Two Months in the Holy Land
TWO MONTHS IN THE HOLY LAND
In Palestine, more than anywhere else, I thought often: How does God reveal Himself to men?
Through a People, through a Book, through a Temple, through Nature, through a Person, or directly, immediately, soul to soul?
In Palestine I realized clearly how different religions understand—or misunderstand— these many ways of Revelation.
Were there in Jerusalem men of the prophetic spirit and temper, to see whom would be to understand better the great
Hebrew prophets?
In such a short time it was no doubt hard to make the acquaintance of such men, even if they lived now, though
I came across one who, aware of the glory of Israel and of his own share in it, was disciplining himself, body and soul, for the hour when his destiny would be fulfilled.
He ate little and that the Passover Bread, kept in store from the days of the Passover. He worked part time in an office to earn just enough to maintain himself and spent the rest of the day at the Wailing Wall, or at home in prayer and meditation and in prolonged and earnest study of the prophecies. His wife supported herself and their son. 'This man possessed, in a small measure, the fire of the Hebrew spiritual genius.
Acquaintance with him brought home to me the fact that the men whose writings have come down to us in the Bible are perhaps but a few lofty, towering souls standing out from among hundreds.
The Hebrew experience of God was—and still continues to be—largely collective.
The choice of the Eternal rests not upon a man but upon a nation.
'No service is possible in a synagogue without at least ten men of over thirty years of age.
We visited an old synagogue in Palestine and heard a legend about it. Once nine men came to the synagogue eager to worship.
But a stranger appeared and the service was held.
People wondered who he was —he looked so much like Abraham. Most of the prayers in the Prayer Book are concerned with national and not merely individual welfare.
The City of Jerusalem takes on a new meaning when it is realized that for centuries during the exile and again during
A. J. APPASAMY
the many generations which have passed after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 a.p. the dream of Psalmists and Seers was that in Jerusalem God would meet them as a people.
Even the Zionist movement was, in-ameasure, the urge of the Hebrew soul's longing for a collective experience of God: I lived ior a few weeks with 'a Zionist family and learnt much about Zionist aspiration and achievement.
Like nationalisms the world over, Jewish nationalism was inspired by many and mixed motives, and there were Jews to whom settlement in Palestine meant nothing more than a comfortable home, free from bitter persecution, in the land of their forefathers.
But it would be wrong to ignore the deeper strata in, the moyement and neglect the long-cherished conviction that the Lord would speak to the nation as a whole.
An individual experience of God is deep but limited, almost confined to the utterances of the-still small voice within.
But the Hebrew idea sof: a God' who reveals Himself in the movements of nations, in the din and rush of battle, in the clamour of politics, is a profound idea.
The Jews have been called 'the people of the Book.'
That is very true.
I visited three synagogues and was struck by the enormous importance still attached to the Law in Judaism,
The place of honour in the synagogue was for the Ark where the scrolls of the Law were kept. There were many scrolls, as it was an act of piety to present the synagogue with a scroll.
Before a scroll was taken out, those members of the congregation who were the descendants of Aaron stood on the platform in front of the Ark with loose mantles veiling their faces 'and engaged in prayer.
During these solemn moments the rest of the congregation stood round, their eyes not allowed to gaze on the veiled figures. After the 'benediction, the Torah or the Law, being 'the Five Books of Moses', was taken out and' every' member of the congregation crowded around it to kiss it.
Then as each section of the Torah was read, a member of the congregation was 'summoned near the Reader's desk to. listen to it. This summons was a matter of great honour and much coveted.
'Those members of the congregation to whom anything special had happened in the week—the birth of a son, the death' of a near relation, return from a long voyage— informed the Rabbi of the fact and were chosen for the honour.
In the course of the week they made a contribution to the synagogue.
TWO MONTHS IN THE HOLY LAND
Both before and after the section was read the man summoned engaged in public prayer.
After the appointed lessons were read the Torah was returned to the Ark, amidst the same impressive ceremonies.
The Jew repeats the Shema every day—morning, late after. noon and night, and several times on Sabbath days and Festivals in the public services—the words, 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our
God, the Lord is one.'
Surely Israel's great contribution to human thought is its insistence upon the One God.
But have they not learnt the lesson already?
Has not its meaning sunk already into their souls?
The daily repetition need not be a burden.
We are not annoyed by the sun rising and setting every day, by the flowers and fruits appearing in their due season.
We rather learn to look for new glories on the horizon every morning and evening, to discern new values in each new harvest.
Great truths likewise call for the observant eye and the meditative soul which sees depths of meaning unrevealed till now.
To us in India, setting out on a fresh formulation of old truths, the Shema ought to serve as a beacon-light.
In a Jewish soul, drawn by the power of Christ, I saw fe conflict-—still urgent, still unsolved—between the demand of the Shema for belief in one God and the demand of Christians for belief in Christ also as God.
Surely there cannot be two Gods.
So the Jew argues, perhaps God was reflected in Christ as in a mirror, or Christ was
God's right hand—i.e., the means by which God worked. These unsolved conflicts point out to us the necessity for. an arduous quest for a Truth great enough to comprehend in itself the unity of the Godhead and the Godhead of Christ.
Does God reveal Himself through a Temple?
The most moving experience in Jerusalem was the sight' of the Jews at the Wailing Wall.
A part of the western wall of the Temple was left, and there every Sabbath as well as.on special days like the fast on the ninth of Ab, when the Temple was twice destroyed, the Jews gathered together to mourn the destruction of the Temple.
It was a motley crowd with tragedy written on face and garb. They were from all parts of the world—Hungarian Jews with their fur caps and long velvet gowns of blue, red and yellow, often faded and threadbare; Spanish Jews; Jews from Arabia and Persia with their fez caps; modern Jews from Europe and America in present-day
A. J. APPASAMY
Western clothes.
'The more pious Jews had their hair uncut, others threw over their head and shoulders, in token of reverence, a cream-coloured shawl with dark stripes and fringes.
The men stood at one end, the women at the other.
Most of .them kept reading from Hebrew books—Psalms or Prophets.
On the ninth of Ab they read the Lamentations of Jeremiah.
Some of them wept, some kissed the massive stones still left of the Temple.
Every now and then someone began chanting, sometimes in a sweet melodious voice and sometimes in a loud vehement voice that had no special charm but succeeded in giving powerful expression to concentrated feeling, and the others joined him. This has been going on for generations.
This moving scene raised many a thought in my mind. True, the grand temples of Solomon and Herod are gone, but the God who answered the prayers in the Temple is not gone, and the Temple of Nature, with the eternal hills as its foundation, overarched by the firmament with its wonderful blue, spacious beyond measure and surpassing in beauty any temple built with hands, is not gone.
Why then do the Jews mourn as if God were not?
It is quite probable that all of them were not there to mourn for the Temple.
Some were there from mere habit, as Christians often go to church.
But the main reason leading the Jews to the Wailing Wall was no doubt sorrow for the loss of the Temple.
As a Jew who visited the Wall daily told me, every Jew was commanded by the Lord to present himself at the Temple three times a year, and as the Temple no longer existed, he came to this spot.
The spirit of prayer dwells in the Mosque of Omar.
The artist's eye picked the right marble, of attractive hue and adequate proportion; the sculptor's hand chiselled it and took away its crude surfaces; the architect's hand fitted it where its beauty would be best seen; the millions of devout souls who have prayed in the mosque generation after generation must have wrought still further on the marble, turning the marble from beautiful, marvellously finished stone into a veritable sacrament, charging it with spiritual energy.
Apparently there is a law of heredity among buildings as among men, the law which passes on greatness with replenished vigour to succeeding generations.
The Mosque of Omar stands as a descendent of a remarkable line of sacred edifices.
In this house of prayer on sacred soil would a Jew care to pray, even if the Moslem allowed him such a rare blessing?
The thought
TWO MONTHS IN THE HOLY LAND
is blasphemy to Jew as well as to Moslem, to the Jew wailing for the Temple in which God dwelt and to the Moselm who disdains the Jew whom he has conquered.
It is significant to note here the attitude of our Lord towards the Temple.
To one who stands on the hills of Nazareth this thought takes on a new urgency.
Here among these beautiful hills His quiet life of fellowship with the Father was lived and perfected.
The hills, the flowers on the wayside, the birds that flew by, the simple village scenes, formed the background on which this life of communion with the Father was worked out.
But it looks as if such a life begun and nourished in such an environment had to reach its perfect development in the Temple and its vicinity.
Jesus passed from Nazareth to Jerusalem and even so a life of prayer begun in solitude must be perfected in the crowd. To Him the Temple was not something opposed to inner piety but something which corrected and supplemented inner piety.
For this our authority is the Fourth Gospel.
'This, the most mystical of the Gospels, places the ministry of Jesus mainly in Jerusalem.
No mere ecclesiastical bias leads the writer to lay this emphasis. He mentions many facts which a biassed writer would have found it natural and advantageous to suppress. Jesus commends
Nathaniel who prays under a fig tree.
The cleansing of the Temple, an act which a mere love of ecclesiasticism would have found hard to understand, is placed at the beginning of the ministry thus going against the Synoptists, who place it at the end. Again, here occurs the great utterance, 'God is Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship in Spirit and truth' (John 4:24).
These facts modify considerably the notion that the Evangelist was an ecclesiastically-minded person.
The same Jesus who loved solitude, who passed over the sea of Galilee to the other side for quiet, who agonized among the trees on the slope of the Mount of Olives, also loved the Temple and prayed in it with others. His ministry finds its centre here.
He who took such an independent attitude with regard to the interpretation of the Law and the Sabbath could not be said to have prayed in the Temple simply because the Jews were in the habit of doing so.
His attendance at the Temple must be as significant as His other acts; it must mean that He puts His sanction on institutional religion as well as on the mystical religion that seeks God in the depths of a forest or a eave:
A. J. APPASAMY
As a Revealer, Nature is often stern and exacting. Like a jealous teacher, she chooses her disciples with greatcare, imposes upon them exacting disciplines, and teaches profound truths, now by half-veiled symbolism and now by strange formula.
To catch the melody of the stars is harder than to understand the significance of a Psalm: to read the apocalypse of budding flower or ripening fruit is harder even than to grasp the meaning of a mystic's visions.
This perhaps explains why most people have sought God more in a Book or ina Temple than in Nature, and why some have equated Nature with God.
Trees and flowers, birds and rivers, are all God.
The visitor to Palestine, interested in problems ot Mysticism, wonders what in the natural surroundings of that country—her hills, her rivers, her trees—accounts for the fact that Hebrew thought is so free from this tendency to equate God with Nature.
° To follow this line of thought is not to say that every aspect of Hebrew thought can be accounted for in terms of the natural scenery of the Holy Land and its influence on the thinker's mind.
For instance, in visiting the Jordan valley, I realized that the wild country may account for the rugged figure of John the Baptist, stern and fierce.
It may also account for the Baptist's burning words, which scathed his hearers in the same fierce way as the sun scorched the valley.
But then, through the hot and wild depression runs the Jordan, cooling and refreshing beyond measure, and calls up on either bank abundant green trees and plants which afford shade and cheer. 'The desert might have made him a son of bronze, winging his words with cruel power.
But the river with its cool and softening influences seems to have sped along without any visible effect on his life or work.
The social character of Hebrew thought may account partly for the absence of Nature-mysticism.
The process by which a soul, moved by the awful splendour of the starry constellations on a quiet solemn night, loses itself in them is an individual rather than a social process.
.Crowd-psychology may add to the vigour of a revival meeting but not to this type of experience.
We have been with friends meeting God in silence, or with bhaktas feeling the rapture of God through prayer and song, but we have not heard of, companies of men: feeling themselves one with the God who is not merely all-pervasive, but who zs the glorious dawn, who is the river heaving with enormous flood.
TWO MONTHS IN THE HOLY LAND
In its higher reaches this type of experience is poctry transformed into religion.
The vague, dim, chaotic yearning of the poet, when accompanied by a strong religious nature, becomes the stuff of Nature-mysticism.
The poet looks for the beauty which is subtle and fine, often confused.
Not so the seer.
He too may be captivated by beauty, but it is the beauty that half hides, half reveals an inner significance.
Like a bud which is even more lovely than a fully opened flower, simply because it reveals so strongly but a part of its real self, this beauty is doubly attractive to certain minds.
'The Hebrew is more seer than poet.
Among the beautiful hills of Galilee I realized how much more of a seer than poet Jesus was.
He does speak of the Western sky, but its red is a sign of the coming rain.
The flowers remind Him of the Father who clothes them with a beauty surpassing the glory of Solomon.
The seer has too vivid a sense of the details to lose himself in Nature or in Nature's God.
Nature-mysticism steps in when the details get blurred and the outlines become dim:
That is why Nature-mysticism is not present in the Old Testament or in the New.
I found it very interesting to observe the carpenters' shops of Palestine.
For in one such our Lord must have spent the greater part of His life.
I noted—rather an obvious fact—that while some carpenters were engaged in doing heavy work, others were carving delicate flowers or leaves.
'To what category did Jesus belong?
When we think of Him as a carpenter, we think of Him as making ploughs and yokes.
But it is not at all improbable that He was a carpenter with the artist's eye and hand, fashioning things of beauty.
If so, His careful observation of Nature—of which we have so much evidence in the Gospels— would enable him to carve flowers, leaves and fruits, at once accurate, vivid and varied.
On the other hand, His trained eye and hand would confirm what was already present in Him, as a part of His equipment as a seer, His habit of noting the details, of remembering the outlines of things He saw.
This would have made impossible the vague, indefinable poetic feeling that sometimes developed into the experience of the Nature-mystic.
There is, however, a feature of Palestinian scenery which may account, partly at least, for the absence of Nature-mysticism in the