Follow the yellow brick road...or Wadi El Joz, whichever.

Ok. So I feel I absolutely have to post something on today’s adventures.

First off, if one is not supposed to walk great distances on the Sabbath, I am about as Jewish as Jimmy Dean. I swear between yesterday and today, I covered the whole of Jerusalem on foot several times over! My feet are killing me, my hair feels like straw, and my cheeks have graduated to shades of rosy which would make the most bawdy rouge in Moulin seem piously pale. Oh - ways I went, what sights I saw! If I could take sensory snapshots of sound and smell to pair with the merely satisfactory impressions I am able to capture with my camera, then you would understand. If New York City is the Olive Garden, Jerusalem is the spiciest Indian restaurant you’ve never eaten at! I am actually really sad when I think that many of you will never make it over here in your lifetime – for various reasons – but I can’t help but think of how much the world you will have missed.

Of course, the same could be said of Kyoto and New Zealand and most places. But if you value a place by how much blood has been shed over it and how broad and pervasive its influence across all measures of time and space, when you think about it, nothing compares with Jerusalem. It’s ridiculously small compared to…well even Cleveland, but its power to both germinate and smother ideas, to incite violence and inspire peace, to conjure new superstitions and promptly remedy them with tinkerbell traditions is unmatched.

If places were people, Jerusalem would be a whacky Italian grandmother – something like mine was – the kind that freaks you out a little but is nonetheless the most interesting way to spend a boring Sunday afternoon – better even than Hollywood – captivatingly spooky at best, amusing and downright ridiculous at worst - greasy in the fingers, stinky in the breath, but stories and more stories and hershey bar on the way out the door.

So I walked into the city today which means walking through primarily Muslim areas. Not exactly Kosher if you heed the fairly biased advice of our Dean. Not very safe. On our first trip into the city, the bus drove slowly through one of the areas I walked through today. Our guide squeaked through a badly amplified mic about how “they” live and advised us to take note of this or that anthropological thing. It was very much like a safari, and they were presented like wildlife – like monkeys that might mount the driver-side mirror or wildcats that were too hot to take on a busload of Jews – but if anyone of us were to wander alone…no telling!

There’s some truth to back up the alarmist, overly cautious perspective most people at Hebrew U have taken when it comes to the neighborhoods of people who shoot off guns in the air each night to celebrate weddings or randomly set fires to things like stolen cars or piles of trash…still – I am convinced that people are people. The kids playing in the streets there are still kids. You know, it’s funny how anywhere in the world, you can give a group of kids a ball and voila (as in abracadabera, for you speedreaders, not a medium voiced stringed instrument), they know instantly what to do with it. You never see kids just look at it like – “What the fuck are we supposed to do with that?” They play. It’s what kids do. American kids. Israeli kids. Palestinian kids. Iraqi kids. To some of them, I was clearly an outsider and somewhere along the line they learned to spit on such as myself…but, unfortunate for them, they missed. I walk at a brisk pace with a confidence that says – "I’m somebody. I’m going somewhere, and wouldn’t you like to know details?" OK. It’s delusional, but it’s a healthy delusion.

Right?

Shut up. It is. It's all I got since I ran out of pills.

Anyway. I had a falafel and an RC cola in the Muslim Quarter today - the more or less off-limits quarter where a couple of students from the program got mugged with clubs recently. I have to say – it was the, hands-down, best falafel I’ve had here. AND, the Muslim areas were by far the most interesting places I’ve been to thus far. Thinking on it, to not have gone there while in Jerusalem would have been like going to Disneyland just to buy batteries. I am glad I went. There were Israeli police at every turn, and moms, we need to be realistic. We’re talking about people. This isn’t snake handling and speaking in epileptic tongues in the Bible-belt of Bush-voting red states; it’s people buying and selling food and clothing on the streets where they live - and occasionally kidnap people so CNN has something to air.

I also went to Holy Sepulchre. Finally was able to find it. Ummm. It should be said that Christians are fucking weird. Really palpably weird. Particularly Roman Catholics, Greek/Russian Orthodox, and Armenian Christians.

Seriously. If I personally had a driver-side mirror on me, these people would have lept up onto it and licked me! I mean – people kissing stones and climbing under things and lighting candles and immediately snuffing them out and lighting more and snuffing those out, dropping coins into holes, and weeping at pieces sparkly and shiny things and putting those sparkly, shiny things in really cold, damp, dark, smelly places where the candlelight only accentuates their sparkly-shininess. There has to be a chapter on them in the DSM-IV. Honestly, the whole place was just eerie. It didn’t feel like God was there. And the big Jesus that stares down at you from the cupola looks menacing and terribly displeased with you - just for breathing His musty inscense-air. It felt like people had died there - along time ago and just - and more were going to die – soon and after. It felt kind of scary and intimidating and hopeless. Like a cemetery with drag queen superintendents to sprinkle glitter on every dead thing and the box it was put in. Everything centered around death – not life – not love – not hope – not joy. Just darkness. Darkness with all the sophistication of Transylvania.

Now – by far one of the best places I’ve been here was the Garden Tomb. It’s probably the only protestant-run holy place here. It was absolutely beautiful. It was a garden. The garden of Joseph of Arimathea – they think. The history, the archeology – everything fits the story - I'll fill you in if you're interested. But for starters – the bible talks about Jesus being crucified outside the city walls, which was required by Jewish law. The Garden Tomb is just outside the walls. The Holy Sepulchre, on the other hand, is smack dab in the freaking middle of the city and was “identified” as a holy place by the mother of Emperor Constantine who came down from Greece so many centuries after the fact. What’s really funny is that people are kissing a stone which purports to be the stone Jesus’s body was anointed on before entombment. Essentially, above and beyond the herpes lottery, why would you want to kiss a stone that is drizzled with hundreds upon thousands of people's saliva and chapstick? Um, we know for a fact that that particular stone was put there in 1810, so Jesus may have made it, but he didn't lie down on it. What’s more amusing is that we also know that the place where the Holy Sepulchre Church is is the site of a Roman Temple to Venus. The Romans were the people who came up with the whole crucifixion thing for capital punishment, right? So, they probably wouldn’t want to do that in one of their temples, right? Um…yeah. Kinda like December 25^th for the birth of Christ who was born in the Jewish month of Tishri. Can we say, September/October?

Sigh.

The Garden Tomb was the most calm place I’ve been in in this whole city. The people who greeted me at the gate had Mormon manners. It was an intelligent, repectable, holy site which made no definitive claims, no solemn deference to tradition, just facts and a good case to support a very plausible connection between a site which was unearthed after being forgotten for a very long time but which is nonetheless validated as significant by early Christian markings around the tomb suggesting early, early, early Christians thought it was someplace pretty special. Anyway. Very cool place. Glad I made it a priority to go find it…in the Muslim part of the city. *wink*

I also stumbled onto another really cool place – again – a church, but not one which is highly publicized. Probably because it’s not flashy and scary. It seems to be the site of an early Byzantine church which was built on top of Caiphas’s palace which is replete with a prison. It’s supposed to be the place where Peter denied Jesus three times, and the underground dungeons etc are believed to be the authentic place where Jesus would have been held from the time of his arrest to the time of his trial. Again, there are all kinds of early, early Christian markings which predate the Byzantine church all of which would suggest that the initial Christians thought this place was significant. I’m beginning to think that the sites with Byzantine correlations are probably the more authentic ones. The rest seem to have popped up out of nowhere at the time of the Crusades. I mean, the Via Dolorosa was pretty much invented in the 15^th century and makes absolutely no sense since it has Jesus coming from the opposite direction of the Citadel toward the Holy Sepulchre Church. The Citadel is where we know Pilate ruled from, so the Roman trial would have happened there. Let's not even talk about how a trip from the Citadel or the first station of the Via Dolorosa to a place outside the city walls would never have led you to where the Holy Sepulchre is. Let's not even discuss how ridiculous that is.

It’s just really funny to me how religion perpetuates falsehoods for the political and economic benefit of the institution and its leadership and absolves itself of all evil with fine print that claims the laity can’t handle truth and faith instantiated by lies is better than no faith at all. I personally think no faith at all is better than faith in a lie. But that’s just me.

Anyhow – I’m gonna post this cause it’s getting late, but I didn’t want to neglect my fans.

Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem.

That’s the trouble with homophones.; everyone prays for his piece of Jerusalem.

Shalom, shalom. Pictures here.