From Jerusalem: No easy answers for what ails the Middle East

I plead guilty. I ran away from home, and since graduating Flathead High in 2006, have not been back. I now live in a country with scoliosis: Israel. A concrete wall twists like a bad spine through the center of the nation, protecting or segregating people from each other, depending on how you look at it. My morning walks are not under the storybook Swan Range any more. The Wailing Wall and Dome of the Rock are my new landmarks, echoing stories of a different kind.

It was an immaculate March day. Everything said springtime. I was running errands on Jaffa Street, the artery pulsing reggae from designer shops on the fringes while a train purrs silver down the heart. About 3 p.m., a crunch hit my ears. “One of the construction sites,” I thought, and paid no notice.

But squad cars began blitzing in fleets down the tracks. A spike in phone use sent servers crashing. The crunch had been a bomb, just blocks away. A suitcase had blown up a bus. Thirty-nine were wounded, and the one fatality was a student in my department at the Hebrew University.

No group claimed the attack, but conventional wisdom lays responsibility somewhere at the broad doorstep of jihad. What is jihad, this holy hatred, which also slammed into the towers on September 11? You may think I’m crazy, but here’s at least part of the answer: theological insecurity.

Monotheism posits one God with one people. God’s love of that people is proved by blessing. Or the equation can be reversed: Those who are blessed must be beloved. These ideas are dry tinder in the Middle East, ready to ignite. Think of Israel and Iran. Why does Iran court political and economic suicide for the sake of annihilating that fleck on the map called Israel? Because that flourishing fleck is an existential threat.

There is a stream of theology that thinks in terms of replacement: Judaism came first, it says. Christianity replaced Judaism. Islam replaced Christianity. God makes successive covenants with humankind, each new covenant replacing the former. But how can a covenant with the invisible God be proven? Visible blessing. The proof is in the pudding!

Which is why Iran hates Israel. The small but powerful country of Jews rebukes the theology on which the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic rests. If Israel scores high in every social index, what does that mean theologically for the limping Arab economies around it? Iran should risk everything to cripple and eradicate Israel. The only other option for Iran, and for the cowards who murdered my classmate on Jaffa Street, is the only unthinkable option: spiritual suicide. Jihad is a defense mechanism for fear. The fear of being unloved.

But violence has struck closer. On Good Friday 2010 I went for an evening walk. It was Holy Week in the Holy City, and I was overdosing on meaning. A nook on a ledge let me watch from a distance the candles of pilgrims twinkling up and down the charcoal shoulders of the Mount of Olives. Wind from the Judean Desert slapped icy fingers across my cheek. Offering “good evening” to a few passersby, I pulled up my collar and sunk into a muse: a shattered god conquering the problem of pain by swallowing a fatal dose of pain himself?

Explosion! Pain itself thundered through my head. Hands were ripping at me, and I was freefalling backwards through the air. I landed skull-first on the stone pavement, fight and flight instincts colliding into one frantic energy. I curled in the fetal position, protecting my face, ready to be gang-stomped, kidnapped, or worse. But when I realized the gang was fleeing with my things, head bleeding and helpless, I could only launch profanities at their backs, into the wind.

I sprinted to Dung Gate, near the Wailing Wall, where soldiers were. The secret police was called. Within minutes I was in the backseat of an unmarked sedan, surrounded by commandos in hoodies, combing the network of hookah shops and alleyways where my attackers were hiding. Not finding them, I hailed a cab to the emergency room. I was fine.

Soon after arriving in Jerusalem three years ago, I had this thought: Everything wrong with this town has to do with hermeneutics. Hermeneutics? It is the discipline of extracting meaning from a sacred text. That is, hermeneutics is why one book, the Bible, generates such a variety of interpretations. Isn’t the Christian family tree massive?

Hermeneutics likewise allows some to point to the Quran and say, “Islam is a religion of peace.” Others point and say, “It is open season on the infidel.” The mechanism of interpretation makes all the difference. What was the hermeneutic, I wonder, of the men from a conservative Muslim neighborhood who pounded me unprovoked?

Please don’t understand me as anti-anyone. I am aware of the appalling contradictions in the history of my own Christian faith. The problem is not any particular religion. The problem is religion itself, full stop. Trying to corral Mystery into brittle stock pens of language, the farm hands have the habit of arrogating to themselves the reins of God, mistaking them for authentic reign. Sillyheads.

Jerusalem has by no means made me a relativist. But blind faith in the inherited hermeneutic keeps us circling forever with crouched knees and bony fingers, yelling “oppressor!” at the unknown other, ourselves wearing the name tag “victim.” Or does my hermeneutic demand something beyond a quaint metaphor in the words “turn the other cheek”?

What’s my main idea, you may be wondering by now. Only that we live within ideas themselves, the contours of which are often invisible to us, but the consequences of which are not.

Replacement theology and hermeneutics brood just below the surface of conflict in the Middle East, and to combat their symptoms is only a palliative song-and-dance.