by Bruce Feiler
That leads to the second, and more profound, change the journey brought about in me. It allowed me to turn off my mind occasionally and open myself up to feelings—spiritual, emotional, divine, even imaginary—that might innately connect me to the world. In effect, it uprooted me from some of my rational instincts, then rerooted me to many of the nonrational elements in the world. After months of traveling around the Middle East, I felt newly aware of the emotional power of certain places, the essential meridians of history that exist just underneath the topsoil, waiting for someone to kick up the dust and lie down on top of them. This feeling was embodied in a quote I found in Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines. “You cannot travel on the path before you have become the Path itself.” The quote was from the Buddha, but it could easily have come from any of the theologians I’d read, or even Deuteronomy, in which God advises the Israelites to celebrate Passover as if each celebrant had personally come out of Egypt. God’s lesson here is clear: only by entering the story ourselves can we truly understand its meaning.
So what does entering the story have to tell us? For starters, it tells us that the land is central to the Israelites and to their experience of God. I had read hundreds of theories about the meaning of the Israelites’ journey, but none prepared me fully for the one overwhelming reality that emerged from retracing their route: its geographic equilibrium, its symmetry. It began in one corner of the ancient world, Mesopotamia; it continued down the central corridor, Canaan; it waylaid in the opposite corner, Egypt; it wandered for years in the desert; then returned, in the end, to the heart of the region. And not just the geographic heart, also the heart of trade, travel, conflict, and cultural exchange. The Fertile Crescent, the Via Maris, the King’s Highway, the Rift Valley, even the Continental Divide all pass directly through the biblical Promised Land.
This sense of centrality—of crossroads—is perfectly captured in the text, which is a paean to taking elements from one culture, mixing them with ingredients from another culture, and creating a greater whole. The Bible may be the greatest melting pot ever forged. Indeed, it survives, I believe, in large measure, because it incorporates spiritual components taken from civilizations all across the region. If the Israelites had begun in Mesopotamia and then promptly captured the Promised Land, their journey—and their faith—would have seemed somehow incomplete. If they had begun as slaves in Egypt and then swiftly conquered Canaan, their trip—and their belief system—would have seemed somehow less monumental, less tested. Ultimately, it is the essential pan–Near Eastern nature of their travels that makes their story—and their religion—stand so well across time and place. They covered every inch of the ancient Near East and faced every imaginable threat to their existence—infertility, famine, slavery, war, starvation, mass death—and still they came out believing in their abstract, universal God.
For me, the feeling that emerged at the end of traversing that itinerary was one of profound stability and composure. As a veteran traveler, I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me. I never felt that more than with this trip. It was as if the act of touching these places, walking these roads, and asking these questions had added another column to my being. And the only possible explanation I could find for that feeling was that a spirit existed in many of the places I visited, and a spirit existed in me, and the two had somehow met in the course of my travels. It’s as if the godliness of the land and the godliness of my being had fused.
Recognizing that continuity was the biggest revelation—and the biggest joy—of my trip, I was fascinated to discover that Saint Augustine, in one of the more famous depictions of spiritual rebirth, described his moment of revelation as taking him not out of his body but deeper inside it, into a complex topography that he never knew existed. And the place he visited was not the Promised Land, not a mountaintop, not the desert. The place was his own imagination—his own memory—and its breadth and richness filled him with astonishment. “It was an awe-inspiring mystery,” he wrote in City of God, “an unfathomable world of images, presences of our past and countless plains, caverns and caves.”
To me, the most fascinating thing about encountering that mystery was what Augustine himself had described: the feeling that I was recovering it, not discovering it. The inchoate belief that the feeling was somehow in me already and that this trip, this route, this dirt, somehow brought it out of me. In the end, I believe the essential spirit that animates those places also animates me. If that spirit is God, then I found God in the course of my journey. If that spirit is life, then I found life. If that spirit is awe, then I found awe. Part of me suspects it’s all three, and that none can exist without the other. Either way, what I know for sure is that all I had to do to discover that spirit—and the resulting feeling of humility and appreciation—was not to look or listen or taste or feel. All I had to do was remember, for what I was looking for I somehow already knew.
In coming to that conclusion I returned to the essential triad at the heart of the Bible: the people, the land, and God. I had gone to the land, I had encountered a spirit, and in so doing I had become more human. That equation drew me back to one of the defining moments of the Pentateuch, Jacob’s wrestling with the messenger of God in the valley of Jabbok, just north of Nebo. At first Jacob doesn’t know who the messenger is. They wrestle, they struggle, one seems to be winning, then the other, until finally Jacob is scarred. The scar, significantly, does not end up on Jacob’s hand, nor on his head, his heart, or his eyes. Humans experience God, the text seems to be saying, not by touching him, imagining him, feeling him, or seeing him. Jacob is scarred on his leg, for the essential way humans experience God, the text suggests, is by walking with him.
This realization marked my closest bond with the Bible. Jacob, more than any other character, embodies the geographical breadth of the Five Books of Moses: He is born in the Promised Land, journeys back to Harran, returns to Canaan, travels to Egypt, and is eventually brought home to the land that bears his name. Like Jacob, I felt as if I had touched the two arms of the Fertile Crescent and engaged in a struggle that I never set out to have. There were times when I felt I was winning that struggle, that I was close to getting my mind around the puzzle of God. I was this close to an answer. But then, just as quickly, that feeling would go away, and I’d be overcome by waves of ignorance and opaqueness. I was defeated by unknowingness and the limits of my own imagination.
Ultimately, rather than try to win this struggle, or succumb to this struggle, I realized that the struggle itself was the goal. I had, like Jacob, wrestled with an adversary I never saw, whose name I never learned, but whose presence I deeply felt. I had, to use the words of Genesis, “striven with God,” the original meaning of Israel and the name given to all his descendants. After all my travels, I had reached the destination that the Five Books, at least, may have intended all along. I had reached the Promised Land—Israel—the place where one strives with God.
Back on the mountain, I was tossing in my bag. Why was I sweating? Had I fallen asleep? I lifted my head. The panorama had changed. The moon was brighter than it had been all night, and the stars more vivid. All trace of haze was gone and the entire landscape was brilliantly illuminated. I could see palm fronds in Jericho, and streetlights in Jerusalem. The moon glanced off the smooth surface of the Dead Sea as if it were a silver serving tray.
There was another change from earlier: A strong wind was now blowing from the east. It was a tenacious wind, with broad fingers, that seemed intent on pushing me down the hill. It reminded me of my first night in the Sinai, when the wind wrapped around my arms, filled my ears, and made me feel alone. I held up my hand to feel the force, then stuck out my index finger to see if I could block out the lights of Jerusalem. I could. The image of Moses reaching out to touch the Promised Land came to mind, followed closely by Lot’s wife, with her finger outstretched, locked in salt. Moving in and out of sleep by now, I could feel a host of images
ricocheting around my head: salt fingers, salt sea, frozen arms, orange moon, rising sun, Dome of the Rock, Mount of Olives, Jerusalem, Jericho, Jordan. Jordan.
Guards!
Were they coming? I sat up. Avner was still asleep. There were sounds from over the hill, but no movement. We were being watched, though, I could tell. I lay back down to sleep but squirmed with a mix of unease and anticipation. Finally I succumbed to the emotion and sat up on the mattress. The first hint of light appeared behind me. It was 3:30. As soon as the sky showed signs of gray, the haze began to return. The palm trees and buildings gradually began to disappear. The street-lights dimmed. Soon there was no horizon.
The wind, which had been gaining steadily, was now whipping past me with greater speed. It was blowing with a force unimaginable even a few minutes earlier. I began to estimate its strength—forty miles per hour, fifty. The wind was cooler than before, and its force had a chilling effect that began at the lower part of my back and spread across my shoulders to the tips of my fingers. I felt completely exposed, as if my skin were being pulled from my body. It was as if the wind was going to reach under my legs, lift me off the mountain, and toss me into the valley.
Looking around, I realized what was happening. The world had entered a state of transition. It was fulfilling its diurnal ritual, creating itself anew. And though I had witnessed many dawns in my life, this time I experienced something I had never felt before: the exact moment when one day ends and another begins. It was as if the wind was blowing so hard it had pushed a new day into existence.
And in the limen of that dawn, I had undergone a transition along with the place. I had slid, unawares, into tomorrow. Looking below, I saw the change instantly. The clear vision and sparkling lights of the evening were now completely awash in haze. Jerusalem had disappeared. Jericho was a fog. The Dead Sea was gone. A sparrow chirped furiously, as if struggling to be heard. There was chaos in the air, but also familiarity, as if everything knew what to do to get ready for morning. And in that dream-addled state, I suddenly realized the power of creation. There was something exhilarating about the moment: I felt directed. There was something destructive about it, too: I felt disconnected from my past. But above all, there was something cleansing about it, as if someone had slid a pipe cleaner through my being and emptied everything out.
And suddenly all the ideas I had been contemplating—my identity, the land, time, God—came together in a flash. And that flash created an energy that seemed to exist outside of time, but that, in its own way, seemed to mark a restarting of time. And without verbalizing it, without even understanding it, I knew that this moment—as light and ineffable as it was—would always be an anchor for me. This would be my beginning. I was new. I was clean.
I was day.
It was the alarm clock that brought me back to earth. At 4:30 it sounded, waking Avner and reminding us that we hoped to be at the monastery by five. Avner took a bottle of water and stumbled down the hill to wash. He left a carton of orange juice on his mattress as a weight. As soon as he disappeared, however, the wind prevailed, sucking his mattress, his sleeping bag, and the carton of juice into the air. Panicked, I jumped from my bag and, before realizing that I was in my underwear and bare feet, went sprinting after the bag. This was a bad idea. First, I was now running around Mount Nebo with no clothes on, a sure invitation for smugglers or hyenas. Second, my feet could not handle the sharp rocks and sage. And third, my sleeping bag and mattress soon joined the others, raining down in a shower of foam and 100 percent artificial juice.
Avner returned just in time to witness my immersion. We laughed, hurriedly packed, then set off down the hill toward the monastery. Along the way, we talked about our visitors. Had they really come at all? Or had we made the whole thing up? Given my hallucinatory night, if Avner hadn’t been there, I might have thought the whole episode a chimera. We did agree, though, that the only reason they allowed us to stay was the nature of our trip. “Maybe they were sent to make us feel special,” Avner said. “If we hadn’t traveled the entire route, we would have been arrested.”
A few minutes later we arrived at the monastery, and Garbo appeared to let us in. He was wearing a gardener’s floppy cap, and I now noticed that he had alternating teeth on his upper and lower gums. “The desert wind is strong this morning,” he said, adding that forecasters were predicting that down in the valley the temperature would reach 50 degrees Celsius, or 120 Fahrenheit.
Garbo invited us to his patio for a cup of coffee. On the way, he moved a hose from the flower bed to a baby olive tree. “Why didn’t Moses strike the rock here,” he said despairingly. “We need the water.” On the wall above the tree was a poster of Michelangelo’s Moses.
We stayed for a few minutes, then walked the short distance to the garden in front of the church. A few stone benches lined the paths, along with cypress trees planted by the Franciscans. We settled underneath a fifteen-foot-high red iron cross, entwined with a serpent, that was designed to replicate the copper snake Moses erects on a pole in Numbers 21. After all our discussion about seeing sunrise, we could see nothing. The desert wind had blown with such fury overnight that it fussed up an even thicker cloud of dust, which obscured not only the sun, but also the sky, the horizon, and most of the landscape we had seen overnight. Looking toward the Holy Land was like staring into a plate of grits. There was a faint hint of yellow, but basically the panorama was mealy and white. I thought back on the sunrise of our first morning on the Euphrates, but there was no chance that the sun would break through here. If anything, the haze would only get worse. I realized again how special our overnight view had been, our own private screening.
We pulled out our Bibles for the final time. In Deuteronomy 34, the last of the Pentateuch’s 187 chapters, Moses goes up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, the peak “across from Jericho.” There God gives him a private tour of the Promised Land. God moves methodically, starting first with the northern area, around the Sea of Galilee, then to the Mediterranean coast and the Negev. He ends with the area closest to Moses, along the Jordan.
“This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” God says. He then reminds Moses:“I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross there.” Moses, the “servant of the Lord,” then dies on Mount Nebo. God buries him in the valley down below, with the text observing, “and no one knows his burial place to this day.” Moses is 120 years old when he dies, but “his eyes were undimmed and his vigor unabated.” The Israelites bemoan him for thirty days.
The death of Moses is one of the most poignant passages in the entire Hebrew Bible. It seems impossibly sad that Moses could lead the Israelites out of Egypt, direct them for forty years in the desert, beat back their many rebellions, only to be stopped just inches from the Promised Land. “It’s a tragedy,” Oded Eran had said earlier. “Moses leads the people from bondage, he resists their pleas to return to the fleshpots, he survives the crisis of the doubting nation. He goes through all this, and he gets two feet, two minutes, from the goal, and God says, ‘Sorry, you’re not going in!’ It’s as if you said to Nelson Mandela, ‘You fought for the people, you led the people, but we won’t make you president. You belonged to the previous generation.’ It’s unfair!”
Avner agreed, pointing to a passage in Deuteronomy 3 in which Moses begs God to change his mind. “You whose powerful deeds no god in heaven or on earth can equal!” Moses says. “Let me, I pray, cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan.” But God snaps back. “Enough! Never speak to Me of this matter again!” Surely this exchange proves Moses’ anguish, Avner said.
While there is certainly a personal tragedy inherent in these passages, there is also, I came to believe, a personal triumph for Moses. This triumph is hinted at in the unusual comprehensiveness of Moses’ final tour. Simply put: It would be impossible, even on the clearest day (or the clearest night), for a person to see everything from Mount Nebo that the text says Moses sees. David Fa
iman, the physicist from Sdeh Boker, actually did a mathematical calculation to prove that based on the curvature of the earth, the speed of light, and the strength of the human eye, no person could ever see the Galilee, the Mediterranean, or the Negev from Mount Nebo.
Also, the text doesn’t actually end with Moses’ death. It ends with a poignant eulogy of the great leader. The last three of the Pentateuch’s 5,845 verses declare:“Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses—whom the Lord singled out, face to face, for the various signs and portents that the Lord sent him to display in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his courtiers and his whole country, and for all the great might and awesome power that Moses displayed before Israel.” The Pentateuch doesn’t end by emphasizing Moses’ tragedy. It ends by emphasizing his uniqueness and his unique relationship with the divine.
This prompted the last—and most unexpected—observation of our trip. The actual physical dimensions of the Promised Land matter far less at this moment than its spiritual dimensions. After hundreds of years in which the land has been the driving force in the story, it now assumes a metaphoric role. Surely, for the Israelites, the Promised Land is still their destination. For Moses, too, the Promised Land is still a dream, and he was no doubt deeply disappointed that he didn’t get to achieve it.
