NEWS FEATURE: Jerusalem Book Externalizes Interior Spiritual Searching

c. 2000 Religion News Service (UNDATED) From the right vantage point, Jerusalem shimmers in the half-light of early morning and the soft glow of an evening sunset, snaring the unsuspecting visitor. For millennia, the Holy City has been both a religious battleground and a faith ballast, a place that legitimizes varying theologies and sustains weary […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) From the right vantage point, Jerusalem shimmers in the half-light of early morning and the soft glow of an evening sunset, snaring the unsuspecting visitor.

For millennia, the Holy City has been both a religious battleground and a faith ballast, a place that legitimizes varying theologies and sustains weary mystics. For Wendy Orange, its charms proved irresistible.


In 1991, while attending a conference in Jerusalem, she fell in love with Israel, lured by its energy, its religious diversity and its tragically divided citizenry. She tells the story of why she moved there, became a correspondent for Tikkun, the influential Jewish-American journal and was then forced for personal reasons to return to the United States, in the recent book, “Coming Home to Jerusalem: A Personal Journey” (Simon & Schuster).

Her book externalizes the interior searching Israel provoked in this thoughtful commentator’s voice. It also highlights the complex reality of trying to understand today’s Mideast, a war-ravaged region where neither simple answers nor explanations exist.

Moreover, the work underscores the aching ignorance so prevalent among Americans when it comes to understanding this part of the world.

Always on the run, we prefer sound bites or Internet headlines to the arduous plodding, flaring hopes, stalemates and endless negotiating that has characterized the last decade of the Mideast peace process.

Many Americans seem to understand what Israel means to Jews. But, if opinion polls measure the mindset of many, too few comprehend what a homeland means to the Palestinians. Or, better yet, what peace might mean to the long-term survival of the Holy Land’s diminishing and beleaguered Christian minority.

A Gallup poll released this summer showed Americans hold much more favorable views toward Israel than toward the Palestinian Authority. Close to four in five Americans rate Israel as either a U.S. ally or friendly nation, while only 14 percent consider Israel an enemy. In contrast, only 34 percent of the American public views U.S. relations with the Palestinian Authority in the same positive terms; 50 percent view it more negatively.

But despite the significance a Mideast peace holds for the world as a whole and for American interests abroad, most Americans prefer to stay out of the fray. The same Gallup poll showed 72 percent of Americans believe the United States should stay neutral.


Wendy Orange found she could not.

Flying home to the United States after her first visit to Jerusalem, Orange writes that there was little logic behind her almost instant decision to move there. A decidedly secular American Jew, she realized at the time: “I have no religious life, speak no Hebrew, have only a beginner’s grasp of Mideast culture and politics. To live in Jerusalem, I’ll have to give up my work as pyschologist and professor.

“I’ll have to learn Hebrew. I’ll be uprooting my already vulnerable daughter, who’s moved about too often in her short life.”

But she went anyway, taking her child with her.

Once she arrived and after returning to the United States six years later, Orange realized Israel felt like home to her for multiple reasons. Growing up in suburban Long Island, N.Y., and while living in a succession of other places, Orange realized she always carried with her a sense of alienation, of being a citizen of an anywhere, not a somewhere.

In Jerusalem, she writes, she found a “warmth born of history.”

Yet she ventured beyond that comfort zone, meeting an Israeli reporter and embarking on a writing career that brought her into close contact, even friendshps, with Palestinians struggling with the difficult nature of living in the West Bank and Gaza.

Orange returned home after she learned her daughter, Eliza, was severely dyslexic. The evaluation explained the child’s inability to absorb Hebrew and drove home the reality that she needed special instruction merely to learn English.

However, her book suggests a part of her never really left Israel, nor the expanded vision of Mideast politics she gained while there. Missing from most American and European reporting on the nation are the nuances always serving to heighten understanding of another nation and region.


DEA END HOLMES

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