Looking with other eyes

At the last moment, I decided to take this week off work. It is March Break, my wife only has a couple of shifts, and I thought it would be nice if we got to spend some time together. Since it has spent much of the time raining, I've been able to do some reading. I'm taking this book slow, since I am really enjoying it – Bruce Feiler's “Walking the Bible.” (It was also a PBS special.)

Bruce Feiler is an American writer who decided he would try and retrace the route of the five books of Moses, and convinces the renowned Sinai archaeologist Avner Goren to be his guide. When he first sets out, he expects his trek to be a journalist's adventure, but as they visit the people living in these places, he discovers that the Pentateuch is a story that is more than history: it is an ever present reality. And in the people he encounters, from Israeli archaeologists to Egyptian historians; from Turkish guides to monks living in the Sinai Desert, he finds that the people of the lands of the Bible are connected to it in a living way, each in their own unique fashion.

And despite being a secular Jew, he finds his own connection to God growing, understanding that we are all perhaps like Michaelangelo's Adam, reaching out to what is really only slightly out of reach. Ending on the last mountain where God allowed Moses to look at all of the lands of Canaan, he realizes that it does not matter that it isn't actually possible to see all the lands the Bible lists Moses as being able to see, for he wasn't looking at the land. Feiler writes, “He was looking at God.”

I really recommend this to anyone looking to form their own connection with this far off place and time that still exists and is still real today.