On the Holy Land (The Garden Tomb is a Protestant Invention)

When I was in Israel eight years ago, I traveled with a group of seven female health and wellness journalists. They wrote for spa and fitness magazines. I was approved for the trip despite the fact that my travel writing at the time had nothing to do with fitness or analyzing the attributes of body massages. Massages are something you do, not write about. I wanted to see the Holy Land, float in the Dead Sea, maybe bring back some rock salt from Sodom and Gomorrah, while imagining myself 2,000 years ago on the Sea of Galilee. I also wanted to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I never got the rock salt because our press bus whizzed past the site of Sodom. We were at least able to smell the scent of sulfur, which penetrates the Dead Sea area; sulfur is also known to be the scent of Lucifer. Our tour director didn’t dare guess as to where Lot’s wife may have stood when she was changed into a pillar of salt. Certain aspects of that Israel trip hit me as significant long after I returned home. This was the harmonious relationship between Israelis and Arabs we encountered as we traveled about the country. It seems no matter where we went – restaurants, roadside cafes, farms that doubled as hotels, and even in the Dead Sea spas where we received those mud massages – there always seemed to be an evenly mixed number of Jews and Arabs living together and getting along peacefully. We never asked one another after a visit to a particular spa, “Were you massaged by a Jew or an Arab?” Then there were the children of these mixed marriages: a large swath of the population identified as Israeli-Arab. This was especially noticeable in many of the restaurants we frequented, where the waitstaff generally came from this group. This pointed to tremendous possibilities for a permanent peace among the two groups. At least the scent of peace was in the air. At the time of the trip — 2018 — there were high tensions between Israel and Middle Eastern countries. The Israel-Palestine conflict of 2018, or the Land Day Protests, began on March 30. The clash resulted in the deaths of 32 Palestinians and thousands of injuries (Israelis included) at the Gaza border. Two years prior, in 2016, there were multiple-armed attacks in Tel Aviv, including shootings and stabbings. Our press group was briefed on possible international friction during our ten-day sojourn. Some journalists who originally signed on for the trip opted to cancel at the last minute. One woman from Dallas told the group she had to keep the trip a secret from her family. Had they known she was going to Israel they would have done an intervention along the lines of “handcuffing” her to a chair. We laughed when she told us the story, but we weren’t laughing when our tour bus traveled along the West Bank, then the location of a lot of violence. We were told to sit on the left side of the vehicle should somebody from the Arab settlements — these consisted of shacks on land dotted with broken machinery, bicycles and burnt automobile wreckage — throw rocks or bombs. Other tour buses had been hit in the past but, as our illustrious Jewish tour guide explained, “Our driver is p-a-c-k-i-n-g.” At the Western Wall, I donned a white skullcap and stood in the male line. Separation of the sexes at the Wall was implemented soon after the Six-Day War in 1967. I was there not as a worshiper but as an historian. I was fully aware that the Wall was not part of the original temple destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans, a destruction that was prophesied by Christ when in Matthew 24:2, He said, “See ye not all these things? there shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” Even Josephus, the Jewish historian and eyewitness to the event, recorded that the Romans who destroyed the temple left so little behind that anyone who came to the spot afterwards would hardly know that the area had once been the site of a great city. The Western Wall, in reality, was a retaining wall, built as a landscaping and anti-erosion tool when King Herod expanded the complex that included the Temple. The retaining wall has nothing to do with the temple of Solomon. The holiest site in Judaism is really the Temple Mount, the site where Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac. In my white skullcap (which looked more papal than Jewish), I went to the Wall without a note to slip into the cracks but studied the crevices in the rocks, thinking of the 17-year-old survivors of the Roman siege who were sent to Egypt as slaves. Confession: I’ve always thought of myself as Jewish in spirit. When I was 20 years old nearly everybody in Boston assumed I was Jewish. These comments were frequent enough that I eventually went to my German great-aunt and asked her if we had any Jewish relatives on the Nickels side. She hesitated, hesitated some more, and then admitted she didn’t know. After visiting the Wall, I returned to the large area where the tour guide was waiting for me. We chatted a few seconds when suddenly I noticed a pair of flailing arms behind me. Accompanying the arm motions were a series of grunts and frog-like sounds. For a second I assumed it was one of the women journalists playing a joke on me, but when I saw the worried look on the tour guide’s face, I knew it wasn’t. “Don’t turn around,” she whispered, cautiously. The flailing arms then twisted into snake-like patterns, coming very close to touching my body. I quickly turned to see a chubby Israeli schoolboy, probably 12 or 13, who reminded me of the original Spanky on The Little Rascals. He wore a school uniform of sorts and a small knapsack on his back. I humored him at first, smiling – a signal that I was cool and could take a joke – but then I saw that his smile had twisted into something else. He went on like this, dancing around me in circles, his arms now enveloping the air above me, ascending and descending in great swivels as if he was performing a ritual. I backed away from him, after muttering a few phrases like “What’s up?” or humoring him further with comments like, “I feel like dancing myself,” when the vibe changed to something vaguely threatening. Not for a second did I think a chubby schoolboy like this could be a danger to anybody, but when he would not stop and actually began body bumping me, the tour guide and I moved a good distance from him. Thinking Spanky had had his fill of harassing tourists, when he followed us with his little snake dance, the tour guide yelled at him and called security. Even this didn’t stop the little bugger, although when security arrived (in less than a minute), he retreated in fear. What caused this schoolboy to react to me the way he did? I’ve thought about that many times since the incident. Although I had a small gold Russian Orthodox cross around my neck at the time (the cross was hidden under my shirt), at best he could only see the back of the chain at the nape of my neck. For all he knew it could have been the Star of David. Or an Aleister Crowley pendant. I recently did a bit of research about strange occurrences at the Western Wall and came up with quite a number of so-called anti-Christian incidents. The bulk of them seem to have happened from 2023 onwards, and perhaps my 2018 experience was a precursor to them. What has come to be a common occurrence, according to an article in Christianity Today, are encounters between Jewish radicals and evangelical Christians at the Wall. These confrontations are usually accompanied by chants of “Go Home!” What struck me as interesting about these reports is that the “Go Home” chanters are usually very young people, some as young as 13. If I had a chance to talk to Spanky today – imagining him as a mature, intelligent adult – I would tell him that even I have a beef with evangelical Christians, rather than Christians in general. “They invent stuff,” I’d say. “They invented the Garden Tomb, which they say is the burial place of Jesus Christ. It is not. The only reason they invented the Garden Tomb is because they don’t like the fact that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Christ died and was buried, is on the site of a Catholic and Orthodox church. The evangelicals couldn’t stand this fact of history, and so they did what evangelicals do best: They make stuff up. “I’d tell people like that to go home too!”