Kraków is a city of immense religious importance, and on my annual visits there is always much to reflect upon and pray about. But this was the first year here that I have been thinking about the tomb of Abraham.
Who owns the burial ground of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? It’s a biblical question to be sure, and even an ancient legal one. Certainly today it is a political one too. All of which invites reflection on hostility between Abraham’s descendants and the possibilities of reconciliation.
UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) thought it wise to stumble into this matter, declaring the Cave of the Patriarchs at Hebron — the tombs of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah — a World Heritage site in Palestine, and an endangered one at that.
My time in Kraków coincided this year with the annual heritage meeting of UNESCO, at which the new World Heritage Sites are declared.
The World Heritage designation serves a purpose when it might bring attention
The list has become somewhat devalued. At now more than a thousand strong it is becoming increasingly obscure. Last year, it is good to know, Canada got a new such site, Mistaken Point. It’s in Newfoundland.
The World Heritage designation serves a purpose when it might bring attention — archaeological protection, cultural education, tourist dollars — that otherwise would not be had. Back home in Alberta, for example, the UNESCO designation of the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump brought attention and money to something that previously was overlooked as a giant buffalo boneyard.
Contrariwise, the tomb of Abraham, father in faith to the world’s great monotheistic religions, has no need of a UNESCO upgrade. Indeed, the designation as a “Palestinian” site created tension with the Israeli government. Hebron is in the West Bank, and mostly under the Palestinian Authority. Hebron though also has a Jewish settlement, populated by those passionately committed to a Jewish presence at the place where their patriarchs are buried.
Abraham is common to both Israelis and Arabs, Jews and Muslims, while Isaac and Jacob belong to the Jewish line. Arabs and Muslims trace their line through Ishmael, Abraham’s elder son, but by his slave Hagar, not his wife Sarah.
UNESCO further slapped the u201cendangeredu201d designation on the site, indicating a lack of confidence in Israeli control
UNESCO further slapped the “endangered” designation on the site, indicating a lack of confidence in Israeli control, furthering aggravating the situation politically. Israelis ought not get too bothered; the politicization of UNESCO over long years now means that few take it seriously anymore.
Yet thinking about Hebron is suggestive for the great religions. Indeed, the very day the UNESCO decision was announced the assigned biblical passage for the daily Catholic Mass was Genesis 23, the story of how Abraham, upon the death of his wife Sarah, purchased a plot of land and a cave in which to bury her. The locals are willing to allow him to use their land, but Abraham insisted on the purchase. He wanted to bury Sarah in land that belonged to him — a sign of the promised land that to be given to his descendants.
So important is that text that Chaim Herzog, when serving as Israeli ambassador to the UN in the 1970s, had those verses from Genesis read into the official record of the UN general assembly.
Hebron thus is at the heart of the promises made by God and the ownership of the land. That makes Hebron a rather intractable sort of place of religious conflict. UNESCO was foolish to declare itself on the matter, which was not necessary.
UNESCO was foolish to declare itself on the matter, which was not necessary
I made a pilgrimage to the Cave of the Patriarchs in 2012. By some accounts it is the oldest shrine in continuous use anywhere in the world, which makes a 2017 UNESCO designation all the more superfluous. It was an unusual experience to say the least, with Israeli security supervising the pilgrims, who have different entrances for the various places of prayer in the complex. The security is a reminder of a dark day in 1994, when a an American-Israeli terrorist, Baruch Goldstein, opened fire on Muslims at prayer in the Ibrahimi (Abraham) Mosque in the complex, killing 29 and wounding another 120.
At the tombs of the patriarchs and matriarchs, it is possible to think that religious rivalry is so entrenched that peace is not possible. But it is this place, argues the learned Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of Great Britain, which provides hope for reconciliation might come.
Rabbi Sacks notes that at the burial of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael — Jew and Arab, foreshadowed — stand together. They are not estranged it appears, let alone mortal enemies. There has been a reconciliation. Indeed the sibling rivalry of the patriarchs — Isaac and Ishmael, Esau and Jacob, Joseph and his brothers — is fractured, but that is not the last word.
“The three dramas of sibling rivalry have all ended on a note of reconciliation, each time at a more profound level,” writes Sacks in Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence.
Something hopeful to think about here in Kraków, the city of divine mercy. May it be so in Hebron too.
National Post