This video was made as a final project for a course I took in 2016 on Space and Place in Religion, with Judith Weisenfeld.
Click here for a PDF of this paper with bibliography.
Transcript
The Land of Israel was the first foreign land I ever learned about. My Bible, like many children’s Bibles, included maps of the Ancient Near East. When I got bored in Sunday School, I would trace the path of Jesus’ journeys across the Levant with my finger. Bethlehem, Nazareth, Capernaum, Jerusalem. I’d been hoping for decades to go see these sites, where so many familiar Biblical scenes took place, when an opportunity finally arose this year. I eagerly booked a ticket and prepared to go, at long last, to the Holy Land.
I’m certainly not the only one whose life has been shaped by those biblical names. Indeed, much of American political history has been inspired by a certain sort of longing for the promised land.[1] Many of the first English settlers of the eastern seaboard likened their journey across the Atlantic to the Hebrews’ journey through the wilderness. They considered their new home a “New Jerusalem,” a place where they would be freed of the political problems they left behind in the Old World. Of course, America was never untarnished by the stain of injustice. Yet even many of those who suffered America’s greatest evils turned, just as the Puritans had, to a vision of the promised land, for hope.[2] Countless spirituals, like “I’m on my way to Canaan Land,” and “Deep River,” envisage the arrival in God’s promised land as the moment when all will be justice and peace. The symbol of a New Jerusalem, depicted in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, pervades American political culture. We have inherited a form of yearning for a place where death and sorrow and pain and injustice will be gone forever.
And so, it kind of makes sense that, as I boarded the plane for Tel Aviv, I found myself eager to cross over the water into the promised land. I knew the place I’d disembark wouldn’t be heaven, exactly, but I somehow imagined it would be something just a little closer. This video is about how problematic that expectation was. It’s the aim of this project to reevaluate the desire for the Promised Land that endures in America, and to consider what alternatives might remain.
Part I: Losing Paradise
After spending my first afternoon in Israel walking around Haifa, my first destination on the trip, I was suddenly incapacitated by food poisoning. I spent the first three days of the journey staring at the ceiling of my Airbnb room, barely able to move, occasionally comforted by my hosts’ dog, Zaya. Once I gathered the energy, I made the drive to Nazareth, my next stop. I entered Nazareth just as the sun went down, and I quickly became lost in the maze of its old city. I had hardly slept for days. As I broke down in tears, I tried to compose myself: here I was, in Jesus Christ’s own backyard, and all I could muster was despair. A kind Arab family helped me find my way, and I finally arrived at my hostel. I tried my best to sleep, confident that once I spent time in the holy ground where Jesus began his ministry, things would surely get better.
Over the next several days, I journeyed to many of the places whose names had long been familiar to me. I visited Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine, and the Sea of Galilee, where he walked on water and calmed the storm, and then visited Capernaum, where he healed many ailing locals. Just as I was beginning to sense my own strength recovering, though, I began to succumb to loneliness. I wondered if I had made a mistake travelling through the Holy Land by myself. I grew envious of the busloads of American pilgrims who recited Amazing Grace together at the seashore, and shared communion at the place where Jesus had shared a meal with his disciples after his resurrection. It seemed somehow that the meaning of the place worked the same way an inside joke works—it only really meant something if you could share it with other people.
But I slowly began to notice that the place they were seeing wasn’t real. Sure, they could walk and talk around each sacred shrine, and would have the selfies to prove it. But even as it became a physical, tangible reality for these pilgrims, it remained a sort of mirage: hilltops and chapels unmoored from their precarious political settings. The tour guides shuffled their groups from sanctuary to sanctuary, and gave the pilgrims fifteen or so minutes at each sacred spot to commune with their God. Their tour buses, like giant rolling fortresses, shielded them from the troubled political context they travelled through. And as it shielded them, it also preserved their notion that, somehow, they had arrived at a sort of New Jerusalem.
Nowhere was this unreality clearer than at Yardenit, the alternative baptismal site at the Jordan River.[3] When rising tensions between Israel and its neighbors in the sixties made it impossible to visit Jesus’ historical baptismal site, some clever entrepreneurs decided to offer an alternative at a location nearer to Galilee for Christians to visit. After all—went the logic—it’s still the Jordan River! And at this site, closer to the other sites of Jesus’ ministry, there was no need to travel through Palestinian territory or approach an unstable international border.[4] Even though the more historic location of Jesus’ baptism has since been opened, Yardenit’s yearly turnout continues to eclipse that of the historical location of Jesus’ baptism, and its gift shop does, too.[5]
Discovering this, though, didn’t make me any less lonely. Hoping to interact with other pilgrims, I desperately called a boat tour company to see if I could join a group for a tour of the Sea of Galilee. An hour later, I boarded a boat with seventeen Chinese tourists who hardly knew that Jesus had been there. Instead of singing “Amazing Grace,” they had the captain blare Celine Dion’s hit from the movie Titanic, and then danced to Hava Nagila.[6] To my surprise, the group welcomed me with open arms. It wasn’t what I’d expected I’d find in the land where Jesus performed miracles—but there was no doubt something wondrous about it all.
Part II: As it isn’t in Heaven
On my sixth day in the Holy Land, as I neared Jerusalem, my spirits began to lift. My feelings of isolation were dispelled when I reunited with a dear friend, who I’d be staying with for the rest of the trip. And then I had my first real meal in nearly a week. But I was also lifted up by the thought of entering the holy city of Jerusalem, the place where many faiths, including my own, claim that God has been present in time and space. Though my expectation that I’d feel different somehow the moment I arrived in Israel had fallen through, I still imagined that when I crossed into what the psalms call the City of God, I’d surely sense something special.
Instead, the disenchantment I’d felt in Galilee intensified. Whereas, in Galilee, I was disoriented by human banalities like food poisoning and loneliness and the presence of Ikea billboards on holy Nazareth’s city streets, as I toured in and around Jerusalem, I was troubled by human cruelty. Within fifteen minutes of my arrival in Jerusalem, for example, I was startled to find an armored vehicle, a sort of small tank, pass us in the next lane over on the highway, on its way to Palestine. How could this possibly be the place that God could ever have been, or ever want to be? It seemed an unlikely spot for God to choose to bring about eternal peace.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised by the armored vehicle. Security is tight all over the country. During my first week in Israel, I had already gotten used to passing through metal detectors as I entered malls and train stations, and seeing teenaged soldiers board buses with automatic weapons in tow. But in the Jerusalem area, the presence of armed forces was even more striking. Of course, there is ample reason for the heightened security. Attacks continue in Jerusalem, and have escalated sharply since September 2015. Only a week before I arrived in Israel, four soldiers were killed and fifteen more were wounded when a Palestinian man rammed into them with a truck in the eastern part of Jerusalem.[7]
But the Israeli desire for security seemed to have warped into something else, something more extreme. It was unmistakable. The institute where I stayed during my week in Jerusalem was less than a block from the border between Israel and Palestine.[8] I could see the 25-foot tall separation wall, constructed in the last decade, from my doorstep. I knew that, unlike many Palestinians on the other side of the barrier, as an American citizen, I could cross the barrier without incident. And so I did.
As I approached the wall, I found myself once again crossing over into holy ground. The checkpoint I passed through was an entrance into Bethlehem, and the Church of the Nativity, which marks the spot of Jesus’ birth, was only a thirty-minute walk away. As I meandered through Bethlehem’s streets, I was troubled. This was the place that, according to the Christian faith, God had once physically shown up. And yet the little town of Bethlehem remained beset by political turmoil. To this day, the town hosts three different refugee camps, all established in the late forties for those who fled what has become the state of Israel. Today, these three camps alone house over 20,000 exiles.[9]
The same feeling struck me as I visited the historical baptismal site of Jesus on the Jordan River. The site, as was mentioned, is located in the West Bank, on the border with Jordan. It was only reopened in 2011, and landmines still remain around the location of the holy place. Once again, I arrived at a place where Christians believe God had been physically present—not only in the person of Jesus but also in the appearance of the Holy Spirit, which descended, according to the Bible, as Jesus emerged from the water. And yet even at this sacred site, Israeli soldiers brandish their weapons to guard the international border, and signs warn visitors of the dangers of unexploded ordnance.
I felt so foolish for having longed to come to this place, for having imagined that I would be able to commune with God here in some special way. Of course, I wasn’t uninformed about the unrest in Israel and Palestine; I had studied international politics and knew a great deal about the history of the conflict. But I had naively thought that it would nevertheless somehow feel different here, in the land of Abraham, and King David, and Jesus. Instead, I found that the holy land was ensnared in the same web of violence we knew so well at home. I began to wonder why the American political tradition continued to be influenced by such an ill-advised yearning for some kind of promised land. Indeed, I had been in the kingdom and heard Jordan roll. I had been to the place where Christians believe God had been at work in the world. And death and sorrow and pain hadn’t disappeared. They were right before my eyes.
Part III: Emmanuel
I began to wonder what it would mean to relinquish the vision of the Promised Land that I had inherited, as a Christian and as an American. If I relinquished that inherited yearning for that utopic Promised Land, would that also mean giving up hope on earthly justice altogether? I didn’t want to give up that commitment. But I also was concerned about the harm that the symbol of the Promised Land has inflicted in American politics. The promise became a weapon all too easily. Was there another way?
One of the favorite passages of the Puritans was Revelation 21, where John describes a New Jerusalem descending from heaven, a place in which sorrow would be no more. The Puritans inherited that dream from John, and we inherit it from them in turn. But there is a different reading available for readers of the text in the third verse of that chapter, which relates God’s promise to be present with his people.
This is a promise with a long history. In the Hebrew Bible, God promises, again and again, to be present with his people: he makes this promise to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, David, and, through many of the prophets, God makes this promise to all of the Israelites. God’s promise to be present in their midst doesn’t mean that the evils that they suffer—and enact—will come to an end. In the Exodus story, for example, God promises to be with Moses and the Hebrews, but that doesn’t mean God will teleport the Hebrews to the Promised Land. Rather, they must travel through the sea—literally—and across the wilderness to get there. But God accompanies them, as he promised, in a cloud of light and fire.
According to the Christian tradition, this same promise is fulfilled in the person of Christ, who is also called Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” Just as in the Exodus story, though, the advent of God in Jesus does not bring evil to an end. Rather, Jesus is born into a community dominated by repressive colonial power and rent by political schisms between insurgents and loyalists.[10] Neither was Jesus’ world fixed by his execution; many of his closest friends and followers also suffered unthinkable deaths.
On the alternative reading, the miracle is not so much that there is a promised land, but that God chooses to journey with his people on the way there. This reading stresses that this world is not free of darkness, but that there is a companion in the darkness, one who empowers humans to live justly—and holds them responsible when they live unjustly.
How might American history have been different if, rather than imagining their community as a divinely ordained utopia, the early colonists had emphasized the presence in their midst of a just and merciful God, in the ways they were blessed and judged? If they had stopped exulting in their divine chosenness, and instead repented of their maltreatment of the indigenous populations they encountered? The problem, I came to believe, was not that the early settlers looked to the Biblical texts for inspiration. The problem arose when they forgot that theirs was an errand in the wilderness, and began to confuse their new home for the Promised Land, imagining it to have been endowed to European descendants by God himself.[11]
But it’s easy to be subsumed by one’s longing for the Promised Land—I certainly was while I travelled through Israel and Palestine. I failed, all too often, to consider how God may have been present during the wilderness of my travels through the Levant. I had overlooked the comfort I received from Zaya, my Airbnb host’s dog, when I was sick, and I had failed to recognize the kindness offered to me by the group of Chinese sightseers in Galilee. But even as I was blessed by these mercies I also was judged: for my hypocritical contempt for the evangelical tourists taking selfies in Galilee, for the lack of concern I had previously had for the Palestinians confined by Israel’s wall, for my unwillingness to appreciate the Israelis’ concerns about safety and security.
I slowly recognized that, if God was present in my midst, that meant that God could empower and embolden me to do better. That was the case in Israel and in Palestine, and it would continue to be the case even as I returned to the American wilderness.
[1] For further discussion, see Walzer, Exodus and Revolution; Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad. This project has been particularly informed by Walzer’s account of the ways the Exodus story has shaped Western political thinking.
[2] See Glaude, Exodus!. Glaude’s work shows us that the victims of the institution of slavery identified America not as the promised land, but as Egypt.
[3] See Toth Stub, “How Tourism Reinvented Jesus’ Baptism Site.”
[4] It is also much cleaner, which is relevant not only due to aesthetic preferences, but also health concerns. See Lidman, “Baptism by Mire? In Lower Jordan River, Sewage Mucks up Christian Rite.”
[5] Yardenit receives over half a million visitors a year, while Qasr el-Yahud receives about 400,000. See Toth Stub, “How Tourism Reinvented Jesus’ Baptism Site.”
[6] Their captains also played the Chinese national anthem. This influenced my understanding of Kaell’s note that American Christians on similar tours of the Sea of Galilee often include a recitation of the American national anthem. Tour guides insisted to me that they know what to play to appeal to their audiences. To some degree, I imagined that the guides had a pulse on something I didn’t myself know, but I also was skeptical of the guides’ expertise in their audiences’ preferences. It seemed an entire paper could be written on the music selections that tour guides curate for their clientele, based on their religious and national backgrounds.
[7] See Kershner, “4 Die in Jerusalem Attack as Palestinian Rams Truck Into Soldiers.”
[8] I stayed at Tantur Ecumenical Institute, an educational institution hosted by Notre Dame.
[9] United Nations Relief and Works Agency, “Where We Work.”
[10] See Horsley, Bandits, Prophets & Messiahs; Horsley, Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine.
[11] Recent work on the Puritans’ understanding of their work finds less fault with the first generation of Puritans, who, as Miller reminds us, imagined their work as an “errand in the wilderness” in Miller, Errand into the Wilderness. For scholars like Bercovitch, it is the Puritans’ progeny that get particularly ensnared by the image of the Promised Land; see Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad.