Notes from Jerusalem

Abstract

Notes from Jerusalem Daniel Noah Moses I One morning I wake up thinking—I don’t need to be doing this anymore. It’s too much. I go swimming in the afternoon, which is wonderful. That night I meet two American friends; we eat grilled vegetables and drink whiskey. Tipsy in the taxi home, I find that Jerusalem is again a magical city. I pass the Old City walls. I pass where Abraham almost sacrificed his son, where the Temple used to stand, where Jesus was crucified, where Mohammed went up to heaven. Then I go home, brush my teeth and go to sleep. II Eighteen months before The toothless Israeli taxi driver and I sing together all the way from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, late on a Friday afternoon, with the windows open and the sun going down. The wiry and wrinkled driver grew up in Morocco, and he sings of his intense love for Jerusalem with a nasal soulful Arabic wail. When he hears that I have not been to Jerusalem in over ten years, that I just arrived from America, that I am moving to Jerusalem, he cannot contain his joy. Almost shabbat. On the way to Jerusalem. With the windows open and the sun going down. This is what the rabbis and mystics and peddlers of Poland dreamt about for generations. This was a Jewish prayer for 2,000 years. III A few days later, I walk in the Old City of Jerusalem with friends and friends of friends. In the room where, according to tradition, Jesus and the Apostles gathered for The Last Supper, an Orthodox Jewish teacher, bearded, head covered, explains what we are seeing. My friend, a Palestinian university professor in his fifties, corrects him on several points. The Jewish teacher turns to my friend. “You seem to know a lot about this room.” “My family lived here for 500 years,” explains my friend. His ancestor was a Moroccan Sheik who, one night, in the fifteenth century, had a dream: he dreamt he, as a good Muslim, should become the caretaker of King David’s Tomb. He moved with his family, his followers, his servants, his wealth, to Jerusalem. Once there, they took care of the tomb of King David—which is just under the room where, they say, the Last Supper took place (according to The New Testament, Jesus was a direct descendant of King David; according to Jewish and Christian traditions, The Messiah must be directly descended from this Royal Line). Later that day, my friend shows me a photograph from the early 1940s of his extended family in the garden of the complex where King David’s tomb is said to be, where the Last Supper is said to have taken place. The ancestral sheik is buried in a neglected mausoleum in “Independence Park,” on the Israeli side, in West Jerusalem, near other half‐forgotten Arab tombs, a Blockbuster’s video store and a good inexpensive Italian restaurant. IV The Holy Land is composed of walls, sacred space, separate worlds. I jump them. Lunch in Hebron; dinner in Tel Aviv. Actual distance has nothing to do with the physical realm. Emotional and spiritual geography have their own reality. On Ben Yehuda Street, the kids with pierced eyebrows and noses and chins skateboard past the black‐coated “haredi” Jews who, in their own way, with the long “payess” (side‐curls), look just as funky. The sidewalks are crowded with tired Russian immigrants, with rambunctious American yeshiva students, with tourists, with Ethopian Jews standing guard to check bags at coffee shops. Young soldiers get on the bus with guns strapped across their shoulders. The soldiers are all colors; all sizes; the green uniforms wrap them up like the candies in a box of mystery chocolates. Their parents and grandparents come from the deserts of Yemen; from the shops of Baghdad and Warsaw; from the rolling countryside outside of Cluj. Where else can one see beautiful young women with machine guns hanging casually between their breasts? Take a right on Jaffa Road (from Ben Yehuda) and head toward Damascus Gate. In ten minutes, by foot, you are in another world. The covered Muslim...