HOW GUIDING CHRISTIANS MADE ME ISRAELI

It's almost 6 o'clock and still over 90 degrees outside. I'm guiding a British charismatic ministry through the sites of Jesus's ministry around the Sea of Galilee. The packed tour bus jiggles and bounces over the patched road on its way back to the hotel. I take the microphone and turn to the group: "Ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions, about anything whatsoever that I might have explained today, please feel free to ask."

A middle-aged Salvation Army guy with an Irish brogue pipes up: "Why don't you Jews accept Jesus Christ as your true Lord and Savior?" I launch into a five-minute explanation on conflicting messianic expectations, varying interpretations of Isaiah, the plurality of Jewish sects in Jesus's day, and how the contingencies of history formed deniers and followers of Jesus into Jews and Christians. After five minutes, I put down the microphone. Dead silence. Fifty-five people crammed into the bus and not a sound but the drone of the motor.

A sweet woman in the fifth row tries to help out. "I once heard the Chief Rabbi of England say that when the Jews' messiah arrives, he wouldn't at all be surprised if indeed he were Jesus." Well, I guessed at what the Chief Rabbi might have meant. And I knew that none of the group would understand it that way. For them, the Chief Rabbi had admitted that "the Jews got it wrong first time, but they'll do better next time around." In most circumstances, I would have put down the microphone and continued to the hotel in silence. I don't have to answer. But this time, I am tired. Very tired. So I take the mike and say, "You know, ladies and gentlemen, the Chief Rabbi of England is right. I wouldn't at all be surprised. But you would!" The group's pastor grabs the mike and harrumphs, "Well, let's all look at tomorrow's program."

At age 22, I, a once-Orthodox Jew from New York City, came on aliya to Israel to study Jewish philosophy and see if I could make my future in a Jewish homeland far away from the Jewish home I grew up in. Three years later, I had become a licensed tour guide, working for Palestinian tour agents specializing in Christian tours to the Holy Land. For reasons I only gradually learned to understand, I had chosen to make my living as a rebbe far di goyim, a rabbi for the Gentiles, presenting and representing Israel, Judaism, and Christianity to a variety of Christian groups from Northern Europe and the United States. I encountered people I probably would never have met otherwise and played a variety of roles, which I came to see as dynamic performances not only for pilgrims but for myself as well. By presenting the land, Judaism, sacred texts, and myself to Christians, I came to appreciate and interrogate my own relations to Judaism, Israeli belonging, voyages of memory, Israeli-Palestinian politics, and religious truths in new ways.

When I first arrived in Israel, guiding seemed a natural choice. My chances of financial survival as an MA student of Jewish philosophy were slim. The tour guide course offered a chance to learn the lay of the land, spend time with Israelis, connect my Jewish textbook knowledge with the realia of mountains, streams, and buried stones – and have fun doing it. Tour guiding offered (or so I thought) a flexible schedule that would enable me to earn a decent living without disrupting my studies. I loved to travel and spoke several European languages, and I enjoyed telling jokes and being on stage. I knew Jewish history and the Bible, had studied Second Temple Jewish thought, and had taken courses in early Christianity and New Testament Greek. I even kind of liked Jesus, especially when he acted like an apikores, a heretic in face of authority. I found some of the moralizing and coming-of-the-kingdom apocalypticism a bit heavy, but in his encounters with the Pharisees, Jesus told them what I'd have liked to say to my high school rabbis but didn't dare. After all, straining out gnats and swallowing camels (Matthew 23:24) was a common pastime of quite a few of them. And anyone who overturned the tables of the money-changers in the temple couldn't be bad.

So, after finishing the tour guide course, leading lethargic Jewish teenagers on long hikes in the summer heat, and presenting my face and business card to an endless array of Israeli and Palestinian travel agents ("We'll call if we need you"), I was offered a real job working for a Palestinian tour company, guiding British Protestants, and later German Catholics, Dutch Reformed, and American Evangelicals. Why Palestinians? Because they offered me work. Why Christians? Probably because I feared that working with Jewish visitors, most of them American, might remind me too much of where I came from. The enclave diaspora mentality that I'd come to Israel to escape might provoke allergies. Also, I thought I knew enough about Jews and wanted to meet someone else. As for nonreligious visitors, many are "post-tourists" who delight in rapid shifts from cynical distance to serious contemplation to hedonistic enjoyment. They enjoy the play of surfaces and the inauthenticity of tourist attractions as a mark of their own connoisseurship and "coolness." Pilgrims, on the other hand, often come in search of a "hotter" authenticity, a more profound sense of self. They want to learn and experience rather than merely relax and be entertained. As a student and sometimes practitioner of religion, I thought they'd be more interested – and more interesting.

Guiding pilgrims also meshed with my own religious search: I had come to Israel out of a strong sense of Jewish commitment, mixed with a deep dissatisfaction with the Orthodox Jewish milieu I was raised in. I was convinced that the rabbis who had educated me had hidden something from me. There must have been more to Judaism than what they fed me in Washington Heights: obedience to the Law, obsession with halakhic detail, preparation for upward mobility, and defense of the borders of the enclave against the ogres of anti-Semitism and assimilation. I registered for a masters' degree in Jewish Thought at Hebrew University, hoping to study the history of heresy. I sought fellow travelers. I began reading Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament in Aramaic and Koiné Greek. I sought an ur-period of unity, before exile and defensiveness, before the Talmudic hair-splitting and the bourgeois conformity my New York rabbis worshipped.

When I began guiding, I was working on a thesis on Second Temple pilgrimage. On opening the authoritative work at the time, Shmuel Safrai's Pilgrimage to the Second Temple, I was dismayed to find the long first chapter devoted to "the commandment of pilgrimage." Impossible, I thought. Are my...