Authors: Bruce Feiler
In 1980, a local Jewish high school student was murdered in Hebron, and later eight more were shot from a building. Jewish settlers swarmed the neighborhood, seeking retaliation. That began a cycle of murder and revenge that only worsened after the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, which gave the Palestinians control of the city. Twenty percent was reserved for Jews, an area the size of a few city blocks. The fifty-five families who occupy the Jewish quarter today are like the core of one of those stackable Russian dolls: a Jewish enclave surrounded by an Arab city; an Arab city surrounded by the Occupied West Bank; the West Bank surrounded by the Jewish State; the Jewish State surrounded by
the Arab World; the Arab World surrounded by the West. Who has the upper hand; who is more vulnerable? It’s not that the answer is complicated. There simply is no answer.
We traveled through eight checkpoints in the next ten minutes; the watchtowers grew taller. We were descending through the Arab body of town into the Jewish heart. A boy across from me, no more than thirteen, changed the prayer tape in his Walkman and continued nodding, oblivious to the stress. Outside, at one of the checkpoints, a soldier focused the scope on his sniper’s rifle. He was wearing a helmet with a visor that shielded his face from the sun, but he appeared to be not much older than Noah, who continued answering questions from his father.
“And do you know why we’re coming here?” the father asked.
“Because Abraham is buried here,” the boy said, jubilantly.
“That’s right,” his father said.
“He’s the father of the Jews,” Noah added.
“That’s right,” his father said. “And Isaac’s buried here, too. Do you know Isaac?”
The boy acted puzzled for a second. “The uncle of the Jews?”
Even around the bus depot, the streets were clogged. Arab vendors pushed forward hawking raisins, dried apricots, pink velour rugs, and every electronic gadget imaginable, from portable microphones to blenders. Hello? Hello! Shalom!
Bevakahsha!
Up a small hill, an even greater throng lined the plaza. Tens of thousands crammed into the mile or so in front of the tomb, an imposing, four-story limestone building on top of the burial caves that looks like a cross between an Ottoman fortress and a college gymnasium. Even a cannonball could not penetrate these walls.
Out in front, dozens of Orthodox Jewish vendors vied for attention. One foldout table overflowed with books offering guidance from long-bearded rabbis. Another sold jigsaw puzzles with pictures of the Western Wall. Four boys wearing sandals, white shirts, and
talit,
traditional Jewish prayer shawls, danced on the sidewalk, here a do-si-do,
there a hora, occasionally clicking their heels like square dancers. The scene looked like the opening number from
Fiddler on the Roof
. There were bumper stickers, blankets, places to wash, and everywhere boys holding plastic canisters, which they shook and asked for contributions for various charities. All around dozens of loudspeakers screamed slogans, prayers, and testimonials of salvation. “Are you Jewish?” someone asked, tugging at my arm. “Are you Jewish?” Another spun me around. In months of traveling around the Middle East, I was never asked that question more than during my trip to Hebron.
“Are you Jewish?” a woman behind a table cried. Her station was scattered with boxes wrapped in aluminum foil and copies of a pamphlet,
L’Chaim,
“The Weekly Publication for Every Jewish Person, Dedicated to the Memory of Rebbitzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson.”
When I said yes, she asked me for my favorite Hebrew letter. There are 304,000 characters in the Torah, she said, and the Lubavitch movement was making a Bible with each character assigned to a different person. She also asked for my mother’s name. “Is she Jewish?” she said, a not-so-subtle way of discerning whether I was a “true” Jew. I said yes and gave her several more names. “God bless you,” she said.
Closer to the cave I stopped by a booth that sold photographs of Rebbe Schneerson. The man behind the table, a Frenchman named Michel, claimed to be the official photographer of the movement. I asked him why there were so many Lubavitchers in Hebron today.
“We come here to celebrate,” he said. “We come every year. This is where our relatives are buried.”
“How does this compare to the Western Wall?”
“The Western Wall has less meaning for me than this. The Wall is a physical thing. These are actual people. We believe that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not just buried here, we believe they’re still alive.” He told me the story of someone who had lost a sword, went inside a cave to look for it, and encountered Abraham.
“The patriarchs are still alive,” I said, “or their spirit is still alive?”
“They are alive.”
“And what will you ask them for?”
“Whatever we need. We ask, and they provide. Somebody wants to
get married. Somebody is going to have a child. I will ask for peace. We need peace more than anything.”
I walked up another hill and merged with several thousand people squeezed in line behind a bank of metal detectors. We were waiting to enter one of the most sacred spots in Judaism, the first place Abraham purchases a spot in the Promised Land and thus starts to claim his covenant.
In Genesis 23, following the birth of Isaac and Abraham’s aborted sacrifice of him, events that Avner and I would come to later, the Bible reports that Sarah, at the age of 127, dies in “Kiryat Arba”—the city of Arba—“now Hebron, in the land of Canaan.” Abraham mourns and bewails her. Then he rises from beside his deceased wife and says to the local residents, “I am a resident alien among you; sell me a burial site among you, that I may remove my dead for burial.” The locals, whom the Bible identifies as Hittites, another migrant people from Mesopotamia, warmly receive the idea. “Hear us, my lord,” they say to Abraham. “You are the elect of God among us. Bury your dead in the choicest of our burial places.” Abraham then offers to buy the cave of Machpelah, on the land of Ephron, son of Zohar. Ephron proposes to donate the land, but Abraham insists, ultimately paying four hundred shekels of silver, “the going merchants’ rate.” He then buries Sarah on the site.
The fortress that I was about to enter is said to exist on the exact spot where Abraham buried Sarah. It was built two thousand years ago, perhaps by Herod the Great. Despite its scale, the building uses no mortar. Inside, it contains a courtyard and two colonnades containing memorials to Abraham, Sarah, and Jacob. The memorials to Isaac and Rebekah are in an adjacent room. The burial caves themselves are hidden beneath a marble floor. After the Six-Day War, Moshe Dayan, the flamboyant military commander and amateur archaeologist, sneaked in one night and lowered a twelve-year-old girl down a narrow hole to look for the caves. She found a long corridor and a blocked entrance. Later, Jews again entered in the middle of the night, removed a Muslim prayer rug, and scouted the caves, finding bones and earthenware from the first millennium
B.C.E.
These shed little light on the patriarchs, but do indicate that the cave was a holy site as early as three thousand years ago.
Tension surrounding the tombs flared dramatically in 1994 when Baruch Goldstein, an American Jewish settler, entered on the last day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and gunned down twenty-nine Palestinians, before being beaten to death. Thirty more Palestinians died in riots that followed. Since then, Jews have been limited to half of the facility—the one including the tombs of Abraham, Sarah, and Jacob. Muslims have the other half. Each side gets unlimited access on ten days a year. Today was one of the Jewish days, which accounted for the thousands waiting by the metal detectors. After the first bank, there was a second, where visitors were asked if they had weapons, video equipment, plastic knives, even compacts for makeup. Compacts? “It could have a mirror,” the guard said. “Crack a mirror, it becomes a weapon.”
Inside, the crowd was almost overbearing, spilling through a maze of small rooms, larger rooms, spiral staircases, and impromptu prayer circles. The atmosphere was as fervid as a medieval cathedral on pilgrimage day. In the smaller rooms, chairs were huddled and worshipers crowded in casual exchange. The covered courtyard was even more intense. In front of each shrine, men nodded in prayer, swaying in unison, but chanting in isolation. Behind them stood scores of women, hiding their faces in their books and generally swaying in a circle instead of front to back. Well behind the worshipers, and by far the majority, were the families, hundreds of them, sitting on the floor, mothers tending their children, children scampering away. One woman was spooning her young son kernels of corn from a can.
I wandered from shrine to shrine, before arriving in the room dedicated to Isaac and Rebekah. There I saw Michel, the photographer I had met outside. We started talking when suddenly he interrupted himself, “Are you Jewish?” When I told him yes he asked why I wasn’t wearing a
kippah
. I explained that I hadn’t brought one and that they were out of temporary ones at the door. I continued my question. “But you need a
kippah
!” he exclaimed. I reached in my bag, pulled out a notebook, and ripped out a piece of paper. “How will you keep it on?” he
asked. By this point several people were watching. “I’ll hold it,” I said. I did so and continued our conversation, but my pose was so awkward he quickly dismissed himself and went to pray somewhere else. I removed the piece of paper and walked toward the other side of the room; several more people hissed at me along the way. I returned the paper to my head. I could not remember feeling more naked—or chastened—as I slouched through the crowds toward the door.
Outside I walked the few steps through the crowded Arab market that splits the Jewish Quarter in two. Up above was a sign:
THIS MARKET IS BUILT ON LAND STOLEN FROM THE JEWS
. The central square of the Jewish Quarter is hardly bigger than a city block, with several limestone apartment buildings crowded around a playground. Overshadowing the quadrangle were three enormous water towers, like booster rockets on the space shuttle, with Israeli flags painted on the side.
“Sixty percent of our water comes from Arafat,” a man watching his children explained. He had a salt-and-pepper beard and knitted
kippah
. “We have to check it for poison. Every week we get a backup shipment from Jerusalem.”
David Wilder was a resident of Hebron. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Israel in the 1970s, married an Israeli, and came to nearby Kiryat Arba. Six months earlier, he, his wife, and their seven children moved into the disputed neighborhood.
“We had to think about it,” he said. “My wife and I had been discussing various options, when one day a terrorist jumped into the bedroom of a sixty-three-year-old rabbi who lived here and killed him. That convinced us to move.”
“Why that?”
“Because the whole act of terror is an attempt to push us out. They figure they kill enough people, eventually we’ll get up and leave. The only way to counter that is to do the opposite. Actually, the major problem we have is that we don’t have enough room. I’m not the only crazy one around here.”
“And are you crazy?”
“You tell me. I don’t think so. I think we’re about as normal as anybody can possibly be.”
“But you’re choosing to put yourself into a tinderbox.”
“We’re here as representatives. We have to remember why the Jewish people live in the Land of Israel. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, when asked what his claim to the land was, held up the Bible. If we weren’t here today, the Bible would have no meaning.”
“So when you read the Bible, and you read about Abraham coming to Hebron, do you feel an attachment?”
“When we pray three times a day, we say in the beginning, ‘The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.’ And when we stand here and realize, this is where they are, this is where they lived, this is where they’ve been for the last 3,700 years—it does something to a person. You’re living in a city, and it’s a city. It smells, it’s dirty, but it’s also very spiritual. And that’s what keeps people here. The only way to live here is to have that spiritual pull that gives you energy to put up with what you have to put up with.”
“Is that spiritual connection to the place, or the patriarchs?”
He thought for a second. “The connection is to God. He’s the one who brought us here. Abraham didn’t come here because he wanted to. He came here because God told him to come. And it’s not just him. It’s a history that runs from Abraham to David, who lived here for seven and a half years. Moses sent the spies, and they came to Hebron. Just the other day I held this jug in my hand. It was four thousand years old. And it was me. There is this chain that goes from four thousand years ago to today. How can you erase it? How can you say it doesn’t exist? The fact that we can be here—and are here—means we are preserving it for my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They should have access to it. It shouldn’t be a place that once existed. It should be a place that always exists.”
I took the bus back to Jerusalem that afternoon and a few days later hooked up with Avner to continue our trip south, to the region where
Abraham first put down roots. Following the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (and before Hebron), Abraham travels south to Gerar, where he meets King Abimelech. Echoing the earlier incident in Egypt, Abraham says that Sarah is his sister. Abimelech takes Sarah for himself, but is warned off by God. The king summons Abraham and asks why he told a lie. “I thought surely there is no fear of God in this place,” Abraham says, “and they will kill me because of my wife.” And besides, he says, she actually
is
his sister, since they have the same father (though different mothers). Abimelech, like the pharaoh, repents by giving Abraham sheep, oxen, and slaves, adding, “Here, my land is before you; settle wherever you please.” Abraham prays to God, who rewards Abimelech with children.
God then rewards Sarah with a child as well. In Genesis 21, Isaac, the long-promised next generation, is born. “God has brought me laughter,” Sarah says. While joyous, the presence of Isaac, whose name derives from a Near Eastern root meaning laughter and gaiety, actually confuses the issue of the patriarch’s succession. Sarah recognizes this and responds with an action that would prove to be one of the most monumental in world history: expelling Hagar and Ishmael from their home. “Cast out that slave woman and her son,” Sarah announces, “for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.” Abraham is troubled by Sarah’s action, but God comforts him. “Do not be distressed over the boy or your slave; whatever Sarah tells you, do as she says, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be continued for you.” As for Ishmael, God continues, “I will make a nation of him, too, for he is your seed.” It’s this line that Muslims cite as their claim to be one of God’s chosen people, directly descended from Abraham.