Bruce Feiler: Where God Was Born

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Be Strong and Very Courageous

I feel the tension before I know its source. My legs begin to quiver, then shake. Soon my whole body is quaking with vibration, or is it fear? Up above, the whir begins to build into a thudding bass beat. Cold air blows through the cracks and up my spine. I'm shivering. My feet are trembling. "Are you ready?" The sound in my ears is crackling, and a bit wicked. I nod. Within seconds the shaking becomes overwhelming, the thump-ing dense, and the pull so strong it seems ready to suck my head off. I feel as if I'm in a full-body migraine. And then, just as suddenly, quiet. The sound dissolves, my body relaxes. I'm in the air, in a war. I'm at peace.

The helicopter pauses for a second, then accelerates into a gentle glide. Down below, the landing pad disappears, and rows of orange and avocado trees poke up toward the sky. I see the hairs on adonkey's ears. Our nose is tipped, we're flying, yet we're not mov-ing very quickly. Lifting off in a helicopter is like drifting off tosleep: You leave one realm and shift into another; the features seem dreamily unfamiliar; you want to touch what you see, but you can't.

We bank toward the Mediterranean. Voices in my headphones interrupt: "This is the Air Force. Identify yourself! Do you have permission to be here?" Boaz, the pilot, smiles. He's anticipated this. He's flown in every war the State of Israel has fought for the previous thirty years. When I asked him what his most dangerous mission was, he thought for a second, then replied, "I once flew seven and a half hours from Israel into enemy territory on a secret mission." I raised my eyebrows; that's halfway to Iran, or Libya.

"Were you part of the mission that destroyed the nuclear plant
in Iraq?"

He smiled. "Let's just say I was in the Middle East."

Boaz replied to air traffic control with a mixture of authority
and evasion. We did have permission, garnered over the preceding
six months, from three government agencies. The night before a
suicide bomber had killed seven soldiers in Tel Aviv, and the Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF) rescinded its green light. Boaz had to
scramble to find a general to overturn the decision. This morning,
after we boarded the McDonnell Douglas MD-500, storm clouds
descended, limiting visibility above one thousand feet. We were
forced to cancel. An hour later, visibility lifted. "There are always
risks with flying," Boaz said. We dashed to the landing pad.

Weather was the least of our risks. War was raging--between the
Israelis and the Palestinians, between a fragile coalition and Iraq,
between the pluralist West and Islamic extremism. Ripples were
reverberating around the globe--in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen,
Kenya, Morocco, Indonesia, and, yes, the United States. The Cra-
dle of Civilization--the tiny, fertile crescent of land that stretches
from Mesopotamia to North Africa--had once more seized control
of the world's destiny, and the future of civilization seemed to be at
stake.

The bloody clash of faith and politics that filled front pages at
the beginning of the new millennium seemed surprising, coming
at the end of a century that had appeared to mark the end of God
as a force in world affairs. Hadn't Nietzsche declared at the end of
the previous century (1882) that God was dead? Hadn't science,
capitalism, and the World Wide Web rendered faith a quaint
hangover from the past?

As a Jew raised in the American South, I grew up in a world
where religion was a regular part of my life but not exactly a cen-
tral one. Politics mattered more to me than faith; and depending
on what I was doing during years as an itinerant journalist, clown-
ing, country music, or Third World travel became my surrogate
religion. Who needed to count commandments when you could
count countries visited?

Fifteen years into a life on the road, I realized something was
missing from my backpack. There were conflicts in the world, and
I had questions that my guidebooks couldn't address. To my sur-
prise, the book that kept calling out to me had been sitting by my
bed all along. The calling wasn't religious exactly; it was historical,
archaeological, cultural. It was a need to explore the world--even
the parts of it that seemed scary, like devotion. I had an idea: What
if I retraced the Bible through the desert and read the stories along
the way?

For a year I trekked across the Middle East, from Turkey to
Jordan, and explored the first five books of the Bible. I visited
Mount Ararat, crossed the Red Sea, climbed Mount Sinai. That
year in the desert changed me forever. I had gone seeking adven-
ture and came back craving meaning. In particular, I came back
struggling to understand the uncertain role of God in my life. The
world was prosperous and at peace; pulpits were filled with
hoorahs of confidence; yet I felt the gnawing tug of doubt.
I didn't know God completely, and I doubted those who did.

And then came the conflagration--planes into buildings, armies
into distant countries, security walls around peaceful towns, geno-
cide, jihad, crusade in the news. The world that had been at peace
was now at war over God. This change seemed startling. Wasn't his-
tory supposed to be ending? Wasn't democratic capitalism supposed
to lead us all to heaven?

History wasn't ending, of course; it was finally coming home.
The collision of politics, geography, and faith has dominated
nearly every story in the Middle East since the birth of writing--
from the epic of Gilgamesh to the fatwas of Ayatollah Khomeini.
It also dominates the greatest story ever told. Jews and Christians
who smugly console themselves that Islam is the only violent reli-
gion are willfully ignoring their past. Nowhere is the struggle be-
tween faith and violence described more vividly, and with more
stomach-turning details of ruthlessness, than in the Hebrew Bible.

Yet nowhere is this conflict conveyed with more humanity
and hope.

And so, I thought, what better way to confront my doubts
about religion and consider the future of faith than to travel to the
land where God was born? And, again, what better guide to read
along the way than the text that defines identity for half the
world's believers?

I would journey to the flash points in the new world war over
God--Israel, Iraq, and Iran--and bring along my Bible. And I
would begin my quest with the second half of the Hebrew Bible,
at the moment when the children of Israel, sprung from Adam
and Eve, descended from Abraham, and freed by Moses, face
their harshest challenge. "Conquer the Promised Land," God
says to Joshua, Moses' successor, at the start of the books of
the Prophets. A former spy, Joshua is one of only two Israelites
(the other is Caleb) whom God deems righteous enough to sur-
vive the forty years in the desert. "Destroy the pagans who live
on the land," God commands. "Seize the future for yourselves--
and for me."

After twenty minutes we approached an isolated landing strip
just north of Ben Gurion International Airport. A silvery
mist hung low over the Mediterranean, a few miles to the west.
Shallow waves unfolded onto the narrow beaches. Palm trees, like
artichokes on sticks, bent in all directions. As we hovered, a man
strode out of a small building onto the black tarmac. He directed
Boaz to his preferred spot, and as the blades spun, he bent and
scampered toward the door.

Yoram Yair is that rare individual known only by his nickname.
For months afterward, when I told Israelis (and Palestinians) I had
gone on a military tour of the Israelite conquest of the Promised
Land with one of the most decorated generals in the history of the
country, a man who had been the first Israeli to penetrate the Sinai
during the Six-Day War, the last to hold the Golan Heights during
the Syrian offensive of the Yom Kippur War, and the one who led
an amphibious landing closest to Beirut during the Lebanon War,
they all said, "Yaya? What's he like?"

A rock. As he boarded the helicopter and greeted us all crisply
yet warmly, he evinced an unimpeachable stableness and sureness
of gesture--firm handshake, steady stare, was that a twinkle?--
that made us instantly trust him. My friend and longtime travel
companion Avner Goren, the archaeologist and explorer, who was
nearing sixty and occupied the fourth seat, said Yaya reminded him
of his father, with a set of idioms and associations that belonged to
the generation of epic founders of Israel. "He's part of the funda-
mental soil of the country."

Yaya was wearing white boaters, navy khakis, and a pink and
green Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to his chest. He had a silver
Brylcreemed pompadour that, despite the wind, came to a perfect
nest above his forehead, causing me to spend the next few hours
wondering how he kept it in place in a foxhole. Altogether, with
his leathery skin and matte of gray chest hair, he reminded me of
my uncle Bubba walking the strip on Miami Beach.

"I will try to be very modest, but maybe there are another five
generals in the world today, alive, who have similar combat experi-
ence," Yaya said. "Unfortunately for normal human beings, but
fortunately for a military person, I fought in four wars, and in each
of those wars, I was in a commanding position. You can't see it, but
my body is full of shrapnel."

Boaz reminded Yaya that he had once rescued the general on an
aborted mission in Lebanon. A soldier had been shot as they evac-
uated. But Yaya's most difficult episode? Commanding the tank
that penetrated the Sinai at the start of the Six-Day War. The unit
behind his was hit and destroyed, as was the unit behind that one.
"I was about a mile inside the Egyptian stronghold, taking fire
from everyone. We were hit by an antitank gun. I asked everybody
to jump; luckily I fell outside. My deputy fell inside and was killed.
And then we were surrounded by Egyptians, and I thought, This is
the end."

"You were held prisoner?"

"No way, are you crazy? I didn't let them capture me. For about
thirty minutes I was all alone until our battalion finally reached my
place."

Yaya told these stories with no sense of bravado, only duty.
This was his job: leading men into war.
"So during these times," I said, "did you ever turn to the Bible
for inspiration?"

"Ever since I was a child," he said, "I liked very much the
Bible--the story, the heritage, the connection to the land. When I
was a young officer, whenever we trained, I always asked one of
the soldiers to prepare something about the place. Every Israeli
commander will tell you that part of our mission is education. Not
just about weapons systems but about values and ethics.

"And I'll tell you," he continued. "The best thing about the
Bible is what it teaches about community. Take Moses: When he
leads the Israelites out of Egypt, he does what all good leaders
should do, first he sets a goal. Then he builds tactics. But before
they leave, he asks his people to do a difficult thing: to put blood
on the doorposts. Is this for God? Nonsense. God doesn't need
signs. Moses does this because he wants the people to develop a
strong identity."

I had sought a warrior to take me on my tour. Had I found
something more?

"And what about Joshua?" I said. "What does his story tell you
about values?"

He raised his eyebrows. "Let's go," he said. "I'll show you."
Boaz moved the collective control shaft up and to his right, and
the helicopter again lifted into the air. He leaned on the ped-
als and pivoted the control stick between his legs. In a moment, we
were catamaraning over the central mountains. For such a narrow
country (eighty-five miles at its widest), Israel has stunning topo-
graphical range, from the flat fertility of the coastal plain, through
the rocky isolation of the central hills, to the desert gulch in the
east. We were heading toward its most distinctive feature, a geo-
logical shelf that runs along the eastern border, dropping with
ear-popping alacrity into the lowest gullet in the world, the
Syrian-African Rift. To conquer the Promised Land, the Israelites,
who end their forty-year trek through the desert bivouacked on
Mount Nebo in Jordan, must first cross this lifeless trap.

Avner, Yaya, and I pulled out our Bibles. The biblical narrative
has a clear geopolitical arc. The story begins in Mesopotamia, on
the imperial shores of the Tigris and Euphrates, with the earliest
scenes of Genesis--the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, and
the advent of Abraham, four thousand years ago. Leaving his fa-
ther's house, Abraham travels to the land God promises him,
Canaan, the fragile coalition of isolated cities squeezed between
superpowers, Mesopotamia to the north and Egypt to the south.
But the patriarchs--Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--are a small family
of pastoral nomads in no position to claim their destiny. With Ja-
cob's son Joseph the family decamps to Egypt, where they live for
four centuries, quietly growing in stature.

By the thirteenth century b.c.e., the Israelites have multiplied
to such numbers that they threaten the pharaoh, who enslaves
them and begins killing off newborn males. This precipitates the
Exodus, the defining event of the Pentateuch, the Bible's first five
books, in which Moses leads millions of Israelites from the most
civilized country on earth and parades them into the desert. In-
stead of heading directly to the Promised Land, a journey of no
more than two weeks, Moses first inculcates the Israelites with the
values of God. They resist, building idols and demanding a return
to slavery. Four decades pass before the Israelites accept their des-
tiny and become a unified nation, ready to fight for the land God
promised their forefather eight hundred years earlier.

"So how different was the world that Joshua faced," I asked
Avner, "from the one Abraham came to eight centuries earlier?"

He sat forward. Nearly seven years had passed since I first met
Avner and the two of us began retracing the Bible, with one eye on
archaeology, another on politics, and a third one, unexpectedly, on
ourselves. Avner had been bruised by the violence of the interven-
ing years, which ate away at his profession, his pioneering bridge
building with Muslims, and his dreams for a greater region in touch
with its universal gifts to humanity: frankincense; the alphabet;
civilization; an eternal, invisible God. His gray hair still squiggled
from his weatherworn face; his turquoise eyes still stopped time
(and women). Newly remarried, with a young daughter, he had
more energy than I'd seen in years. But he no longer accepted easy
optimism, looking instead for the darker currents and hidden
themes in the scorched soil of the region.

"When Abraham came, it was the age of empires," he said.
"The world was divided into big powers: Egypt, the biggest, to the
south, then the Mesopotamians to the north. It was a bipolar
world, and the land in the middle was weak. Canaan wasn't even a
state; it was city-states.

"At the start of the thirteenth century b.c.e.," he continued,
"the world began to change. Twelve hundred b.c.e. was a land-
mark in history." First, Egypt and the reigning Mesopotamians,
the Hittites, clashed in Syria, coming to a virtual draw. Soon after,
the empires began to decline, leaving a vacuum in Canaan. This
social breakdown opened the door to new powers from the West,
namely the Myceneans, the Greek-speaking empire that built
Thebes and Troy and provided the backdrop for the Iliad and the
Odyssey. Also, a mysterious population called the Sea Peoples be-
gan a full assault on the coastal plain. Scholars disagree about
whether these Viking-like bands were from the Aegean, Anatolia,
or some combination, but the result is the same: a new western
front in the struggle for Canaan.

"So if the world before was bipolar," I asked Avner, "would you
say this world was nonpolar?"

"I would say it was chaos."

"But why bother? This land is not that big. It's not that fertile."

"If you're in Egypt, it's the only way to get to Syria. If you're in
Mesopotamia, it's the only way to get to Africa. If you're in the
Mediterranean, it's the only way to get to Asia. It may not be the liv-
ing room, but it's a corridor, and a very important corridor at that."

"Israel, the world's greatest hallway."
Learning about this chaos reminded me anew how brilliantly at-
tuned the Bible is to the geopolitical realities of its time. It may not
be history as we have come to expect it--an objective retelling of
events--but it is steeped in rich, historical detail. This richness also
highlights an intriguing possibility: If the Sea Peoples are invading
a suddenly weakened Canaan from the west, why can't another pre-
viously unknown power invade the same land from the east?

The Book of Joshua begins the second major section of biblical
books, the Prophets, which follow the five books of the Torah,
Genesis through Deuteronomy. The story opens with God address-
ing Joshua, Moses' aide who has risen to leader of the tribes. "My
servant Moses is dead. Prepare to cross the Jordan, together with all
this people, into the land that I am giving to the Israelites." Be
"strong and very courageous," God says. Joshua sends two spies to
reconnoiter Jericho. A harlot hides them in her home, and they
promise to protect her during the invasion if she ties a crimson cord
to her window, a vivid echo of the bloody doorposts in Exodus.

The ties between Joshua and Moses are etched even deeper as
three days later the former lieutenant leads the Israelites to the
shores of the Jordan, the river that extends from Lake Huleh in
the north through the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. When the
priests bearing the Ark reach the river, the waters divide in the
same manner as the Red Sea and "all Israel crosse[s] over on dry
land." Once again, the Israelites begin a new phase in their history
with God showing his manifest control over nature and his inti-
mate involvement in everyday events.

After about fifteen minutes in the air, we reached the Rift Val-
ley. From the helicopter, the cleft seemed particularly bar-
ren, a frightening gash of charred, chalky sediments, the color of a
wasp's nest. The Jordan, depleted from overirrigation, was barely
visible, a narrow wrinkle as thin as a pencil line. Not a mile to the
west, the Judaean hills begin, gentle slopes covered in gray grooves
as if a million earthworms had edged through the sand. From
above, the hills look like sleeping armadillos.

"Do you see that?" Yaya shouted. "That's the ancient city." He
pointed to the tell, a ten-acre site nestled within the modern city.
Human beings have lived here for ten thousand years. The Is-
raelites also stop here first, whereupon God asks Joshua to circum-
cise all the men, since none has received this holy mark.

"Now why is this the first thing he does?" Yaya asked. "Because
he needs to turn his men into fighters. The key to war is making
everyone cohesive. In this ceremony, everyone has to commit
himself. Remember, they have no antibiotic. And this touches a
very sensitive area for every man. Even the Bible says they have to
wait a few days for everyone to recover. Yet every man does it. This
is the fundamental moment of building community."

Afterward, they turn their attention to war. Jericho is block-
aded. For six days, forty thousand Israelites march around the
walls, led by seven priests, each blowing a trumpet, followed by
the Ark. On the seventh day they circle the city seven times. On
the final leg, as the priests blow their horns, Joshua cries, "Shout!
For the Lord has given you the city." The city and everything in it,
especially the silver and gold, are to be reserved for the Lord,
Joshua says. With trumpets blaring, the people raise a mighty
shout and the walls come tumbling down. The Israelites rush in,
killing everything in sight, "man and woman, young and old, ox
and sheep and ass." The only people spared are the harlot, her par-
ents, and her brothers.

"So what do you think?" I asked Yaya.

"The first thing you have to see about Joshua is that his back-
ground is typical of our way of bringing up leaders. In the Israeli
Army, unlike the American or European ones, you cannot go
straight to the academy and become an officer. You have to go
through the ranks. First you join as a private, and only if you are a
successful foot soldier will you be sent to the squad leader course,
and only if you are a successful squad leader will you be sent to of-
ficer school. Joshua did the same thing, so when he became a
leader, he knew exactly what to do."

"And what about his tactics?"

"Brilliant. In war, you always try to make use of different kinds
of tricks. I know everybody talks about miracles--and I don't want
to take anything away from God--but capturing Jericho, in my
opinion, is the first example in history of psychological warfare."

"Really?"

"Because what they do is surround the city for seven days. Now
try to imagine you are defending the city. Everyone in Jericho is
nervous; they are expecting attack. They wake up every morning
and see the Israelites walking around with their trumpets. And
they think any minute they will attack: `Now they will! Now they
will!' But nothing happens. The next morning, the same feeling.
People are going crazy!

"Imagine if every day they take you to the hospital. `Now we are
going to operate.' You see the doctors, the nurses, you are scared to
death. And suddenly they take you back to your room. No explana-
tion. They don't even say, `Not today.' The next morning, the same
thing. You are going crazy. `Cut me! Kill me! Do whatever you
want, but I can't take this back-and-forth.' That's what happens.
Seven days. The Israelites defeat a totally protected city."

We turned north up the valley toward Shechem, a hotbed of
contention then as now. To the west, we could see the next
target for the Israelites' attack, Ai. After Jericho, Joshua moves
northward in an attempt to defeat the weaker towns along the cen-
tral spine of mountains. Feeling cocky, his spies declare they need
only a small garrison to conquer Ai. But the men are quickly routed,
which God attributes to the Israelites having kept forbidden booty
during the attack on Jericho. Yaya was equally unforgiving: "Don't
underestimate your enemy: That's the first rule of war."

Joshua then dispatches thirty thousand men to hide behind Ai.
He leads the rest to the city walls, before fleeing in apparent re-
treat. The men from Ai follow hotly, leaving the city unprotected
and easy prey for the waiting troops, who quickly conquer it. Yaya
described this as a textbook ambush. It's what follows, though,
that is momentous. Joshua marches all the Israelites--men, women,
and children--north to Shechem, a place of emotional signifi-
cance because Abraham first stopped here when he came to the
Promised Land.

"You see that valley," Yaya called out. We were over the central
mountains, where down below a clear boulevard was visible be-
tween two ridges. "You can see why Joshua took this path. The
people walked in the middle, and he put troops on either ridge to
protect them."

Once Shechem is captured, Joshua gathers the Israelites around
the Ark, with half facing a mountain of blessing and half a moun-
tain of cursing. Joshua then reads everyone the Laws of Moses.
This moment represents the first time in Israelite history when the
written Torah plays a central role. "There was not a word of all
that Moses had commanded that Joshua failed to read in the pres-
ence of the entire assembly of Israel, including the women and
children and strangers."

Yaya was awestruck. "Try to imagine how advanced that was,"
he said. "Women and children were not counted back then.
Women got the right to vote only a hundred years ago. This is
three thousand years ago!"

As he spoke, a burst of shouting interrupted our conversation.
The Air Force was furious we were approaching Shechem,
modern-day Nablus, one of the bloodiest cities in the region. "You
don't have permission to be here," the voice insisted. "Turn back.
Now!" A small band of ultra-Orthodox Jews had recently block-
aded themselves in Joseph's Tomb and been firebombed by Pales-
tinians. "We're not going over the city," Boaz replied, turning to
me and winking. The voice did not let up. Directly under us, Yaya
pointed out the Balata Refugee Camp, from which dozens of sui-
cide bombers had been dispatched. It looked like an intractable
gray maw.

Ignoring the Air Force, Boaz maneuvered the helicopter over
the city, which was bracketed by two beautiful peaks: Gerizim, the
mount of blessing, and Ebal, the mount of cursing. They were
clearly the highest summits in the area. My mind considered how
high a rocket-propelled grenade could fly. Boaz seemed unmoved.
Earlier, I had asked him if he ever got nervous. "During a situa-
tion, you don't have time to feel uncomfortable," he said. "It's like
being in a car accident. Afterward, your legs are shaking, but dur-
ing, you have to guide the steering wheel." And do you feel more
peaceful? "From the air, everything looks different. I don't know
how to describe it, but when you're up here, you feel better."

He steered us to the center of town, directly between the
mountains, and over the monastery of Jacob's Well. And then he
stopped. The staccato warnings from the controller continued.
The rotor kept spinning, and the sun tried to sieve through the
clouds. But we weren't moving. We paused, suspended in midgulp,
just beyond the reach of conflict, far from the fullness of calm,
motionless, yet hoping for a hint of blessing from the rival hills.

Yaya broke the silence. For the first time all morning, his voice
was low, unanimated. It was personal. "Whenever I try to read
the Bible," he said, "I try to grab the most significant part. In my
opinion, the most significant part of this story is that Joshua didn't
read the Laws of Moses only to the heads of the tribes. He read it
to everybody. Remember, they had no radios, or loudspeakers. Try
to imagine what it means to pass a lesson along the chain so it
reaches every man, every woman, every child."

"So why does he do it?"

"Because that's what distinguishes the Israelites from the rest of
the world. Moses' rules touch every little corner of your life, from the
moment you wake up to the moment you sleep. Even hygiene:
how to take care of animals, keep your camp clean, what happens
when you pee. Even today, how many countries have legislation on
how to treat animals? But three thousand years ago, the Israelites
built their nation around living a meaningful life. That's why they
survived."

The journey south from Shechem became more treacherous.
We were covering the most hostile part of the terrain, the
central mountains, where for millennia the weaker peoples have
been driven to live. What confines the Palestinians to this terri-
tory today is exactly what drove the Israelites here in antiquity: be-
cause the land is less desirable, the lesser power must accept it.
Surviving in the Middle East is elementally a matter of water, not
land. The most fertile areas are secured the earliest. In Canaan
that means the Galilee, the coastal plain, and what the Bible calls
the shefela, the foothills. In today's world of long-distance surveil-
lance and projectile weaponry, the tops of mountains might be
coveted, but in antiquity they were shunned. None of the strongest
cities in Canaan, like Beth-shan and Hazor, or even the second-
tier cities, like Jericho or Jerusalem, were built at the summits in
their neighborhoods. They were built closest to water.

Joshua's warpath through the Promised Land is brilliantly
designed to capitalize on this. First he threads his population in
between Canaanite strongholds and stations them alongside a tak-
able city, Shechem. Then he prepares to attack surrounding cities.
But his enemy adjusts. A huge coalition of regional kings, includ-
ing ones from Jerusalem and Hebron, form an alliance to attack
the Israelites. Joshua marches all night to surprise them. The sem-
inal battle takes place a few miles west of Jerusalem, where Boaz
steered our craft. The hills below were covered in terraces, desper-
ate attempts to keep rainwater from draining away too quickly.

In the battle, Joshua has the advantage of attacking first. But he
has an even greater ally. In the war's most arresting scene, God ac-
tually joins the fighting, hailing huge stones from the sky to de-
stroy the fleeing enemy. Desperate for total victory, Joshua pleads
for God to stop time. God obliges.

And the sun stood still
And the moon halted
While a nation wreaked judgement on its foes.

Never before, the Bible says, "has there ever been such a day,
when the Lord acted on words spoken by a man."
Joshua soon sweeps from north to south and completes his van-
quishing of Canaan. "Thus Joshua conquered the whole country,"
the text says, "with all their kings; he let none escape, but proscribed
everything that breathed." In less than ten verses, the dream of the
Israelites for over ten centuries has come true.

Or has it? Since I began exploring the Bible, I had been bede-
viled by the tantalizing, tender relationship between the details in
the text and the facts in the ground. After two centuries of aggres-
sive digging, archaeologists have come to what can be character-
ized as an awkward accommodation with the Hebrew Bible. For
the Torah, there is simply no physical evidence that any of the
events described took place. There is, however, plenty of support
that the stories fit squarely into the historical reality of the second
millennium b.c.e. When Abraham wanders from Mesopotamia to
Canaan, for example, he follows a familiar migration pattern.
When Moses commits murder and flees to the desert, he travels a
well-known trading route. Later, with the rise of the prophets in
the middle of the first millennium b.c.e., history arrives in full
panoply and the Bible is a much more reliable narrator. Joshua,
along with David and Solomon, inhabits a ticklish middle ground.

The primary problem with Joshua's conquest story in the text is
that few of the cities described--including Jericho and Ai--show
any signs of having been occupied at the time the Israelites ap-
peared in the country. As Avner put it, "The walls could not have
come tumbling down around Jericho because the city didn't have
walls. Plus, it wasn't inhabited in 1200 b.c.e., when the Israelites
arrived. For sure we have a story that was added later." Neverthe-
less, there is extensive evidence that the social and political land-
scape of the country changed around this time and irrefutable
proof that the Israelites eventually took over. So what happened?

There are four theories. The oldest is the monolithic war the-
ory: the Israelites came en masse, largely as described in the text,
with the story receiving some tinkering when it was written down
a few centuries later. Avner, like many, was taught this as a child. A
more radical idea, introduced in the 1920s, was peaceful infiltra-
tion: the Israelites were pastoralists who wandered in with their
flocks in seasonal migrations, settled in the sparsely populated
highlands, and eventually clashed with the Canaanites.
Later archaeology showed that the Israelite communities were
more advanced, unified, and apparently established within a few
generations, which gave rise to a third theory, the wave. The Is-
raelites moved in aggressively from outside, but not all at once,
and they never really conquered the entire land, only parts of it.

This is what Avner learned in graduate school. A revisionist the-
ory, introduced more recently, suggests the Conquest was an in-
ternal rebellion. The Israelites, instead of being outsiders, were
Canaanite peasants who broke away from their lords and fled to
the highlands, where they adopted the religious ideals of equality
gleaned from renegade Egyptians.

"So what do you believe now?" I asked Avner.

"I still believe there is a lot of truth in the biblical story," he
said. "Granted, it's much more complicated, but I have difficulties
saying they are indigenous people. Archaeologically, I would ex-
pect to see much more continuity. The new inhabitants dressed
the same, but they had much poorer materials. Even the pottery
shows differences. We have a clear break with Canaan. I think we
can be confident that the Israelites came from outside and some-
how took over the country."

Soon we arrived over the southern hills, our last stop before
Jerusalem. Yaya had grown more emotional, pointing out
landmarks where he trained as a private. Hearing him tap into that
raw passion of youth drew me closer to him, and I said, "The Bible
never says men going into war are scared. In your experience, do
people get scared?"

"No doubt. One of the things you do as a leader is say, `All
those who are afraid, go back.' Almost everyone will go forward.
If you identify with the unit, and your commander, you will over-
come your concern. People will do unbelievable things if they be-
lieve in the values of the group."

I had been thinking a lot about fear. I wasn't a direct combatant
in this conflict. I didn't wear a uniform, live in an occupied town,
or face mandatory service, like all young Israelis. Instead I was
something odder: a volunteer. The simple fact was that I didn't
have to be in this helicopter. I didn't have to leave my mother cry-
ing on the telephone. I didn't have to leave my new apartment and
the mementos I'd just bought on my honeymoon. I didn't have to
leave my new wife.

Yet I did.

And I was afraid. Afraid that I was doing the wrong thing, that
I was taking my life into my hands, that I was bringing pain to the
people I loved. And I was concerned that the idea that motivated
me--thinking about the past as a way to understand the present--
was wrong.

Still, my motivation seemed clear. After decades of traveling
around the world, thinking about religion and God had brought
me more stability than I had ever experienced. Exploring the world
through the prism of the Bible had allowed me to understand my
surroundings in a way I never thought possible. Interfaith prob-
lems are rooted in Abraham; the first war in Iraq was between
Cain and Abel. For years I ran decisions through the part of me
rooted in my hometown in Georgia and the part grounded in my
Ivy League education. Now I also ran them through the Bible and
the lens of meaning provided by the ancient stories.

But nagging questions remained. The hardest one I was asked
about my earlier journeys through the Bible was how they had af-
fected my faith. I was raised as a fifth-generation Jew in the South
in one of the oldest synagogues in the United States. Religion was
a matter of rote and pride, not a matter of conviction. But my
journey grounded me, I often said. I discovered in myself a molec-
ular attachment to the land. My bond with the Bible moved from
my head to my feet.

I felt safe.

But there was something I felt that I rarely said: Traveling in the
desert drew me closer to God but further away from organized re-
ligion. I love the text, but not necessarily what human institutions
have done in its name. Manipulation, exclusivism, hatred, and vio-
lence are undeniable outgrowths of biblical monotheism. Perhaps I
had no need for religion and could cultivate a personal, nonsectar-
ian relationship with the Bible, with other seekers, and with God.

September 11 at first deepened that conviction. My animosity
toward religion seemed bolstered by the new reality, as violence in
the name of faith now imperiled the world. Turn on a news broad-
cast anywhere. Fundamentalists had seized control of faith and
slammed the door on tolerance. There was only one route to sal-
vation, and Osama bin Laden, or Mullah Omar, or Jerry Falwell,
or any number of radical Jewish settlers I had met over the years
held the key. To me this extremism held an alarmingly real
prospect for religious war.

But the alternative--radical secularism--seemed equally dan-
gerous and unappealing. The bloodiest wars of the twentieth
century were fought for secular ideologies, including socialism,
fascism, and communism. When I was growing up, the world had
seemed to be disengaging from religion; it turned on the axis of
the Cold War and worshiped the twin gods of science and plea-
sure.

In the West, the biggest alternative to faith was capitalism
and the promise that the global marketplace held for heaven on
earth. People were just too busy getting ahead and enjoying the
moment to worry about profiting from the past or preparing for
the afterlife. The result left what Jean-Paul Sartre called a God-
shaped hole in human consciousness, where the divine once was
but had disappeared.

So is there a middle ground? I wondered. Is there a place where
faith and tolerance can live side by side? In short, is religion just a
source of war, or can it help bring about peace?

As I tried to answer those questions, the Bible took on new
meaning--and new urgency--for me. In particular, I became fasci-
nated by the underappreciated second half of the Hebrew Bible, in
which the birth of religion is described in dramatic, contentious de-
tail. For the first thousand years of Israelite history, the patriarchs
have a personal relationship with God and their descendants receive
the 613 Laws of Moses. But their ways of worship--building altars,
making burnt sacrifices--bear little resemblance to what organized
religion would become. Nowhere in the Torah, for instance, does it
say how to conduct a wedding or a funeral. Not until the first mil-
lennium b.c.e. do the Israelites begin to refine the basic tenets of
biblical monotheism--worshiping in the Temple, reading the Bible,
celebrating Shabbat. The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from the late first
millennium b.c.e., contain extensive details on how to plan nuptials.

The latter parts of the Bible portray this evolution as messy at
best. Here, in a glorious sweep that heralds God's kingdom on
earth, Joshua parades the Ark into Israel, David unites the tribes in
Jerusalem, and Solomon builds the House of the Lord. But here
also, in a vivid portrait of the moral decay that shadows that king-
dom, Jeremiah decries the ethical rot of the people, Isaiah weeps
over their exile to Babylon, and Ezekiel dreams of their return to
Zion. In this graphic interplay, the Bible seems to be saying that
godliness and godlessness are in perpetual tension.

For years I deflected questions about religion by pointing out
that organized faith didn't exist during the time of the patriarchs.
The second half of the Hebrew Bible puts that vacancy to an end,
as Israel develops Judaism, the foundation faith for Christianity, Is-
lam, and half the world's believers today. And Israel was not alone.
Around the globe, from Japan to India to Iran to Greece, organized
religion was invented in the first millennium b.c.e. The German
philosopher Karl Jaspers termed these years (800 to 200 b.c.e.) the
Axial Age, because they gave rise to Shintoism, Confucianism,
Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Platonism. The central
challenges of our time--the relationship between individuals and
God, faith and reason, theocracy and democracy, church and
state--were born in the centuries between Moses and Jesus. For
that reason, some scholars believe we are in a new Axial Age. Re-
gardless, the need to understand the birth pangs of religion is more
pressing than ever.

At the close of my first journey, as I climbed down from Mount
Nebo, I had turned to Avner and said, "We're not done yet." Fi-
nally I understood why. I had to return to the scene of my desert
transformation. I would travel through the tinderbox of Israel,
exploring the prickly relationship between God and the first kings
of Israel. I would try to penetrate Iraq, the birthplace of the Bible
and the scene of the most traumatic--and least understood--
revolution in the history of religion, the Babylonian Exile. And I
would attempt to pierce the religious iron curtain surrounding
Iran, home to the unexpected savior of the Israelites, Cyrus the
Great, the first interfaith leader in history.

"Great, the Axis of Upheaval," my wife cracked.

Still one more reason drew me back to the Bible. The comfort
I took from my earlier travels had been undermined by a series of
crises. My mother got cancer; my father, too, had been touched by
illness. I had arrived in a new phase of life. On a personal level,
one relationship ended, and another began. That, too, failed,
which sent me back to the woman whose strength, wisdom, and
fire mirrored the feelings I had in the desert. One thing love and
faith have in common is that they grow from the same human
amalgam of unease, desire, passion, and need.

We were married on a June evening under the stained-glass
light of Noah and by the words of Moses in my childhood syna-
gogue. Two rabbis, each invoking Abraham and Sarah, wove the
present to the past with an ineffable flax. It was the part of religion
that seemed most appealing: the comfort and import of repetition,
something totally familiar that became, through its sheer ordinar-
iness, something fresh and uplifting.

Two months later, I kissed my wife good-bye and set out to un-
dermine everything we had built. The world was filled with terror,
fear, and death. War, so long prosecuted in the name of states, was
now being rendered most commonly in the name of God. The
Bible, which for so long had seemed the refuge of the past, sud-
denly seemed the most vital route for making sense of the tumult
of the hour.

I had wanted to go on my first journeys back to the Bible.

I needed to go on this one.

I arrived in Jerusalem on the most gorgeous day I could remem-
ber, drinking in the clean air. Wind tussled the palm fronds, a
kippah blew down the street, a huff of clouds chugged by as if
from a storybook train. On a passing bus, a pudgy elderly couple,
Eastern Europeans who no doubt had survived World War II,
gripped each other in a tight embrace, as if granting and taking
life. There is no uncomplicated emotion here. No day is purely
beautiful; no tragedy is merely tragic.

Avner and I drove to the fashionable German Colony to have
dinner. It seemed safe. No bombing had ever occurred on this
block. "Are you armed?" the guard said at the gate of an open-air
restaurant. Earlier, a soldier across the street had foiled an attack,
holding up the arms of a heavily perspiring man to prevent him
from detonating the explosives around his neck.
After dinner we walked back to the car. Most of the shops were
closed, except one. It was crowded, bright, with a square red sign
that said coffee. "That's new," I said. "I hear it's wonderful,"
Avner said. "We should go there sometime." He paused as if to
say, "Should we?" Nah, it was late, our helicopter tour was sched-
uled for the morning. I was asleep by 11:00 p.m.

Twenty minutes later the telephone woke me from a dead
sleep. "There's been a bombing in Jerusalem," Avner said. "I think
you should call home." I had done so earlier, after a bombing in
Tel Aviv. I telephoned my wife, who was more shaken this time.
"Please, no more outdoor restaurants," she said. My mother
started pleading. My father was grim.

I got off the phone and turned on the television. The familiar
chaos was on the screen--people crying, running, splattered blood
on a young girl's face, a darkened arm in the street. And then they
showed where it had happened. A bright red sign. Square. coffee.

Never before in my years of traversing the Middle East and
confronting the reality of religious violence had I felt such a trem-
bling of raw emotion. "Oh, my God," I cried out, alone. I grabbed
at my face. I felt the imminence of death, as if I had touched a
place in my body I didn't know was there. I watched the endless
loop on television, the faces of people I almost knew. I muted the
sound and for a few minutes, groggy from half sleep, watched over
and over and over again. I turned the sound up and heard how the
bomber had been stopped, someone had shouted "Terror!" and still
no one was safe.

My wife called back, and I started babbling, trying to be sooth-
ing, yet a little out of control. By the end I was just hugging the
phone in silence. Finally I turned off the television and tried to
sleep, half waiting for another call. The room was cold. It was late.

Tomorrow was the anniversary of September 11.
We were climbing again, approaching Jerusalem from the
south, gliding over the bank of pines that rings the city.
"Get ready!" Yaya said. We drifted above the ridge, and suddenly
the city burst before us, like a platter of treats being served up by a
waiter. My heart leapt as my eye scurried to orient itself, looking
first for the bell tower on the Mount of Olives, then the Tower of
David, and finally the large plaza with the golden dome at its
heart. "Pray for the well-being of Jerusalem," wrote the Psalmist.

"May those who love you be at peace. May there be well-being within your ramparts, peace in your citadels.� For the sake of my kin and friends, I pray for your well-being; for the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I seek your good."

Yaya was bursting with pride, a little boy with a train set he had
built himself. "Look! That's the hill we captured in '48." "That's
where David eyed Bathsheba." "Wait! Do you see that . . ." The
windows nearly fogged with the intensity. After a while I stopped
looking at the landmarks and stared at him.

"You're part of one of the most efficient, lethal fighting forces
in the world," I said. "And yet you're passionate about the Bible?
What would your soldiers say?"

"Can I tell you a secret?" he said. "For years I chaired the com-
mittee that wrote the code of ethics for the IDF. It was one of the
most enjoyable assignments I had. In the introduction we wrote
that all our ethics are based on the values that come from our
Bible. I once taught at the War College outside Washington, and
they said no other military in the world has such a code."

"But the Bible is so brutal," I said. "Joshua kills women and
children."

"That was the custom of the time," he said. "Today, the battle-
field is the place where real human character is displayed. I have
seen people ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. I have seen peo-
ple turn into animals. The difference is their values. Do you know
that during the whole Yom Kippur War and the Lebanese War
there was not even one case that an Israeli soldier raped a woman?
You won't find any army in the world with such a record."

We arrived over the Old City. For the first time all day, the
clouds dissolved and a clear, white sun washed over the honey-
colored stones. A rainbow appeared over the gilded onion domes
of the Russian Orthodox church in Gethsemane. "Wanna go for a
ride?" Boaz said.

I held on. He pushed down on the control shaft, and suddenly
we began to dive. We were forbidden from flying below five thou-
sand feet. Soon we were at four thousand, then three. Our nose
was headed at the heart of the Temple Mount, the Haram al-
Sharif, the legendary Mount Moriah, where Ariel Sharon in-
flamed the second Intifada, Yitzhak Rabin led the capture during
the Six-Day War, King Hussein watched as his grandfather was as-
sassinated and he received a bullet to his own chest. Mohammed
ascended to heaven from here; Jesus made a Passover pilgrimage
here; Solomon built the Temple here.

Two thousand feet. Fifteen hundred.

None of us was speaking. My eye was drawn to the crescent on
the top of the golden dome. The guard towers on the four cor-
ners. The black-capped worshipers at the Western Wall. We were
blasting through the cornea of what the Talmud calls the Eye of
the World. Our tail swung left, then right, but our head never wa-
vered, locked onto the glint of infinity that has lured people to this
spot since God was born. It was like being pulled backward
through a vortex of time, an ineluctable wave of legend on top of
custom, hatred on top of hope.

The dial said 1,000 feet. We were close enough to hear the
prayers. We were near enough to get shot. We were poised in a
nameless breach between heaven and earth.

When I first came to Israel, I was drawn by the country's phys-
icality, the dripping sense that past and future lived closer to the
surface of every life. In Jerusalem I was more alive. Here I could
engage the smorgasbord of history and politics, war and peace,
that had absorbed me since I was a teenager arguing current events
around the breakfast table. I had walked down the steps to the
Western Wall, placed my hands on the stones, and wept. I had
reached the bedrock of my identity. I had come home.

But now, suspended above that plaza, I wondered. The stones
seemed so unmoving, and the history in them so inflexible. The di-
mensions of that holy mountain had become the battle lines of holy
war. Maybe the only way to reach peace was to peer beyond the tan-
gible structures and reclaim the original sacred space. The Temple
was never supposed to be merely a place; it was supposed to be the
embodiment of an idea: Humans can live in consort with God.

This tension, I realized, forms the undercurrent of the Bible: try-
ing to balance a life on earth with a life that meets the standards of
God. When Moses gathers the tribes at the end of his life, he warns
them that conquering the land will not end their challenges; it will
begin them. And he cautions them that God will punish failure to
obey his laws by ripping them from the land. "The Lord will scatter
you among all the peoples from one end of the earth to the other."

When Joshua gathers the tribes at the end of his life, he deliv-
ers a similar message. Do not mingle with the foreigners that sur-
round you and worship their pagan gods. "You will not be able to
serve the Lord," Joshua says. "He is a jealous God; he will not for-
give your transgressions and your sins." This is the painful mes-
sage at the heart of the Conquest: For centuries the Israelites had
dreamed of setting foot in the Promised Land, but once they ar-
rive there is little celebration. There is doom. Instead of being a
land of milk and honey, it is a land of blood and tears.

This reality sets up the question that defines the rest of the
Hebrew Bible: Which is more important, living on the land or liv-
ing a life of God? For me, this question was acute. So much of my
rediscovery of the Bible was about reconnecting to the land. But
for the Israelites, occupying the land involves a vicious slaughter
of men, women, and children. One overlooked legacy of Israel's
God is the beastly violence he continually demands. If you love the
lessons of the Bible--particularly its legacy of ethics and morality--
it's sometimes hard to love the stories of the Bible. The life of God
is not always a life of peace and light.

And neither is life on the land. Jews often claim that, according
to the Bible, God promised this land to Abraham; we were here
first, and our claims should have precedence. The land is vital to Ju-
daism. But the Bible delivers a very different message. It says living
on the land is not the most important thing; living on the land while
obeying God is the most important thing. The land is secondary to
living a virtuous life. Faced with a choice, the people of Israel
should chose the values of heaven over the virtues of earth.

"So you fought for this land," I said to Yaya, gesturing to
Jerusalem and beyond. "Would you give it back?"
"It depends on what you want to achieve," he said. "War is just a
tool to achieve your national goals. Land is important to a nation,
but so is language, and ideology. The Jewish people have always
wanted to come back to Jerusalem. But more important than this
city, or any city, are the rules, the beliefs, the way to treat yourself,
your wife, your neighbors. The key to Judaism is the principle that
everyone is responsible for the well-being of the people."

"At the end of the story, Joshua gathers all the Israelites at
Shechem," I said. "He tells them they must choose the God of
Abraham or the gods of Canaan. If you were talking to the Jewish
people today, what would you say?"

"As I told you, the most important thing for any leader is to
define the goal. For me, the goal is to live in this place, in peace-
ful conditions with our neighbors, according to our values and
beliefs--and not to sacrifice our values and beliefs because of a
piece of land, or a question of pride. You have to compromise. All
our history we have compromised. But there is one thing we cannot
compromise: our values."

The helicopter started to rise. I felt the now familiar vibration
from above, the swell of air from below, the gentle lift.

"Can that goal be achieved?"

"No doubt," he said. "No doubt."

Back in Jerusalem a few hours later, the air was still electrified,
sad. I went to visit Bikur Holim Hospital, the cramped Dick-
ensian building in the heart of the city that serves as ground zero
for many of the victims of suicide bombings. A pall of emptiness
still hung over the seventy-five-year-old building, as a guard slowly
inspected my bag. Inside a long, dimly lit hallway, a few family
members huddled along the stone walls; patients with wounds on
their faces sat in wheelchairs.

Seven people were killed in the blast at the coffee shop; fifty-
seven were wounded. Craig Nelson, a reporter eating at a pizza par-
lor across the street from the café, described seeing a man turn away
from his restaurant, run into the shop, utter "Allah Akbar," "God is
great," then blow himself up. His severed head landed in the middle
of the street. The neck is the weakest part of the body, the police ex-
plained. Nelson found a twenty-year-old woman curled on her side,
gasping for breath, her arm twisted grotesquely. Her hair was singed
gray. Nava Applebaum died in his arms. Eight feet away lay the
corpse of her father.

Dr. David Applebaum, a native of Cleveland, was one of Is-
rael's most famous emergency room physicians. He had flown
back that evening from a conference in Manhattan, where he was
asked to speak about his pioneering efforts to treat victims of
suicide bombings. He had taken Nava to the café for a father-
daughter chat to impart some last-minute advice. Today was to be
her wedding day. She was buried instead. As Nava's body was low-
ered into her grave, her fiancé placed a farewell gift on her shrouded
body. It was her wedding ring.

"In the last three years, we've had more than twenty-four sui-
cide bombings," explained Alex Farkas, a friend of Avner's who
worked as the hospital's spokesman. Alex was a forty-something
Hasidic Jew, with a beard and white shirt; he was disheveled from
a night of no sleep. "We got information yesterday morning from
the police that a bomber was on his way to Jerusalem. We even
knew the color of his shoes. And they caught him a few meters
from here; the hospital was his target. But we didn't have warning
about the man at the café."

With so much experience, the hospital had become adept at
crises. "People come from all over the world to learn how we do it.
You hear the doors banging, then--it's a miracle--in two minutes
you wouldn't recognize the place. It's like a new dimension of
smell, light."

First come light victims, often strapped to chairs. Next are
more serious victims, brought by professionals. Ambulances use a
special code to get through the barriers, after the IDF warned that
bombers might usurp medical vehicles. Then come people in
shock, screaming. "Last night we had a serious case, a man who
saw his friend lose two legs. He was hyperventilating so severely it
took four hours before he came out of it."

I asked Alex how he would explain to someone, like my mother,
why there was so much violence in a place of such faith. Was reli-
gion to blame?

"I will tell her that one thing is for sure: There is one God, and
God controls the world. God controls the bomb, and the bomber.
God chooses the doctor who takes my wife's three eggs and,
through IVF, turns one of them into my son. And God decides
that Dr. Applebaum and his daughter, on the day of her marriage,
will go into heaven.

"And I will tell her," he continued, "that as a religious person, I
believe the world is going to get better. There will be a messiah. It is
written in the Bible that the sheep will live together with the wolf."
"But when you read Joshua," I said, "the story suggests you
can't have God's kingdom without violence."

"Why does a baby, when it's born, have to go through such
drastic bloodshed? I don't know. I didn't create the world, but I
know that good things come from stress. Through that war, the
land of Israel was created. Through this war, we created many
methods of saving lives."

He told me a story. A woman had come into the hospital the
night before. She had shrapnel in her back and was covered in
blood. She was hysterical. They got her during the Golden Hour,
the first sixty minutes after a crisis. They saved her life. "Do you
want to meet her?"

Before I could think I was ushered down the hall, through the
emergency ward, into a dimly lit room. Tzippy Cohen was sitting
against the pillows in a loose-fitting hospital gown, her bangs
hanging limply around her expressionless face. The twenty-five-
year-old Australian was more alert than I would have expected, but
her eyes were still vacant. She was vacationing from New York,
where she works at the National Society of Hebrew Day Schools,
just blocks from Ground Zero.

"We decided kind of late, Let's go out for coffee," she said.
"We chose the German Colony, because it's not the center of
town. We took a cab, because you're not supposed to take buses. I
had wanted to go to Café Hillel. I had heard it was good."

"It looked very inviting last night," I said.

"It was full, we noticed that. We decided not to sit outside,
safety-wise. We also made a decision to sit in the back, safety-wise.
I had a salad, nothing major. We were just picking at our food.

"And then, in the middle of nowhere . . ." Her eyes blinked.
"And you knew what it was. There was no question it was a bomb.
The place just jumped, like an electric shock went through us. I
can't separate anything, except to say: Bang. A shock. Black.
Smoke. Shattered. And then a split second of darkness and silence.
Followed by screaming. And running. And pandemonium."

Her voice trailed off.

"I knew immediately I had to get out of there," she continued.

"I felt I was cut. I was bleeding. Instinct told us to go out the back.
We climbed through the glass walls, which were blown out, and
went running through the alley, just screaming. `Call an ambu-
lance! Someone call an ambulance!' A lady said, `Come with me,'
and drove me to the hospital. When I got here I realized there was
blood on my body that was not my blood. My hair had pieces in
it. . . . It was other people."

Again there was a pause.

"So why were you saved?" I asked.

"I believe in higher powers," Tzippy said. "If you ask me, it's a
miracle. I was in New York on September 11 and watched the sec-
ond tower fall. I was covered in dust. My faith does not let me be-
lieve that if I'm going to a land--my holy land--that something
will happen to me. If I would have died here, I would have died in
New York."

"But in the face of what you've seen, some people might say
that religion is the problem. You have come face-to-face with one
of the worst things a human being can do."

"I have to say, on the contrary, it makes me do a turnaround. I
need to turn closer to religion. I am lying here for a reason. You
can't attribute something like this to coincidence every time it
happens. Luck doesn't come your way so much. If I have learned
anything from this experience it is that, despite the evil in this
world, there is still goodness in each human being. When I walk
out of here, I owe it to God to do something good for his allowing
me to survive such hell." She attempted a wan smile.

"And I will."