next year in jerusalem...: A long walk and my first camel.

In Judaism, the formal call to worship is called the Borchu. It is followed by the recitation of the Shema, which affirms the Jewish belief in one and only one God. The first line of the Shema translates “Hear oh Israel, The LORD is our God, the LORD is the one and only” (from The Complete Art Scroll Siddur). This statement of faith comes directly from the Torah. As it is written on the Torah Scroll, two letters are enlarged. The Ayin and the Daled. Rabbinic tradition holds that the two letters spell Eid or witness. This is to say that when we publicly recite the Shema we are bearing witness to God’s “oneness”.

In Islam, the formal call to prayer is the Adhan. It is sung from the Minaret of a Mosque by a righteous upstanding lay person, called the Muezzin. In any movie that’s ever been filmed in a Middle Eastern Arabic City, there is an obligatory shot where the western hero stands against a stunning panorama of the city, and hears the Muezzin chant the Adhan. It’s that establishment of local color shot that, although corny, I’ve always enjoyed. It also means that you’ve probably heard the Hollywood rendition of the Adhan and are at least a little familiar with the Muezzin and the Adhan.

The Adhan is a public statement of faith. “God is the greatest, I bear witness that there is no deity but God.” (wikipedia). I happen to think that’s a remarkable similarity, but maybe it isn’t so surprising, considering that Islam worships the same One God as Judaism.

This is all by way of introduction to a remarkably strange and wonderful day I had last week. My friend Gella has a friend (Rakhel) who has two friends (Yonatan and David) who took Gella and myself on a remarkable tour of some very old things in Jerusalem. Yonatan, a security guard and aspiring English tour guide, took us through Ir David, a late bronze age walled settlement (circa 1800 BCE). Biblically speaking this is where King David lived. In real life there is only a little evidence of someone by that particular name living there. But there is evidence of Jews living there from circa 1000 BCE onwards. This is consistentish with the Biblical history, but who knows. The stories that a community tells itself are rarely historically accurate. George Washington, for instance, never cut down any cherry tree, George W. Bush is from Connecticut, and Hilary Clinton is a robot. From Ir David, there is a beautiful view of the Mount of Olives, and of the Arab Village of Silwan, which is pictured below.

Here is a photograph of two tombs cut into the hillside of Ir David (from sometime after 1000 BCE). They were most likely royal tombs, as the commoners would have been buried outside of the city (in accordance with Jewish Law). The tombs have been empty for thousands of years, looted during one of the 52 historical sieges of Jerusalem.

Yonatan then took us through the Valley of Silwan, which is the empty little stretch of real estate between the Old City and the town of Silwan. The Silwan valley ostensibly divides Israeli from Arab, and it is interesting to think of the differences between the two. For instance we encountered a goat grazing on the Arab side, on the Israeli side there are tour buses.

It was walking through Silwan valley at around the time for afternoon prayers that we heard the Adhan coming from the Al-Aksa Mosque (to my left) and several Mosques off to my right. It was very moving and beautiful to hear from all sides the different Muezzin calling out their affirmation of God’s Oneness. Here are the views of Silwan (top), and the valley (Bottom), on the left side of the valley photo is one little rampart of the Temple Mount, off to the right is the Mount of Olives in the distance.

Part way through the Silwan valley we met up with David, who is a student of archaeology at Hebrew University and working on digs in Ir David. He guided us through several more tombs from the First Temple period (c. 1000-586 BCE). Of the two tombs pictured, one is slightly older (the one with Doric columns) the one with the Ionic pilasters is carved from a single big hunk of rock. It is hard to see in the photograph, but the tombs are covered with old carved religious graffiti. The graffiti is mostly people trying to insert themselves and or their teachers into history.

Another tomb, dating from the period of the Second Temple (516 BCE-70 CE) is called Absalom’s Tomb (Apocryphally the resting place of King David’s Son). Napoleon is credited with blowing the decorative top off of the tomb; just like the Sphynx’s nose…three more myths of the powerful.

Here Yonatan and Rakhel left Gella, David and myself to explore things further. We walked up to the Mount of Olives, past an olive grove with a guy pulling water from a cistern with a bucket and a rope. This was only a mile or so from the city center. It is as if there are people in Brooklyn who still get water from cisterns.

We walked through a Muslim Cemetery that is right next to the eastern wall of the Temple Mount. David is a fairly intrepid fellow, carrying his bicycle up over walls, hopping over thorn bushes with abandon and bringing a pair of slightly timid Americans through a part of Jerusalem that is most assuredly NOT on the Jewish Agency’s list of approved places for Americans to go. That being said, I felt safe. When we walked through the cemetery and encountered the end of a Muslim funeral, I didn’t feel unwelcome, or out of place. We didn’t even get a funny look.

The cemetery is centered on what is called the Golden Gate (pictured below). The Golden Gate was built by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian around 520 CE. It took the place of an older gate (from the Second Temple Period). Jewish Tradition holds, that when the Messiah comes, the Messiah will come from the Mount of Olives through the Golden Gate to the Temple Mount, and the Messianic Era will begin. Now is not exactly the time to critique Messianic Judaism, if you’re interested, I wrote about it a little in an earlier blog entry, and will probably do so again later. Suffice it to say, not that many Jews are holding their breath for Moshiach.

The point of all this, is that Sultan Suleiman I sealed the Golden Gate to prevent the Jewish Messiah from being able to enter Jerusalem in 1541 CE. Later a Muslim cemetery was established there, because Elijah, the prophet who will herald the Messiah is a Kohen (priest) and therefore not allowed to walk through cemeteries (turns out he can walk through non-Jewish cemeteries without a problem, also, we (my friends in the Yeshiva) can’t figure out if Elijah actually was a priest, or just did priestly things. I’ve been trying to go through in my mind all the possible permutations of the meanings behind actions like these.

It gives some idea, I think, of the relationship between two groups of people who worship the same One God. If Suleiman was doing these things to actually prevent the Messiah, then he must have believed that the Jewish prophesies about the world to come were valid enough to merit concern. If he didn’t believe that the Jewish prophesies had merit, then why bother to try and prevent them from happening, except maybe to dishearten the Jews? The truth is probably very complicated, like all religious matters, when it comes to relating to God, people often hold opinions that contradict one another. Yet, these same people are unwilling to accept contradictory evidence from other groups of people. This sort of behavior permeates both sides of the conflict here. But that’s another story than the one I’m telling right now, and this blog entry is already longer than the paper I had to write for my senior thesis (granted that was more of an artist statement and I made a lot of teapots too).

On top is a view of the Mount of Olives, and the Jewish Cemetery there, the Golden Gate, sealed by Suleiman, and my first real glimpse of the separation wall between Israel and West Bank. It was a fairly emotional moment for me, to be feeling five hundred years of conflict all at once. And to see the wall that is the most recent jab from one side to the other. The trajectory of the conflict is heartbreaking. Finally, here is the Dome of the Rock, seen from a side of the Temple Mount not usually visited by young American Jews. But I think they should put it in the book. It makes you think in a way about conflict that is difficult to do from the Wailing Wall. Everything is just right THERE to look at.

David took us from there to view the archaeological dig he is currently working on. At that point I was a little saturated with information and unable to retain all the information he gave us about what was being dug, what was being found, etc. David said he spent the better part of five hours sweating in the sun that was streaming through the gap between tarps, because the work he needed to do could not be done in the shade.

After a walk along the ramparts of the Old City (which I didn’t get a good photo of this time so I’ll do it again some other time), we ran into this camel, my first camel. It was a little embarrassing how loudly I yelled “YESH GAMAL!!!!” (There is a camel!!!!!). And I couldn’t exactly get my camera up in time to get a really good photo, but here you are.