We are home now with much to think about and digest following an incredible trip in the land where Jesus walked, taught, healed, died, and was raised. As Christian pilgrims, we went to enter into this story and hopefully come into spiritual contact with the person we consider our Savior. As I mentioned in one of the first posts, before leaving on the trip, one of the children at St. Andrew’s School, a first grader, asked me to please take a picture with Jesus to share with them when I get back. All I could do was chuckle in delight while thinking that I had much explaining to do when I got back. In retrospect, I think this child knows more about adult behavior than I realized, because all 38 of us went from site to site taking pictures like paparzzi desperate for a glimpse of our religion’s greatest celebrity. The point is, for Christians coming from outside of Israel and Palestine, the place is about a the person of Jesus Christ; the land is holy primarily virtue of Jesus’ presence in it.
For those who live there, however, the land is holy for very different reasons. One of our speakers, Dr. Yarden, explained to me, that for Jews the land is in and of itself holy, starting from the site of the Holy of Holies on the Temple Mount and spreading out in concentric circles wider and wider. There is no place that is not holy in all the land, which is why many orthodox Jews will get off the plane and immediately kiss the ground. It is, to them, the promised land. The specific location of historic events is not necessarily of utmost importance. What is of utmost importance is its representation of the relationship – the covenant – between God and the Jewish people. After the holocaust when over 6 million Jews were systematically subjected to state-sponsored murder, the land also represents the security of a Jewish state – a place where Jewish people might be safe from anyone or any nation ever again trying to wipe them off the face of the earth. The land itself is like a signpost on the door calling for God’s protection and care.
For the Palestinians – both Christian and Muslim – the land is no less important. Their lives are inextricably tied to it, despite being forced from it and having lived as an occupied people in for much of modern history. Nasser, our guide, is a Palestinian Christian born in the Old City of Jerusalem. He and his family are refugees twice over. His grandfather fled what is now Northern Israel in the late 40s when civil war broke out, the state of Israel was established and many Palestinians fled, were ejected from their homes or killed in the conflict that ensued. He fled up through Jordan and back into the territory to settle his family in what is now the West Bank. In the 1967 War between Israel and the neighboring Arab States, Nasser’s family again lost their land and became refugees for the second time. When you enter the home of a refugee in Palestine, you will most likely find the keys to their original homes hanging in some prominent place. Their ability to return home, called the ‘right of return,’ is one of the key sticking points in peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine.
For all these groups of people, the land is more than about livelihood; it is about their identity as a people. They belong to the land, and it represents nothing less than life and freedom for them.
I said after my first trip here (this was my third) that this place seeps into your skin and settles in your bones in some inexplicable way. If it does that for me, it’s almost unimaginable how deeply it is settled into those who live there.