Jake was all right. He wasn’t dead. He was coming home. Hannah collapsed onto the nearest chair and wept.
Devorah began to laugh and cry at the same time as she struggled upright and reached for the telephone. “For goodness’ sake, Hannah, put this miserable receiver back on the hook and talk to the poor man!”
“I pray that I never have to go to war again,” Jake said as he and Hannah finally lay in each other’s arms. “I thought the weeks of waiting were bad, but the battle was worse—much worse than I can ever describe.”
“The world marvels that we won in
only
six days, but they weren’t here, Jake. They don’t know that those six days seemed like an eternity. Each day wasn’t twenty-four
hours
long, but twenty-four
years
! I wondered, sometimes, if we were facing another holocaust.”
“I know.” Jake’s arms went slack and he rolled onto his back, staring up at the darkened ceiling. “They were talking about passing out medals for bravery, but I told my C.O. I didn’t want one. I didn’t feel brave, Hannah. I felt terrified most of the time. Before the fighting we joked around and acted tough, but we were all shaking inside. When they gave the order and the assault began, I did what I was trained to do, but I knew this wasn’t another exercise or a drill. The shells were real, the machine-gun fire was real . . . and there was an enemy out there who wanted to kill me.”
Hannah moved closer, gripping him tightly, letting the warmth of him assure her that he was indeed alive. “When I was working at the hospital and all the wounded were coming in, I remembered the words you read to me in Isaiah where God promised to swallow up death forever. I kept thinking, ‘Now would be a good time, Lord.’”
“Yeah. It would have been. Men I knew died, Hannah. A lot of them.” He waited until he could go on. “I always wondered if it would be hard to kill the enemy. They tell you in training that the reason we drill so much is so that we’ll fire automatically, without thinking. But it was still hard. Ben and I talked about it while we were waiting to start the assault. He told me to think about you and Rachel, to imagine the Syrians overpowering our defenses, imagine them running up the stairs to our apartment and battering down our door like the Gestapo . . .” Jake’s voice broke. He paused again. “When the time came, I made myself fight so that you and Rachel wouldn’t have to be afraid. But I pray to God I never have to fight again.”
“No choice, Jake. They gave us no choice.”
“You know, the world is busy spinning myths about the amazing Israeli military and how we won against overwhelming odds, but they don’t understand that we were fighting to survive.”
“I hate the Arabs for putting us through that.”
Jake rolled onto his side and took her in his arms again. His dark brows creased into a frown. “Don’t hate them, Hannah. They win if you hate. The Holy One is a God of redemption, and it’s our job to show His redemption to the whole world. We can’t do that if we hate.”
What Jake was asking her to do was impossible. Hannah wondered if he would feel the same way if Israel had been defeated, if they were the ones who were prisoners of war in an occupied land instead of the Palestinians. “Our victory was miraculous, wasn’t it?” she said instead. “All of the ancient historical land of Israel is ours now—the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights! And Jerusalem! Think of it! The Old City, the Wailing Wall—we can pray at the wall for the first time in our lives, Jake! The Rockefeller Museum and the Dead Sea Scrolls are ours, too. And all those ancient sites are just waiting to be excavated.”
“You need to be part of it, Hannah. You need to go back to work. We won the city, but the battle for Jerusalem is far from over. You need to help excavate it and prove that it’s ours. Jerusalem is our ancestors’ most important legacy.”
“But what about Rachel?”
“Give her a shovel and let her dig alongside you. What kid wouldn’t love a giant sandbox?” Hannah hugged him harder still as tears of joy filled her eyes. “They intended to harm us,” Jake whispered, “but God intended it for good.”
As Hannah kissed him, she knew that her cup overflowed. She not only had Jake back in her arms, but all of Jerusalem at her feet.
CHAPTER 8
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL—1999
W
hat an incredible city!” Abby said as the bus rolled through the streets of Jerusalem. “I can hardly believe I’m here!”
“You aren’t disappointed, then?” Hannah asked. “People sometimes are. They say it’s so much smaller than they imagined, or they complain because it’s too modern.”
Ari leaned across the aisle and added, “And some people can’t help noticing how dirty certain sections are, and how much tension there is.”
“I think it’s beautiful,” Abby said. “I can understand why people still fight over it.”
Their bus had traveled down the Jordan Valley for a day of touring and lectures, stopping at the oasis of Jericho before climbing up the desolate Judean hills to Jerusalem. Hannah had explained how the mountain ridge divided the region, with green, productive land on the western slopes and parched, barren land on the eastern slopes, down to the Dead Sea. “You can see where King David got his inspiration for some of the psalms,” she said. “We thirst for God in a dry and weary land, then find Him enthroned on His holy hill.”
“I suppose if you live in a wasteland long enough you don’t realize what you’re missing,” Abby said. “I know it took this crisis with Mark to make me realize how thirsty I was.” She thought about how empty her life would be when she returned home with her husband gone, her children grown. She wondered if a closer relationship with God would really make a difference. Life in Israel had been immensely difficult for Hannah, yet her faith gave her a vitality and strength that Abby knew she lacked. As the bus climbed up into the cool green hills, the difference in landscapes was as stark as the contrast between Abby’s faith and her friend’s.
“The Dead Sea is the lowest place on earth,” Hannah said. “I think it was part of God’s design to require the Israelites to climb
up
from there to worship Him—from death to life. When the pilgrims finally reached His dwelling place in Jerusalem, they found it had been well worth the long, rugged journey. I know it’s a lesson I had to learn: Faith in God often comes by way of a hard upward road.”
Abby hadn’t expected Jerusalem to be surrounded by such lovely rolling hills. The city perched on the mountaintop like a proud, golden ship riding a wavy green sea. From a distance, it had appeared gilded, all of its buildings hewn from the same creamy limestone that had been quarried and used for construction since King David’s day. Hannah pointed out the golden dome of a Muslim mosque, standing where Solomon’s Temple had once stood. “According to tradition, the Temple also had a golden roof. The pilgrims would have seen it from afar as they climbed to the city.”
Portions of Jerusalem looked like any other modern city, with high-rise buildings, shopping plazas, and the bustle of traffic and buses. Other sections, like the Arab bazaar near the Damascus Gate, could have been a scene from Bible times, with bleating sheep and haggling merchants, sacks of aromatic spices and mounds of fruit. Abby could scarcely take it all in. A montage of pedestrians hurried across the intersection as the bus paused at a traffic light—Eastern Orthodox priests in black cassocks and glinting crosses, bearded Jewish men in dark suits and fur hats, Muslim women with ankle-length skirts and veiled heads. Arabic prayers blared from the top of a minaret, competing with the clamor of ringing church bells.
“This has to be the most religious city I’ve ever seen!” Abby said.
Ari frowned as he leaned toward them again. “It’s probably the most religious city in the world. The Jewish poet Yehuda Amichai says the air over Jerusalem is so saturated with prayers and dreams it is hard to breathe.”
At each tourist spot they visited, Abby heard guides lecturing to groups in various languages. She recognized Spanish, Italian, English, German, and French. “I never realized that tourists came here from all over the world,” she said when they returned to the bus.
Hannah smiled. “One of Jake’s favorite verses from Isaiah says that in the last days all the nations will come to worship on the Lord’s mountain. He pictures it like the Tower of Babel in reverse, with people of every language reunited here.”
“You are wrong to think they will ever be united,” Ari said, his voice sharp-edged. “It is true that people come here from all nations, but the walls dividing them are as thick and as high as the walls around the Old City. Even the name ‘Jerusalem’ is wrong. It is not a city of peace.”
“But Isaiah is a
Jewish
prophet, Ari,” Hannah said gently. “That verse is found in the Jewish scriptures. It
will
be fulfilled.”
Ari gave the shrug of a skeptic, shaking his head. Nearly every day he seemed to find a reason to argue with Hannah. Since the arguments were usually in Hebrew, Abby didn’t know what they were about most of the time, but she marveled at Hannah’s patience with him.
The bus parked outside the Jaffa Gate, which led inside the walls of the Old City. While most of the college students hurried ahead, Ari and Abby stayed by Hannah’s side as she maneuvered down the uneven, twisting lanes. Hannah seemed eager to continue the discussion they had begun on the bus.
“Do you call it a coincidence, Ari, that millions of followers of the three great world religions all come to worship God within these ancient walls?”
“I call it unfortunate,” he said, frowning again.
“Three of the holiest sites in the world can all be found in this small walled-in area called the Old City,” Hannah said, turning to Abby. “Muslims come to the Dome of the Rock, which is built over the place where Muhammad took his night journey into heaven. It’s their second holiest shrine after Mecca. Muhammad said that one prayer in Jerusalem outweighs a thousand elsewhere. Christians worship at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over the traditional site of Calvary and Christ’s empty tomb. Jews pray at the Wailing Wall, which is all that remains of our Temple. Solomon built the Temple oyer the place where Abraham offered his son Isaac to God.”
“Praying on the same scrap of land hardly unites the three,” Ari said. “In fact, it has been the cause of many problems.”
“They are also united by a common ancestor,” Hannah said. “All three religions trace the roots of their faith to Abraham—the Jews and the Christians through his son Isaac, the Arabs through his son Ishmael.”
“If we are one big happy family, why does the holiest Jewish site need to be fortified with guns and barricades?” Ari gestured to the army checkpoint they were approaching. Green-uniformed soldiers with guns slung over their shoulders searched backpacks and purses. Everyone was required to pass through a metal detector before entering the plaza facing the Wailing Wall.
“People who expect Jerusalem to have a holy atmosphere must be very disillusioned when they see these constant reminders of our hatred,” Ari said.
“It was no different when the Jewish Temple stood here,” Hannah said. “Worshipers who came to Jerusalem in Jesus’ time saw Roman soldiers patrolling the streets and the An-tonia Fortress dominating the plaza on the Temple’s north side. Yes, this is ‘holy ground’ in a sense, but at the same time, God expects us to live out our faith in a real world of pain and strife until His redemption is complete.” Ari shrugged again but didn’t reply.
Hannah gathered the group around her to explain that she would give them time to approach The Wall and pray if they wanted to—men on the left-hand side, women on the right. “Many people like to write out their prayers and place them in the cracks between the stones,” she said as she passed around a small pad of paper. “But first, listen to the words of Solomon’s prayer as he dedicated the Temple to God three thousand years ago.” She opened a pocket-sized Bible and began to read. “‘As for the foreigner who does not belong to your people Israel but has come from a distant land because of your name . . . when he comes and prays toward this temple, then hear from heaven, your dwelling place, and do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your own people Israel . . .’ You see, God’s Temple was to be a place of refuge for all who sought Him. Jesus threw the money changers out of the court where the Gentiles were allowed to pray, reminding the Jews that God’s house should be a place of prayer for all nations.”
As Abby entered the enclosure and slowly approached The Wall, she wondered what she should pray for. She hadn’t been able to forget Hannah’s story of the Six-Day War and how the Israelis had miraculously won back the Old City and the freedom to worship at this site. But Jake’s words still lingered in Abby’s heart, pricking her conscience:
“Don’t hate them . . . they win if you hate.”
Abby admitted that she hated Lindsey Cook for destroying her marriage. And she hated Mark for betraying her trust and forsaking his marriage vows. She knew it was wrong, but how did she get rid of all that enmity? What should she do with it? Forgetting what Mark had done was impossible. Her feelings couldn’t be erased like a computer file with the simple push of the Delete button. Here in Israel she was able to put him out of her mind for several hours at a time, but eventually she would have to return home. She would have to face the empty closets, the lonely dinners, the vacant side of the bed. And her hatred would still be there like a carefully banked fire, waiting to re-ignite.
“Show me what to do, Lord,” she prayed as tears welled in her eyes. “Show me what to do with all this pain. I’m so tired of carrying it around in my heart.” As she swiped at her tears, the comment Jake had made after the war inexplicably came to Abby’s mind:
“They intended to harm us, but God intended it for good.”
If He was a God of redemption, as Jake had said, could He possibly use even the wreck of her marriage to bring about something good? Abby wondered if she would have the opportunity to meet Jake before the summer ended. She would love to ask him.