Death as a Way of Life

The Pope’s Visit to Israel

March 2000

Pope John Paul II made a historic official visit to the State of Israel on March 20, 2000, as part of a wider, millennium-commemorating visit to the holy Christian sites of the region. He was accompanied by tens of thousands of pilgrims. During his weeklong stay, the Pope visited the Christian holy sites both in Israel and in the Palestinian Authority territories, as well as sacred Muslim and Jewish sites and “secular” sites like Tad Vashem and a Palestinian refugee camp. The visit elicited much attention and interest around the Christian world and among Israelis and Arabs.

Day One: The Pope Arrives

An Israeli sits in front of his television set in his home in Jerusalem and watches the Pope arrive in his country.

This person is not religious. Religious ceremonies are foreign to him, and religious institutions in particular are foreign to him. He is very Jewish, and he respects those whose religious fervor burns in their hearts, but he himself has not performed what Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith.”

For a few days he’s been telling himself that this visit, historic as it is, will certainly neither move nor impress him. He’s been explaining to himself that the Pope’s visit is of no relevance to him, to his day-to-day routine, to the immediate problems of his private life, or to the political and moral dilemmas that his country has been agonizing over for decades. But when the airplane lands in Israel and the Pope emerges atop the stairway leading down to the tarmac, something suddenly happens.

The Israeli looks at the Pope, an old man, bent and burdened with years, weighted down with experience and the vicissitudes of life. Real sorrow, personal and very human, is also evident in his everyman’s face. He gazes at the Pope and suddenly sees, as if by an epiphany, what the Pope himself sees, perhaps: the state of Israel. The reality, both symbolic and concrete, of a country born after two thousand years of exile, religious persecutions, inquisitions, blood libels, pogroms, and the Holocaust.

The man in the armchair isn’t in any way resentful about this. He does not in any way see Israel as reprisal for what the Gentiles have done to the Jews, under the leadership and inspiration of most of this current Pope’s predecessors.

The opposite is true. In the meditative, profound gaze of the Pope he sees the marvel and the opportunity of the Jewish state. He sees the Jewish people’s life force for revival and renewal, which in these difficult times is the source of the great hope that Israel can save itself from the curse of war and attain peace.

The Israeli sitting and watching television fidgets uncomfortably in his chair. He really had had no intention of being carried away by such “historic” sentiments. Nor has he had any intention of reopening old accounts with either the Christian world or the Christian religion. Keeping such score would not, in any case, repair anything, and who today has the strength to peer again into the darkness in which Jewish-Christian relations have been conducted over the last two thousand years?

But then the Pope passes before the honor guard of Israeli soldiers. Bent over, leaning on his cane, deep in his own thoughts, he moves past the strapping armed men, who embody an ironic reversal of ancient stereotypes. The man in the armchair, who is no great fan of armies of any kind, reflects to himself that had any Jews of the last forty generations seen this Jewish military honor guard — even his own father, who fled Europe only seventy years earlier — they would not have believed their eyes. Then the Israeli suddenly comprehends, more than he had allowed himself to do up to this moment, that the restrained, well-planned ceremony is a thin veneer of formality, behind which seethes an entire history. It is a cruel, primal, deep open wound, but maybe now, finally, there is a new opportunity, the first of its type, to heal it.

Then the Israeli national anthem is played. There’s no way of knowing whether its words have been translated for John Paul II. Perhaps they ought to be explained here. They speak of hope — the Jews’ two-thousand-year hope to establish a free nation in their own land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.

Then the Pope speaks. He conveys fine and moving thoughts. This brave man, who had the courage to change the Church’s position toward Israel and Judaism. He speaks of his spiritual journey here, and a thought about what this great journey can become steals into the Israeli’s heart: a journey of elucidation and study, of identification and remorse, a religious and physical journey traversing all the terrible stations we have passed, Jews and Christians, human beings, men, women, and children; a journey to the beginning, from which will, perhaps, begin a new future, a life that is more possible and more human. This will certainly not happen in one short week. But it can begin here.

Day Two: Visit to a Refugee Camp

The Israeli and Palestinian officials were worried and tense as they sat and measured each word of the Pope’s speech. Would he depart from the text that had been prepared and agreed to by all the parties? Would he refer to the status of Jerusalem? Would he mention the Palestinian demand for a return to the 1967 borders? In the struggle between the two peoples, each gain by one side is still perceived as a defeat for the other. But beyond the words that were said, something deeper was becoming evident. The Israelis and the Palestinians look now like two inimical brothers, modern incarnations of Jacob and Esau, waiting for the blessing of their father. Each brother eyes what the other receives, and has faith in the magical power of the blessing.

I wonder whether the Pope — in his talks with this and that side — was able to comprehend the extent to which their long struggle has made them eerily similar to each other. Both have the same, almost hysterical sensitivity to what other people say and think about them. There’s the same manic-depressive excitability, the same need for any former enemy to love them, really love them. They share a potent self-destructive instinct, a compulsion to trip oneself up, and a bitter gravity that is nearly devoid of faith in any promise or hope.

Precisely because the Pope took care not to enter the political minefield, he was able to pronounce some important truths that have almost been forgotten after years of conflict. He spoke of the simple human suffering of millions of refugees, of the pointlessness and inexplicability of this ongoing misery. He reminded those people that their plight does not make them less deserving. With a few simple words he restored to them the honor that the “situation” has stolen from them.

And, in passing, he also spoke of the responsibility that all the leaders in the Middle East have for this suffering. I believe that this wholesale indictment was intentional. It’s not just Israel’s leaders who bear responsibility for the refugees’ misery. The leaders of the Arab world do as well. The wealthy Arab countries could long ago have alleviated the refugees’ day-to-day distress to some extent, but they preferred to preserve their misery and to cement their suffering in the ugly setting of the refugee camps.

In the Pope’s visit to the Deheisheh refugee camp, there was, however, something more important. In conversations I’ve had with Palestinians, I’ve often heard them say that they are now paying the price of the persecutions that the Jews suffered from the Christians. “We,” say the Palestinians, “are the victims of victims.” They often say that the fears that history has instilled into the Jewish soul have made it impossible for Israel to ever feel fully secure. The result, say the Palestinians, is that there will never be true peace.

I reminded them in these conversations that the Arab world has never shown any genuine goodwill toward the tiny Jewish refugee state, and that Israel is not exactly surrounded by the Salvation Army. Even today, I point out, you can still hear Arab radio stations broadcasting calls for the destruction of the “Zionist entity.”

But there can be no doubt that the Jewish people’s tragic past — a past for which the Church is largely responsible — has created some of the convoluted psychological complexities that make it very difficult for Israel to act today with more courage and largesse, with greater confidence in the Arabs.

From this point of view, the fates of the three religions, and of the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the Catholic Church, are tangled up in a tortuous and tragic knot. When I saw the Pope in the narrow streets of Deheisheh, when I saw him bless the children, the fourth generation of misery, I felt how right this visit was, this visit into the wound; how important was this direct contact with plain human suffering. Redemption will not come, of course, from this short visit, but as an Israeli, I also see recognition of the Catholic Church’s obligation to try to loosen, carefully and delicately, the noose that is strangling millions of Israelis and Palestinians.

Day Three: Yad Vashem

Today, after the ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, even the most out-and-out cynics must realize how the Pope’s visit to Israel touches the foundations of our identity, our most primal emotions.

In their planning of the visit, the parties seem to have thought mostly about abstract symbols, the big images. Yet now, during the visit itself, symbols and human beings are melding time and again; abstract ideas are mixing with tears and wounds and human fragility.

So it was when the Pope spoke of the suffering of the Jews, and so it was when he met with people from his hometown in Poland, with the woman that he himself bore on his back out of the ghetto, to whom he gave a slice of bread and whom he saved from death. And so it was when he stood, head bowed, and communed with the memory of the victims.

Allow me to tell a brief story, a private one. A very dear member of my family, a survivor of the Treblinka death camp, arrived at my wedding with a bandage on her forearm. She was covering her tattooed number so as not to mar the celebration with a memento of the Holocaust. I remember how I was unable to take my eyes off that bandage. I understood then, very sharply, how much all of us here in Israel are always walking on a surface as thin as that bandage, under which lies a void that threatens, every moment, to drag down our daily lives, our illusion of routine.

I was reminded of that feeling again yesterday, when, at the ceremony, they read a letter that a Jewish woman named Jennia wrote to the woman who hid her son, Michael. The mother asked that he not forget to wear his pajamas at night, and pleaded that he eat well, to strengthen him for what awaited him. At the end, the reader concluded by saying that Jennia and her son had perished in Auschwitz. I felt then — perhaps not only I — all at once, that the thin bandage that separates our “here” in Israel from the “there” of the Holocaust had suddenly been ripped off.

True, the Pope did not ask for the Jewish people’s forgiveness, and did not apologize for the Church’s deeds during the Holocaust. Perhaps he refrained from doing so for internal Church political reasons, but to my mind it was just as well.

Think of the outcome had he apologized. Hundreds of millions of Christian believers would have felt that the Pope had absolved them forever of any personal obligation to face up to the Holocaust.

I don’t belong to those who believe that the Holocaust was a specifically Jewish event. As I see it, all civilized, fair-minded persons must ask themselves serious questions about the Holocaust and what permitted it to take place.

These are not Jewish questions. They are universal questions about the relations between human beings, about attitudes to the foreign, the different, and the weak. They are questions about the human soul that can so easily be made to stop speaking as “I” and to begin roaring about “we.” They are questions about attitudes to force, about the way a person can preserve his humanity in the face of an arbitrary power that seeks to obliterate him, and about the greatest courage of all — the courage to do a kindness to the oppressed, when it is so easy to collaborate with evil.

It is good that the Pope did not ask for forgiveness. No one can ask for forgiveness for the Holocaust in the name of others, and no person may forgive in the name of the victims. The Pope’s presence in Yad Vashem, within the most profound dimension of Jewish suffering, like the deeds of human kindness that he, as a human being, performed during the war, are more eloquent than any official declaration.

It is impossible to sum up what happened in the Holocaust in one sentence, or in one gesture, as important as that gesture might be. What happened there will remain forever mute, like a mouth wide open to scream. Something of that cry is present in the silent, missing line at the end of the poem by Dan Pagis, “Scrawled in Pencil in a Sealed Boxcar”:

Here in this transport

I Am Eve

With my son Abel

If you see my oldest son

Cain son of Adam

Tell him that I

Day Four: Service at the Mount of the Beatitudes

Yesterday, for three hours, faith and myth united concretely with the landscape in which events happened, with the names that became the building blocks of Western civilization.

More than anything else, you could perceive, in the faces of the people sitting in wheelchairs, the sense that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event. You could feel — and identify with all your heart — the magnitude of the hope and the faith here, in this place, where miracles happened.

And I, the Jew that I am, watched the ceremony, and I thought that this was the first time that most of the Jews in Israel had seen a Catholic prayer ritual. I know this may seem strange to anyone who has grown up and lived in a Christian country, or anyone accustomed to thinking of the Jews as a tiny minority, but this is the reality in Israel, and if you think about the history of relations between Jews and Christians, maybe you will be able to understand the Jewish aversion to everything having to do with Christianity and with Christian religious institutions.

Jewish pupils in the Israeli school system know almost nothing about Jesus or Christianity. They study about the Christians, generally, in the context of their persecution of the Jews.

I can testify — with some embarrassment — that I never met a single Christian person before I was ten years old (yes, yes, in little, provincial Jerusalem of the 1960s) and that what I knew about Christians came from scary stories about their cruelty toward Jews.

I’m relating this because the service yesterday at Corazin, the Mount of the Beatitudes, was a unique opportunity for millions of Israelis to shed some of these inborn stereotypes and to see — perhaps for the first time — Christianity’s other face. Jewish Israelis could now discover the humane, socially conscious, peace- and justice-seeking elements in the teachings of the man of Nazareth. Moreover, they could suddenly be close to a Christian religious ceremony without the trepidation and fear that have, for two thousand years, reverberated almost uncontrollably in the hearts of so many Jews, like a survival reflex.

But there is also another aspect, a mirror image of the important change that this visit is generating. It has to do with the way the land of Israel, and the Jew, now appear to believing Catholics.

Another personal story: Some years ago I was travelling in Portugal. One night I arrived in a village in the north and lodged in a small family hotel. I wanted to call home. The hotel proprietress volunteered to connect me with the telephone exchange. She asked me where I wanted to call, and I told her “Jerusalem.” She gave me a strange look and began to laugh. “That can’t be,” she said. “You can’t dial Jerusalem.” When I asked why, she said quite simply, “Because Jerusalem is in heaven.”

But when John Paul II is in Israel, all his millions of believers, in all corners of the world, meet Israel. Not only the Holy Land, but the real, quotidian Israel, in which there are flesh-and-blood Jews, who are in no way just an abstract symbol of anything.

Because that, perhaps, is the Jewish people’s great tragedy — throughout the generations others, the Christians in particular, viewed them as a symbol, as an allegory or metaphor for something else, as an exceptional entity, possessing powers beyond nature, or below it, as the Nazis put it in their definition of the Jew as untermensch.

For thousands of years the Jew was set apart, exiled from reality. From the familiar. His concreteness and humanity were confiscated through the most subtle means of demonization. The wandering Jew, the eternal Jew, Judas Iscariot, the poisoner of wells, the elders of Zion, and hundreds of other Satanic and grotesque images percolated into folklore, religion, language, literature, even science. Perhaps as a result, the Jews took comfort in a no less dangerous faith, that of self-idealization, regarding themselves as a chosen people, a people set apart.

The state of Israel today is an attempt by Jews to live a life that is not ideal, not demonic. To live reality itself. The normal life of a people living in its country, on its land, raising its children, defending itself with its own strength, and trying, at last, to find a way to conduct normal relations with its neighbors.

The Pope now sees this new, very fragile normality, and so do the thousands of pilgrims who came with him, and his billion believers, and all those who watch his journey on television. I say this without forgetting all the difficult problems that Israel has become entangled in during these many decades. Also, without forgetting the injustice that it still inflicts on others. But through the Pope’s private eyes, and through the eyes of the generations that he represents, it seems to me that we can also make out the new and growing desire of the Jewish people to be, finally, part of life, not just part of a story, of a myth, of a heavenly Jerusalem.

Day Five: Mass in Nazareth

The world held its breath for a minute. A man, old and sick, knelt and communed with his God. In the midst of the worldwide media tumult, in the heart of the almost Woodstock-like euphoria that has overcome nearly everyone who has a part in the visit, a single man closed his eyes and was entirely alone. In this journey of his, John Paul II has succeeded in excising layers of spiritual, political, and religious cataract from many things he has touched. Yesterday, and not for the first time, it was possible to appreciate for a moment the secret of this man’s personal charisma, even in his dealings with the media.

Maybe it is his appearance. Anyone can immediately empathize with his stooped back, the tremor in his hands, his slow movements, his physical agonies. Maybe it’s because of the different, so untelegenic tempo of his movements, of his steps, of his reticent gaze, watching the commotion surrounding him like someone gazing at life from elsewhere, from some other dimension. Perhaps it is because of his rare ability to guard his privacy — even his intimacy — in the middle of the hue and cry surrounding him. Either way, he forces the media to cast aside their conventions about how they relate to a subject. When we see his image on the television screen, we intuit simultaneously his symbolic, ceremonial figure, as well as the individual man on whom we can project our sensibilities and deepest wishes, perhaps even better than on that symbol, the official figure. Here is food for thought: It’s precisely those qualities that make the man Karol Wojtyla so untelegenic by the merciless normal criteria that make him so human and moving, a real media megastar.

A similar paradox, deceptive and much more problematic, has to do with the personal qualities of this man, and of the religious establishment he represents.

When he knelt, we forgot for a moment what surrounded him: a huge church building, impressive in its beauty, but grandiose, ostentatious, built at a cost of millions of dollars. To an outsider, a nonreligious one, the church in Nazareth looks like a metaphor for spiritual coagulation, a kind of elephantiasis of the private faith between man and his God. The church seems to be completely foreign to the spirit of simplicity and humility, and to the modesty of Jesus himself.

And for a moment we also forgot that this Pope vehemently opposes birth control, and in so doing prevents progress in the status of women and social development in Third World countries. Still, he knelt in the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, in the place where, according to the Catholic faith, Mary received the announcement of her pregnancy. And at that moment I felt how all this exaggerated magnificence, all the flab of this overly wealthy, overly powerful, materialistic, bureaucratic, conservative establishment vanished for a single moment, and withdrew to its real roots, to the sensibility that created it. It harked back to an era when religious faith — and not just Christian faith — was a matter of private dialogue between man and his Creator, without trying to impose itself, generating rivers of blood, on other people. Suddenly there was just one elderly man, his body anguished, and he knew that all the magnificence and grandeur around him did not protect him from pain, and from the most profound human fear. Even the most secular of eyes, eyes which cannot and do not want to find comfort in any religious faith, could then see the kernel of religious emotion, and mourn for what has happened to this authentic sentiment over the course of thousands of years.

Day Six: In Jerusalem

Jerusalem is a hard city. Every one of its inhabitants knows it. History is so dense here that it sometimes seems as if the city turns you, despite yourself, into a player on a huge stage, with a single huge but hidden eye watching you.

Perhaps that’s why everything in it is overstated, larger than life. Every twinge turns immediately into the agonies of the Son of God; every soccer victory augurs the Messiah’s arrival. Every love affair resonates with the love of David and Bathsheba. It’s hardly surprising, then, that each year a hundred or so tourists lose their mind in the city. This strange, unique phenomenon even has an official diagnosis: the Jerusalem Syndrome.

Yes, it is hard to live a normal, inconsequential life here. “Jerusalem, a port on the shores of the eternal,” the Jerusalem poet Yehuda Amichai wrote. And eternity, what can I tell you, is a pain. The people, even the most common people, are full of a strange self-importance, inflated with the glory of the past. They are quick to be insulted, always feeling as if they are the representatives of something awesome. There’s too much holiness in the air. I remember, from my childhood, a tiny back yard on one of the city’s side streets where huge graffiti summed up the nature of this city: HOLY SITE — NO PISSING ALLOWED!

Four thousand years of history, of civilization, of the different cultures that were created here and passed through here. The cradle of Jewish and Christian thought, the center of the three great monotheistic religions. So much wisdom, life experience, knowledge of human suffering and weakness have collected here, and what have we all really learned? Have we — Jews, Christians, and Muslims — really succeeded in being better people, more tolerant neighbors of our neighbors?

John Paul II came to this city today. In many ways, the visit here was perhaps the climax of his journey, yet it was the least uplifting day. The streets were nearly empty, and there was tension in the air. Politics brushed aside human warmth.

But this does not detract from the day’s historic events: the visit to the mosques on the Temple Mount, the visit to the Western Wall. Perhaps you need to be Jewish to understand the significance of the moment: The Pope at the Western Wall. Even this phrase sounds like an oxymoron.

Excuse me if I speak for a moment as a resident of Jerusalem (that is, with all that history on my back). The Western Wall stands above all other Jewish national or religious symbols; it is the most important monument to the Jewish people’s continuity. Paradoxically, the fact that it is not a whole, that it is but a remnant of the Temple that was destroyed, has made it into what it is in the consciousness of every Jew in the world. Jews have prayed in its direction three times a day, a depiction of the wall hung in the home of nearly every Jew in the Diaspora, and scraps of paper bearing their most intimate requests of God were interred in the fissures among its huge stones.

The Pope’s visit here today testifies, principally, to Judaism’s enormous life force. This tiny nation, numbering 12 million people — about equal to the number of inhabitants of Cairo or London — has succeeded, over four thousand years, in preserving a culture, language, and identity, despite countless attempts to destroy all these. It also has succeeded in instilling, in the hearts of its most bitter enemies — the Church in the past, the Arab states today — the understanding that it must be reckoned with. Acknowledged not only for its existence, but also for the importance of its contribution to mankind.

But that’s not all. The Pope, in coming here, in his entire visit, taught us that something else is possible. That even religious establishments, those dogmatic institutions, may grow through openness to and curiosity about other religions. It is hardly credible that, in the third millennium, religions will continue to be nurtured by the hatred of the other. On the contrary, they must begin to carry out their moral and humane precepts. The time has come for a revision of relations between religions and nations.

That, I think, is the essence of the Pope’s visit in Israel.

Over the course of six days, John Paul II succeeded in capturing the hearts of Jews, Arabs, and Christians. The most surprising effect he had was on the Jews. It had to do with his personal history from the time of World War II, and with his positions toward the Jewish people, but it was also a result of his unique personality. He captured the hearts of Israelis in a way that few foreign leaders have ever done before. A cabdriver from Tiberias expressed this sentiment best: “What a sweet guy that Pope is. If you ask me, he’s really a Jew!” (And I’m sure that the Pope would appreciate the compliment.)

For six days we followed him into the forge of our identity, Jews, Arabs, and Christians, Israelis and Palestinians. We were with him in places where our wounds are still bleeding. But somehow, in a wonderful way that is new to us, his visit made us consider how different and better our lives here could be if we stopped seeing the Other as an existential threat. If we began, for a change, to take joy in the variety of cultural and human richness that this country, and the entire region, offers.

True, the war over geopolitical issues did not really cease during his visit, yet this heavyset man, whose face is both elderly and childlike, passed through at his slow, meditative gait, and with simple gestures made connections between churches, mosques, and the Western Wall. He connected the suffering of the Palestinians in the refugee camps with the most profound fears of the Israelis. He linked the great miracles of ancient days with the little miracles of our daily lives.

I do not know what of all this will remain in our region after he returns to his own land. It’s reasonable to assume that, in the days to come, if the negotiations between Israel and Syria and the Palestinians resume, the sides will again take more extreme positions, sparking hostility anew.

But for one week a different wind blew here; there was a sense of reconciliation. For a moment we tasted the possibility of a different kind of life, free of hatred and the exhausting need to always be an enemy. For this small miracle I, a nonreligious Jew, say to John Paul II, Thank you.