What's the Good of Traveling?
May 17, 2008
I do wonder about that question. I would label myself a historical traveler since my avid hope is always to catch sight of places from the past.. and to note how ruins are worked into modern landscapes. But travel can be depressing as it quickly becomes obvious that the past really is gone (contra Faulkner, no matter how many people think his comment is amazing).
Israel is a great example. I remember my shock as I crossed the land border from Egypt into Israel and was suddenly confronted by a road lined with shiny SUVs. It was a sunny Friday morning in early spring and everyone seemed to be at the Red Sea.. or at least Israel's small slice of it near Elat. I remember my bus trip back to Elat and a brief stop at a resort along the Dead Sea.. and the people with mud plastered faces (good for your skin). It was weird to be in a land that I had been reading about since grade school, but now transformed into the setting for a culture that was a lot like what I knew growing up in America. It is cool to say that I have been to Israel and Jerusalem, but it is not clear to me how that experience would lead me to a better understanding of Hebrew Scripture.
The past couple of days I have been reading a book called The Israelites by B.S.J. Isserlin. The book is a neat overview to what we know about the Israel of the Bible. I am looking forward to reading the chapters on town planning and the economic system. This will all be information that is better to learn from a book than from actual travel to Israel.. with the possible exception of someone who is participating in an archeological dig. But even then the real interest will come from time spent in a library comparing particular finds with the generality of finds and interpretations of ancient Israel. A visit to a past archeological site is difficult to make heads to tails of without written interpretation.
If one is interested in the past it is more important to have access to a good library than to visit a site. But I will note one exception to this: the "sense of a landscape" that comes from being there. In the Isserlin book the first chapter is dedicated to geography, and I was reminded of how Israel slopes upward from a low fertile plain to the low foothills of the Shephelah to the Judean Hills in which Jerusalem is located. When I was in Israel I never got over to the coast, so I have no real way to imagine this. But this is something that would actually be valuable about visiting.. this sense of the movement of the landscape and how it looks.. even if one only sees it from the window of a car.
The cultural contacts made by a traveler are mostly overblown. There is too much water under the bridge for a visitor to England to believe that anything he or she hears in England is a window into the world of Chaucer. So why should anyone be confident about being able to learn about medieval Islam by living with Muslims in contemporary Iraq?
