Walking the Bible (7 page)

In a few moments we were joined by Suher, an official at the local tourist authority who was one of the Palestinian tour guides Avner had trained in Jewish history. She was demure, and a little nervous. She had been sent to town seven months earlier. “I don’t consider living in Nablus living,” she confessed. “It’s very different from Jerusalem. Gossip here is at a very high level.” She drove into town, which was crowded with white concrete slab buildings bedecked with rugs hanging out to air. Fruit trees dotted the central square, which was bustling and well manicured, though the telephone boxes had no telephones. Across the street was a large institutional building that had been the British headquarters, then the Israeli headquarters, and was now the Palestinian headquarters. An enormous portrait of Yasser Arafat hung from the roof, giving the town the feel of a place poised between democracy and dictatorship.

After a few minutes we arrived at the site of ancient Shechem. Compared with other archaeological sites, this one was fairly run-down, with grass growing over untended mounds of dirt and a graveyard of old auto parts encroaching on the city wall. Excavations show that Shechem was a thriving community as early as the fifth millennium
B.C.E.
, but wasn’t fully developed until the nineteenth century
B.C.E.
, reaching prosperity a few hundred years later. The lack of significant remains from the time of Abraham has led some to speculate that Shechem might have been added by later editors of the Bible.

Either way, Shechem’s prominence for biblical writers is clear. After arriving in Canaan, Abraham passes through the land “as far as the site of Shechem,” which is located alongside the “terebinth of Moreh,” a term usually interpreted to mean “wise oak tree.” God once again appears to Abraham and renews his promise:“I will give this land to your offspring.” Abraham expresses his appreciation by building an altar on the site.

We walked around for a few minutes, and Avner pointed out the city gate and a number of storehouses, as well as a temple and altar from the early second millennium
B.C.E.
, the time of the patriarchs. The Canaanite altars were in town, he noted, while the mention of the oak in Genesis suggests Abraham camped outside the walls, a position consistent
with his status as a migrant. The existence of several altars inside the city walls suggests that seminomadic clans might have been welcome inside the city, the two communities—Canaanites and proto-Israelites—living side by side. For Suher, this was welcome news, archaeology that could be used to mend, not divide. But even she couldn’t avoid drawing political conclusions.

“We believe this is a very important place, a Canaanite place,” she said. “We believe that Canaanites, they are Arabs. That supports our rights on this land.”

“So you believe the Arabs were here before the Israelites,” I said.

“We believe that, very strongly.”

“How do you make the connection?”

“The Canaanites are Arabs, from Saudi Arabia, from Hejaz. I know that we, the Palestinians, are also from the Arabs.” Though historians don’t necessarily agree on this point—most say Canaanites were drawn from all over the Near East, not just Arabia—I asked her if this idea would have an impact on the future.

“I don’t know if we can make real peace,” she said. “I don’t know if we will ever settle who was here before the other. But we can live together. We are human. The land is for those who build it. For those who live on it. The Romans were here, but it’s not their land. They went back to their country. If we leave the land, we don’t deserve it.”

“In other words, the Israelites left, so it should be your land.”

“Yes. But the Jews are much more clever than we are. They believe in this land more than we do. I don’t know why. They, their children: they are very serious about this place.”

“So what’s your dream for Shechem?”

“I love this place,” she said. “I don’t know why. I would love to clean it, to bring more people here. To bring children here. It’s a feeling. Maybe because we are raised to love this place, to love our history. It’s a history of pain. This place has seen a lot of pain. I hope it will go away.”

We said good-bye at our car and turned south toward Bethel, the site of Abraham’s next layover. We were passing through one of the poorest
pockets of the West Bank, a rocky, agricultural no-man’s-land. Small trucks and taxis choked the road, which was dotted with mosques and coffeehouses that blocked the view of ageless olive groves. The taxis came in a variety of shades—Mello Yello, mango, Tang—everything around, but not quite, New York City yellow-cab yellow. The road signs were all in Arabic—no Hebrew, no English, no neon. Drenched in sun and dust, the landscape looked like paper, toasted, its edges singed by fire.

In time the hills became more rolling and the olive green a bit more plentiful. We veered around Ramallah on an Israeli bypass road and rolled to the gate of Bethel, a modern Jewish settlement in the midst of Arab domain. Such communities are the tinderbox of the Palestinian-Israeli relationship, an ever-shifting frontier of faith that triggers passions and hatreds that could only be aroused by the potent braiding of faith, family, and text.

We waited for the yellow gate—twice as big as the one on the border with Jordan—and proceeded inside the community. Suddenly we were in Israel again. The buses were red, the signs were in Hebrew, the children wore
kippahs,
or skullcaps, on their heads. Yet the place felt different, tense. The school, the playground, even the bus stops were protected by fences. The entire place was swathed in barbed wire. It was a voluntary ghetto, a Wild West outpost of choice, not force.

We drove up the hill and decided to stop by the director’s office, which was in a Quonset hut. The secretary, whose hair was hidden in a net as per Orthodox tradition, looked at us skeptically, as if to say, “Are you for us or against us?” After a brief negotiation, the director agreed to meet us for five minutes. We stepped into his office, which was lined with maps and blueprints. He had a grimace for a face, and a scar across his cheek. I asked him why he was here. “We are here because of the Five Books,” he said. “We are living in Bethel, on the road of the patriarchs, and this is our contract.” He placed his hand on the Bible, which sat prominently on his desk. Of all the places Abraham visited, why did he stop here, I asked. “I cannot tell,” he said. “It’s not a high place. It’s difficult to defend. If there’s a possibility to ask Abraham why, we will ask.”

Back in the waiting room, Avner remembered that he knew an
American couple in town. The husband, a guide, was working, but his wife invited us to stop by their home. It was a modest home, barely large enough for the couple, their five children, and several thousand books. “They’re my husband’s,” explained Fern Dobuler, who, like him, grew up in a moderate Jewish household on Long Island. “When we first became religious, I had all these questions. Every time Abby couldn’t answer one of them, he went out and bought a book.”

Fern was garrulous and gesticulative, in a Catskills-real-estate-broker sort of way. A phys-ed teacher by training, she balanced her athleticism with her religious need for modesty by wearing a long skirt made of sweatpant material and covering her head with a New York Yankees cap. She met her husband in college in New York, where both were active in a pro-Zionist group. One year Yitzhak Rabin, then the Israeli ambassador to the United States, paid a visit. “If you really want to help,” he told them, “move to a settlement and be a pioneer.” Others delivered similar messages. When Abby’s grandmother was dying, she made them promise: “Don’t forget you’re Jews. Don’t forget Israel.” A week after she died, Fern gave birth to a daughter and slowly the couple embraced a more traditional brand of Judaism—saying daily prayers, resting on Shabbat. Eventually they came to Israel for a summer.

“We had three children at the time,” Fern said. “We rented an apartment in the Old City. It was fabulous. My kids went to the Western Wall by themselves. You could smell history in the air. We came back to New York and every single Friday night Abby would start to cry. ‘I wish we could live in Israel. A Jew belongs in Israel.’ It was like Chinese water torture. He just wore me down.”

The following year they sold their house, their two cars, their real-estate business, and moved back. “At first it was very hard,” she said. “We had to learn how to put on gas masks. My oldest son sat in school for a year unable to understand anything. I kept saying, ‘What did I do to my kids?’ It was hard for me, too. I missed my friends. I missed my house. I missed my central air-conditioning. I lay on my bed at night, saying, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t do this.’ My father thought Abby had brainwashed me.”

Worse, their money soon ran out and they had to flee the high
prices of Jerusalem. “We drew a circle with a half-hour radius,” she said, “and started looking at communities. We knew it had to be religious. We wanted something established enough to have teenagers. We wanted a place new enough to have young children. We wanted diversity. This place just fit the bill.”

“There’s one thing you didn’t mention,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “The Bible is not the reason we came to Bethel, but once we were living here, every time Bethel was mentioned in the weekly Torah portion, only then did I feel part of the community. Part of the extended Jewish people. I remember the first time they read the part where Abraham builds an altar in Bethel, and I thought, That’s where I
live
!”

The feeling only grew, she said, once they realized the grave political situation. “Until they had the bypass road, there wasn’t a day we would drive without being stoned. It was extremely unpleasant. Once, when my sister-in-law was here, somebody dropped a cinder block on the car. Not a rock, a cinder block. The whole ceiling on the passenger side caved in. I had been sitting in the back with my sister-in-law, who fell to the floor, shaking. If I had been sitting in the passenger seat I’d probably be dead.”

I suggested that she seemed remarkably free of anger.

“I don’t hold the anger,” she said. “You can’t live that way. You have to live a normal life. I just don’t want to give up any more land. I don’t want to give up my home.”

“Do you feel living here has brought you closer to God?”

“Yes. Because I see purpose in our living here. If I didn’t, it would be very hard. I wonder how anybody who’s Israeli and not religious can stand it. If they don’t have that connection to God, with all the aggravation and hardship, why stay here?”

“Why
do
you stay here?”

“I stay here because Jews belong in the land of Israel. God
gave
us this land, and it’s not up to us to give it back. When we stood at Sinai as a Jewish people and said, ‘We accept the Torah,’ we didn’t just do it for that generation in the desert. We did it for all future generations.”

“Tell me about the land. Do you have a different relationship with it?”

“There are many things about living in Israel that are wonderful. One of those is the land.
When my kids used to go on field trips
in America they went to a museum, to the Empire State Building. Here when you go on a field trip they drop you off in the middle of nowhere and you walk, for hours and hours and hours. A field trip is seeing the land, connecting to the land. You don’t have to see a thing. There’s an expression, ‘To walk in the land of Israel is a holy thing to do.’ ”

We pulled out our Bibles and began to discuss the sections that take place in Bethel. After Abraham leaves Shechem, he travels south to the hill country “east of Bethel,” where he once again builds an altar to the Lord. Later Abraham revisits the place on his return from Egypt. After that, Bethel only grows in importance, becoming, after Jerusalem, the most frequently mentioned place in the Bible. Jacob, during his flight from Beer-sheba to Harran, sleeps there and has his famous nocturnal vision of angels ascending and descending on a ladder. He awakens and erects a pillar to mark the place, calling it Bethel, house of God. Years later, on his way home from Harran with his wife and children, Jacob again stays in the place. Fern began to read this passage, from Genesis 35.

“And God said to Jacob: ‘Arise, go up to Bethel and remain there; and build an altar there to God.’ ” Jacob responds, instructing his family, “Rid yourself of the alien god in your midst, purify yourselves, and change your clothes. Come, let us go up to Bethel, and I will build an altar there to the God who answered me when I was in distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone.” Jacob hides the idols under the same terebinth tree in Shechem that his grandfather used. Then he travels to Bethel, where God again invokes the name he earlier gave Jacob: Israel, meaning Striven with God. “And God said to him, ‘You whose name is Jacob, you shall be called Jacob no more, but Israel shall be your name.’ Thus He named him Israel.”

As she was reading, Fern began to choke up. She closed the book. “Maybe it was my destiny that I ended up in Bethel,” she said. “There are such special people here.” She got up and walked to the one shelf that wasn’t covered in books, where she retrieved a large framed photo
of a mother and her son. She handed it to me. “They were killed about two years ago now. They were gunned down on the way back to Bethel from a family gathering. When we first came to Bethel they were the first family that had us over. I didn’t speak Hebrew. She didn’t speak English. But there was such warmth there, and welcome. Just very special people. We went to their funeral. We went to the funeral of a kindergarten teacher. We went to the funeral of a young man in his early twenties. My children go every six months to someone else’s funeral. When I lived in America the only funerals I went to were for old people.”

“So why do you keep her picture?”

“Because I don’t want to forget them. It’s part of our life here. We have a cemetery. It’s filling up!”

“And that doesn’t make you want to stay less?”

“It makes me want to stay more. It strengthens my pride for this place. Not only was Abraham here, and Jacob. But now I’ve been here, and my children, too. Not only did they make sacrifices. We made sacrifices, too. And we did it for the same reason. We believe in God.”