In the desert, Jesus fasted for 40 days, resisting Satan’s chiding to turn stones to bread to feed Himself. Like Jesus, all groups and individuals in Israel must resist the temptation to manipulate the land for their satisfaction.
Also on the Mount of Temptation, Jesus refused to pay homage to the devil in exchange for power over all the kingdoms of the world. Like Jesus, all groups and individuals in Israel — Christians and Muslims and Jews — must resist the temptation to compromise in exchange for control.
Humanity, however, has not enjoyed such success in resisting temptation. Consequently, the modern Israeli state provides an ongoing case study in our inability to solve problems by force.
Still, we live in a world of tooth-and-nail power struggles for everything from parking places to public office. Ultimately, these struggles make losers of all participants. Like a chess match in stalemate, the moves continue, but nobody wins, as in Israel, where war is waged. More people die; borders change; but attitudes don’t. More people are born, and hatred is bequeathed to still another generation.
Irony abounds in Israel, where even the road signs in Hebrew, Arabic and English signal a country with overlapping layers of language, culture and faith.
Consider, for example, the Cenacle. Tradition holds that the location is above David’s Tomb — a site of Jewish significance. The Crusaders believed that the space marked the room of the Last Supper — a site of Christian significance. Eventually, the Cenacle served as a mosque — a site of Muslim significance. The same holy place, but in Israel the imprint of differences seems to bear more weight.
That’s why, along with the holy places of the Holy Land, pilgrims will see military installations, border patrols stationed in the hills and along river beds. In Israel, young women soldiers in “civvies” carry M16 rifles as casually as handbags.
Bullet holes pock a marble column in el-Aksa Mosque. Barbed wire and international land-mine warning signs belie the gentle landscape. At the Tel-Fahr Memorial, cyclamen — flowers protected by the Israeli government — blossom delicately along the Syrian bunkers where soldiers battled for possession of the Golan Heights.
At one of the famously bountiful Israeli breakfasts, I peeled a Jaffa orange while reading the morning paper’s account of two theaters in Amman, Jordan, bombed because they had screened soft porn.
The violence in the Middle East embodies the ultimate hypocrisy: People who claim to love God, but hate God’s children. But not only in the Mideast. In the former Yugoslavia, too. In Northern Ireland. In Africa. Surely here, in the United States, and in all places where we succumb to the temptation to take the devil up on his challenge to turn bread to stones, to forsake humility for power.
People who truly love God do not harbor hatred within their hearts. People of faith do not murder believers of other religions. Or bomb churches. Or movie theaters. They do not open fire on a crowd of people, or beat to death a man who made a wrong turn and then brutalize the corpse. It’s a risky, risky business deciphering God’s will, but it’s pretty safe to say these are not actions readily categorized as holy.
One day on pilgrimage, my party strayed from our itinerary, as pilgrims are wont to do, and happened upon the Church of Sts. Joachim and Ann, the parents of Mary. Down the hillside from a convent, we found the Crusader church’s ancient walls still standing. Upon entering the limestone ruins, the heady fragrance of narcissus buckled my knees. All along the fallen, corroding columns and throughout the roofless space, narcissus bloomed. And, wonder of wonders, from the remains of the altar grew an almond tree blossoming soft pink and perfumed.
In the years since my pilgrimage, much has happened in the Holy Land: historic handshakes, an assassination, bus bombings, an election, flirtation with treaties, more war, more talks. Much, in the past years, has remained the same. I think of the people I met in Israel, the holy places I visited, the landscape of milk and honey trodden over time by humanity, but also divinity. I recall the River Jordan, Sea of Galilee, the Mount of Temptation. And I keep hoping that — like the flowers blooming among the ruins — peace can take root in the Holy Land.
But intractable problems can’t be solved until we work earnestly to salve the world’s wounds with an example of love, respect for life, and religious tolerance. Until then, the peace in the Holy Land that so recently seemed possible will remain a dream. So close and yet so far away to hands that grab rather than reach.
