The Necessity of a Homeland

Pope John Paul II at the Western Wall in 2000.

LONDON, ONTARIO – I journeyed to the Holy Land this spring as a Christian pilgrim, primarily seeking to deepen my historic understanding of the faith, and this goal was most happily achieved. Along with that illuminating process of discovery came a keener appreciation than ever before that Judaism isn’t just another religion which I can lightly regard as a distraction or mere sidelight to Christianity. I now understand that geographically, historically and existentially, Israel is the carefully prepared and cultivated ground from which the latter faith sprang.

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Frequently over the course of our tour I was reminded of the – I almost want to call it a ‘comeuppance’ – that crashed upon my consciousness prior to coming into the Catholic Church when I finally decided it was time to read the Holy Bible in its entirety. In some passive way I must have already been aware of a certain disparity between the constituent parts of Christianity’s primary literary document. But taking up the good book at that moment in my religious formation, I was floored by the magnitude of the disproportion which so clearly reveals how very much Christianity owes to the Jews.

More than eight hundred pages of Jewish wisdom, legend and history – otherwise known as the Old Testament – precedes and sets up and profoundly informs the comparatively modest two hundred pages of Christ-centred New Testament that follows. At first blush, the newer faith can almost seem like a burr that has hitched a ride to the Promised Land on a sweater sleeve as the older faith passed by. But there’s something much more dynamic going on here than that.

Once you comprehend how the incarnation of Christ enhanced and fulfilled the Jewish experience of God’s participation in human existence, a much more charitable metaphor occurs; that of a Holy Child who has scrambled up onto the shoulders of his prescient parent to attain his perfect vista. In this most sovereign of successions, the two faiths really are that vitally and inextricably linked. In the wake of our tour, I will never again hesitate to characterize the world-shaping perspective which these two faiths forged as ‘Judeo-Christian’.

In recounting our Holy Land tour in the last Hermaneutics, I did my best to keep the focus on the historical aspects of what we saw and experienced with a particular emphasis on the life of Christ and the early beginnings of His Church. I was determined to avoid any mention in that essay of the inter-religious and political squabbles which have plagued Israel since its designation or reclamation as a Jewish state seventy-five years ago this spring. It so happens that those tensions are operating at a higher pitch than usual because of that anniversary of Jewish jurisdiction which Israel’s neighbours find so galling and also the co-incidental overlapping this spring of the moveable religious observances of Passover, Ramadan and Lent, leading up to Easter.

Of course strife in that region had been pretty well constant and long preceded the establishment of modern day Israel. For hundreds upon hundreds of years, Muslims, Christians and Jews struggled for supremacy in a land that holds such rich significance for adherents of all three faiths. And at various moments in the past when each of those parties had their moment at the top of the greasy pole and got to call the shots, they were all seen to throw their weight around in some appalling ways.

Christians are only incidental players in Israel nowadays – our greatest impact might well be as economy-boosting tourists – and leave the argy-bargy to the Muslims (who instigate virtually all of the attacking) and the Jews (who repel and try to head off those attacks). On a sliver of land that isn’t even as large as Vancouver Island, today’s Israel governs itself and relates to her neighbours with conspicuous openness and generosity. Fully democratic and one of the most economically dynamic countries in the world, Israel now stands alone in a sea of despotic dysfunction. Surrounded by resentful and low-functioning countries that wage incessant attacks (with the support of anti-Semitic entities from all around the globe) Israel hangs in there, protected and sustained by her own formidably efficient defense apparatus.

As a child, I would read news accounts of attacks along Israel’s borders and think that if I lived in such a contentious region, I’d probably find a way to relocate to some quieter, more anonymous corner of the globe where – Candide-like – I could cultivate my garden in unharassed peace. But as I grew older, I came to understand that even in a ‘New World’ backwater like London, Ontario (where few families’ roots go deeper than a couple generations) it is only natural for people to manifest deep spiritual bonds with the land of their origin. This gave me a measure of empathy not just for citizens who refuse to give up on their country because it happens to be located in a war zone but also for exiles who’ve had to carry the image of a lost homeland for generations as they bed down each night, inconsolable, by the unloved waters of Babylon.

I know that the circumstances attending the creation of modern-day Israel gave rise to some deep and lingering resentments which, seventy-five years on, don’t seem to have abated. Perhaps it is futile to point out that no nation was ever forged without conflict ... that there are other similarly intractable hotspots festering away on our globe today (Russia/Ukraine and China/Taiwan spring to mind right now) ... and that often the best solution that can be achieved in the wake of a perceived raw deal is for both parties to establish and maintain the least abrasive status quo which they can concoct. All the evidence I’ve seen suggests that there are few concessions that Israel won’t make if her neighbours will just lay down their vendetta against the Jews. Yes, indeed, the Jews do stubbornly insist that they have a right to exist. On that point Israel will not budge and there are at least six million never-to-be-forgotten reasons for holding that line.
 
Perhaps you can tell that it is far from a matter of indifference to me which group controls Israel today. After all that they have suffered at the hands of just about everybody, I am glad that, however artificially it may have been contrived, the Jews once again have a place of their own where they can hunker down when the times turn rancid. Even if that home is tiny and requires constant vigilance to defend, that surely beats finding yourself at the mercy of temperamental host states that occasionally get it into their heads that they aren’t just tired of having you around, they’d like to annihilate you and your kind altogether. And I further have to admit that I trust the Jews far more than the repressive, icon-smashing Muslims to preserve and fairly administer the full range of religious and cultural heritages that flourish in this uniquely endowed land.

So, there’s my position on governance in the Holy Land; offered not because I believe anyone’s going to find it persuasive or particularly illuminating or original but to give you some personal context as I describe my experiences with the two most politically ‘loaded’ sites that we visited in the last couple of Jerusalem-based days of our tour.

First up was the Western Wall. This massive retaining wall of the First and Second Jerusalem Temples is one of Judaism’s oldest and holiest sites. Also known as the Wailing Wall because of the prayers which are constantly sent up there, the Wall directly abuts the Muslim Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is one of Islam’s holiest sites. We had to pass through the heaviest security of our tour to get onto the open square in front of the Wall and were wanded and patted down by Israeli guards who were considerably more pleasant and respectful than the petty tyrants who routinely perform such tasks at Canadian airports. Surveillance drones were zipping about overhead. Armed police and military personnel moved among us on the ground and also monitored the scene from a sort of elongated watchtower that reached up to the top of the Wall. Such a heavy security presence made some of our fellow pilgrims nervous but I was glad they were there.

The Western Wall [Photo: Diane Sloot]

I was however shy about going up to the Wall where dozens of Jews and a good many Christians (including many from our group) recited their prayers and inserted notes of holy petition into crevices between the enormous boulders. I held back, not out of nervousness or fear, so much as respect for another people’s tradition. I was content – and a little awestruck – to stand in a merciful sliver of shade on the far side of the square and gaze upon this ancient shrine that I’ve seen in so many pictures and movies and paintings. Mostly as I stood there, drinking it all in, I gratefully recalled John Paul II’s long-desired visit here, quite late in his life, on March 26th of 2000. In humility and silence this most beloved of Popes spoke for billions of Christians in the prayer that he set into the Wall:

“GOD OF OUR FATHERS,
YOU CHOSE ABRAHAM AND HIS DESCENDANTS
TO BRING YOUR NAME TO THE NATIONS.
WE ARE DEEPLY SADDENED
BY THE BEHAVIOUR OF THOSE
WHO IN THE COURSE OF HISTORY
HAVE CAUSED THESE CHILDREN OF YOURS
TO SUFFER,
AND ASKING YOUR FORGIVENESS
WE WISH TO COMMIT OURSELVES
TO GENUINE BROTHERHOOD
WITH THE PEOPLE OF THE COVENANT.”

Visiting the second site, Yad Vashem, was a much more daunting experience, entailing a dreaded re-immersion in the loathsome details of an utterly despicable chapter of history that I already know well but can never know well enough and ardently wish I didn’t have to know at all. The horror that is commemorated here was perpetrated too recently to be safely written off as some archaic fluke that could never happen again.

And it was committed on too large a scale to be dismissed as only a factional or regional disgrace. The blame which emanates from this most unnatural of disasters not only compelled the Pope to make his public act of repentance on behalf of the Catholic Church, but reaches halfway around the globe to supposedly innocuous states like Canada; indicting us for refusing to open our doors to people in such desperate need of sanctuary that they make many contemporary refugees look like sightseers on a day trip.

Situated on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Yad Vashem is an enormous Holocaust Museum that took a full decade to design and construct. Cut into the side of a mountain, this brutalist bunker of a Museum is ingeniously laid out like a tunnel with a series of themed galleries off to either side which you zigzag your way through as you take in a mostly chronological exposition of the plight of the Jews in Europe toward the end of the first half of the twentieth century. Moving along the Museum’s central hallway, you are on a downward incline from the moment you enter which is both spiritually and psychologically apt.

Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum. [Photo: Diane Sloot]

In those side galleries you encounter blown up photographs of hellish scenes and carefully curated displays of small mountains of banned books and purloined silver-plate, a wall of claustrophobic bunks from one of the concentration camps, a reconstructed gas chamber and one of the actual boxcars that transported Jews to their death. There are official documents that speak of atrocities in sanitized bureaucratese and newspaper clippings that fumble to grasp the full horror of what was being perpetrated. There are personal letters and diary pages, sketches and paintings and family photographs, documentary news clips from the ‘30s and ‘40s and filmed latter-day interviews with survivors of the Shoah.

Two of the interviews I watched that made a particular impression recalled instances when it wasn’t just the world that had turned against the Jews in such an appalling way. Such was the wicked ingenuity of the Holocaust that in the utter hopelessness of their plight, many Jews were degraded and coerced into turning on each other as well. An old woman from the Warsaw ghetto recounted the resentment that older prisoners expressed to the younger ones when they’d catch them plotting desperate maneuvers of escape. If those schemes failed – and they probably would – more severe punishments would be swiftly imposed on everyone. But so what? All but the most delusional knew that their own extinction was imminent anyway but still they censured the brave souls among them who risked bringing that death forward one second sooner by trying to find a way to live.

Then there was the old man fighting back tears some sixty years after the fact as he recalled that day when he was barely a teenager and he and his family were being marched into their death camp. He knew it would get him a bullet to the head if he stopped to help his ailing father who’d collapsed as they were being herded along ... and so he kept on walking without so much as a glance for the man who’d given him life. His father was dead two days later anyway and the boy’s own death wouldn’t have improved a blessed thing. But more than half a century later he still couldn’t forgive himself for the betrayal.

I was not looking forward to visiting Yad Vashem. And in my weakest, shallowest and most forgetful moments, I would catch myself studying our itinerary to see where we’d be going each day and wondering what this horrid block of misery was doing at the very end of our tour. Well, the question answered itself by posing another: And just what is this magical place of unbroken sunshine and pleasantness that you’re visiting? Why, I’m on a tour of the Holy Land which I wouldn’t have bothered coming to at all if the Jewish Messiah and my personal Saviour hadn’t been born here and lived here and taught here and then fallen into the hands of fallen people just like me who stripped Him and whipped Him and spat on Him and then nailed Him to a cross. In short, I’m required to visit this place so that I never forget that this is just the sort of atrocity that I am capable of should I ever get it into my head that I am the arbiter of which people do and which people don’t have value.

Our group had about three and a half hours at Yad Vashem. But you could – I won’t say ‘easily’ – devote a week to the place and not run out of heart-rotting material to examine and study. Allow me to share with you a subversive – if not blasphemous – thought that occurred to me as I careened my way through that chamber of horrors which so vividly chronicled the Nazi campaign to exterminate an inferior race. If some vain idiot really wants to play the monstrous game of ‘Which race is better than all the others?’ . . . and if they bother to factor in desirable human characteristics like intelligence and talent and humour and ingenuity and adaptability and enterprise and diligence . . . does there anywhere breathe a bonehead so benighted that he would not grant the Jews a place at or near the top of that roster? I mean, just going by Nobel prizes which have been bestowed in every field of positive human endeavour, does any other people even come close?

What in the world could inspire such hatred of any group? It’s an unsettling question to even contemplate as it entails examination of the very darkest forces by which the human heart can be captured and controlled. The closest thing to a satisfying answer that I have ever found comes from Andrew Klavan’s spiritual memoir, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ (2016). I was struck by Klavan’s formulation when I first read it a couple years ago and it resonates with me even more today since visiting Israel as a Christian and coming to this deeper appreciation of the supernaturally familial relationship – child to parent and brother to brother – between our two faiths:

“There are some people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The very fact that there is so great an evil, so great that it defies any material explanation, implies a spiritual and moral framework that requires God’s existence. More than that. The Holocaust was an evil that only makes sense if the Bible is true, if there is a God, if the Jews are his people, and if we would rather kill him and them than truly know him, and ourselves.”

The ingenuity of Yad Veshem’s layout and design carries through to the very end where you finally start to ascend and the galleries off to the side are devoted to the war’s aftermath and the international campaign to return the Jews to the Holy Land. For what they call the Museum’s ‘Epilogue’, you move through the Hall of Names where testimony and information are preserved to memorialize millions of Holocaust victims. Overhead a spectacular dome is plastered with photographs of many of those who perished. At first, all you can see as you make your way up the final stairway to the exit is an overarching window of sky until you come up to the level of the tall glass doors and pushing through, you literally emerge from the side of the mountain onto an immense patio/balcony that looks out over the valley below.

Standing out there in the sunlight and fresh air at last and reflecting on all the suffering and strife you’ve just seen commemorated inside, you can make out Jerusalem in the distance; that single most contested city in the history of the world. Dear God, you think to yourself; it’s still there. In the wake of your visit to Yad Vashem, you understand with a new acuity that while there are no guarantees of a safe passage in this world for any of us, no group has been so vulnerable to the mercy of mankind’s destructive whims for so perilously long as the Jews. And there, arrayed below you from one end of the horizon to the other, is the one necessity which, finally attained, they will never give up – a fighting chance.