Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

We walked down the ramp, placed cardboard kippot on our heads, and made our way to the benches in the back of the male-only worshiping area. Hundreds of dark-coated men strolled about, opening books and nodding quietly. Across a small divide, an even greater number of women crowded into a much smaller area. I checked to see if any Palestinians were preparing to throw stones from the Haram.

  Our walk had left me exhausted yet riled up. None of the scars we encountered, none of the gestures of self-appointed probing, saving, erasing, or rewriting seemed in the least bit related to how most people I know experience God. What has always appealed to me about the Temple Mount is how many of the holiest spots in the Abrahamic faiths are all gathered on the same piece of earth. Geography, so central to the roots of monotheism, seems to bond practitioners into some forced accommodation.

  Now I wasn’t so sure. The Temple was dreamed up by David and built by Solomon as a way for a king, whose hold on power was insecure, to honor God but also to secure his own control over a wobbly united monarchy. Herod, whose family were converts to Judaism, used the Temple for a similar political purpose. This legacy seemed to be repeating itself. Far from being a purely religious place, the Temple seemed to me to be more and more like a largely political place. Given this history, why base my religious identity on its remains?

  We pulled out our Bibles. Solomon takes twenty years to construct the Lord’s House and his royal palace, an event that comes to a close in I Kings 9. Only a few verses later, God has already turned against the king. Solomon’s many wives lure his attention to other gods, and he even builds shrines to two, the god of the Moabites and the one of the Ammonites. This is a stunning admission: the man who builds the Temple to the one God of Israel also builds monuments to honor the gods of lands David had supposedly vanquished. As a gesture promoting coexistence and interreligious harmony, Solomon’s act is foresighted.

  But the Bible hates it. “The Lord was angry with Solomon, because his heart turned away from the Lord.” God berates him: “Because you are guilty of this, I will tear the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your servants.” God raises up adversary after adversary and rips the united tribes asunder. By the time Solomon dies, Israel is once again a splintered nation, the dream of imperial dominance shattered. The Temple would stand for another 350 years, be destroyed, and rise for 500 years more, but the land God promised to Abraham would never be whole again.

  In its place, Jews would eventually begin to worship in synagogues—miniature, surrogate temples of a sort—and they would save their highest prayers for a remnant of the Temple. Invoking this sacred rampart, they would wail at the memory of God’s lost house and plead for its reconstruction. At least that’s the story I was taught as a Jew growing up in the last decades of the twentieth century.

  Only it’s not true. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the entire compound fell into disuse. Jews were forbidden from entering Jerusalem and, with the exception of a few isolated uprisings, mostly stayed away. Jews believed God’s presence never left the Temple area, but for centuries the traditional place for mourning the loss was the Mount of Olives. Not until the Turks overran Jerusalem in 1516 did Suleiman the Magnificent issue an edict permitting the Jews to pray before the Temple’s remains. The Western Wall soon became a center of Jewish life, and the belief that God’s spirit had never departed from the area now became associated with this particular spot. Jews removed their shoes before praying, kissed the stones, and wrote petitions to God, which they inserted into the cracks. The Wall became a symbol of the divine, and an emblem of the Jewish people.

  Non-Jewish observers began to notice the particular aural praying style of the Jews and nicknamed the site the “wailing place.” As the British cleric Samuel Manning wrote in 1873, “Here the Jews assemble every Friday to mourn over their fallen state. Some press their lips against crevices in the masonry as though imploring an answer from some unseen presence, others utter loud cries of anguish.” When the British took over Jerusalem in 1917, the popular term for the area became the “Wailing Wall,” which is the phrase I learned as a child. But after the Israelis liberated the area on June 7, 1967, Jewish leaders renamed the sacred spot the Western Wall, claiming that Jews need no longer weep, as their state had been renewed and their freedom of worship returned.

  The question for me, after our circumnavigation, was whether the wall had become too fetishized. Has the bickering over every speck of limestone detracted from the larger spiritual meaning of the Temple, which is a spot where God dwells close to humans and humans strive to be closer to God? By focusing so intently on the physical structure of the Temple, rather than on the covenant with God it was meant to embody, Jews risk equating their faith with a totem, which is the essence of the paganism they tried to transcend.

  “For me, the Temple is such an abstract thing,” I said to Avner. “It’s this strange place, only a priest can enter it, then only once a year. There are sacrifices. It seems unlike everything modern Judaism represents.”

  “On the other hand, religious Jews study these practices daily,” Avner said. “How you prepare the frankincense, how you prepare the animals. They anchor themselves to the physical details. I agree that the Temple has become an icon and not a sign of the obligations that God and humans make to each other.”

  “But what about you? As a person who loves the Bible, and grew up in Jerusalem, do you feel attachment to the Temple?”

  “As a symbol only. I have big problems with the idea that a Third Temple should be built. For me it’s withdrawing back into a nonspiritual land of Judaism. Most of Judaism was developed after the Temple was destroyed. During the First Temple, the Israelites believed that God lived here. What happened during the Exile in Babylon is that those who believed God has a territory were forced to change. God had to be everywhere. This is the great vision of monotheism that allows Judaism to reach a quite impressive level of spirituality.”

  “But I’m confused. The first time I came to Jerusalem, I walked down this plaza, put my hand on the Wall, and cried. But now that I think about it, I wasn’t crying for the Temple. I was crying for having arrived here, for the history of suffering in Judaism, for the love my mother taught us about God. I was crying for the Jewish people.”

  “Same with me. In 1967 I was in the Army, listening on the radio, hearing the soldiers coming to the Wall. And I cried like crazy.”

  “But now what I believe is that those tears were not to have the Temple rebuilt,” I said. “I’m not crying because the Temple was destroyed. If anything, I’m here because the Temple was destroyed. That’s what allowed Judaism to survive. It became portable.”

  “I agree. Personally, I don’t need the Wall anymore. It was a symbol of everything the Jewish people were longing for, and we’ve fulfilled that longing. But I have understood since I was four years old that the Temple was something beyond our reach. Judaism doesn’t need the physical structure. We have something higher: an understanding of the nonphysical dimensions of God.”

  “But why, if you have devoted your whole life to archaeology, do you want to be in a position where the physical places don’t matter? Wasn’t the entire theme of our first journey together the importance of land?”

  “Because I see the land as only a part of the culture that came out of this time. I can take the essence of the land with me into a higher, more spiritual plane.”

  “Then why does God promise land to Abraham at the very beginning?”

  “Because God relates to us on two levels: the level of faith and belief, and the level of nationality and being a people. As a nation, you need land. But as a religion, you do not. That’s the essence of what we’ve learned so far on this journey. Moses is the most central figure of the religion, even though he never sets foot on the land. David and Solomon are the greatest leaders of the nation, but they are moral degenerates and disappointments to God. The lesson of the second half of the Bible is that physical land, political power, even the Temple, are not the end
s for God’s people. Following God’s law is the goal.”

  I said good-bye to Avner and stayed behind. As the sun slowly set behind me, the town’s shadow inched up the stones until the face of the Wall was in darkness and the sky behind it deep blue. The plaza got more crowded as the sun receded. Dusk is a time of prayer.

  I got up and started walking toward the Wall. I had made this walk many times, but today was different. For the first time I was approaching the stones not with reverence but with ambivalence. I was overcome with the feeling that I wanted to tear down the Wall as a way to liberate Jews from their obsession with stones and wipe out the fanaticism it had come to represent. Surely Judaism is more resilient than any symbol. Surely faith in God does not depend on who controls a few feet of masonry.

  I could hardly believe my emotions. My journey retracing the Pentateuch had been a paean to land. In the Torah, God repeatedly pushes his chosen people into the wilderness so they will develop a closer relationship with him. For me, going into the desert achieved a similar end. And I was hardly alone. From Moses to Buddha to Jesus to Mohammed, the history of religion shows that venturing away from the civilized world and into isolated landscape is one way to become more intimate with the divine.

  But my current journey was teaching me something deeper. Land is not the destination. Being in a sacred space does not guarantee that one will act more nobly. History is also replete with examples—the rebellious Israelites at Mount Sinai, the marauding armies of the Crusades, the suicide bombers of today—that show you can be in a holy place and still not be holy. Proximity to God cannot be confused with intimacy with God. And if one goal of my travels was to confront my own doubts about faith, I was learning that I could no longer rely on the once familiar pillars of my religious identity: King David, the Temple, the Western Wall.

  I had to find my own route to God. I had to tear down the icons I once blindly accepted, go back to the source, and construct a new religious identity. And I felt this way not because I wanted to—who wants the burden?—but because I felt forced by the religious battles around me, by the petty sectarian violence, and most of all, by the Bible.

  One would think the first books of the Hebrew Bible after the Torah would be the story’s crowning achievement. The Israelites have endured generations of humiliation in Canaan, centuries of enslavement in Egypt, and decades of isolation in the desert. They are finally ready to conquer the Promised Land and fulfill their destiny as God’s people. Moments of triumph do fill the text—the lightning sweep through the land, the new capital in Jerusalem, a brief blazing empire across the Fertile Crescent. But the overall feeling of these books is disillusionment: The judges fail, the kings fail, the people fail, even the Temple fails. And the Bible responds to these failures by making a bold and unexpected shift.

  God flushes the people from the land he promised them. He sends them back into the wilderness. He exiles them.

  It’s a pattern we’ve seen before. From the beginning, the Bible follows a narrative cycle of creation, destruction, and re-creation. God creates the world, fills it with plants and animals, then adds humans to the mix. Humans disappoint, God wipes out the earth with a flood, then starts again with Noah. Noah disappoints, God withdraws his favor, then starts again with Abraham. The patriarchs disappoint, God sends their descendants into slavery, then starts again with Moses. The Israelites disappoint, God banishes them to forty years in the desert, then starts again with Joshua.

  This pattern continues apace once the Israelites reach the Promised Land. Joshua disappoints, Saul disappoints, David disappoints, Solomon disappoints. So yet again God goes looking for a new set of leaders to be his partners on earth, a new group of men to fulfill his promise to spread his blessing to “all the families of the earth.”

  There are monarchs who follow Solomon. Kings I and II contain an endless litany of the divided leaders of Israel and Judah—Rehoboam, Jeroboam, Abijam, Asa, Baasha, Nadab, Ahab, Jehoshaphat, Ahaziah, Joram. But find even the greatest lay lover of the Bible today and ask him to name three kings who ruled in the centuries after Solomon. Some might manage Hezekiah, the great eighth-century B.C.E. leader who expanded Jerusalem; a few might muster Josiah, the enlightened seventh-century ruler in whose court many scholars believe the Bible was first recorded. But who could come up with much more than that?

  The truth is: Even Bible lovers don’t know these leaders, and there’s a reason. The Bible turns against them. The experiment in investing God’s authority with earthly rulers has come up short. And so God shifts his favor toward a different kind of partner, one who won’t husband his authority into brutal leadership. The new hero won’t be God’s arm, he will be God’s voice. He won’t rule with power, he will speak for the powerless. He won’t embody the state, he will speak for the people. And look whom God chooses: Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Jonah, Daniel. Some of the most enduring figures in the Bible.

  We may no longer be able to name the kings.

  But we can name the prophets.

  And so the Bible reinvents itself yet again. It no longer is the chronicle of the ruler; it becomes the poetry of the outsider. It no longer is the tale of the king; it’s the portrait of the people. The most powerful portion of the Hebrew Bible following the forty years in the wilderness is not the forgettable narrative of the kings; it’s the stirring story of the Exile, and the prophets who give it meaning.

  And for me, as I reached the Wall, the lessons were clear. I must sever my attachment to the land. I must end my devotion to a physical symbol. I must look beyond stones. In elevating the prophets, the Bible speaks directly to the challenges of our time, and what it says is surprising. God cares more about how we behave than about how much territory we control. God believes that secular leaders cannot provide moral deliverance. God directs us to turn away from power and embrace the part of our community—and ourselves—that is vulnerable. We should listen instead for what the prophet Elijah experiences as the “still, small voice” of God, the soft, murmuring sound in our most wounded places that yearns for goodness and aches for forgiveness. We should be open to pain, and dedicated to assuaging it.

  For some reason this message of tenderness is rarely taken from the Bible anymore. More take confidence, arrogance, and the authority to impose their faith on others. Yet most people in the text who do that, like David and Solomon, do not end as noble figures. Even dramatic victories, like Joshua’s, are quickly followed by periods of moral murkiness. The heroes are the ones—like Abraham, Moses, or the newly minted prophets—who look critically at power, and even at God, and keep their gaze on the moral foundation of life on earth.

  I take humility from this story. I take self-restraint from the narrative. And most freeing of all, as I stop short of touching the Wall, I realize I must look beyond the outward remains of God’s glory in order to construct my own private relationship with God. I must turn, instead, to where the prophets point. I must turn to loss. I must turn to exile. I must turn to the source of salvation I would have least imagined.

  I must turn to Babylon.

  B O O K T W O

  EXILE

  . 1 .

  IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN

  Kejo Level III Rapid Response body armor is made in South Africa to manufacturing standards set by the U.S. Department of Justice. The ballistic material that composes the vest is Kevlar HT 1100 d’tex. The garment contains two ceramic plates capable of stopping 7.62-by-39-millimeter ammunition from an AK47 assault rifle, as well as protecting against 7.62-by-51-millimeter projectiles fired from a G3 assault rifle and 5.56-by-45-millimeter rounds fired by an M16 assault rifle. Weighing six pounds, the made-to-measure vest is covered in a polycotton, sixty-five-to-thirty-five mix, along with textured nylon 6.6, stitched together with polyfill thread SABS 1362. It can be washed with warm water and pressed with a warm iron but should not be bleached. It is dry cleanable.

  And surprisingly fashionable. Black and form-fitting, with an optional Kevlar groin protect
or that hangs over the waist like a miniskirt, the entire getup reminded me of an outfit some Mad Max–like postapocalyptic warrior would wear. Basically it feels like a sandwich board with really, really stale bread.

  At 4:15 on a cool desert morning, I stuffed my rented XL armor into a duffel bag, along with a ballistic combat helmet designed for the Israeli Army, a satellite telephone, a dozen PowerBars, and a Bible, threw the bag into the backseat of a taxi, and headed toward Camp Doha outside Kuwait City. Home to the Third United States Army—“Always First—Always Ready”—Camp Doha is the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command and, months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the jumping-off point for anyone hoping to fly into Baghdad.

  Ever since I’d come up with the idea of retracing the Bible, I had longed to visit Iraq. The land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Cradle of Civilization, has been known since antiquity as Mesopotamia and gave birth to the earliest empires in history, from Sumer to Babylon. The Garden of Eden was rooted here, the Tower of Babel was conceived here, the first alphabet was scripted here, the day was carved into twenty-four hours here, and some of the greatest stories ever told were first uttered here, from the epic of Gilgamesh to the saga of Abraham.

  But for thirty-five years, these sites were mostly closed to the West, eventually sealed off from outside scholars, and, in the case of Babylon, crudely reconstructed as a propagandist playground to promote the idea that Saddam Hussein was the new Nebuchadnezzar, the great emperor of antiquity. I dreamed of seeing where the Tigris and Euphrates merge. I yearned to walk where Abraham first pined for God. Mostly I hoped to penetrate the black hole of the Middle East and see for myself if the provenance of so many Western values could elucidate the struggle for those values today.

  But I was rebuffed. My first attempt, in the late 1990s, was quickly shot down by the U.S. State Department. Later Pope John Paul II tried to visit these sites, but Washington deterred him, too. I received a break in 2001, during a chance meeting with Bob Simon of CBS News, who offered to show me how to sneak across the border. Three days later came September 11.