My Holy Week in Israel
When Joshua Levine flew over Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock and the site of Jesus’s resurrection still shone out prominently
As Easter approached, I was flown almost the entire length of Israel and Palestine (and across into Jordan) in a little light aircraft. As it buzzed uncertainly along, I understood just how small Israel is, and how much of it is covered by stark, bare, uninviting desert. It is an environment in which only the most desperate would choose to settle.
We flew over two ancient sites – Qumran and Masada – settled by fugitives escaping Jerusalem. The Essenes of Qumran were Jews disgusted by the corruption of the Jerusalem Temple. They fled the city 2,000 years ago to form an ascetic desert community. At Masada in around AD 72-73, Jewish rebels were besieged by the Romans. In their desert compound, the rebels chose to commit mass suicide rather than be taken.
The desert is now punctuated by Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements. The villages are poor, their flat-roofed buildings topped by water towers. The settlements might be gated communities in Florida, their pitched roofs capped with terracotta tiles. They sit at once together and apart, tied to the old stories. ‘Masada will not fall again!’ cry the settlers, the rebels’ heirs.
As we flew over Jerusalem, a golden cupola stood out. It caps the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine built over the rock from which Mohammed ascended to heaven. The site is also known as Mount Moriah, where King David set down the Ark of the Covenant and proclaimed his holy city. And on the same spot once stood the magnificent temples of Solomon and Herod, the base of which – the Western Wall – is Judaism’s holiest site. A few inches to the left, staring down from the plane, I saw the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site of Jesus’s crucifixion, burial and resurrection.
I was awed by the influence of this thumbprint of land on the world. Down there is who we all are. Though I’m no longer religious, I mumbled the Shema, a Hebrew prayer. Partly out of habit. Partly because I still have no better method of expressing awe. And partly because I wish I could still pray and mean it.
I was here at the invitation of the sculptor Mark Coreth. Mark had recently carved a large bronze olive tree for the garden of St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital in the centre of the Old City. Instead of leaves, the branches sprouted swifts, which nest happily in the holy sites of all three Abrahamic faiths.
Now Mark was leading a flight of eight small aircraft, containing Jews, Muslims and Christians, alongside the swifts’ annual migration path. A Jordanian general who negotiated the 1994 peace treaty sat with an astronaut recently returned from the International Space Station. An international expert on the behaviour of birds sat with a humanitarian adviser to the UN. Mark was carving ‘a message of hope and mutual respect’ above the Holy Land.
In the following days, I rediscovered
Jerusalem. It isn’t really one city but four: the Jewish religious city, the Jewish secular city, the Arab city and the walled Old City.
Each of these is physically and spiritually separate, and no visit is complete without them all. A fifth city, the Heavenly City, is described in the Book of Revelation. It contains many features of the Garden of Eden and promises an end to suffering and death – but is no longer accessible.
From the air, the Old City appeared densely packed. On the ground it feels even more so. Divided into four quarters – Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Armenian – it is almost entirely resistant to change. Its walls have been built from the same golden limestone for over 3,000 years. Donkeys and zealots still pace its uneven, vehiclefree streets. A wooden ladder leaning against the Church of the Holy Sepulchre hasn’t been moved for at least 200 years. When Jesus returns, he will recognise the place.
He might recognise the people, too. Every year, dozens of perfectly sane visitors are so overwhelmed by the city’s religious intensity that they begin to act like Biblical characters. They preach in the streets, imagining themselves prophets and holy men. After a period of hospitalisation, they return to perfectly normal lives, having fallen victim to Jerusalem Syndrome, an officially recognised psychotic condition.
Jerusalem is so febrile that many visitors profess to hate it. But this is what fascinates me. As I watch Jews and Arabs and Christians jostling each other on the Via Dolorosa, they strike me as competitive members of a single family, despising one another for thinking ever-so-slightly differently about things that matter to nobody else. “You observe Sabbath on which day?”
The only time I’ve ever felt truly scared in Jerusalem was several years ago, when I accidentally drove into Mea She’arim, an orthodox Jewish area, on a Friday night, after the beginning of the Sabbath. Men and boys dressed in unseasonal gabardines and fur hats began tossing rocks at my car. Not all exertion is forbidden on the Sabbath, apparently.
On the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I visited the Ethiopian Orthodox chapel. The Church is divided among the different Christian denominations – and the Ethiopians are clearly the poor relations. For centuries, they have been relegated to a tiny makeshift chapel with space for just three small wooden benches on either side of a narrow nave. I stood at the back during Mass – and listened to something that sounded remarkably like a synagogue service.
The service had been conducted in Ge’ez, a dead language similar to Hebrew. The Ethiopian Church, it seems, is a 1,600-year-old throwback to a time when Jewish ritual was still morphing into Christian ritual.
Do visit the Israel Museum to fall back on some actual facts. The museum is unafraid of disproving (or, for that matter, confirming) Biblical stories. While there, I became obsessed by a 2,000-year-old heel bone pierced by a rusty nail. This heel bone, belonging to a man named Yehohanan, is the only solid archaeological evidence of crucifixion discovered in the Roman world. Yet the exhibit on show is only a plastic copy: the Bible declares human remains to be a source of ritual impurity, and so the original isn’t on public view.
Towards the end, as my trip began to feel like a race to get home before the onset of Jerusalem Syndrome, I was grateful for my choice of guest-house. The Austrian Hospice was an oasis of sanity in the Old City. Built in the 1850s for Austrian pilgrims, it was comfortable and inexpensive, serving unusually good coffee for Jerusalem. And it was an excellent base for wandering through the local shops.
The day before I left, I walked into a shop in the Jewish Quarter. The shopkeeper sized me up, before leaning under the counter and pulling out an aerial photograph of the Old City. It was perfectly nice – but something looked wrong.
Then I saw it. The Muslim Dome of the Rock had been Photoshopped out and replaced with a detailed rendering of Herod’s Jewish Temple. The shopkeeper grinned like a naughty schoolboy. Did I like it? Did I want it?
I was ready to go home to boring old London.