"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
(Puck [Robin Goodfellow] in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Act 3, scene 2.)

As if Israeli police don’t have enough problems, there’s a new fracas in the offing. Long ago, even before Sunnis and Shiites started slaughtering each other, Christians were killing other Christians. The cause? A proper understanding of who and/or what Jesus was; a proper understanding of the relationship between the three Persons of the Holy Trinity. This is a series of arguments Jews managed somehow not to have with each other, and I, for one, thought that in the name of sanity that a via media by which each sect agreed not to persecute members of the others had been reached. But Christians can’t agree on things any more than Muslims. Or Jews.

In 326 CE, St. Helen, the mother of the Emperor Constantine the Great, traveled to the Holy land and identified exactly where every event mentioned in the New Testament took place. “The birth was here,” she pronounced pointing to the spot where there arose the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. “Our Lord was crucified here, anointed there and entombed (from which on the third day He emerged) precisely here.” In short order a huge church was built to encompass all three of these latter spots, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Identifying where something took place 300 + years before is difficult, but did not stop the saint from her appointed task. After all, Jesus had to be crucified somewhere and St. Helen’s location is as good as anyone’s. (The last time we were in Israel we wanted to visit this holy shrine but got lost in the backstreets of the Arab shuk. My wife approached a merchant and asked how to get to the church and I knew that our children’s inheritance would be diminished considerably. He showed us; in fact he took us and gave us a mini-tour and then brought us back to his shop. By the time we were able to extricate ourselves… well, she looks lovely in the items we purchased at bargain rates.)

The Christian community has fractured many times over the centuries. There is the split between east and west that became official in 1054. The Orthodox Church has as many branches as there are nations that adhere to it. In the West from 1517 on Protestants divided, subdivided and continue to create new and fascinating versions of the one true holy apostolic church. Whether Mormons are Christian is a debate I choose not to enter.

But back to the Holy Land, which Zionists such as myself call Israel, there is a new feud developing. No one Christian sect controls the church of the Holy Sepulchre. It’s been divided amongst six different forms of Christianity with precise lines of demarcation ever since 1852 when the Turks, in a vain attempt to stop the shouting, divided authority between the sects and left other areas as common (which means that no one controls them, so no one cleans them which creates a terrible odor from the lavatories. No, I’m not making this up.)

To complicate matters, at noon on every Easter eve (I don’t know what that means either) the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, currently Theophilos III, descends into the tomb in which Jesus was briefly buried and receives from God, fire. According to an article in the April 7, 1982 Christian Century, “The event consists of the sending down of fire by God, the bursting forth of flame at the sacred tomb and the lighting of the candle held in the hand of the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem.” It should be noted that this sort of thing has precedent. Two weeks ago Jews read parsha Sh’mini, about the dedication of the Tabernacle. God sent fire then, too. It is said.)

But for the past couple of years the Greek Patriarch has refused to be accompanied by the Armenian patriarch who is slighted, feeling that the Greeks are treating Armenians as second-class Christians. Fisticuffs have resulted. Israeli authorities arrest the miscreant monks, but then release them. Oh, if you’ve not read about the fights it’s because Christians can’t seem to agree on when precisely to celebrate Easter. In the West this year it was March 23. To the Orthodox it will be April 27. Israeli police are hoping that the only sparks flying will be the divine ones sent from heaven.

Lord, what fools these mortals be/To take religion seriously.