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Holy Journey
Yigal Schleifer
 Avi Katz |
Author Bruce Feiler likes to immerse himself in his subjects -- to the extreme. For his 1998 book "Dreaming Out Loud," which chronicled the careers of three country-music stars, Feiler spent three years on tour and backstage with the artists gathering material. In the book previous to that, "Under the Big Top," Feiler went beyond being an observer, spending a year performing as a clown with the famous Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus.
But for his latest undertaking, the ambitious Feiler chose a topic that no big top could contain and for which a tour bus would not do. The project? Retracing the story of the Five Books of Moses from beginning to end ... on foot. The result of that trek, which Feiler began in 1998, is "Walking the Bible," which took him from the mountains of Turkey to the pyramids of Egypt and through the Sinai desert, Jordan and, of course, Israel.
The book, a New York Times bestseller, has received strong reviews, with a Los Angeles Times critic even comparing it to Mark Twain�s classic Middle East travelogue, "The Innocents Abroad." It�s a fair comparison, in a certain way, since Feiler, like Twain, reports on his visits to Biblical pilgrimage sites with a keen eye and a healthy sense of perspective. But Feiler also tells of another journey: the intense spiritual one he took while working on his book.
"I really wasn�t prepared for the emotional intensity of it all," Feiler, 36, says, speaking on the telephone during a break in a marathon speaking and book-signing tour. "When I started, I really did say, �This is not about me and my spirituality or me and my God. This is about me and the stories of the Bible.� But, of course, it didn�t take long to realize that that was self-protective folly."
Indeed, while Biblical sites provide the backdrop for "Walking the Bible," the real heart of the book is Feiler�s coming to terms with his own deepening spiritual connection with the land that he�s walking in. "If I had to put into one sentence what happened to me, it�s that my learning went from my head to my feet," Feiler, who grew up Reform in Savannah, Georgia, says, with a slight hint of a Southern twang in his voice. "By walking in the land, I developed a very spiritual connection to these places."
"So much of the spiritual conversation in America today, even among Jews, is very abstract," Feiler continues, pausing carefully between each sentence. "What I�m talking about is a very tangible spirituality. It�s almost as if I grew a third leg on my being and I�m standing on three legs now. I feel like I�m much more firmly rooted in the ground."
THE SEED FOR THE BOOK, Feiler says, was planted about six years ago, when he decided to re-read the Bible -- not out of any sense of religious curiosity but rather out of a literary one. He was able to find the Bible he received for his bar mitzvah, which he promptly put beside his bed, where "it sat untouched for two years, gathering dust and making me feel guiltier," he says with a laugh. With the Bible apparently still on his mind, Feiler, who now lives in New York City, made a fateful 1997 trip to Israel -- his first ever -- to visit a friend.
"My friend took me to the Promenade, the Tayyelet [in Jerusalem�s Talpiot neighborhood], and said, �Over there is Har Homah, the controversial neighborhood, and over there is the rock where Abraham was to sacrifice Isaac.� It hit me like a bolt of Cecil B. DeMille lightning," says Feiler, who has an affinity for using pop culture metaphors. "It had never hit me that these abstract places could be real."
Feiler, of course, is hardly the first visitor to Jerusalem to be struck by that bolt of lightning. But, from that vantage point overlooking Jerusalem, he started contemplating the idea that ultimately became "Walking the Bible." For six months the people around him tried to talk him out of it. The places don�t really exist, they told him. There�s no way to find them. But Feiler says there was no turning back. "The idea was just too magical," he says.
Luckily for Feiler, he was able to find the wizard to bring his magical idea to life, in the form of Israeli archaeologist Avner Goren, who was the chief archaeologist in the Sinai during the years that Israel controlled the peninsula. "No Avner, no book. That�s my motto," Feiler says.
With his deep knowledge of Biblical history and his robust yet rumpled Sabra character, Goren was able to bring the sometimes neurotic Feiler down to earth. Together, the two make for entertaining travel partners, which becomes particularly evident early on in the book when Feiler, dressed in brand new Banana Republic travel gear, describes waiting for Goren at Ben-Gurion airport so the two can fly from Israel to Turkey.
Goren, a well-respected archaeologist who never finished graduate school, arrives wearing a T-shirt, baggy Beduin trousers and scruffy sandals. "I was the organizer who made the schedule and read the books and had the maps," Feiler says, "and he pulled me away from my attachment to structure and said, open yourself up to the land and see what you can learn. That�s why it worked."
The two spent a year traveling together, covering close to 10,000 miles in the process. Starting in Turkey, near the site of Mount Ararat, believed by some to be the spot where Noah�s Ark came to rest, Feiler and Goren worked their way through Israel, Egypt and then Jordan.
PERHAPS IT CAME FROM spending so much time with Goren, but it didn�t take long for Feiler to indeed "open himself up to the land." In the book, after visiting sites connected with the Bible in Turkey and Israel, Feiler and Goren arrive in Egypt, where they hope to recreate the crossing of the Red Sea by taking a boat across one of the large lakes between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, that is considered a possible site for the actual crossing.
After a long, hot day of driving through the Nile Delta and along the Suez Canal, Feiler and Goren reach the lake, only to find that there are no boats to take them across. Determined to cross, Feiler persists until he finds a fisherman with a small rowboat who is willing to paddle them across the reed-filled lake. As the boat leaves the shore, Feiler -- for the first time in the book -- begins to cry.
"The first thing was, �Oh my gosh, this is the reason I�m doing this. To change the way I read the story,�" Feiler says, recalling the moment. "For me it was a realization that it was becoming much less of an intellectual exercise and much more of an emotional experience. That�s what I was trying to do, to take people out of their familiar way of reading the story and out of their rote way of talking about the politics and reimagine the land, reimagine the story."
As he and Goren continued their trip into the Sinai desert, Feiler says he was becoming more deeply enmeshed in the Bible, which no longer seemed like such a "story" to him anymore. "I no longer believe science or reason is the answer to all questions about the Bible," Feiler writes in an e-mail message sent a few days after our interview. "I believe there is wisdom in connecting to the ground, and I believe there is truth in the Bible, even if that truth cannot be etched in numbers on a blackboard in some scientific formula."
Asked about a Los Angeles rabbi who recently caused waves when he challenged the veracity of the Exodus story during a Passover sermon, Feiler says he himself no longer doubts the story�s truth. Would he have answered the question differently before writing the book? "Yes, absolutely," he answers immediately.
Feiler says the change in him has been subtle. In short, he finds that his mind is more occupied with "spiritual" issues.
And so, Feiler found that the most difficult part of his latest immersion was not navigating the political and religious minefields of the Middle East or finding the Biblical spots he was in search of. Rather, he says, it was simply trying to make sense of the changes he was going through. "Trying to figure out what was happening to me and why it was happening to me and should I write about it," says Feiler, was the tough part. "You can�t play word games with it. You can�t argue it away. It�s not rational."
"When I was under my desk in a fetal position" while writing the book, Feiler says, "it wasn�t because of the religion or the politics. It was because of that."
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