I am excited to announce that I will be featured in a weekly column on Patheos.com, the "premier online resource for those looking to learn more about different belief systems". I serve as a cultural commentator in the Mormon portal. This week's column, about teaching Gospel Doctrine in my ward, inspired me to revisit some of my experiences in Israel.
I didn't fall in love with Israel upon first meeting. I had to be convinced. But once I did fall, I was in love for good.
I was introduced to Israel by my seminary teacher, R., who taught the high schoolers in my ward in an early-morning class at our ward building. I was a freshman when we started the four year curriculum, so R. and I jumped into the Old Testament together and I stuck with her through the New Testament, Book of Mormon and Church History as well. I went to a school with pretty fabulous teachers, and, because my school was small, I had some of those teachers for two and sometimes three years of my high school experience. But there was no one who had such a life-changing and long-lasting influence on me than my seminary teacher.
It breaks my heart when I hear of youth in the Church who get stuck with seminary teachers who use class time for comedy routines rather than challenging students to "work out" their salvations. R. brought donuts plenty of times, but there was never any doubt that she meant business. My freshman year, five of us attended her class. By my senior year, there were seventeen teenagers who regularly arrived at the Lincoln Center building by 6:15am four mornings a week.
After my sophomore year, R. convinced some of our parents to let us go to Israel with her for ten days. That trip was, for me, utter magic. For one of the first times in my life, I felt empowered as a religious person. I didn't feel like I was being laughed at or scorned or even viewed skeptically. I was simply a person of faith like so many others there, and my faith was connected to the pavement of the streets and the sounds of the air in a way that it was not in New York. It was the first time I realized that my religious observance wasn't actually that weird at all; in fact, our little group was initiated on the airplane going over by a group of yeshiva boys who periodically rose together, wrapped their phylacteries around their wrists and foreheads and chanted in unison. I thought they were stunningly beautiful.
I don't believe it is necessary for a person of faith to visit the Holy Land in order to have a perfect understanding of either Jesus Christ or their own personal beliefs. I don't think my faith was crafted by my acquaintance with Israel as much as my willingness to be absorbed by a religious culture. Israel reminded me that I, as a member of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, am a part of a covenant that goes back thousands of years, to Abraham and Isaac and prophets after them to whom I am bound by the observance of ritual and the culture of a peculiar people.
Several years after my trip with R., when I returned to Israel to work on an archeological dig at Tel Megiddo with the University of Southern California, I sat at the window of a public bus on my way back to the dig from Jerusalem where I had played the piano for my church's prophet, President Gordon B. Hinckley, at the LDS Jerusalem Center campus. The bus passed through the Jezreel Valley, with the sun going down behind Nazareth at one end of the valley and casting its last rays over Megiddo -- the supposed site of the battle of Armageddon -- on the other end. That bus ride took me across centuries of history right up to my latter-day prophet. I walked along a dusty road from the bus station up to the top of the tel. The kibbutz I was living at welcomed me back with a hearty dinner of falafel, tomato and cucumber salad and Nutella sandwiches for dessert, and I felt as at home as I ever have.
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