by Bruce Feiler
The only other people in the church were about a dozen nuns in black habits and head scarves, as well as a bishop who emerged from behind the screen waving an incense holder, giving the room the mesmerizing smell of allspice and cinnamon. The service was conducted by a nun chanting in Slavonic, the ancient Slavic liturgical language that sounds Russian, only sweeter. The sweetness was enhanced by three sisters standing behind her, singing magically harmonic tunes that seemed like a combination of Mozart sonatas and Appalachian folk melodies. Their voices were plaintive, as if coming through a gramophone.
Sister Xenia turned out to be an American, who had been raised Catholic in Northern California. When the service ended, she shyly but warmly invited us to dinner in an underground hall. We sat in silence as the sisters prayed, and ate boiled potatoes and pasta, sliced tomato, and a persimmon. Avner advised me to leave some food on my plate, as nuns adopted this custom to indicate they are eating only for survival, not pleasure. When we finished, Sister Xenia led us up the hill to a small, whitewashed room for pilgrims.
As a teenager, Catherine, as she was known, grew disillusioned with her faith and went seeking other truths. At sixteen she was hit by a car and flew forty feet, smashing her pelvis. Doctors told her she would never walk again. When she did, she went on to study medicine at Berkeley, working as a maid to pay the bills, until she nearly lost her life in the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Penniless, she moved in temporarily with a friend in a Russian Orthodox monastery. “I had only one dress I could wear,” she said. “I was very fashionable and into boys. I said, ‘Just for a few months.’ ” But when one of the sisters got cancer, Catherine began attending morning services to help with the singing. “And I began to notice: If I got up to say morning prayers, my day was brighter. If I slept in, my day was more pressured.”
She never left.
She moved to the Mount of Olives in 1994 and nearly lost her life again, in Jericho in 2000, when Palestinian gunmen held her captive in a Russian Orthodox monastery for forty-five nights in a precursor to the second Intifada. “I felt so free, even though I was so captive,” she said. “It’s like a curtain opened, and I saw something. I felt Christ.”
“You remind me of someone I met, not far from here, over a year ago,” I said. “Her name was Tzippy Cohen, and she was nearly killed twice. First in New York on 9/11, and then here, in the bombing at Café Hillel.”
“I always say, ‘Living here, we have orchestra seats on history.’ ”
“So what have you learned from your front-row seat about the relationship between faith and violence?”
“I think the violence we have developed as humans is a very negative violence,” Sister Xenia said, and I was struck by how beautiful her face became when she spoke about faith. “The violence we should use in religion is the violence of commitment: Using every means you have as a creative being to bring yourself closer to God. The violence out there”—she gestured toward the Temple Mount—“is a repellent thing. But the violence in here”—she gestured to the compound—“is of people coming together.”
“So the answer to violence in the name of God is violence in the service of God?”
“Sort of, but it’s not the violence people know. It’s destroying the culture in which people put themselves at the center of everything. And putting God at the center. The day will come, Isaiah said, when ‘the haughtiness of man shall be humbled, and the pride of men shall be brought low; and the Lord alone will be exalted.’ ”
“And do you believe that will happen? Do you believe the religions will get along?”
“Look, I’m a nun in the Orthodox Church. I believe that Orthodoxy is the truth. I believe that Christ is the messiah. But I also believe that everybody on earth was created in God’s image. We are all related in being created. So I, as a created, have to respect other created things. That’s what I mean when I say putting God at the center. He created us this way. We have to learn to live together.”
In front of our room was a large stone patio with palm trees that looked west over the Old City. Directly in front of the patio, at eye level, was the Dome of the Rock, almost hovering in the air, illuminated by the moon.
Avner and I began talking about his father. I mentioned that there was one thing about his dad I had never understood. “There would seem to be a contradiction in his feeling this personal connection to the land and to the Bible yet being openly hostile to religion.”
“I don’t think he considered it a tension,” Avner said. “I think one of the things that bothered him most was religion being used for politics. That’s what he fought against. His idea was that religion should be a private belief. He even tried to get a bill introduced into parliament.”
“So do you think his resistance mirrored what was going on in the world at that time, with the Holocaust, socialism, et cetera? In the mid–twentieth century, God seemed to be dead.”
“Very much so. A big part of secular Zionism was turning against the ghetto mentality of Judaism and reconnecting to the land. I felt the same attachment. And I loved the Bible, but not necessarily religion.”
“So what happened? When we met in the mid-1990s, religion and God were not part of our conversation. Now we talk about them all the time. Obviously part of that’s the world, but part of it is us, too.”
“A lot of it has to do with our travels,” he said. “We’ve met so many people who are believers but who are also committed to peace. I’ve come to appreciate the more generous side of faith. And I’ve also come to realize that so many people who are fighting in the name of religion actually lack an identity, so they cling to things that are physical, like land. I really believe now that religion is central to helping people develop an identity that is more mature, having to do with morals and ways of living.”
“So you’re saying that in this part of the world, where religion seems to be the motivation for many of the problems, you believe that religion can actually be part of the solution?”
“I think that’s true for all parties. Once you are mature enough, and have self-confidence, you can talk better with others, be more open, and give up your convictions for things that might be more important, like peace.”
It took a second for this idea to settle over me, yet I knew it mirrored my own journey, in which knowledge of matters of faith had helped buttress my self-confidence. Only when I became confident in myself as a Jew could I safely reach out to others.
“When I met you, I would have described you as an archaeologist and an adventurer. Maybe even a humanist,” I said. “But I’m not sure I would have described you as a Jew. Are you a Jew now?”
“I’m quite sure that the answer is yes. One reason is that I’ve learned a lot more. As we know from Babylon and elsewhere, the power of Judaism is its openness to change, to answering the needs of a new world. There’s always been change, but the twentieth century, the State of Israel, and 9/11 pushed these changes even faster. I’m proud to be a part of that.”
“Does that mean wanting a relationship with God?”
“You can call it God. You can call it values. You can call it heritage.”
“And would your father approve of that relationship?”
“I think so, because whatever it is, it brings me closer to other humans, and that’s what he really wanted out of life.”
Avner went off to bed, and I decided to stroll down the stairs to see the view from in front of the church. Pine trees mostly blocked the light on the path, and I was startled to hear in the bushes a hound, geese, and several cats. My heart lurched with each sound. I realized my hands were trembling. The Mount of Olives at midnight seemed like an eerie menagerie. Reaching the wall, I sat beneath an olive tree and peered out at the Eye of the World.
When I made my first journey retracing the Pentateuch through the desert, I was struck by how linear the biblical narrative was—the Israelites begin in Mesopotamia with Abraham, travel down to the Promised Land, descend into Egypt, then cross the Red Sea in
to the wilderness. The story gallops along like one of those moving red lines on a map in a 1950s movie. The second half of the Hebrew Bible begins with that momentum with Joshua, David, and Solomon. But around the time of the Exile, the story line shifts. Gone is the linear drive, replaced with a diffusion, as if the straight red line on the map got wet and the color began to seep across the region.
This diffusion is one of the reasons the second half of the Bible is less appreciated; there’s simply less action. But it’s also why the themes from this period have endured across so many cultures. If the Pentateuch is the story of a nation coming of age, the prophets tell what happened when that nation left home and interacted with the world. The prophets are mediators who spread the message of God to the ages.
This difference between the first and second halves of the narrative reflects what happened to me on my journeys. On my first trek, I was focused more on my personal relation to the story—whether it was fact or fiction, science or myth; whether something that happened thirty centuries ago could still speak to me today. Looking back, I see that that journey occurred at a time when it may have been easier to indulge in those private questions. That time seems far away now. The second Intifada, September 11, Afghanistan, Iraq, the growing divide between secular-minded Western Europeans and faith-based Americans, have all changed the global reality. Closer to home, gay marriage, the Ten Commandments, moral values in Washington, God in Hollywood, suddenly dominated nearly every conversation. Sorry, Ma, we have no choice: We have to talk about religion and politics in public.
As a teenager and young adult, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would become, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to our parents, and to Jewish families for generations. But the older I get, the more I realize that religion is not going to be easily marginalized by one of its wannabe successors—science, capitalism, communism, consumerism. The last thirty years witnessed what George Weigel called the desecularization of the world, a resurgence of faith in part as a counter to the impersonalization of modernity.
Religion surged also because it offered a counterweight to the searing speed of contemporary life and to the burden of national rivalries that have dragged the world through war after war. Religion is broader than nationalism. It addresses the dignity of all human beings, not just those in one geographic area. It is universal. “Politicians have power,” says Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Britain, “but religions have something stronger: They have influence. Politics moves the pieces on the chessboard. Religion changes lives.” Religion also breeds overconfidence, and one challenge for today’s believers is to rediscover in the fire of faith the source of warmth that can overpower the flames of destruction. This change can be achieved only by fellow believers, I think. The first conviction I took from my journey is that the only force strong enough to take on religious extremism is religious moderation.
Religion can be saved only by religion.
And in that battle, one of the greatest weapons of all may be the Bible.
For all its singularity, the Hebrew Bible can still be seen as a product of the Axial Age, that several-century span in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. when great belief systems emerged across the world to answer the most profound questions of the human spirit. Religions, as those systems came to be called, are what Rabbi Sacks calls “sustained reflections on humanity’s place in nature and what constitutes the proper goals of society and an individual life.” My experience traveling and exploring this period reinforced the logical-yet-unprovable notion lingering behind the idea of an Axial Age: It’s no coincidence that so many great religions evolved around the same time.
Religion is not a single red line. It’s not a private universe in which each of us can look only at our own past, read only our own version of history, and talk only to our coreligionists. Religion began as a complex, interdependent web, in which people took ideas from other cultures, rituals from rival faiths, and even notions about their deities from competing gods. If religion is to be preserved as a moral force in the multifarious world of today, I believe, we must rediscover the legacy of interaction and accommodation. The great religions were not born in isolation from one another; they cannot survive in isolation from one another.
One reason that organized religions emerged as human societies became more complex is that they build community. The name of the other great force of community building, politics, comes from the Greek polis, or “city,” and refers to the governing of civic affairs through the mediation of power. The word religion comes from the Latin religare, “to bind,” and religion sets out to fuse people to one another and to God through rituals, narratives, symbols, and ceremonies.
These two colossal human creations—politics and religion, state and church—arose nearly simultaneously in antiquity and, through their fertile and sometimes tense interaction, created the twin pillars of contemporary civilization. In the West, those two pillars were defined by two cultures. “No two people have set such a mark upon the world as the Greeks and the Jews,” Winston Churchill once said. “Each of them from angles so different, have left us with the inheritance of its genius and wisdom. No two cities have counted more with humankind than Athens and Jerusalem. Their messages in religion, philosophy and art have been the main guiding light in modern faith and culture. Personally, I have always been on the side of both.”
At its core, Greek philosophy revolves around the individual and focuses on intellectual achievement, autonomy, and self-sufficiency. In Greek politics, as in Plato’s Republic, the philosopher has to be persuaded to go back to the community. In Greek religion, the God of Aristotle is a perfect being, rapt in thought, whom humans contemplate and want to emulate but don’t necessarily interact with. In the Bible, by contrast, God and humans have a relationship with one another. God seeks partnership with humans. He speaks through human agents. He cannot achieve his vision of a moral universe unless he acts in concert with humans. The Bible, at its heart, is an ode to interdependency. In the biblical view, God is born not in any particular place but anyplace where humans and the divine act in the service of a righteous world.
And nowhere in the Bible is this vision of interdependency expressed with more eloquence and passion than in the Prophets. Any effort to celebrate moderation in the text rightfully focuses on them. Working in intimate contact with God and speaking in sometimes abstruse, highly stylized rhetoric, the Hebrew prophets burst from the ashes of monarchy and the squalor of exile to persuade the Israelites—and the world—that when human beings act as part of a community, they fully realize their God-given powers. The Hebrew prophets were the first spiritual leaders to think globally, to conceive of God as transcending national borders and of humanity as a single moral entity. The idea of a global village began in Babylon.
The notion of universal values has deep roots in the Bible, especially in the stories of Abraham and Moses. But the prophets take these rudimentary ideas and amplify them into an all-embracing vision of humanity, in which, as Amos says, “justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a never-ending stream.” God knows what he requires of humans, Micah declares: “Only to do justice and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God.” In presenting this new ideal, the prophets show that the relationship between God and humans is not static; it evolves. As Avner put it, “The earlier laws were created because these values existed, but the values were not presented specifically. The prophets articulate the values themselves.”
The heart of the prophets’ philosophy of humane values relies on one of the oldest ideas in the text, the story of Creation. In going back to the Garden of Eden, the prophets alight on God’s deepest desires for humans: that they live alongside other humans. In Genesis 2, after God has created Adam and placed him in the Garden of Eden, he looks at Adam and declares, “It is not good for man to be alone.” Humans, God insists, mus
t be in relationship with others.
And the foundation of all human relationships rests on an even earlier notion: “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ ” All humans are created in God’s image, so disrespecting another human is disrespecting God. From the earliest days of human existence, God compels us to honor his creation by respecting its diversity. As Rabbi Sacks put it in his seminal book The Dignity of Difference, “The challenge to the religious imagination is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image.” The Bible answers this challenge and clears the path to a pluralist world. It shows that all humans, at one time or another, are strangers. “You shall not oppress the stranger for you know the heart of a stranger,” says Exodus 23:9, “you yourselves were strangers in the land of Israel.”
The early religious showdowns of the early twenty-first century have made one thing clear: In the battle for the soul of Western religion, it is scripture—whether the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or the Koran—that is ground zero. Fundamentalists of all stripes cite text as the inerrant foundation of their convictions. After more than a year of traveling through some of the most extreme places of religious fundamentalism, I determined that the Hebrew Bible, at least, cannot be read as endorsing the idea that one group of people has exclusive claim to God. In fact, from Creation to Jonah to Second Isaiah, the text explicitly endorses the opposite idea, that God embraces any people who share his moral vision, no matter their identity.
Religious extremists cite the Bible continuously as advocating their beliefs. Religious moderates can, and must, do the same. Just as flamethrowers lift the text and say, “It says this,” progressives can lift the same text and say, “But it also says something else.” The Bible simply is too central to the history of Western civilization—and too vital to its future—to be ceded to one side in the biggest struggle of our time, the quest to define the nature of God.