The Story Behind the Photographs: Rachel’s Tomb

(c)Eva Marie Everson

Then they journeyed from Bethel. When they were still some distance from Ephrath, Rachel went into labor, and she had hard labor. And when her labor was at its hardest, the midwife said to her, “Do not fear, for you have another son.” And as her soul was departing (for she was dying), she called his name Ben-oni; but his father called him Benjamin. So Rachel died, and she was buried on the way to Ephrath (that is, Bethlehem), and Jacob set up a pillar over her tomb. It is the pillar of Rachel’s tomb, which is there to this day (Genesis 35: 16-20).

Very few moments in my life have had the same effect on my life and my spiritual growth as those I spent in Rachel’s Tomb.

Rachel, Jacob’s second wife. Jacob, the woman he loved. The woman he worked 14 years for the honor of being her husband.

Even though she only gave birth to two of Jacob’s twelve sons, she is often called “The Mother of Israel.” Her grave, sitting just outside of Bethlehem, a city that no longer welcomes Jews beyond her walls, is visited daily by Jewish men and women who wish to pray.

In 2009, my co-author Miriam Feinberg Vamosh (Reflections of God’s Holy Land and Ahoti) and I took a bus from Jerusalem to the gates protecting it, then beyond the gates to the door. On the way, we passed through Meah Shearim, an ultra-Orthodox section of Jerusalem. As we neared the tomb, we were kept safe by IDF soldiers and, as we waited outside a protecting gate, I witnessed the love between a soldier and his son.

We dashed between two rows of soldiers and went inside the tomb. Within the cool stone walls, I watched and listened as men cantered and women returned the melody. I listened as women prayed the Psalms from books they’d gotten from shelves in an anteroom. I watched as one particular woman, one I’d met at the bus depot in Jerusalem, laid her hand gently against the velvet covering the tomb and wept.

“Didn’t you feel as though you were in danger?” someone asked me later.

“No,” I answered. “I haven’t felt that safe since I was in my mother’s womb.”