February 17, 2023

A toxic spill has drawn the nation’s attention to the little town of East Palestine, Ohio, just as another tragedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, turned the nation’s gaze upon the town of Palestine, Texas, where much of the debris landed.

The tragic spotlight now shining on Ohio’s “East Palestine” naturally leaves some people curious as to why it has such as unusual name. The answer is that it’s not a very unusual name at all.

Elsewhere in Ohio, there are towns named Hebron, Gilboa, Canaan, and Shiloh (two of them, in fact). There’s even a Sodom, which was given its name after a prohibition advocate, disappointed at the small turnout for his lecture in 1840, jokingly compared the locale to that infamous biblical center of sin.

In Texas, in addition to Palestine, there are towns named Hebbronville and Joshua. There is a Hebron in North Dakota and a Sinai in South Dakota, a Jerusalem in Arkansas, a Jericho in Vermont, a Bethlehem as well as a Nazareth in Pennsylvania, and a Zion in Maryland. Nearly every state has one or more towns named after biblical sites or individuals. Altogether, there are more than 1,000 biblically-named towns from coast to coast.

Towns such as East Palestine, Ohio, were established by 19th-century religious Christian settlers; they chose those names to express their spiritual attachment to the land and people of the Bible. When they thought of Palestine, they recalled the Jewish kingdoms and temples of ancient times, as well as the events surrounding the origins of Christianity in the Jewish town of Bethlehem. In their prayers, they prayed for the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, which they understood to be inextricably linked to the coming messianic age.

The area that became East Palestine was originally known as Mechanicsburg. There are a number of towns in the U.S. that were originally settled by mechanics of various types. But in the case of Ohio, “Mechanicsburg” was changed in 1836 because—according to an early history of the region—“the wife of Dr. Robert Chamberlin desired a more euphonious appellation and desired it [be] called ‘Palestine,’ the quiet beauty of the little town, and the earnest, virtuous, simple life of its people suggesting to her a name recalling holy memories.”

Since there already was a town named “Palestine” in the western part of the state—likewise founded by religious Christians who wanted to infuse their town with “holy memories”—government officials, in assigning the new post office, added the prefix “East.”

That early account of East Palestine’s founding was published in 1905, when it was common for a married woman’s name to be hidden behind that of her husband. But a historical marker in front of the log house where the Chamberlins once lived tells us that the name of the doctor’s wife was Rebecca—an appropriately biblical name for a woman who took her Bible seriously.

Not surprisingly, numerous churches quickly sprung up in East Palestine and its environs. Lutheran and Reformed congregations established the Salem Church, choosing a name derived from “Jerusalem.” Evangelical Lutherans founded the St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, while Methodists originally held their services in a local school—the separation between church and state was still rather fuzzy in those days—before eventually erecting their Methodist Episcopal Church. East Palestine also had a United Presbyterian Church and, later, another house of worship with a biblically-inspired name, the Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church. 

When America’s religious Christian settlers thought of the Holy Land, they thought of the Hebrew bible and the area’s 3,000 years of Jewish inhabitation, not the Koran or the more recently-arrived Arab residents of the area.

 When America’s religious Christian settlers thought of the Holy Land, they thought of the Hebrew bible and the area’s 3,000 years of Jewish inhabitation, not the Koran or the more recently-arrived Arab residents of the area. They thought of the many Jews who appear in the accounts of the birth of Christianity (including its founder), texts that do not mention any Palestinian Arabs.

Certainly Americans were aware that there were Arabs living in Palestine in the 19th century. Mark Twain, for example, had mentioned them in his account of his visit to the Holy Land, The Innocents Abroad (1869). So had Herman Melville in his famous Clarel: A Poem and the Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876).

But it was common knowledge that the Arab population of Palestine was relatively small and unsettled, and that the Arab residents of 19th-century Palestine regarded themselves as part of southern Syria, not as a separate nationality. H. Allen Tupper, Jr. wrote in the New York Times in 1896, after having “ridden on horseback more than four hundred miles through Palestine and Syria,” that virtually the only local people he encountered were “merchantmen with their long camel trains” and “wild Bedouin tribes” that “reside in one locality not more than two months.”

Today’s residents pronounce East Palestine “Palesteen,” but the original settlers undoubtedly pronounced it the more common way. Because it was the Holy Land, with its deep Jewish roots, that burned bright in the hearts and prayers of the founders of the many biblically-named towns across America. And it is for the same reason that Bible-believing Christians today—probably including more than a few residents of East Palestine, Ohio—constitute one of the major sources of pro-Israel sentiment in the United States.

In a column I wrote a few weeks ago, I addressed the pain that sometimes accompanies the experience of prayer in a broken and unredeemed world. “​​It is frustrating to pray for the same things three times a day and not to get them,” I wrote. “It is frustrating to want a better world and not to have one.”

Today, I would like to take a different approach to this same issue, entertaining the idea that the requests we make in our prayers actually have been answered, especially those expressions of national longing for redemption that have animated the Jewish soul throughout history.

We pray for the ingathering of exiles, the rebuilding of Jerusalem, the return of Davidic rule, the restoration of the Temple service, and for peace. Is it really possible to say that these prayers have not been answered? After all, here we are—an ingathered Jewish people in a rebuilt and thriving Jerusalem in a sovereign Jewish state where Jewish religious practice and learning flourish. As for peace, we enjoy that too, in a relative, if not an absolute way.

If this isn’t enough for us, I can’t imagine what could ever be.

Then again, it isn’t enough, and the dominant feelings in Israel at this moment in history are anger, fear and resentment.

This is not because we are ungrateful. Our reasons for dissatisfaction are utterly legitimate. There remain societal inequalities, wars, internecine power struggles, and an unresolved conflict with the Palestinians. Moreover, the classic signs of Jewish redemption—the Temple service and a Davidic monarchy—have yet to materialize.

And so we have a difficulty—our prayers have been answered, but it doesn’t look or feel the way we imagined that it would. As Saint Teresa of Ávila said, there are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.

Many religious Jews resolve this difficulty by referring to the state of Israel as the “first flowering of our redemption,” the first step in a process that will conclude with the coming of the Messiah and the end of history, war and strife.

This allows Jews to recognize with gratitude the significance of our historic moment, and yet preserves the Messiah as he who, in the words of philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, is always on his way but who never arrives, perched eternally on the ever retreating horizon where we humans mount our most beautiful hopes.

And yet, by claiming that the Messianic process has begun, this shimmering vision is dragged—albeit partially—into the morass of the present, where it becomes distorted. Take, for instance, the idea of the Third Temple. For millennia, the restoration of the Temple on the Temple Mount has been central to the Jewish vision of future redemption, tied to notions of universal peace and accord. When this dream is brought into reality, however, it becomes political. Third Temple activists in Israel believe that a Jewish state ought to be building a Temple on the Temple Mount in the here and now, an idea with terrible implications for the Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount. By forcing this dream into our waking reality, these activists have debased it. It is no longer a symbolic light, but an abhorrent form of fundamentalism.

And yet, by claiming that the Messianic process has begun, this shimmering vision is dragged—albeit partially—into the morass of the present, where it becomes distorted.

Another way to resolve the difficulty posed by the simultaneous sense of redemption and brokenness in our midst is to hold like Shmuel, the Talmudic sage who suggested that perhaps our expectations of redemption are unrealistic.

In the Talmud, Shmuel says that there is no difference between this world and the Messianic world (B. Talmud Shabbat 151b). It will not be, as perhaps one might think from the words of Isaiah, a preternaturally blissful utopia in which wolf lies down with lamb. Rather, according to Shmuel, the only change will be the release of the Jewish people from foreign subjugation. He bases this on a passage from Deuteronomy: “for there will never cease to be poor ones in the land” (15:11).

In other words, there will still be work to do in the age of the Messiah. Even in a redeemed world, there will be iniquities and inequities that require our concern and our action. As it is also written in Deuteronomy, “there shall be no needy among you” (15:4). Even though we know that this work of perfecting the world will never be complete, we will not be free to desist from it.

This has a ring of truth to it. The question is, do we want our idea of redemption to have a ring of truth? Is it better to let the vision of future perfection warm us like a flame in the long winter of history? Or is it better to accept redemption when it comes, as Shmuel would recommend, letting go of perfection so that we can get on with things—taking care of people in need and working to improve our lot without reference to unattainable utopias?

I continue to waver on this issue. The machlokets, disputes, that we carry on within ourselves are destined to endure—enlivening us as we pray, knowing not whether we are saying please or thank you.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.