Walking the Bible Again

A while back, I read Bruce Feiler's Walking the Bible (my wife got it for me for Christmas, actually.) He tells his story of discovery – a fifth generation secularized Jew from America's south who undertakes a journalist's mission to visit the geographic locales of the five books of Moses with Israeli archaeologist Avner Goren, and instead finds himself on the spiritual pilgrimage of a lifetime. He learns that the Bible and geography are inextricably intertwined, the Bible a thing fully alive in every place he visits.

A few weeks ago, the city library opened a new branch right near where I live. On my first visit, I saw the last book in Feiler's trilogy, “Where God was Born.”

It is a tremendous work that takes the reader into Iraq, Iran, and into the underbelly of Jerusalem and the temple mount, reaching astonishing conclusions. Feiler becomes increasingly conscious that in fact the last half of the Bible – the prophets, the psalms, and Esther's story – tells a very different story. Faith is not the land – faith is more important than the land, much moreso.

First there is the litany of kings who are disappointments – David, a turbulent man who went to war with his own usurping son and stole another man's wife; Solomon, an exceedingly wise king who sank into depravity and tyranny as his grandiose buildings took wing – and then a nameless sequence of kings who follow (save Hezekiah and Josiah.)

What arises instead are the prophets, the exile, and the righteous foreign kings – the faith is forever divorced from the body politic. The prophets – from Elijah to Isaiah - speak for the disenfranchised, and lobby for the ethical conduct of the people – they are not political figures in the same way Moses or even the Judges were. And it is in the Exile that Judaism is truly born – where concepts like the omnipresence of God, personal prayer and personal connection to God – are born, along with the Talmud, the Psalms, and the Book of Lamentations. There is God's use of foreign kings such as Cyrus and Darius as righteous liberators of the Exiled, many of whom decide they can serve God in exile.

It is particularly in the ironically harsh land of Iran that Feiler learns that dialogs between religions, between cultures are at the very heart of the beatific vision he is seeking. He finds it in the ruins of Persepolis, where images of the fertile crescent's many peoples are intermixed in the crowds visiting the king peacefully, a king willing to pay tributes to Gods he does not know and build them temples.

“Religion can be saved only by religion,” He writes. Abolishing it, fundamentalizing it – none of these can save it. “The only force strong enough to take on religious extremism is religious moderation.”