It's odd, trying to reconstruct stuff from a few days ago, but oh well. There simply was no time to do anything then. Now, as I sit in Istanbul overlooking the Bosporus, I'm hoping my recollections aren't too far off target.
Our second day in Jerusalem was a very full one. Though we had some time the first day to roam about, in general it was on day two that we really focused on the Old City. Jerusalem, Al Quds, Yerushalayim, whatever you want to call it, is not just a city, it's a time machine (this, I cribbed from one of our speakers, Daniel Rossing, a former Ministry of Religious Affairs official for the Israeli government). That is, there are not only different faiths and ethnicities and physical sections in the city, but different times too. The Greek Orthodox live in 6th century Byzantium. The ultra-Orthodox Jews live in 17th-century Poland. The Catholics seem rooted somewhere in the genteel 19th, and Muslims run the gamut from the time of Saladin to the era of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader in Lebanon.
We spent this day largely on a walking tour of some of the areas in the Old City where conflict has occurred, mostly between rival Christian groups. One of the oddities of Jerusalem is that often the most fervent defenders of their rights to certain sites and places are neither Muslims nor Jews, but Christians--and usually Eastern Christians. While you find a lot of Protestant pilgrims here, and a few Protestant churches (the Lutherans with their 19th century bell tower that deafen you at noon, for instance), generally the people here are Greek, Syrian, or Armenian Orthodox, with some Copts, Ethiopians, and of course Roman Catholics thrown in for good measure. While tensions between Jews and Muslims, particularly between ultra-Orthodox Jews and their neighbors, are not uncommon, actual clashes between various Christian sects are far more common it seems.
We visited the Muslim quarter, the Jewish quarter, the Christian areas, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, though naturally in three or four hours we couldn't do that much. The Armenian quarter, for instance, is a closed ghetto, and the ultra-Orthodox Jews who inhabit much of the Jewish section don't like people poking around too much either. But we saw a lot. We saw incredibly narrow streets, with millennia-old paving stones, flanked by shops (usually holes in the wall, literally) selling everything from kitsch to kitchenware.
In the Muslim areas, this is their Wal*Mart--it's where they buy food, clothing, hardware, whatever. The volume is loud, the press of people intense, and the smells, well, they're interesting, to say the least. Sweaty bodies, sewage, trash, food, spices, foam rubber, tobacco, incense--it's all here, all at once. It's overwhelming, but its very very alive.
People are generally friendly, the kids play soccer, and everyone dives out of the way of the green tractors that, with their narrow prows and rumbling carts, plow through the narrow streets hauling God knows what to God knows where. What separates the experience from other places though is that, every few feet, you see three or four types of clerics in different garb, a station of the Cross, and a reminder that, oh yeah, three major religions call this place sacred.
The Western Wall is the center of the Jewish quarter, really, and I've described some of that. There really aren't that many Jews in the Old City right now; the Christians have had a lot more time to stake out claims it seems. The center of
the Christian presence in the city is the Sepulcher, a battleground of rights and responsibilities where religious and ethnic identities are sorted out. With six sects--Greek, Armenian, Roman Catholic, Coptic, Syrian, and Ethiopian--sharing control of parts of the shrine, and with no one responsible for other parts because no one can agree on anything, it's pretty amazing. The shrine includes Golgotha, where Christ was crucified, the slab of the Last Unction, where His body was laid out, and the tomb from which He was resurrected. Or so Christians believe; none of the locations is necessarily right, or necessarily wrong. It's immaterial; people believe. The place is filled to overflowing with pilgrims, and stuffed to the gills with mosaics, chandeliers, icons, and gilding. It's a riot of sensation, with candles and incense and the press of bodies, but there is definitely a feel of something there--the faith is real, whether one believes it themselves or not.
One interesting thing we can learn from how all of this gets managed is that in the Middle East, ambiguity and vagueness are often necessary. Because everyone takes things so seriously, and no one can afford to compromise on vital issues, circumlocutions and evasions are needed to allow anything at all to get done. Sometimes this is accompanied by arbitrary division--the slab at the bottom of the Catholic stairs but above the Greek courtyard is Greek half the week, Catholic the other half--that makes things run but seems rather, well, arbitrary to us. Getting the various sects to get along is tough, and in many ways just as tough as getting Muslims and Jews to get along. There, of course, there is the added political dimension to worry about too.
More later.
Pictures:
1. Damascus Gate, on the north side of the Old City.
2. Outside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, this quaint bomb disposal unit--for "small bombs," our guide said dismissively.
3. A mound of spices in the Old City.
4. Golgotha, or what has become of it.
5. A "redeemed" house in the Muslim quarter, purchased by Israelis.
2 comments:
Bob, it sounds like you had a great visit to Jerusalem. How did Jerusalem compare to Amman?
Gary
In response to Gary, Jerusalem is much more "cultural" I guess than Amman. Amman is a fine city, but it is also a city that feels sort of transitory. After all, much of it was built fairly recently as wave after wave of exiles, immigrants, refugees and whatever swarmed in, many bringing their money with them. Jerusalem, on the other hand, has a feel of antiquity to it, at least in the Old City.
Most of all, though, is that sense of meaning. Jerusalem feels weighty, while Amman feels...well, less so.
And there is more diversity in Jerusalem as well. Amman, on the other hand, is not likely to see an outbreak of Armenian vs. Greek grudge matches in the middle of the street.
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