Tikkun Magazine, May/June 2008

If I Forget... 

by Harvey Cox

"Last night as I lay sleeping, I dreamed a dream so fair. I stood in old
Jerusalem beside the temple there."
—"The Holy City", Frederick Weatherly

MY FEELINGS ABOUT ISRAEL TODAY TEETER PRECARIOUSLY BETWEEN HOPE AND HEARTBREAK, between a deep, almost irrational fondness and a simmering anger. It is the fate of that little country, and always will be I suppose, to be burdened with an overload both of symbol and significance. As someone has said of Jerusalem, too many people love it to death.

As a kid in a Baptist Sunday School I watched in admiration movies about those brave pioneers, the kibbutzniks, marching off singing, with their picks and shovels, to make the desert bloom. I heard choir anthems and sang hymns about Jerusalem (like the one quoted above). In our church that little slice of earth was always referred to as the "Promised Land," or "The Holy Land." When Israel declared its independence in 1948, I was a freshman in college and when I saw the newspaper pictures of the joyful Jews dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv, I wished I had been there.

Like many other people, my feelings began to change after 1967. I was gladdened and amazed that the Israelis had won. But then, beginning with Hebron, the settlements started, and since then my feelings have been in a tailspin. What a fatal error it was, for Israel, the Palestinians, and the world, that successive Israeli governments sponsored or supported this gross violation of international law and human decency. How infuriating that successive American administrations have watched smugly or issued an occasional mild disagreement, while continuing to arm both Israel and the Arab world with increasingly lethal weapons, seeming to stoke some ghastly Armageddon.

For my fortieth birthday I treated myself to my first visit to Israel. In Jerusalem I walked around the entire wall of the city. Later I sloshed into the Jordan up to my thighs at the spot our guide solemnly assured us was precisely where Jesus had been baptized. Since then I have returned to Israel and Palestine a number of times. Whenever I do, I spend long hours with friends on both sides of the lines. The experience is always a profoundly moving one for me. I feel, of course, a special kinship with the tragically diminishing minority of Palestinian Christians who represent the oldest continuing witness to the spirit of Jesus in the world. Every time I visit, there are fewer of them.

Maybe the next American president will have the courage and the intelligence to exert the indispensable influence—not just rhetoric—of this country to advance the solution that every thoughtful person agrees on: A fair arrangement for the refugees, sharing Jerusalem, adequate water resources for everyone, and, above all, removing most of the settlements.

Sadly, the leadership on all sides now seems weak and paralyzed. But achieving a just peace would make an incomparable contribution to the peace of the whole world.

I hope and pray that I will be granted enough years of life to see a peaceful Israel living with a peaceful Palestine, making together a true "Holy Land." And I look forward to walking those old walls again, to be in "old Jerusalem" not in a dream but for real.

Harvey Cox is Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard. His The Secular City (first published in 1965) has sold one million copies in 17 languages. His most recent book is When Jesus Came to Harvard.

Cox, Harvey. 2008. If I forget... Tikkun. 23(3):38-39.