Abstract
Pilgrim itineraries often promote trips to the Holy Land so that pilgrims may see where Jesus walked, make the Bible more real, and strengthen their Christian faith. I suggest, however, that Christian pilgrimage may also be an interreligious and intercultural encounter. The environmental bubble of the guided group pilgrimage encloses not only the Christian pilgrim and his pastor but often the Jewish-Israeli guide as well. In such groups, Christian pilgrims’ initial religious views may be confirmed or challenged through the guide’s presentation of Christian holy sites, the Bible, and his own life history. Guides may struggle with their attraction to and repulsion from Christianity and their own Jewish commitments in the course of shepherding pilgrims through the Land.
Based on three decades of experience guiding Christian groups and interviews with guides, pastors, and pilgrims, I demonstrate how Christian pilgrims and Jewish guides negotiate their expectations and commitments through performance in the charged landscape of the Holy Land. While the convergence of Christian pilgrims and Jewish guides over the significance of the land and its sites creates avenues for shared discourse, the developing interaction reflects a wide variety of different attitudes toward Judaism, Christianity, and the relation between the two.
By describing the spatial and institutional setting of the pilgrimage tour and citing several guide-group interactions, I offer new perspectives on the performative dimensions of interreligious encounter. An understanding of the dynamics of this case can sensitize us to the roles that power, ritual setting, and space play in interreligious hospitality and ritual.
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Notes
- 1.
Following Marianne Moyaert, I use ‘Jewish-Christian’ here, rather than the more problematic term ‘Judeo-Christian.’ The latter may be a form of cultural appropriation and a subjection of Judaism to a Christian theological framework that fails to recognize the independence and otherness of Jewish identity. See Moyaert 2014. In addition, in recent years, the term ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ has often been martialed by European xenophobes as a way of marshaling Jewish authority/antiquity to exclude Muslims from European culture. See Topolski 2016.
- 2.
Among the many accounts of the disputation, the most popular is Hyman Maccoby’s Judaism on Trial (1993). Maccoby also wrote a script for a play, The Disputation, which has been performed frequently.
- 3.
I am aware that I have not described the (relatively minor) role of the Palestinian driver in these interactions. The interactions with Muslim guides merit independent research.
- 4.
In ‘Living Stones’ tours, Palestinian Christians are often assigned a mediating role as ‘brothers and sisters of Jesus.’ Such groups would be highly unlikely to hire a Jewish-Israeli as their guide to the holy sites.
- 5.
Some guides refrain, as much as possible, from religious explanations and systematically turn the microphone over to the pastor or priest.
- 6.
The guides’ names have been changed to preserve their anonymity. Most information is based on open interviews with them, which lasted from two to nine hours.
- 7.
The interview with Zaki was conducted in December 2001.
- 8.
As a guide, this is a sentence I often heard from pilgrims both during the tour and in the letters sent to me afterward.
- 9.
The appropriation of Christianity to justify Jewish-Israeli claims to the land and proclaim the superiority of Judaism is the dominant discourse presented to Jewish-Israeli pupils by educational guides on school trips. See Ramon et al. 2017.
- 10.
In Moyaert’s example of infelicitous ritual hospitality (Moyaert 2017, pp. 337–38), she cites a Protestant theologian who was invited to partake in a ceremony in a Hindu temple. He relates that he had no problem eating the prasadam (“St. Paul said that was alright”) or touching the sacred fire to his forehead (“We Christians even symbolize the Holy Spirit with fire”) but refused contact with the feet of the image of Vishnu (“but touching my head to the feet of another God?”). In this example, the theologian engages in an extended hermeneutic, making the Hindu rite more intimate (and ‘kosher’) by interpreting the symbols in Christian terms. The establishment of this intimacy and proximity to Christianity is what provokes the emotional (though respectfully controlled) refusal of contact with Vishnu’s feet.
- 11.
Whether Jewish ritual will continue to mark the boundary, given the tendency among Evangelical congregations to adopt Jewish ritual (Dulin 2015)—including the wearing of a tallit—remains to be seen.
- 12.
The ways that the performance aroused my own religious reflection also indicate that it was more than a theatrical mimicry of a religious rite. As Edward Schieffelin writes: “[W]e are, in effect, more performative than we intend, and we are in good measure ‘submitted to’ our performativity as part of our active being-in-the-world” (Schieffelin 1998, p. 197). Performance does not merely express feelings or intentions; it helps create them.
- 13.
Perhaps I was, half-consciously, reaffirming Jewish traditions that proclaim the wearing of tefillin as a sign of the exclusive covenant binding God and Israel. The verse recited when binding the straps of the phylacteries on the hand (making the letters of God’s name—shadai) are Hosea 2:21 “I betroth you unto me forever,” which compares the bond of God to his people to that of a husband to his beloved wife. In a Talmudic commentary on the biblical verse “And all the nations of the world shall see that the name of God is called upon you and shall fear you,” Rabbi Eliezer says (B. Menahot 35b), “these are the phylacteries worn on the head.” In this commentary, the phylacteries serve as a sign of the unique relationship of God with the Jewish people, one that instills fear and respect among the nations of the world. Thus, one could argue that the fact that I wore tefillin as a show to the Gentile pilgrims was not ‘merely’ a performance.
- 14.
The Western Wall has been visited by three popes and numerous Christian leaders who prayed and left notes at the site. Many Christian groups pray individually at the wall and place their prayer requests among its stones. It is a ‘must’ site for Evangelicals. This phenomenon awaits ethnographic research.
- 15.
I use Judeo-Christian here in accordance with Steve’s own pluralist understanding of the contribution of the two traditions to a shared spiritual quest.
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Feldman, J. (2019). Christian Holy Land Pilgrimage as an Interreligious Encounter. In: Moyaert, M. (eds) Interreligious Relations and the Negotiation of Ritual Boundaries. Interreligious Studies in Theory and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05701-5_8
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