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[travel] Jerusalem, pt 2
More stories from Jerusalem:
This place is the closest you will come to experiencing day-to-day life in a city of 2000 years ago. Cars are kept out of the old city, so you pass through everything on foot. Streets are a cavernous human-scale tan stone habitrail of arched passageways, stairways, and narrow alleys. Religious buildings dominate the skyline, and people are squeezed into stone buildings in between. Every shop is a little hole-in-the-wall. It's glorious.
Ah, back to religion, the city's focus.
The holiest Christian site, the location where Jesus was supposedly laid to rest, was honored with an enormous church, but the six responsible Christian sects were fighting so bitterly about how exactly to decorate the church that they had to hand over the keys to the church to a Muslim because they couldn't trust one another. The responsibility of mediating for the squabbling Christians has been passed down through the same family for generations. Even now, Christ's tomb is decorated in a mishmash of six different styles of candelabra. The line for Christ's tomb was very long, but I found a porthole where I could look in. While the sight of a rock that may or may not have been the location of Jesus's final resting place didn't have much effect on me, I was very interested to see how it affected true believers. Their emotional reactions were stunning and beautiful. This was their culmination of a lifetime of faith – a trip to the holy lands, and a chance to ground their faith in something physical.
There's a huge jam-packed Jewish cemetery by the Mount of Olives. Apparently the Bible can be interpreted to state that at the end of the world, God will raise the dead starting at the Mount of Olives and then gradually working his way out. Basically, these people are all jostling (and I mean jostling.... these graves are cheek-to-cheek) to be the first in line to Heaven. They want to get all the good seats before they're all taken.
My friend Daniel was hustled by a rabbi at the holiest of Jewish holy sites, the Western Wall. While we were looking at an old copy of the Torah on display at the Wall, the rabbi pulled him aside, gave him some blessing, and then hit him up for cash. Daniel provided some, and then the rabbi tried to hit him up for more cash. So much for the holiest of holy sites.
I spent some time walking through the Muslim quarter. Parts of it have the edgy rough-and-ready feel you get in some lower-class neighborhoods in the US. However, other parts were filled with schoolchildren happily playing, oblivious to the tension. I noticed a lot of Palestinian kids with toy guns. These toy guns were all black, unlike the orange-lined ones you see in toy stores in the US. These also weren't little shiny funny-shaped ray guns. They looked sufficiently like real guns that I felt a bit uneasy. There were 14-year old kids waving around convincing-looking toy machine guns just a couple of blocks from where 19-year-old Israeli Defense Forces soldiers were standing around with real, loaded machine guns looking for signs of trouble. This can't end well.
I have very limited data to go on, but it seems like the Israeli government is already making a lot of compromises to the Palestinians to keep the peace in Jerusalem. Non-Muslims are not allowed into many sections of the city, and Muslims are given full control of the top of the Temple Mount even though it's also one of the holiest sites in the world for Jews, and there's plenty of empty space up on the Temple Mount to put up a Jewish temple in between the mosques.
My friends and I discussed various potential solutions to creating peace in the Middle East, but almost all of them came down to the same problem... there are enough fanatics on both sides who will screw up any compromise even if it's not in their best interest to do so.
I think the only real solution will have to involve forced cultural intermixing, and for that to be successful it has to be started when people are very young. It's hard to demonize a group when you've had playmates from that group as far back as you can remember. Currently parents can choose public integrated schooling or various faiths of religious schooling for their kids. Thus fundamentalists can raise their children in a very indoctrinating environment where they are not exposed to peers of other faiths. For intermixing to occur, public school needs to be mandatory and fully integrated, starting from preschool. This needs to happen for the good of society. It will require very effective teachers, as fundamentalist parents will probably be arming their children with various prejudices. It will also require Israel to give up some aspects of being a Jewish state, as ultra-orthodox Jews would no longer be able to raise their children in a biblically strict manner. However, the benefits of educating an entire generation of tolerant youth are well worth paying for, especially given the astronomically high cost Israel currently pays for security, both in terms of military budget and in terms of lost productivity.
I'm relatively new to this whole situation, so those of you who are experts on the Middle East should share your thoughts.
This place is the closest you will come to experiencing day-to-day life in a city of 2000 years ago. Cars are kept out of the old city, so you pass through everything on foot. Streets are a cavernous human-scale tan stone habitrail of arched passageways, stairways, and narrow alleys. Religious buildings dominate the skyline, and people are squeezed into stone buildings in between. Every shop is a little hole-in-the-wall. It's glorious.
Ah, back to religion, the city's focus.
The holiest Christian site, the location where Jesus was supposedly laid to rest, was honored with an enormous church, but the six responsible Christian sects were fighting so bitterly about how exactly to decorate the church that they had to hand over the keys to the church to a Muslim because they couldn't trust one another. The responsibility of mediating for the squabbling Christians has been passed down through the same family for generations. Even now, Christ's tomb is decorated in a mishmash of six different styles of candelabra. The line for Christ's tomb was very long, but I found a porthole where I could look in. While the sight of a rock that may or may not have been the location of Jesus's final resting place didn't have much effect on me, I was very interested to see how it affected true believers. Their emotional reactions were stunning and beautiful. This was their culmination of a lifetime of faith – a trip to the holy lands, and a chance to ground their faith in something physical.
There's a huge jam-packed Jewish cemetery by the Mount of Olives. Apparently the Bible can be interpreted to state that at the end of the world, God will raise the dead starting at the Mount of Olives and then gradually working his way out. Basically, these people are all jostling (and I mean jostling.... these graves are cheek-to-cheek) to be the first in line to Heaven. They want to get all the good seats before they're all taken.
My friend Daniel was hustled by a rabbi at the holiest of Jewish holy sites, the Western Wall. While we were looking at an old copy of the Torah on display at the Wall, the rabbi pulled him aside, gave him some blessing, and then hit him up for cash. Daniel provided some, and then the rabbi tried to hit him up for more cash. So much for the holiest of holy sites.
I spent some time walking through the Muslim quarter. Parts of it have the edgy rough-and-ready feel you get in some lower-class neighborhoods in the US. However, other parts were filled with schoolchildren happily playing, oblivious to the tension. I noticed a lot of Palestinian kids with toy guns. These toy guns were all black, unlike the orange-lined ones you see in toy stores in the US. These also weren't little shiny funny-shaped ray guns. They looked sufficiently like real guns that I felt a bit uneasy. There were 14-year old kids waving around convincing-looking toy machine guns just a couple of blocks from where 19-year-old Israeli Defense Forces soldiers were standing around with real, loaded machine guns looking for signs of trouble. This can't end well.
I have very limited data to go on, but it seems like the Israeli government is already making a lot of compromises to the Palestinians to keep the peace in Jerusalem. Non-Muslims are not allowed into many sections of the city, and Muslims are given full control of the top of the Temple Mount even though it's also one of the holiest sites in the world for Jews, and there's plenty of empty space up on the Temple Mount to put up a Jewish temple in between the mosques.
My friends and I discussed various potential solutions to creating peace in the Middle East, but almost all of them came down to the same problem... there are enough fanatics on both sides who will screw up any compromise even if it's not in their best interest to do so.
I think the only real solution will have to involve forced cultural intermixing, and for that to be successful it has to be started when people are very young. It's hard to demonize a group when you've had playmates from that group as far back as you can remember. Currently parents can choose public integrated schooling or various faiths of religious schooling for their kids. Thus fundamentalists can raise their children in a very indoctrinating environment where they are not exposed to peers of other faiths. For intermixing to occur, public school needs to be mandatory and fully integrated, starting from preschool. This needs to happen for the good of society. It will require very effective teachers, as fundamentalist parents will probably be arming their children with various prejudices. It will also require Israel to give up some aspects of being a Jewish state, as ultra-orthodox Jews would no longer be able to raise their children in a biblically strict manner. However, the benefits of educating an entire generation of tolerant youth are well worth paying for, especially given the astronomically high cost Israel currently pays for security, both in terms of military budget and in terms of lost productivity.
I'm relatively new to this whole situation, so those of you who are experts on the Middle East should share your thoughts.
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