A Match Made in Heaven

by Zev Chafets

  “I’m here because I want to learn more and know more,” said Beth Jones, a pretty blonde in her forties who still looks like the captain of the cheerleader squad. She and her husband are co-pastors of a church in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She also writes books of popular Bible commentary and an advice column in the local newspaper. Her mother, who bears a striking resemblance to Lauren Bacall, sat next to her. “I’m here because my son-in-law blessed me with a trip,” the mom said in a cigarette-inflected baritone.

  I leaned over to Pastor Jerry Clark, another IFCJ staffer.

  “What’s that mean?” I asked. “That her son-in-law paid for the trip?”

  Clark nodded. “I see you’re starting to speak Christian,” he said approvingly.

  George Mamo presented me to the group as a writer who would be accompanying them. “I’m an Israeli Jew,” I told them. “But in the next nine days I want to see Israel and Jews through Christian eyes.”

  I made it clear that no one should feel obliged to talk to me, but most of them did. They had personal stories to relate. A few may have looked upon me as conversion material but nobody brought it up. They were evangelical Christians, but they were also Americans who had been taught good manners.

  Some, I knew, were suspicious of me and my motives. Born-again Christians are usually ridiculed by secular writers. Linda, the theologian, was especially alive to this possibility, and made me her project. “It’s easy to mock some of these flamboyant television evangelists,” she said. “They embarrass us too sometimes with their outrageous behavior. But I want you to understand that we’re not all fakes or religious nuts. There is an intellectually and spiritually serious side to evangelical Christianity. I hope you see that, too.”

  Before the trip, the IFCJ sent out an information package with a list of things to pack: jeans, T-shirts, bathing suits, suntan lotion, sports clothes. There was nothing on the list that couldn’t be bought at Wal-Mart. Say what you like about evangelical Christianity, it’s the only fundamentalist religion I know that doesn’t require uniforms and special equipment.

  In fact, during my travels through evangelical America I had noticed that a lot of younger pastors have wives who go to church dressed like nightclub singers. Often the ministers openly brag to their congregations about their wives’ beauty and glamour. There is more than a little sex in the evangelical appeal. My fellow pilgrims certainly weren’t naive or inexperienced—quite the opposite, as I discovered during our trip.

  A CHRISTIAN TOUR of Israel is, for an Israeli, an excursion into a different country. Contemporary Israel is of almost no interest to the pilgrims. During the entire trip I never saw anyone reading the Jerusalem Post or any other newspaper. There was almost no discussion of Big Issues. It was a given that everyone was pro-Israeli. No one displayed any interest at all in the Palestinian “narrative.” The group even skipped the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

  A couple of days into the trip, Palestinian terrorists launched a suicide attack on a shopping mall in Netanya, killing five and wounding dozens more. No one seemed concerned by this. The day after the bombing we passed Netanya on the way to the Galilee. Word spread through the bus, and a few people looked curiously out the window, but most just ignored the whole thing. I couldn’t tell if such calm was a sign of faith or obliviousness.

  WE BEGAN OUR tour of Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives, from which you can see the gleaming gold dome of the mosque that stands on the site of the First and Second Temples. Mark gave a dry account of the history of the place and a description of the mosque.

  “The so-called mosque,” one of the women said, and the others murmured approval. “These Muslims don’t belong here.”

  “Why not move them to Jordan?” asked Catfish.

  “Heck, the Jordanians don’t want ’em,” said Texas Jack, the retired lieutenant commander. He was a great admirer of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who, just a few days earlier, had left the hard-line Likud to form Kadima, a centrist party. Jack was all right with this move to the middle, which he regarded as tactical, but it didn’t alter his own hawkish views. “I was in Saudi Arabia for a year and a half, got a pot of money, and left,” he said. “There’s nothing about the place I like. They settle everything with violence. They don’t even have third-party insurance because if you get hit by somebody in a car, you’re supposed to take revenge by hitting them back or something.”

  “Will the Temple ever be rebuilt?” asked the mom from Kalamazoo in her Lauren Bacall voice.

  Mark was ready for the question evangelical groups always ask. “Most Orthodox Jews don’t believe the Temple will be rebuilt until the Messiah comes,” he said. In fact, pious Jews think it is sinful to so much as set foot on the Temple Mount for fear of inadvertently stepping into the Holy of Holies where only priests are supposed to trod. The majority of Israelis, however, are not expecting the Messiah; their interest in the Temple Mount tends to be symbolic and national, not religious.

  One Israeli group that does keenly focus on the Temple Mount is the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency. It has long feared that Jewish fanatics may try to blow up the mosques and set off an international conflagration.

  “The fanatics worry us,” Mark said. “Sometimes my Christian friends say, ‘Well, God did promise to reestablish the Temple.’ And I say, ‘Okay, but are you sure the time is now? If not, we could start World War III here.’”

  From the Mount of Olives we went to the Garden of Gethsemane, where George Mamo read from the book of Matthew. “Jesus could have called down angels to save him but he didn’t,” said Mamo. “Because how could the scriptures be fulfilled if this [crucifixion] doesn’t happen here in this way?” This is a cardinal tenet of evangelical Christianity as it is currently preached and understood. Jesus was not murdered by the Jews. He was a willing actor in a drama of his own creation, in which the crucifixion was a necessary element. The Jews, too, were actors, not free agents.

  FROM GETHSEMANE WE went to a nearby religious supermarket run by George Nisan. He belongs to a small Assyrian Christian sect that still speaks Aramaic, and he greeted us by reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the language of Jesus. It caused a stir—“Just like in The Passion,” one woman said—but the evangelicals weren’t interested in Nisan’s Christian merchandise. They skipped the mother-of-pearl crèches, ornate wooden crosses, votary candles, and genuine crown-of-thorns made in Bethlehem and went straight for the Jewish stuff. One woman bought a shofar, a ceremonial ram’s horn, so big she needed help carrying it to the bus.

  Linda the theologian, my intellectual minder, explained: “There’s a lot of curiosity because some people on this trip have never met a Jew before,” she said. “This is a new experience for them. I grew up Swedish Lutheran, in Boston, and went to U Mass. I’ve known Jews. And I’ve known anti-Semites, too. I had a Catholic friend who didn’t like Jews. But when she became an evangelical Christian she prayed and prayed for an understanding of the Jewish people. Today, she’s a member of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.”

  Linda saw the threat of Christian anti-Semitism emanating largely from the theological left. “Replacement theology is taking hold even at some of the more liberal evangelical colleges,” she said darkly. This doctrine teaches that when the Jews rejected Jesus they lost their status as God’s Chosen People and were replaced by the Church. Replacement theology concerns Christian Zionists, who see it as the path to liberation theology. “Because of replacement theory, it’s become politically correct on certain Christian campuses not to have a heart for Israel,” said Linda.

  MANY OF THE pilgrims were open not just to Jewish products and customs, but to other religious traditions. The lanky lady from Montana, for example, had worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and was highly sensitive to the needs of her Native American clients. “They like to keep evil spirits away by what they call smudging,” she told me. “They do it by burning prairie grass, and I always kept some for them in my desk.”

  But ecume
nism stopped at the doors of the Roman Catholic Church. Strangely, almost half the pilgrims were lapsed Catholics themselves, and many spoke of their previous denomination with anger and contempt. When the group went to the Galilee, it skipped Nazareth. Mark explained that evangelicals don’t usually visit the hometown of Jesus because it is dominated by Catholic churches and shrines. When I asked the group’s lone practicing Catholic about this, he simply shrugged. If he had wanted to visit Catholic sites, he said, he would have taken a Catholic tour.

  ON SATURDAY MORNING I ate breakfast with Pastor Don Cobble from Boston by way of Alabama. Throughout the meal he kept hopping up and greeting his fellow guests in foreign languages. Cobble is a compact, peppy man who has spent years doing missionary work around the world. He prides himself on his ability to tell, say, an Uzbek from an Armenian, and to greet each in the appropriate tongue. “A few words at least,” he explained to me. “Something familiar. It opens hearts.”

  In 1994, Cobble and his family returned from overseas missionary work and moved to Woburn, Massachusetts. Cobble’s son Judah was nine years old and rambunctious. One day he came home from school with poor marks for behavior, and Cobble spanked him with a belt.

  Judah’s teacher heard about this, and she alerted the authorities. Cobble got a visit from the Massachusetts Department of Social Ser vices.

  “I told them I had given him a light spanking, which is how you’re supposed to punish your children according to the Bible,” Cobble told me. “Spare the rod and spoil the child? But as soon as they heard the word ‘Bible’ they were off and running.”

  Cobble was issued an official warning. He responded by taking the Department of Social Ser vices to court, charging them with trying to deny him his right to practice religion. He lost in Superior Court, appealed, and won 5–0 in the Massachusetts Supreme Court. One Justice recalled, with obvious nostalgia, that when he was a boy he got his spankings with a wooden switch.

  “They paid my court costs,” Cobble said. “I was on a bunch of national TV shows. My name was cleared and I made my point—the government doesn’t have the right to punish you because you want to raise your child according to Christian principles.”

  One of those principles is unquestioning love for the Chosen People. To Cobble’s regret, it has gone largely unrequited, at least in Massachusetts.

  “Last year I invited three hundred rabbis from the Boston area to participate in my church’s rally for Israel. I only got one response and that was a polite no. The Jewish newspaper in Boston didn’t even want to print an ad until the Israeli consulate intervened.”

  The Israelis sent a diplomat, but the rally was pretty much boycotted by the local Jews. “It was awful disappointing,” recalled Cobble. “Jews in Boston don’t want anything to do with evangelical Christians. They think we’re missionaries.”

  “Well, are you?”

  “Some are,” Cobble said, “but we’re not. There’s a caucus in the Israeli Knesset that supports ties with us. A lot of the members of the caucus are Orthodox. If they thought we were bent on conversion, they’d cut us off just like that.”

  He snapped his fingers so loud he caught the attention of a group of mustachioed businessmen at the next table. He greeted them in a guttural language and they smiled. “Ukrainians,” Cobble said. “I met them last night. Very nice people.” He paused, reading my mind. “And they definitely aren’t Jewish.”

  AFTER BREAKFAST THE group took a walk in the Old City of Jerusalem. Going up the Via Dolorosa we passed a knot of young Palestinian men sitting on the stoop of a building. “I hear on the news fifty Americans killed in Iraq,” one hollered at us from no more than ten feet away, “I very happy about this.” His friends laughed and cast challenging looks at us, but the pilgrims kept moving. As we walked toward the Church of the Holy Sepulcher I could hear shopkeepers happily calling out to one another, in Arabic, “American soldiers killed in Iraq!” while they gestured for the tourists to enter their stores. None did.

  The incident surprised me. Palestinians are not rude people; like other Arabs, they pride themselves on hospitality and good manners with strangers. The fact that they were now shouting insults at tourists was an index of how radicalized and furious they had become. A few months later, when I heard that Hamas had won the Palestinian election, I recalled those voices on the Via Dolorosa.

  THAT AFTERNOON WE took communion at the Protestant Garden Tomb. By the time Protestant denominations got to the Holy Land, all the good ecclesiastical real estate had been snapped up by Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and various Eastern denominations. Protestants had solved this shortage with Calvinist ingenuity, by declaring a series of alternative holy places.

  The Protestant Garden Tomb, putatively the place where Christ had been buried and risen, is located across the street from the Damascus Gate of the Old City, next to a bus park. My fellow pilgrims sat on simple chairs, ate matzo instead of wafers, and drank tiny cups of wine symbolizing Jesus’ blood. I was next to Catfish, who was barefoot—he made a habit of removing his leather sandals whenever he entered a sacred site—and he noticed me skipping the wine.

  “It’s not a religious thing,” I said. “I just don’t drink. I quit almost ten years ago.”

  “I quit back then too,” said Catfish. “After a shooting incident. But sometimes I slip up. You never slip up?”

  “Not so far,” I said. “But you never know.”

  “Yeah, that’s the truth,” he said. “See, back then, around 1994? Man, I was a mess. Crack cocaine, heroin, booze—you name it—I was doin’ it. And I sorta just got out of control. I had this woman? She and I quarreled all the time until this one time I just grabbed a shotgun and aimed it right at her head, and I was about to pull the trigger on her when I heard Jesus say: ‘Don’t do that!’ I just raised that barrel up and blew a hole right through the ceiling, and I walked out on that relationship and didn’t never turn around.”

  “That’s when you were saved?”

  Catfish gave me an even look. “Saved is a big word,” he said. “I had a lot of problems back then. I never did have any money, for one thing. I don’t think I ever cleared more than $18,000 a year installing air conditioners. Sometimes I’d make a little extra taking guys out into the swamp to hunt wild hogs. I taught ’em how to kill the animal with a knife and cut its head off. Redneck work.

  “Then my daddy fell sick and I went up to where he was and tended to him. I figured he’d help me out eventually, but when he died my brother got his hands on the old man’s money. I was mad. I told my sister I was gonna take my brother out in the woods and wasn’t but one of us coming back.”

  “And then what?”

  “Let’s just say, if it wasn’t for Jesus, my brother wouldn’t be alive today. I’m a sinner and I know it, but I’m trying to be better. I still smoke and drink, but not like I did. I might have three or four shots before dinner, and maybe a couple afterward, but I quit when I get that buzz.”

  “Your church doesn’t frown on drinking?”

  “I don’t belong to a church,” Catfish said. “I’m a Christian man and I’m trying to do my best to find some spiritual peace. Church hasn’t got anything to do with that.”

  DURING THE TRIP Catfish stayed mostly to himself, but somehow everybody in the group eventually heard his story. The men began referring to him as “Ole Catfish” and the ladies fell for him in a chaste way. “I believe that if he were alive back in the day of Jesus,” Beth said, “he would have been chosen as a disciple.”

  Catfish wasn’t the only one with a history. Almost everyone in this band of outwardly bland, cheerful Americans seemed to be struggling with epic inner demons. Nobody flaunted their sins, but if you asked personal questions people responded with an amazing directness.

  A middle-aged teacher from Arizona named Tonya sat next to me on the bus from Jerusalem to the Galilee. Making conversation, I asked why she had come on the trip.

  “I was born with a rare childhood illness,” she co
nfided immediately. “My life was saved by Jewish doctors. Obviously, I need to give something back. So here I am. I know a lot of Jews are suspicious of us, but if you look at our gospel, really, it’s all about love. God is love.”

  “God is love” is a formulation so un-Jewish that I don’t even know how to express it in Hebrew. I was thinking about that when she said, “But still, the church can be smothering. A lot of evangelicals preach that you should fear God. And if you don’t, he’ll squash you like a bug. A lot of people feel that way.”

  “A lot of Orthodox Jews feel that way too,” I said, but she wasn’t really listening. She said, “Among Christians we have an expression, ‘We kill our own.’ One sin can be perceived as enough to send you to hell.”

  “Sure, but can’t you repent and get saved?”

  Tonya stared out the window, collecting her thoughts, took a deep breath, and said, “When I was sixteen years old I got pregnant. I was in a Christian high school. And everybody turned their backs on me. I even married the boy, but it didn’t matter. My own family ostracized me. One woman in my church gave me a baby shower present. One woman.

  “My baby died at two and a half months. The Christian school took my classmates on an educational trip to the cemetery, to see the grave. ‘The wages of sin is death’ is what the teacher told them.”

  Tears were running down her face. “I think maybe it’s getting better now,” she said. “These end-times teachings have a lot of so-called Christian people scared, and that makes them a little nicer to each other. I hope they are. Despite what I’ve been through, I’ve got to believe that God is love.”

  I DIDN’T SEE many books on the trip, except for the Bible, but a surprising number of pilgrims were amateur writers. My favorite was Giggles, the woman from Atlanta who took care of old people. This was her second trip to Israel. One day she handed me a note she had composed: “A lot of ideas are founded by the devil when ideas are negative, such as hip-hopping, dead-beating, soul train–dancing, women not respecting men and men not respecting women.”