Where God Was Born Read online

  I asked Alex how he would explain to someone, like my mother, why there was so much violence in a place of such faith. Was religion to blame?

  “I will tell her that one thing is for sure: There is one God, and God controls the world. God controls the bomb, and the bomber. God chooses the doctor who takes my wife’s three eggs and, through IVF, turns one of them into my son. And God decides that Dr. Applebaum and his daughter, on the day of her marriage, will go into heaven.

  “And I will tell her,” he continued, “that as a religious person, I believe the world is going to get better. There will be a messiah. It is written in the Bible that the sheep will live together with the wolf.”

  “But when you read Joshua,” I said, “the story suggests you can’t have God’s kingdom without violence.”

  “Why does a baby, when it’s born, have to go through such drastic bloodshed? I don’t know. I didn’t create the world, but I know that good things come from stress. Through that war, the land of Israel was created. Through this war, we created many methods of saving lives.”

  He told me a story. A woman had come into the hospital the night before. She had shrapnel in her back and was covered in blood. She was hysterical. They got her during the Golden Hour, the first sixty minutes after a crisis. They saved her life. “Do you want to meet her?”

  Before I could think I was ushered down the hall, through the emergency ward, into a dimly lit room. Tzippy Cohen was sitting against the pillows in a loose-fitting hospital gown, her bangs hanging limply around her expressionless face. The twenty-five-year-old Australian was more alert than I would have expected, but her eyes were still vacant. She was vacationing from New York, where she works at the National Society of Hebrew Day Schools, just blocks from Ground Zero.

  “We decided kind of late, Let’s go out for coffee,” she said. “We chose the German Colony, because it’s not the center of town. We took a cab, because you’re not supposed to take buses. I had wanted to go to Café Hillel. I had heard it was good.”

  “It looked very inviting last night,” I said.

  “It was full, we noticed that. We decided not to sit outside, safety-wise. We also made a decision to sit in the back, safety-wise. I had a salad, nothing major. We were just picking at our food.

  “And then, in the middle of nowhere . . .” Her eyes blinked. “And you knew what it was. There was no question it was a bomb. The place just jumped, like an electric shock went through us. I can’t separate anything, except to say: Bang. A shock. Black. Smoke. Shattered. And then a split second of darkness and silence. Followed by screaming. And running. And pandemonium.”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “I knew immediately I had to get out of there,” she continued. “I felt I was cut. I was bleeding. Instinct told us to go out the back. We climbed through the glass walls, which were blown out, and went running through the alley, just screaming. ‘Call an ambulance! Someone call an ambulance!’ A lady said, ‘Come with me,’ and drove me to the hospital. When I got here I realized there was blood on my body that was not my blood. My hair had pieces in it. . . . It was other people.”

  Again there was a pause.

  “So why were you saved?” I asked.

  “I believe in higher powers,” Tzippy said. “If you ask me, it’s a miracle. I was in New York on September 11 and watched the second tower fall. I was covered in dust. My faith does not let me believe that if I’m going to a land—my holy land—that something will happen to me. If I would have died here, I would have died in New York.”

  “But in the face of what you’ve seen, some people might say that religion is the problem. You have come face-to-face with one of the worst things a human being can do.”

  “I have to say, on the contrary, it makes me do a turnaround. I need to turn closer to religion. I am lying here for a reason. You can’t attribute something like this to coincidence every time it happens. Luck doesn’t come your way so much. If I have learned anything from this experience it is that, despite the evil in this world, there is still goodness in each human being. When I walk out of here, I owe it to God to do something good for his allowing me to survive such hell.” She attempted a wan smile.

  “And I will.”

  B O O K O N E

  LAND

  . 1 .

  MAN OF BLOOD

  Razor wire is made up of thin metal twine with small sharp barbs every few inches that is twirled into coils about two feet in diameter, then bundled outside fences, roofs, and doorways like a lethal scarf. Razor wire is so ubiquitous in Israel it could almost be the national flower. It even looks like a shrub, the way it twists and turns, catches plastic bags and soda bottles in its web, and rubs against civilization like poison ivy on a playground. Whenever I see a bundle, I imagine myself making a daring escape through its coils. Then I see myself slipping, my leg catching in the tangle, tearing, then blood, and the disappointment of failure. Razor wire is barbed wire with a greater power to intimidate.

  It does have one unexpected benefit, though. The airiness of its coils allows just enough light to get through so that if you leave it for a while, at, say, the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, a sprout of yellow daisies can take root in the desert and pop up through the fear.

  Razor fences are not the only impediment to traveling the six miles from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. There is also, on this chilly morning, the Israeli Army, the Palestinian security forces, and a border so volatile that Avner couldn’t traverse it. He left me at a long line of cars to walk along a cliff with a few Italian tourists in wheelchairs, through a checkpoint armed with Israeli teenagers, into a gamut of taxi drivers so desperate for business one actually looked hurt when I passed him by. “Why are you angry?” he shouted.

  Moments later Arlet Odeh sped up in a white Mercedes. She was thirty years old, with dangling curls, a hawk nose, and deep bags under her eyes that came more from lack of hope than from lack of sleep. Arlet was also a tour guide with no tours to guide. For three years she hadn’t worked. Her father is old, she said, her mother ill. They are one of only one hundred Palestinian Christian families left in town. “We are living in a cage,” she said. “But living means having a life. I have no life. Would you like to see where Jesus was born?”

  “Actually, on this trip, I’m interested in King David.”

  She brightened. “He was born here, too!”

  We headed toward the center of town. The cobblestone streets, repaved when Pope John Paul II visited for the bimillennium of Jesus’ birth, were deserted, shops boarded up, few people in sight. Though Christmas was still months away, a pale plastic wreath and faded star dangled from the side of the road.

  Bethlehem is one of the few cities that appears across the entire two-thousand-year arc of the Hebrew Bible, from the patriarchs to the prophets. The city is first mentioned in Genesis as the place where Jacob’s wife Rachel died after giving birth to Benjamin. A tomb marks the spot, which we passed on our way into town, fenced in, empty. Joshua later assigns the area to the tribe of Judah, and it’s frequently mentioned during the period of the kings, most prominently as the birthplace of King David. The story of the boy warrior who becomes the king of Israel lords over the early books of the Prophets and introduces what will become a major theme of the second half of the Hebrew Bible: the Israelites’ quest to find proper balance between their spiritual identity as an ethically minded people of God and their political identity as a nation strong enough to survive in a region of superpowers.

  After the lightning conquest described in the Book of Joshua, the biblical story quickly becomes diffuse, even chaotic. The Book of Judges describes an awkward transition as the people settle the land and try to determine their political leadership. The preeminent fact of the Israelites’ existence is that, unlike their neighbors, they don’t have a monarch. Four times the text says, “In those days there was no king in Israel,” adding, “every man did what was right in his own eyes.” For two hundred years, their leaders are judg
es, including Ehud, Gideon, and Samson, from the Hebrew word sopet, which adds the theological element of divination to the more legalistic English term. The authority of the judges comes from God, the ultimate sopet, and their principal task is to ensure that the people uphold the Laws of Moses.

  But the people are not satisfied, especially as they are repeatedly trounced by the Philistines, the new power along the coastal plain. Samuel, the reigning judge at the time, gathers the Israelites and leads a comeback. But the people still feel insecure and, around 1020 B.C.E., parade en masse to an aging Samuel: “Appoint a king for us, to govern us like all other nations.” In a classic case of “Throw the bums out!” they declare they are not happy being ruled exclusively by God; they want more competent, secular leadership based on sound economics and a strong military.

  We have reached a familiar moment, when the crabby wandering people of the desert become the surly settled people of the land. The Israelites are never happy. In the Sinai they gripe about the lack of food and poor leadership and demand to be sent back into slavery; in the Promised Land they gripe about their lack of power and poor leadership and demand to be subjected to a king. In both cases, Israel lives up to its namesake, Ysra’el, one who wrestles with God.

  And God, as he has done before, lashes out: “Me they have rejected as their king.” Still, he grants the request but asks Samuel to warn them of their mistake. Samuel’s speech is one of the most prophetic in the Bible. A king, he says, will take your sons and sacrifice them in battle, take your daughters and make them perfumers, cooks, and bakers. He will seize your choice fields, take a tenth of your grain, claim your slaves and beasts of burden, and put them to work for himself. “The day will come when you cry out because of the king whom you yourselves have chosen; and the Lord will not answer you that day.”

  There are many dangers in discussing the Bible in contemporary terms; so much about the ancient world bears little resemblance to our democratic, post-Enlightenment world. In antiquity, all leaders used the gods to bolster their authority. But Samuel is clearly skeptical of having a king over Israel because he believes a monarch will not uphold the values of God. By granting the Israelites’ request for a monarch, God acknowledges that they must form a state. The judges, with their ambiguous power, just won’t do anymore. But if the Israelites do get their state, God wants their leader to have limited power. The king can rule the country, but God must still have dominion over the spiritual life of the people. In contemporary parlance, state and church should be separate; morality is too important to be entrusted to humans.

  Our first stop was a small Catholic school, covered in lemony Jerusalem stone, where three cisterns discovered in 1895 are known as David’s Wells, after a passage in Samuel in which David, as a young commander, muses out loud, “If only I could get a drink of water from the cistern which is by the gate of Bethlehem!” Three warriors promptly battle the Philistines to produce the water, only to have David callously reject the drink.

  Arlet and I continued toward the town center. The birth of David in the first Book of Samuel marks a milestone in the narrative. Scholars generally regard the Bible’s first four books—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers—as a single unit. Deuteronomy is linguistically and stylistically linked with the subsequent books—Joshua, Judges, I and II Samuel, I and II Kings—into a second unit, known as the Deuteronomistic History. These books describe the five hundred years that include Joshua, the united monarchies of David and Solomon, the split kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and their ultimate destruction, ending with the population’s exile to Babylon in 586 B.C.E.

  Just as Moses is the dominant character in the first section, David is by far the seminal figure in the second. His name appears more than one thousand times in the Hebrew Bible. Some scholars have even suggested that Israel’s faith should have been called not Judaism (from the kingdom of Judah, which David headed) but Davidism. By receiving the blessing of eternal kingship, he also becomes the messianic forefather of Christianity. Even the Koran honors him as a prophet. David, the Bible says, is clearly “a man after God’s heart.”

  But he’s also “a man of blood.”

  David’s story begins with Saul, the first king of Israel. After the Israelite tribes enter the Promised Land, each one is assigned a region, where they quickly begin setting up rival spheres of influence. Saul controls the central region, but he is too weak to forge a unified state, so God goes looking for a worthier man. “I am sending you to Jesse the Bethlehemite,” God tells Samuel, “for I have decided on one of his sons to be king.” In a charade prescient of Cinderella, Jesse marches seven sons before Samuel, who rejects them all. “Are these all the boys you have?” Samuel says. “There is still the youngest,” says Jesse, who is tending flock. A “ruddy-cheeked, bright-eyed, handsome” boy appears. He’s also a stalwart fellow, the text says, is sensible in speech, and plays the lyre with such skill that when King Saul hears it, he feels better and evil spirits leave him. The boy’s name, in all likelihood, means “beloved.”

  The Bible, in other words, protests too much. Even from these early verses, the portrait of David is too good to be true; he’s more heart tugging than Abraham or Moses, more dreamy than a love-struck first date. Also, certain patterns reappear. David is the younger son who claims power over his elders, as were Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. He’s also a shepherd, a familiar metaphor for a king that began with the pharaohs and continued through Jesus.

  But amid this hagiography, the text sends a hidden message that all might not be well. David’s lineage can be traced through several women: Ruth, who was from Moab, not Israel, and seems to have been sexually promiscuous; and Tamar, who seduced her father-in-law and bore him twins. David’s family tree has roots in tainted, foreign soil, which, in an age when land is central to identity, places his loyalty to Israel at least somewhat in doubt.

  We arrived at Bethlehem’s heart, Manger Square, which had recently been replanted with palm trees in an effort to gussy it up. Today, the only people around to appreciate it were several hundred Palestinian mourners who emerged from the church carrying a simple black coffin on their shoulders and an enormous crucifix in their arms. Waiting by the door for their exit were a bride and groom in full regalia. “A funeral and a wedding on the same day!” I said to Arlet.

  “The funeral was in the Catholic part,” she said. “The wedding in the Greek Orthodox.”

  Ah, the ecumenical age.

  Unlike their siblings in Europe, churches in the Middle East often appear bulky and sullen—pale brown, Escher-like patch jobs that appear to have been constructed by feuding committees, from the inside out. Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity is a sterling example of this architecture by time line: this door from the Byzantines, that arch from the Middle Ages, never mind that a lintel conceals the arch. Constantine’s mother, Helena, identified this site as Jesus’ grotto and ordered a church built in 326 C.E.; it has been rebuilt every few hundred years since. Stepping through the low Crusader door—built four feet high to prevent nonbelievers from entering on horseback—I emerged in a dark, spacious sanctuary. Four rows of Corinthian columns line the hall, which has a stone floor with occasional trapdoors revealing mosaics.

  The space soon unfolds into a complex maze: To the right is a Greek Orthodox chapel, to the left an Armenian one. Nearby is a small Franciscan patio with four plucky lemon trees. In 2001, the Israeli Army surrounded the church after Palestinian gunmen barricaded themselves inside, along with 160 hostages. For a symbolic forty days, the prisoners slept in corners, losing thirty pounds each. “A priest made soup for the people,” Arlet said. “He used the leaves of the lemon trees and the oil from the lamps. They ate it every three days.”

  I asked if the church had any symbols recognizing David’s importance to Bethlehem, and she led me down a narrow set of stairs to an underground chapel. A small marble altar is tucked into the wall, with eighteen wooden icons dangling from its mantel. Embedded in the marble hearth is a fourteen-poin
t silver star that marks the spot of Jesus’ birth. A Latin inscription reads HERE JESUS CHRIST WAS BORN TO THE VIRGIN MARY.

  “The star has fourteen points,” Arlet explained, “because there are fourteen generations between Jesus and David—”

  “And fourteen more between David and Abraham.”

  We smiled at this shared bit of knowledge. The holiest spot in Bethlehem shows the deep roots between Judaism and Christianity: both believe the blood of David runs through the messiah.

  As it happens, the interfaith roots of David extend even deeper. The most iconic symbol of Judaism today is the six-pointed star, or hexagram, made from two interlocking equilateral triangles and known as the Magen David, or Star of David. This motif, however, is not Jewish in origin. In the Hellenistic world, hexagrams were used by all religions, and in the Middle Ages, Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike used them to ward off demons and fires. In the fourteenth century, Jewish mystical texts began associating the image with the shield of God used to protect King David, and it first appeared on a Jewish flag in Prague in 1527. Enlightenment Jews needed a symbol equivalent to the cross to indicate that Judaism was a religion, not a race, which led to the Magen David being adopted by Zionists as a symbol of strength and by Nazis as a brand of hate. The Star of David adopted for the Israeli flag was blue to evoke the Jewish prayer shawl, which harkens back to the tradition that the Ten Commandments were carved on blue stone from God’s sapphire throne.

  “So when you bring people here,” I asked, “do they think it’s the actual place where Jesus was born, or do they think it’s just a story?”