On the Rocks
The hotel rooms are just fine, but the building itself and its elegant outdoor café and massively-treed courtyard are amazing. Designed by the architect of the Empire State Building, and erected in 1933, the Jerusalem International YMCA – the Imcah, in local slang – incorporates architectural flourishes galore (Gothic, Moorish, Byzantine, Romanesque) and three central arches representing the ideal of peaceful co-existence between the three major monotheistic religions. This naïve idealism is one reason I found the Imcah both a stimulating and comforting place to stay. At the building’s heart a stone tower ascends 150 feet sky-high over Jerusalem, a city which, exalted reputation aside, occupies merely a small confluence of hillsides. On our third day at the Imcah, on a Sunday morning, Elahna and I ascended its tower and stood on the wind-swept observation deck. Just yards away, 35 carillon bells tolled a thunderous song.
They were not automated; not yet in Jerusalem. One floor below, like puppeteers, Norman Squires and his wife Dorene operated a piano-like instrument with wooden batons connected to an assembly of levers and wires strung to the carillon bells. Mormons from the U.S. on a volunteer mission, the musical couple wrangled forth Ode to Joy, a celebration of international brotherhood which concludes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The song, for all its sweeping melody, sounded to me like an assault.
No joy, just dizziness. The bronze-pounding bells, the low stone wall between me and a death dive, the undulating city of sacred hills and ageless acrimony – a vertiginous swell overcame this pilgrim, all very Hitchcockian. I kept a palm pressed flat on the tower’s cold, granular surface, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t felt this scared hiking rocky cliffs on Shvil Yisrael. “Please, step back,” I said to my wife as she leaned over the abyss with the digital camera. She didn’t seem to hear, and I diverted myself by scanning the city.
Jerusalem was described as a squalid, disappointing backwater by many 19th century travelers. “Palestine [Jerusalem] sits in sackcloth and ashes,” Mark Twain wrote, having “lost all its ancient grandeur and become a pauper village,” but from on high in the 21st century it looked built out and spiffed up. Construction cranes shot up in the north; condominium complexes arose in the east. Only a stretch of barren land to the southwest, abutting the Barrier Wall, could have interested a goat. The city’s roofs sparkled with solar panels hooked to water tanks, and one luxury apartment building sported an L.A.-decadent rooftop swimming pool. The most dominant feature in Jerusalem, the Muslim shrine known as the Dome of the Rock, appeared from here as a small, golden nub.
“C’mon, let’s go,” I shouted at Elahna. She kept snapping photos. I went inside and waited in the darkened stairwell. The air was stale, heating up. I felt nauseous. The bells bonged.
Eventually, my wife appeared. What’s wrong with you? she asked. We spent the morning in the Old City, wandering the alleys of the Armenian and Jewish quarters, shopping for tiles along the Villa Dolorosa in the Christian Quarter, and peeking into the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It’s the ultimate airspace where holy stuff happened: here and here and here, the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Saint John of Damascus, an 8th century monk, referred to this structure (which replaced both a Roman temple of Venus and a landfill) as “the mother of all churches.” Mama Church is said to contain the omphalos or navel of the world – the ultimate hole for our longings – not 100 yards from the foundation stone of the cosmos beneath the Dome of the Rock.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre pulsated with pilgrims when Elahna and I had toured it three years earlier. Devotees threw themselves onto the rectangular Stone of Anointing, upon which Christ’s body was prepared for burial. They wailed and weeped and spilled vials of water from the River Jordan. I found it a disconcerting spectacle, but that’s my default reaction to all mob behavior, including parades and standing ovations. According to the historian Richard Cohen, author of Saving the Holy Sepulchre, the occasional fistfight between the Roman Catholic, Armenian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox monks who’ve jointly administered the church for centuries has eclipsed the fact that these Christian sects have cooperated, grudgingly, over the past 50 years to save the place from ruin. Tales of ninja monks, of course, are better reading than dome restoration agreements. Not that the monks get along, but the roof ain’t falling.
Finally we spilled out, around noon, onto the enormous, open plaza in front of the Western Wall, the Kotel. Sooner or later, you end up there. You make your way to Jerusalem and by some pull of horizontal gravity you stand under the Middle Eastern sun on the paving stones before the Kotel. You stand surrounded by American and German tourists, Australian backpackers, Canadian and Peruvian pilgrims, teenage soldiers, Birthright kids led by guides with Stars of David in their eyes, religious Jews under kippas and temple youth groups from Long Island with the girls in modest makeup, their skirts just below the knees. You stand surrounded by politicians, celebrities, tough-guy settlers packing heat by special permit, refugees, business persons hitting their Jerusalem marks and, outnumbering everyone, the ultra-Orthodox in anachronistic black.
One way to understand a foreign world, favored by media pundits, is to fashion an Olympian perspective that spans the space-time continuum. And so Thomas Friedman writes in The New York Times: “If you look at it from 30,000 feet, what we’re actually dealing with in the Middle East today are the long-delayed consequences of the end of the Ottoman Empire.” Oy vey! Sounds mighty smart, as well as hard to disprove. Let’s also declare that political gridlock in the U.S. stems from the long-delayed consequences of post-Civil War Reconstruction policies. There is, however, at least one other way to understand this fractious world: from zero feet off the ground and in the right now. Just hang about and look at stuff and then jump in. Maybe learn something, get hurt.
I stood before the Kotel wearing my faded Yale ball cap, veteran of Shvil Yisrael, plus my Larry’s PX t-shirt. Since 1955, the shirt boasts, “Countless People Have Eaten at Larry’s PX and Gone on to Live Normal Lives.” No joke, their food is pretty bad – soggy, greasy, cold. The eggs over easy are hard. The toast, like buttery cardboard. The bacon, burnt and fatty. And yet the fishermen, tourists and old-timers cramming the place don’t seem to mind. Neither does this middle-aged man who, as a boy, hunted for ripe, exploding blackberries along the dirt road between home and the diner. I remember storing the berries in my cheeks, letting them ooze into me.
Larry’s PX on Cape Cod has this outstanding virtue: it knows what it is and what it is fills the belly and sells t-shirts. So, pray tell, what is the Western Wall? Does it know itself? A 130-feet high expanse of squarish stones, the Kotel was constructed in 37 BCE as a retaining wall, a practical necessity, during the epic renovations of the Temple Mount by King Herod, an egotistical despot if ever there was one. After the Temple was smashed and burned and torn down to atoms, the Romans allowed the Jews to come here on the yearly anniversary of the destruction and abase themselves at the foot of the wall. Since then a lot, as they say, has transpired and the Kotel has become a monumental icon attracting millions of pilgrims. The Divine Presence, it’s said, exists here – not covered in marble and gold, not sheathed in iconography crafted by artisans, but inside a load-bearing wall built by peasant labor.
For Elahna’s mother, the Western Wall was neither historical artifact nor massive prayer accelerator. For Hadassah, who died less than a year after her final visit to her hometown Jerusalem, it was a rebuke.
I helped build this country, she said, pounding her rubber-tipped cane. We stood in the plaza beside a low fence that served as an entrance to the Kotel. Hadassah had refused to get in the separate line for women, far to the right in the shadow of the aerial walkway to the Dome of the Rock. I helped build this country, she repeated again and again – and it’s true, as a child she lived through the War of Independence. She went hungry, shivered as bombs fell. For the Havdalah ritual that concludes Shabbat, Hadassah collected herbs in the Jerusalem hills under the threat of sniper fire. She served her years in the Israeli military. We built this country, she proclaimed, speaking now for all women, for all Israelis in exile and for every soul told to stand aside by the rabbis empowered by “local custom,” according to the Israeli Supreme Court, to set the rules for Kotel encounter.
The security guard – I couldn’t help but feel for him – grew frazzled and called his supervisor, who, several cane poundings later, called his supervisor. Finally, the Guardians of the Wall allowed Hadassah to approach the Kotel from the far left side, not with the women and not with the men, but alone. Hadassah is not alone, however, in her outrage; a group called Women of the Wall regularly attempts to break down segregation at the Kotel. In May, 2013, the women gathered in the plaza wearing prayer shawls and were accosted by ultra-Orthodox Jews. These righteous ones threw fruit and pebbles and insults; security guards formed a cordon to protect the women from their fellow Israelis. Recently a kind of peace treaty was forged between the women and the rabbis, but it didn’t hold.
Up close, the lower stones of the Kotel appear to be mortared with paper. That’s because every year more than a million notes are tucked into crevices between the rocks; each note contains a personal message, although I suppose there are people who express nothing, or everything, by leaving blank notes. Those who don’t make it to Jerusalem in person can perform a virtual pilgrimage to the Western Wall via an Orthodox website, aish.com, which allows you to compose a heartfelt note on your smartphone and, click, have it inserted by proxy. No charge, $18 contribution suggested. This website also provides a 24-hour Kotel Cam surveying the wall and its plaza; I sneaked a peek just moments ago and became Visitor 35,269,307. The Kotel Cam comes with sound and, if you close your eyes, you could be at any public park in the world, any swimming pool without the splashes. Twice per year the conglomerating notes in the Wall are pulled out – so deprived, do the stones cringe a bit? – and buried on the nearby Mount of Olives where, the story goes, Judas betrayed Jesus.
On that day, in 2012, I took out a tiny notebook, scribbled a note and ripped out the page. “Better problems, please” – best I could do on short notice. O Lord, cut Israel a break. Yes, not very eloquent, and it certainly didn’t rival the beautiful, solemn note shivved into the Western Wall by Senator Barack Obama in 2008. Snatched by a yeshiva student and published in the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, Obama’s message omitted mention of Israel or Jews and referred to me and mine seven times in four brief lines. The not-yet president’s note was written on the stationary of the King David Hotel, a fancy-pants joint terror-bombed by the Irgun and since rebuilt to evoke past splendors and snobberies.
I strode forward. As I passed through the entrance, the Kotel growing larger and larger in my Irish hazel eyes, a Haredi gentleman spoke up. “If you are a real Jew,” he said, holding out a blue-and-white prayer shawl and tefillin. “If you are a real Jew,” he repeated. I stopped, stared at him. He beckoned. He knew my type. He could tell a faker, a poser, a perpetual seeker and not finder…converted to Judaism or not, this Haredi would always consider my type a counterfeit bill if not an abomination...I spun away from him, Di!, Di!, enough already, buster, I’m not yours to bend, and I marched a beeline right up to the Kotel. I stood inches away, almost touching. But I didn’t touch it. I pushed my note between two stones, between notes mashed in and twisted.
I let go. I stood there.
The young man in a t-shirt and red ball cap at my right shoulder mumbled a prayer. To my left, an ultra-Orthodox man of painful thinness leaned his forehead on the stone. His eyes were closed, the lids quivering. If possible, he would have gratefully melted into the Kotel, let it absorb him and his pathetic individuality. I looked up – stone after stone after stone rising to the blue sky, interrupted only by a clump of poisonous henbane in a crack. On Shvil Yisrael, I’d seen grasses and flowers growing high on cliffs, in the most remote and inhospitable places. Life prevails. The sight always cheered me. But not here, not now. The Kotel overwhelmed everything. And that’s when I took off my Yale cap and exposed my bald head. It seemed the right thing to do. You take off your hat to show humility, out of respect – that’s how I’d been raised. At the very same time, as I removed the cap, I realized that I was violating a fundamental rule. You cover your head at the Kotel – at any Jewish sanctuary or holy place, in fact. But then why did Moses take off his sandals at the burning bush, or was that the Hollywood version with Charlton Heston?
Hats on? Hats off? I stood and stared into the rock, mottled white and brown and streaked with fissures like the face of an elderly woman. I stared at the pores in the stone. Christ, what’s the difference? Hats on or off, tefillin gear, prayer shawls…such details couldn’t possibly matter, couldn’t come from a mind as vast as G-d’s. It’s just man-shit.
Long ago Jews hovered at the Kotel on their designated day of debasement. The Roman guards laughed at the wailing fools. They threw stones down at the lamenting, lamentable curs. (Remember, never a shortage of stones here.) The Jews took the abuse. They gathered and took it. Was that bravery? Cowardice? Did their suffering produce this present scene? Now I stood facing the stone wall, just inches away, yet no prayer came to mind; nothing was revealed or taken away; it didn’t even repel me. The wall was a wall was a wall, meaning everything and nothing but wall, and maybe that’s a prayer in itself, the acknowledgement of what, stripped of our vain metaphor making, stripped of deadening history, is.
So I put on my cap and walked back through the exit. I averted my eyes from the Haredim and kept a straight line on my way out, trying not to look at the Australian backpackers and Birthright grabbers and kids toting guns for the nation of Israel. Bells bonged in my skull. I stood with my wife in the Kotel’s wide-open plaza beneath the Middle Eastern sun.
“Why’d you take your hat off?” she asked, sounding annoyed. It’s a holy place, she reminded me. “I guess,” I shot back, “I’ll never become a real Jew.”
@ @ @
After lunch, after my Kotel encounter, Elahna and I visited the Jerusalem Archeological Park near the southwest corner of the Temple Mount.
There we looked at the relics behind glass. We watched an animated film, the tale of a Temple-era pilgrim on his first trip to Jerusalem; awestruck, he buys a baby goat for slaughtering on the heights of Har HaBayet. Then we walked in 102 degree heat to the foot of the southern wall where, supposedly, flesh-and-blood pilgrims had ascended a broad staircase and passed through a massive gate to their heart’s desire – the Temple and, at its core, the Ark of the Covenant. The stairs were still there – maybe not the stairs, but some stairs built at some point during thousands of years of reconstructions and warfare.
In a corner manufactured by the southern wall and another jutting wall, always more walls, I noticed half an arch embedded in the solid stone. It protruded barely, forming the suggestion of half a maybe-gate, maybe. Above the arch glowered an iron-barred window fronting a dark tunnel leading G-d and his keepers know where. And under the half arch, a middle-aged couple stood on a flat rock that protruded a few inches from the ground. The couple stood close together in order to fit on the rock, with the man’s arm around his lady’s waist. He was a burly fellow, full-bellied in slacks and a collared shirt, and she was petite and coiffed in the skull-hugging manner of women from the red states of America. The armor of money, of flush retirement accounts and real estate holdings, surrounded them. Ten feet away, a skinny man cradled a long-lens camera. He wore a wide-brimmed safari hat.
“Jesus stepped on that rock when he entered the Temple,” he said. “Just think, you can tell people you stood on the same rock as Jesus.”
The man, who I assumed to be a guide employed by the couple, lined up the shot and snapped. “One more,” he said, and snapped another. He pulled the camera from his eye and the couple stepped gingerly from the Jesus rock. The woman patted her man’s arm. He smiled. And then, as if catapulted, I moved forward and yelled out, “That’s bullshit!”
Believe me, it’s not something I do, rush at folks yelling profanities – not unless a person is in danger or being badly mistreated. But on this day of stone staring in Jerusalem, I intruded like an avenging angel. The couple looked horrified. I veered toward the guide. “There’s no way you know if Jesus stepped on that rock,” I lectured, and I rattled off my reasoning. Too much had happened here. The walls and stairs and tunnels and gates had been destroyed and rebuilt and reused and renamed too many times for him or anyone else to say where Jesus had or had not stepped. You, sir, are slinging total, unmitigated bullshit.
The guide closed the distance between us. Within arm’s length, he was older than I’d thought, in his late 50s with a scrap of white hair breaking from the safari hat. He was short, barely to my shoulders, and his face had been scarred, perhaps from the removal of skin cancers. He clenched a green toothpick in his yellow, disorganized teeth, and I couldn’t help noticing that he managed to retain the toothpick as we conversed.
“Can I give you a little bit of wisdom?” he asked, quietly.
“No, you can’t,” I replied. “Let’s talk about your Jesus rock, let’s talk about that.”
Elahna stood about 20 yards away, on the ancient stairs. At this point, she later informed me, the middle-aged woman started to move toward me, but the man told her to stay out of it, don’t make trouble. (He could be crazy, after all. Look at that vein in his forehead!) The guide stared with a weirdly relaxed gaze. Brain-zonked, burnt-out? Holy Land boor relishing an audience? Just another Israeli enjoying the national pastime of speaking his mind? At any rate, he began a rambling story about how once upon a time he gave his wife a $10,000 diamond ring for some reason I can’t remember. As he spoke, he pointed his crooked index finger at my face.
“Put away your finger,” I told him.
“It’s not pointed like a gun,” he said.
The guide kept talking, lowering the non-gun finger and letting it float up again, and here’s the upshot: his wife loves him and he’s not sure why. For the diamond ring? Or for himself? “Must be the diamond,” I answered, but he didn’t register the insult or didn’t care and just kept talking. “Perception,” he announced, “is reality.” This was the story’s kicker, his nugget of wisdom for the day. “Perception is reality,” he repeated.
“Reality is reality,” I said, feeling ridiculous for saying that. “You don’t know if Jesus stepped on that rock.” Why did this matter so much to me? What did I, who had abandoned my Catholic upbringing decades ago, care where the Son of G-d stepped and why did I begrudge this poor fellow a living? Surely it did no good to reveal a con-man to clients who desperately wanted to be conned.
“That man is a lawyer from Texas,” he said, pointing to the couple. “He can decide what to believe. Perception is reality – know what I mean, friend?”
“Well, if he’s a lawyer,” I said, “then he’s used to people lying to him.” And that was pretty much that. The guide had kept his cool, advising philosophical toleration; ungraciously, I’d insisted on the last word. Now my opponent shifted his toothpick and walked over to the befuddled Americans. I sought out my wife who, I will hazard, loves me regardless of the sapphire on her finger. Who loves me even when I make a total, unmitigated jerk of myself. (Woe onto me – for a sin committed in Jerusalem, according to the Islamic book of Fada’il, is the equivalent of a thousand sins committed elsewhere.) I knew, too, that in the final analysis I had confronted the guide’s authenticity because the ultra-Orthodox man had confronted mine at the Kotel – and wasn’t that the way in Jerusalem, the too holy city, the great amplifier of grudges and outrages passed around with the desperate vengeance of the true believer wandering on sore feet among silent stones.
Maybe Jesus did step on that rock. Maybe he tripped over the damn thing.
@ @ @
We left Jerusalem in the late afternoon. The goal was to drive to Auntie Sarah’s kibbutz before dark. First, though, Elahna took my picture in front of the Imcah, its lone tower in the background. I look uncomfortable in the shot, as if I don’t fit inside my own skin.
Fast forward several months. I’m scrolling through photos on my computer screen. This one appears and I veer from my awkward self, zooming in on the bas relief three quarters of the way up the Imcah tower. Look, there – an angel emerging from the stone, a celestial being called a seraph that shows up in Christian, Jewish and Islamic writings. According to the prophet Isaiah, the seraph has three pairs of wings – two wings covering the face, so not to look at the Lord; two wings covering the feet, for the sake of modesty; and two more used for flying around the ultimate throne. The seraphs circle and circle as they call out to each other, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” An Israeli rabbi told me that these holy exclamations allow the seraphs to fly with their eyes covered, in the same manner that bats navigate with sonar pulses. Okay, nice try, rabbi, nice Talmudic workaround, but they’re still flying blind.
In Jerusalem, even the angels fly blind.
@ @ @
The hotel rooms are just fine, but the building itself and its elegant outdoor café and massively-treed courtyard are amazing. Designed by the architect of the Empire State Building, and erected in 1933, the Jerusalem International YMCA – the Imcah, in local slang – incorporates architectural flourishes galore (Gothic, Moorish, Byzantine, Romanesque) and three central arches representing the ideal of peaceful co-existence between the three major monotheistic religions. This naïve idealism is one reason I found the Imcah both a stimulating and comforting place to stay. At the building’s heart a stone tower ascends 150 feet sky-high over Jerusalem, a city which, exalted reputation aside, occupies merely a small confluence of hillsides. On our third day at the Imcah, on a Sunday morning, Elahna and I ascended its tower and stood on the wind-swept observation deck. Just yards away, 35 carillon bells tolled a thunderous song.
They were not automated; not yet in Jerusalem. One floor below, like puppeteers, Norman Squires and his wife Dorene operated a piano-like instrument with wooden batons connected to an assembly of levers and wires strung to the carillon bells. Mormons from the U.S. on a volunteer mission, the musical couple wrangled forth Ode to Joy, a celebration of international brotherhood which concludes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The song, for all its sweeping melody, sounded to me like an assault.
No joy, just dizziness. The bronze-pounding bells, the low stone wall between me and a death dive, the undulating city of sacred hills and ageless acrimony – a vertiginous swell overcame this pilgrim, all very Hitchcockian. I kept a palm pressed flat on the tower’s cold, granular surface, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t felt this scared hiking rocky cliffs on Shvil Yisrael. “Please, step back,” I said to my wife as she leaned over the abyss with the digital camera. She didn’t seem to hear, and I diverted myself by scanning the city.
Jerusalem was described as a squalid, disappointing backwater by many 19th century travelers. “Palestine [Jerusalem] sits in sackcloth and ashes,” Mark Twain wrote, having “lost all its ancient grandeur and become a pauper village,” but from on high in the 21st century it looked built out and spiffed up. Construction cranes shot up in the north; condominium complexes arose in the east. Only a stretch of barren land to the southwest, abutting the Barrier Wall, could have interested a goat. The city’s roofs sparkled with solar panels hooked to water tanks, and one luxury apartment building sported an L.A.-decadent rooftop swimming pool. The most dominant feature in Jerusalem, the Muslim shrine known as the Dome of the Rock, appeared from here as a small, golden nub.
“C’mon, let’s go,” I shouted at Elahna. She kept snapping photos. I went inside and waited in the darkened stairwell. The air was stale, heating up. I felt nauseous. The bells bonged.
Eventually, my wife appeared. What’s wrong with you? she asked. We spent the morning in the Old City, wandering the alleys of the Armenian and Jewish quarters, shopping for tiles along the Villa Dolorosa in the Christian Quarter, and peeking into the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It’s the ultimate airspace where holy stuff happened: here and here and here, the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Saint John of Damascus, an 8th century monk, referred to this structure (which replaced both a Roman temple of Venus and a landfill) as “the mother of all churches.” Mama Church is said to contain the omphalos or navel of the world – the ultimate hole for our longings – not 100 yards from the foundation stone of the cosmos beneath the Dome of the Rock.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre pulsated with pilgrims when Elahna and I had toured it three years earlier. Devotees threw themselves onto the rectangular Stone of Anointing, upon which Christ’s body was prepared for burial. They wailed and weeped and spilled vials of water from the River Jordan. I found it a disconcerting spectacle, but that’s my default reaction to all mob behavior, including parades and standing ovations. According to the historian Richard Cohen, author of Saving the Holy Sepulchre, the occasional fistfight between the Roman Catholic, Armenian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox monks who’ve jointly administered the church for centuries has eclipsed the fact that these Christian sects have cooperated, grudgingly, over the past 50 years to save the place from ruin. Tales of ninja monks, of course, are better reading than dome restoration agreements. Not that the monks get along, but the roof ain’t falling.
Finally we spilled out, around noon, onto the enormous, open plaza in front of the Western Wall, the Kotel. Sooner or later, you end up there. You make your way to Jerusalem and by some pull of horizontal gravity you stand under the Middle Eastern sun on the paving stones before the Kotel. You stand surrounded by American and German tourists, Australian backpackers, Canadian and Peruvian pilgrims, teenage soldiers, Birthright kids led by guides with Stars of David in their eyes, religious Jews under kippas and temple youth groups from Long Island with the girls in modest makeup, their skirts just below the knees. You stand surrounded by politicians, celebrities, tough-guy settlers packing heat by special permit, refugees, business persons hitting their Jerusalem marks and, outnumbering everyone, the ultra-Orthodox in anachronistic black.
One way to understand a foreign world, favored by media pundits, is to fashion an Olympian perspective that spans the space-time continuum. And so Thomas Friedman writes in The New York Times: “If you look at it from 30,000 feet, what we’re actually dealing with in the Middle East today are the long-delayed consequences of the end of the Ottoman Empire.” Oy vey! Sounds mighty smart, as well as hard to disprove. Let’s also declare that political gridlock in the U.S. stems from the long-delayed consequences of post-Civil War Reconstruction policies. There is, however, at least one other way to understand this fractious world: from zero feet off the ground and in the right now. Just hang about and look at stuff and then jump in. Maybe learn something, get hurt.
I stood before the Kotel wearing my faded Yale ball cap, veteran of Shvil Yisrael, plus my Larry’s PX t-shirt. Since 1955, the shirt boasts, “Countless People Have Eaten at Larry’s PX and Gone on to Live Normal Lives.” No joke, their food is pretty bad – soggy, greasy, cold. The eggs over easy are hard. The toast, like buttery cardboard. The bacon, burnt and fatty. And yet the fishermen, tourists and old-timers cramming the place don’t seem to mind. Neither does this middle-aged man who, as a boy, hunted for ripe, exploding blackberries along the dirt road between home and the diner. I remember storing the berries in my cheeks, letting them ooze into me.
Larry’s PX on Cape Cod has this outstanding virtue: it knows what it is and what it is fills the belly and sells t-shirts. So, pray tell, what is the Western Wall? Does it know itself? A 130-feet high expanse of squarish stones, the Kotel was constructed in 37 BCE as a retaining wall, a practical necessity, during the epic renovations of the Temple Mount by King Herod, an egotistical despot if ever there was one. After the Temple was smashed and burned and torn down to atoms, the Romans allowed the Jews to come here on the yearly anniversary of the destruction and abase themselves at the foot of the wall. Since then a lot, as they say, has transpired and the Kotel has become a monumental icon attracting millions of pilgrims. The Divine Presence, it’s said, exists here – not covered in marble and gold, not sheathed in iconography crafted by artisans, but inside a load-bearing wall built by peasant labor.
For Elahna’s mother, the Western Wall was neither historical artifact nor massive prayer accelerator. For Hadassah, who died less than a year after her final visit to her hometown Jerusalem, it was a rebuke.
I helped build this country, she said, pounding her rubber-tipped cane. We stood in the plaza beside a low fence that served as an entrance to the Kotel. Hadassah had refused to get in the separate line for women, far to the right in the shadow of the aerial walkway to the Dome of the Rock. I helped build this country, she repeated again and again – and it’s true, as a child she lived through the War of Independence. She went hungry, shivered as bombs fell. For the Havdalah ritual that concludes Shabbat, Hadassah collected herbs in the Jerusalem hills under the threat of sniper fire. She served her years in the Israeli military. We built this country, she proclaimed, speaking now for all women, for all Israelis in exile and for every soul told to stand aside by the rabbis empowered by “local custom,” according to the Israeli Supreme Court, to set the rules for Kotel encounter.
The security guard – I couldn’t help but feel for him – grew frazzled and called his supervisor, who, several cane poundings later, called his supervisor. Finally, the Guardians of the Wall allowed Hadassah to approach the Kotel from the far left side, not with the women and not with the men, but alone. Hadassah is not alone, however, in her outrage; a group called Women of the Wall regularly attempts to break down segregation at the Kotel. In May, 2013, the women gathered in the plaza wearing prayer shawls and were accosted by ultra-Orthodox Jews. These righteous ones threw fruit and pebbles and insults; security guards formed a cordon to protect the women from their fellow Israelis. Recently a kind of peace treaty was forged between the women and the rabbis, but it didn’t hold.
Up close, the lower stones of the Kotel appear to be mortared with paper. That’s because every year more than a million notes are tucked into crevices between the rocks; each note contains a personal message, although I suppose there are people who express nothing, or everything, by leaving blank notes. Those who don’t make it to Jerusalem in person can perform a virtual pilgrimage to the Western Wall via an Orthodox website, aish.com, which allows you to compose a heartfelt note on your smartphone and, click, have it inserted by proxy. No charge, $18 contribution suggested. This website also provides a 24-hour Kotel Cam surveying the wall and its plaza; I sneaked a peek just moments ago and became Visitor 35,269,307. The Kotel Cam comes with sound and, if you close your eyes, you could be at any public park in the world, any swimming pool without the splashes. Twice per year the conglomerating notes in the Wall are pulled out – so deprived, do the stones cringe a bit? – and buried on the nearby Mount of Olives where, the story goes, Judas betrayed Jesus.
On that day, in 2012, I took out a tiny notebook, scribbled a note and ripped out the page. “Better problems, please” – best I could do on short notice. O Lord, cut Israel a break. Yes, not very eloquent, and it certainly didn’t rival the beautiful, solemn note shivved into the Western Wall by Senator Barack Obama in 2008. Snatched by a yeshiva student and published in the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, Obama’s message omitted mention of Israel or Jews and referred to me and mine seven times in four brief lines. The not-yet president’s note was written on the stationary of the King David Hotel, a fancy-pants joint terror-bombed by the Irgun and since rebuilt to evoke past splendors and snobberies.
I strode forward. As I passed through the entrance, the Kotel growing larger and larger in my Irish hazel eyes, a Haredi gentleman spoke up. “If you are a real Jew,” he said, holding out a blue-and-white prayer shawl and tefillin. “If you are a real Jew,” he repeated. I stopped, stared at him. He beckoned. He knew my type. He could tell a faker, a poser, a perpetual seeker and not finder…converted to Judaism or not, this Haredi would always consider my type a counterfeit bill if not an abomination...I spun away from him, Di!, Di!, enough already, buster, I’m not yours to bend, and I marched a beeline right up to the Kotel. I stood inches away, almost touching. But I didn’t touch it. I pushed my note between two stones, between notes mashed in and twisted.
I let go. I stood there.
The young man in a t-shirt and red ball cap at my right shoulder mumbled a prayer. To my left, an ultra-Orthodox man of painful thinness leaned his forehead on the stone. His eyes were closed, the lids quivering. If possible, he would have gratefully melted into the Kotel, let it absorb him and his pathetic individuality. I looked up – stone after stone after stone rising to the blue sky, interrupted only by a clump of poisonous henbane in a crack. On Shvil Yisrael, I’d seen grasses and flowers growing high on cliffs, in the most remote and inhospitable places. Life prevails. The sight always cheered me. But not here, not now. The Kotel overwhelmed everything. And that’s when I took off my Yale cap and exposed my bald head. It seemed the right thing to do. You take off your hat to show humility, out of respect – that’s how I’d been raised. At the very same time, as I removed the cap, I realized that I was violating a fundamental rule. You cover your head at the Kotel – at any Jewish sanctuary or holy place, in fact. But then why did Moses take off his sandals at the burning bush, or was that the Hollywood version with Charlton Heston?
Hats on? Hats off? I stood and stared into the rock, mottled white and brown and streaked with fissures like the face of an elderly woman. I stared at the pores in the stone. Christ, what’s the difference? Hats on or off, tefillin gear, prayer shawls…such details couldn’t possibly matter, couldn’t come from a mind as vast as G-d’s. It’s just man-shit.
Long ago Jews hovered at the Kotel on their designated day of debasement. The Roman guards laughed at the wailing fools. They threw stones down at the lamenting, lamentable curs. (Remember, never a shortage of stones here.) The Jews took the abuse. They gathered and took it. Was that bravery? Cowardice? Did their suffering produce this present scene? Now I stood facing the stone wall, just inches away, yet no prayer came to mind; nothing was revealed or taken away; it didn’t even repel me. The wall was a wall was a wall, meaning everything and nothing but wall, and maybe that’s a prayer in itself, the acknowledgement of what, stripped of our vain metaphor making, stripped of deadening history, is.
So I put on my cap and walked back through the exit. I averted my eyes from the Haredim and kept a straight line on my way out, trying not to look at the Australian backpackers and Birthright grabbers and kids toting guns for the nation of Israel. Bells bonged in my skull. I stood with my wife in the Kotel’s wide-open plaza beneath the Middle Eastern sun.
“Why’d you take your hat off?” she asked, sounding annoyed. It’s a holy place, she reminded me. “I guess,” I shot back, “I’ll never become a real Jew.”
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After lunch, after my Kotel encounter, Elahna and I visited the Jerusalem Archeological Park near the southwest corner of the Temple Mount.
There we looked at the relics behind glass. We watched an animated film, the tale of a Temple-era pilgrim on his first trip to Jerusalem; awestruck, he buys a baby goat for slaughtering on the heights of Har HaBayet. Then we walked in 102 degree heat to the foot of the southern wall where, supposedly, flesh-and-blood pilgrims had ascended a broad staircase and passed through a massive gate to their heart’s desire – the Temple and, at its core, the Ark of the Covenant. The stairs were still there – maybe not the stairs, but some stairs built at some point during thousands of years of reconstructions and warfare.
In a corner manufactured by the southern wall and another jutting wall, always more walls, I noticed half an arch embedded in the solid stone. It protruded barely, forming the suggestion of half a maybe-gate, maybe. Above the arch glowered an iron-barred window fronting a dark tunnel leading G-d and his keepers know where. And under the half arch, a middle-aged couple stood on a flat rock that protruded a few inches from the ground. The couple stood close together in order to fit on the rock, with the man’s arm around his lady’s waist. He was a burly fellow, full-bellied in slacks and a collared shirt, and she was petite and coiffed in the skull-hugging manner of women from the red states of America. The armor of money, of flush retirement accounts and real estate holdings, surrounded them. Ten feet away, a skinny man cradled a long-lens camera. He wore a wide-brimmed safari hat.
“Jesus stepped on that rock when he entered the Temple,” he said. “Just think, you can tell people you stood on the same rock as Jesus.”
The man, who I assumed to be a guide employed by the couple, lined up the shot and snapped. “One more,” he said, and snapped another. He pulled the camera from his eye and the couple stepped gingerly from the Jesus rock. The woman patted her man’s arm. He smiled. And then, as if catapulted, I moved forward and yelled out, “That’s bullshit!”
Believe me, it’s not something I do, rush at folks yelling profanities – not unless a person is in danger or being badly mistreated. But on this day of stone staring in Jerusalem, I intruded like an avenging angel. The couple looked horrified. I veered toward the guide. “There’s no way you know if Jesus stepped on that rock,” I lectured, and I rattled off my reasoning. Too much had happened here. The walls and stairs and tunnels and gates had been destroyed and rebuilt and reused and renamed too many times for him or anyone else to say where Jesus had or had not stepped. You, sir, are slinging total, unmitigated bullshit.
The guide closed the distance between us. Within arm’s length, he was older than I’d thought, in his late 50s with a scrap of white hair breaking from the safari hat. He was short, barely to my shoulders, and his face had been scarred, perhaps from the removal of skin cancers. He clenched a green toothpick in his yellow, disorganized teeth, and I couldn’t help noticing that he managed to retain the toothpick as we conversed.
“Can I give you a little bit of wisdom?” he asked, quietly.
“No, you can’t,” I replied. “Let’s talk about your Jesus rock, let’s talk about that.”
Elahna stood about 20 yards away, on the ancient stairs. At this point, she later informed me, the middle-aged woman started to move toward me, but the man told her to stay out of it, don’t make trouble. (He could be crazy, after all. Look at that vein in his forehead!) The guide stared with a weirdly relaxed gaze. Brain-zonked, burnt-out? Holy Land boor relishing an audience? Just another Israeli enjoying the national pastime of speaking his mind? At any rate, he began a rambling story about how once upon a time he gave his wife a $10,000 diamond ring for some reason I can’t remember. As he spoke, he pointed his crooked index finger at my face.
“Put away your finger,” I told him.
“It’s not pointed like a gun,” he said.
The guide kept talking, lowering the non-gun finger and letting it float up again, and here’s the upshot: his wife loves him and he’s not sure why. For the diamond ring? Or for himself? “Must be the diamond,” I answered, but he didn’t register the insult or didn’t care and just kept talking. “Perception,” he announced, “is reality.” This was the story’s kicker, his nugget of wisdom for the day. “Perception is reality,” he repeated.
“Reality is reality,” I said, feeling ridiculous for saying that. “You don’t know if Jesus stepped on that rock.” Why did this matter so much to me? What did I, who had abandoned my Catholic upbringing decades ago, care where the Son of G-d stepped and why did I begrudge this poor fellow a living? Surely it did no good to reveal a con-man to clients who desperately wanted to be conned.
“That man is a lawyer from Texas,” he said, pointing to the couple. “He can decide what to believe. Perception is reality – know what I mean, friend?”
“Well, if he’s a lawyer,” I said, “then he’s used to people lying to him.” And that was pretty much that. The guide had kept his cool, advising philosophical toleration; ungraciously, I’d insisted on the last word. Now my opponent shifted his toothpick and walked over to the befuddled Americans. I sought out my wife who, I will hazard, loves me regardless of the sapphire on her finger. Who loves me even when I make a total, unmitigated jerk of myself. (Woe onto me – for a sin committed in Jerusalem, according to the Islamic book of Fada’il, is the equivalent of a thousand sins committed elsewhere.) I knew, too, that in the final analysis I had confronted the guide’s authenticity because the ultra-Orthodox man had confronted mine at the Kotel – and wasn’t that the way in Jerusalem, the too holy city, the great amplifier of grudges and outrages passed around with the desperate vengeance of the true believer wandering on sore feet among silent stones.
Maybe Jesus did step on that rock. Maybe he tripped over the damn thing.
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We left Jerusalem in the late afternoon. The goal was to drive to Auntie Sarah’s kibbutz before dark. First, though, Elahna took my picture in front of the Imcah, its lone tower in the background. I look uncomfortable in the shot, as if I don’t fit inside my own skin.
Fast forward several months. I’m scrolling through photos on my computer screen. This one appears and I veer from my awkward self, zooming in on the bas relief three quarters of the way up the Imcah tower. Look, there – an angel emerging from the stone, a celestial being called a seraph that shows up in Christian, Jewish and Islamic writings. According to the prophet Isaiah, the seraph has three pairs of wings – two wings covering the face, so not to look at the Lord; two wings covering the feet, for the sake of modesty; and two more used for flying around the ultimate throne. The seraphs circle and circle as they call out to each other, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” An Israeli rabbi told me that these holy exclamations allow the seraphs to fly with their eyes covered, in the same manner that bats navigate with sonar pulses. Okay, nice try, rabbi, nice Talmudic workaround, but they’re still flying blind.
In Jerusalem, even the angels fly blind.
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