Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

  Rereading the story of Hanukkah now, I was frustrated to learn how whitewashed our version had been. I was also disappointed that American Jews had pumped up Hanukkah to mimic one of the least spiritual sides of Christmas. Hanukkah fit a pattern consistent with the way many in my generation were raised to be Jewish. Judaism was cherished in my home for its values of self-reliance, community service, and education. Still, many parents, rabbis, and teachers I knew couldn’t help dwelling on the negative reasons to be Jewish—Jews can be wiped out at any moment; Israel is imperiled; you face discrimination, so you better stick together—as well as reactive reasons: We’re just like Christians, only better.

  Recently I had begun to wonder if Jews might find a way to stress the more affirmative reasons for their faith.

  Just above the Western Wall, we stopped off to meet Noam Zion, a philosopher from Minneapolis who now heads the Center for Jewish Continuity at the Shalom Hartman Institute and has become one of the world’s leading experts on Jewish holidays, including Hanukkah. He is a passionate advocate for what he calls “Home-made Judaism.” The future of Judaism (and perhaps religion in general), he believes, depends on turning away from the professionalization of faith that has occurred in recent centuries, which overemphasized soaring buildings, stern public rituals, and passive congregants, and rediscovering a more familial, do-it-yourself tradition of creatively celebrating holidays at home. “This change fits other aspects of modern living,” he said, “in which people say, ‘I’m taking back control over my life. I exercise, I eat healthily. Why can’t I do the same thing with the way I shape my home time?’ ”

  I asked him if the struggle to redefine Hanukkah worried him.

  “I find it a very exciting battle,” he said. “The celebration of holidays has always been based on creating collective identities, and Hanukkah fits that perfectly. It’s a home holiday, but it’s different from most home holidays because it’s a liminal holiday—it’s about putting the menorah in the window. It’s about a public statement of what I believe in. With Passover, the mitzvah is to publicize the miracle to the next generation of your family. With Hanukkah, the mitzvah is to publicize the miracle to the outside world.”

  For that reason, he continued, “Hanukkah is the perfect holiday for a multicultural world. It’s a statement that I want to preserve my values and trumpet my beliefs—not that other people have to adopt them, but that other people accept them. And I think each home has to be the center of those values, so that instead of the light coming from the outside world, which is what television is, ultimately dissolving everybody into their own rooms, the light comes from inside the family and illuminates the neighborhood.”

  I mentioned my frustration that Hanukkah had become too reactive to Christmas.

  “I faced the same thing growing up in Minnesota,” he said. “The Christmas tree was always in the background, even if we didn’t have one ourselves. But I’m trying to make you more appreciative of your parents. Understand that all cultures, at all periods in human history, have been in dialogue with others. Early Christians adopted customs from Judaism in the way that Judaism later adopted customs from Christianity. The question should be whether your parents used the competitive religious environment to spur you to retrieve your Judaism.”

  “That raises my big question,” I said. “If my wife and I are lucky enough to have children, what narrative should we tell them?”

  “For me, I think the narrative is of personal courage. In the darkest month of the year, in a dark time for Jews in the world, Hanukkah was the first piece of light. But I think it’s important to remember that the Maccabees’ struggle for independence lasted another twenty-five years. Hanukkah does not celebrate the final victory. It’s not the Exodus from Egypt. It’s the first victory in a long struggle against the Greco-Roman empire.

  “And I want to celebrate beginnings,” he continued. “As my teacher, David Hartman, says, the miracle is not that one vessel of oil lasted for eight days but that the community was willing to light one vessel not knowing whether it would last. The true miracle is daring to dream. And that’s the key to Jewish life. Any realistic analysis says, ‘Forget it! You’ll never succeed.’ But if you say I believe in the power of a little bit of light, and I believe in the kinds of things that aren’t codified, then I believe that this little tiny flicker of faith I have can produce an enormous transformation, so that somehow I’ll have a greater and greater effect on the world.”

  The winter light on the Western Wall becomes dull and gray by the middle of the afternoon, as the sun dips behind the crest of Mount Zion. Though the sky is still blue at 4:00 P.M. and the last rays of sun are just glinting off the Dome of the Rock, the limestone blocks of Herod’s retaining wall have already descended into shadow. On this afternoon, a ten-foot span to the far right of the men’s praying area had been illuminated with stage lights. A small dais had been erected, covered in a black velvet mantle, embroidered with the name of its maker, www.rikmatova.com.

  On top of the stage was a protective glass box about seven feet high, and inside it stood a giant sterling-silver menorah. The menorah had nine glass containers for oil, each the size of a shot glass, and elaborate silver arabesques that connected the arms to the trunk. If Louis XIV had needed a menorah, this one would have fit perfectly at Versailles. It, too, boasted a sign at its base, perfectly positioned for news cameras, sporting the name of its manufacturer, Hazorfim. Americans are clearly not the only ones who understand marketing.

  We arrived just as afternoon prayers were beginning, and were ushered onto the dais. About a hundred people were praying. The only other person on the stage was the chief of police of Jerusalem. He was a gruff man, with eyes darting anxiously about, but when I asked him if he looked forward to Hanukkah, he brightened. “Doesn’t every Jew?”

  At that moment, the crowd of onlookers parted, and a broad-shouldered man in a perfectly pressed black cape with gold embroidery on the shoulders strode into view. He had a white beard that reminded me of Santa Claus, spectacles, and a mesmerizing black satin hat, in the shape of a turban, that indicated he was the spiritual leader of the Sephardic Jewish community. Shlomo Amar, a native of Morocco, was also a chief rabbi of Israel. As he moved toward the stage, worshipers took their prayer shawls and kissed his cape, as if he were a Torah being paraded through a synagogue.

  Arriving on the stage, he greeted each of us warmly and stood to my right, in front of the menorah. While a men’s chorus began to sing, Rabbi Amar struck up a conversation. “Forget the outside world,” he said to me. “Assume you’re on an empty planet. What’s the meaning of Hanukkah? If you take the rabbinic story of the oil, it shows there is something that makes things go beyond their natural limit. I want to connect myself to that ultimate fire.

  “Look at these stones,” he continued, gesturing to the Wall. “When you stare at them, you see just stones. But if you’re connected to a higher power, they are so much more.”

  The time had come to light the menorah. Rabbi Amar took a braided candle, lit it, and began chanting the prayer: “Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha-olam . . .” “Blessed are you, Adonai, our God, ruler of the world . . .” As he did, the crowd, which had swelled to four hundred, chanted with him. Then he began lighting the cups of oil, and when he finished, he did something I didn’t expect: He took the few steps to the Wall, bent at the waist, and kissed it. I froze.

  The last time I had stood in this spot, I had recoiled. I was fed up with religious extremists who seemed to place the physical symbols of religion over the spiritual message. The Wall had become for me an example of this kind of religious fervor. More than a summons to elevation, it had become a rallying point for radical fantasies of Armageddon.

  Now I felt somewhat differently. One gift of my journey was discovering that the Hebrew Bible tells a more subtle story of the origins of monotheism than I had been led to expect. Land is not the focal point of that story; walls are not its core. At the center of the bibl
ical model is a moral relationship between humans and God. Land is important to that relationship. From the moment God calls Abraham to set out to the Promised Land, through the Exodus, through Joshua’s conquest, humans and God dream of a home where they can realize their relationship in freedom. But from the Exodus, through the Exile, to the diaspora, humans and God reach their most intimate moments when they are not on the land.

  If anything, Jewish life finally seems to achieve a working equilibrium near the end of the biblical era, when some people live on the land and some people live off it. The ideal condition for a fully realized relationship between humans and God may be this period, the late first millennium B.C.E., when land-based monotheism and landless monotheism exist in a state of creative tension. It was during this era that the returnees from Babylon restored faith to the land, and when Ezra and Nehemiah infused the fractured Jerusalem community with a stronger, text-based faith. They are the final heroes of the Bible. And as an American Jew, I found their story revolutionary, even freeing. Diaspora Judaism is not secondary Judaism.

  It is coequal.

  Particularly in the pluralist world of today, the example of these latter biblical years is resonant, and even uplifting. They show that in the birth moment of Western religion, Judaism pioneered the idea that religion need not be imperial, ever-expanding, and intolerant. From Persia to Babylon to Egypt, Judaism thrived as a minority faith in the late first millennium B.C.E., living alongside much stronger, majority faiths. Through a combination of historical circumstance and the tutelage of at least some of the prophets, the first great monotheistic religion began its existence in a posture of humility.

  As a Jew, I take from the final books of the prophets the positive message I had been craving in my upbringing. Judaism can be a living alternative to triumphalism. After centuries in which many Christians and Muslims tried to assert themselves as the universal religion; at a time when violent fundamentalists of all Abrahamic faiths try to impose their views on rivals; Jews, and non-Jews, can reach back to the base text for all three traditions and declare, “There’s another way.” Faith in God does not depend on size. As lovers of the Bible, we fulfill our relationship with God by upholding his values, and we define our relationship with others not by thrusting our ways onto them but by asserting our willingness to be vulnerable in the face of dominant cultures.

  And in this new, affirmative worldview, Hanukkah is uniquely positioned as a shining example. Like the Bible, the Maccabees’ story contains sickening undercurrents of extremism. But Hanukkah endures because it’s a tribute to the absurd idea that even something tiny can outshine its potential. Not until I reexamined the holiday as an adult did I realize that one is not supposed to light the candles in private, then move them to the door. One is supposed to light them in the threshold. The blessing comes from willingly asserting your faith in public, not with raging fire but with a single, quiet flame.

  And by reaching this belief, I had arrived at an unexpected destination in my journey. As Rabbi Amar leaned up from the Wall, the crowd behind him began to sing Maoz Tzur, “Rock of Ages,” the traditional hymn of Hanukkah. I was transported back to my childhood home, my family awkwardly holding hands, butchering this beautiful melody. My throat caught. My eyes welled. I had finally broken through my hostility. I bent toward the Wall, smiled, and kissed the stones.

  And when I turned around, the rabbi had lifted his hands in the air, the five hundred people now gathered before him bowed their heads, and he offered a blessing. When he finished, what seemed like half the crowd retrieved cameras, raised them to their eyes, and flashed. The explosion of white was unlike anything I’d ever seen. A paparazzi scrum in the holiest place on earth. Modernity bowing down to tradition. And looking up, I saw the most magical constellation. In every window, in every doorway, an infinite galaxy of light.

  Within half an hour, the lighting ceremony had ended, and Avner and I made our way around the southern perimeter of the Temple Mount to the base of the Mount of Olives. We planned to spend the final night of our travels in a place intimately connected to the end of the first millennium B.C.E. and to a revolutionary new phenomenon in Western religious life. From the remnants of the biblical era, the dream of the messiah would rise.

  The Mount of Olives is actually three mountains in one, a two-mile-long ridge of Israel’s central mountains that contains three separate summits. At 3,000 feet above sea level, the highest peak is the tallest mountain in Jerusalem, 230 feet taller than the Temple Mount. During the Second Temple period, Olives, named for the abundant trees that once lined its slopes, was the first in the chain of peaks throughout the countryside where bonfires were lit at the start of each month. The Talmud says the chain of bonfires continued all the way to Babylon.

  As early as the time of the prophets, the Mount of Olives had been associated with divine redemption. Jewish tradition held that the Shechina, or Divine Presence, left the First Temple after its destruction and hovered over Olives for three and a half years, waiting for Israel to repent. When it did not, the Shechina ascended to heaven on the footstool of God. During the Second Temple period, many Jews wanted to be buried on the mountain because God, when he returned to earth, would descend the same footstool and stand here first.

  But late in the first millennium B.C.E., Jews began associating Olives with an even more supernatural notion. The dream of a messiah, evolving for centuries, erupted into a full-scale societal frenzy following the collapse of the Hasmonean empire. The idea of an anointed savior took two forms. The first was restorative and political: The day would come when a militaristic leader from the House of David would rise up, restore Israel to its rightful place, and redistribute the land to the twelve tribes. The second was futuristic and utopian: The day would come when a spiritual figure would arise, remake the cosmic order, and deliver the world into salvation.

  “The utopian movement was really something unique,” Avner said. “The messiah it imagines has no political power to speak of. Instead he remakes the laws of nature, so that the wolf and the lamb will live together.”

  I asked him what happened between the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. and the late first millennium that allowed this idea to take hold.

  “A lot of it has to do with the Maccabees,” he said. “Many people were uncomfortable with the Hasmonean kings because they weren’t from the House of David. So they went back to the Davidic image but updated it with a more complete purpose and aura.”

  “So after two thousand years of failed leaders, the people finally get the hint that profane leadership is not going to work,” I said. “They need a miracle.”

  “With good reason,” Avner said. “The Romans conquered Israel, and the Hasmoneans failed. Sure enough, soon you begin to encounter self-proclaimed saviors, somewhere between prophets and messiahs, who are roaming the countryside making promises. ‘My breath will bring about the fall of the walls of Jerusalem.’ ‘I will part the seas of the Jordan.’ ‘Let’s go back to the desert and establish God’s kingdom.’ ”

  “So it’s in the air.”

  “Yes, and what happens is that people take ideas that have been percolating for centuries, like resurrection of the dead and life after death, and combine them with this new ideal of messiah.”

  “So if we were standing on this mountain at the end of the first millennium B.C.E.,” I said, “and I said to you that a figure was going to emerge—”

  “Yes . . .”

  “—who was going to husband all the people who believe in the utopian, end-of-days, nonphysical, cosmological messiah, that would not have shocked you.”

  “No. That’s what was happening.” He paused. “And we certainly know one messianic figure—or at least one messianic movement—who did just that.”

  Beaming our flashlights, we reached the halfway point of the mountain and the crowded huddle of churches, shrines, and monasteries. The narrow streets were mostly empty at this hour, but I could smell incense. The New Testament overflow
s with references to the Mount of Olives, which played a central role in the last week of Jesus’ life. Olivet, as Luke calls it, is where Jesus liked to meet his disciples, where he wept for the Jewish nation, and where he began his walk into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. As a result, the western slope today contains three triumphal entry trails, three Gardens of Gethsemane, three sites for Jesus’ ascension, and a shrine to the supposed last footprints of Christ.

  By far the most visually arresting facility is the Russian Orthodox Compound of St. Mary Magdalene, the centerpiece of which is a two-story white sandstone church built in 1888 by Czar Alexander III with seven gilded, bulbous domes that look like a bouquet of giant garlic cloves. Nearing six o’clock, the street in front of the compound was dark and spooky. We rang the bell, and a nun opened a window in the door and told us that the monastery was closed. “But you invited us,” Avner said.

  “Oh, we invited you,” she said, opening the door. “I’m sorry. Evening prayers are under way. Ask for Sister Xenia.”

  The interior of the church was dim, illuminated by a half dozen candles placed in front of icons. We sat alongside one of the columns. The squarish nave was largely empty, with smaller alcoves along each side. The entire facility was painted in shades of brown, red, and gold. The centerpiece was a giant iconostasis, a white marble and bronze screen that shielded a private sanctuary and was painted with the four evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Above the screen was a painting depicting Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’ followers and the first to see him after the Resurrection, standing before Emperor Tiberius in Rome. In the painting, she is holding a red egg. Tradition says she brought a regular egg to the emperor and declared, “Christ has risen!” “How could anyone rise from the dead?” he said. “It is as impossible as that egg turning red!” As the emperor spoke, the egg turned crimson, a symbol of Jesus’ blood. Some believe the custom of dyeing eggs on Easter came from this story.