’ ” For weeks they smoked free British cigarettes, but the day before the attack, the British laced the cigarettes with opium. On October 31, 1917, the British finally conquered Gaza. “Three months to come all the way from Suez,” he said. “Eight months to go three kilometers.

  “And as always, Gaza was the key,” Rami said. “Take it and you take the land. Six weeks later he took Jerusalem.”

  “So if what you’re saying about this area is correct,” I said, “then what they said in the Bible is correct.”

  “And what did they say in the Bible?” he said, delighted by the point.

  “They sent spies from Kadesh who said the Israelites couldn’t take Canaan.”

  “And what did they do in the Bible?” he asked, in the manner of a lawyer asking a leading question.

  “They decided not to come from the south.”

  “And where did they go?” he said. “Aaaaalllllll the way around.” He swung his arms in a giant windmill to reflect the Israelites’ journey across the Jordan River, up the east bank of the river, to the central mountains of Jordan. “And where did they attack the Promised Land from?”

  “Jericho,” I said.

  Rami was smiling from ear to ear. “Hard to believe,” he said. “But it’s the same thing that happened in World War I. It’s all but impossible to conquer Israel from the Sinai.”

  We drove a few miles to a large concrete memorial, about two stories high, in the shape of a giant A, built to commemorate the ten thousand soldiers of ANZAC, the Australian–New Zealand Army Corps, who died in the 1917 attacks on Gaza. From the overlook we had a clear view of the surrounding area: Gaza, the Mediterranean, the Sinai, the Negev, the mountains around Hebron. The afternoon light was changing to dusk, and the colors—pale yellow, powder blue, eggplant purple—reminded me of the Nile.

  After a while we pulled out our Bibles and finally read through the story of the spies we had been referring to for so long. In Numbers 13, following the first few rebellions of the Sinai, but before the incident with the earth opening its mouth, God instructs Moses, “Send men to scout the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelite people; send one man from each of their ancestral tribes, each one a chieftain among them.” Moses gathers the men and instructs them, “Go up there into the Negev and on into the hill country, and see what kind of country it is. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many? Is the country in which they dwell good or bad? Are the towns they live in open or fortified? Is the soil rich or poor? Is it wooded or not? And take pains to bring back some of the fruit of the land.” The spies set forth through the Negev, along a route that probably had them brush alongside Ezuz and the Ramon Crater, as well as where we were now standing, before arriving in Hebron, where the patriarchs were already buried.

  The spies make this trip “in the season of the first ripe grapes,” which Avner said probably meant late July. Fittingly, the only thing the text says they actually do in the Promised Land is harvest some pomegranates and figs, as well as
cut down a branch with a cluster of grapes, which they carry back on a pole stretched between them. This image of two men carrying grapes has become so famous a symbol of the Promised Land that the Israeli Ministry of Tourism uses it as a logo.

  After forty days, the scouts return to Kadesh and give their report. “We came to the land you sent us to; it does indeed flow with milk and honey.” This term probably refers to goat milk and bee honey, Avner said, though some commentators suggested the honey could be referring to nectars from fruits like figs or apricots. Another line of thought suggests the term milk and honey is metaphoric, meaning the country enjoyed an abundance of animals. Either way, the first report is bearish. “The people who inhabit the country are powerful,” they report, “and the cities are fortified and very large; moreover, we saw the Anakites there,” a name that is derived from the Hebrew term meaning long necks and has long been interpreted to mean giants.

  Still, as would be the case with countless espionage missions throughout history, different spies interpret the information in different ways. Caleb, one member of the team, rises to give his spin, saying, “Let us by all means go up.” Surely we can overcome any obstacle, he says. But the majority of his colleagues disagree, saying, “We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we.” The Israelites break into cries upon hearing this report, and weep half the night, eventually railing against Moses and Aaron: “It would be better for us to go back to Egypt!” Joshua and Caleb rend their clothes in frustration and exhort the community, “The land that we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land. If the Lord is pleased with us, He will bring us into that land, a land that flows with milk and honey, and give it to us.”