Destruction and Remembrance

November 2, 2007
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

Abraham purchases a cave in which to bury his beloved wife Sarah. The Torah does not tell us too much about the cave, but the name is Ha-Machpelah, which almost all scholars agree means "the double-cave." Therefore, we can assume that the cave was either much larger than any others in the area or that it was two caves joined by a passageway. The cave that is today known as the Machpelah is actually three connected underground caves. It may be that only two were evident in the time of Abraham and that the way into the third cave was discovered later.

Jewish tradition had already taken steps to widen the cave in other ways. Any time we know little or nothing about a place, stories are told to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. For example, while the usual name for the place is Hebron, another name by which it is known in the Bible is Keriyat Arbah, "The place of the Four." Tradition states that the reason for this name is that four couples are buried in the cave: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, and -- believe it or not -- Adam and Eve. To fill this out, a midrash is told:

What did Adam do? He dug out a cave, and he and his wife were buried there. How did he decide where to dig? He saw a thin ray of light peeking out of that place, coming from the Garden of Eden, and so he wanted that place for his grave. That was the place, near the gate to the Garden of Eden (Zohar Bereshit 57).

In the Zohar, Rabbi Yehudah teaches that

Abraham identified the cave ... since previously he discovered that Adam and Eve were buried there. And how did he know that it was them? Because he saw Adam's visage and gazed on it. Then an entrance to the Garden of Eden opened up to him and he saw the visage of Adam standing in Eden. ... So Abraham longed for that spot as his final resting place, and his heart and mind were preoccupied with it (Zohar, Chayei Sara, 127:1).

In their time, the rest of the patriarchs were also laid to rest in this cave in the field of Machpelah, all except Rachel who died in childbirth and was buried along the road near Bethlehem. The Torah tells that the spies sent by Moses came to Hebron and the Midrash adds that Caleb paused to pray at the cave. In the end only Caleb and Joshua were allowed to enter Canaan -- Joshua because he was the faithful servant of Moses and Caleb because he had prayed at the cave of Machpelah (Sotah 34b).

In the first century BCE, either before Herod or by Herod, an area surrounded by an enormous wall was established above the entry to the tombs. Within the walls monumental cenotaphs or "false tombs" were set up for the patriarchs. From that time onward, entry into the caves themselves was very limited, though the twelfth century traveler Benjamin of Tudela claimed to have gone into the caves to visit the actual burial sites. And we also know that Maimonides set aside two days of each year as special family holidays, the day he would go up to Jerusalem and the day he would go to Hebron to pray at the tombs. Toward the end of his life, Maimonides wrote a letter saying that he was planning to dig his own grave at Machpelah, but tradition suggests that his actual grave ended up either in Jerusalem or near Haifa. By this time, already, the legend had grown that all Jewish prayers enter Eden and then heaven by way of the Cave of the Patriarchs.

When Christians conquered the land, the monument was transformed into a church. When it was retaken by Muslims, its care was first given into the hands of the Jewish community of Hebron, but a mosque rose on the spot. When the extremist Islamic Mamelukes conquered the land, they drove out the Jews of Hebron and added two minarets to the monumental walls, marking the whole place as a Muslim holy site. Jews were allowed to go up only to the seventh step leading to the entrance to the walls. It was during this period that the Jews arranged, probably through heavy payments of bakshish, the bribery that greases the Middle East, to have a hole opened up at the fourth step. The hole opened directly into the cave itself, some said just above the actual burial place of Abraham. And through this hole, small pieces of paper with prayers were pressed, in the hope that Abraham would beseech God to attend to these desperate prayers of the Jews.

Under the British, after the first World War, a synagogue reappeared at the side of the walls, though the Jews were still not allowed to go above the seventh step. But when the area of Hebron fell to the Jordanians after the Israeli war of Independence in 1948, the Jordanians allowed the synagogue to be turned into a heap of rubble and an animal pen. Israel regained the possession of Hebron in the 1967 war and the Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Armed Forces triumphantly visited the tombs to pray there. For a while the enclosure was again open to Jewish prayer.

Shabbat Chayei Sarah is a special occasion at the present-day Ma'arat HaMachpela. On this Sabbath, when we read the story of the cave in the Torah, thousands of Jews gather in Hebron. The local Jewish community is small, but Jewish visitors are accommodated everywhere -- in homes, guest houses, schools, tents, and even in sleeping bags. Anyone willing to compromise a bit on comfort is guaranteed a special experience.

Needless to say, the ancestors of the Jews, Muslims, and Christians do not rest any easier today than they have in the past. In 1929, Hebron was the scene of a terrifying massacre in which 67 Jews were murdered by Islamic extremists and the rest of the Jews of Hebron were forced to flee their homes. Likewise, in March 1994, a Jewish extremist murdered 29 Palestinian Muslims outside their mosque. Hebron will soon be part of a Palestinian state, though at present the holy site is surrounded by soldiers of the Israeli armed forces. Muslims and Jews use the site daily, but parts of it are off limit to Jews except on ten days each year and the site is governed by Muslim authorities even though it is protected by the State of Israel. What a mess we can sometimes make of the world in the name of religion!

How do we end a sermon like this which begins with the beginning of our history and continues to the present-day conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians? Perhaps the only way to make any sense of all this is to think about the meaning of destruction and remembrance. Just after the site of Hebron was returned to the hands of Israel in 1967, the steps leading up to the entrance of the massive walls were dismantled by the Israelis. This was done to erase the hundreds of years of shame in which Jews were forced to go no higher than the seventh step. The new ramp did away with steps entirely.

But what was the ultimate result? Signs were set up where the seventh step had been and to this day many Jews stop and pray at this spot, leaning their heads against this wall, even as they do at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, just trying to associate themselves more closely with the plight of thousands upon thousands of their people through the ages.

Perhaps it is destruction that calls forth remembrance as much as remembrance calls forth destruction. It seems to me that to visit and to pray at the tombs of our ancestors should be a great privilege. It seems to me that the cave of Machpelah, the first field and cave owned by any Jew within the Holy Land is a place deserving of reverence and remembrance. But it also seems to me that we must expend just as much energy in avoiding destruction as we do in promoting reverence. Religion should not be an excuse for violence and terror, when we know that religion can be a cure for violence and terror. It is a lesson that I pray the entire world can learn. And the Cave of the Patriarchs might be just the place to preach this sermon. And let us say: Amen.