Abraham

by Bruce Feiler

  What Levenson, and almost everyone else I talked to about this process, advocated was a different kind of conversation, one that did not minimize differences but accentuated them. One that did not ignore the variations among the routes to God but stressed that even the idea of other routes is accept able. “We should indeed keep the differences there,” Rabbi Rosen said, “and learn to respect them. Each religion has its particular approach to God. But we also have a universal dimension to our traditions that we share, and we must emphasize that as well. That, I would say, is the charge of the hour.”

  And to fulfill that charge, the leaders of the interfaith conversation realized they needed more than just mandates and dictums. They needed a common source. They needed a foundation that all three traditions revered equally, that embodied the monotheistic ideals of faith in God and righteous behavior toward humanity, and that existed before the religions themselves existed.

  They needed Abraham.

  I STARTED UP the stairs toward the entrance to the tomb, an imposing building that looks like a cross between a fortress and a castle. Built by Herod, who also expanded the Second Temple, the three-story structure has casing stones the size of refrigerators, two towers on either end, and storybook crenellations around the top of the entire perimeter. A lone worshiper in a dark coat stood along the base of the wall, while a donkey strolled behind him.

  At the entrance, about a dozen Israeli soldiers stood behind a bank of four unused metal detectors. They informed me I would not be allowed to take my knapsack into the shrine and must leave it at the visitors’ center back on the road where the truck dropped me off. But it was too dangerous to walk back by myself, they suggested, so four armed men—four—with rifles and combat helmets escorted me down the stairs I had just walked up, waited for me to leave my bag, then chaperoned me back to the entrance. “Pretty quiet day,” I said, hopefully.

  “Keep walking,” the commander said.

  After three more layers of security, a body check, and a short interview, I finally stepped inside the door. The Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs is called El-Haram el-Ibrahami in Arabic, meaning the Sanctuary or Mosque of Abraham; in Hebrew it’s called the Machpelah, a word implying doubling, for the couples buried here. The site is a three-dimensional model of the history of interfaith relations. Jews built the original shrine; Byzantine Christians rebuilt it as a church; medieval Muslims rebuilt it as a mosque.

  Though Muslims kept Jews out during their reign, they did let Jews pray along the exterior, a rare allowance. When Jews reclaimed the site in 1967, they actually allowed the Muslim religious trust to retain majority control of the building against the wishes of right-wing Israelis. For nearly three decades Muslims and Jews prayed alongside each other, the only site in the world where this happened. After Dr. Baruch Goldstein, a radical Jewish settler, massacred twenty-nine Muslims inside the tomb in 1994, the building was divided. One half is controlled by Muslims, the other by Jews. Each community has unrestricted access to the entire facility for roughly a dozen days a year. This gerrymandered solution, though it pleases no one entirely, actually makes the tomb a working model of coexistence—messy, but functioning.

  In a way, Hebron has always represented the ache for lost perfection. Jewish tradition says that the Machpelah is located over the entrance to the Garden of Eden. One day Abraham was searching for a missing lamb and came upon a cave. Inside he saw a ray of light and smelled the most beautiful fragrance. Following the light, he met Adam and Eve and knew he wanted to be buried here. After all the divisiveness in his life, Abraham longs to return to the earliest, most unified spot on earth, Paradise.

  On this morning Paradise was far away. The only fragrance was loss. The hive of prayer rooms and stone corridors, normally bustling with minions, was vacant. I walked through the open courtyard on the Jewish side and down two steps into the small room between monuments to Abraham and Sarah. The burial caves themselves are hidden underneath the floor, off-limits. The shrine to Abraham is about the size of a small mausoleum and was covered in dark green cloth and locked away behind brass gates that seemed crusted into place. Arabic script lined the trim near the ceiling.

  The room between Abraham’s tomb and Sarah’s had been turned into a ramshackle synagogue, with a portable, somewhat beat-up ark, a stack of prayer books, a plastic time chart, and an ornate chair for circumcisions. The walls were painted pea green and orange, and a chandelier that seemed out of some Dickensian parlor dropped down from the ceiling. Half the bulbs were out. With the dust, the emptiness, the few overturned chairs, the room felt like a flea market.

  I picked up one of the Bibles and turned to Genesis 23. Immediately after the binding of Isaac, Sarah dies at age one hundred twenty-seven, “in Kiriath-arba—now Hebron.” Abraham mourns her, then speaks to the Hittites who live in the area, saying, “I am a resident alien among you; sell me a burial site among you.” They reply, “You are the elect of God among us. Bury your dead in the choicest of our burial places.” But Abraham turns down the gift and insists on buying a cave, the first and only time he legally possesses the land promised his descendants. He then buries his wife.

  Abraham’s role as a sort of über-father to the region is subtly apparent in these last biblical passages about his life. He buys Sarah’s burial cave (where he will ultimately be buried as well) from the Hittites, a Mesopotamian people who must have migrated to Canaan as he had. He and his family will rest forever on surrogate Mesopotamian soil; they will always be strangers in the Promised Land. Moreover, after burying Sarah, he goes on to marry a woman named Keturah, and has six more children. The name Keturah appears to derive from the word ketoret, or incense, and seems to link Abraham even more deeply with Arabia because their children have names associated with other Arabian places, such as Midian and Sheba.

  Finally, in Genesis 25, verse 7, Abraham dies at one hundred seventy-five years old. The fact that he’s far younger than Adam (nine hundred and thirty years), Noah (nine hundred and fifty years), and even his father (two hundred and five years) suggests Abraham is moving from the realm of mythical ideal to a more recognizably human figure. Moreover, after all the dramas in his life, he dies “at a good ripe age, old and contented.” He dies at peace.

  Even better, his death promotes peace. At Abraham’s burial, his two most prominent sons, rivals since before they were born, estranged since childhood, scions of rival nations, come together for the first time since they were rent apart nearly three-quarters of a century earlier. The text reports their union without comment. “His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, facing Mamre, in the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites.”

  But the meaning of this moment cannot be diminished. Abraham achieves in death what he could never achieve in life: a moment of reconciliation between his two sons, a peaceful, communal, side-by-side flicker of possibility in which they are not rivals, scions, warriors, adversaries, children, Jews, Christians, or Muslims. They are brothers. They are mourners.

  In a sense they are us, forever weeping for the loss of our common father, shuffling through our bitter memories, reclaiming our childlike expectations, smiling, laughing, sobbing, furious and full of dreams, wondering about our orphaned future, and demanding the answers we all crave to hear: What did you want from me, Father? What did you leave me with, Father?

  And what do I do now?

  The cry of Abraham’s children at the death of their father is the cry of their father before they were born: “Help!”

  As I was reading a man came into the small sanctuary. Middle-aged, he was wearing a light blue dress shirt, a pair of baggy navy blue trousers, and a kippah over his graying, slightly disheveled hair. He rolled up his sleeve and wrapped teffilin, leather prayer boxes, around his left arm. He pushed his kippah back and strapped a similar box to his forehead. Then he pulled out a small book and proceeded to recite a prayer, bowing several times as he did, oblivious to me
, murmuring and occasionally moaning a particular line.

  “I can’t say I feel close to Abraham every time I pray,” Daniel Ginsburg said when he finished. Ginsburg, an American, was a settler in the tinderbox Jewish settlement of a few hundred people in the heart of disputed Hebron itself, just steps from the tomb. “But sometimes I do. We circumcised my youngest son in this room, and it was special.”

  I asked how he was coping with the situation. “Are you afraid?” I asked.

  “It’s not a question of afraid,” he said, his voice jaded like that of a New York deli attendant. “If you’re afraid it’s very difficult to live here at all. More concerned, yes. More aware, yes. Taking more precautions, yes. But I don’t think that translates into raw fear. If they’re shooting outside, you don’t go out and say, ‘Here I am!’

  “My apartment has sandbags in it,” he continued, “because ninety-nine percent of my windows face the hills where they shoot at us from. So we have no light. When I first brought in the sandbags, I was told it was enough to put them up to regular height. So I left a little hole so we could have some light in the room, and one of the terrorists found the hole and pumped a few bullets through it and almost killed two of my kids.”

  He asked why I had traveled to Hebron in the middle of the war, and we began discussing Abraham. At one point we opened the text to the moment when Isaac and Ishmael bury their father. “Is that a hopeful moment?” I asked.

  “If you’re asking, Can Jews and Muslims live together,” he said, “we have. Jews and Muslims lived together in Hebron for hundreds of years before there was a State of Israel. The only way to live in this land is to be open enough to live together.”

  “So can there be discussion among the faiths?”

  “Of course there can be. On a personal level, two people of any faith, or any political persuasion, can sit down, have civil conversation, and even reach civil conclusions. But moving it to a national sphere . . . ? Never happen. First of all, there’s always a question about the sincerity of the people involved. I don’t know what’s in his heart. If you look back at our relations, they’ve never given me a reason to believe. So can there be a dialogue? Sure, but give me a receipt. Say something to obligate yourself. Then uphold your obligation for a little while. The Arabs have never done it. Study the whole history of Islam and they’ve never done it.”

  I felt that familiar heaviness grip our conversation, the same one I had felt a few days earlier with the imam in East Jerusalem, the same one I had experienced many times, over so many years in the region. It was the feeling of interchange giving way to polemic. But this time I also felt something different. I felt that I didn’t have to succumb. I felt buttressed by my own experience, by my own newfound knowledge that each religion had a similar strand of chauvinism. And I felt confident in my growing conviction that such rigidity need not be the only path.

  “So do you think Abraham is a good vessel for conversation?” I asked.

  “If you want to try to figure out from the biblical story if we can live together, I think it’s clear that the Bible shows us the personalities of the two peoples. There’s an old saying: ‘What happened to the forefathers will happen to the sons.’ A lot of it bears true. The Muslims are very aggressive, like Ishmael, and they have swords raised against everyone. And the Jews are very passive, like Isaac, who nearly allows himself to be killed without talking back. That’s why they are killing us, because we don’t fight back.”

  I started to ask another question, but refrained. He sighed, finished stuffing his teffilin into a bag, bid me good-bye, and walked out of the room. Alone again, I wasn’t agitated or afraid. I wasn’t even sad somehow. I had reached a place where I stood contented alongside Abraham’s tomb. I did not need to bow to dogmatism, fanaticism, exclusivism, passivism. I did not need to defer to men of hate, men of despair, radical settlers, genocidal imams. I could pray as myself, with my own contradictions, my own creed, my own sense of unease, my own needful dreams. Abraham was my father, too.

  Hearing a noise, I looked out into the courtyard. Two stu dents in black suits and white shirts clasped each other’s arms and danced in a circle, chanting joyously. For the first time all morning, music filled the air. The funereal mood turned hopeful. As I was watching, a white pigeon with gray speckles around its neck flew into the chamber where I sat. He sailed into the wall, fluttered, crashed into the brass gate, panicked, then soared to the top of the room, flapping his wings faster and faster, spinning in a circle like the boys outside, seeming to twist the room into a vortex as he sucked the air up toward his wings, swirling around in a never-ending cycle, and searching, clamoring, grasping, clawing for what he knew was there: a way out.

  AFTER DANIEL GINSBURG LEFT, I walked around the tomb for a few minutes, sat with some old men who were praying, and then departed. The soldiers were still sitting by the gate, smoking. Ginsburg was with them, and he offered to give me a lift up to Kiryat Arba. We didn’t speak on the way. He drove up through the Disneyfied town and through the yellow gate to Nasser, who was waiting in his car, drinking a generic cola. We started back to Jerusalem. Nasser and I also didn’t talk on the way. I didn’t look around this time, didn’t count the bullet holes or stare at the darkened glass of the cars that passed us. I just looked straight ahead. This time I wanted to be alone.

  On the morning of September 11, I watched from the sixteenth floor of my apartment building as the second World Trade Tower collapsed to the ground, kicking up embers and dust like cinders in a fireplace. I stood speechless, not even able to cry, in the apartment of neighbors I had never met. That afternoon I walked along the Hudson River, past a triage center that was empty because bodies never arrived. Thousands of people had come for the same vigil, some in couples, some with babies in strollers. The sky was burnt orange, the air clear. This was before the smoke and smell turned uptown and choked us, a stir of putrid air and sirens.

  Like many, I was mute for days, as stories of death and near death among friends spread quickly through the telephones, the smiling photographs of lost loved ones began to appear on light poles around the city, and candles lined the streets. And still the smell lingered.

  In time, the feeling that began to rise inside me was one of being trespassed against, of being violated. A physical sensation of being invaded, and afraid. Then one day I recognized that emotion. It’s the feeling one has every day in the Middle East—the sense of terror, pride, and connection to a place. September 11, 2001, was the day the Middle East came to America. The tiny, fertile crescent of land that gave birth to the world’s great monotheistic religions and, through them, to Western civilization, had now conquered the far side of the earth, a land long blessedly removed from its tensions.

  Like the Middle East, America was forged out of the mixture of politics, religion, and geography. The Founding Fathers echoed biblical language by speaking of the United States as having a “covenant with God” and declaring that America would become a “New Promised Land.” America would be its own Rock. For most of our history, Americans believed that being a Promised Land meant we stood apart from the rest of the world. Now we know otherwise. Middle Eastern sprawl has reached the United States.

  The number one question Americans asked after the attack was, Why do they hate us so much? People seemed confused by the irrationality of the act. Sure enough, the number one reality one confronts every day in the Middle East is irrationality. Hatred is a daily emotion, fanaticism an hourly occurrence.

  Yet this irrationality comes with an unexpected gift. The Middle East is the cradle of God. When life is not defined by reason, money, or box-office receipts, it must be defined by something nonrational. That something is spirit. In America after September 11, people retreated to emotional havens: flag, family, faith. Grown men cried on national television. There was a sudden glorification of irrationality, of raw emotion, of not being able to explain things.

  It became commonplace to say that this response was classically America
n. While that may be true, the deepest aspect of that Americanism is our emotionalism, our tribalism, our conviction of being called to a higher purpose, and, above all, our feeling of an intimate connection between our land and God. Only when we understand that about ourselves can we truly understand what we face in our adversaries around the world.

  And that, I finally realized, is why I had come on this journey. I had come because I needed to understand the depth of mistrust among the monotheistic religions, and I needed to understand how it was connected to the basic building blocks of my own identity—geography, family, faith. I had come because I felt hatred myself, and because I needed to know if the roots of that feeling also held possibilities for accord. I had come because I wanted to be alone, because at every turning point in my life, only by breaking away from my surroundings could I come to understand myself—and my dilemma—better.

  Above all, I came because I needed an anchor. I needed to believe that loving God, that being prepared to sacrifice for that belief, and that believing in peace had not somehow become incompatible. I needed to know that feeling uneasy yet full of hope went back to our earliest selves.

  I needed Abraham.

  And I found him—not in the books, in the religious leaders, in the caves. Not in any particular place at all. I found him everywhere, in a sense. When I first set out on this journey, I believed Abraham existed in some mysterious place. The Great Abrahamic Hope was out there, an oasis somewhere in the deepest deserts of antiquity, and all we had to do was track him down, unveil him to the world, and his descendants would live in perpetual harmony, dancing “Kumbaya” around the campfire.

  That oasis, I realized, is just a mirage.

  But Abraham isn’t. Abraham is like water, I came to believe, but not the oasis I had originally thought. He’s a vast, underground aquifer that stretches from Mesopotamia to the Nile, from Jerusalem to Mecca, from Kandahar to Kansas City. He’s an ever-present, ever-flowing stream that represents the basic desire all people have to form a union with God. He’s a physical manifestation of the fundamental yearning to be descended from a sacred source. He’s a personification of the biological need we all share to feel protected by someone, something. Anything.