First Steps

The first time I toured Israel I cut my trip short a few days. A parishioner in my congregation passed away and I came back to do the funeral.

Traveling alone with a schedule change flagged my itinerary for the folks at El Al. After being ticketed a very beautiful woman approached me. I am generally unaware of people’s appearance, but this young woman was quite amazing. Later I would discover, this was part of their tactics.

“Where are you traveling,” she asked?

I muttered something about the US as she gently took my tickets. Scanning the pages she said, “what holy sites did you visit during your stay in Israel?”

The question threw me. “I didn’t go to holy sites. We visited archeological sites or historical sites that are mentioned in the Bible. But not holy sites.”

She flashed me a look that discerned I was more a risk to myself than anyone else and then invited me to meet her colleague for my next set of questions. Her colleague had a good four inches on me and at least 60 pounds which means he was enormous. As this hulking tree trunk rummaged through my suitcase I got it. The first person, the woman, was to disarm me; the second was to alarm me.

The impressions the two made have lingered as a fun memory, but what has really stayed with me as a kind of perennial question is the one of “holy site.” Why did I not view the places we visited as “holy”?

My first tour was in 1999. I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Rock, and the Wailing Wall. All of which are considered as the most holy of sites by three major religions of the world. Why did I not share their sense of awe?

Part of the answer was the nature of the visit. I was invited by Princeton Seminary to travel with classmates five years out of seminary. The trip was subsidized by a lovely donation from an Atlanta businessman and it was led by professors and directed by the leading archeologists in the Holy Land. The trip, then, had the feel of an academic endeavor. We talked a lot about competing theories for interpreting archeological finds; we found every site couched in caveat with the words “this isn’t the real site, but it’s a traditional one"; and our guide was doing his PhD in Hebrew studies so there was little that he didn’t doubt.

Another big part of the answer of not seeing the Holy Land as holy was the Protestant strain in me that said, God makes us Holy, God makes the church holy, not the building, not the place upon which we stand. Holiness was within the soul, not within a relic or surrounding a spot.

Yet, in the years that followed my first visit, I have changed my tune. If I were asked the same question by the El Al security person, (what holy sites did you visit?), I would start rattling off the churches of St. Helena and the tombs of this figure and that prophet, and it wouldn’t be just an attempt to avoid having my bag searched. It was a change of heart.