Holy Land

The most narratively dense region on the planet 🪬

The Melody of Jerusalem by Elisha Ben Yitzhak (2012, image source)

I visited the Holy Land once, six years ago. I say “holy,” even though I am of no religion, partly because it’s a neutral term fitting the fact that I visited both Israel and some of the Palestinian territories (and a tiny bit of Jordan too), and partly because there was something very special to it, which even the nonreligious might want to call “holy.”

When I was there, I realized that so many of the places mentioned in the Bible, and therefore broadly in the Christian culture to which I belong, are really just a bunch of ordinary locations in the vicinity of Jerusalem. The Mount of Olives, for instance, is just some hill outside of the old city. The Sea of Galilee is just a big lake with some gaudy hotels on its shores. I realized that nothing is more natural for human tribes than to construct their mythologies out of the mountains, rivers, forests and deserts around them. If you’re born to a Mongolic people in Siberia, Lake Baikal is sacred; if you’re a native from the uncontacted depths of the South American rainforest, the Amazon river might represent a god. But Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures were so successful that they have spread far and wide, from the tips of the Americas to the heart of Africa to the most remote islands of Oceania. Most people of these religions will never see Jerusalem. To them, a sacred mountain or river is an abstraction, something that exists far away, or maybe doesn’t exist at all. The Mount of Olives and the Sea of Galilee might as well be metaphorical.

I visited the Holy Land for no particular reason. An airline had just started offering direct flights to Tel-Aviv from my city. Upon learning this, my brother and I spontaneously decided to go. We spent two weeks touring Tel-Aviv, Eilat, Aqaba, Petra, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the Dead Sea, Tiberias, Haifa, Acre. It was a great trip, perhaps the best in my life so far.

Part of why the trip was so fun is that it’s an extremely interesting place, even to a nonreligious person. It’s wild, when you think about it, how important that region is. The Holy Land is the spiritual core of the entire Greater Western civilization, with the exception of (some of) the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. This is true obviously for religion, but also for many basic features of the Greater West — crops, domesticated animals, writing systems, ancient technologies like glass blowing — since the Holy Land is part of the Fertile Crescent. The only places that are decidedly foreign to the civilization that was born in the Middle East, near or in the Holy Land, are those that belong to the Sinosphere, and perhaps a few uncontacted tribes. And even then, Judeo-Christian-Muslim civilization is encroaching. There are more than 4 billion people of those three religions, plus some number of people who culturally belong to them, like myself. The Holy Land is the mythological origin for more than half of humanity. Where our sacred mountains and rivers are.

It’s wild, also, what happened there in recent history. If a science fiction writer invented a made-up version of Israel and Palestine, and their conflict, and the events that led us there, we’d reject it as unrealistic. Over-the-top. No one would ever expect to see an ethnoreligious group build a modern, prosperous country, in which everyone speaks a revived extinct language, on ancestral lands from which they were expelled by an ancient empire, after which they spent millennia living all over the world and being routinely persecuted and even having half their population exterminated by the most evil dictatorship ever seen. No storyteller would decide that the best way to add drama would be to make that ancestral land already inhabited, by a people of an offshoot creed, who have been in the area for centuries, ever since the founders of their religion conquered a gigantic part of the world and built a golden-domed temple on top of the holiest site of the aforementioned ethnoreligious group. Nobody would have written as background information that those local people lost their land in what they see as a literal catastrophe, leading them to live partly as a minority in the modern prosperous country, partly in awkward exclaves of disputed status, and partly in the surrounding states — all of which, by the way, are supremely hostile to the modern prosperous country, which somehow keeps winning wars anyway because of its advanced economy and support from powerful faraway allies. Oh, and also, the most widespread religion in the world is from there for some reason, which has had geopolitical implications for at least a thousand years, even though few of its believers live in the region anymore.

If you tried to sell this story to Hollywood, they’d tell you to come back once you’ve learned some worldbuilding principles, the first of which would be: keep things plausible!

But this implausible story is real. It packs a tremendous narrative punch. We can’t help but pay attention, when something happens there.

And sometimes we can’t help but write about it.

I didn’t really want to, to be honest. I don’t even know why I felt compelled to. What could I possibly say that thousands haven’t already said? Why didn’t I just tune out from the news? I really don’t need to know the details of this new war. I don’t even know anyone in the region, except one friend, whom I already made sure is safe.

Yet this week it felt wrong to think and write about anything else. Why, I don’t know. Maybe because I once visited that part of the world. Maybe because it is the origin of Western mythology. Maybe because its story just so narratively engrossing. Maybe because it is, in some sense that transcends religion, holy.

I don’t have much to say, really. Just the above stray thoughts, and this prayer: let’s hope that the current conflict doesn’t, through cruelty and inhumanity, desecrate the holiness.

Jerusalem in God’s Hands by Elisha Ben Yitzhak (2011, source)