Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

  So is there a middle ground? I wondered. Is there a place where faith and tolerance can live side by side? In short, is religion just a source of war, or can it help bring about peace?

  As I tried to answer those questions, the Bible took on new meaning—and new urgency—for me. In particular, I became fascinated by the underappreciated second half of the Hebrew Bible, in which the birth of religion is described in dramatic, contentious detail. For the first thousand years of Israelite history, the patriarchs have a personal relationship with God and their descendants receive the 613 Laws of Moses. But their ways of worship—building altars, making burnt sacrifices—bear little resemblance to what organized religion would become. Nowhere in the Torah, for instance, does it say how to conduct a wedding or a funeral. Not until the first millennium B.C.E. do the Israelites begin to refine the basic tenets of biblical monotheism—worshiping in the Temple, reading the Bible, celebrating Shabbat. The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from the late first millennium B.C.E., contain extensive details on how to plan nuptials.

  The latter parts of the Bible portray this evolution as messy at best. Here, in a glorious sweep that heralds God’s kingdom on earth, Joshua parades the Ark into Israel, David unites the tribes in Jerusalem, and Solomon builds the House of the Lord. But here also, in a vivid portrait of the moral decay that shadows that kingdom, Jeremiah decries the ethical rot of the people, Isaiah weeps over their exile to Babylon, and Ezekiel dreams of their return to Zion. In this graphic interplay, the Bible seems to be saying that godliness and godlessness are in perpetual tension.

  For years I deflected questions about religion by pointing out that organized faith didn’t exist during the time of the patriarchs. The second half of the Hebrew Bible puts that vacancy to an end, as Israel develops Judaism, the foundation faith for Christianity, Islam, and half the world’s believers today. And Israel was not alone. Around the globe, from Japan to India to Iran to Greece, organized religion was invented in the first millennium B.C.E. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers termed these years (800 to 200 B.C.E.) the Axial Age, because they gave rise to Shintoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Platonism. The central challenges of our time—the relationship between individuals and God, faith and reason, theocracy and democracy, church and state—were born in the centuries between Moses and Jesus. For that reason, some scholars believe we are in a new Axial Age. Regardless, the need to understand the birth pangs of religion is more pressing than ever.

  At the close of my first journey, as I climbed down from Mount Nebo, I had turned to Avner and said, “We’re not done yet.” Finally I understood why. I had to return to the scene of my desert transformation. I would travel through the tinderbox of Israel, exploring the prickly relationship between God and the first kings of Israel. I would try to penetrate Iraq, the birthplace of the Bible and the scene of the most traumatic—and least understood—revolution in the history of religion, the Babylonian Exile. And I would attempt to pierce the religious iron curtain surrounding Iran, home to the unexpected savior of the Israelites, Cyrus the Great, the first interfaith leader in history.

  “Great, the Axis of Upheaval,” my wife cracked.

  Still one more reason drew me back to the Bible. The comfort I took from my earlier travels had been undermined by a series of crises. My mother got cancer; my father, too, had been touched by illness. I had arrived in a new phase of life. On a personal level, one relationship ended, and another began. That, too, failed, which sent me back to the woman whose strength, wisdom, and fire mirrored the feelings I had in the desert. One thing love and faith have in common is that they grow from the same human amalgam of unease, desire, passion, and need.

  We were married on a June evening under the stained-glass light of Noah and by the words of Moses in my childhood synagogue. Two rabbis, each invoking Abraham and Sarah, wove the present to the past with an ineffable flax. It was the part of religion that seemed most appealing: the comfort and import of repetition, something totally familiar that became, through its sheer ordinariness, something fresh and uplifting.

  Two months later, I kissed my wife good-bye and set out to undermine everything we had built. The world was filled with terror, fear, and death. War, so long prosecuted in the name of states, was now being rendered most commonly in the name of God. The Bible, which for so long had seemed the refuge of the past, suddenly seemed the most vital route for making sense of the tumult of the hour.

  I had wanted to go on my first journeys back to the Bible.

  I needed to go on this one.

  I arrived in Jerusalem on the most gorgeous day I could remember, drinking in the clean air. Wind tussled the palm fronds, a kippah blew down the street, a huff of clouds chugged by as if from a storybook train. On a passing bus, a pudgy elderly couple, Eastern Europeans who no doubt had survived World War II, gripped each other in a tight embrace, as if granting and taking life. There is no uncomplicated emotion here. No day is purely beautiful; no tragedy is merely tragic.

  Avner and I drove to the fashionable German Colony to have dinner. It seemed safe. No bombing had ever occurred on this block. “Are you armed?” the guard said at the gate of an open-air restaurant. Earlier, a soldier across the street had foiled an attack, holding up the arms of a heavily perspiring man to prevent him from detonating the explosives around his neck.

  After dinner we walked back to the car. Most of the shops were closed, except one. It was crowded, bright, with a square red sign that said COFFEE. “That’s new,” I said. “I hear it’s wonderful,” Avner said. “We should go there sometime.” He paused as if to say, “Should we?” Nah, it was late, our helicopter tour was scheduled for the morning. I was asleep by 11:00 P.M.

  Twenty minutes later the telephone woke me from a dead sleep. “There’s been a bombing in Jerusalem,” Avner said. “I think you should call home.” I had done so earlier, after a bombing in Tel Aviv. I telephoned my wife, who was more shaken this time. “Please, no more outdoor restaurants,” she said. My mother started pleading. My father was grim.

  I got off the phone and turned on the television. The familiar chaos was on the screen—people crying, running, splattered blood on a young girl’s face, a darkened arm in the street. And then they showed where it had happened. A bright red sign. Square. COFFEE.

  Never before in my years of traversing the Middle East and confronting the reality of religious violence had I felt such a trembling of raw emotion. “Oh, my God,” I cried out, alone. I grabbed at my face. I felt the imminence of death, as if I had touched a place in my body I didn’t know was there. I watched the endless loop on television, the faces of people I almost knew. I muted the sound and for a few minutes, groggy from half sleep, watched over and over and over again. I turned the sound up and heard how the bomber had been stopped, someone had shouted “Terror!” and still no one was safe.

  My wife called back, and I started babbling, trying to be soothing, yet a little out of control. By the end I was just hugging the phone in silence. Finally I turned off the television and tried to sleep, half waiting for another call. The room was cold. It was late.

  Tomorrow was the anniversary of September 11.

  We were climbing again, approaching Jerusalem from the south, gliding over the bank of pines that rings the city. “Get ready!” Yaya said. We drifted above the ridge, and suddenly the city burst before us, like a platter of treats being served up by a waiter. My heart leapt as my eye scurried to orient itself, looking first for the bell tower on the Mount of Olives, then the Tower of David, and finally the large plaza with the golden dome at its heart. “Pray for the well-being of Jerusalem,” wrote the Psalmist.

  “May those who love you be at peace.

  May there be well-being within your ramparts,

  peace in your citadels.”

  For the sake of my kin and friends,

  I pray for your well-being;

  for the sake of the house of the Lord our God,

  I seek your good.
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  Yaya was bursting with pride, a little boy with a train set he had built himself. “Look! That’s the hill we captured in ’48.” “That’s where David eyed Bathsheba.” “Wait! Do you see that . . .” The windows nearly fogged with the intensity. After a while I stopped looking at the landmarks and stared at him.

  “You’re part of one of the most efficient, lethal fighting forces in the world,” I said. “And yet you’re passionate about the Bible? What would your soldiers say?”

  “Can I tell you a secret?” he said. “For years I chaired the committee that wrote the code of ethics for the IDF. It was one of the most enjoyable assignments I had. In the introduction we wrote that all our ethics are based on the values that come from our Bible. I once taught at the War College outside Washington, and they said no other military in the world has such a code.”

  “But the Bible is so brutal,” I said. “Joshua kills women and children.”

  “That was the custom of the time,” he said. “Today, the battlefield is the place where real human character is displayed. I have seen people ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. I have seen people turn into animals. The difference is their values. Do you know that during the whole Yom Kippur War and the Lebanese War there was not even one case that an Israeli soldier raped a woman? You won’t find any army in the world with such a record.”

  We arrived over the Old City. For the first time all day, the clouds dissolved and a clear, white sun washed over the honey-colored stones. A rainbow appeared over the gilded onion domes of the Russian Orthodox church in Gethsemane. “Wanna go for a ride?” Boaz said.

  I held on. He pushed down on the control shaft, and suddenly we began to dive. We were forbidden from flying below five thousand feet. Soon we were at four thousand, then three. Our nose was headed at the heart of the Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif, the legendary Mount Moriah, where Ariel Sharon inflamed the second Intifada, Yitzhak Rabin led the capture during the Six-Day War, King Hussein watched as his grandfather was assassinated and he received a bullet to his own chest. Mohammed ascended to heaven from here; Jesus made a Passover pilgrimage here; Solomon built the Temple here.

  Two thousand feet. Fifteen hundred.

  None of us was speaking. My eye was drawn to the crescent on the top of the golden dome. The guard towers on the four corners. The black-capped worshipers at the Western Wall. We were blasting through the cornea of what the Talmud calls the Eye of the World. Our tail swung left, then right, but our head never wavered, locked onto the glint of infinity that has lured people to this spot since God was born. It was like being pulled backward through a vortex of time, an ineluctable wave of legend on top of custom, hatred on top of hope.

  The dial said 1,000 feet. We were close enough to hear the prayers. We were near enough to get shot. We were poised in a nameless breach between heaven and earth.

  When I first came to Israel, I was drawn by the country’s physicality, the dripping sense that past and future lived closer to the surface of every life. In Jerusalem I was more alive. Here I could engage the smorgasbord of history and politics, war and peace, that had absorbed me since I was a teenager arguing current events around the breakfast table. I had walked down the steps to the Western Wall, placed my hands on the stones, and wept. I had reached the bedrock of my identity. I had come home.

  But now, suspended above that plaza, I wondered. The stones seemed so unmoving, and the history in them so inflexible. The dimensions of that holy mountain had become the battle lines of holy war. Maybe the only way to reach peace was to peer beyond the tangible structures and reclaim the original sacred space. The Temple was never supposed to be merely a place; it was supposed to be the embodiment of an idea: Humans can live in consort with God.

  This tension, I realized, forms the undercurrent of the Bible: trying to balance a life on earth with a life that meets the standards of God. When Moses gathers the tribes at the end of his life, he warns them that conquering the land will not end their challenges; it will begin them. And he cautions them that God will punish failure to obey his laws by ripping them from the land. “The Lord will scatter you among all the peoples from one end of the earth to the other.”

  When Joshua gathers the tribes at the end of his life, he delivers a similar message. Do not mingle with the foreigners that surround you and worship their pagan gods. “You will not be able to serve the Lord,” Joshua says. “He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions and your sins.” This is the painful message at the heart of the Conquest: For centuries the Israelites had dreamed of setting foot in the Promised Land, but once they arrive there is little celebration. There is doom. Instead of being a land of milk and honey, it is a land of blood and tears.

  This reality sets up the question that defines the rest of the Hebrew Bible: Which is more important, living on the land or living a life of God? For me, this question was acute. So much of my rediscovery of the Bible was about reconnecting to the land. But for the Israelites, occupying the land involves a vicious slaughter of men, women, and children. One overlooked legacy of Israel’s God is the beastly violence he continually demands. If you love the lessons of the Bible—particularly its legacy of ethics and morality—it’s sometimes hard to love the stories of the Bible. The life of God is not always a life of peace and light.

  And neither is life on the land. Jews often claim that, according to the Bible, God promised this land to Abraham; we were here first, and our claims should have precedence. The land is vital to Judaism. But the Bible delivers a very different message. It says living on the land is not the most important thing; living on the land while obeying God is the most important thing. The land is secondary to living a virtuous life. Faced with a choice, the people of Israel should chose the values of heaven over the virtues of earth.

  “So you fought for this land,” I said to Yaya, gesturing to Jerusalem and beyond. “Would you give it back?”

  “It depends on what you want to achieve,” he said. “War is just a tool to achieve your national goals. Land is important to a nation, but so is language, and ideology. The Jewish people have always wanted to come back to Jerusalem. But more important than this city, or any city, are the rules, the beliefs, the way to treat yourself, your wife, your neighbors. The key to Judaism is the principle that everyone is responsible for the well-being of the people.”

  “At the end of the story, Joshua gathers all the Israelites at Shechem,” I said. “He tells them they must choose the God of Abraham or the gods of Canaan. If you were talking to the Jewish people today, what would you say?”

  “As I told you, the most important thing for any leader is to define the goal. For me, the goal is to live in this place, in peaceful conditions with our neighbors, according to our values and beliefs—and not to sacrifice our values and beliefs because of a piece of land, or a question of pride. You have to compromise. All our history we have compromised. But there is one thing we cannot compromise: our values.”

  The helicopter started to rise. I felt the now familiar vibration from above, the swell of air from below, the gentle lift.

  “Can that goal be achieved?”

  “No doubt,” he said. “No doubt.”

  Back in Jerusalem a few hours later, the air was still electrified, sad. I went to visit Bikur Holim Hospital, the cramped Dickensian building in the heart of the city that serves as ground zero for many of the victims of suicide bombings. A pall of emptiness still hung over the seventy-five-year-old building, as a guard slowly inspected my bag. Inside a long, dimly lit hallway, a few family members huddled along the stone walls; patients with wounds on their faces sat in wheelchairs.

  Seven people were killed in the blast at the coffee shop; fifty-seven were wounded. Craig Nelson, a reporter eating at a pizza parlor across the street from the café, described seeing a man turn away from his restaurant, run into the shop, utter “Allah Akbar,” “God is great,” then blow himself up. His severed head landed in the middle of the street. The neck is th
e weakest part of the body, the police explained. Nelson found a twenty-year-old woman curled on her side, gasping for breath, her arm twisted grotesquely. Her hair was singed gray. Nava Applebaum died in his arms. Eight feet away lay the corpse of her father.

  Dr. David Applebaum, a native of Cleveland, was one of Israel’s most famous emergency room physicians. He had flown back that evening from a conference in Manhattan, where he was asked to speak about his pioneering efforts to treat victims of suicide bombings. He had taken Nava to the café for a father-daughter chat to impart some last-minute advice. Today was to be her wedding day. She was buried instead. As Nava’s body was lowered into her grave, her fiancé placed a farewell gift on her shrouded body. It was her wedding ring.

  “In the last three years, we’ve had more than twenty-four suicide bombings,” explained Alex Farkas, a friend of Avner’s who worked as the hospital’s spokesman. Alex was a forty-something Hasidic Jew, with a beard and white shirt; he was disheveled from a night of no sleep. “We got information yesterday morning from the police that a bomber was on his way to Jerusalem. We even knew the color of his shoes. And they caught him a few meters from here; the hospital was his target. But we didn’t have warning about the man at the café.”

  With so much experience, the hospital had become adept at crises. “People come from all over the world to learn how we do it. You hear the doors banging, then—it’s a miracle—in two minutes you wouldn’t recognize the place. It’s like a new dimension of smell, light.”

  First come light victims, often strapped to chairs. Next are more serious victims, brought by professionals. Ambulances use a special code to get through the barriers, after the IDF warned that bombers might usurp medical vehicles. Then come people in shock, screaming. “Last night we had a serious case, a man who saw his friend lose two legs. He was hyperventilating so severely it took four hours before he came out of it.”