Ingathering of the exiles
It's a story that has changed hearts and minds. But where is this story going?
When I launched Towers of Babel, I wanted to address three questions:
Have journalists over-promised on what they can realistically deliver?
If the stories that journalists tell don’t really change hearts or minds, then what does?
When you discover that much of your career was built on a deeply flawed premise, what do you do next?
Thus far, I’ve been focusing mainly on the first question. Listening to journalists and to critiques of journalism that focus on our hunger for entertainment… our fear of boredom… our focus on Right Now… our lack of memory & inability to see ourselves in history… our frustration with the ineffectiveness of good reporting and dramatic stories to move the needle on most every issue… and so on.
Now I’d like to begin weaving in some tentative answers to the second question. To look at a story that clearly has affected the hearts and minds of many — a story that is arguably the greatest story ever told. It has compelling characters. It has narrative punch. It has what my friend Randy Olson calls ABT structure. It’s old and new. And while the original source of the story might be unclear, its enthusiastic embrace by almost 4 billion people suggests it still has some narrative power and appeal. It’s a story familiar to Jews, Christians, and Muslims — a story of the Jews wandering in exile who finally are summoned “home” by… well, by something or someone.
I’ve been aware of this story in its roughest outline ever since I attended Hebrew school as a kid. But the power and popularity of the story didn’t really hit me until I visited Israel for the first time in the early 1980s. Back then, a rabbi assured me that if I don’t eventually emigrate to Israel, then my kids probably will… if not my grandchildren. The Ingathering was embedded in the DNA of Jewish history, the rabbi insisted. There was no escaping it. Our Return was historically inevitable.
I heard something similar from Christian evangelical friends who believe in the prophetic visions of a reborn Zion welcoming Jews home from exile, all as a prelude to the Second Coming of Christ.
I heard it years ago from an elderly Muslim gentleman in Jerusalem whose family claims to have lived in the Old City ever since the time of Mohammed. When I asked him about the Jews’ return, he said it didn’t surprise him. It’s part of a prophetic plan. “All the Jews will come back here,” he told me. And what happens (from a Muslim perspective) when the latest Jewish exile finally ends? He told me about this historic climax, and it’s not a pretty sight.
How many people believe this story or variations of it? How many people see the ingathering of the exiles as inevitable or simply desirable? And if this ingathering comes to pass, then what happens? Where is the Story supposed to go next?
I’ll be pulling on these threads in the months to come. I’m going to try and make sense of a narrative that runs right through the Tower of Babel… to Abraham… Moses… Jesus… Mohammed… and eventually to you and me, right here, right now.
As I’ve said from the beginning of this project: Our love of Story has become an addiction — and it’s killing us.
But is there a way to embrace this popular story — and a way to accept what History has given us thus far — but tweak the plot to create a more humane and life-affirming next chapter?
Is it possible that Abraham’s fractured family can finally reconcile and build a better future together?
More to come…