Peter Novecosky, OSB

Holy Land’s divided history

The Holy Land is a point of focus for Christians during Easter, as that is the place where Jesus lived, died and rose again on Easter Sunday. The land is also sacred to Jews and Muslims. Jerusalem is a holy city for all three religions; it is also an “unholy” city because of the controversies and violence that religion has engendered here.

All three religions have different reasons for claiming Jerusalem as their city and they have vastly different accounts of their traditions and histories.
Given this reality, a professor at Tel Aviv University thought it would be helpful to write the history of the Holy Land, in particular to bring a common understanding to the current conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Eyal Naveh, head of the Political Education Project within the Israel Deomocracy Institute, has worked 10 years on the project. His original goal was to write a history book that could be accepted by both Israelis and Palestinians. Disagreements between Palestinian and Israeli history teachers quickly showed him this was an impossible task.

The teachers couldn’t agree on the names of the chapters, nor could they agree on how to refer to themselves. What the Israelis call the 1948 War of Independence is known to the Palestinians as An-Nakbeh, or “catastrophe.”

Since a common history seemed impossible to achieve, the author produced a side-by-side version that gave the perspective from each side across facing pages. RNS reporter Sarah Grooters calls it “rewriting the history of the Holy Land, two pages at a time.”

“The format and content are groundbreaking because Israeli history textbooks generally don’t include the Palestinian narrative — even though Palestinians comprise nearly 20 per cent of Israeli society,” Grooters said. An-Nakbeh isn’t in the books, according to the Jews, because they only recognize Jewish/Israeli culture.

The Israeli narrative explains how the Holocaust drove the Jewish search for reclaiming their homeland; the Palestinian narrative explains how the Arabs were driven from their homes to make room for the returning Jews.

To make the book less inflamatory, Naveh asked two Palestinian and two Jewish history teachers to write their own histories, leaving out extremists on either side. The teachers then read each other’s accounts and suggested improvements. As the discussions unfolded, Naveh said, both histories became more moderate.

This process reminds me of the progress that has taken place in ecumenical relations. A half century ago, each church presented its own view of its history as well as its own interpretation of what other churches taught. After the Second Vatican Council, we Catholics began to read the history of other churches and invited their professors to teach in our seminaries and universities.

We hope the start Naveh has made will lead to similar progress in dialogue and reconciliation among the people of the Holy Land.

When Easter divides

Christians celebrate Easter as the most important feast day in the church calendar. However, over the centuries Christians have found it hard to agree when to do it. The main division now is between Western and Eastern churches: Eastern churches base their Easter on the Julian calendar’s equinox and lunar cycle calculations; Catholics and Protestants use the Gregorian method, adopted in the 1582 by Pope Gregrory XIII. For westerners, Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. This means Easter is moveable feast and can occur any time between March 22 and April 25.

The controversy over the date of Easter goes back to the beginning of Christianity.

It began with a discussion of whether Easter should be celebrated on a weekday or always on a Sunday.

In the first centuries, Christians linked the feast of Easter with the Jewish Passover. The controversy centred on whether it should be on the same day as the Jewish Passover, the 14th day of the moon, or should Easter always fall on a Sunday? Christians in Asia took the former position, others the latter.

The next issue was what Sunday to choose. Christians in Syria and Mesopotamia held their celebration on the Sunday after Passover while those in Alexandria and other regions celebrated Easter on the first Sunday after the spring equinox, without regard to the Passover.

This issue was settled at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, which decreed that Easter should be celebrated by all on the same Sunday, that is, the first Sunday following the paschal moon: the full moon following the spring equinox.

In some parts of the Roman Empire, the issue was still not settled. When missionaries from Rome went to England in the time of St. Gregory the Great, they found that Christians there used their own system of determining the date of Easter, similar to the Christians of Asia. The differences were not settled until the Synod of Whitby in 664, which adopted the Roman custom.

The difficulty with Easter being celebrated on different dates is not so evident when the churches involved live isolated in different countries. With the massive migrations of peoples in the previous century, however, the differences among churches became evident — especially evident in the Holy Land where differences in traditions have led to physical confrontations.

In the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy passed in 1963, the Council Fathers agreed to establishing Easter on a fixed date, given that other churches agree. In 1997 the World Council of Churches also put its weight behind establishing a common Sunday for celebrating Easter. The Eastern churches, seeing it as an assault on their tradition, have resisted the notion.

In 2010 and 2011 the dates for Easter happen to coincide for both traditions. In fact, in the next 10 years the dates will converge four times. The US National Council of Churches recently raised the issue again of setting a common date for Easter for all Christians. Rev. Michael Kinnamon, the NCC's general secretary, and Antonios Kireopoulos, the NCC's director for faith and order and interfaith relations, said the split among Christians “is a scandal that surely grieves our God.”

While different dates are a religious scandal, some people see advantages. Christians following the Eastern tradition may find it easier to get vacation days approved when they’re not competing with Catholic and Protestant colleagues. In Jerusalem, crowding and security issues are more manageable with two sets of Holy Week.

The difference is more a matter of heart than of mind.