Jerusalem, Israel: The Sacred and Silly
By Gregory McElwain

I

I arrived in Arab East Jerusalem on a Friday during Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, squeezed out of the service taxi I’d been packed into at the Jordanian border, and stepped into a get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time frenzy.  Afternoon prayers loomed, and the faithful were hurrying to be down on their knees in time for the muezzin’s first “Allah akbar!”  I stumbled around with my map trying to figure out exactly where I was and ended up in a throng of Arabs rushing toward the Old City’s Damascus Gate.  The mob pushed me south, but I elbowed and shoved north and eventually managed to pop out of the chaos.  Moving away from the gate, I found HaNevi’im Street, a string of shops and cheap hotels on one side and a sea of service taxis and touts screaming out destinations on the other.  Bustling scarved women buying food for that evening’s break-the-fast meal swept around me.

Then I headed to the other side of town.  And just blocks away from Arab East Jerusalem, as if I’d crossed a border instead of a street, I found myself in a parallel universe:  the Jewish New City, a quiet pocket of the West with tree-lined streets, sidewalk cafés, and department stores.  Friday afternoon is an especially serene time in Jewish Jerusalem as its businesses shut down for the Sabbath, which begins at sundown and ends at sundown on Saturday.  While wandering the nearly empty streets, I found their spiffiness alternately reassuring (order can exist anywhere) and discomfiting (maybe it’s too spic-and-span considering what’s a few blocks away).

The this-is-yours-and-this-is-mine mentality is obvious in Jerusalem’s centerpiece, the Old City.  A walled maze that’s ground zero for tourists; it’s carved into four quarters:  Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Armenian.  During my first ventures into the Old City, I quickly learned to approximate my location by looking for the innumerable kiosks and shops peddling religious trinkets to pilgrims.  The Jesus kiosk, the most plentiful and a sign that I was somewhere in the Christian Quarter, specialized in olive-wood anything; entire forests must have been decimated to provide the timber for the thousands of crucifixes, nativity sets, and Christmas ornaments for sale.  The Moses kiosks in the Jewish quarter with myriad menorah on offer cater to a more upscale crowd, and the Quarter’s Cardo, a bustling thoroughfare during Jerusalem’s Roman and Byzantine past, is now part archaeological site, part shopping mall.  The modest Mohammed kiosks with their stacks of Korans were proof that I’d stumbled into the Muslim Quarter.  (The small Armenian Quarter is the Old City’s stepchild; its streets nearly kiosk-less; and its churches small potatoes compared to the attractions in the other quarters.)
In the Muslim Quarter, the Old City’s largest and most heavily populated section, residents going about their daily chores ignore the tourists, most of whom are there to stroll along the Via Dolorosa, the route the cross-bearing Jesus allegedly walked to his crucifixion.  Roughly half of the 14 Stations of the Cross are in this quarter; the rest are in the Christian Quarter.  The Muslim Quarter also offers the only access to Temple Mount, ancient site of Judaism’s First and Second Temples and present site of a mosque, an Islamic museum and the Dome of the Rock.  A politically sensitive area, Temple Mount is administered by the Palestinians; but Israeli soldiers guard all entrances. 

Trying to visit during Ramadan was an undertaking, and it took me four tries before the Israelis with guns let me in.  Dome of the Rock is magnificent and its name is apt—it’s a dome built over a rock.  While the dome, coated in a thin layer of 24-karat gold, is beautiful, the intricate tiles covering the building’s exterior and interior are more impressive.  Under the dome, the focal point is the large rock—supposedly the one where Abraham nearly sliced up Isaac (or Ishmael, as Muslims believe)—surrounded by a fence.  At one corner you’re allowed to reach in and touch a heavily perfumed portion of the rock; so I did and walked out with a sweetly scented hand.

Temple Mount’s southwestern retaining wall, the Western Wall, separates the sacred area from the Jewish Quarter.  Since Arabs nearly destroyed the Jewish Quarter in 1948 and it’s been rebuilt since then, it lacks the antique charm of the rest of the Old City.  The Quarter’s gentrified apartment-complex buildings and their upscale inhabitants (many are American Jews) give the Jewish section a suburban atmosphere.  The exception is the Western Wall, once better known as the Wailing Wall, which is the quarter’s prime tourist draw.  Security is tight here; each entry to the area has a metal detector and armed guards who search bags.  The crowd is a mix of the devout—traditionally dressed Jews who come to pray and tuck written prayers into the Wall’s crevices—and the curious—tourists who converge on it to take photos and cram their requests in the cracks. 

The Christian Quarter’s main drawing card is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is jointly administered by the Franciscans, the Greek Orthodox and the Armenian Orthodox.  The Coptic, Syrian, and Ethiopian churches have minor stakes in it as well; and the various denominations squabble endlessly over trivial matters such as what wall belongs to what sect; so in a way, the church mirrors the city it’s in perfectly.  An architectural hodgepodge built in bits and pieces over the years, the Church protects the sites where Christ is supposed-to-have been crucified, buried, and resurrected.  Supposed-to-have is a phrase I heard frequently in Israel, as no one is certain where many biblical events took place; but supposed-to-have was often good enough reason for people to erect churches, even though most were first built some 300 years after Christ’s death and some seem to have been established on sites of little religious significance.

Since cynicism is hardly in keeping with the spirit of the shrines, I muzzled mine and acted the earnest pilgrim.  Entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I found myself in a large, dimly lighted room replete with candles, brass oil lamps, statues and icons.  The first thing I saw was a slab where Jesus is supposed-to-have been anointed before he was buried.  A few people lay prostrate in front of it.  One woman kissed it.  Hoping to soak up some magic, one man rubbed the slab with a cloth, which he then lovingly pocketed.  I went upstairs next, where a large cross stands on the spot where Jesus was supposed-to-have been crucified; candles, flowers, oil lamps and a vigilant monk surrounded this area, and so did a clutch of kneeling pilgrims, some kissing an icon propped in front of the cross.

             

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