Back blog: Jerusalem

Happy Independence Day! I love this holiday. Can't help it. I'm a sucker for parades, fireworks, and grilled hot dogs. Now if it would just stop raining here in NJ, I'd be a happy camper.

KC's watching Wimbledon and freaking out. Federer's just not up to snuff today. I thought I'd blog about our day in Jerusalem ... could it have been almost a month ago???

One day our friends in Israel brought us up to Jerusalem in the rental car. I was very frustrated because we'd gotten a very late start, and by the time we got to the Mount of Olives it seemed like everything was closed. NB: plan ahead, things in the Old City of Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives are never open when you think they are - and they're never closed when you think they are either.

We dragged ourselves up the Mount of Olives in the heat to get a lovely view of the Temple Mount (yes, I know this picture's from the evening. I left my full set of the pictures back in Cairo). It was getting later and later, and I was becoming more and more upset.

Finally, we got back into the car to head for the Old City. We crossed the valley and headed up to the top of the cliff along the outside of the wall. We were searching for parking, which seemed to be in very short supply, especially with the double-parked tourist buses lining the single-lane road along the cliff. Suddenly KC jerked the wheel and pulled us onto the narrow dirt track between the highway and the cliff edge. He'd seen a likely parking spot.

But as he was driving along the edge, we drove over a half-hidden rock ... and when the undercarriage of the car slammed down on the rock, we were good and stuck. On the edge of the cliff. Outside Jerusalem.

To make a long, hot, increasingly hilarious story short, it took 45 minutes, two physicists, two long-suffering vindicated women, some sticks, and a destroyed rental car jack to get us off the rock and back on the road. Believe me, KC was done picking parking spots for the day.

Our friends had managed to score us tickets to the archaeological tour of the Western Wall. We entered the site from the Western plaza next to the Wailing Wall, which is oh-so-modernly divided into male and female sections. The tour was definitely interesting, although it wasn't exactly, shall we say, objective and full of reliable content. Our tour guide was a young woman originally from Maryland whose family had moved to Israel when she was younger. I only presented one of my "scientific thinking" questions to her, which I thought she handled quite well, all things considered. In fact, we spent most of the day marveling at how much "information" seemed biased, unreliable, or just plain fictional. I guess that happens when you leave the empirical world and cross into the World of Religion and Culture.


The picture above was taken at a spot underneath the wall that is apparently as close as modern Jews can come to the site of the Second Temple. All these women had basically put themselves into trances - repetitive movements, droning chants, tears. It was somehow both moving and puzzling to me.

I don't have the fortitude to resist editorial comments in my description of how the Old City of Jerusalem is set up, so take a look at this Wikipedia page if you're interested. It really defies belief and rational thought, let me tell you. Before I left Cairo, my boss gave me a copy of this book that was clumsily written but informative. The history of Jerusalem is so full of people acting irrationally it's hard to believe. In fact, all day I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone in Jerusalem. Everything is just completely outside the realm of my experience.

After we finished in the Wall, we exited to an armed escort in the Muslim Quarter. To my satisfaction, we left our escort and wandered around a bit in this quarter. I suddenly felt very relaxed and happy in the Muslim Quarter. I could read the signs, I could talk to people, and I realized I felt very comfortable watching these people go about their daily business. I guess I really am getting culturally acclimated in Cairo.

As we wandered along something clicked in my brain and I realized we had crossed the Via Dolorosa, the pilgrim route that supposedly traces Christ's passage through the city on the way to his crucifixion. It's this walk that's the basis for the Stations of the Cross in the Catholic tradition - the tradition that I grew up with, incidentally. There was nothing for it, as far as I was concerned, but to throw ourselves into the Christian mindset and do the pilgrimage stuff - as far as was possible, anyway. So we walked the Via Dolorosa and I did my best to remember content from all those years of Sunday school. It seemed to me that the marked Via Dolorosa is unlikely to reflect any sort of historical accuracy. If it's the real one, Christ had to backtrack a whole lot - and it's uphill both ways, which is ironic. I found it was almost impossible to make any sort of statements at first, because I felt compelled to add "supposedly" and "in the tradition" and "possibly" to so many places in my sentences it was impossible to get them out!

Eventually we popped out at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the subject of the above book. I was pleased to realize that I was recognizing things from the book, including the subtle passage that brought us out onto the roof into the Ethiopian section of the church. The roof is the site of frequent beat downs between the Copts and the Ethiopians. I'm not kidding. They fight each other with clubs and rocks over who gets to do what in the Church. The day we were there, all was quiet.


The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a labyrinth of chapels and stairs built on top of the supposed site of Golgotha, the site of Christ's crucifixion. It was a little odd for me; in the Bible, the Crucifixion is described as taking place outside the city, and there we were, right inside the walls. The Church somehow encompasses the site of crucifixion, the prison where he was kept pre-execution, the places where Christ's body was treated (see below picture), and the tomb itself. I found this a little hard to believe; why would Joseph of Arimathea have bought tomb real estate right below the place where they executed criminals? Also, in an interesting coincidence, the tomb of Adam is also enclosed on the site. It got a bit hard to swallow.


KC very gamely walked through the whole church with me, visiting all the chapels and doing the whole pilgrim routine. We even waited in line to visit Christ's (empty) tomb, guarded by a zealous priest whose job seemed to be keeping everyone moving along. I was reminded of a very funny class session this semester where my students told me they wanted to do a DNA test on Jesus' body. An emergency Christianity lesson was necessary.


Finally, I ascended the stairs to the Calvary chapel. This chapel is built on the top of the hill where Christ was crucified; pilgrims can crawl under the altar and reach down through a hole to touch the stone of the hill. When I reached down I encountered something that felt remarkably like a stone box with a few coins in it, but then again, who am I to judge?


All in all, it was a very odd day for me. I found myself reaching back into my past for my former religion. Most of it was still there, and on that day at last the knowledge was finally useful. And yet I couldn't turn off the scientific portion of my brain, which really slowed down the information transfer to KC and my Jewish friends. Finally I told them to just "qualify everything I'm saying" in order to get the sentences out in a timely fashion.

My conclusions? Religion makes people stop thinking, and when people stop thinking, they do really stupid things. Like Christian monks fighting over inches of floor space in the holiest place in the world. Like Muslim children throwing rocks at Jewish tourists (didn't happen to us but I've heard stories) and vice versa. Like Hamas members shooting Jewish religious students.

The three major world religions have laid claim to Jerusalem. How about we all just take our heads out of our asses and let all people of the world share the world's heritage?