Walking the Bible (36 page)

“Living here has been a profound revelation,” Father Justin said. “Especially for an American.” He was close to six-five, with long flowing black robes that accentuated his otherworldliness. His face was gaunt, with a gnarled black beard dusted with gray that seemed like a piece of Spanish moss attached to his chin; he wore thin round spectacles. With his earnest manner, deep-set eyes, and his black skullcap, he looked like a character out of
The Brothers Karamazov
.

“Just the services alone,” he continued. “If you think that ever since the sixth century they have been going on here. Not just in this place, but within these very walls. There are so many places where you see a few tumbledown stones and you wonder what this place must have been like over the years. What the way of life was like. What were their goals?”

We were sitting in a small stone room with a wooden icon of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus. On the opposite wall was a picture of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on top of Mount Sinai, along with a picture of Saint Catherine being carried to burial by angels. The setting, again, as spiritual forge.

“What’s amazing,” he said, “is that I see the bedouin girls walking through the mountains, feeding the goats, and I think to myself, ‘That’s exactly what Zipporah would have looked like twenty-three centuries ago.’ Even to this day, the bedouin are building primitive homes and bringing in all the amenities of modern life, but you still see tents. And these tents are exactly like the ones that would have been used in the time of Moses.”

“And do you feel isolated by all this tradition?” I asked. “There’s a whole world out there you never hear about.”

“Who says we never hear about it?” he said. “Some Americans came here about a year ago and said, ‘You people need e-mail, because you need to be in touch with scholars all over the world.’ ”

“You have
e-mail
!” I said.

“They gave us computers and we hooked them up. And they pointed out some Internet search engines where you can look for used and rare books. So all I did was type ‘Sinai’ for the subject, but so many thousands of books came up that after sixty seconds it just cut off.”

“So what’s your e-mail address?”

“[email protected],” he said, spelling it out. “The problem is that sometimes for days on end you can’t get through with a telephone or a fax. That’s why e-mail has become the easiest way. But usually the telephone lines are so poor that if you try to open up a Web page it will take you two minutes or longer. The worst is when people send us these mammoth files and then you sit there for a whole day and try to get a connection!”

I was stunned: downloading problems at Mount Sinai, the place of the most famous download in history. The irony was too rich to contemplate. “In Jerusalem, they have this service where you can fax a message to the Western Wall,” I mentioned. “Can you e-mail a message to Mount Sinai?”

“Why not? What’s amazing to me is that I can sit up there in the library working on the computer and look out the window and there’s Mount Sinai to my left, a sixth-century basilica to my right, and it’s thirty-four centuries between me and Moses.”

I asked how he came to be at the monastery, and he began to sketch the story. Like many young believers, Father Justin first visited Jerusalem as a young adult and was transformed. He studied Hebrew, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Modern Greek and joined a Greek Orthodox monastery near his home in Massachusetts. After a decade of service he made a pilgrimage to Saint Catherine’s and told the archbishop he would like to become a member.

“He just gave me this icy look,” Father Justin recalled. “It’s like I asked the wrong question. And then that night he left for Greece. I didn’t know what my status was.” After three weeks the archbishop returned. “Now that you’ve seen the monastery without rose-colored spectacles,” he said, “do you still want to become a member?” Father Justin said yes.

“Many people come here with idealistic views of what it is to be a monk,” Father Justin continued. “It was only after we had gotten to know each other that he was willing to discuss my becoming a member. Even then I had to tell him my whole history and they had to vote. It was a happy moment when they told me I would be allowed to stay.”

And now that he lived here, what did he feel about scholars who suggested the events in the Bible, specifically the events at Mount Sinai, may not have happened?

“A lot of people say that what’s important is
that
it happened, not
where
it happened,” Father Justin said. “We base our confirmation on two things: One is the living tradition. Moses lived in the area for forty years. It’s recorded in the Scriptures that he told the people around him what happened and they passed it down from generation to generation. The second thing is research. In the nineteenth century, when they first deciphered hieroglyphics, the French and British did all sorts of archaeology and many, many scholars came to the conclusion that this is the only place that fits every description we have of Mount Sinai in the Bible.”

But these days many people question that, I said.

Father Justin was unmoved. “Archaeologists may challenge the connection today,” he said. “But you have to remember, history has shown repeatedly that scholars get consumed by fads and that subsequent generations have different fads.” In the corner Avner started to nod. “Living here you become intensely aware of the history of the area. You see how many times the church came close to being destroyed, how many times the weather was horrendous, how many times it came close to being abandoned because it was so difficult to bring supplies here. There’s been an amazing continuity that defies all human explanation. So the only explanation is that it’s a place that has been especially protected by God.

“There’s one story,” he continued, his eyes brightening. “Centuries ago, when the monastery was in extreme isolation, it was very difficult to bring supplies here. One time the monastery was infested with flies, ants, and fleas, in such numbers that they destroyed the supply of corn. The number of monks had dwindled to just a handful and they were starving to death. Figuring there was no way to survive, they decided to hold a last service on the mountain and then abandon the place. As they were coming down, the Virgin Mary appeared to them and persuaded them of her protection. Once on the ground a caravan appeared on the horizon. ‘Who brought these supplies?’ they asked the members of the caravan. And the people said, ‘This older man appeared and told us to take these supplies to the monastery. Then he disappeared.’ When they finally entered the church at Saint Catherine’s, one of the little boys who was on the caravan saw the depiction of the prophet Moses and screamed, ‘That’s the man that appeared. He’s the one who sent us.’ ”

Father Justin crossed his hands on his lap. Though he was of a different generation, a different nationality, and a different religion from Avraham Biran, he had an avuncular tone and a kind tutorial disposition that reminded me of his fellow teacher. The scientist and the theologian, separated by outlook, but brought together in a common quest to understand and explain the same story—and to keep it alive by passing it on.

“There’s one more thing I want to ask you,” I said. It was almost sunset now, and the next morning we would begin our ascent up the mountain. But one paradox about Saint Catherine’s still puzzled me. It was the same paradox that had hovered over our quest from the beginning. Was retracing this route something that the Bible itself demanded, or requested? If anything, the opposite seemed true. Exodus, for example, clearly states that Mount Sinai was so sacred—and so highly combustible—that no one was allowed to climb it, no less touch it, look at it, or sleep on it.

“That’s right,” Father Justin said. “In the story, when the Israelites first came into contact with the mountain, they marked the whole area off. There was thunder and lightning and thick black clouds. Even the animals were not allowed to go up the mountain. And that’s when they heard the sound of trumpets, as if the mountain was on fire. Everyone was terrified. And the people said to Moses, ‘If we go up we will surely die, so you go up and speak to God for us.’ ”

“If that’s the case, then how do we justify walking up the mountain today?” I asked.

Again he was serenely confident, even brotherly. “In ancient times,” he explained, “a monk would be at the top of the path and he would hear a person’s confession to make sure that he was spiritually prepared to be at the sacred place. That’s how we justify it. You come to the monastery. You purify yourself. And then you ascend.”

“And once you arrive at the top?”

For the first time all afternoon he smiled. He knew what happened to people when they walked in the footsteps of the Bible. “You don’t have to prepare for that,” Father Justin said. “As the Bible says, ‘This is holy ground.’ When you get there, your heart will be beating and your head will be light. Just shut your eyes and listen closely. God will tell you what to do.”

3. The God - Trodden Mountain

I
f I learned anything during my time in the desert it was this: Places have the power to transform—people, nations, even ideas. The Bible understands this implicitly. The story of the Five Books of Moses is the story of the people, the land, and God, and their relationship to one another. Take out the land, and you lose the grounding element in the equation. God could have offered Abraham dominion over any place; he offered him dominion over the land of Israel. The place, in this instance, was inextricable from the people. God could have led the fleeing Israelites directly from Egypt to the Promised Land; instead he led them for forty years in the desert. The place, in this case, was necessary for their development as a nation. And above all, God could have given the Israelites the Ten Commandments wherever he wanted. He chose Mount Sinai. The place, we can conclude, must be vital to the event. And what is that connection? That question was foremost on my mind as I awoke from my second night in the monastery, met Avner at the entrance, and prepared to climb the mountain that lorded over us all.

One possible answer was already becoming clear: A desert is a spiritual enough place; a desert mountain is downright inspiring. Avner Goren was an untested graduate student in 1967 when Avraham Biran asked him to serve as the chief archaeologist of the Sinai. By the time he left fifteen years later, Avner had been transformed into a diplomat, a man of stature. He was a member of the Israeli delegation that negotiated
control of the Sinai with the Egyptians. He had received enough gifts from local residents to begin Israel’s first-ever museum of bedouin culture. Israeli television aired a documentary on his children called
The Blond Bedouin of the Sinai.
The place, in effect, had elevated him.

That transformation was apparent from the moment we arrived in the small village of Saint Catherine’s, where Avner was like a father showing his son the old house where he grew up. “This road wasn’t there,” he would say. “That building is new. The entire neighborhood has been redone!” I had never seen him more emotional, or engaged, than when we were around the mountain.

Yet for all his nostalgia, he never showed regret. If anything, he was proud that Israel had returned the Sinai in 1982. As he explained during our walk toward the camel-resting area alongside the monastery, “I was among those who always said, ‘Guys, we can talk a lot, but one day the Egyptians will get it back. We have to be prepared for that.’ The others said, ‘What are you talking about? This will stay in our hands.’ ” Eventually, as part of the Camp David Accords, Israel agreed to give back the peninsula. “A few weeks later Sadat approached us and asked us to let him celebrate one of the holy days of Islam at the mountain,” Avner said. “According to the agreement, the Saint Catherine’s area should have been given back two months after the feast. But it was his own personal request, and he was so beloved among Israelis for having stepped into the new world of peace, that the government agreed. And I agreed, too, even though for me personally it was one of the hardest things I ever faced in my life.”

“What was hard?” I said.

“Withdrawing from here. Leaving the mountain as my home.”

“So what happened?”

“I sent my family ahead. But I stayed behind, and the day before Sadat came, a half a day after the Egyptians took control, I waited for a few hours, then started to drive home.”

“And what did you do in those few hours?”

He stopped and looked up at the summit. “I cried.” Then he caught himself and looked back at me. “But I want to emphasize, that was on a personal level. I do think, even now, that things should be done for
peace. Because the Sinai was taken in war, and the war was fought to try to find some way of living together.”

Jebel Musa in the morning is like a tiger at dawn, a cat curled up in the shadows, its coat the color of pumpkin pie, its demeanor a misleading message: tame. As we arrived at the small plateau where climbers prep for the hike to come, the mountain seemed almost inert, waiting. At 7,455 feet, it’s not a particularly tall mountain: half as high as the tallest mountain in the Colorado Rockies; roughly as tall as the highest peak in the Appalachians. But it is impressive, completely dominating the landscape around it like a mother elephant dwarfing her babies. A mixture of red and gray granite fused together in an imposing, almost threatening mass, Mount Moses rises straight from the ground and softens slightly at the top like a drip castle. Though not as angular as Mount Ararat, nor as tall as nearby Mount Katarina, it still seems like a particularly imposing backdrop, waiting for some particularly majestic drama to take place in front of it. As American visitor John Lloyd Stephens wrote in 1836, “Among all the stupendous works of Nature, not a place can be selected more fitting for the exhibition of Almighty power.”

There are two basic ways to climb the mountain. The direct route is the Path of Our Lord Moses, or Steps of Repentance, a near-vertical climb of 3,750 steps hewn out of the rock by a penitent monk. It takes an hour and a half to climb up, nearly twice that to climb down. The longer, easier route is via a serpentine camel path that goes up the east side of the mountain and joins the stairs about two-thirds of the way up. Both paths then converge on an additional 750-step ascent to the summit.