After the First Rain

The First Rain

Jerusalem begins to turn when the rain is there. In 2011, Jerusalem entered this season through an unusual crossing of calendars. Ramadan, the Jewish month of Av and the late Orthodox summer ran almost alongside one another, carrying different languages of fasting, repentance, forgiveness and expectation.

Fifteen years later, the calendars still turn, but another kind of turning has become more visible.

Much is said about the disappearance of Christians from the Holy Land. Taybeh has again become one of the places around which this anxiety crystallizes. The concern cannot be brushed aside. Christian families have emigrated for decades under economic, political and social pressures, and communities whose churches embody centuries of history may become increasingly fragile.

Yet another reality exists at the same time. Patriarch Theophilos III continues to inaugurate, restore and strengthen parish structures serving Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians. Churches remain active; children are baptized; marriages and funerals gather families; priests travel between communities. Across the Jordan, Arab Orthodox ecclesiastical life continues to develop.

This makes the usual question – “Are Christians disappearing?” – too simple. A more difficult question is: What does Christian presence mean when every structure surrounding it is changing?

George Deek makes the question particularly uncomfortable. A Greek Orthodox Christian from Jaffa who has represented Israel diplomatically, he has spoken forcefully of Israel as the country in the region where Christians remain free to worship. Such a statement inevitably collides with Palestinian Christian experience and with the political conflict surrounding it. Yet it should neither be converted into a slogan nor dismissed because it is inconvenient.

Freedom of worship is real. Friction is real too.

Christian presence within Israel requires more than the preservation of ancient sanctuaries. Churches have to understand a modern state: Hebrew, ministries, municipalities, courts, property regulations, taxation, security requirements and an administrative culture very different from those inherited from Ottoman, British or Jordanian periods. Israeli society can be remarkably open and remarkably demanding at the same time. Ancient institutions must learn not merely to possess rights but to articulate, administer and defend them.

Israel, reciprocally, has to recognize that Christian communities are not archaeological ornaments surrounding holy buildings. Their presence is local, human and contemporary.

The Palestinian territories present another configuration of the same difficulty. Politics enters parish life whether anybody invites it or not. National identity, property, mobility, economic prospects, family continuity and emigration cannot be separated neatly from religion.

Above much of this complicated landscape stands one of Christianity’s strangest surviving institutions: the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

Its Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre is remarkably small in comparison with the historical, political and spiritual weight placed upon it.

The structure can appear anachronistic. Arab Orthodox demands for greater participation in their own hierarchy are neither new nor imaginary. Yet the same Greek institutional instinct that can appear closed and defensive has also demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for survival.

The weakness and the strength may come from the same instinct.

To understand that paradox – and why apparently obvious futures in Jerusalem so often fail to happen – it is useful to return to the final years of Patriarch Diodoros.

Moscow believed it understood what was coming.

Two Thrones and No Patriarch

Toward the end of Patriarch Diodoros’s long tenure, Metropolitan Timotheos of Vostra occupied an exceptionally important position within the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. For some twenty years he had helped shape its internal structure and administration as Secretary-General. He knew the tiny Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulcher, its relationships and its machinery from within. When the question of succession approached, his name therefore carried considerable weight.

Moscow had particular reasons to look favourably upon him. Timotheos had studied at the Leningrad Theological Academy and possessed longstanding relations with the Russian ecclesiastical world. For a Moscow Patriarchate eager to strengthen its historical presence in the Holy Land, his possible election appeared to offer an exceptional opportunity.

The representative of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission brought an exceptional wooden patriarchal throne, and around Timotheos’s birthday openly expressed the expectation that he would soon be leading the Patriarchate.

The thrones arrived. The expected patriarch did not.

The story was more complicated than a Greek-Russian contest. Timotheos and Metropolitan Hesychios had themselves passed through a serious confrontation with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. In the early 1990s, Jerusalem had attempted to establish an ecclesiastical presence in Australia outside the structures recognized there by Constantinople. Patriarch Bartholomew intervened forcefully, and both hierarchs were deposed for a considerable period in connection with the affair.

There is some historical irony in this today. Australia has become one of the territories in which the Ecumenical Patriarchate most confidently displays the growth and vitality of its Greek Orthodox presence.

The geography remained. Its ecclesiastical meaning shifted.

There were other complications around Timotheos. His father was remembered for prominent Communist political engagement in Greece. His Russian formation and perceived closeness to Moscow added another layer in an environment where Greek national and ecclesiastical sensitivities remained powerful. After Diodoros died in December 2000, the succession did not follow the path that had appeared so convincing to some observers. Irenaios was elected patriarch in 2001.

Perhaps Moscow mistook proximity for possession.

There is a deeper lesson in this small piece of ecclesiastical history. The Greek character of the Jerusalem Patriarchate can be frustratingly defensive, particularly when seen by Arab Orthodox faithful who reasonably expect fuller participation in the hierarchy of their own Church. Yet the Brotherhood’s reluctance to surrender control has also repeatedly prevented Jerusalem from becoming an instrument of another Orthodox or political power.

The Moscow Patriarchate of today is not the Moscow Patriarchate that once anticipated a favourable succession in Jerusalem. Ukraine, the rupture with Constantinople and the increasingly close association between Russian ecclesiastical and state interests have profoundly altered its position. How Russia will behave in the coming years cannot safely be predicted.

Jerusalem has seen confident powers miscalculate before.

The Ground Beneath the Church

Jerusalem is only one part of the Patriarchate’s geography. Across the Jordan River, the same Church encounters a rather different reality.

Jordan is one of the rare places in the region where a substantial Arab Orthodox life has retained recognized ecclesiastical and social space. Metropolitan Christophoros of Amman – Philadelphia of the ancient Church – offers an important counterpoint to the familiar picture of a Greek hierarchy governing an Arabic-speaking flock. An Arab Orthodox hierarch within the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, he represents a community that is not merely preserving memories but building, teaching and organizing for the future.

This matters when Christian presence throughout the region is so often described almost exclusively through the language of disappearance. Jordan should not be romanticized: it demonstrates that Arab Orthodox presence can be more than a grievance addressed to a Greek institution.

The contrast becomes sharper when one looks south toward Sinai.

Few Christian institutions seem more immovable than St Catherine’s Monastery. For nearly fifteen centuries monks have remained beneath the mountain associated with Moses while empires, governments, borders and languages changed around them. Its manuscripts, icons and liturgical life give the impression of a continuity almost beyond ordinary historical time.

The dispute surrounding St Catherine’s and its lands in Egypt has exposed an uncomfortable distinction. Egyptian authorities have repeatedly affirmed that worship and the sacred character of the monastery will be protected. At the same time, court decisions and subsequent negotiations have raised serious questions concerning ownership of land, legal possession, the status of surrounding properties and the institutional security of the monastic community.

The monastery is not simply being “closed,” as some alarmist descriptions have suggested. That would make the problem easier to understand than it really is. The church can remain open, the monks can continue to pray and pilgrims can still climb toward Sinai while the juridical ground beneath an ancient Christian presence becomes less certain.

Freedom of worship is not identical with security of presence.

The distinction reaches far beyond Egypt.

None of these situations is identical, and forcing them into a single political explanation obscures more than it reveals.

The same applies to the wider Greek presence. Jerusalem, Sinai and Constantinople cannot simply be placed in one national ecclesiastical box. Their interests sometimes coincide and sometimes collide. The Australian episode already demonstrated how sharply Greek churchmen could oppose one another over jurisdiction. Today Sinai poses a different challenge: not competition between Orthodox jurisdictions but the vulnerability of an ancient Christian institution before the legal authority of a modern state.

Sometimes, as at Sinai, fifteen centuries of presence discover that age alone does not constitute a title deed.

The Year Turns

September therefore arrives with more questions than answers.

The Orthodox ecclesiastical year begins on September 1/15. Jewish life moves through Elul toward Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur 5787. The first rain has fallen, quite early.

There is something appropriate in the Hebrew shanah/שנה: a year, a return, something repeated and yet changed. The same root leads toward learning and repetition; nearby shenah/שינה means sleep. Jerusalem seems permanently suspended between these movements – repeating, changing, learning, occasionally sleeping through transformations that become obvious only afterward.

Christian presence in the Holy Land may have to be understood in much the same way.

The history surrounding Diodoros and his succession is a useful warning. An expected future did not happen. Hierarchs disciplined in one period later returned to positions of considerable responsibility. Russia’s apparent opportunity in Jerusalem passed, comes and goes.The Greek Brotherhood remained.

The same caution is required now.

It would be unwise to predict what place Moscow will occupy in the Orthodox world a decade from now, or how Constantinople will respond to new circumstances. It is equally hazardous to assume that the Greek character of Jerusalem can remain indefinitely unchanged, or that greater Arab participation must necessarily destroy what the Brotherhood has preserved. Sinai may find a durable legal settlement. Jordan may develop forms of Arab Orthodox leadership with consequences beyond Jordan itself. Israel and Palestinian society will continue to change around Christian communities that must learn how to remain without turning themselves into museums or touristic places.

Preservation and transformation are not necessarily enemies.

Perhaps this is why the Christian presence should not be measured only by numbers, buildings or jurisdictional maps. Presence also means the capacity to transmit, to make faith really alive: prayer, language, memory, responsibility, education and the knowledge required to inhabit a changing society.

That may be the quieter lesson of September. Neither Christian disappearance nor Christian permanence is predetermined.

Shanah: repetition, learning, change.

The first rain does not tell Jerusalem what the coming year will bring.

It simply shows that remaining and changing can happen at the same time.