The passing of a beloved singer or poet is a sad affair, the initial shock on hearing the news segueing into bitter-sweet memories of songs and poems and how they provided a soundtrack or bookmark to significant events in our lives. We’ve had opportunities aplenty this year with so many of our icons knocking on heaven’s door.
But the murder of singers and poets on account of their words and their voices is sadder still. It diminishes our lives and indeed, it diminishes the world in which we live, and in its hatred and nihilism, strikes at the heart of the values we hold most dear.
So it was with Spanish poet Garcia Lorca, murdered in 1936 by Generalissimo Franco’s Nationalist soldiery at the beginning of the savage Spanish Civil War. So it was with Chilean folk singer and songwriter Victor Lara, slain in a soccer stadium in September 1973 by Augusto Pinochet’s thugs.
Rest In Peace, Amjad Fareed Sabri, acclaimed Pakistani maestro of Qawwali Sufi devotional music who was murdered in Karachi in June this year by Taliban militants.
Ajmat and his brother Maqbool were the acclaimed Sabri Brothers, two the most renowned qawwals – up there with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, muse and mentor of Jeff Buckley.
The Sabri Brothers
The songs Ahmad Sabri and his father performed are part of a Sufi tradition dating back to the 13th century. Known as Qawwalis, steeped in mysticism and sometimes based on mystic poetry, they are a key part of the spiritual life of millions of Muslims across south Asia and enjoyed by wider audiences of many faiths.
But both the music, and the shrines at which it is often performed, have long been a target for religious conservatives who shun all forms of music and consider the shrines unorthodox. Dozens of sites have been targeted in attacks, including a 2010 suicide bombing at one of Pakistan’s most popular shrines. Qawwalis have long been criticized by the Taliban and other hard-line groups that reject all music as un-Islamic, and particularly object to those songs which focus on the life of the prophet Muhammad.
The murder of a popular singer from a famous and well-loved musical dynasty was a clear warning to others trying to celebrate and preserve Pakistan’s indigenous traditions, and the pluralism and diversity of religious practice and cultural expression in this tortured part of the world.
I recall seeing the Sabri Brothers perform in London in 1977, led in those days by Ajmad’s father Ghukam Farid, just before I departed for Oz. I still treasure – and play – these glorious songs of praise. their driving rhythms, exotic melodies, and spirited call and response, and enthralling and hypnotic, Here are two of my long-time favourites, sung by Sabri Senior. Listen for yourself.
‘Bhar do Jholi’ is a praise song for the Prophet and for his companion Bilal and his grandson Hussein, (who with his father Ali are the founding martyrs of Shia Islam). Read the translated lyrics here.
‘Balaghal bi Kamalihi’ tells the story of Muhammad’s night journey to Jerusalem on the horse Buraq. Read the translated lyrics here.
I know we’ve come a long way, We’re changing day to day, But tell me, where do the children play?
Cat Stevens
A feature of the growth of Jewish “settlements” in the Old City of Jerusalem – houses occupied by Jewish families, bought or rented from Muslim and Christian owners through a mix of arms-length transactions, subterfuge, proxy purchasers, and intimidation – is the appearance of “kindie convoys ” in the crowded, colourful, bustling streets of the Muslim Quarter.
You will be walking down Suq al Khan az Zait towards the Danascus Gate, or al Wad, the Main Street, towards where it crosses the Via Dolorosa at the IV and V Stations of the Cross, amidst busy weekend shoppers and folk heading to the Haram for Friday prayer. Then, of a sudden, like a school of little fish, a gaggle of small children in kippas and backpacks flows onto the crowded street, enroute to kindie or home.
But these kids are like none other around them – those running, jumping, excitable, hyperactive Arab children who regard these ancient streets as their playground. For the Jewish littlies are being herded, and guarded, by slim, casually dressed young men with tee shirts over what appear at first glance to be bulging waistlines, but are in fact utility belts that would make Batman proud, and concealed handguns.
Two to the fore, two aft, and two more on each side of the infant convoy, keeping them in line and coaxing in the strays who meander out of the designated two-by-two line. And all the time, these young men turn and scan the streets, pedestrians, the roof tops, constantly alert, constantly scanning – and not being discrete about it either. They make no pretense at subtlety. For their very attitude is a warning, a demonstration of firepower, to any who would disturb or threaten their little convoy in any way: “you don’t want to mess with us!”
It reminded us of the scene in Series Three of “Deadwood” when, after Alma Garrett is fired upon by Hearst’s hired guns, antihero Al Swearengen orders his men to watch over her as she walks to her bank.
We follow them for quite a distance – immediately behind them, in fact -, and the rearguard look us up and down too. This is not the time for grabbing a Kodak moment.
Then, just as suddenly as they first appeared, the young men herd their charges into the passageway of a hidden house, or up a deserted alleyway, the wary rearguard facing the street until their cargo is safely delivered.
And then they are all gone.
Demographic Qualifier
The events described above took place in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City.
The population of the Old City is overwhelmingly Muslim – are an estimated thirty thousand Muslims here, and the population is growing due to high birth rates.
In the past, Christians, predominantly Armenian and Greek Orthodox, constituted a significant minority, concentrated in the centuries-old Christian and Armenian Quarters. The Arab Christian population has declined significantly since 1967, and stands at less than 6,000 according to the latest census figures. As with so many things in Jerusalem, appearances are deceptive. In the Christian Quarter, where pilgrims and clergy throng 24/7, almost all of the shops that cater for the tourists and the faithful are owned by Muslim Arabs as Christian owners have sold up and departed.
Christian numbers have declined drastically over recent decades, a development that has been mirrored throughout East Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories. From some 20% during the Mandate, to under 1% today. Bethlehem was once a predominantly Christian city, and this is no longer the case. Ramallah’s population used to be about 20% Christian, but no more.
The Jewish Quarter, which appears so vibrant and fresh since being rebuilt and repopulated 1967, and bustling with people visiting the Kotel and the many synagogues, is home to some three thousand souls only. In addition, there are some two thousand transient yeshiva students. Apart from the Jewish Quarter, Jewish residents are very few, living in dwellings scattered throughout the Muslim Quarter.
A Bigger Picture
This is Jerusalem. In London, Paris, and in other cities throughout Europe, synagogues and Jewish schools are for good reason under armed guard as antisemitism rises.
During its long history, Jerusalem has been destroyed at least twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times.
The Citadel or Tower Museum at the Jaffa Gate, the westernmost entrance to the city, is all the history you can eat in a four hour sitting. It’s a four thousand year old story: from the Canaanites and the Hebrews to the end of the Mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel, via Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Hasmoneans, Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatamids, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Tartars, Mongols, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, and even Australians. Each left their mark on Jerusalem, and most planted their brickage upon and within the Citadel.
There is a long roll-call of famous names who may or may have not resided in the place.
King David didn’t, despite his name being given to the place and the apocryphal story that he once spied on the bathing Bathsheba from its ramparts – indeed, her bathroom is said to be underneath the New Imperial Hotel, just across the way. Nor did his son and heir, Solomon, builder of the First Temple. Conquerors Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus did not. They just wrecked the joint. Judah Maccabee might have, and those other famous Jewish rebels, the Zealots didn’t, but during Great Revolt, they retreated there and trashed the place. Herod the Great, a psycho with an serious edifice complex, resided here. As did also Procurator Pontius Pilate when he was in town (he preferred the luxuries of Caesaea Maritimus (Latin for “on Sea). Historians now believe that the Citdel was where he actually cast judgement on Jesus, and not in the Antonine Fortress which overlooked the Temple (where the Haram al Sharif now stands) throwing into question the whole basis for the existence of the Via Dolorosa.
Roman general and future emperor Titus would have taken up residence therein after he destroyed the city in 70CE, leaving only the citadel standing. His troops needed somewhere to crash. Constantine didn’t, but his mom Helena most likely did when she “discovered” The True Cross, commissioned the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and single-handedly invented the Holy Land pilgrim industry that endures to this day. The Muslim conquerors Omar Ibn Khattab, Salah ud-Din, and Baybars may have, but Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the magnificent, who built the city walls we see today, never set foot in Jerusalem, and nor did his successors.
Ottoman troops occupied it, and General Djemal Pasha would hang Arab Nationalists in the Square before it. General Allenby declared Jerusalem and Palestine liberated on the steps leading to the citadel in 1917, but most likely stayed across the square at our wonderful East New Imperial Hotel (the Kaiser stayed there too when he visited Jerusalem in 1898). British troops garrisoned it during the Mandate years – like the Roman legionaries before them, they’d’ve needed a place to lay their heads. The British-commanded Arab Legion of then Transjordan took control of it in during the the battle for Jerusalem in 1948 and defended it successfully against the new IDF. They did so again in 1967 only to lose it and the Old City.
If the stones could talk, what a tale they would tell. And indeed, the museum now does just that, in content and in form. We sit on the roof garden of our hotel, directly across the street on Omar Ibn Al Khattab Square, and look across at its towers, ramparts and gardens, and sense it’s story in our souls. We watch present generations passing beneath its walls, and the young folk dancing on the ramparts, all part of the passing parade of humanity that has lingered by and upon these ancient walls.
For further reading, you can’t beat Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s Jerusalem : The Biography (Phoenix 2011).
“Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train.
Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again.”
Cat Stevens, Peace Train
Completed in 2011, the Jerusalem Light Rail unites east and west Jerusalem. This how a light rail should be – small, light, and frequent, on a traffic free Jaffa Road. It links the Jewish suburbs of west and northeast Jerusalem with the Arab suburbs of the north and east of the Old City. The featured picture shows two trains passing at Jaffa Central, underneath a neat mural that shows one weaving down Jaffa Road through vignettes of Israeli urban life. Their destinations are shown sequentially in three languages. Synchronicity determined that in the picture, both were in Arabic.
It was controversial when first mooted, and extreme elements on both sides of the conflict opposed any such normalization of relations between the Jewish and the Arab communities. There were demonstrations in European countries against the “line that divided a city”, but these petered out when polls showed that Arabs in East Jerusalem found the line to be a blessing. It got dad to work on time; it got mom to the cornucopia that is the Mahane Yehuda fresh food markets, just four stops from the Damascus Gate; and it delivered the kids to school and back safely and punctually. It is said, with some justification, that earlier attacks on the line were perpetrated by thugs incited by Fatah, the political wing of the Palestinian Authority, which is alleged to control the taxi industry of East Jerusalem.
During the recent unrest, the line was often blocked and trains attacked during demonstrations and street fighting, but service was resumed quicksmart. Arab passengers were at times abused by Jews, and stations were the targets of random rammings by cars and heavy vehicles – the so-called “siyarah intifada” – with many Jewish casualties and “neutralized” perpetrators.
If you’ve ever ridden the light rail in Jerusalem, then you’ve seen the section with the chairs that go down when you sit on them – each has a wheelchair sign because people in wheelchairs get priority there since there’s space, but if you’re a mom and you’ve got a stroller, you can sit there, too, and that’s where these two women are sitting: I watched them both get in, one wore a hijab and the other wore a sheitel, and they both had their arms and leg covered, and no collarbone, no sir, and I watched the struggle through the crowd on the light rail with their strollers, big and blue and bulky, match match.
They each took a seat on opposite sides of the row where the wheelchairs go, and they put their strollers in the middle. Each woman stared straight ahead out the window as Jeursalem went by in one long smear, looking straight past each other.
Strangers on a light rail, with their matching strollers, but by accident, their strollers faced each other, and the kids met eye to eye — both bundled up in winter coats and hats and shoes, both brown eyed babes with pink cheeks, and curly hair, well fed and well loved, and they could have been brothers. And while their mothers stared straight ahead watching Jerusalem blur by, the two boys smiled at one another, and chatted back and forth as only little babies can, but as everybody should.
But calm appears to have descended, and folk of good will on all sides of the literal and figurative line pass in peace through Arab and Jewish Jerusalem.
“I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem”
Steve Earl, Jerusalem
Light Rail Mural, Jaffa Road
Facebook Postscript from Sarah Tuttle-Singer, 20th February 2023
If you’ve ever ridden the light rail in Jerusalem, then you’ve seen the section with the chairs that go down when you sit on them – each has a wheelchair sign because people in wheelchairs get priority there since there’s space, but if you’re a mom and you’ve got a stroller, you can sit there, too, and that’s where these two women are sitting: I watched them both get in, one wore a hijab and the other wore a sheitel, and they both had their arms and leg covered, and no collarbone, no sir, and I watched the struggle through the crowd on the light rail with their strollers, big and blue and bulky, match match.
They each took a seat on opposite sides of the row where the wheelchairs go, and they put their strollers in the middle. Each woman stared straight ahead out the window as Jeursalem went by in one long smear, looking straight past each other.
Strangers on a light rail, with their matching strollers, but by accident, their strollers faced each other, and the kids met eye to eye — both bundled up in winter coats and hats and shoes, both brown eyed babes with pink cheeks, and curly hair, well fed and well loved, and they could have been brothers. And while their mothers stared straight ahead watching Jerusalem blur by, the two boys smiled at one another, and chatted back and forth as only little babies can, but as everybody should.
Like Lord Byron, he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know. He may or may not have been a psychopath – he killed his way to the top, murdering his relatives, and also, his wife Mariamne, whom loved truly, madly, deeply – but he suspected her of plotting to depose him, so she had to go too. He regretted it instantly and embalmed her in honey so he could spend quality time with her by her open catafalque.
Herod did a lot of questionable things, but he has gone down in Christian demonology for an atrocity he did NOT commit – he didn’t massacre the Innocents to ensure that baby Jesus would not live to supplant himself as King of the Jews! The slaughter of the babies was an invention of later Christian propagandists. Also, he was not the Herod who’s daughter Salome invented lap dancing and in payment, demanded the head of John the Baptist. Nor was he the Herod who told the imprisoned Jesus “I’m the King of the Jews!” That was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s camp caricature. Herod was a common name amongst the later (and last) Hasmoneans.
To his Jewish subjects, he was not a Kosher King, being only half Jewish, and then, only through this dad (even today, opinions about him are mixed for the same reason). Accordingly, he felt that he had to prove himself, like similarly half-Jewish, and much wiser King Solomon. So he built things. And man! Could he build! His stuff was not large – it was Monumental.
At Caesarea, on the Mediterranean coast, he build a port, a seaside palace and a city. In Jericho, another magnificent palace. At Herodium, he built a fortress-palace-mausoleum, but first, he built a hill high enough that he could see Jerusalem from the summit. Across the River Jordan, in present day Jordan, he rebuilt a fortress-palace at Machaerus which was said to be location of the imprisonment and execution of John the Baptist, and the venue for Salome’s notorious dance, The ancient town of Sebastia, on a hill with panoramic views across the West Bank, is another location of Herodian brickage; its Nabi Yahya Mosque is said to be the burial site of the Baptist – although his head is believed to rest in an ornate catafalque in Damascus’s splendid Umayyad Mosque. And he a fortress and summer palace on the Masada massif overlooking the Dead Sea, and the site of one of history’s most famous “last stands”.
He obviously liked palaces. When he died – and he died horribly as befits a bad boy – he was laid to rest in a bespoke tomb in his Herodium eyrie.
But his crowning glory was his breathtaking refurbishment of the Second Temple, rendering it a wonder of the contemporary world. Too bad that a “wabble of woudy webels”, to quote Bickus Dickus in “The Life of Brian”, had to rise up against Rome in 66CE, precipitating the destruction of Jerusalem, the death of thousands, and the razing of temple to the ground. All that impressive Herodian brickage was sent crashing to the ground, and all that remains is the Kotel, the hallowed Western or Wailing Wall.
(The featured image shows signature Herodian ashlar blocks in the Kotel, the Western or “Wailing” Wall)
Apart from building things, was Herod really that “great”? I reckon he gave himself that soubriquet – or else the Romans did, probably in sardonic irony (which Herod, narcissistic and paranoid, probably didn’t get). His subjects didn’t think so and were happy when he died. Some accounts suggest that he’d ordered his bodyguard to slaughter the heads of prominent Hebrew families on the event of his death so that the people would not feel like rejoicing when he passed.
Herodian brickage thrown down by the Romans
Herodium
Masada
The largest house brick in the world. The Western Stone of the Kotel 13.6m
You come at the king, you best not miss.
Omar Little, The Wire (after RW Emerson)
The phrase “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist” is at once apt, correct, and yet often oversimplified to the point of disingenuousness. The word “terrorist” itself describes its goal. To instill fear in the heart of the enemy. In the past, the target would have been the king, the dictator, the ruling class, and those who served them and upheld their rule. Politicians, officials, solders and policemen. Today, terrorists indiscriminately target whole societies. Irish bombers blasted communities of the rival faith, murdered shoppers, office workers, and pub patrons, as well as soldiers and policemen. Palestinian suicide bombers hit malls and pizza bars in city centres. ISIS, al Qa’ida and the Taliban detonate cars in busy city streets and publicly execute prisoners in callous and calculating “lectures in flesh” (the phrase is civil rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson’s, from his chilling account of the trials and execution of King Charles I of England and those who sentenced him, The Tyrannicide Brief.).
But targeted and random terrorism has a long historical pedigree. For centuries, it has been the desperate and nihilistic weapon of last resort of resistance and rebellion against perceived oppression and injustice, and against invaders and occupiers.
In the second century BCE Palestine, the Maccabees used assassination in their resistance to the Seleucid Greeks, and a century later, the Jewish zealots, the Sicarii, named for the easily concealed small daggers, paid the Romans in like coin, and ultimately in an insurrection that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE and the scattering of the Jewish race (giving history the emotive and symbolic last exit that was Masada). In an etymological irony that Mark Twain would have been proud of, the present unrest in Jerusalem, a large number of young Palestinians have perished in attempting to stab jewish soldiers and civilians. Their jaquerie is called the “Intifada Sakni-in”, the ‘Knife Uprising – an echo of those long-dead Sicarii “dagger men”.
Nowadays, one would be excused for thinking that “terrorism” and “terrorist” are synonymous with Arabs and Muslims. And a historical precedent reinforces this erroneous assumption. The Hashishan or “Assassins” of Middle East fame (yes, that is where that noxious noun originated) were Muslim men and boys mesmerized and mentored by Rashid ad Din as Sina-n, the “Old Man of the Mountain” (and all this, before Osama in the caves of Tora Bora), and were Twelfth Century hit-men contracted out to rival Muslim princes in the internecine conflicts that plagued the Levant in the wake of the Crusades and the demise of the great Arab Caliphates.
But the assassin’s knife (and in modern times, the gun and bomb, and latterly cars and trucks) predates these medieval hoods and links the Hebrew rebels of old to the Irgun and Stern Gang who encouraged Britain and the UN to abandon Palestine in 1948, bequeathing most of it to the new state of Israel, and triggering the Palestinian diaspora. European anarchists and Irish rebels and loyalists were adept at shootings and ambushes. In Algeria, during the ‘fifties, the nationalist FLN and the “colon” OAS shot and bombed each other and those unfortunates caught in the crossfire. The IRA perfected the improvised explosive device that today has crippled thousands of American, Canadian, and Australian soldiers in Iraq abd in Afghanistan. Hindu Tamil separatists of Sri Lanka introduced the suicide bomber, an economical and efficient weapon against soft (civilian, that is) targets, deployed today by Islamist killers in the streets of London and Lahore, Damascus and Dar es Salaam, Jerusalem and Jakarta. Whilst Arabs – and particularly Palestinians may have given the world the hijacking of aircraft – a tactic that fell into disuse due to diminishing political returns and rapid response forces – other Arabs showed us how to fly them into public buildings as the whole world watched in horror and disbelief. The shockwaves of this one are still reverberating through the deserts of the east and the capitals of the western world.
In going up up against their occupiers, the Palestinians have an old heritage. In my old country, Boudicca and Caractacus fought a losing battle against the Romans in Britain during the First CE. The Roman historian Tacitus ascribed to a vanquished chieftain the memorable words “solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” – they make a desert and they call it peace. After the battle of Hastings in 1066, the defeated Saxons pushed back against the Normans and brought the genocidal wrath of William the Conqueror down on their heads with the devastating “Harrying of the North”. The Green Man and Robin Hood legends are said to be a retrospective and romanticised remembering of the Saxon resistance. Warrior fugitives from that failed guerilla war fled as far as Constantinple, where many joined the Emperor’s acclaimed Varangarian Guard, (see When Harald Went A Viking)
In the streets and the countryside of Ireland, my parents’ birthplace, the United Irishmen, Fenians, Free Staters, IRA and Unionists fought against the redcoats, tommies, and black and tans of the British Army. Fought amongst themselves, fought against each other, and killed and were killed in their centuries long war of liberation. And in my adopted country, indigenous Australians fought a futile frontier war against settlers and soldiers just as native Americans did, albeit on a much smaller scale, and paid the price in hangings, massacres, poisoned wells, dispossession, marginalization, and “stolen children”. The legacy of those times lingers still – see The Frontier Wars – Australia’s heart of darkness.
In Central America, Juarez led the Mexicans against the French, and Sandino, Nicaraguans against US marines. Spaniards rose up against Napoleon’s forces, giving the world the word “guerilla”, or “little war”. Russian partisans ambushed the Grande Armé and the Wehrmacht. Throughout occupied Europe, the very term “resistance” became synonymous with the heroic unequal struggle against tyranny. In another of history’s ironies, muqa-wamat, Arabic word for resistance, unites sectarian rivals Hamas and Hizbollah against Israel.
And not just resistance to invasion and occupation, but also against oppression by one’s own rulers. Religious tracts tie themselves in knots reconciling the obligation to obey our rulers with the right to resist and overthrow those that rule badly. The unequal struggle against tyranny – or what is perceived by the perpetrators as tyranny – is the cause that inspires men and women to desperate acts.
The most celebrated in fact, film and fiction is the death of Julius Caesar at the hands of peers who feared that he intended to usurp the ostensibly democratic Republic (ostensible because democratic it was not) and institute one-man rule. That ended badly for the conspirators, and for Rome, as it precipitated years of civil war and ultimately, half a century of empire).
In 1880 the reforming Czar Alexander II of Russia, discovered the hard way that liberating the serfs did not inoculate himself against the bomb that took his legs and his life. His fearful and unimaginative successors hardened their hearts and closed their minds against further reform. setting in train the crackdown on dissent and democratic expression that led eventually to the storming of the Winter Palace on Petrograd in 1917. Narodnaya Volya, the killers called themselves – the People’s Will. And that is what terrorists do. They appeal and owe fealty to a higher court, a greater good, a savage God.
So it was when student and Serbian nationalist Gavril Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in June 1914 and ignited the spark that lit the conflagration of World War 1 which precipitated the demise of the old European empires.
So too when John Brown and his sons brought their broadswords to bear on slavers and their sympathizers and made a date with destiny at Harpers Ferry. Their famous raid may or may not have accelerated the downward slide to the secession and civil war that erupted the following year, but it provided a moral and symbolic prelude and also, the resonating battle hymn of the republic. John Wilkes Booth bookended this bloody era with his histrionic and public murder of Abraham Lincoln, shouting “sic semper tyrannis”, “thus always to tyrants,” attributed to Brutus at Caesar’s assassination – today, it’s the Virginia state motto. Brown and Booth were quite clear in their motives. As was were the segregationalist shooters who did for African Americans Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King. Less so were the killers of the Kennedy brothers in the sixties.
To conclude, sometimes that savage, rebel God is one of faith, sometimes, of blood and soil. In some instances, it is revenge for wrongs real and imagined – the reasons at times lost or forgotten through the passage of time and fading memories. And often, “the cause” is corrupted by the immoral economics of illicit commerce, including contraband, kidnapping, blackmail and extortion. Sometimes all merge in an incongruous hybrid of religious passion, ethic identity, libertarian or anarchistic fervour, and protection racket. As was the case in Northern Ireland, in Lebanon, in sub-Saharan Africa, and currently so in Syria and Iraq.
But most times, terror and turmoil is simply a political weapon planned, targeted and executed as a mechanism of regime change. Rebellion, revolt and revolution. Resisting, opposing, challenging, confronting and defeating the central authority. The seizing, holding, consolidation and keeping of political power.
And one thing is for sure. The outcome is unpredictable. History does not move in straight lines, but often follows a bitter and twisted path. Cliched as it is, the phrase “be careful what you wish for” is an apt one. And when, as Bob Dylan sang, “the line it is drawn, the curse it is cast”, there is no going back. To quote WB Yeats’ famous lines, “all is changed, changed utterly”.
Terrorism, then, can shift the course of history. If we were to stumble into the swamp of alternative histories, imagine what might of happened
If Caesar had walked home from the senate on the Ides of March
If Lincoln had been able to guide the Reconstruction
If the reforming Czar had introduced democratic government to Russia
If Gavril Princip’s shot had missed the archduke
If Kennedy had returned from Dallas
If John Lennon outlived George Harrison
If Yitzak Rabin had left the peace concert in Tel Aviv
If the Twin Towers stood still
To quote “Stairway to Heaven”, a curiously apposite title given the millenarian mindset of many terrorists, “Oh, it makes you wonder!”
Its been a diverse year In That Howling Infinite. We have traveled, to quote Bob Dylan, “all the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem” – and to many other places in between. Vikings and Roman legionaries; Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne and Bruce Cockburn; Britain in the ‘forties and Paris in the ‘fifties; America, the Levant, and even Wonderland. By Year’s end a million souls will have journeyed to Europe from the war-ravaged lands of the Middle East, and my final posts for the year contemplate what it might mean for refugees who find to safe haven in Australia.
Here is a retrospective.
The year began with a short piece on recent archeological discoveries in Jerusalem that strongly suggested that the Via Dolorosathat Jesus trode on his final journey to Golgotha was the wrong route, and that instead, it began just inside of the Jaffa Gate. I took a light-hearted look at the Jerusalem Syndrome, a mental condition involving the presence of religiously-themed obsessive ideas, delusions and other psychoses triggered by a visit to The Holy City.
I read but one piece of fiction this year – a sad admission from a lifelong bibliophile – but this one book was probably one of the best I have read: The Incorrigible Optimists Club, winner of the prestigious Prix de Goncourt, by Jean Michel Guenassia. It is set in Paris’ Rive Gauche, as the ‘fifties gives way to the ‘sixties; as the crooners makes way for rock n’roll; as the Cold War divides a continent, sending dissidents and refugees fleeing to a safe haven in Paris; as the Algerian war divides and destroys families: and as the seeds of ‘les evenments de Mai 1968’ are sown in the hearts and souls of France’s young people. It is a coming of age book, of young hopes and fears, love and loss, a book about writers and reading, and the magic and power of the written word in prose and poetry.
March saw the passing of my old friend Dermott Ryder, chronicler and luminary of the Folk Music revival in Sydney in the early ‘seventies. Dermott’s Last Rideis my tribute to him. And April was a month of anniversaries and remembrance. Forty years since the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, and the centenary of the landings of the ANZACs at Gallipoli. Pity the Nation takes its title from Robert Fisk’s tombstone of a book on the long war; and he had taken it from a poem written in 1934 by Khalil Gibran, Lebanon’s most celebrated poet, a poem that was both a prophetic testament and a testimony of times to come: “Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation”. The Watchers of the Water is a song about Gallipoli sing by a Turkish solder.
May saw two diverse pieces of social history. The Spirit of 45 takes personal perspective of British filmmaker Ken Loach’s documentary of the excitement and optimism that followed the Labour Party’s election victory at the end of World War II. This laid the foundation stone for the British welfare state. Bob Dylan’s Americana discusses the meaning and significance of the lyrics and the imagery of Dylan’s early ‘eighties masterpiece Blind Willie McTell, a harrowing journey through America’s dark heart.
In June, we visited Yorkshire and in London, conjuring up memories and historical connections. Harald Went A Vikingis a saga about the first of two kings to die on English soil in the late summer of 1066, and the adventures that took him from Norway to Constantinople and Jerusalem and finally, to Yorkshire. Roman Wall Bluestakes its title from WH Auden’s poem about a homesick and grumpy legionnaire on Hadrian’s Wall, and contemplates the lives of the ethnically polyglot soldiery who defended the Empire’s borders. And June saw another famous anniversary, the Bicentennial of the momentous and bloody Battle of Waterloo. The Long Road to Waterloo prefaces a song for the men who, after twenty six long years of war, never came home.
Battle of Stamford Bridge, depicting King Harald Hardrada hit in the neck by an arrow
In July, controversy erupted in the Land of the Free over the flying of the Confederate Flag in states that were once part of Old Dixie. The dead hand of the Civil War reached out and touched the hearts of Americans and their friends throughout the world in the wake of yet another mass shooting. This time, a young man gunned down worshippers at prayer. That the victims were folk of colour, and the shooter, a young white extremist, reopened wounds that have never really healed. Rebel Yellsurmises that The South will always be with us, in our thoughts, in our historical memory, in our art and literature, our books and films, and our favourite music.
September marked the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s timeless, fabulist masterpiece Alice In Wonderland. Go Ask Alice, I Think She’ll Know reproduces Australian critic Peter Craven’s masterful celebration of Alice 150. The title belongs to the mesmerizing Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane who cut through to the rabbit chase channeling the long-gone Lewis in a psychedelic musical masterpiece.
On an infinitely sadder note, Ruins and Bones is a tribute to the memory of Syrian archeologist Khaled Muhammed al Asaad, murdered by ISIS in August 2015, and of Palmyra, the ‘Pearl of the Desert’.
Allende’s Desk and Osama’s Pyjamas is a brief commentary on the extension of American military power and the pathology of demons and demonization. Tales of Yankee Powerlooks at American foreign policy during the 1980s from the perspective of the songs of Jackson Browne and Bruce Cockburn.
November’s Children of the Revolution looks at the events that led up to the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, and the early days before it became too dangerous to gather on the streets, when men, women and children would parade in public places, waving the flag of the old Syria, the one that flew before the Assad clan seized power in 1966. Canny camera men could take media-friendly shots of photogenic little girls in face makeup looking sad, vulnerable and defiant. Those days of hope are long gone.
A highlight of this past year has been my work as a volunteer with the Humanitarian Settlement Services programme. The HSS’ mission is to assist newly arrived refugees to settle in Australia. In No Going Home, I endeavour to imagine the refugee journey. Hejirais a sequel of sorts and, indeed, a happy ending.
Happy New Year to these prospective New Australians, and to all my readers. May 2016 be fortunate and fulfilling.
These are lands of testament and prophecy, of sacrifice and sacrament, of seers and sages, of vision and vicissitude, of warriors and holy men. The spiritual and the temporal have melded here for millennia. We see still the remnants of ancient empires and the echoes of their faiths. We chart their decline and fall in the fortunes of their monuments and their mausoleums, in the “tumbled towers and fallen stones, broken statues, empty tombs” where “ghosts of commoners and kings walk the walls and catacombs of the castles and the shrines”.
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
Read also,The Rubble Of Palmyraby Leon Wieseltier, published in The Atlantic, 5th September, 2014
When it comes to stories about The Middle East, I am reminded of the Bobster’s closing lines in the wonderful ‘Black Diamond Bay’: “Seems like every time you turn around, there’s another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear”. Anyhow, getting away from all the doom and gloom, here is something completely different.
Our recent visit to Jerusalem inspired several posts on this blog, and several songs. One of the latter, published below, examines the Jerusalem Syndrome.
This is a group of mental phenomena involving the presence of either religiously themed obsessive ideas, delusions or other psychosis-like experiences that are triggered by a visit to the city of Jerusalem. It is not exclusive to one particular religion or denomination, having affected Jews, Christians and Muslims from many different countries and backgrounds.
Jerusalem is all about faith and passion, and there is no city on Earth that people get more passionate about. The light is luminous. In high summer it almost shimmers. The very air is full of prayer and politics, passion and pain, and the rocks and stones virtually sing a hallelujah chorus of history. I am not a religious person, but I cannot help getting excited by the place – although I do not transcend to transports of delight and delirium.
In The Simpsons episode The Greatest Story Ever D’ohed, the Simpsons travel to Israel where Homer is afflicted with the syndrome, the illness and its effect on Homer being one of the plot’s central themes. In The X-Files episode Revelations, agents Scully and Mulder try to subdue a man afflicted with a form of the syndrome.
The featured photograph at the head of this blog is a real-life version of the above Simpsons picture. The man at centre stage is Carl James Joseph of Detroit, Michigan, ‘The Jesus Guy’ we encountered in the Church Of The Holy Sepulchre. He has been a common sight around the Old City for many years now.j
Of all the cities in the world, why Jerusalem?
“ The Arabs call the city ‘Al Quds’, “The Holy’. It was deemed sacred from pre-history. Those aforementioned iconoclast scholars suggest that Jerusalem was actually the holiest place in Islam, and that like Islam itself and the Prophet, Mecca and Medina were retrofitted to suit the conqueror’s narrative. A city of the mind as much as of this earth, it haunts the prayers and dreams of three faiths, and to this this day, it is coveted and contested. “The air above Jerusalem”, wrote Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, “is filled with prayers and dreams, like the air above cities with heavy industry. Hard to breathe”. Arthur Koestler wrote: “The angry face of Yahweh is brooding over the hot rocks which have seen more holy murder, rape and plunder than any other place on earth”. Perhaps it is because Jerusalem is mankind’s number one hot spot! “There’s this thing that happens here, over the hell mouth”, says Buffy, “where the way a thing feels – it kind of starts being that way for real. I’ve seen all these things before – just not all at once”. More Jews have probably died violently in Jerusalem than in the Holocaust. And countless folk of other faiths have likewise perished”. From A Brief History Of The Rise And Fall Of The West by Paul Hemphill
A lot of folk put a lot of energy into mattters millenarian, when they could divert it to more practical matters like health, water, human rights, blah, blah blah… Some diligent souls have constructed a 3D virtual second temple as a template for its reconstruction. And they don’t care if they start a world war to get it built. Others strive to create a Caliphate that will precipitate the long foretold great battle at The End of Days. And yet others are endeavoring to recreate Noah’s Ark in Kentucky, USA. Different tribe, same psychosis. Never underestimate the irrational mind. For such is the power of myth and magic even in this techno day and age. More blood has been shed in and for Jerusalem than any other city on earth, and we ain’t done yet!
O Jerusalem!
Sound the trumpets of Zion to summon forth the saints.
From The Song of Solomon
O Jerusalem!
I never thought that faith could be so strong!
Ah, Jerusalem!
I never knew that faith could be such fun!
It’s something you don’t do at home.
It happens in Paris and Rome.
The fevered faithful’s illusion
That causes such holy confusion.
Scully and Mulder have fought it,
Homer Simpson has caught it
In Jerusalem.
Bear me up on angels wings
And other transcendental things.
Cradle me in Jesus’ arms,
Far from home but safe from harm.
Where the Golden Walls still glow,
Let my people go
To Jerusalem.
Never knew that faith could be so strong!
O Jerusalem,
Never knew that faith could be such fun!
Filipinas in a row harmonizing with “Swing Low
Sweet Chariot”.
Charismatic holy clown roams the alleys of the town,
Says he’s hunting down Iscariot.
Pentecostal Germans heard
Their pastor preach the Holy Word.
Drab babushkas clutch their crosses,
Eastern priest in black now blesses
Those who lie with arms out swept
On the rock where Jesus wept,
In Jerusalem.
Never knew that faith could be so strong!
O Jerusalem,
I want whatever they are on!
See that women dressed so plain, thinks she’s
Mary Magdelene
Waiting just beyond the Tomb for her Lord
To come again.
Is he not already here? Don’t you see him
Over there?
In his robe of woven wool, sandals, beard,
And flowing hair.
There’s lady known to me
Who would make a cup of tea
And take it to Mount Scopus every morning
To give to Christ when he returned in glory –
I tell you, I’m not making up this story!
Its Jerusalem!
I never knew that faith could be such fun!
O Jerusalem!
I want whatever they are on!
Sometimes in morning dreams, I see
The Holy City in front of me:
Forever and ever, and world without end,
We all need an invisible friend
In Jerusalem.
Jerusalem Syndrome? Tourist Goes Treasure Hunting in Old City Cave
Nir Hasson Ha’Aretz Mar 15, 2016
Zedekiah’s Cave is a remnant of what was the largest quarry in Jerusalem that dates back to at least Second Temple times. Daniel Bar-On
An American tourist was arrested last week after spending the night in Zedekiah’s Cave, also known as Solomon’s Quarries, which lies under the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.
Last Thursday afternoon, when the site was open to the public, the 19-year-old entered the cave carrying a backpack. When closing time came, he hid in one of the crevices of the cave and the security people did not notice him as they checked the site before closing. He was there overnight and started digging in various sections of the cave, apparently seeking to find some of the treasures that various legends say have been buried there over the centuries.
While the cave is usually closed on Fridays, last Friday it was opened to do some development work. The workers found the tourist in the cave covered with mud, his backpack full of stones and shards that he’d dug up from the floor of the cave. He was handed over to police and his findings were confiscated.
During questioning the young man could not explain his motives for what he did. Police said he apparently has emotional problems and may have contracted the so-called Jerusalem Syndrome, a phenomenon involving religious obsessions or other psychosis-like experiences seemingly triggered in some people by visiting Jerusalem. He was released and has since left the country.
Zedekiah’s Cave is a remnant of what was the largest quarry in Jerusalem that dates back to at least Second Temple times. It covers some nine dunams (two and a quarter acres), with an entrance between the Old City’s Damascus Gate and Herod’s Gate. Over the years a number of legends and traditions have sprung up involving the cave. The Jewish tradition is that King Zedekiah tried to flee through the cave during the destruction of the First Temple.
A later Muslim tradition identifies the cave as “the cave of Korah,” the place where the biblical Korah and his allies were swallowed up by the earth when they tried to revolt against Moses.
In 1968 a resident of the Old City claimed that his grandfather had hidden three crates of gold coins in the cave before the War of Independence. He asked permission to search for the crates using signs his grandfather had left him and promised in return to give three-quarters of the treasure to the authorities. He was given permission to search but found nothing.
The cave also serves as a ceremonial site for the Freemasons from the 1920s to this day. The Freemasons revere the place, believing it to have been the site from which the stones for the First Temple were quarried. Since the 1980s the cave is operated by the East Jerusalem Development Corporation as a tourist site, and events are held there from time to time.
The Jerusalem Syndrome: Why Some Religious Tourists Believe They Are the Messiah
Chris Nashawaty, Wired, 17th February 2012
Shortly after his 40th birthday, the life of a man we’ll call Ronald Hodge took a strange turn. He still looked pretty good for his age. He had a well-paying job and a devoted wife. Or so he thought. Then, one morning, Hodge’s wife told him she no longer loved him. She moved out the next day. A few weeks later, he was informed that his company was downsizing and that he would be let go. Not knowing where to turn, Hodge started going to church again.
Even though he’d been raised in an evangelical household, it had been years since Hodge had thought much about God. But now that everything seemed to be falling apart around him, he began attending services every week. Then every day. One night, while lying in bed, he opened the Bible and began reading. He’d been doing this every night since his wife left. And every time he did, he would see the same word staring back at him—the same four syllables that seemed to jump off the page as if they were printed in buzzing neon: Jerusalem. Hodge wasn’t a superstitious man, he didn’t believe in signs, but the frequency of it certainly felt like … something. A week later, he was 30,000 feet over the Atlantic on an El Al jet to Israel.
When Hodge arrived in Jerusalem, he told the taxi driver to drop him off at the entrance to the Old City. He walked through the ancient, labyrinthine streets until he found a cheap hostel near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He had a feeling that this was important. Supposedly built on top of the spot where Jesus Christ was crucified and three days later rose from the dead, the domed cathedral is the holiest site in Christendom. And Hodge knew that whatever called him to the Holy Land was emanating from there.
During his first few days in Jerusalem, Hodge rose early and headed straight to the church to pray. He got so lost in meditation that morning would slip into afternoon, afternoon into evening, until one of the bearded priests tapped him on the shoulder and told him it was time to go home. When he returned to his hostel, he would lie in bed unable to sleep. Thoughts raced through his head. Holy thoughts. That’s when Hodge first heard the Voice.
Actually, heard is the wrong word. He felt it, resonating in his chest. It was like his body had become a giant tuning fork or a dowsing rod. Taking a cue from the sign of the cross that Catholics make when they pray, Hodge decided that if the vibrations came from the right side of his chest, it was the Holy Ghost communicating with him. If he felt them farther down, near the base of his sternum, it was the voice of Jesus. And if he felt the voice humming inside his head, it was the Holy Father, God himself, calling.
Soon, the vibrations turned into words, commanding him to fast for 40 days and 40 nights. None of this scared him. If anything, he felt a warm, soothing peace wash over him because he was finally being guided.
Not eating or drinking came easily at first. But after a week or so, the other backpackers at his hostel began to grow concerned. With good reason: Hodge’s clothes were dirty and falling off of him. He had begun to emit a pungent, off-putting funk. He was acting erratically, hallucinating and singing the word Jesus over and over in a high-pitched chirp.
“Jesus … Jesus … Jesus …”
Hodge camped out in the hostel’s lobby and began introducing himself to one and all as the Messiah. Eventually, the manager of the hostel couldn’t take it anymore. He didn’t think the American calling himself Jesus was dangerous, but the guy was scaring away customers. Plus, he’d seen this kind of thing before. And he knew there was a man who could help.
Herzog Hospital sits on a steep, sun-baked hill on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Its sprawling grounds are dotted with tall cedars and aromatic olive trees. Five floors below the main level is the office of Pesach Lichtenberg, head of the men’s division of psychiatry at Herzog.
Lichtenberg is 52 years old and thin, with glasses and a neatly trimmed beard. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, he moved to Israel in 1986 after graduating from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and has worked at Herzog more or less ever since. It’s here that he has become one of the world’s leading experts on the peculiar form of madness that struck Ronald Hodge—a psychiatric phenomenon known as Jerusalem syndrome.
On a bright, late summer morning, Lichtenberg greets me in the chaotic lobby of the hospital, smiling and extending his hand. “You missed it!” he says. “We had a new Chosen One brought into the ward this morning.” We go down to Lichtenberg’s office; on top of a bookcase is a giant shofar, a curved ram’s horn that religious Jews sound on the high holidays. A middle-aged British man under the doctor’s care had used it to trumpet the Messiah’s—that is to say, his own—coming. Lichtenberg explains that allowing me to meet his latest patient would violate hospital policy, and he can’t discuss ongoing cases. He’ll talk about past patients as long as I agree to de-identify them, as I did with Hodge. “But,” he adds, “that doesn’t mean we can’t try to find a messiah of our own. In a few days, we’ll take a walk around the Old City and maybe we’ll find one for you there.”
There’s a joke in psychiatry: If you talk to God, it’s called praying; if God talks to you, you’re nuts. In Jerusalem, God seems to be particularly chatty around Easter, Passover, and Christmas—the peak seasons for the syndrome. It affects an estimated 50 to 100 tourists each year, the overwhelming majority of whom are evangelical Christians. Some of these cases simply involve tourists becoming momentarily overwhelmed by the religious history of the Holy City, finding themselves discombobulated after an afternoon at the Wailing Wall or experiencing a tsunami of obsessive thoughts after walking the Stations of the Cross. But more severe cases can lead otherwise normal housewives from Dallas or healthy tool-and-die manufacturers from Toledo to hear the voices of angels or fashion the bedsheets of their hotel rooms into makeshift togas and disappear into the Old City babbling prophecy.
Lichtenberg estimates that, in two decades at Herzog, the number of false prophets and self-appointed redeemers he has treated is in the low three figures. In other words, if and when the true Messiah does return (or show up for the first time, depending on what you believe), Lichtenberg is in an ideal spot to be the guy who greets Him.
“Jerusalem is an insane place,” one anthropologist says. “It overwhelms people.”
While it’s tempting to blame the syndrome on Israel’s holiest city, that wouldn’t be fair. At least, not completely. “It’s just the trigger,” says Yoram Bilu, an Israeli psychological anthropologist at the University of Chicago Divinity School. “The majority of people who suffer from Jerusalem syndrome have some psychiatric history before they get here.” The syndrome doesn’t show up in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but it and its kissing cousins are well-known to clinicians. For example, there’s Stendhal syndrome, in which visitors to Florence are overwhelmed by powerful works of art. First described in the early 19th century in Stendhal’s Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio, the disorder can lead to spontaneous fainting, confusion, and hallucinations. Paris syndrome, first described in 1986, is characterized by acute delusions in visitors to the City of Light and for some reason seems to preferentially affect Japanese tourists. Place, it seems, can have a profound effect on the mind.
What’s actually happening in the brain, though, isn’t completely clear. Faith isn’t easy to categorize or study. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, has conducted several brain-imaging studies of people in moments of extreme devotion. The limbic system, the center for our emotions, begins to show much higher activity, while the frontal lobes, which might ordinarily calm people, start to shut down. “In extreme cases, that can lead to hallucinations, where someone might believe they’re seeing the face of God or hearing voices,” Newberg says. “Your frontal lobe isn’t there to say, ‘Hey, this doesn’t sound like a good idea.’ And the person winds up engaging in behaviors that are not their norm.”
SHE WOULD RUB HER TEMPLES, DESPERATE TO DIAL IN THE VOICE OF GOD LIKE SOMEONE TRYING TO TUNE IN A FAR-OFF RADIO STATION.
The psychosis typical of Jerusalem syndrome develops gradually. At first the victim may begin to feel symptoms of anxiety, nervousness, and insomnia. The next day, there may be a compulsive urge to break away from the rest of the tour group and visit holy places like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Sufferers might follow this with a series of purification rituals such as shaving all of their body hair, clipping their nails, or washing themselves free of earthly impurities. The afflicted may then venture into the Old City to shout confused sermons claiming that redemption is at hand. In some cases, victims believe they are merely a cog in an ineffable process, helping to set the stage for the Messiah’s return with some small task they’ve been given. In more extreme cases, they can be swept up by psychotic delusions so intense, so ornate, that they become convinced they are Jesus Christ. “Jerusalem is an insane place in some ways. It overwhelms people, and it has for centuries,” Bilu says. “The city is seductive, and people who are highly suggestible can succumb to this seduction. I’m always envious of people who live in San Diego, where history barely exists.”
In other words, what you can blame Jerusalem for is looking like, well, Jerusalem. The Old City is a mosaic of sacred spaces, from the al-Aqsa Mosque to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount to the well-trodden stones on which Jesus supposedly walked. Like every city, it’s the combination of architecture and storytelling that makes Jerusalem more than just a crossroads. Great cities, the places that feel significant and important when you walk their streets, always rely on stagecraft—a deftly curving road, finely wrought facades, or a high concentration of light-up signage can all impart a sense of place, of significance. This architectural trickery can even instill a feeling of the sacred. The colonnades around St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, the rock garden at Ryoanji temple in Kyoto, and the pillars at the Jamarat Bridge near Mecca all shoot laser beams of transcendence into the brain of a properly primed visitor. “Part of the experience of going to these places is the interweaving of past and present,” says Karla Britton, an architectural historian at the Yale School of Architecture. “There’s a collapse of time. And for some people who visit these sacred sights and spaces, this collapse can be psychologically disorienting. The whole act of pilgrimage is deliberately intended as a kind of disorientation.”
That in and of itself doesn’t make someone crazy. “There are a lot of people who come to Israel and feel God’s presence, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Lichtenberg says. “That’s called, at the very least, a good vacation. God forbid a psychiatrist sticks his nose into something like that.” He smiles and rubs his beard. “But the question is, at what point is belief OK and at what point is it not OK? If someone says, ‘I believe in God,’ OK. And if they say, ‘I believe the Messiah will come,’ fine. And if they say, ‘I believe His coming is imminent,’ you think, well, that’s a man of real faith. But if they then say, ‘And I know who it is! I can name names!’ you go, wait a second—hold on!”
When people with Jerusalem syndrome show up at the hospital, doctors often just let them unspool their stories, however strange the narratives may seem. If the people aren’t dangerous, they are usually discharged. Violent patients might be medicated and kept under observation pending contact with their family or consulate. After all, the most effective treatment when it comes to Jerusalem syndrome is often pretty simple: Get the person the hell out of Jerusalem. “The syndrome is a brief but intense break with reality that is place-related,” Bilu says. “When the person leaves Jerusalem, the symptoms subside.”
Lichtenberg didn’t know any of this when he started at Herzog. Then, shortly after he began his residency in the late 1980s, he met a 35-year-old Christian woman from Germany. She was single and traveling alone in Israel. He remembers her as being gaunt, prematurely gray, and highly educated. The police had picked her up in the Old City for badgering tourists about the Lord’s return. “She arrived in a state of bliss because she believed the Messiah was coming,” Lichtenberg says. “I probably thought, she’s just meshuggeneh.”
Over the next few days, Lichtenberg underwent a transformation of his own. He became obsessed with the German woman’s case. He thought about how she would ricochet from periods of giddy rapture to moments of outright hostility and confusion. During her more manic moments, she wanted to share the Good News with the doctor. In her more depressive ones, she wandered the psychiatric ward desperately trying to hear the voices in her head that had gone momentarily silent. She would rub her temples as if she could dial in the voice of God, like someone trying to tune in a far-off radio station.
The woman stayed at the hospital for a month, until the doctor could arrange for her to be sent home. Lichtenberg has no idea what happened to her after she returned to Germany, but more than 20 years later he can still recall the smallest details of her case. “It was so interesting talking to her, but I was also a little embarrassed because there was no one at the hospital to encourage that sort of thing back then. At the time, the thinking here was more like, OK, what dosage is she getting? Should we increase it?”
This way of thinking is more sympathetic than many psychiatrists would call for. Actually, it wasn’t that long ago that one respected Israeli physician put two patients who both claimed to be the Messiah in a room together just to see what would happen. Each rabidly accused the other of being an impostor, barking fire-and-brimstone threats.
“People come to Israel and feel God’s presence,” Pesach Lichtenberg says. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Self-styled prophets have been journeying to Jerusalem on messianic vision quests for centuries. A certain Nazarene carpenter was merely the most charismatic and most written about. But it wasn’t until the 1930s that an Israeli psychiatrist named Heinz Herman clinically described Jerusalem syndrome for the first time. One of his early cases involved an Englishwoman who was so convinced the Second Coming was at hand that she climbed to the top of Jerusalem’s Mt. Scopus every morning with a cup of tea to welcome the Lord.
Most cases are harmless, but there have been disturbing exceptions. In 1969 an Australian tourist named Denis Michael Rohan was so overwhelmed by what he believed to be his God-given mission that he set fire to the al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s most sacred sites, which sits atop the Temple Mount directly above the Wailing Wall. The blaze led to rioting throughout the city. Rohan later said that he had to clear the site of “abominations” so it would be cleansed for the Second Coming. (The mosque was rebuilt by a Saudi construction company owned by Osama bin Laden’s father.)
More recently, an American man became so convinced he was Samson that he tried—and failed—to move a block of the Wailing Wall. An American woman came to believe she was the Virgin Mary and went to nearby Bethlehem to search for her baby, Jesus. And a few years ago, the Israeli press reported on a 38-year-old American tourist who, after spending 10 days in Israel, began roaming the surrounding hills muttering about Jesus. Shortly after being hospitalized, he jumped off a 13-foot-high walkway near the emergency room, breaking several ribs and puncturing his lung.
Lichtenberg says that during times of uncertainty and conflict (not infrequent in Israel), admissions to his ward spike. For example, in late 1999, when the rest of the world quaintly panicked about the Y2K bug and whether they’d be able to use their ATMs on January 1, Israel was on high alert, afraid that deranged religious crazies would flock to Jerusalem in anticipation of a millennial apocalypse. At the peak, five patients a week were brought into Lichtenberg’s ward. The country’s defense forces were concerned that someone would try to blow up the al-Aqsa Mosque, finishing the job Rohan started 30 years earlier.
One of the patients brought into Herzog at the time was an old man who sold novelty wooden back-scratchers near Lichtenberg’s home. The doctor knew him. He also knew that the man firmly believed he was King David. “Was he psychotic? Yeah, OK,” the doctor says with a shrug. “But I didn’t see any need to keep him. Unfortunately, he passed away recently. Otherwise, I would have loved for you to meet him. He would have been happy to talk to you.”
At 9 the next morning, the doctor and I are walking the narrow streets of the Old City. It seems like a good way to conduct an interview, outside the sterile confines of the hospital. Plus, we are still hoping to meet a messiah.
The scents of cumin and turmeric and cardamom are so overwhelming that my eyes begin to water. And even though the doctor has lived in Jerusalem for 25 years, his sense of direction in the winding alleys of the Muslim Quarter seems sketchy at best. After several embarrassing wrong turns and switchbacks, we find ourselves standing face-to-face with an Arab butcher skinning a goat that hangs on a giant rusty hook. We detour left down a dark passageway and nearly crash into a dozen elderly Italian women dressed in the black clothes of mourning, carrying a 6-foot wooden cross on their hunched backs. They’re huddled together like a rugby scrum, chanting in Latin as they take plodding steps along the Stations of the Cross, reenacting Jesus’ bloody march to his crucifixion.
We move aside to let them slowly pass. Neither one of us says a word. And as soon as they turn the corner and disappear from view, he turns to me. “I’ve got chills. Do you?”
I have to admit I do.
The doctor asks me to try to describe what I’m feeling as if I am one of his patients, and I stammer a response about going to Sunday School as a kid and the thick smell of incense I remember at Easter Mass at my father’s Syrian Orthodox church. But, really, as soon as I try to put the sentiment into words, the chills subside and trickle away.
This is essentially what happened to the patient I’ve called Ronald Hodge. After a month of taking antipsychotic drugs under Lichtenberg’s care at Herzog, he gradually came to accept the hazy reality of what he’d been through. He was still confused, but he was calmer, more cooperative, and he no longer felt voices thrumming through his body. The American consulate arranged for his discharge and put him on a flight back to the States. He went back to his old life.
Lichtenberg and I come to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Inside the entrance is the Stone of Unction, symbolizing the spot where Jesus’ body was anointed and wrapped in a shroud after he was taken down from the cross. Men are kneeling with lit candles. Women are kissing the stone and running their rosaries along the top of it. Many are crying. It’s profoundly moving.
We head east toward the Wailing Wall. There, rows of men dressed in black and wearing sidecurls are rocking back and forth as they pray. Lichtenberg grows quiet and slowly approaches the wall, rubbing his hand on one of the giant stones. He leans forward and softly kisses it. After a few minutes, he looks around and says, “No messiahs here today. Sorry.” He seems honestly apologetic.
Later, over a cold drink, Lichtenberg confesses that he sometimes views his patients with less-than-scientific eyes. “I guess when someone comes into the hospital claiming to be the Messiah, my interest is not just clinical,” he says. “Sometimes you can see right away that the patient isn’t the charismatic type. They’re just a sick patient. But, OK, yes, I’ll admit it. There have been a number of people over the years who managed to arouse a certain hope that, hey, wouldn’t it be great if this person really is the One? So far I’ve been disappointed. But you never know who will walk through that door tomorrow.” His cell phone buzzes on the table. He’s needed back at Herzog.
As Lichtenberg walks off toward the hospital, the drone of the muezzin’s call to prayer crackles and hisses over a loudspeaker. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Is this the strange power of Jerusalem? Or just the result of an overactive limbic system? It feels deeper than that—more holy. But then again, what is deeper than neurochemistry?
In my earlier blog, The Grand Old New Imperial Hotel, I wrote:
Had the hotel been there in Biblical times, what events we might have witnessed from our balcony. King Herod, the ostensibly psychotic master builder of Bible infamy dwelt opposite as he planned his Second Temple. So did Pontius Pilate. If one accepts the narrative of Simon Sebag-Montefiore, in his Jerusaelm : The Biography, we could also have watched the last journey of Jesus of Nazareth. It was but a short distance from the Citadel where he was condemned and Golgotha where he died: across the square, right at the New Imperial, left just past the Med, and straight on to the Hill of the Skull (where the Church of the Holy Sepulcher now stands). The present Via Dolorosa runs from the site of the Antonine Fortress, on the northern edge of the Haram ash Sharif, to The Church, its course set by custom and customers from Byzantine days.
In That Howling Infinite 