Pilgrimage to Roots of Faith and Strife [Jews return to Joseph's Tomb]

NABLUS, West Bank — They came in waves, ardent Jewish settlers, religious women from central Israel, black-clad followers of Hasidic courts and groups of teenage boys and girls, almost a thousand of them in all.

Crammed into a dozen buses and escorted by the Israeli military, the Jewish pilgrims slid quietly along deserted streets throughout the early hours of a recent morning while the residents of this Palestinian city, a militant stronghold ruled until recently by armed gangs, slept in their beds.

The destination was the holy place known as Joseph’s Tomb, a tiny half-derelict stone compound in the heart of a residential district that many Jews believe is the final burial place of the son of Jacob, the biblical patriarch.

The first group arrived around midnight. Rushing through the darkness into the tomb, they crowded around the rough mound of the grave and started reciting Psalms by the glow of their cellphones, not waiting for the portable generator to power up a crude fluorescent light.

One of the greatest tragedies in history is the fact that the Bible has come to be disassociated with the Jewish People and to be associated instead with another religion (chr*stianity). The fact that 'Eretz Yisra'el is the Holy Land and filled with the tombs of tzaddiqim but is treated by its government (and by most "official" Jewish communities) as nothing but a secular place of refuge that might as well be in Uganda is absolutely maddening.

Orthodox Jews live their lives in a totalitarian Theocratic bubble surrounded by secularism, yet they are associated with that secularism and sometimes blamed for it (and it must be admitted that the enemies of G-d have stressed the Jewish People as victims rather than as practitioners of religion because they must do so or admit that Jewish survival is a testimony to the existence of HaShem). And for over two hundred years even many (perhaps even most) Jews have adopted the language of secularism and enlightenment (rights, autonomy, etc.) in order to justify Torah observance in a chr*stian world when the Torah is an obligation, not an assertion of autonomy. I'm still seething over the fact that while the brou-ha-ha about teacing Tanya in that English shul provided an excellent opportunity to point out that HaShem, not the zeitgeist, is the ultimate definer of right and wrong the opponents of this bit of political correctness have instead tried to outflank their opponents to the Left by invoking chr*stian censorship and book-burning instead.

It seems to me that while American (and Western) Jews are intimately familiar with ethnic bigotry that actual persecution for religious beliefs has been unknown to them for a very long time. Jewish defense groups seem to be attuned to four things: remarks about noses, charges of "international banking," opposition to the secular State of Israel, and chr*stian supersessionism. Do American Jews (even the Orthodox) ever wonder whether they will be arrested for teaching that homosexuality is forbidden or for not excising that verse from the Torah and from Chumashim? American Fundamentalist Protestants (the white ones, anyway), on the other hand, while not being attuned to ethnic slurs, are super-sensitive to attempts to criminalize religious belief. The fact that so many Jews seem unaware of such things is tragic.

Perhaps an Obama victory (chas vechalilah!) will force American Jews to attune themselves to threats to theology and not just to ethnic slurs.

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