Sifting History
What’s behind the world’s most famous Wall? Yuval Marcus, archeologist and tour guide at the Temple Mount Sifting Project, spun around a rectangular fake stone in his fake Wall and, ta da, revealed a picture and fun facts about the Kotel, also known as the Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall if you prefer language depicting Jews as submissive and in permanent mourning. Elahna and I were Yuval’s audience of two. We sat on a front-row bench, on the lower slope of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, and listened to his not-so-brief history of the Temple Mount, a 37-acre raised platform of earth within the Old City that contains, most notably, the Kotel, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. What lies behind the Wall and beneath the Dome and the Mosque, that’s a mystery that archeologists have picked at for centuries. At this juncture in history, explained Yuval, no new digging is allowed on the Temple Mount for religious and political reasons. The stones and dirt and buried, broken stuff might shout something someone doesn’t want to hear.
We asked a lot of questions. “Again, you stretch my tongue,” said Yuval, exasperated, and then like a game show host he twirled another stone on its axis and elaborated on the Persians or Macedonians or Maccabees or Romans or Byzantines or Mamluks or Ottomans or British, to name a few of the tribes who have controlled the Temple Mount, and with every spinning stone and stretching tongue the history, the mythology of Har HaBayet grew ever more multi-layered and tangled. Up there, God scooped earth and made Adam. Noah jumped from the ark and made sacrifice. Abraham bound and nearly killed his son. Jacob had his psychedelic ladder dream. Up there, from that dirt, the prophet Muhammad jumped on his trusty steed with a human face, Buraq, and took his magical night journey. To name just a few incidents. All of it, up there! And, of course, the rock under the Dome is said to be nothing less than the foundation stone of the world.
“There’s never going to be peace,” Elahna blurted out.
Yuval’s tongue unstretched. For a moment, he went silent. Then he told us a little story, maybe we’d appreciate it. This story, he said, has “stuck in me.” Not long ago, a group of 5th graders visited the Sifting Project. While Yuval was giving his Temple Mount talk, turning his stones about, flipping through eras, he asked the children if anyone knew what lay beneath the Dome of the Rock. A boy raised his hand and said, “An atomic bomb.”
Yuval paused again, let it stick in us. And suddenly he was talking about Temple Denial, which he equated with Holocaust Denial. It was spreading, said Yuval, the contention that the First and Second Temples never existed on the Mount, that the Jews had no history on ground that is holy to Muslims. He described Temple Denial as an attempt to delegitimize Judaism and the state of Israel and, thereby, advance political aims for a Palestinian takeover of Jerusalem in a future peace deal. Although many Arab scholars had acknowledged the Temples as historical fact, Yuval instructed us, their viewpoints were discredited in the Arab world after the 1948 war. In recent decades, Jews are routinely barred from visiting the Temple Mount and almost always excluded from the Dome of the Rock.
The Temple Mount Sifting Project started in a Kidron Valley dump. In 1999 the Waqf, an Islamic council, carted to that dump a huge quantity of soil taken from an excavation project on the southern side of the Temple Mount. Outraged Israelis accused the Waqf of exceeding their permit as they carved out an emergency exit to a new, underground mosque constructed where Solomon’s stables once existed. (Yuval had a good laugh; there were no stables there, he said, and Solomon didn’t keep horses. Other than that, it’s a great story.) In turn, the Waqf accused the Israelis of hysterical exaggeration. Then a plucky archeology student, Zachi Dvira, located the excavated fill and had it moved to its current home outside the Old City. And there it offers up a jumbled treasure trove of antiquities dating back 3,000 years.
As volunteers for the morning, Elahna and I stood under an arched tent and poured buckets of sludgy dirt onto an elevated, wood-framed sifting screen. With a garden hose, we washed off the remains and hunted for finds which we placed in separate boxes for glass, metals, pottery shards, mosaics, unique stones, bones and fossils. It was great fun combing through the detritus of centuries, and the responsibility of not missing an object of epic historical significance kept my focus sharp. Alas, we didn’t find a Roman-era coin or Ottoman belt buckle or pottery shard from King David’s dinner plate. I did, however, pick out several mosaic cubes that, most surely, had paved the great courtyards around the temples or the lavatories out back. Elahna identified a triangle of green glass that probably came from a 1970s-era pickle jar. And then a girl screamed.
Yuval ran to her side. She was a tall blonde in an all-female group of Israeli high school students and in her palms she cupped a green-tinted, cruddy disc which, we later learned, could be a 2,000 year-old coin. Elahna sighed; her shoulders tensed and she returned fiercely to the task – out of competitiveness and her irrational dislike for tall, leggy blondes. Soon we were joined by a woman in her forties, Ellen, who spends her vacations volunteering with the Sifting Project. She rifled through our finds – junk, junk, keep that one, junk. Ellen hailed from Texas and worked for a company that sold Bibles translated into dozens of languages. It was so exciting, she said, to discover in buckets of muck the Herodian stones over which “Jesus walked and prayed.”
“Okay, you’re done with that one,” said Ellen, and we picked up the screen and dumped the leftover debris into a trough. We replaced the screen on its mount, poured out another bucket of fill, ran the hose and resumed scouring. This was can-do, keep-your-eyes-peeled archeology; no gentle scraping with a soft-bristled toothbrush for us. The Wafq’s bulldozers and dump trucks had erased all context, all layering of epochs – as if a laughing G-d hit “scramble” on the time machine. Go ahead, figure that out! Try to build one of your highly speculative, self-serving stories from this trail mix.
At noon, we finished up and bought ice cream. Yuval was busy with blondie’s coin, so we thanked Ellen and climbed back to the main road, which led to Hebrew University. The high fence around the campus was locked tight. Not surprising – in anticipation of Shabbat, much of Jerusalem closes after lunch on Friday. Traffic was sparse; no buses or taxis came by. Elahna and I stopped at a mitzpe near the peak of Mt. Scopus and surveyed an incredible view of the world north and east of Jerusalem. In the foreground, racks of bleached white and gray houses baked in the sun’s runaway oven. To our right, small towns and parched ground and the winding road to the Dead Sea and Masada. To our left, a Jewish cemetery with 150,000 graves. (Menachem Begin’s grave, vandalized, is under guard there.) And straight ahead to the horizon, the contested West Bank and its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. The Barrier Wall, which has deeply curtailed suicide bombing while infuriating Palestinians on a daily basis, snaked up and down the hillsides; in a few places it mutated into honeycombs of territoriality and mutual fear.
A car pulled into the mitzpe and an Arab family got out – a man, a woman in hijab and two little kids. They stood far apart from us. But, just like us, they looked out. Adults arrive at lookouts tainted, their prejudices and habits of mind steering their eyes, filtering what they report. Everything in context. But the kids – what did they see? Were their eyes free?
Finally, we found a taxi. No, said the driver, he had no intention of schlepping into downtown Jerusalem on the Muslim holy day. Instead he drove us a few miles south to a crowded intersection in an East Jerusalem neighborhood. We stopped in a pocket of bedlam. Horns honking, dust drifting, people crossing against traffic, meat cooking…and our driver jumped out and yelled in Arabic at a man standing next to another taxi, a man in cool-cat shades who made some imperceptible gesture of agreement, and then he motioned for us to switch cars – quickly, quickly now, go, go. And for ten seconds, the affluent Americans Hal and Elahna experienced the clamor of the Arab Street. Not so different than any city street – so why did we have to hurry? Would our pasty, perplexed faces really incite resentment, rage and riot? I must have paused. Move, we were commanded, quickly now, and we were shoved or shoved ourselves in the second taxi and it jolted away.
The cool-cat driver tried to charge us double. Shabbat rates, he insisted. I haggled him down as he cried bankruptcy. None too seriously, we all played our roles.
In the mid-afternoon, we arrived at the apartment of Elahna’s Aunt Miriam. A stout woman in her early 80s, Miriam had spent the day cooking a feast in a kitchen so narrow I could stretch out my arms and touch both walls. Operation of the oven, a pre-war (all of them) model crammed into the back of the kitchen, required a twisting, dipping motion and the ability to see at right angles. A sleek, new air conditioner – her first ever, a gift from cousin Alex – had just been installed and it purred over the picture window in the living room. It’s not necessary, Miriam scoffed. All these years without and we survived. While she’s never traveled outside Israel, hers is a curious mind and she wanted to hear everything about our day sifting history. She brought out homemade cookies plumped with apricot jam, sat herself down with a satisfied sigh and listened good as we described the process of dumping the bucket onto the screen, washing the debris and separating the treasure.
Miriam stood up. Wait, she told us, wait right there. Don’t move. She rushed to the kitchen and returned with Savta’s sifter.
Savta, the grandmother, was Miriam’s mother. The object in the daughter’s hands, a metal screen attached to a round collar of wood, had been used for generations to sift flour for bread, cakes and treats for the high holidays. Miriam cupped the sifter by the sides and shook it back and forth and around and around, as if panning for gold. She shook it with gusto, staring into its cross-hatched depths, and Elahna and I stared with the old lady as she sifted the atoms of the apartment’s newly air-conditioned air. It was warped, Savta’s sifter, the wood dark brown from generations of handling. The strands of the screen were thick and distended. How old? Older than Miriam, yes, although she couldn’t produce an exact date. Very old and possibly a wedding gift.
I wondered if Savta’s sifter still worked. “Of course,” said Miriam. So wait a second, asked Elahna, you used it for tonight’s dinner? Miriam laughed. No, no, she had a better sifter than that, only 40, 50 years old, and she hurried again to the kitchen.
@ @ @
What’s behind the world’s most famous Wall? Yuval Marcus, archeologist and tour guide at the Temple Mount Sifting Project, spun around a rectangular fake stone in his fake Wall and, ta da, revealed a picture and fun facts about the Kotel, also known as the Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall if you prefer language depicting Jews as submissive and in permanent mourning. Elahna and I were Yuval’s audience of two. We sat on a front-row bench, on the lower slope of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, and listened to his not-so-brief history of the Temple Mount, a 37-acre raised platform of earth within the Old City that contains, most notably, the Kotel, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. What lies behind the Wall and beneath the Dome and the Mosque, that’s a mystery that archeologists have picked at for centuries. At this juncture in history, explained Yuval, no new digging is allowed on the Temple Mount for religious and political reasons. The stones and dirt and buried, broken stuff might shout something someone doesn’t want to hear.
We asked a lot of questions. “Again, you stretch my tongue,” said Yuval, exasperated, and then like a game show host he twirled another stone on its axis and elaborated on the Persians or Macedonians or Maccabees or Romans or Byzantines or Mamluks or Ottomans or British, to name a few of the tribes who have controlled the Temple Mount, and with every spinning stone and stretching tongue the history, the mythology of Har HaBayet grew ever more multi-layered and tangled. Up there, God scooped earth and made Adam. Noah jumped from the ark and made sacrifice. Abraham bound and nearly killed his son. Jacob had his psychedelic ladder dream. Up there, from that dirt, the prophet Muhammad jumped on his trusty steed with a human face, Buraq, and took his magical night journey. To name just a few incidents. All of it, up there! And, of course, the rock under the Dome is said to be nothing less than the foundation stone of the world.
“There’s never going to be peace,” Elahna blurted out.
Yuval’s tongue unstretched. For a moment, he went silent. Then he told us a little story, maybe we’d appreciate it. This story, he said, has “stuck in me.” Not long ago, a group of 5th graders visited the Sifting Project. While Yuval was giving his Temple Mount talk, turning his stones about, flipping through eras, he asked the children if anyone knew what lay beneath the Dome of the Rock. A boy raised his hand and said, “An atomic bomb.”
Yuval paused again, let it stick in us. And suddenly he was talking about Temple Denial, which he equated with Holocaust Denial. It was spreading, said Yuval, the contention that the First and Second Temples never existed on the Mount, that the Jews had no history on ground that is holy to Muslims. He described Temple Denial as an attempt to delegitimize Judaism and the state of Israel and, thereby, advance political aims for a Palestinian takeover of Jerusalem in a future peace deal. Although many Arab scholars had acknowledged the Temples as historical fact, Yuval instructed us, their viewpoints were discredited in the Arab world after the 1948 war. In recent decades, Jews are routinely barred from visiting the Temple Mount and almost always excluded from the Dome of the Rock.
The Temple Mount Sifting Project started in a Kidron Valley dump. In 1999 the Waqf, an Islamic council, carted to that dump a huge quantity of soil taken from an excavation project on the southern side of the Temple Mount. Outraged Israelis accused the Waqf of exceeding their permit as they carved out an emergency exit to a new, underground mosque constructed where Solomon’s stables once existed. (Yuval had a good laugh; there were no stables there, he said, and Solomon didn’t keep horses. Other than that, it’s a great story.) In turn, the Waqf accused the Israelis of hysterical exaggeration. Then a plucky archeology student, Zachi Dvira, located the excavated fill and had it moved to its current home outside the Old City. And there it offers up a jumbled treasure trove of antiquities dating back 3,000 years.
As volunteers for the morning, Elahna and I stood under an arched tent and poured buckets of sludgy dirt onto an elevated, wood-framed sifting screen. With a garden hose, we washed off the remains and hunted for finds which we placed in separate boxes for glass, metals, pottery shards, mosaics, unique stones, bones and fossils. It was great fun combing through the detritus of centuries, and the responsibility of not missing an object of epic historical significance kept my focus sharp. Alas, we didn’t find a Roman-era coin or Ottoman belt buckle or pottery shard from King David’s dinner plate. I did, however, pick out several mosaic cubes that, most surely, had paved the great courtyards around the temples or the lavatories out back. Elahna identified a triangle of green glass that probably came from a 1970s-era pickle jar. And then a girl screamed.
Yuval ran to her side. She was a tall blonde in an all-female group of Israeli high school students and in her palms she cupped a green-tinted, cruddy disc which, we later learned, could be a 2,000 year-old coin. Elahna sighed; her shoulders tensed and she returned fiercely to the task – out of competitiveness and her irrational dislike for tall, leggy blondes. Soon we were joined by a woman in her forties, Ellen, who spends her vacations volunteering with the Sifting Project. She rifled through our finds – junk, junk, keep that one, junk. Ellen hailed from Texas and worked for a company that sold Bibles translated into dozens of languages. It was so exciting, she said, to discover in buckets of muck the Herodian stones over which “Jesus walked and prayed.”
“Okay, you’re done with that one,” said Ellen, and we picked up the screen and dumped the leftover debris into a trough. We replaced the screen on its mount, poured out another bucket of fill, ran the hose and resumed scouring. This was can-do, keep-your-eyes-peeled archeology; no gentle scraping with a soft-bristled toothbrush for us. The Wafq’s bulldozers and dump trucks had erased all context, all layering of epochs – as if a laughing G-d hit “scramble” on the time machine. Go ahead, figure that out! Try to build one of your highly speculative, self-serving stories from this trail mix.
At noon, we finished up and bought ice cream. Yuval was busy with blondie’s coin, so we thanked Ellen and climbed back to the main road, which led to Hebrew University. The high fence around the campus was locked tight. Not surprising – in anticipation of Shabbat, much of Jerusalem closes after lunch on Friday. Traffic was sparse; no buses or taxis came by. Elahna and I stopped at a mitzpe near the peak of Mt. Scopus and surveyed an incredible view of the world north and east of Jerusalem. In the foreground, racks of bleached white and gray houses baked in the sun’s runaway oven. To our right, small towns and parched ground and the winding road to the Dead Sea and Masada. To our left, a Jewish cemetery with 150,000 graves. (Menachem Begin’s grave, vandalized, is under guard there.) And straight ahead to the horizon, the contested West Bank and its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. The Barrier Wall, which has deeply curtailed suicide bombing while infuriating Palestinians on a daily basis, snaked up and down the hillsides; in a few places it mutated into honeycombs of territoriality and mutual fear.
A car pulled into the mitzpe and an Arab family got out – a man, a woman in hijab and two little kids. They stood far apart from us. But, just like us, they looked out. Adults arrive at lookouts tainted, their prejudices and habits of mind steering their eyes, filtering what they report. Everything in context. But the kids – what did they see? Were their eyes free?
Finally, we found a taxi. No, said the driver, he had no intention of schlepping into downtown Jerusalem on the Muslim holy day. Instead he drove us a few miles south to a crowded intersection in an East Jerusalem neighborhood. We stopped in a pocket of bedlam. Horns honking, dust drifting, people crossing against traffic, meat cooking…and our driver jumped out and yelled in Arabic at a man standing next to another taxi, a man in cool-cat shades who made some imperceptible gesture of agreement, and then he motioned for us to switch cars – quickly, quickly now, go, go. And for ten seconds, the affluent Americans Hal and Elahna experienced the clamor of the Arab Street. Not so different than any city street – so why did we have to hurry? Would our pasty, perplexed faces really incite resentment, rage and riot? I must have paused. Move, we were commanded, quickly now, and we were shoved or shoved ourselves in the second taxi and it jolted away.
The cool-cat driver tried to charge us double. Shabbat rates, he insisted. I haggled him down as he cried bankruptcy. None too seriously, we all played our roles.
In the mid-afternoon, we arrived at the apartment of Elahna’s Aunt Miriam. A stout woman in her early 80s, Miriam had spent the day cooking a feast in a kitchen so narrow I could stretch out my arms and touch both walls. Operation of the oven, a pre-war (all of them) model crammed into the back of the kitchen, required a twisting, dipping motion and the ability to see at right angles. A sleek, new air conditioner – her first ever, a gift from cousin Alex – had just been installed and it purred over the picture window in the living room. It’s not necessary, Miriam scoffed. All these years without and we survived. While she’s never traveled outside Israel, hers is a curious mind and she wanted to hear everything about our day sifting history. She brought out homemade cookies plumped with apricot jam, sat herself down with a satisfied sigh and listened good as we described the process of dumping the bucket onto the screen, washing the debris and separating the treasure.
Miriam stood up. Wait, she told us, wait right there. Don’t move. She rushed to the kitchen and returned with Savta’s sifter.
Savta, the grandmother, was Miriam’s mother. The object in the daughter’s hands, a metal screen attached to a round collar of wood, had been used for generations to sift flour for bread, cakes and treats for the high holidays. Miriam cupped the sifter by the sides and shook it back and forth and around and around, as if panning for gold. She shook it with gusto, staring into its cross-hatched depths, and Elahna and I stared with the old lady as she sifted the atoms of the apartment’s newly air-conditioned air. It was warped, Savta’s sifter, the wood dark brown from generations of handling. The strands of the screen were thick and distended. How old? Older than Miriam, yes, although she couldn’t produce an exact date. Very old and possibly a wedding gift.
I wondered if Savta’s sifter still worked. “Of course,” said Miriam. So wait a second, asked Elahna, you used it for tonight’s dinner? Miriam laughed. No, no, she had a better sifter than that, only 40, 50 years old, and she hurried again to the kitchen.
@ @ @