A remarkable day. I’d booked a bus tour to Jerusalem, but when I met up with the organiser this morning, I found that there was just one other person (a clean-cut, young South African called Stephen) who’d arranged a trip today. So instead of the expected ancient bus with no suspension, we had a roomy, air-conditioned Mercedes saloon and our own personal guide, a chap with the improbable name of Israel Rodrigues.
We spent an hour meandering south-west, being shown where David slew Goliath, where Abraham went to slaughter his son, where Samson and Delilah lived… that sort of thing. We also talked a lot of politics. I’d say it was best summed up by one of our guide’s many jokes:
The President of the USA goes to God and asks when they would solve their all social problems. “Well”, said God, “It will take a long time. Not in your lifetime.” Then the President of Russia goes to God and asks when they might see an end to their economic problems. “Well”, said God, “It will take a long time. Probably not in your lifetime.” Finally, the President of Israel goes along and asks when the problem with Palestine might be solved. “Well”, said God, “It will take a long time. Not in my lifetime.”
Jerusalem is a truly extraordinary spectacle. Its epicentre — the Old City, and much of the New — lies sprawled along a massive valley floor, with seemingly dozens of satellite villages and new settlements peering down on it from the surrounding hills. Coming into the city by road, from whatever direction, you have several opportunities to stop and admire this quite amazing sight. Despite the new developments, there’s an immediate appreciation of the ancientness of what you’re seeing. When places like the Mount Of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane are pointed out, and the Temple Mount, and the tombs of Solomon and King David, you can feel your mouth drying.
After this aerial survey, we drove down into the city, parking up close to one of the gates of the Old City.
I’m not going to describe all the things we saw today. Any tourist guide to Jerusalem will list them. But a couple of things that stood out:
The Holocaust Museum. What a terrible place this is. “Terrible” because of what it commemorates. The photographs, the diaries, the towels from Auschwitz, the desecrated ancient scrolls. All these were bad enough, but I think it was the bars of soap “made from the molten fat of Jews burnt in the ovens of Belsen” that was the worst thing.
And the Wailing Wall. We’ve all seen the pictures of the holy wall itself, and people praying, but I didn’t realise there was an adjoining, enclosed chamber where the real action takes place. This was a very surprising experience: not just the amazing appearance and behaviour of the Hassidic Jews, but their almost total indifference to me, an obvious Gentile tourist with his blinking digital camcorder.
|
|
The place was dark and echo-ey and claustrophobic and profoundly spiritual. Humming, quite literally, with prayer and agonised incantation. Many of these guys were in trances, and seemed to be dancing and giggling, or bowing frantically at the wall. For me, it was a experience akin to time travel – in two senses. Apart from the obvious, it reminded me of some of those moments in my trips to India and Nepal when I was in my twenties — visits to holy Hindu places like Varanasi on the Ganges, or Pasupatinath in Kathmandu. Undoubted “Crikey” moments.
I don’t want to offend anyone, but it has to be said that some of these chaps reminded me of characters from the Lord Of The Rings film. Particularly the fellow in the second picture.
Another experience worth mentioning was the walk along the Via Dolorosa, which follows the Fourteen Stations of the Cross. In theory, this traces the journey of Christ with the cross on his way up to Calvary; though as with many of the sacred sites in Jerusalem, it seems likely that these are symbolic rather than actual. Apart from anything else, in a city that goes back three or four thousand years, it’s certain that the ground levels have changed. This is borne out by some of the excavation work that shows the streets of the really ancient city to be a good twenty feet lower than the ‘current Ancient’ city. It seems likely that the general areas are about right, but little evidence exists to show that this really was the slab where someone called Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross, especially as it exists inside a church which was built about 1500 years after his apparent crucifixion.
It was somewhere in my mid-teens, after reading that brilliant essay by Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not A Christian that I felt able, finally, to release myself from the Catholic fait accompli I’d been presented with at birth. But even so, old habits die hard, and I felt compelled to drop a few shekels into the box and light a couple of candles. I did it out of respect to my parents, who will be delighted to hear about it, rather than out of respect to ‘God’.
After a tasty al fresco falafel, I popped into a gift shop to buy a Crucifixion fridge magnet and a celebratory Resurrection mug. As I came out of the shop, our guide was talking excitedly on his cell phone, and looking anxious. He grabbed my sleeve and said “Come, we must find a different way back. There’s been a shooting.”
It wasn’t panic, but there was a definite air of tension in the souk as we made our way out of the Old City through the Christian and Armenian Quarters. People were shouting, and shopkeepers were pulling down their shutters with an air of resignation. It’s in a situation like this that you appreciate being with a guide who’s been taking people round the place since the 1960s. I don’t know where we were, but spent ten minutes or so hurrying along narrow alleys and up and down worn flights of steps, eventually emerging just opposite the city gate we’d entered by.
(Later, back in Tel Aviv, I called in at an internet café to investigate the story on the Jerusalem Post website. It seems that after midday prayers a group of “several hundred” young Moslems began stoning the guys at the Wailing Wall. They were chased by police back into the Moslem Quarter and shots were fired into the air. I don’t know how it developed from there.)
I saw several fantastic things today. I don’t yet know how much of a landmark it was — it will take a while to tease out the lessons fully, and be able to articulate them. And no, it certainly wasn’t a religious conversion. If anything, something pretty much like the exact opposite. I’ve seen enough fanaticism today to last me into my dotage. Jewish, Christian, Moslem, Nazi… it’s all there, laid out for the traveller to Jerusalem. It seems to me that most of the great channels through which human history must flow, have been carved by small groups who have to live beyond the mainstream; whose fundamentalism forces them to reside on the edges of madness. Their search for some unattainable, non-existent purity draws them through lifelong misery towards certain failure, and the rest of us seem destined to be dragged down in their wake. I’m angry about this. It’s selfishness. This kind of religious and political bigotry amount to a kind of despotic egocentricity. Well thanks a bunch, God. You blew it big time.
There was, at least, one mention of running today, though it wasn’t too encouraging. When we were discussing our guide’s military service (and today’s guided tour included a trip around his corrugated torso, which turns out to be as graphic a map of Israel’s recent military history as anything you’ll find in a book), he mentioned that national service gets scaled down as they get older. Instead of having to donate a month or so each year, the period gradually gets shortened. “After all”, he said, “We all know that over the age of forty you can’t run any more”.
Quite.
