Posted under Israel & Middle East
Nestled on the western border of the infamous West Bank and simultaneously claimed as Holy Land by Muslims, Jews and Christians who live there in a segregated togetherness, Jerusalem can most accurately be described as “intense”. We stayed at the Jaffa Gate Hostel, inside the Old City, near the Tower of David. The hostel was friendly enough, tucked back in a small nook amid the old stone walls, but it left a lot to be desired in the way of cleanliness. We have come to realize that paying to rent a room, even in an establishment that is in the business of renting rooms, does not guarantee you a clean room. The linens, though tattered and worn, seemed relatively fresh but the shower, if you could even call it that, was filthy. It appeared as though it hadn’t had a good (or even a bad) scrubbing in quite some time. Also, as with many old buildings with old plumbing, you couldn’t flush ANY paper products down the toilet – I will never get used to that as long as I live! To compound the issue, there was no daily maid service to empty the trash. Suffice it to say that this girl was ready to either vomit or move on at the end of our three night stay.
We planned our first day of sightseeing using brochures from the tourist information center near our hostel. We decided against purchasing the Israel guide book since our stay would be short but we definitely missed having one. The Lonely Planet guide books are expensive but they are like our Bible on the road. Since we had only budgeted a few days in Jerusalem, we tried to fit in as many sites as possible on the first day, which turned out to be a bit overwhelming.
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum, was high on our list of sites, partly because we had been lazy about doing any research in advance on the Christian sites and partly because our combined Bible knowledge is borderline heathen, so we hopped on the morning bus to educate ourselves on one of the most powerful and haunting events in human history. There is no real way to mentally prepare yourself for the experience of walking through the most comprehensive collection of Holocaust artifacts and personal accounts of the survivors. The museum is in a nondescript location about two hundred yards from the main road. The focal point as you enter the compound is a plain white building, which houses a reception desk, cafeteria, cloakroom, and gift shop. The museum itself is built underground. The large rectangular structure is brilliantly designed in such a way that you enter from one end, view each section chronologically through a zigzag formation, and finally emerge breathless, tearful and forever changed at the opposite end. The beginning of the exhibit focuses on answering the most pondered question regarding the Holocaust: How did humanity let such atrocities take place? How did a regime of hatred and unadulterated murder literally exterminate millions of innocent people while the world remained oblivious or turned a blind eye? The audio tour, stunning photographs, and descriptions of political, social, and economic conditions in post WWI Germany lay the foundation for understanding the people’s vulnerability to Hitler’s horrific brainwashing schemes. Why Hitler chose the Jews as his target still remains a mystery. It is, however, abundantly clear that he built his political strength on the desperation and despair of the people, providing them a scapegoat for their struggles. The German Jews were educated, cultured, affluent and hardworking. They could not fathom the hatred that was brewing around them, among their own countrymen. They had no way of predicting the horrific course of events that became their collective fate. Hitler preached fear into the hearts of the Germans – fear that the Jews were a threat to their very existence. He preyed on man’s inherent struggle to survive. Kill or be killed. History has repeatedly shown that we humans, created by God in his own image, can be manipulated like puppets on a string by governments and mass media.
As I walked through the many rooms of the exhibit, listening to the personal accounts of Holocaust survivors who had been children and teenagers at the time, I grew increasingly emotional and often found myself choking back tears. The depravity of abuses and degradation, the lack of regard for human suffering and human life, are unimaginable and yet here were walls of photographs of hundreds of emaciated corpses, diaries of innocent children who perished at the hands of their evil captors, the recorded tearful interviews of survivors describing gruesome details no photographs captured. Millions of Jews were heinously murdered. Millions! I want to scream at the thought but I can only cover my eyes and fight back the tears that want to flow like a river of the blood of millions.
The museum is dedicated to the all of the living and the dead who were victims of the Holocaust. Admission is free. The powerful experience of walking through the zigzagging corridors could not be equaled by reading a hundred books on the subject. It was a haunting, overwhelming, shocking, intense moment of enlightenment that has left me forever changed. Every person should see this place. It would change the world.
The Christian Sites
We had spent several hours at Yad Vashem, much longer than we had planned, and when we finally emerged in the early afternoon, I was emotionally exhausted. I would have preferred an afternoon of quiet contemplation but that was not in the cards. We took the bus back to the Old City and tried to walk to Dome of the Rock, which was built upon the rock which Abraham is believed to have bound Isaac in preparation for the sacrifice. It is a holy place for Muslims, many of whom go there to pray when they are called to prayer over the loudspeaker five times a day. The Ramadan breakfast seems to occur at a different time in every town and in the hour or two before breaking the fast that day, the narrow, enclosed stone road in the Muslim Quarter, leading to Dome of the Rock, was completely congested with shoulder-to-shoulder pedestrian traffic. We slowly shoved our way through the crowd but as we reached the entrance to the Dome, we were sternly turned away by armed Israeli guards; no gringos allowed. How they differentiated us from Muslims going to the mosque to pray is beyond me…just kidding.
We pushed our way back through the crowd and turned down the Via Dolorosa, where an intimidated-looking group of European tourists were eagerly waiting for the Ramadan madness to run its course so that they could cross. We walked the Via Dolorosa from the Lions Gate to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This is the road on which Jesus carried the cross to the site of the Crucifixion. It was a narrow, stone road lined with stone and mortar buildings and, as we walked, we came upon the Prison of Christ, where he was held in captivity prior to his death. The prison was cavernous, claustrophobic and full of sweaty tourists. We descended a narrow, winding staircase to the lowest level and found a single cell: a deep hole carved out of the wall and rusted iron bars, sealing the fate of the captive. In ancient times, there would have been no light, no place to relieve oneself; nothing but hopelessness. We emerged stoic and thankful for the fresh air and daylight in the street. We continued along our path to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which contains the sites where Jesus was nailed to the cross, crucified, prepared for burial and buried. It all seemed surreal and we spent the afternoon in a state of weary disbelief. It didn’t hit us until later that we had stood in front of the most significant sites in the history of Christianity.
The Dead Sea
The earliest morning bus from Jerusalem dropped us off in the parking lot of our intended destination: the Ein Gedi Spa. The admission price was about $15, which included use of the spa facility, shuttle to the Dead Sea, a mineral mud bath and the spa pool. We changed into our swimsuits and decided to walk the path to the Dead Sea. It was a long, straight dirt road; with mountains behind us and the sea in front of us, we felt the desolation of our surroundings. The walk to the sea lasted about fifteen hot minutes and we arrived among the first sea-goers of the day. After dropping our things on a couple of sun chairs, we carefully waded in. The shore was made of solid, crystallized salt that created a glistening, wavy ground beneath our feet. The water felt oily and warm on our skin. When we were about waist deep, we sat down as if in a chair and the density of the water caused our feet to shoot up as though we were sitting in a Lazy Boy. In a swimming pool, you can float on your back, with your body straight, and rise and fall as you inhale and exhale. You control your buoyancy with your breath. In the Dead Sea, you are buoyant; you float, even at full exhalation. It is oddly relaxing, comfortable and effortless. You feel as though you are lying on a float in a swimming pool, only there is nothing beneath you but water. We floated and laughed away the beautiful, cloudless day. We were so happy.
After frolicking in the water like schoolchildren, we rinsed off in the freshwater shower and rode the shuttle to the mineral mud bath area, where there was already a crowd of mud-covered, giddy tourists. We went right for it, digging our hands into the square wooden trough of slimy Dead Sea mineral mud and slathering it all over ourselves and each other. I liked the way it felt on my skin and the way it made our bodies sleek and dark. Playing in the mud put everyone in a playful mood and we were no exception. We let the mud work its mineral magic for the recommended twenty minutes and then followed the crowd to the sulphur shower. The water was unpleasantly hot and tasted awful. I hurriedly scrubbed the mud off my body and moved to the freshwater shower to rinse away the smell and taste of the sulphur. Satisfactorily rinsed, we headed to the spa to find some lunch. I had asked Aaron in the morning to give me one day without commenting on the price of anything and he humored me, even at the whopping $15 sticker price on the buffet, which reminded me of a lesser quality version of Bishops. We ended the Ein Gedi Spa day with a short dip in the spa pool and then caught the first afternoon bus back to Jerusalem.
A quick comment (a.k.a. short rant) on the public buses in Israel…
There is a phenomenon at the main bus stations whereby passengers push and shove in a barbaric, disorderly fashion at the terminal gate for admission onto the bus. The problem is this: tickets are sold at the ticket counter inside the bus station but with no assigned seating and passengers can alternatively pay the fare to the driver upon entering the bus. The unruly patrons, mostly young adults, have no respect for the order and civility of a single file line. They elbow and shoulder their way to the front of the crowd under the guise that only the strong shall survive; likewise, only the ruthless and pushy shall get a seat on the bus. And it’s absolutely true! You can arrive at the gate thirty minutes early to get in line but people completely disregard the line and push their way to the front. It’s maddening!
We spent our last day in Jerusalem catching a few last-minute sights. We saw the crypt where the Virgin Mary lived the remainder of her life after the Crucifixion and eventually died. The crypt was a cavernous vault on the lower level of a church. In the center was a carving of the Blessed Virgin lying in repose, encircled by benches on which you could kneel and pay your respects. A tour group entered shortly after we did and commenced to sing a beautiful hymn to Mary in Italian, the harmony reverberating off the ancient marble walls. Again, the experience was surreal. The story of Mary’s life is just that – a story to me; it was difficult to comprehend that this was the place where the flesh and blood Virgin actually lived and died. We also saw the room where the Last Supper supposedly took place and I felt the same way there – stoic. Part of the problem was that we viewed these Holy sites in the presence of a throng of tour groups, their trusty guides explaining the details in seemingly every language except English. The experience of walking inside those walls in quiet solitude would have been a more suitable environment for prayer, reflection and realization of where we were. We concluded Jerusalem with the Ramparts Walk – a walk along the top of the stone wall surrounding the Old City. From there, we got some excellent views of the Dome of the Rock and the Temple of Mary Magdalene, as well as a bird’s eye view of the Muslim Quarter, bustling with the usual Ramadan madness. The intensity of Jerusalem was overwhelming and the population of religious extremists created an atmosphere which I found to be stifling and ultra-conservative from every angle. While we believe that there is much more to Jerusalem than we have uncovered during our short stay, we are ready to move on.
The Sea of Galilee
At the last minute, we decided to spend a couple of days in the sleepy resort town of Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee’s western shores. This area, not far from Nazareth, is where Jesus is said to have spent almost thirty years of his life and where he multiplied fish and bread to feed five thousand people. Today it is where vacationing Israelis come to enjoy the picturesque mountains surrounding the serene sea. We had envisioned spending a few relaxing days sitting in seaside cafés and lounging on sandy beaches to rejuvenate ourselves for our upcoming Petra adventures. The reality was a non-descript, two-street town with trendy clothing shops but few cafés, many of which had already begun closing down for the winter. The only beaches were rocky, cobbled patches along a busy highway without a sunbather in sight. The highlight of our short stay was a great meal at a quaint restaurant called Little Tiberias, where we enjoyed a wonderful local Galil Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon and three delectable, leisurely courses. We have had very few alcoholic beverages thus far on our trip so the two half-bottles of wine slipped easily down our throats and worked wonders on our spirits.
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