Mapping a trip to Israel: 11-10-11

I have been poring over the excellent maps of the Holy Land contained in the new Common English Bible's special Bible Map Guide.

This book is so engaging that I plan on taking it with me when I help lead a Jewish-Christian study trip to Israel in April. (The link in the previous sentence will give you the information you need to join us on the trip.)

The two other leaders of that April 15-25 trip, by the way, will be with me at 9 a.m. this Sunday at my church speaking about "Israel Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow." I hope you can join me, Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn of Temple Israel of Greater Kansas City and Father Gar Demo, rector of St. Thomas the Apostle Episcopal Church, in the Witherspoon Room of Second Presbyterian Church for this presentation -- even if you don't plan to join our excursion next spring.

I love maps. Maybe that's because my father was a mapmaker as his final career, and, watching him and sometimes working with him, I came to understand the detailed work that goes into the craft.

This new map guide is designed to accompany the new Common English Bible translation, which I wrote about here on the blog. It contains 21 maps, each one with a reference to a passage from the Bible that gives its historical and spiritual context. There's a page of text on the left page and a map on the right page. The text contains such extras as charts of Roman history and the Herod family.

If you come to our presentation this Sunday, by the way, I'll be handing out an Israel history timeline that begins 17 centuries B.C.E. and continues through to the present.

I can imagine traveling around Israel, having this map book with us and sharing its features as we make various stops. The color maps, by the way, were produced by National Geographic.

This is the third pre-trip class Jacques, Gar and I will have done. Once people are signed up, we'll also be doing some trip preparation classes to help all of us be ready for what we'll encounter next spring in Israel, a land sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I hope you'll be among those along for the trip.

By the way: Rabbi Jacques is doing a couple of new things to help people understand Judaism. First, he's doing some brief YouTube teaching clips he calls "Jewish Tidbits." To watch the first one, click here. Then this coming spring, he'll be teaching classes called "The ABCs of Judaism" and "Tales of Hassidic Masters" through Communiversity, the community outreach school operated under the auspices of the University of Missouri-Kansas City. When Communiversity's spring catalog is out, you'll be able to find it here.

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A NEW LOOK AT TODAY'S ISRAEL

Speaking of Israel, Slate is running excerpts from a new book (just released this week) by Israeli historian and journalist Gershom Gorenberg, The Unmaking of Israel. Part two is here, though you can get to part one there, too. In part two Gorenberg argues that the growth of ultra-orthodox Judaism in Israel has been an economic disaster. What a complex, fascinating place, Israel. I wonder if its people ever will experience anything like what we middle-class Midwesterners think of as normal life.

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THE BOOK CORNER

Hope Underground: The 34 Chilean Miners, a Story of Faith and Miracles, by Carlos  Para Diaz. Those of us who watched on TV the breathtaking rescue last year of the miners trapped in Chile may think this: Hey, weren't there just 33 of them? What's with the 34th in this title? The Seventh Day Adventist pastor who has written this book quotes the miners as saying over and over, "God was our 34th miner." This is an engaging book about a news event that received attention worldwide for weeks on end, and I found that it filled in some gaps in my knowledge and reminded me of things I did know. But this is not a journalistic recounting of the collapse of the San Jose mine and the astonishing recovery of all 33 miners alive. Rather, this is a story of faith told from the perspective of a man who became known as the chaplain of Camp Hope, that temporary tent community of miners' family members that they set up near the mine entrance. It is, in many ways, a touching story of a man who sought to be a healing presence in the midst of wild despair and wilder hope. At the same time, you may, as I did, struggle some with the author's rather deterministic theology. Through the author's eyes, this was a story of divine intervention in a world filled with attacks from Satan. He does not question that it was God behind the whole event, and he asks why God permitted it to happen. His answer: "To get our attention. To call humanity back to Himself. . .God has issued a call to His creation, every human being to make a decision while there is still time to do so." This approach to theology, common as it is, raises profound -- even disturbing -- questions about the kind of God who would subject 33 men to terror and possible death to send a message. And it raises the question of what it means to decide "while there is still time." The obvious implication of such a statement is that each of us must answer the decision question in the way this pastor thinks we should or we may face eternal damnation. Setting all that (and more) aside, however, I found the story of the mine rescue compelling enough to work my way through the simplistic theological assumptions of the author. And in the process I was inspired again by the families of the trapped men as they kept vigil in hope. And I was impressed by the author's description of the leadership abilities of the woman who became known as the mayor of Camp Hope. Still, I will be looking for a careful, historical book that will tell the story of the Chilean government's decision to do everything possible to save the miners and of the international help that arrived to work with Chileans to accomplish the task. Such a book should not ignore the spiritual support that people like Carlos Parra Diaz generously gave to the anxious families, but it should go well beyond that.