A friend of mine was last in Jerusalem for the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin and wrote me glowingly of its blushing stone, of its golden light that could convince you that God lived in the sky. But after thirty-six hours here, I wrote him this:
“Hail…I wish I could share your enthusiasm for the City at the Center of the World, but apart from its roseate glow I’m resisting it with striking force… I feel a terrible urgency to slice through the Gordian knot of all these competing religious narratives, not to delicately unravel this moderately-irrelevant-untruth from that totally-toxic one.
It seems to me that the raison d’être of the Old City of Jerusalem–the least liberal city on the planet to which the West looks for cues–is to use the human hunger to transcend the quotidian in order to insist on the equation of religious folktale with historical fact. The only faintly authentic site seems to be the Western Wall-contrast it, please, with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in which teen shoppers crouch to smooch the stone on which Christ’s body was anointed (never mind that it was laid in 1810) as their doting mothers click and flash-while everywhere, everywhere through the city’s conversation threads the migraine-inducing leitmotiv of “us, not them.” Your guide will chuckle at your description of the ersatz Via Doloroso winding through the stalls of “Guns & Moses” T-shirt stands–chuckle, that is, until it’s time to sell you a tour of Bethlehem, because there, he assures you, is REALLY where Christ was born: and only he can take you there, unlike your Jewish friends, who won’t be admitted through the checkpoint. And expect no chortling when we speak of the rock off which Mohammed’s winged horse flapped and grunted heavenwards: that Dome’s too expensive for knowing laughter. Even the Jewish Quarter, all but razed in ‘48, is now an EPCOT-careful reconstruction of a medieval city, haunted by the dogged Hasidim, dressing daily for that bad winter of 1819 in Minsk despite the 100-degree heat. Of course, it’s tradition: but isn’t tradition without critique merely inertia? Does Talmudic scrutiny not extend to wardrobe? ’This is what we’ve always done. What the text says matters less than our passionate adherence to it.’ Am I exasperated because this uncritical reverence of received not-quite-history reminds me, all too often, of the opera house? ’Is Ernani telling you anything?’ ’Maybe not, but she sings it so beautifully! Isn’t that enough?’
No, it is not enough. Newer stories: truer stories! Stories that unite people in the present, as opposed to stories that exclude them based on a feigned or imagined past!”
Thus I ranted. And yet: take away the expectation of the numinous, and you are left-I was left, on a Friday in August-with laughing women ringing doorbells, greeted, when doors opened, by other laughing women: quiet men reading newspapers in chairs; boys competing on bicycles. Wasn’t that enough?
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