The wall streaks across the Israeli countryside like an enormous grey scar. There are some drawings, and I was reminded of the wall in Belfast. The murals have not had time to emerge in the same scale, but given time, I’m sure they will. The French artists who make a point of arranging large-scale photographs of people “from the other side” making silly and goofy faces had managed to already decorate this wall. Going through the Checkpoint was an exercise in understanding the power of the USA passport. They barely glanced at us just seeing the fronts of our passports. We walked through these bleak, concrete structures, in which Israeli soldiers stood with automatic weapons at the ready. Emerging from the other side, it looked the same geographically, but it was evident immediately that this was an entirely different world. The Palestinians live in poverty literally 1 mile away from wealthy Israelis. The desperation of the citizens is evident. There were probably 20 taxi drivers who immediately clamored around us, hoping to get our business. They were pushing for an “all day tour” rate, when we just wanted to get to the heart of the town. We wound up having to walk away in order to secure a ride to the Church of the Nativity. The poor taxi driver who had to support us told us his own tale of sorrow. Apparently, times have been tough financially for the people of Bethlehem. The wall has led to financial hardship as tourism has decreased. The taxi driver told us that at noon, we were his first fare. Our fare equalled out to about $4. This was probably all that he would be able to bring home to his family. He continued to insist that he would wait for us. We arrived at the Tourism Office after driving through bomb-devastated and poverty-stricken neighborhoods.
At the Tourism Office, we were given maps and encouraged to see various things. We crossed the street and entered the Church of the Nativity, established by Constantine’s mother as a monument to the place where Jesus had been born. This became a theme. Churches and monuments built on sacred spaces. I think I’m more of a pagan than I let on, because a large part of me desires for sacred spaces to be left intact, as they were when they became holy. This is why the Western Wall was so incredible. It stands exactly as it did 2000 years ago. The Church of the Nativity was exquisite, however, and we managed to secure a tour guide. He showed us the various places believed to be the place of Jesus’ birth and his laying in the manger. There was a sense of holiness to the place, but whether that was from the thousands of years of pilgrimage or because it actually *was* the place of Jesus’ birth was unintelligible. The floor has a mosaic thousands of years old, and the grottoes were lovely and filled with icons.
Another strange characteristic to holy sites in the Holy Land is that they are normally inhabited by at least three denominations. The Church of the Nativity had three sections, one each for Roman Catholic, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox. Upon emerging, as we were paying our tour guide, we were surrounded by small children, with hopeless eyes. They kept begging for money, and upon receiving all we had to spare, continued following us as we began our walk down the hill to the Shepherd’s Field.
I normally have a pretty good sense of direction. Thus, when we decided to walk to the Shepherd’s Field, approximately 1.5 miles away, none of us were concerned. The map was quite clear. We followed the road into a residential neighborhood. As we were walking, we reached a fork in the road. Both forks led down to a road heading down the road. We met a few kids (maybe 8-12) who introduced themselves and seemed very friendly. As we walked down the right fork, they asked for money. We had already given it away to other children and told them so and kept walking. We realized that we had taken the wrong fork, so turned around and began walking the other way. At this point we began to notice that rocks were falling around us. We began to walk faster. This part is hard for me to write. Because I’m filled with compassion for these poor kids who don’t have safe places to be and people mentoring them to be better. They have pain and suffering and people teaching them acts of violence as defiance to unjust rule. But I was rather scared. I went to Jerusalem with the solemn belief that God would take care of us, and that if it was my time, then so be it. But this experience was worse. The rocks started coming faster, and at least they were skipping the stones along the ground, but we became more and more glad that they didn’t have any all-star pitchers in the group. We continued walking, and the rocks kept coming, Occasionally we would turn around to see if they had stopped. They began yelling epithets at us which were awful... “**** you, **** your mother” it was horrific. I have no idea who taught them these words, much less in English! I got hit in the leg, by a rather large rock, and Aaron got hit in the neck by a smaller one. Aaron turned around, as they were running up behind us and somehow diffused the situation by asking simply, “Why are you so angry?” This seemed to tone the situation down, and we kept walking quickly away as the kids dissipated. But we were still pretty frightened, shocked, and I was having to temper my anger. We survived, and God is good, but I must admit, I never have experienced such hate and anger turned into violence towards strangers.
At the bottom of the hill, we found the municipal offices of Shepherd’s Field, but still hadn’t found the holy site itself. We wandered for about another 30 minutes, with me having an absolute terror attack as a bus full of young kids drove by (I’ve never been scared of kids before!), until a cab driver took pity on us and took us the 100 yards in the other direction that we had somehow missed. He didn’t even charge us.
Shepherd’s Field is holy. There is no other way to describe it. They say that this is the place where multitudes of angels came down to announce the arrival of the Messiah to the shepherds. There are, again, two different sites, one for the Roman Catholic Church and one for the Greek Orthodox. We were at the Roman Catholic site. And there was a peace and holiness there that is simply from God. There were butterflies fluttering about, and I felt the presence remaining of a multitude of heavenly host. I felt as though the holiness, peace, and purity of the place washed the hatred, fear and anger out of my heart. It was a very good place.
By this time, we were exhausted, and needed to eat. We found a nearby restaurant and ate, then called our friendly cab driver to take us back to the Checkpoint. At the Checkpoint, we were harassed by various salespeople who wouldn’t leave us alone. At this point, I just kept walking. We went through the Checkpoint, watching various Palestinian people harassed for their papers. I understand the need for security, especially considering all that has erupted in the last few days, but it was still out of the ordinary.
We hopped on the Palestinian bus which would take us to Damascus Gate in the Old City. On our way back, we were stopped by the military, and everyone’s passports and papers were checked, again by a young woman in the military carrying a handgun and automatic weapon. Upon arrival at Damascus Gate, I was grateful to be back in some semblance of normalcy. Our plan was to venture through the Arab Shuk (marketplace) to pick up veggies and such for Shabbos.
Our first stop in the shuk was at the oil stand. I had forgotten how wonderful pure essential oils were! I procured a number of them, and we began walking down the market. 2 lbs of strawberries for $3! What a treat. The spice merchants had literally mountains of loose spices and seasonings, and the pastry merchants had goods dripping with sugar and nuts. There were also a number of Americana merchants, selling all the latest clothes, gadgets, and various must-haves of western culture. The shuk was remarkably wonderful after our rough afternoon in Bethlehem, until I received the lovely gift of a dropped garbage box. This time, I know it was simply an accident, as I heard a shout behind me to watch out. Luckily, it was just dust and paper waste, but it fell all along my head, shoulder, and arm. A day full of experiences in which my American identity meant good things (with Checkpoint control), bad things (with being stoned), and completely non-important things (the trash coulda hit anyone).
We happened upon the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, another location where three different churches inhabit the holy sites. In this Church, there are I think 3 crucifixion locations and at least two empty tombs. It was getting dark, so Aaron and I decided that we would just poke our noses in and then we should get back to get some food. We left through Jaffa Gate, taking a taxi back to Lizzi’s and then allowing me to get cleaned up. While we were there, Deborah (our second host) stopped by and we had a chat about conflict areas. She had grown up in the UK during the “Troubles” so understood my comparison of Bethlehem to Belfast. We then went to Te’enim, which is an incredible dairy restaurant with a gorgeous view of the Old City. We had a lovely, relaxing dinner, and tried to recover from our very eventful day. It took some time to make sense of some of it, but it was good to have some time to decompress. One thing that I loved about being with Lizzi, in Jerusalem, was the time we took to savor our dinners. Our evenings were always filled with amazing food, delicious coffee, tea, and dessert and phenomenal conversation. And they normally lasted about two or three hours.
We went home, and prepared for bed. Aaron & I stayed up a little longer, trying to fathom what had happened that afternoon. We went to bed.
I’m going to include part of Day 3 here, because Shabbos is very special and I want it all to be together. Friday morning, Lizzi and I woke up early, in order to go over to Abe and Rebecca’s to make the food for Saturday lunch. It was so exciting to meet little Odelia (the newest member of the Friedman family!) who is all of 3 weeks old. She was beautiful. While there, I learned how to cook in a kosher kitchen. For all you non-kosher people, I do not recommend even trying. Even though I practiced kashrut last year for Lent, and felt as though I understood it all, getting through it without mixing any pots and pans was a challenge. Especially because a great deal of what I prepared was what is known as Parve. This means that it is neither meat nor dairy. Which means it can be cooked in either pot, but it needed to be cooked in meat pans for this meal, because the meal was to be meat. Then, there were a few parve pans, but we had to make sure that we didn’t mix the utensils for the meat with the parve, or the pan would turn meat. The idea of cross-contamination gains a whole new meaning. Not to mention the fact that the pots had recently been rearranged, so it was a continual asking adventure to determine what each pot exactly was. THANK GOODNESS Abe was there to provide direction while giving little Odelia her bottle. We finished around 11:30 and headed back to the house to pick Aaron up. At this point, because we didn’t want Aaron to be near a 3-week old with nasty cooties, we had scheduled a doctor’s appointment just to make sure he didn’t need antibiotics. We wound up at the doctor’s, and he checked us both out for good measure, and behold! We were both fine, but he prescribed the following: lots of rest and fluids, lemon tea with honey, and an expectorant and cough suppressant with codeine. Now here is the miracle. Lizzi had gone shopping for baked goods and other such things while we were doing this, and I managed to use my broken, limited Hebrew to chat with the Pharmacist in his broken and limited English! But we did it! Phenomenal. Then we met Lizzi at the natural goods store and found our tea. She also had brought me a messy goodie of chocolate happiness. What a treat! We went our way back to her house to drop off our various things, and headed back to the old city for our pilgrimage down the Via Dolorosa.
Every Friday afternoon, at 3:00pm, the Franciscan monks in Jerusalem lead a pilgrimage from Lion’s Gate (directly opposite the Garden of Gethsemane) down to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This walk is to illustrate the walk that Christ took with his cross. It represents the stations of the Cross as understood in the Catholic tradition. At 3:00pm, as we were standing in the courtyard of an Arab school, waiting for our walk to begin, I had a truly ecumenical moment. I, a Presbyterian pastor-in-training, was standing next to my good friend Lizzi, a Conservative rabbi-in-training, and we were listening to the prayers of the Franciscan monks in five different languages, when all of a sudden the call to prayer began for the Muslims of the city. As we were walking down, there were hundreds of people walking with us. I think the most memorable were the 80-year-old grannies who reminded me of my Grandma Lucille. They had more energy than most of us, knew all the Latin by heart, and had no compunction about charging over anyone in the way. There were at least a couple times when Aaron & I were nearly bowled over by these lovely little ladies.
As we walked along the path, I noticed a few things. First, the concept of personal space is very different in Middle Eastern culture. People bump into one another without a thought. Also, the reverence that I had expected during a religious pilgrimage/service simply was not there. Arab music blasted from the shops, various youths used the opportunity to charge up and down through the crowd with heavy packages, yelling or whistling. Part of me was horrified, although that may have been partly due to our previous day’s experience. I just wondered what would happen if I decided to blare Brittany Spears or Eminem during their call to prayer. Probably nothing good. But because I was trying to imagine Jesus’ walk, I tried to ignore it. In reality, the most I got out of the Via Dolorosa was “Wow, that’s quite a trek, and a lot of it uphill! That must have been a literal and horrible pain!” When we arrived at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, we meandered with the crowd and saw the various places of Jesus’ death and tomb, although as I’ve said, they’re all contested. The Church is filled with gold, silver, icons, and various treasures. It didn’t remind me of churches I’m familiar with, as the wealth seemed almost gratuitous. I can understand the desire to give all good things to Christ, but this seemed over the top. We bumped into numerous US tourists, one of whom took a picture of us on the Catholic site of the crucifixion.
And at the end of it, I didn’t feel that much different than I had after watching Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ for the second time. Humbled, reminded of Jesus’ sacrifice, a little sad that he had pain, but in general, non-plussed. We went to get coffee and juice and I picked up a Byzantine cross pendant for my collection, then the sun went down and Shabbos began. Praise the Lord for Shabbos.
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