IN THE STERILE SILENCE OF CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL IN BOSTON, I AM watching my son Gabriel’s vital signs, monitoring every line of his heart rate and waiting for any change in the digital readout of his oxygen intake. By now, my wife, Julie, and I are exhausted and scared. A hospital tray with his uneaten breakfast sits on the nightstand.
Julie stares at the depressing plate of food and begins to read the ingredients with shock, which is quickly followed by contempt. “How do they feed children this crap when they’re sick?” she asks, looking at the side of the box of Froot Loops and pointing. “Look at this sugar content!”
She picks up a rubbery piece of white bread that is coated in an unnatural yellow, spongy film of “egg substitute” batter. On the menu, it’s called French toast. It looks completely inedible.
“This isn’t maple syrup! Look at this, it is just pure high fructose corn syrup. One hundred percent high fructose corn syrup. Really, look at this,” she says, putting the little plastic container of syrup in front of me.
But I don’t take my gaze from the monitor. She’s right, of course. American hospitals provide absolutely horrible food for patients, who, more than any of us, need nutrition and the healing power of good, wholesome meals. This is true even at great hospitals like Children’s, which is one of the world’s best medical institutions. For Julie, this terrible hospital food devoid of all taste and nutrition is where she is investing her anger. She’s railing about the red dyes in the Jell-O and the unbelievable gall and carelessness of offering all the soda and pudding and cookies and Frosted Flakes that kids can get their hands on in the little kitchenette that’s open all night. Julie believes in eating well, and our children have for the most part been fed organic and, whenever possible, locally grown food in our home. For sure, I am known to join my boys’ chorus of groans over all the tofu and sprouts, though deep down I respect her for the time and energy she invests in helping us all eat healthy food. But at this point I just can’t care about it.
My head is somewhere else, and I can’t take my eyes off the monitor. I am channeling my rage more in the direction of the doctor at the emergency room at our local hospital who first misdiagnosed our nine-year-old son’s stomachache. He sent us home, urging Gabriel to “drink fluids.” And he did this even though Gabriel was exhibiting what we now know is every classic symptom of appendicitis. The doctor blew it. And when we got home from the local hospital in the predawn darkness, Gabriel’s appendix burst and left him doubled over in excruciating pain. That’s when we rushed him here to Children’s Hospital Boston. He’s in serious condition now with toxins coursing through his intestines and causing intense pain. The battle now is fighting the massive infection, which can be fatal. We are very frightened.
The way Gabriel moaned and winced when he first got here reminded me of the gut shot I once saw a Syrian fedayeen fighter suffer in Kurdistan in March 2003. But this wasn’t a war zone and this wasn’t a soldier, this was my rail-thin nine-year-old son, with the gentle soul of a poet and boyish dreams of being a boxer. He just didn’t deserve a painful blow like this. And all I can keep coming back to is how much I want to strangle the admitting doctor who blew a simple diagnosis for appendicitis. Julie’s thinking food, I’m thinking revenge.
In the long, empty silence of a hospital room, Julie and I try to distract ourselves by thinking back to the day Gabriel was born nine years ago. We have four sons and, of course, every one of their births is etched forever in our memory. But Gabriel’s birth was the most memorable of all. It was laden with meaning as he was born in the biblical town of Bethlehem in December of the year 2000. We were living in Jerusalem, where I served as the Middle East bureau chief for the Boston Globe.
I was working on a book at the time, retracing the path of Jesus’ life in the year 2000. I can feel—and sometimes see—people roll their eyes when they hear we had a child born in Bethlehem in that year of researching the book. The whole reality we were living sometimes felt a bit too contrived. It didn’t go unnoticed by my fellow correspondents, who relished teasing us about it. Some jokingly suggested that we might even be suffering from Jerusalem Syndrome, the extraordinary psychosis in which people living in the Holy Land take on biblical characters as part of their persona. There’s even a mental ward dedicated to such sufferers in Jerusalem, and in the millennial year the ward was packed with several John the Baptists, a few Marys, and at least one Moses and one Jesus.
The truth about how Gabriel came to be born in Bethlehem is a simple story, but one that got increasingly complicated as time went on. We certainly wouldn’t be described as particularly religious, and there was absolutely no conscious level at which we decided to have the birth there for any religious reasons. After all, Julie is from a Jewish family, and I am tribally Catholic, though hardly a practicing one. The reason Julie had chosen the Holy Family Hospital in Bethlehem was that there was simply no Israeli hospital that allowed women to have natural childbirth with a midwife. The Jewish hospital Misgovladak, where our son Riley Joseph had been born nearly two years earlier, had closed. At most Israeli hospitals there was a big focus on high-tech intervention and a high rate of C-sections. At Hadassah in Jerusalem, the nurses took the baby away at night and fed the child formula even if you insisted on nursing. Bethlehem’s Holy Family was the only nearby hospital that had midwives and allowed women to nurse through the night. When Julie first made what then seemed like a very rational decision, it was months before the violence of the second Palestinian intifada had really broken out. By the time she had reached her third trimester, the violence was all around us. There were bus bombings and raging machine-gun battles and the loud thud of tank fire that could be heard from our home.
As we think back to our son’s birth, I can almost smell the tear gas, burning tires, and cordite that usually accompanied the sounds of fighting at the time. But mixed among the memory of those bitter smells are mouthwatering aromas, as comforting to us now as they were delicious then: take-out orders of falafel and tabbouleh salads of finely chopped bulgur, parsley, and green onions soaked with lemon and olive oil; the lamb that Julie craved when she was pregnant—typically seasoned with garlic, rosemary, and thyme, with a hint of the tangy olives on which the lambs graze in the chalky hills of the West Bank clearly noticeable in the tender and delicious meat; and, more than anything, soft Palestinian bread, warm and fresh from the oven.
On November 13, 2000, the Israeli military checkpoint into Bethlehem, the biblical birthplace of Jesus, was unsettlingly quiet.
Looking back, these were actually the quaint days of foreign reporting before September 11, 2001, when we still placed “Foreign Press” signs on our dashboard or taped “TV” on the car doors of our four-wheel-drive vehicles. And we still believed these symbols were as good as white flags or papers of transport that could get us through almost anything.
On this day, something intangible but ominous hung in the air as we approached the first checkpoint, and I adjusted the “Foreign Press” sign to draw more attention to the pretext that I was just a journalist trying to get through. Julie was eight months pregnant and she had an appointment at Holy Family Hospital. The decision to have the baby there made sense at the time, and despite the outbreak of violence we hadn’t changed our plans. That is always what it’s like to live in a place that is in conflict. We adapt in incremental and almost imperceptible ways until the peril surrounds us, and even then it’s hard to see. We just go on living, breathing, and eating even as the fighting intensifies. It all just seems to be part of life. We had reasons beyond Julie’s preference for natural childbirth and the closure of Misgovladak. Holy Family Hospital was actually closer to our home in West Jerusalem than the Hadassah Hospital at Mount Scopus. And we liked the obstetrician there, Dr. Nihad Salsa. The nurses were well trained, and no small consideration was the fact that the French nuns who ran the hospital were fantastic cooks. Julie, who was a journalist and documentary producer before we moved to Jerusalem for my job, had volunteered in the orphanage there. She’d come to know the French nuns and Palestinian nurses trained in Ireland and their cooking, which was a perfect blend of local Palestinian recipes with a distinctly European elegance and seasoning.
We were set on having the baby in Bethlehem, but the palpable tension around us was making it seem like a bad idea, particularly on this day. I had a distinctly bad feeling as we rolled to a stop in the long line of trucks and vans packed with Palestinian day laborers. It was quiet and there was no sign of any clashes. But just in case I reached into the backseat of the Isuzu Trooper, grabbed a Kevlar vest, and wrapped it around Julie’s pregnant belly, positioning it to best protect her and the baby from possible gunfire. Despite the bad feeling in my gut, we pressed on to our ultrasound appointment with Dr. Salsa.
We rolled up slowly to the checkpoint. The Israeli border guard confidently waved us through, and I felt my nerves settle for a moment. Then at the second checkpoint, near Rachel’s Tomb, an Israeli border policeman with a drawn M-16 banged on the hood of the car and waved us back. There were spent rounds littering the road, and the pavement was pocked by gunfire and what appeared to be tank rounds. Rocks carpeted the road from the Palestinian shabab, or “boys,” who had barraged the post in a demonstration the evening before.
The Israeli border policeman shouted “Y’allah!” and waved us back. It’s an Arabic expression that translates as “Go with God,” but the Israelis have annexed the phrase and made it sound more like “Move it!” We explained that we had a doctor’s appointment and I pointed to my wife’s very obvious condition. “Go to hospital in Jerusalem. This is danger here now,” the Israeli said in broken English with a dismissive wave.
We retreated to the first checkpoint. On our way back we heard a loud explosion to the east near the Palestinian village of Beit Sahour. I later learned that it was a helicopter missile attack on a local leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which were largely under the direction of the Abayat tribe, a Muslim clan in this largely Christian town. The Abayats’ heavily armed militia had stepped up their involvement in the intifada.
We pulled over to the side of the road and called the doctor to explain that we could not get through. Like all Palestinians, Dr. Salsa had learned over many years to accept the unpredictability of life under occupation, and she and Julie were going over dates to reschedule the visit. But just then the border police started waving the line of traffic through again, so we decided to go forward and try to keep the appointment. We made it. The ultrasound was fine. The baby was due any day. This was our third child, so we were not necessarily new to this drill, but having to navigate a drive to a doctor’s appointment through a war zone was a first, and I was increasingly nervous about how we’d get through the checkpoint when Julie went into labor.
I loved the way Julie ate whenever she was pregnant. There was a ravenousness to it that was wild and joyous and full of life and often involved her buying huge legs of lamb and abandoning any earlier inclinations toward being a vegetarian. On one occasion she had bought an entire lamb from the Palestinian butchers, and the legs and loins and rack of ribs were all wrapped in white butcher paper and stuffed in our freezer.
But as we drove through Bethlehem, Julie said she was craving bread, a simple basket of warm bread. And I knew that a nearby hotel, the Jacir Palace, which was located just before the checkpoint, had delicious Palestinian bread from one of the better local bakeries. So we pulled in. All the excitement of getting to the appointment and the great relief knowing that the baby was healthy had made us powerfully hungry. We ordered a meze plate with hummus, baba ganoush, finely chopped tomatoes with thyme, and rolled grape leaves stuffed with rice. We also ordered delicious freshly squeezed orange juice. Julie mostly focused on the bread, working her way through the basket.
The name of this ancient town comes from the Hebrew beit lehem, “house of bread.” And the town lives up to its name. In the warren of narrow streets that cling to the steep hills of Bethlehem, there are busy bakeries with wood- and coal-fired ovens, or taboons, that begin to burn in the predawn darkness every morning. The ovens produce soft, warm layered pita bread and the heartier taboon bread, which is baked directly on the hot coals. The taboons are round loaves of bread typically about eighteen inches in diameter. I watched with great happiness as Julie pushed the folds of the taboon into her mouth and quietly and happily devoured it.
Bread is a universal food, a culinary core that lies at the center of just about all cultures. In our neighborhood in Jerusalem’s German Colony, our garden backed up to a kosher bakery just off Emek Refaim Street where we would buy warm challah bread on Friday mornings, standing in line with Israelis doing their shopping before Shabbat. Our children, especially Gabriel, loved challah bread, and in our home outside Boston we traditionally had sweet loaves of challah on Sunday mornings. The wonderful, warm smells of the kosher bakery wafted through our memories of Jerusalem.
In Bethlehem, where tradition holds that Jesus was born, the bread is not just delicious, it also serves as a religious metaphor and a sacrament that lies at the center of the Christian faith. There is, of course, the obvious and laden imagery of the bread of life in Christianity, which harkens back to the Last Supper, when Jesus broke bread and drank wine with his disciples. Bread is also central in the Transubstantiation, which for Catholics means quite literally a mystery of faith in which bread is consecrated and becomes the body of Christ. For the Palestinian Christians who live in Bethlehem this kind of weighty religious idea of bread is about the furthest thing from their minds as they go about their daily routine, which every day involves buying warm, fresh taboon. They are not thinking about bread as a sacrament. They’re just hungry, and the bread is cheap and delicious. In modern Bethlehem, life is hard under military occupation, but the enduring simplicity of warm, fresh bread is a wonderful and very straightforward part of that daily life.
The Christian Palestinians, who tend to be middle-class, love not only their bread but also finer pastries and cookies that imitate European styles of baguettes and sweet breads. This more bourgeois kind of baking has been brought to the Christian Palestinians through the French, Italian, and German religious orders that have played a role in the Holy Land since at least the Crusades. The cookies in particular are famous. But the core bakery experience for Palestinians is still the warm, pillowlike pita bread, or taboon, or the rugged carpets of braided Iraqi bread.
After we had spent about a half hour eating bread in the nineteenth-century grandeur of the old Jacir Palace hotel, the manager came to us and politely asked us if we were finished, as we might want to consider leaving very quickly. He said there was a large demonstration taking shape, and it was about to descend on the checkpoint in front of the hotel. With a grim, weary look, he politely explained that there was almost certain to be gunfire and violence. A waiter wrapped the warm bread in a cloth napkin and guided us to our car, which was waiting out front.
We set out from the hotel entrance, and literally ten yards behind us was the front line of the demonstration. I could see the angry and determined faces of young Palestinian men pushing forward with fists raised in protest. Many were clutching rocks. As we passed the Israeli border guards, they were just loading tear gas canisters into their weapons, and we heard the soft pop of the first volley as it lofted into the crowd, forcing them to disperse into doorways and cover their mouths and noses with kaffiyehs, the signature Palestinian headscarves.
In the next few weeks the intifada raged and reached new heights of violence that stunned us all. I was very worried about having Julie deliver the baby in Bethlehem, and Julie and I agreed that if there was any problem at the checkpoint when she was in labor we would go to a Jerusalem hospital without hesitation.
The monitor suddenly begins beeping, interrupting the quiet of the hospital room and the stirrings of our memory. Gabriel wakes up for a moment and grimaces. His face crumples into a frown. Then he is crying and saying, “It hurts too much. Make it stop!”
At one point, Gabriel keeps repeating, “I can’t do this anymore.” There is no feeling more powerless than that of a parent who can’t console a sick child. Many times I had seen this in the field as a reporter. There were the scenes of Palestinian children wounded in the Israeli military’s response to the intifada. And there were the Israeli children screaming in pain in the chaos of the emergency rooms in Jerusalem after a suicide bombing by Hamas. In refugee camps in Kosovo, and in the grimy hospital wards in Iraq, and in rural villages far from any medical care in Afghanistan, I had seen far too many scenes of kids suffering in war. It’s always heart-wrenching, but when it is your own child in pain, it is all-consuming. It is the only thing that matters in the world. And I am promising myself never, ever to forget this when I am on a story and see a parent going through this. At Children’s Hospital, literally every floor is a level of relativity for anyone with a sick child. Yes, Gabriel is in pain, but we only have to stop in on the cancer ward or visit the trauma unit to realize just how lucky we are to be struggling through a burst appendix. Still, when it’s your kid, all relativity is out the window.
The morphine drip is wearing off, and the real pain of what Gabriel is going through is tearing through him again. We ring for the nurse, who hangs a new IV drip for him with more morphine. Slowly he calms down and eventually fades back to sleep. There are more long silences as we watch him sleep, his eyes darting back and forth in some troubled dream sequence he’s having. He looks afraid and uneasy in his sleep. I am crying, but then I watch his face grow more peaceful as the morphine envelops and comforts him.
On the afternoon of December 8, 2000, Julie was in labor and we were on our way once again to Bethlehem.
We had worked out an arrangement with a Catholic priest at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, which is perched on the hilltop just above the checkpoint. We arranged that we would check in with him when we were on our way. The priest informed us that the checkpoint was quiet and there was no fighting in town. We confirmed this with our dear friend Gerry Holmes, at the time the ABC News bureau chief, who happened to be reporting nearby. So we were on our way, and we sailed through the checkpoint.
As Julie settled in at the hospital, we realized we had made the rookie mistake of coming a bit too early. But at this point, there was no turning back. I felt strongly that we should not take any chances. So Julie stayed at the hospital and waited for the contractions to intensify. There was a whole different etiquette for men in the delivery room in the conservative Palestinian culture, and I felt more like an outsider on this birth than on the previous two. Mostly, I smoked cigarettes with an on-duty doctor. We stood in the doorway of the entrance to the hospital and watched a machine-gun battle between the Palestinian village of Beit Jala and the Jewish settlement of Gilo just across a valley. Tracer fire lit up the night, and the thud of tank fire sounded like distant thunder. Julie’s room was in the basement of the ancient stone building, and it felt safe and fortressed. We told Julie it was quiet outside, but I have never been able to get anything past Julie, and she looked very suspicious.
“It’s gunfire, isn’t it?” she asked.
That night I finally checked in to the nearby Bethlehem Star Hotel, with lots of jokes from colleagues covering the story about how there was plenty of room at the inn. When Julie was ready to deliver at last in the early morning of December 9, I was there at her bedside. Gabriel Jerome Sennott was born at 7:35 A.M. He was healthy, weighing in at eight pounds, five ounces.
He had a Palestinian birth certificate issued to him in the hospital, and he would soon have an American passport to back up his American citizenship. The passport listed his place of birth as “Bethlehem, West Bank.” But it listed his country of birth as “_____.” The space was simply left blank, a legal document that revealed the fact that Bethlehem still did not belong to a recognized state. Palestinian statehood was a matter for what was called “final status” in the peace talks. So Gabriel’s birth documents seemed to defy the land’s narrow notions of tribe and nationality and even religion. He was listed on his birth certificate as Christian because in Arab culture a child’s religion is determined by his father’s. But just across the checkpoint he would be defined as Jewish, because under Jewish law his mother would determine his religion. We want our children to love everything about who they are, and we find some mystical meaning in the idea that Gabriel was born in a place that straddles the three faiths of the Holy Land, and in a sacred city that was not yet defined as belonging to any one nation.
After his birth Julie’s hunger quickly came raging back, as she was nursing again. Julie’s favorite meal at the Holy Family Hospital was musakhan, the delicious Palestinian chicken dish served atop taboon bread and a layer of caramelized onions and crunchy, sticky rice scraped from the bottom of the pan. There was also a simple, delicious lentil soup, which had the nuns’ distinctly French flavorings of lemon and thyme. For dessert there were rice pudding and dried apricots. And, of course, with every meal there was warm taboon and pita bread. With breakfast it was served with honey and orange marmalade.
Gabriel wakes up, and he is smiling. It is six days in and he is looking much better as the antibiotics slowly take hold. It’s Friday, and when the hospital chaplain, Rabbi Susan Harris, is making the rounds she stops in to see us. She asks about Gabriel and we begin talking about his life and about being born in Bethlehem, and she is very intrigued. She returns later that day with a loaf of challah bread for Gabriel. It’s something she does for children on the ward; the loaves are donated by Rosenfeld’s Bakery in nearby Newton. She calls the challah bread gifts a “big, cosmic hug.” The bread is still warm and perspiring in a plastic bag as she gives it to Gabriel. He smiles and begins eating. This challah is the first thing he has been able to eat in days. He devours much of the loaf, breaking off one piece of the braid at a time and smiling, and we can see that he is finally getting through his ordeal. Rabbi Harris leans over him and offers a blessing, saying, “Be who you are and may you be blessed in all that you are.”
On Christmas Eve that year of Gabriel’s birth I took his two older brothers, William and Riley Joseph, to Shepherds’ Field in Beit Sahour. I was just trying to get them out of the house while their mother wrapped their presents and foraged for a few hours of sleep with the newborn Gabriel. As we drove through the West Bank we saw a shepherd tending his flock. For the boys, all the Christmas Nativity play imagery was always very real and tangible, a part of the landscape in which they lived. We pulled over and walked up into the olive grove to see this shepherd tending to lambs. He was using a wooden staff to knock olives off the branches of a gnarled set of ancient olive trees. The lambs eagerly munched on the olives that landed amid tufts of dry grass in the chalky hills. It was an image straight out of the Bible and an experience I will never forget.
I often found myself questioning these experiences in the context of my faith. I knew it wasn’t the religion that pulled me toward them, but I definitely did feel a strong connection to the place, to understanding its reality and trying to get beyond the iconic stained-glass images in the parish church in the Boston archdiocese where I grew up. I wanted to see the living, breathing reality of the land out of which Christianity grew, and the life of the Palestinian Christians who were part of a two-thousand-year continuum of the faith and whose presence was dwindling rapidly in the land where the faith began. I had come to realize that Bethlehem, Jerusalem, the Galilee, and all the datelines of the New Testament were caught in a modern reality that was not unlike the reality two thousand years ago, a place of occupation and violence and a political struggle to control sacred space. I was drawn to the research for my book because of the great layering of history.
Down in Bethlehem that year there was a dark mood. All of the musical and cultural events of “Bethlehem 2000,” which was to have been a boon to tourism and the Palestinian economy, were canceled. The traditional Christmas lights strung along the roads leading up to Manger Square were all turned off as a protest by Palestinians against the Israeli-imposed closure of Bethlehem. We stopped at a bakery near Manger Square and bought taboon and Christmas cookies. We as a family were celebrating the birth of Gabriel. But the town of Bethlehem was simply not joyous on this Christmas. It was sad and tragic, and we could feel it. As the violence reached a fever pitch in the spring and then into the summer, we knew it was time to leave, so we moved to London, where I had a new assignment for the Boston Globe.
A year and a half later, I was back in Bethlehem. The events of September 11, 2001, meant that I was reporting mostly from Afghanistan. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was raging, and the Globe had asked me to return to cover the events, as they were centered on an Israeli military siege of Bethlehem. The Israeli tanks surrounded the Church of Nativity, and Palestinian Muslim militants were holed up inside the basilica with several priests and Christian shopkeepers being held inside the church. It was a thirty-eight-day siege that held the world transfixed. I was covering the story from the edges of Manger Square, and I smelled the bakeries and the warm aroma of taboon bread mixed with the conflicting burned smell of cordite from Israeli tank fire. The two smells—warm bread and cordite—mingling together is now my strongest memory of Bethlehem.
On the seventh day, a sleepless, terrible week has finally passed and Gabriel is going home from Children’s Hospital. He is doing much better, the antibiotics having finally gained the upper hand against all the toxins in his system. He is slowly realizing that the pain is subsiding. He is beginning to trust that he feels better. When we get Gabriel home, he is treated like royalty by family and friends who’ve rallied around and helped us get through this rough patch. His brothers are joking with him and making him laugh again. His grandmother, aunts, and uncles are all doting on him. Our yellow Labrador puppy, Bella, sleeps at the foot of his bed. We all love him more than ever and love having him back home, making us laugh as he always does. Julie is cooking for him now. Simple, good food. She brings up bowls of oatmeal with local maple syrup. And she prepares French toast, his favorite meal, only this time it is not rubbery inedible squares like those at the hospital. This time it is made with delicious challah bread from a local bakery and eggs that come from our neighbor’s hens. The food is real and it is delicious. It is as simple as eggs and bread and cinnamon, but it is good and warm and Gabriel is devouring it and slowly getting his strength back. He surprises us by asking for more French toast. He is on the mend, and, as it turns out, the thing he wants more than anything else is something so simple and meaningful and a part of his life. He wants bread.