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Awild euphoria swept the country. Israel had defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, conquering the Sinai Desert, the Golan Heights, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and East Jerusalem, with its Old City and holy places, which Jews had not been allowed to visit in twenty years. Israelis stood in the street in front of the Western Wall, the holiest place in the world for Jews, weeping and praying. It’s as if the images minted in the war—tanks wedged in the alleys of the Arab market, jets blazing across the sky, soldiers storming the Temple Mount—were too much. Even atheists felt the press of God.
There is a condition suffered by tourists who visit Israel. It’s called the Jerusalem Syndrome. It’s contracted mostly by Christians, who, touched by the light of the city and its ancient names (Gethsemane, Calvary) lose their minds, claim they are not the person on the passport but a figure from the Bible, sometimes a major figure such as Solomon or John the Baptist, sometimes a minor figure such as Boaz or Enoch. They say they have come with a mission, a purpose: to ready the people, to clear the way for the end-time. Their eyes glow. They shout fearful warnings. There are around a hundred cases a year. The symptoms usually disappear when the sufferer leaves the country. One thing always confused me about the Jerusalem Syndrome: Why do Jews rarely get it? What makes them immune? Then, one day, as I was walking around the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, looking at the Israeli soldiers in their Kevlar, with their machine guns and aviator sunglasses, and at the Hasids praying in the cave beside the Western Wall, it dawned on me: they don’t get it because they already have it. In 1967, with the triumph of the biblically named Six-Day War, a strange, haunted quality entered the Jewish soul. Nearly every Jew in the world has since evidenced symptoms of the Jerusalem Syndrome.
There were two million Jews living in Israel in 1967. In the week following the war, five hundred thousand of them visited East Jerusalem. They wanted to see the old places, touch the old stones. They went through the city, then out into the West Bank, a desert that runs from Jerusalem to the Jordan River. This was once Judea, the heartland of ancient Israel, with its capital in Hebron. For the first seven years of his reign, King David ruled from Hebron. It’s where the Ark of the Covenant was kept in its tabernacle, where, according to Genesis, the Hebrew patriarchs are buried: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. It was home to half a million Palestinian Arabs, whose towns and cities had suddenly come under Israeli control. Jews crowded the markets of Bethlehem and Tulkarm and Nablus. They haggled with Arab merchants and dug in the fields, looking for artifacts, shards of pottery, anything that might connect them to the past.
Ariel Sharon was then thirty-nine years old. He had led a column of tanks through the Sinai Desert, taken prisoners, defeated armies. He was one of the heroes of the war. Everywhere he went, Israelis shouted, “Arik, King of the Jews!” He toured Jerusalem and the West Bank with his wife, Lily, and son Gur. Lily was his second wife, the younger sister of his first wife—Gur’s mother—who had been killed in a car crash. “The roads were choked with people,” he wrote.
And every place we stopped we were met by an outpouring of love and affection. I had never seen people in such a state of excitement, visiting Jericho, the old cemetery on the Mount of Olives, the Western Wall, all the holiest sites that had been closed to Jews throughout the Jordanian occupation . . . [Nothing could] dampen the euphoria. It was as if the country was celebrating the most joyful period of its existence. Certainly it was the happiest time I had known, there was a feeling that we had finally broken free from the noose that had been around our necks . . . Once again we were able to go to all these places, these old places that were so much a part of our identity.
A friend gave Sharon’s son Gur an antique gun found in the Judean hills, a front-loading rifle that had not been fired in perhaps a hundred years. It was a weapon you might see a Bedouin carrying in a daguerreotype, cresting a hill in white robes. In October, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Sharon was in his bedroom at home when Gur came in as if he wanted to say something, then, seeing his father on the phone, saluted—“the gesture of a boy who had grown up around the army,” Sharon wrote—then went outside. A moment later, Sharon heard a shot. He ran to the yard, where he found Gur on his back, the antique rifle at his side, and a hole in his eye. Gur’s little brothers, Gilad and Omri, were a few feet away, in their playpen. Sharon rushed to the hospital with the boy on his lap breathing heavily. “Ages seemed to pass as we raced to the hospital,” he wrote, “and as we did, he died in my arms.”
This was a personal tragedy for Sharon and his family, but it’s also the story of Israel and the Jews. Like a story in the Bible, it can be read both literally and symbolically. Here is Ariel Sharon, the war hero, greeted everywhere by cries of “Arik, King of the Jews!” Here is the rifle, a relic waiting all those years in the hills, which is the ancient world of the Hebrews. Here is the man who goes into the hills and comes back with the artifact, the old gun presumed harmless. Here is the boy, the oldest son of the general, at play on a warm afternoon, his baby brothers looking on. Here is the bullet that comes from the past and kills the boy who was to inherit the kingdom.
In AD 70, when the Second Temple was destroyed, a group of rabbis saved Judaism by reinventing it—by taking what had been a national religion, identified with a particular territory, as most religions were in the ancient world, and, amazingly, detaching it from its nation. The Temple and the sacrifices and practices associated with it were replaced by prayer. The capital, Jerusalem, was replaced by the image of an ideal or heavenly city, where people would gather at the end of time. Jews would no longer need Jerusalem in order to be Jews, not the physical Jerusalem. Whenever a Jew prayed, or studied the Torah, he would be in Jerusalem. In this way, the rabbis turned a real city into a city in the mind; in this way, they turned the Temple into a book. Which is why Judaism survived. You can burn a city, but you cannot sack an idea, or kill a book. But in our own time, Zionists have turned the book back into a temple. (Modern Israel is itself the Third Temple.) Temple into book back into temple. And unlike an idea, a temple can be destroyed. By making the faith physical, by locating it in a particular place at a particular time, Zionists have made Jews vulnerable in a way they have not been since the fall of the Second Temple. The fact that Judaism survived that calamity was a miracle, but would it survive it again? In this way, modern Israel, meant to protect Jews, may have put them in greater danger than they have known in two thousand years.