Christ stopped at the Egyptian border
August 26th, 2007Kadesh Barnea is literally the last stop before Egypt. About 50 yards after the turn-off to the moshav is a decrepit military observation tower and a sign saying “Official Vehicles Only”. The border fence runs alongside the road. We didn’t think it could be the border fence, until I switched off the car engine and we heard Egyptian music issuing from a tinny radio in a hut on the other side. The Egyptians helpfully waved their torches at the Israeli soldiers patrolling somewhere down the road to warn them that someone might be trying to trespass.
It is an incongruous part of the country. As you drive down from Jerusalem, the towns give way to sprawling Bedouin villages that are fighting a losing battle for recognition and state services. Then the encampments thin out, and for a while there is nothing but army bases, prisons and war memorials, whose very remoteness seems itself a form of mourning. There are also some really weird road signs. As we approached the border, with the sun about to set, the slight background claustrophobia that accompanies wherever I go in this tiny country fell away, and I became suddenly aware of the immensity of the Sinai desert opening up ahead.
The incongruity did not end there. Avishai Pinchas, the hero of this week’s story, brought some 50 Sudanese refugees to stay in a series of huts in his back yard. Why does he have a series of huts in his back yard? Because Avishai, who seems at first to be just what you would expect of a third-generation Israeli Jew from a Yemenite family - practical, unassuming, right-of-centre - is actually a messianic Jew (meaning that he believes Jesus was the son of God but not in all the subsequent paraphernalia of Christianity, though the details of messianic Jewish belief vary considerably). His wife, Yolanda, was raised a Protestant in Holland. The huts are for other messianic Jews who come to the moshav for retreats, to meditate surrounded by the harsh beauty of the desert.
As Yolanda tells it, Avishai woke up one Saturday morning with a feeling that God had spoken to him and told him to help the Sudanese “because we too were refugees from Egypt”. (A campaign for Amnesty International against the deportations employed a similar tug on the heartstrings: images of refugees with a song in an African language to the tune of the Israeli national anthem). That same evening a friend called to tell him that some refugees staying at a hotel in Beersheva were in danger of being sent back to Egypt unless they found more steady accommodation. The next morning he hired a bus and brought the biggest families back to the ranch. At least one other messianic family in Israel is hosting Sudanese too.
The women have hair-raising stories of the treatment they got in Egypt, but as the night set in they sat outside under the kind of star-field that only the desert can display, talking and shrieking with laughter as the extended Pinchas family and friends tried to teach them Hebrew. The children seemed healthy and boisterous, and the Pinchas children seem to have adopted them all as siblings, at least when it comes to watching TV…
(Note added September 4th: in the original I mistakenly referred to Kadesh Barnea as a kibbutz. It is actually a moshav, a communal settlement. Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the tip-off.)