What Lies Beneath Our Feet

 At a dig about four or five blocks from our apartment in Jerusalem, archeologists have unearthed the remains of a First Temple-period palace that appears to have been built shortly after the Assyrian siege of the city in the time of King Hezekiah, which is to say about 2,700 years ago. (For the full Times of Israel story, click here.)  In some ways, this is something that happens all the time in Israel, where archeologists are constantly finding traces of the past buried deep in the earth. I’ve written about some of those discoveries in this space several times, in fact. (To review some of what I’ve had to say in that regard, click here and here.) But in the context of Elul, the month of the Jewish year devoted to an entirely different kind of archeology (see below), I found this remarkable discovery not only to be interesting, but moving and meaningful on a spiritual level as well. It’s that latter lesson I’d like to share with you all this week.

The interesting part is easy to explain. Our Jerusalem home is a normal apartment in a regular building surrounded by other buildings and a huge garden promenade. Because it is, after all, Jerusalem, everybody knows—at least passively—that the piece of land our building occupies has been home to countless generations of Jerusalemites before us. But then a discovery like this comes along—and, really, the site is not even a ten minute walk from our home—to remind us that there were Jewish people living in our neighborhood, not just a hundred or even several hundred years ago, but twenty-seven centuries ago. And, of course, that thought brings on its own set of questions. What did my ancient neighbors look like? How did they dress? What did they eat? Would I be able to understand their Hebrew? Did they travel to the Temple by descending into the huge valley that separates our neighborhood, called Arnona, from the Old City and then climbing up on the ridge on the other side? Or did they follow the route the no. 78 bus still takes along the western side of the valley into the city center? Would these people have recognized me as one of them? And, more to the point, how would they even have understood that question?

For Americans, of course, the 8^th century BCE is almost unfathomably far back in the past. (In New York, we award landmark status to buildings built in the 18^th century and somehow still standing.) Nor is the story of the Assyrian assault against the capital of Hezekiah’s kingdom one of those biblical stories that has retained some measure of currency among educated, literate Americans. But for Jerusalemites, the year the neighbors down the block built their huge house overlooking the Old City is the year of a siege that everybody—not nobody—recalls at least having once learned about in school. As noted, the biblical story has a lot of holes in it, and not least of all because it remains unclear why the Assyrians ultimately chose to withdraw rather than moving on to seize the city. Did Sennacharib simply need his troops more urgently elsewhere? Or did the huge ransom Hezekiah paid—three (or eight) hundred talents of silver and thirty of gold, a talent being about 130 lbs.—did the ransom do the trick? And then there’s a third explanation in the biblical account of how God spared the city by sending an angel to finish off 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in one single evening. The truth presumably lies somewhere between all those ideas and theories, but the bottom line is that King Hezekiah died in his early fifties in about 687 BCE without ever having to relinquish control of his capital city or his palace.

So the reason the siege was lifted is unclear. But that Jerusalem was besieged until the siege somehow lifted seems incontrovertible. And that siege seems to have been the context for someone—some wealthy citizen, perhaps even a member of the royal house—choosing to resettle outside the walls of the city and build a home on a verdant ridge that then as now looks over the valley directly at the Temple Mount and which now is about where our Jerusalem synagogue gathers on Tisha Be’av to chant the Book of Lamentations on the anniversary of the day about 120 years after the Assyrians went home on which the city actually was destroyed and its temple razed. And that is only appropriate since the same archeologists who found the remnants of the house are convinced that it was during that final siege of the city by the Babylonians (who in the meantime had taken over the role of dominant force in the Middle East from the Assyrians) that this palatial structure was finally destroyed.

I’ll paste in here a picture of one of the capitals they found, but what speaks the most directly to me is the thought that this palace—bearing mute testimony to the precise era in which the earliest version of Judaism was developed—that this magnificent home was there just beneath the surface of land along which Joan and I have walked countless times without knowing what lay just beneath our feet.

As I’ve written many times before, Elul is our month of introspection and self-analysis. For some reason, I always start by thinking about the past and wondering where it could possibly have gone to. The young tree is somewhere inside the mature one, its inmost rings deriving from the earliest stages of its existence. But is that how it works on the level of individual human beings as well? Or on the broader level of national identity? The palace from the time of King Hezekiah was there all along, supporting the present from beneath—but without making its own presence known, without intruding on the present, without forcing itself on the generation now occupying the space its original builders chose to build on. For two and a half millennia, it was just there.  But now that we’ve found it, how much the richer we are! Knowing that in the time of the kings of Judah, there were building crews putting up palatial homes in our neighborhood reminds me that the past does not have to be remain buried, that knowing what lies beneath the surface can lead to an enriched sense of one’s place in the world, to an intensified understanding of one’s identity, possibly even to an enhanced sense of destiny as the contemplation of the formerly unknown past suggests the possibility of a heretofore unimagined future as well.

As I make my way forward through Elul, I find myself wondering what lies beneath my feet. What part of my past is providing me with my place in the world without making its presence known or felt. What version of the younger me is resting just behind the visible surface of my life and influencing decisions I feel that I’m making independent of outside influences.  What historical relic known to none and whose presence is not even sensed by myself…what relic of my past or my family’s is there nonetheless. And how much richer my sense of self would be—and how much more focused and balanced—if I could only find the courage to dig beneath my own feet to see what lies beneath the soil upon which I stand as I move forward through the days of my life. The palace was there all along, of course. But now that archeologists have found it…now follows the possibility of listening to what it has to say and allowing ourselves to grow through that specific encounter with the past. I wish that for myself in these waning weeks of Elul. And I wish it for all of you as well!