“If I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem!”

Jerusalem, The Golden. The Arabs call the city ‘Al Quds’, “The Holy’. It was deemed sacred from pre-history. 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 breath”. 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.

Paul Hemphill, A Brief History Of The Rise And Fall Of The West

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.

These include 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. 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.  read all about in Messianic Carpet Rides

It is Shabbat in Jerusalem, and there’s magic in the air.

This morning, Enya wafting across the square in front of the Imperial Hotel. This afternoon, a Gregorian Chant rendering of REM’s “Losing my religion”. This evening, Haredim hustle through Omar Ibn Al-Khatab Square just inside the Jaffa Gate on the way to the Kotel, and the walls in Royal David’s Citadel are alive with Son et Lumiere, a weird blend of classical and faux movie music, retelling the ageless story of this ageless old town.

The Kotel, or Western Wall, is open to all, twenty four seven. Women now have their own section – a hard-fought for innovation. And Jews of all courts and communities share the space without rancour, each tribe differentiated by their interpretation of the Holy Torah, and by their garb, as determined by the fashion codes of 18th Century forebears in Eastern Europe and Mitteleuropa, heedless of the Mediterranean climate.

This, the only variable remnant of the Herodian Great Temple, is Judaism’s Holiest Place. And down below, in the tunnel, one can now actually walk the wall’s fundament (and view the biggest house-brick in history). This too is now a sacred site, the more holy the closer one gets to the location of the long-destroyed Holy of Holies. Tucked away in in a courtyard in the heart of the Arab Quarter is yet another, tiny remnant called appropriately The Little Wailing Wall. It’s location, up a narrow deserted alleyway is one Jews where do not venture. We had the space all to ourselves.

Immediately above the Kotel, on Temple Mount, is the Islam’s third holiest, Al Haram ash Sharif, the “noble sanctuary “. It is said that the Prophet alighted here on his night journey to Jerusalem on Borak, the winged horse with a human face, conversed with Abraham, the father of the three faiths, and thence, ascended to Paradise. Revisionist historians suggest that Jerusalem may indeed have been the primary Islamic city, sacred from times long forgotten, until Mecca and Medina were retrofitted to suit the conquering Muslims’ desert narrative.

Non-Muslims can enter the Haram for strictly limited times (three hours a day, on five days of the week), and then, only through the Maghrebi (or Western) Gate, which ascends like an unsightly concertina from the right of the Kotel Plaza. Admittedly, the Haram custodians are wary of would-be desecrators and of Jewish religious elements seeking to pray on the Mount (haram!), and set precedents for the rebuilding of The Temple. But they do themselves and Islam no favours when the other People Of The Book permit pilgrims of all persuasions and passions to enter their precincts.

And passion is the name of the game.

On the Church Of All The Nations, at the foot of The Mount Of Olives, pious of all nations prostrate hysterically across the stone where Jesus wept and prayed in the Garden of Gethsemene. There is bliss in the Filipino pilgrims choraling ‘Amazing Grace’ in the Basilica of St. Anne. There is ecstasy In The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, an Escher jumble of chapels and chalices. Russian pilgrims, most of them babushkas, led by a priest in black, and looking like they have just come in from their villages on the steppe, clutch their many wooden crosses and clamour at the penultimate Station Of The Cross. A young man dressed like Jesus sits in a terry-towel habit of white, beard and hair looking for all the world like the Jesuses in ‘GodSpell’ and ‘Super Star’. Groups gather in clumps, cabals, and covens and read the Word to each other. A kind of ecclesiastical book club with only one book.

Over the centuries, The Church, as it is called, has seen much biffo and bloodshed as three faiths butted each other for dominance. At times, knives and guns have been drawn. The Ottomans sent in troops at one time to restore order, and they didn’t pussyfoot around. They used their weapons and scores of faithful were killed. Nowadays, there is the occasional dust up with monks from the opposing teams going at each other with baskets and brooms. There is a ladder below the middle window that has not been moved for three hundred years because no one can agree as to which faith can remove it. The right hand door was sealed up several hundred years ago to control (and charge for) pilgrim access. Nowadays, entry is free.

It’s that centuries old conflict between the three custodian faiths, the Roman Catholics, the Greek Orthodox, and the Armenians. They each have their own chapels within the church. The Greek’s have the glitziest. Historically, the first two have always been the strongest, backed by the French and the Russians respectively! It was one of the many causes of the bloody and arguably unnecessary Crimean War. Russian influence prevails still with state-supported legions of pilgrims who throng the Via Dolorosa. The Ethiopians now have a small presence. They have be given a tiny little chapel ON THE ROOF!  And there is a rival Tomb of Christ just outside the Old City walls in Arab East Jerusalem , patronized mainly by Protestants. But that is another story.

You know you are near the the Church of The Holy Sepulcher because the aroma of frankincense and candle wax hits you before you reach the it. The Pope arrives for a flying visit next week, so there are banners and all manner of preparations taking place to greet His Holiness. Outside the church of churches, still the basilica that the crusaders restored to Christendom in a welter of blood and violence, shops hawk kaffiyehs, kippas and headscarves, icons, crucifixes and menorahs. Jerusalem is economically ecumenical. And the patronage of pilgrims unites the divided sects of the Old City in a common purpose that prevails regardless of the political impasse, positions, and non-negotiables that divide their political and pastoral leaders.

At the Jaffa Gate, we look out from our balcony in The grand old New Imperial Hotel, a late 19th Century mix of trash & treasure, five-star history, and ten-star views. The Kaiser slept here in the days when Germany had an emperor. His bust sits in the entrance hall (on the floor, strangely enough, but nothing is surprising in this Fawlty Towers of a hotel). The old gate was demolished to let him and his entourage pass through. He didn’t want to walk like Omar al Khatib did when he first entered al Quds and claimed the city for Islam. British General Allenby walked too, and may have even stood on this same balcony in 1918 when he addressed Jerusalem and declared it liberated from Turkish rule. He left the the best news for the politicians to reveal a while later, and for the world to agonize over ever since.

And meanwhile, back in the now: Jaffa Gate, Shabbat.

The pilgrims are still flowing though like schools of fish, with matching hats, and happy, awestruck faces. Filipinos and Brazilians, Indians and Americans. And in a poignant sort of irony, Germans. Gloria in excelsis Deo! Tourists and backpackers amble through in daggy dress, maps and cameras in hand, all mini-back-packs and sun hats. Why do tourists dress so badly? And why in bright reds and blues that make them stand out so in photographs! Thank god for Photoshop!

Jews of all sects walk by all day and all night, in a myriad of hats and coats, the men in their devotional array, their ladies in plain garb. Young men walk out in groups of black, locked in serious discourse, young women, in many shades of sober fashion, yet all striving somehow for an individual voice. Young folk don bright plumage regardless of the chains of faith. Young soldiers ramble by, a hotchpotch in khaki and beige, half with handbags and sandals, clutching their mobile phones, and half with weapons and in army boots. A reminder that this is at once a land of fable and also one on constant alert. And just to prove this, on occasions, noisy groups of stotting teens with Israeli flags gallivant through the Old City, and one time, semi-automatics, “trying it on” with the ever vigilant Border Police who endeavour to keep the peace on this here frontier. Unmarked white vans, and incongruously, horse floats, are never far behind to foil these attempts to mark territory.

Yes, Jerusalem is all about faith and passion, and there is no city on Earth that people get more passionate about.

© Paul Hemphill 2014.  All rights reserved

Read more about Jerusalem in In That Howling Infinite: Oh, Jerusalem, A Middle East Miscellany, and A Short History of The Rise and Fall of The West