Finding Love in Jerusalem

This is a hard post to write.  I’ve been thinking about it ever since we visited Jerusalem, trying to think of ways of explaining my thoughts, my feelings.  So, if this is slightly incoherent, bear with me – just aim to get past the words and feel what I’m saying, intuit it rather than analyse it. 

I have a real big hefty problem with religion.  I hate to offend (yet know I will and I apologise here and now) but truly I believe that religion has blood smeared all over its body and soul.  It’s been said before, so many times, but a huge proportion of war and murder throughout history has been promulgated in the name of religion.  My god is better than your god.  My religion is right; yours is wrong.

I understand why people believe; I think I do.  It has been said that we have a genetic propulsion towards belief; that belief in a god or gods is effectively a survival mechanism; that without belief, we can easily fall into despond, believing that the universe is ungoverned, our lives purely animalistic, without deeper meaning. I get that.  And I don’t mind belief; I don’t mind faith, I don’t mind different religions, people worshipping in whatever way they wish. I just hate the religious dogma; the one-upmanship; the hard-lining – I’m in, you’re out; I’m right, you’re wrong.

Really.  Think about it.  Imagine, for a moment, there is a god.  A God. Let’s keep it simple and just deal with one for now, okay?  God is up there/in here/wherever – all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful.  Do you really, truly honestly think He/She/It is going to fret about the detail?  About which day we take for rest; about which foods we eat or don’t eat; about whether a festival is celebrated this way or that way?  About what kind of covering we wear or don’t wear on our heads?  Really?  Truly?  Honestly?  And, if He/She/It does, then - you know what – I’m not sure I’m terribly impressed by Someone/thing that is quite so petty. 

Individual religions and their rules erupt from social and geographical conditions and that’s fine.  I don’t have a problem with anyone celebrating spirituality in any way they wish.  Just accept that it is a choice and that other people can celebrate it in their own different (not better, not worse) way. It’s when religion starts or fuels conflict that my blood really boils.

I went to former Yugoslavia literally right before the bloodbath began. I remember sitting in a café in Sarajevo talking to a bunch of people over lunch.  They truly didn’t believe there would be war.  ‘We’re too well integrated,’ one of them said. ‘Look at us here, round this table  – I’m Muslim, he’s Catholic, she’s Greek Orthodox, he’s Jewish…and so on.’  Yet, the day I left the tanks rolled into Zagreb. The market I’d shopped in was bombed; the mountain we’d picnicked on became a front-line; to this day I wonder if those people round the table are still alive.

In Israel, nobody even pretends there is integration - because there isn’t.  Yet in Jerusalem, three religions (and many variations within those three) are squashed into one small city centre, eyeing each other up uneasily like children in a playground. 

‘Jerusalem is weird,’ my friend Jane told me before I went. ‘I hated it.’

I didn’t.  I loved the higgledy-piggeldy streets, the architectural play of curve and line – reminiscent of a child’s wooden building blocks.  I loved the brashness of the souks, the vendors cajoling; the clouds of incense; the twists and turns.  As Tel Aviv is all fresh and funky and outgoing; Jerusalem is ancient and deep and introspective. It broods, despite the sun.

We went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre - as tourists.  A shop was selling crowns of thorns at the entrance.  Inside there were Islamic tiles and stained glass in the ante-rooms.  I wished people would see the similarities, rather than the differences.  There's a lesson in Kabbala - all religions find a place on the Tree of Life.

This is Golgotha, where Christ was crucified.  There was a queue to pray at the altar, to lay one’s hand on the Rock of Calvary.  And I don’t know why I queued but I did, chatting to Rosie, snapping pictures as we waited.  But then, as I knelt down and laid my hand on the rock, going through the motions, something happened.  It felt like something had stabbed me in the heart, deep, deep, deep. Tears sprang to my eyes and I fought hard to keep control.  What was it? 

Love. Total overwhelming Love. Unconditional love that sweeps away all prejudice, all difference, all wanting, all needing, all sense of I, of ego. 

I staggered to my feet and walked unsteadily away.  Someone touched me on the arm. Michal, who runs the educational programme at Kinetis. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes, sure. It was just…’

‘Powerful?  Yes, it is. It hits me too. And I’m Jewish.’ She smiled.  ‘Maybe it’s the years of belief and prayer that imbue the atmosphere of Jerusalem. Faith sticks to the walls.’

Maybe it is.  Maybe it does.

We walked then to the Western Wall. Watched the same kind of pilgrimage, the same intent, the same need. This time prayers written on paper and pressed into crevices.

So many people.  So much humanity.  The same hearts and bodies dressed in different ways; the same anguishes and desires wrapped in different rituals.  It sounds trite, it sounds New Age and hippy dippy, but really – we are all just people. 

What was my prayer, for the wall?  It has to be obvious, surely?

To dissolve the need for enmity, to eliminate fear over that which is different; to replace hate and suspicion with that one true cleansing emotion. Love. 

Does that leave you wide wide open?  Yes.  Does it mean you can be hurt, used, manipulated, crucified even? Yes. Does that matter?  No. 

Deserts, dreams and angels

Oh, what is it with me and deserts?  I don’t know, I just don’t know but they pull me, they pull me, inexorably.  They soothe my heart and they scour my soul.  I had been promised desert on this trip and so it was to be.  But I wondered, I wondered.  We were a large group.  Deserts are solitary places.  I needed time.  I needed to be.  I needed to meditate and get back in touch.  Was it possible?

We drove to the Dead Sea, past Jerusalem (I still can’t quite get my head round glancing out the window and seeing a road sign to The Mount of Olives) and, strangely, we weren’t talking on the bus.  There was an easy silence so I put on my iPod and let it go on shuffle and – hmm – it landed on my shamanic drumming track and I figured, well why not, it’s as good a place as any to journey for guidance… and it was a strange journey for sure.

When I opened my eyes the dust had began.  Past Bedouin settlements, dust-coloured shacks blended into dust. Past dust-coloured camels, gazing with total disinterest from dust.  The Judean Desert.  Midbar Yehuda.  

And then the rock began…striated sculptures, Lego of the gods.  And then, oh, and then, a haze, a shimmer of blue. Sky? Sea. The Dead Sea.  The lowest point on the Earth.  Jordan on the other side.  I love these water boundaries – it reminded me of a very different one on Lake Ohrid in Macedonia – with the Albanian border snaking through the waves.

But this was Ein Gedi.   And we met Giora and Barak who loaded us into LandRovers and we bounced our way up and into the desert…

Scrambling down the banks of a wadi; walking along the arid bed of a sleeping river until we came to a sheer cliff face, a natural auditorium with clear acoustics…sat on rocks and then – magic.  This guy who’d appeared pretty well out of nowhere, hitching a lift on our bus, took out a guitar and started to strum and sing.  Beautifully. 

He sang this…

And then he sang Faith...

And then A Horse with No Name (of course)...

And Barak carved open a water melon and it was the sweetest flesh I had ever tasted.  And, truly, I could have sat there and dreamed for ever…

The guy’s name?  Raphael.  Hmm…

PS

He didn't play this one but it's a damn good desert song, no?

Jerusalem is "complicated"

‘This is a complicated city,’ says Shai, head of the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem. He gives a rueful shrug as if he knows full well this were the understatement of the year.  ‘And a zoo in Jerusalem is a very different thing from a zoo in London, Barcelona, Los Angeles.  I reckon I’m the only zoo director who starts off talking about human beings, rather than animals.’ 

A group of small children race past at a hundred miles an hour, giggling out loud.  A family steps aside sedately to let them pass.  Shai nods at them.  ‘I can tell by their dress that the family are Palestinian Muslims, the school children are orthodox Jews.  But, you see, this is the one place where everybody can come. Everyone who walks through the gates is welcome.’ 

It could sound corny anywhere else but he has a serious point.  This is possibly the only place in Jerusalem where religion and politics need not raise their heads (except, of course, we’re talking about it).  ‘It’s one of the very few places that orthodox Jews will come, for example, because their religious strictures count out most other cultural pursuits – museums, theatre and so forth.  Yet, because a zoo purely presents ‘God’s creation’ it is deemed suitable. 

‘Of course they don’t come to learn about conservation, about our breeding programmes, about our ecological pursuits..’  He pauses and grins… ‘Yet, hey, once they’re here…we hope we can raise some awareness.’

Shai loves to tell stories and his stories have messages.  He tells us about the zoo's disastrous attempts to get their flamingos breeding.  After trying every ingenious situation going (from oomphing their diet to placing mirrors around the lake to kid the birds into thinking their flock was larger) they realised, to their acute embarrassment that the reason their flock of 60 wasn’t producing eggs was quite simple: they had 60 male flamingos. 

Moral of the story?  Check your basic assumptions.

He then goes on to explain, ruefully, that even adding females into the mix hadn’t produced a rash of eggs.  Meanwhile another zoo, much less pristine and fabulous, had a superb breeding programme. ‘Maybe, just maybe perfect conditions, perfect facilities aren’t the most important thing,' he says.  'Maybe it’s something else – Love perhaps?’

He smiles and takes us to meet the Griffon vultures and tells the tale of the gay vultures – the pair of males which fell in love and built a nest together.  The zoo tried to split them up but then, realising they weren’t having any success, took pity on the star-crossed lovers and let them build their nest, even giving them first a dummy egg and then a newly hatched chick to raise.  ‘They were the best parents,’ says Shai. ‘Loving, attentive – and hey, guess what?  Their chick grew up totally naturally and went on to have chicks of her own – so gay parenting really doesn’t affect a child’s development!’  He grins rogueishly.

Moral of the story?  Be open-minded. 

Then, oh my, we go to meet the elephants.  As in really meet the elephants – up so close we could nigh-on hug them.  There was a moral here but, to be honest, I missed it as I was talking to Ofer, a journalist with the newspaper Ha'Aretz, who was telling me more about the political minefield that is life in Israel. But really, the lesson of elephants is,surely, quite simple.  Beauty, dignity, love.

In Tel Aviv, it was possible to ignore, if not forget, the huge conflicts surrounding this baby nation carved out of desert.  In Jerusalem it is impossible. Three major world religions jostle uneasily, their buildings and worshippers nudging right up against one another.  Bullet holes pit the ancient city gates.  And that most physical and redolent of boundaries – a wall – stretches out over the hills surrounding.  

Will there ever be peace; ever any kind of reconciliation, resolution?  Nobody I spoke to seemed very hopeful. 

I found myself thinking, as I walked away from the most famous wall of all, having poked my prayer into a tiny gap, how sad that we can’t learn from the lessons of the zoo. 

Check your assumptions

Be open-minded.

And, above all. Love.