JERUSALEM

THE CITY OF RELIGION

HUMANS WITH HEARTS

February 2, 2010. I attend a basketball game that is part of the European League playoff between Hapoel Jerusalem and Galatasary Istanbul. The name Hapoel literally means “the worker.” It says quite a lot about the team. This club was once affiliated with the massive General Federation of Labor in Israel trade union, but is now a nonprofit organization whose supporters often wear red shirts and are associated with the left politically. I fell in love with the team as a teenager and developed into a die-hard fan. On my left today in the stands are a pair of modern Orthodox Jews,¹ who, like me, have bought season tickets. We are friends and have stood in the stands for years now, cheering and shouting and wishing the referee’s wife and mother all kinds of things. Today, on my right is a young Arab I’ve never seen before. It strikes me that our little group actually sums up the way Jerusalem is conceived by many: nearly 50 percent religious Jews, 25 percent secular Jews (me), and 25 percent Arabs. Our team does very well and the three of us shout and joke. Yet the young Arab is deadly serious and doesn’t move. I ask him why he isn’t cheering and shouting, and he just looks at me so seriously and sadly that I can’t help thinking: he must be a terrorist and he’ll blow himself up any second now. I feel terrible at being unable to rid myself of this stupid idea. But perhaps this is what Jerusalem is about, I think dejectedly: enmity, suspicion, and the ever-present Israeli-Arab conflict. Thankfully, the minutes tick by and he doesn’t explode. I become even more ashamed of having thought what I thought, so I strike up a conversation with the young Arab. Some minutes later, another religious man comes along and stands between me and my ultra-Orthodox friends. Deciding he needs more space, I move closer to the Arab guy to give him room. One of my Orthodox friends comes over to tease me, saying, “Hey, Lefty, you think I haven’t noticed recently that you are moving away from us?!”

Jerusalem is a holy city for hundreds of millions of people. It is also a city where 780,000 people live and work. As host to the best university in Israel, it has a large student population. Jerusalem has a small number of theaters, a symphony orchestra, and a respectable bohemian community. It is a city where Arabs and Israelis coexist, as do Muslims and Christians with Jews, secular Jews with Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, Oriental Jews with European Jews.² The city is thousands of years old. It was probably first settled in the nineteenth century BCE. It has seen countless wars and conquests (according to the records, Jerusalem was the site of a well-known battle as far back as 1250 BCE). But above all, it is not a city you can be dispassionate about: either you love it or you hate it. “That’s obvious,” says my friend and university colleague. “The religious love it and the secular hate it.” I disagree. I, for one, consider myself secular but I adore the city and, at least for now, cannot see myself living and working anywhere else. Admittedly, though, I am a believer and feel a lot of sympathy with faith.³

So what is the secret of Jerusalem? Why do people love it? Why are so many people ready to die for it or, worse, kill for it? It is no good trying to work out how many have died in wars in and “because of” Jerusalem. The task is impossible because there are no historical data, but I do know that enough lives have been lost for me to say with the utmost conviction, “Enough is enough!” And yet, can anyone guarantee that no one will kill or be killed over Jerusalem in the near future? The Jerusalem poet Yehuda Amichai wrote, “Suicide attempts of Jerusalem … / She’ll never succeed, but she’ll try, try again and again.”⁴

Indeed, hatred resides within the city of God. This absurdity is wasted on the many who kill and fight over this city. Jerusalem’s image as a city of God is so strong and has become so distorted that many—too many—people believe that the very fact of God’s “existence” in Jerusalem justifies violence, intolerance, and hatred. So this is the subject of the chapter on Jerusalem: How Jerusalem could have been a symbol of beauty, kindness, benevolence, goodness, and grace. About how it often is. How it always should be. How it often is not. And this chapter will try to discover why not.

Dan Pagis is a Holocaust survivor who migrated to Israel in 1946, when he was a sixteen-year-old boy, and later became a lecturer at my university, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A renowned poet, Pagis wrote a wonderful poem about Jerusalem, titled “The Eternal City.” Here is my own translation.

Wounded in psalms of glory,

engraved in daggers

on her poor shoulders, adorned with a corona

of holy fire, all legions

lunged at her to look for their savior

within her arms, and made her the world’s heart

to all who seek the miracle, and bound her

and crucified her to glorify her name—

and never stopped and never wondered why

she is hiding a wall within a wall

Eternal city, like a brownish fist

tightly closed in a stone, still awaiting

hard-headed, fenced and delimited

to live peacefully not twiddling her thumbs

but within her all those who feed on wonder

wizards of magic, praying for the sign

which will descend on her from Heaven

and turn her face upside down, and bury

her soul in a bundle of soil, and sanctify her

forever with their feet, like a cemetery.

The Jerusalem cemetery is the first thing one sees at the western entrance to the city. I drive Daniel to Jerusalem from the airport. As we reach the city, to our right is a mountain covered with graves. I tell Daniel that one of Jerusalem’s best-known writers, Meir Shalev, jokes that the municipal cemetery was put at the entrance to Jerusalem because the strongest trade union in Jerusalem is that of the dead. Many Jerusalemites say cynically that Jerusalem is the only city in the world where the right to vote is granted to the dead. Daniel finds that a good joke, but maybe it isn’t a joke.

Jerusalem has no natural resources and sits on no natural trade routes. Therefore in ancient times its wealth was made up entirely of donations brought by the devoted. Today the city is the poorest of Israel’s major cities, and one of the poorest of all its cities. A third of Jerusalem’s population lives below the poverty line (the situation for Jerusalem’s Arabs is worse; nearly two-thirds live below poverty line). Many Jerusalemites do not work, but pray and study. There is not much of an industrial zone, and efforts by Jerusalem’s mayors to attract high-tech companies in the 1980s and 1990s were only partially successful. You will find the big money in Tel Aviv, city of affluence and antithesis of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is thousands of years old; Tel Aviv celebrated its one hundredth anniversary only recently. Jerusalem people tend not to go out much, especially in winter, when it can get really cold (snowing twice a year), whereas Tel Aviv is a 24/7 city and certainly, in terms of culture and entertainment, the richest in Israel—some would say the Middle East. Jerusalem has a symphony orchestra; Tel Aviv has a philharmonic. Last October, as dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Hebrew University congratulating our students on the first day of the year, I said, half joking, “Welcome to Jerusalem. It’s a great city; we have two pubs!”

All this affects the population and its character. People who are into urban fun don’t find Jerusalem very appealing. People who are into spirituality do. One of our interviewees said, “In Tel Aviv they know how to live; in Jerusalem we know why we live.” Those looking for high salaries tend to find work in Tel Aviv, not in Jerusalem. Above all, Tel Avivians are mostly secular. And Jerusalemites, even when they are not religious, usually acknowledge and accept the city’s religious flavor and atmosphere. When I ask a friend of mine who loves living in Jerusalem what he finds so appealing, he answers, “A city that dates back to the nineteenth century BCE gives one a feeling of responsibility; we are responsible for its continuity. It lacks the unbearable lightness of being typical of Tel Aviv.” I guess one can generalize that people in Jerusalem are humble in an arrogant way.

But living in Jerusalem is authentic; there are no pretensions. You know what Jerusalem is about and you are willing to accept it. In Tel Aviv, though, it is always about “appearance,” “make-believe.” When I asked one person how he would define the difference between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, he replied: “The clothes people wear in Tel Aviv are worn to make a statement. ‘Hey,’ they are saying, ‘Look at my clothes, look at me, I’m cool, or I’m doing well.’ In Jerusalem, people wear clothes because it’s cold outside and they want to warm up.” One day, as Benny Tziper, a journalist for Haaretz, Israel’s most liberal newspaper, strolled around Tel Aviv, he was struck by the fact that a massive military complex surrounded by barbed wire stands opposite the opera house, and that a jail is across the street from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Writing on the subject of hypocrisy and people’s indifference to the suffering of others, he ended his essay: “From that perspective, it is so much easier in Jerusalem. There, the tension between Jews and Arabs, religious people and secular people, in fact, the tension between people in general, and the brutality and violence in our lives, is an open part of the city’s narrative. In Tel Aviv … people stroll past the military complex convincing themselves it is a fairground…. Tel Aviv has taught itself to turn a blind eye to the unpleasant.”

Indeed, since poverty prevails in Jerusalem, there are more local charities and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) devoted to helping vulnerable people than in any other city in Israel. But the explanation for this massive infrastructure of poverty relief is not only that the city is poor; it is also that Jerusalem contains a colorful patchwork of ethnic and religious groups, each with its own organizations to care for its members. Thus, pluralism is part of the city’s life and even its folklore. In fact, Mark Twain, on his visit to the city in 1867, described this plurality: “The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants…. The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too numerous to mention. It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem.”⁵

Twain’s additional comment—”Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt [were the] signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem”—is arguably not the best example of tolerance. Many believe that even today Jerusalemites are basically tolerant of many religions around them, including churches, mosques, synagogues, and self-nominated prophets. Or are they? Or maybe the story is that they should be yet they aren’t?

In the early 1990s, I was a young lecturer at the Hebrew University, specializing in environmental politics and environmental ethics. One day I received a letter from an American professor of environmental policy who had read my works. O.P.—that was his nickname—wrote that he was a Hindu believer and was eager to visit Jerusalem, the holy city, and would I host him? Though I had never met him, I thought this would be a fascinating experience, which indeed it was. When he arrived, he could not wait to take the bus to the Old City, where we went from one holy place to another. In each place he prayed. I asked him to which God he prayed, and whether it was to the same God in all places. “Of course,” he said, with a shining smile, “it is the God that is within us.” “But,” I insisted, “these places you have visited are holy to religions that denounce other people’s Gods and prophets and claim that God is external to human beings.” “Oh,” he sighed as we climbed the Mount of Olives toward the Church of the Ascension, where, according to Christian tradition, Jesus ascended to Heaven. “They don’t really mean it.” I looked at him wonderingly, and he continued, “God is everywhere; outside you, inside you, and it has many forms.” I still remember how he emphasized the word many, stretching it out as long as he could. When we reached the tiny church, he continued, “Humans who have a heart have God within them.”

A CITY WITH AN IMAGE OF GOD

Jerusalem could easily be described as the center of monotheism. For Muslims, it is called “the sacred” (in Arabic, Al-Quds). According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad visited Jerusalem during a famous and fascinating night journey that included ascension into the heavens to be shown the signs of God.⁶ When Omar seized the city from the Christians in 638, he built a modest mosque on Mount Temple. The current amazingly beautiful mosque, called Dome of the Rock, is the oldest existing mosque in the Muslim world, dating from 691. The initiator was Caliph Abd al-Malik. Several historians claim that he built the mosque not so much out of religious belief as for political and economic reasons. A competing caliph who ruled in Mecca challenged the legitimacy of Abd al-Malik. Being the birthplace of Muhammad, Mecca attracted many pilgrimages and therefore benefited financially. So in order to attract these people to Jerusalem Abd al-Malik built this huge and beautiful mosque, claiming that the rock at the center of the dome is the spot from which Muhammad ascended through the heavens to God. Other historians claim that the reason the mosque was built was to compete against the beautiful buildings serving at that time the Christians. Indeed, they point out, the measurements of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher were copied. The diameter of the mosque is 20.20 meters and its height 20.48 meters, while the diameter of the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is 20.90 meters and its height 21.05 meters.⁷

In the early 1990s, our university hosted a professor from Canada and I was asked to book a hotel room for him. Never having met him, I booked him a room at one of the city’s five-star hotels, which is about the same as any other five-star hotel on the planet. I could see that he was deeply disappointed on his arrival at the hotel. “Don’t you like the hotel?” I asked, and he replied, very politely: “Well, you know, it’s Jerusalem. I wasn’t expecting to stay in yet another five-star hotel.” I knew immediately what he had in mind and drove him to the YMCA. “This is actually a hotel,” I said, “though quite a modest one.” As he looked at the building, his face shone.

The Jerusalem YMCA building on King David Street is considered the fanciest YMCA in the world.⁸ It was built in 1926, thanks to a donation of one million dollars. Nowadays it faces the King David Hotel, perhaps the most luxurious hotel in Israel, but when it was built it faced the walls of the Old City. The Young Men’s Christian Association hired Arthur Louis Harmon, the same architect who five years later designed the Empire State Building in New York, to design its building in Jerusalem. The goal was to create a center for cultural and social interaction among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The Jewish community was initially quite suspicious, but gradually the building did emerge as a center for such activities. If there is one building in Jerusalem that seeks to capture the idea of religion, it is this. The building has three wings, representing the Christian Trinitarian formula of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But the three wings also represent the unity of mind, spirit, and body,⁹ and, naturally, the three monotheistic religions. At the top of the northern wing is carved the Jewish declaration of faith, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” At the top of the Southern wing is carved the Muslim declaration of faith in the Oneness of God, “There is no God but Allah” (God). In the garden, there are twelve cypress trees representing the twelve tribes (Judaism), the twelve apostles (Christianity), and the twelve successors to Muhammad (Islam). The symbolic number twelve is repeated again in the twelve windows of the concert hall, where I often enjoy recitals thanks to the superb acoustics. The external corridor has forty pillars, representing the forty years of the Israelites’ wandering in the desert on their way from Egypt to the land of Israel, and the forty days that Satan tried to tempt Jesus. A statue depicting the head of a woman carrying a jar of water depicts the Samaritan woman Jesus talked with at the well. Below the entrance door stands the statue of an altar built of unshaped and unrefined stones. This represents the altar that Jacob built at Bet El, north of Jerusalem, and indeed the architect brought the stones to build this one from Bet El. There are other highly symbolic works dotting the Jerusalem YMCA, making it seem more like a homily than a work of architecture.¹⁰ When you visit this building, you cannot ignore the message of this city: it is God’s city; the city’s story is about faith; more accurately, it is about the three monotheistic religions sharing a faith in the oneness of God.

There is a lot to be learned regarding the role of religion in the conception of Jerusalem from studying its maps. The geographical historian Rehav Rubin believes that until modern times, maps of Jerusalem indeed resembled an idea and embodied an attitude rather than a description of a real-life city. Many maps of Jerusalem were, in fact, drawn by people who had never seen the city with their own eyes.¹¹ And although the usual purpose of maps is to depict the real world in graphic form, this was not really what those who drew maps of Jerusalem wanted to do. The idea of Jerusalem was more important to them than the real city. As I reflect on this, I cannot help but feel that for many, Jerusalem is a dream, an idea, perhaps an idealization. Hence, most of the Jerusalem maps were more attuned to guiding people’s thinking about their experience of faith and belief in the city than to help them move around it. Thus, some maps of Jerusalem show it as the center of three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. On the other hand, maps drawn during the period of the Crusades (1099–1187) tended to be detailed but often drew the city as a circle, as if to show its roundness, wholeness, and completeness. In maps from the fourteenth century, some details are exaggerated: for example, the Kidron valley—which is nearly always dry—is shown as a broad river; the city has walls even though they were destroyed in 1219.¹²

Mark Twain, whose 1867 visit to the city was mentioned earlier, described the excitement and joy of his fellow pilgrims as they approached Jerusalem (from the north) and saw the city from afar:

At last, away in the middle of the day, ancient bits of wall and crumbling arches began to line the way—we toiled up one more hill, and every pilgrim and every sinner swung his hat on high! Jerusalem! Perched on its eternal hills, white and domed and solid, massed together and hooped with high gray walls, the venerable city gleamed in the sun. So small! Why, it was no larger than an American village of four thousand inhabitants…. We dismounted and looked, without speaking a dozen sentences, across the wide intervening valley for an hour or more…. I think there was no individual in the party whose brain was not teeming with thoughts and images and memories invoked by the grand history of the venerable city that lay before us…. There was no call for tears. Tears would have been out of place. The thoughts Jerusalem suggests are full of poetry, sublimity, and more than all, dignity. Such thoughts do not find their appropriate expression in the emotions of the nursery…. Just after noon we entered these narrow, crooked streets, by the ancient and the famed Damascus Gate, and now for several hours I have been trying to comprehend that I am actually in the illustrious old city where Solomon dwelt, where Abraham held converse with the Deity, and where walls still stand that witnessed the spectacle of the Crucifixion.¹³

But once inside the city, Twain was not so impressed with its small scale, noting its very narrow and inconvenient streets and describing it from a somewhat disillusioned perspective. The city is not sacred but rather poor and filthy: “Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently—the eternal ‘bucksheesh.’”¹⁴ He was cynical: “To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here.”

So Twain was not very keen on living in Jerusalem, but I’m sure most Jerusalemites would not take it personally. Others, however, have moved to this holy city and not regretted it.

Daniel and I meet Orly, a PhD student of mine who is an expert on Jerusalem. She knows a lot of people in the city and takes us to meet Brother Oscar, a Franciscan monk who decided to move to Jerusalem upon graduating from university in Italy seven years ago. We enter the Old City through the Jaffa Gate and turn left. We are now in the Christian Quarter, where we meet Brother Oscar at the Franciscan Saint Savior’s monastery. Two hundred years ago, a group of friars established a monastery on Mount Zion where the Last Supper is believed to have taken place. In the early twentieth century, the monastery was moved to where it stands today. Brother Oscar has only been here for seven years, yet he says “we” when he explains the history of the site. “We bought this place from the Georgian monks.” Brother Oscar is the kind of person you immediately fall in love with. He is gentle, polite, and charming, and has a good sense of humor, sometimes directed at himself. In describing meal times at the monastery, he says, “You know, you are supposed to eat in silence. But for me, as an Italian, it goes against my nature. We can’t keep quiet when we eat.” Brother Oscar explains that Christians in Jerusalem are a minority in two senses: like the Arabs, they are a minority compared to the Jews, and they are also a minority within the gentile community, which is mostly Muslim. So does he feel at home here? Mario Oscar was not religious when he took his political science degree in Naples. But when he became religious, he realized without a doubt that he would come to Jerusalem, and now he feels at home. “In this city, even if you are an atheist, you are religious,” he says, flashing that warm smile again.

Brother Oscar shepherds us to the monastery chapel. On the way, we ask why he felt so certain that he would come here. He catches us off guard: “Everyone was born in Jerusalem,” he says gravely, and it strikes me that although I was born in Rehovot, a small town not far from Tel Aviv, and lived there until the age of fifteen, when my family moved to Jerusalem, I nonetheless felt that somehow I had been born in Jerusalem. I tell him this, expecting him to laugh, but Brother Oscar takes me seriously. He takes what I said literally, though I was speaking metaphorically.

Unlike Twain’s mixed portrayal of delight and shock, the British have tended to see Jerusalem through a romantic haze, idealizing the city and its religious halo. For many years, the dream of rebuilding Jerusalem in England, on England’s “green and pleasant land,” was part of English culture and, many would claim, its religious identity. In fact, this ideal influenced the way the Victorians responded to real-life Jerusalem, then a dry and dirty city in the Middle East. The historian Eitan Bar Yosef has suggested that metaphorical appropriations of the “Holy Land” and “Jerusalem” have played a much more dominant role in the English cultural imagination than the city itself has.¹⁵

Daniel is in Jerusalem and, naturally, we make our way to a basketball game. The Jerusalem team is behind and there are 1.7 seconds left on the clock. The player throws from eight meters without even a glance and the ball dives miraculously into the basket. Jerusalem wins. And the man next us yells, “You see! There is a God!”

FAITH AND RELIGION

After living in Jerusalem for more than a year or so, many secular people come to like the idea of a life lived with faith. However, they reject the idea of institutionalized faith: that is, Religion. So I discussed this point with many religious and secular people from the three monotheistic religions—Jews, Muslims, and Christians. My conclusion was that if religion was a voluntary get-together of people with a shared faith, it could be great for many; but it would have to be spontaneous, almost anarchistic, and somewhat eclectic, allowing individuals to pick and choose the elements they want to frame their faith. Of course, the core idea would have to be clear—say, a belief in the oneness of God. For this to happen, religion would have to be pluralistic, open, tolerant and accepting, detached from politics as a form of order and hierarchy, and spiritual rather than materialistic, so that religious leaders could avoid corruption. If you ask me, Jerusalem has this ethos to offer because it is home to so many faiths and religions, because it is not an affluent city, because it has seen too much bloodshed and war, and because its architecture and planning provide the right atmosphere. Having said that, I can see much too much of the opposite in my meetings and conversations: I see religion that deteriorates into hatred and spirituality that deteriorates into witchcraft and paganism.

It is New Year’s Eve or, as it is called among Christians in Jerusalem, Sylvester’s Day. Pope Sylvester died on December 31, 335. Many Jews regard Sylvester as an evil enemy and persecutor of the Jews, but that will not trouble the hundreds of youngsters who will be out celebrating New Year’s Eve in the city’s pubs and restaurants. At the moment it is a gray day as I drive with a friend to Ein Kerem (Vineyard’s Spring, in Hebrew), a picturesque “village” on the edge of the city. There we come across a group of Nigerian pilgrims. Wearing ornate, colorful clothing, they rush excitedly into one of Ein Kerem’s many churches. It is still quite early in the morning and the village itself is only just stirring. The door of one of the cafés is open, and I suggest we go in so I can warm myself with an espresso and chat with the young man who works there. A young Jerusalemite, he has rented a room in the village. Why does he like Ein Kerem? The atmosphere, he says, a lot of tourists, some artists, a few hippy types, religious people, restaurants. I mention to my friend that Palestinians used to live here until they were forced to leave in 1948. Perhaps the pleasant, harmonious atmosphere that currently prevails rises from the many tears buried in this soil, he says. Perhaps that is the story of Jerusalem, I reply. For those Nigerian pilgrims, this is beside the point. Mostly, what interests them is that, according to Christian tradition, Ein Kerem was the home of Zacharia and his wife, Elizabeth, and, even more important, the birthplace of their son, John the Baptist. We step out of the café into the chilly morning air. The sun breaks through the clouds, shedding light on the main church here. Such are moments when rare beauty combines with a sense of sweet sadness, and gives rise to something that many would call kitsch. But I feel a kind of spiritual elevation. I see the many Christians around me and I feel that we share the same God, “the God that is within us,” as O.P. taught me. I recalled that the previous week I had walked just outside Jerusalem with Daniel, who had already been here two months. The sun had suddenly shone through the thick clouds, throwing a golden rosy light across the hills surrounding Jerusalem, and Daniel had cried, “Look, here is God again!” Perhaps this is what happens to people who stay too long in Jerusalem.

I follow one group of tourists and listen to their guide’s explanations. She says that spirituality and pluralism are the two terms that most characterize Ein Kerem. For Catholics, visiting the holy sites implies reinforcement of the text. For Orthodox Christians, visiting the holy sites guarantees them a reward in the afterlife (and they must carefully scrutinize the icons in the churches for this to happen); for Protestants, the site itself is holy—it is less important whether the story in the New Testament is true; they care more about the direct connection, while visiting holy places, between the visitor and God.

Daniel spent two months in Jerusalem conducting this research with me. He met a migrant worker who was really delighted with Jerusalem. A Christian from a town near Bangalore, he attends church each Saturday (which is his day off because he works for Jews). The church he visits in the Old City hosts a congregation of three hundred Indians for Mass. Jerusalem, he says, offers this group of migrant workers an opportunity for spiritual experiences that other cities might not be able to provide.

In 1891, a group of rather affluent Bukharan Jews decided to build a new neighborhood outside the walls of Jerusalem. It would serve as a pleasant vacation resort during their visits to Jerusalem. In 1905, when the neighborhood began to grow, two men, Mr. Yeudayof and Mr. Hefetz, decided to add a magnificent palatial building to welcome the Messiah on his arrival. The architect was Italian and the design European, with two marble staircases leading up to the entrance. On the outside wall they had engraved Im Eshkachech Yerushalayim (“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not”), a quotation from Psalm 137:5, which has been said many times in the context of waiting for the Messiah and longing to see him enter the city. When the Messiah failed to come, the house was put to good use hosting guests and as a venue for celebrations, showing a kind of naïve spirituality combined with down-to-earth practicality. For example, in May 1918 the city’s Jewish community held its welcome party there for General Allenby, the commander of the British forces who had defeated the Ottomans and occupied Jerusalem.¹⁶

Jerusalemites are in love, and love is blind. They usually think Jerusalem is the most beautiful city on earth. On Passover 2008, although it is early morning it is already 40 degrees Celsius and terribly dry and hot. I walk down Emile Botta Road, past a sign reading, “To the Kosher Wine Fair.” Anybody who knows something about wine knows that kosher wine used to be synonymous with wine too horrible for words, described by some as grape vandalism. That was because making kosher wine used to involve boiling it. Nowadays, the only thing that being kosher implies is that the wine was produced by Jews. Still, the idea that wine has to be kosher may sound quite odd to most folks outside Jerusalem, but this is what you get in most local restaurants when you order wine (Daniel, who has had many Israeli bottles of wine with me, would agree that it’s actually not bad). Ahead of me now are the Old City walls, and I hurry toward the Old City through the Jaffa Gate, past the Via Dolorosa, to the Jewish Quarter and the Wailing Wall. On the way I see the Christian Information Center, the Swedish Christian Center, and Christ Church Guest House. Religions in Jerusalem do not try to outdo one another by building higher than the next. Rather they build solid buildings that say, “We’re here to stay.” Men with their talliths, Jewish prayer shawls, pass me. They are all rushing to the Wailing Wall because today is the day Birkat Kohanim (the Priestly Blessing) is said.¹⁷ This is a threefold blessing, asking God to protect the individual: “May God bless you and guard you; may God cause His countenance to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may God lift up His countenance to you and grant you peace.” For many, Birkat Kohanim is a form of incantation, made up of verses of three, five, and seven words; the blessing, it is said, can overcome bad omens and dreams.

I walk by the Cardo, where recent archeological excavations have exposed First Temple period walls from the eighth century BCE. I stop at a shop with an exhibition of photographs shot during the fall of the Jewish Quarter in Israel’s Independence War in 1948. I imagine very few people know that in the 1948 war, Jews lost land to Arabs, the Jordanian army. That was how my mother, her sister, and their parents lost their home.

I suddenly hear the Priestly Blessing over the loudspeakers and hurry along, descending the many stairs to the wide bright plaza of the Kotel, the Wailing Wall. There I can see thousands of people gathered.¹⁸ I see the Temple Mount and, on it, the two famous Muslim mosques. As I said, here religions do not compete with one another by building taller towers; they simply build on one another’s remains. The vast plaza in front of the Kotel is filled with thousands of people. When I was a child, it was not like this. It was full of houses, which were “shaved,” to quote the verb used at the time, to create this huge public square.

When I was seventeen, our football team, Hapoel Jerusalem, made it to the cup final. What a rare event that was, and my friend and I decided to skip school and go to Tel Aviv to watch the game. But on our way, we went to the Kotel. We wrote a letter to God asking for Hapoel to win, and we stuck it between the massive stones. Of course, in those days God listened to simple people, and our team won. Nowadays you can send a fax to the Kotel’s fax machine, and someone prints your fax and sticks it between the stones. Ah, I think, that is not the real thing. If you want God to listen, get yourself to the wall and touch its cool stones and pray. What’s all this about faxing a note? Instant prayer?

I see people carrying Torah scrolls—they are very heavy—and the loudspeaker announcer begs the crowd, “Please let the scrolls of the Torah through.” Then I see what looks like a fetish—people kissing the scrolls—which makes me want to cry, “Hey, Judaism is not about scrolls being holy!” There are fundraisers amongst the crowd trying to raise donations for a Jerusalem yeshiva (college for religious studies), telling people, “Every penny you pay will help sustain Israeli rule in Jerusalem.” My thoughts drift off: I begin to recall theories about the relationships between religion and politics, religion and nationality.

Suddenly, the muezzin’s voice from a not-too-distant mosque comes blasting over its own set of loudspeakers, mixing with the Priestly Blessing. For a moment I feel as if peace has come and that prayers are melting in one sincere voice, rising in the sky above us, trying to break open the skies and reach Heaven. On second thought, there is no harmony between the two prayers, and it is clear they are challenging each other. It’s a shame. So, in Jerusalem religions do not compete by building towers or by building on one another’s remains; they compete by using louder loudspeakers. But the text goes on: “May God lift up His countenance to you and grant you peace.” Peace. Peace. Peace. The final word echoes across the massive plaza.

If religion is meant to uplift, to create a sense of peace and tranquility, to bring about brotherhood and sisterhood, then it must acknowledge pluralism. It has to respect other religions, especially if there is a common belief, namely, a belief in the oneness of God.

Brother Oscar undertakes pastoral care in his local community. “Do you help non-Franciscans?” we ask. People have moved from one stream of Christianity to another since the sixteenth century, he answers, and so members of the Greek Orthodox community are served as well. “We don’t serve stones, we serve people,” Brother Oscar adds with a shy smile.

This sounds like a recipe for peace and tranquility, Daniel and I comment. “Not at all,” sighs Brother Oscar. “Nothing is easy here.” The Christians of the Holy Land, it seems, have had to learn to adjust. Between 1948 and 1967, they were a minority among the Muslims; in 1967, Israeli forces occupied the Old City, so now they are a minority among the Jews. But “we” have always been a minority in the Holy Land, explains Brother Oscar, so we learned to live with it. He sees the advantage in it: Because Christians are a minority, they try to get along with the other religions. If George and Muhammad play football together, they’ll eventually learn to live with each other. This is the motto of the many church-run schools open to children of all religions.

During the nineteenth century, foreign superpowers invested in Jerusalem, building hospitals, churches, and pilgrim hostels. This introduced a new architectural style into the old walled city, changing its architectural character from oriental and Ottoman to eclectic. Near the contemporary local municipality building I can still see what used to be the Russian Hospital, built in 1863, the first hospital to be built outside the Old City walls. The roof of this building carries the words of the prophet Isaiah: “For Zion’s sake¹⁹ will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof goes forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burns.” I personally would not choose this sentence, but it suggests that, indeed, for many Jerusalem is about the unvarnished truth and about truth actually winning.

DOWNWARD SLIDE: FAITH, POLITICS, AND PARTIES

Faith can deteriorate into something else, though. I find four reasons for this. First, when religion frames faith in the confines of political institutions, it changes the character of faith and establishes walls between faith and plurality, harmony, and tolerance. That is what happens when political parties back religion. Second, the institutionalization of faith leads to preferences about what others ought to do and believe. When this happens, and when the other does not conform to one’s preferences, the other becomes an obstacle to one’s ability to fulfill or even practice one’s faith, and therefore the other becomes a hated enemy. In Jerusalem, the most striking example of this is the intimate relationship among faith, religion, and nationality. Third, when competition between faiths is expressed through competition between religions, faith becomes closely allied to power. But power might corrupt. Fourth, faith is about spirituality. But spirituality might deteriorate into something with a pagan element, such as attributing magical powers, like the power to cure, to objects. Let me begin with the first reason for faith’s deterioration.

When religion is about faith, it is supposed to be about the relationship between human beings and the eternal, the Almighty. Prima facie, it is odd if this relationship has any connection at all with political parties. But, unfortunately, it does in Jerusalem. If the reader believes that this connection is inevitable, it is worth mentioning that there were periods when the city’s religious communities apparently did not wish to be involved in politics. The British governor of Jerusalem in the 1920s, Sir Ronald Storrs, wrote in his diaries: “The Orthodox Rabbis, remote from politics and administration, moved in a world of their own…. [They] never occasioned either to me or to the police the faintest trouble whatever. From the administrator’s point of view they were ideal subjects, for all they desired was to be left in peace and the practice of their religion.”²⁰

But one does not have to be ultra-Orthodox and antipolitical to see that faith and religion are not always the same. Faith is often private, whereas religion is not; faith is not driven by the goal of maximizing utility, whereas religion often aims at increasing the utility of its members, the believers.

I asked many Jerusalem residents, secular as well as religious, what “religion” and “being religious” should mean. The answers I received showed me the gap between what religion should be and how it is often practiced. If I generalize and draw conclusions from all these insightful talks, religion as it should be has three elements. First, it is a concern with what exists beyond our senses, beyond the visible. However, unlike philosophy and metaphysics, it is based not on reason but only on faith. “How do you know that God exists?” I asked people, and they all told me about their intuitions without offering any theory. The second element in the way religion is conceived is that God, or the transcendent entity, has superpowers. This entity created the world, and in some religions it intervenes in current affairs. The third element is that we human beings can try to influence the way this power intervenes and we can and should do it by praying or by following customs and laws. Is this the form that religious life takes in Jerusalem today?

On February 2, 2010, a team of policemen went to investigate the death of a twenty-five-year-old woman in the predominantly ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Geula, but the body was snatched by dozens of ultra-Orthodox protesters from the hands of the officer in charge because the police postmortem that would follow this suspected death by unnatural causes (drug overdose) would violate God’s law. Wishing to avoid a clash with hundreds of demonstrators, the police fled the scene as screams of “Nazis, go back to Germany!” echoed in their ears.²¹ About two hours later, the corpse was finally returned to the police after assurances that it could be buried that night with no autopsy performed.

In an earlier incident, one Saturday in November 2009, some fifteen hundred ultra-Orthodox demonstrators gathered outside the Jerusalem factory of the computer chip manufacturer Intel to protest the company’s opening on the Sabbath²² (even though Intel had promised to schedule only non-Jews to work on this day). Dozens of protesters physically attacked the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Yitzhak Pindrus, himself an ultra-Orthodox Jew—though from a different political party than the protesters—saying that he had failed to take sufficient action to prevent Intel from opening its plant and employing workers on the Sabbath.

Unfortunately, clashes become even more violent when tensions are not between different political parties but between different ethnic groups or nationalities.

DETERIORATION: FAITH AND NATIONALITY

My office on the Mount Scopus campus of the university faces out over the predominantly Arab East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where several very good restaurants and smart hotels share the neighborhood with semidetached and detached villas of upper-class Palestinians, and also where the police headquarters is located, along with several government ministries. I open my window to enjoy the light wind that is blowing, and suddenly hear loud voices. A demonstration is in progress, with Arabs protesting against allowing Jews to purchase homes and live in the neighborhood. I feel torn. I live in a neighborhood that is nearly 100 percent Jewish. If we had Jews demonstrating against Arabs purchasing houses in our neighborhood, I would regard them as racists. On the other hand, this is not the same case, because the question here is one of sovereignty. Before the 1967 war, this neighborhood was Jordanian—in other words, Arab. The local residents see the Jews who come and settle there as representing a system that aims at establishing Israeli—that is, Jewish—sovereignty in all parts of Jerusalem, and it seems to me that this might block the way to a peace agreement. But my thoughts drift to this chapter. “We share the same biology, regardless of ideology,” sings Sting. How relevant is that to this case? And what does religion have to say about it? On the one hand, fear of the Other is built into religion. For example, “The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high, and thou shalt come down very low; He shall lend to thee and thou shalt not lend to him; he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail” (Deuteronomy 28:43–44). On the other hand, the Israelites were ordered to love and respect the stranger: “Love ye therefore the stranger; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19); “And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him; but the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19:33–34). So the lesson one should learn from the experience of being a stranger (and Jews were strangers for hundreds of years in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America) is to respect and sympathize with the stranger. I know and cherish a very beautiful teaching by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, which says that the only difference between the other and the Jew is that Jews have to respect others who live among them even more than Jews respect one another because, by being “strangers” or “others” or a minority, in practice non-Jews face great difficulties. My thoughts are interrupted by an ambulance siren. More casualties.

When faith becomes institutionalized we find that, not only are the believer’s preferences about him- or herself affected, but so are his or her preferences about what others ought to do and believe. The reason for this is that if, in order for me to practice my faith, I need a certain set of conditions (for example, a prohibition against working on the Sabbath), then I am in fact expressing preferences about the way I would like others to behave. When others refuse to conform to my will, however, and when, in fact, they have a set of preferences of their own about how they think I should behave, preferences to which I do not conform, then we both become threats to each other’s practice of faith. Since this threat or obstacle is not simple but rather has to do with the most important of all my relationships—with the Eternal, with God, maybe also with the salvation of humanity—I inevitably regard as a threat to my own practice not only the other’s interruption but even the other’s very existence: he or she becomes an enemy; a hated one. This is why, when faith and religion are associated with nationality, outbreaks of violence often result.²³

Daniel and I take a tour of the Western Wall tunnels, archeological excavations, begun in the 1970s, that reveal the foundations of the Wailing Wall and other parts of the Temple Mount, as well as many layers of buildings from various historical periods. We join the night tour with a guide who speaks fluent English. With us are a group of tourists from North America and a few families visiting Jerusalem. The guide is an Orthodox Jew who makes no attempt to hide his political views. He says, “For centuries Jews came here, touched the stones, and prayed.” Well, I cannot but doubt his accuracy. Maybe more wanted to come, but very few Jews came to Jerusalem, say, in the sixteenth century, or eighteenth century. He continues: “The Muslims built their houses as near as they could to the mosque, on the temple ruins.” He takes us to a model of the Second Temple before we enter the tunnels. Flags of Israel stand like sentries near this model. He tells us that the Western Wall is the closest place to where the Holy of Holies stood. The Holy of Holies, or Kodesh Hakodashim in Hebrew, was the most sacred place in the temple. No one could enter except for the high priest, just once a year, on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), when he conducted the offering before God. As the guide tells us the story, I cannot avoid thinking of one idea: exclusion. In biblical times, Jews who did not have the status of ritual purity could not ascend to the Temple Mount. Jews and Christians were barred from ascending to the Mount Temple to pray during the Muslim period; even today, Jews are not allowed to enter the Temple Mount due to a political arrangement between the Muslim council, the Waqf, which controls the Temple Mount and the mosques, and the Israeli government. In fact, religious Jews restrict themselves, and according to Jewish tradition, they may not set foot on the Mount itself. Since it is not known exactly where the Temple stood, and since the Temple contained rooms and areas to which the ritually impure could not go, and since one might be ritually impure for all kinds of reasons, there is a general, all-embracing religious regulation that forbids any Jew from setting foot on the Mount. Yet, some right-wing Jews campaign for the exclusion of non-Jews from the Temple Mount, arguing that the present arrangement undermines Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem. I recall that several weeks ago, a colleague from London telephoned me to say that a PhD student of his was coming to Israel and could I get in touch with him to see if everything was alright. When this student arrived, I phoned him. He told me that he was an English citizen, born in Pakistan and therefore a Muslim. He was eager to visit the two mosques on Temple Mount: the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. He was here on a tour with other members of an English NGO who wanted to help the Palestinians. I wished him the best, leaving him my phone number in case he needed anything. Two days later he phoned me to report that he had tried to enter the mosques but was stopped by the (Muslim) Waqf representatives. They asked if he was a Muslim (since only Muslims are allowed in), and he said he was. But then they asked him to say the prayers, which, coming from a secular family, he did not know by heart. Therefore they did not let him in. “You see,” he added in a soft and gentle voice, “In England I am too Muslim and not English enough; in Jerusalem I am not Muslim enough and too much of an Englishman.”

On September 24, 1996, clashes began between Israeli military forces and Palestinians in Jerusalem. Binyamin Netanyahu, then the Israeli prime minister, had decided to open the Kotel tunnels to tourists. There were rumors among the Palestinians in Jerusalem that Israel was digging beneath the holy mosques. Not only were tensions high, the two leaders—two secular leaders, it should be mentioned—delivered speeches that included religious motifs. Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader, delivered a speech quoting from the Quran, asserting that “God bought from the believers their souls and property because they inherited Eden and will fight for their people … will kill and get killed.” Netanyahu said that people walking through the tunnel would feel sela kiyumenu (the Foundation Stone), the term used in the Jewish Talmud to denote the place from which the world was created and expanded into its current form. Some traditions have it that this was the stone where the Holy of Holies stood. Presumably, at least for some Muslims, this sounded not only like political incorrectness but like religious incorrectness as well. The Muslims have their own Foundation Stone (Sakhrah in Arabic), located in the holy Dome of the Rock mosque (Masjid Qubbat As-Sakhrah in Arabic), which is on the Temple Mount. According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad stepped on this rock when rising to Heaven to receive Allah’s message and guidance.

The chain of events in 1996 rightly gives one the impression that, in Jerusalem, rocks and stones are so holy that human beings and their lives are secondary in importance. What started out as a demonstration quickly turned violent, with Israeli forces shooting at Palestinian rioters. On September 26, sixty-nine Palestinians and eleven Israelis were killed. Over the succeeding days, the two leaders decided to order a cease-fire and the killing stopped. Altogether, more than one hundred Palestinians and seventeen Israelis had been killed. This reminds me of a great poem by Yehuda Amichai, who lived in Jerusalem. He tells a story of seeing a group of tourists while he walked in the Old City. The tourist guide pointed to a man who had returned from the market, sitting to rest for a moment, and said: “Do you see this man who returned from the market sitting there? Just to the right of him you see an important building.” Amichai writes that the Messiah will arrive when tourist guides say: “Do you see this building? Right next to it is a man who has returned from the market.”

Originally, Aaron came from Brisbane, Australia. He meets Daniel, me, and my PhD student, Orly, at Christ Church, Jerusalem, an Anglican church with Jewish elements in its design. Aaron distinguishes between faith and religion. He is a Christian who believes that the Jews are the Chosen People. To show this intimate relationship among God, the Jews, and Jerusalem he says: “God chose Jerusalem as the site for His temple. The binding of Isaac happened here.” And to explain why he regards Christianity as a continuation of Judaism, he adds, “In the case of God and Jesus, God is also a father who sacrifices his son.” When Aaron compares the three monotheistic religions, he seems to prefer two based on the following distinction. He says: “Muslims go to Mecca because their religion orders them to. Christians coming to Jerusalem do so because of faith. They are not told to do so.” Daniel and I look at each other. Is this a kind of a coalition between two religions against the third, Islam? We are not sure. Aaron is cheerful and charming, and his religious conviction is naïve, in the positive sense of the word. But Aaron is an outsider because, no matter how long he stays in Jerusalem, ethnically he is neither Israeli nor Palestinian. So he may feel excluded because his church is not really mainstream, but he surely feels excluded in terms of ethnicity.

One problem is that tensions exist not only between different religions but also between different ethnic groups within religions and between different sub-religions within religions, such as Protestants, Catholics, and so on. If we look at the different Christian denominations and their relative numbers, we find that approximately a third of Jerusalem’s Christians are Latins, less than a third are Greek Orthodox, and the remainder are Armenians, Greek Catholics, various kinds of Protestants, Syriacs, Copts, Maronites, and Ethiopians.²⁴ With so many subgroups and customs, how could there be peace? But was it ever different? Have things changed over the years? Mark Twain described his impression of his visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher thus: “Entering the building, through the midst of the usual assemblage of beggars, one sees on his left a few Turkish guards—for Christians of different sects will not only quarrel, but fight, also, in this sacred place, if allowed to do it…. All Christian sects (except the Protestants) have chapels under the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and each must keep to itself and not venture upon another’s ground. It has been proven conclusively that they cannot worship together around the grave of the Savior of the World in peace.”²⁵

Pilgrims arriving at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for prayer on Good Friday, April 2, 2010. Photograph © Gregory Gerber. Courtesy of Shutterstock.

I visit the planned site for the Museum of Tolerance. This interesting initiative represents for me the beauty of the city of faith: I imagine it to be about living together in a spiritual rather than a material manner, with people who accept pluralism joining together and holding hands. For me, it would be the jewel in the crown—Jerusalem, of course, being the crown—if the city had a museum able to express this ideal. The plan, initiated by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was to build something similar to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.²⁶ The architect originally asked to design the museum was Frank Gehry, who had designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Dancing House in Prague, and many other famous buildings. The plan was to build the museum on the present site of an eight-story underground parking lot and a street-level parking lot. But because an ancient Muslim cemetery, dating from the eleventh century, lies next to the site, Muslims have been trying to stop the plan from proceeding. They claim that the construction of this museum on this site is a deliberate attempt to erase their history. I stand there, looking at the signs of construction that was started and then stopped. The authorities feared that going ahead with construction would create a hostile atmosphere that might deteriorate into riots and violent clashes. Therefore they stopped all work. “This city should go see a shrink,” says a passerby with whom I chat about the problems preventing the building from being built. In July 2009, Haaretz newspaper reported that an interesting coalition, this time between ultra-Orthodox Jews and Muslims, sought to stop this museum from being built: “The initiative hopes to get the site declared ritually impure under Jewish law, due to the fact that the construction has involved unearthing the remains of hundreds of Muslims. Such a declaration would keep religious Jews from visiting the museum.” The Palestinians now claim that they expect Israel to recognize and respect the sanctity of this cemetery and refrain from moving the remains of the people buried there. But in May 2010, Haaretz newspaper published an eight-page report on what had happened on this site. According to this report, one cannot claim that the authorities expressed too much sensitivity toward religious feelings and sentiments, but it is clear that much of the built environment in the area lies on what used to be a cemetery, later covered by layers of soil. In court, the developers showed documents from the 1920s demonstrating that Amin al-Husayni, the leader of the Muslim community (the mufti) in Jerusalem, initiated construction of a luxurious hotel, the Palace, on the grounds where this cemetery used to be. The contractor reported to the mufti that construction workers had found graves and bones, and the mufti begged him to keep this secret and to transfer all the bones to another site. This indicates, the planners argued, that the objection to this plan is purely nationalistic, rather than religious.

By now I understand that religion and nationality, and religion and politics, are so thoroughly enmeshed in Jerusalem that they sabotage the city’s potential to become truly a place of worship for all religions, a place of spirituality, a place where faith is revealed. When I ask a religious acquaintance how he would describe the relationship between faith and politics in Jerusalem, he replies, “Imagine a large crowd that is standing on the sidewalk, awaiting someone who is about to pass by. The crowd is made up of tall grown-ups, in the midst of whom stands a small child. The child cannot see anything, so he tries jumping up behind all the grown-ups; he also asks people politely to let him through to the front to watch. But they ignore him. That child is Faith. The grown-ups are Politics. That is the relationship between the two in Jerusalem,” he sighs.

So is the ethos of Jerusalem based on religion or national aspirations?

October 28, 2008. At a seminar organized by the Yad Ben Zvi Institute, an independent research and teaching institute in Jerusalem, regarding the ethics of guiding tourists in Jerusalem, the second panel is titled “How to Tell the Story of Jerusalem and Avoid Being Unethical.” The panelists seem to see no option but to respect the Other’s story. The titles of their talks are: “The Zionist Narrative,” “The Christian Narrative,” and “The Palestinian Narrative.” So maybe all one can do is admit there are different narratives and “live and let live.”

I ask a friend who works in Jerusalem’s tourism department what Christian tourists are told by the guides when they visit Jerusalem. She reports that very few tourists are exposed to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in any profound or unbiased manner. On the contrary, when American Christians visit Jerusalem on a pilgrimage tour, they often are told the Christian Zionist story, that the Jews’ return to the land of Israel is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus. Christian Zionists and many evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants believe that Christians are obliged to support the return of Jews to Israel to fulfill God’s plan. Indeed, Christian Zionists believe that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and that the Jews are God’s true people (at least in the Middle East), implying, of course, that any compromise with the Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are Muslim, is out of the question—not for strategic reasons, but for theological ones. God promised the land to the Jews, and if you don’t want to upset God, the best thing is to respect Israel’s sovereignty over this land.²⁷ If that is one’s religious perspective, then the two characteristics of Jerusalem, religion and national conflict, seem very closely linked.

March 14 is my wife’s birthday and we wanted to celebrate. But it is a very tense day in Jerusalem and we are not in a great mood. The reconstructed Hurva synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City was officially opened this morning. The synagogue, with a remarkable history dating back to the early 1700s, was destroyed by the Jordanian army when it occupied the Jewish Quarter during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. The Hurva has stood abandoned and in rubble ever since, although parts of it could still be seen. Now it has been restored and it seems that experts all agree that its reconstruction too is remarkable.²⁸ It so happens that the great-grandfather of the current Speaker of the Israeli parliament, Reuvin Rivlin, was the rabbi who restored this synagogue in the nineteenth century after it had been partly destroyed. Rivlin himself delivers the dedication speech at the event and is clearly extremely moved. But the Haaretz correspondent Yosi Verter reports that the prime minister made it clear to the Knesset Speaker that his speech should include nothing that could annoy the Arabs or Americans, who would be watching the event anxiously, fearing it could descend into more clashes between Arabs and Jews. Rivlin, Verter writes, had to delete some of the sentences he had planned to read. To me, this incident captures the tragedy of Jerusalem and its faith-religion-nationality clash. Even an extremely emotive and poignant event involving faith and worship (namely, the rededication of a historic synagogue with strong personal ties to the speaker) sadly must be hijacked into playing a role in an ongoing violent national dispute. A city whose ethos is faith is forced to bow to the city whose ethos is nationality.

FAITH AND POWER, AND HOW POWER CORRUPTS

Faith and religion can be in tension. Whereas faith is based on intuition, religion is organized around a theory told as a story. This story does not leave room for intuitions that are out of harmony with it. Moreover, whereas faith can be private and personal, religion is not. It is based on a tradition of texts shared by all members of the religion, and on customs that are often meant to be practiced in public. This is where power relationships come in, because these texts, which interpret God’s will, are actually a body of texts written by people over many generations. They establish the basis for a community organized with hierarchy and order to advance the interests of the faith and its adherents. But the interests, like all interests, are defined by the community’s leaders, so there is a danger of the leaders’ particular interests being given priority rather than the community’s interests.

Brother Oscar is very modest. He tells us that when he ventures out of the monastery into the city, he does not wear his monk’s habit. Surprised, we ask him the reason for this, because he seems rather proud of his habit, with its three-knotted cord belt denoting the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. “Well,” he replies, “the uniform gives me power and people relate to me as a holy person. I feel uneasy about that. I don’t like having power.”

Religion defines its rules of practice in two domains: the private domain, or what people do in their own homes, and the public domain, or what people should do when in the public domain. The latter, as noted earlier, must include preferences about what others ought to do and believe. For example, when walking through Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Me’a Shearim, you will likely be struck by the large pashkvil notices posted along the way. The name pashkvil comes from Yiddish, the language European Jews spoke for centuries and is still used now in ultra-Orthodox communities.²⁹ Pashkvilim (plural) are notices posted on city walls that set out what is acceptable behavior and what is not.

I walk through the streets of Me’a Shearim. One pashkvil asks women not to dress immodestly in the neighborhood; another calls people to a demonstration against postmortem examinations, which it refers to as sacrilegious; another calls for a boycott of a certain rabbi for his misinterpretation of Jewish law.

What these pashkvilim share is that they turn preferences about what others ought to do and believe into rules: they assume the right of religious authorities to tell people how to dress, why women should not sing in public, whether to attend demonstrations, and so on. When such authority is wielded in the name of religion, it raises the question of power. Why should faith be defined and organized in a top-down manner?

I stand in the Church of St. John the Baptist in Ein Kerem. The church is built on the site where, according to Christian tradition, St. John the Baptist was born. As we enter the church, we see the symbols of the Franciscan order, the arms of Jesus and Saint Francis. A church built here during the Crusades later collapsed, and a new church was built on its ruins in 1674. The present structure, however, mostly dates from the late nineteenth century. On the church’s southern wall is a painting by Francisco Ribalta, a Spanish painter of the Baroque period, depicting the death of St. John the Baptist.

The story of the death of St. John serves as a good illustration of the way power corrupts. John was a very humble person who ate little more than honey. He lived alone and could be termed an ascetic. He was a moralist, however, and he dared to denounce the marriage of Herod Antipas to Herodias. According to the New Testament, Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee and Perea, was married to the daughter of the Nabatean king Aretas. But during a visit to Rome to secure the territory of his late brother Herod Philip, he met his brother’s widow, Herodias, and fell in love with her. In order to marry her, Herod Antipas divorced his wife. Meanwhile, John the Baptist had gained a reputation as a preacher, and his baptism in the River of Jordan, several hours’ walk from Jerusalem, was probably also famous. The River of Jordan was on the very edge of Perea, the area governed by Herod Antipas. Therefore, John was conceived as a kind of political threat to the ruler or, more accurately, a moralist who challenged political power in the name of religion.³⁰ John dared to denounce Herod’s marriage, and for this Herod threw him in jail. According to the gospel of Matthew, on Herod’s birthday, Herodias’s daughter, Salome (Shlomit in Hebrew), dances for him and in return he offers to give her whatever her heart desires. Following her mother’s advice, Salome asks for John the Baptist’s head, which is delivered to her on a charger. This cruelty and the unbearable lightness of killing that power allows has shocked many artists, including Heinrich Heine,³¹ who imagines a different ending to the story, one in which Salome falls in love with John’s head.³²

Daniel and I meet Orly, my PhD student, near the Jaffa Gate. Orly used to be a tourist guide and has written several chapters in guidebooks on Jerusalem for people who take their travel seriously. We meet near the Old City wall. The wall is rather long—4,018 meters, with an average height of 12 meters, and an average width of 2.5 meters. The wall has thirty-four towers and seven gates, each with a different name.

Not far from where we stand, two soldiers approach two Palestinians, asking to see their papers. I feel uneasy. Passersby pay no attention. The two Palestinians show their papers and move on, but not before the soldiers conduct a body search. Alright, I think to myself, security people search my body when I visit a shopping mall, an airport, a train station, or even the university where I work, so what do I sense is wrong here? Perhaps it feels wrong because the Old City of Jerusalem should be different; perhaps we would have loved it if people who visit the city could feel at home. Orly asks me why I think there are walls in Jerusalem. I think to myself that it is so the security forces can check people and body search them, but I put aside my cynicism and regret and try to be a good pupil. “To protect the inhabitants of the city, of course,” I say. “No, no,” says Orly. “These walls could never protect a city.” And she is right—I never thought of it like that. The walls of Jerusalem are gentle and beautiful, not monumental and strong. Orly explains that during the rule of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (mid-sixteenth century), Jerusalem was not considered a very important city except for religious reasons. However, Muslims came from all over the Ottoman Empire to visit the city—which was in fact a village of seventy-nine hundred people (estimates are that 80 percent were Muslim and the rest Jewish). It seems that those who came complained that you could not see the city from afar and that its appearance was unappealing and filthy. The city walls had been destroyed in 1219 and never rebuilt. So Suleiman ordered a set of walls to be built (in 1535) in order to impress visitors, make them feel that this was a holy and important city, and make their journey seem worthwhile.

I recall standing on the ramparts of the Jaffa Gate in 1974, if I remember correctly. I was a teenager then and loved walking around the Old City. One day I was on the walls (you can still climb them and walk along the ramparts—which I thoroughly recommend!), when I heard a commotion. A group of some twenty people began demonstrating at the Jaffa Gate entrance into the Old City. I was less than three meters above them, standing on the ramparts, and I could see Meir Kahana, who at the time was a recent immigrant to Israel from the United States and held very radical ideas. He later formed a racist party that was eventually outlawed. On that occasion, Kahana was demonstrating against allowing Palestinian refugees to return to the villages of Ikrit and Bir’am, which they had been forced to leave in the 1948 war. In the present, I can recall how I felt as I stood there, hating Kahana deeply for his racist ideology. I imagined myself as a soldier from the sixteenth century, when the walls were built, protecting Jerusalem from this lunatic. It seems that nothing has changed in the interim, and Jerusalem has needed to cope with plenty more lunatics of all stripes.

More than other places in Jerusalem, the Last Supper Room symbolizes the intense hatred that can exist between religions. Ask a tourist guide to take you there and you will be led to a second-story room on Mount Zion that commemorates the Upper Room in which, according to the New Testament, Jesus ate the Passover meal that became his “last supper.” As a matter of fact, this building is definitely not the one in which Jesus celebrated the Passover meal because it dates only to the twelfth century. Some archeologists do claim, however, that the Little Church of God, which existed on this site on Mount Zion during the second century CE and is mentioned in various writings, was built where Jesus and his followers had gathered.

The history of the churches built on this site encapsulates the tragedy of religious hatred in a number of ways. First, the Last Supper is often associated with the betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot, who, according to Christian tradition, approached and kissed Jesus, a prearranged sign which identified him to the Roman soldiers, who then arrested him. The story fueled anti-Semitic outrage and persecution for centuries. Second, the churches later built on the site were repeatedly destroyed through hatred. The first church, constructed during the second century, was reconstructed in the fourth century after the persecution of Christians ended.³³ When the Persians attacked Jerusalem in 614, however, they burned the rebuilt church. When the Crusaders reached Jerusalem in the twelfth century, the church was in ruins but they built the room (the Cenacle) that we see today. When the Crusaders were defeated, the church was once more destroyed but the Cenacle was spared. The Franciscans tried to renovate it during the fourteenth century and it was used as a Franciscan monastery until 1524, when the Cenacle became a Muslim mosque under the Ottomans. In the early the twentieth century, the German organization Deutscher Verein vom Heiligen Lande built a new church around this room—the Hagia Maria Sion Abbey (also known as Dormition Abbey).

It is early morning, Easter 2008, and I march with a crowd of hundreds toward the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Russians in dark clothing holding huge wooden crosses; Brazilians marching cheerfully, praying in a way that reminds me of their samba; Africans feeling so emotional that when they walk, it looks as if their legs do not touch the earth. The archbishop is out in front, leading the procession. He knocks on the church door.

The key to the door is held by a Muslim. It is said that the various Christian sects could not agree among themselves on which of them would hold the key, so they eventually gave it to a Muslim. Inside the church is the eleventh station of the Via Dolorosa (where Jesus walked carrying the cross, and where, according to tradition, he was nailed to it), which belongs to Catholics. The twelfth station (dedicated to Jesus’ mother, Mary, and where the crucifixion took place), belongs to the Greek Orthodox and is adorned with lights. The stone on which Jesus’ body was placed after the crucifixion lies between the two stations. The various sections of the church, or ambulatorium in Latin, are administered by different Christian sects: the Armenian, Catholic, Greek, and so on.

Several minutes pass while the procession stands silent. Eventually, a tiny window opens and the key is passed out. Someone climbs up a ladder and opens the church doors. Suddenly, in the chaos of entering the church, everybody mixes; suddenly, we are all human beings.

STONES WITH HUMAN HEARTS

Accompanied by Orly and Brother Oscar, Daniel and I climb up to the roof of the Franciscan monastery’s guesthouse for pilgrims. The muezzin’s voice calling people to prayers mixes with the church bells and the strong wind that blows on this sunny but rather chilly day. From here, there is a great view of the Jewish graveyard on the Mount of Olives, where for centuries Jews sought to be buried, so that when the Messiah came they would be the first to enter Jerusalem.³⁴ This belief is based on the Jewish Midrashic commentaries on the Bible, which say that while other souls would need to “travel” long distances from wherever they were to Jerusalem, the people who were buried here would be spared the arduous journey. It was believed that the Mount of Olives would tear in two, and that the dead would rise from its depths and walk to Jerusalem.³⁵ But there were other rumors about those who were buried on the Mount of Olives: they would not be subject to worms eating their flesh or be beaten by angels, who often beat the dead, it seems.³⁶ I look at the Mount of Olives. There are more than seventy thousand graves, all reflecting the sun’s light. A thought comes to mind: okay, so I don’t believe in all this coming back to life stuff; but suppose it were true. What would happen if these dead people all rose on the same day and marched into Jerusalem? No, I am not worried about how we would cope with them…. I imagine the Old City store owners would be happy to see them. What I’m worried about is what they would think. Would they take one look at what the city has become, feel it’s not what they thought it would be, and want to rush back to their graves? Could they bring peace and tranquility back to my beloved city?

At the time of the British mandate in Palestine, there were clashes between Muslims and Jews who wished to pray at the Wailing Wall. The military governor of Jerusalem, Ronald Storrs, asked the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, Abraham Isaac Kook (spelled Kuk in Storrs’s memoirs), why Jews insisted on praying next to this old stone wall. He offered to build a similar wall somewhere else. After all, he said, they are only stones. Rabbi Kook looked at him in wonder and replied, “There are people with hearts made of stone but this wall is made of stones with human hearts.”³⁷

Many Jerusalemites are proud of living in a city where spirituality is more important than materialism and wealth. Jerusalem students are far poorer than their Tel Aviv peers. In Jerusalem, the elite consists of professors, academics, rabbis, and government officials; in Tel Aviv, it consists of businesspeople and lawyers. So Jerusalemites say that theirs is a city of spirituality. But where does one draw the line between spirituality and paganism or fetishism? When do objects become replacement for God? Yehuda Atzba relates a story told to him by Rabbi Parla, who was the rabbi of the Kotel, the Wailing Wall: “Once I saw a very old Jew standing kissing the Wall, kissing it and kissing it, again and again. This seemed odd, so I went over to him and asked him: ‘Friend, why are you kissing the Wailing Wall so much?’ The old man looked at me and said: ‘What can I do? It is the Kotel kissing me.’”³⁸

Spirituality is often tied to superstition. Yona Ba-Gad tells this story: “When I was young, I was sick with diphtheria. In those days, children who caught diphtheria died. My older sister died, and it was certain that I would die, too. The doctor was determined to save this child. Everyone decided that the answer was to confuse the Angel of Death so that he wouldn’t enter our house a second time. So that the Angel would not know it was me, they burned all my clothes and asked a childless young couple to buy me new clothes and bring them to the hospital. Then they dressed me up and sent me home with the young couple as if I were their child. I recovered and was never ill again.”³⁹

Of course, Mrs. Ba-Gad does not believe that the Angel of Death got confused. But if I told this story to many Jerusalemites, they would take it seriously: the very belief in the ability to deceive the Angel of Death gave this child and her family the strength to resist and defeat this illness. So the line drawn between spirituality and superstition is unclear, and perhaps there is some sense of mysticism in spirituality. However, it is possible for spirituality to decline into a form of paganism and adoration of ancient stones, as opposed to the idea they represent. Placing too much weight on the irrational and the mysterious, on avoiding the evil eye, and on what is beyond us diminishes the importance of human beings and their relationship with faith and religion, and the supernatural takes their place. In Jerusalem, many conceive that places and stones are the habitation of the supernatural. Every religion has its Foundation Stone, for example. But I fail to see a Foundation Idea of the person, the human being. Moreover, when stones and buildings become so important and crucial to a religion, the distinction between the monotheistic religions and paganism becomes vague and blurred.

At Hebrew University, I teach a course on modern political theory. There are 250 students in the class, but one student always sits in the front row. She is very bright and enthusiastic. She often sees me after class to ask questions. Judging from her economic and social views, I would guess that she is a socialist. One day, the class deals with modern conceptions of punishment. We somehow reach a very interesting discussion on suffering and whether criminals should suffer more than their victims. Suddenly, this student launches into the debate: “But suffering in this world is because of our sins in a previous life,” she asserts. I ask her what she means and she replies—and I quote: “We Jews, this is what we believe: that suffering in this life is due to a sin we committed in a previous life.” Very gently, I note that Judaism does not believe in previous incarnations. She looks at me in astonishment and says, “Of course we do; this is what I learned at home,” emphasizing “I.” The students started to lose patience. “What are you, some kind of Buddhist?” they ask.

According to a story about Hebrew University, during the 1960s a great scholar by the name of David Flusser gave a very popular course on the history of Christianity. Students were in awe of him: his breadth of knowledge was phenomenal and he was highly charismatic, but also very authoritarian. Students never dared to argue with him and, to avoid his calling on them, they knew better than to sit near the front. But one student kept sitting in the very front row. One day, while Professor Flusser was lecturing on Jesus, she suddenly stood up and addressed the class, shouting, “This is rubbish, this is completely wrong; the professor does not know what he is talking about!” There was a deafening silence; people were utterly shocked. How dare she say so? “And you, do you know what you are talking about?” one student queried. “Sure,” the woman replied. “I have connections to the One.”⁴⁰

Once, about fifteen years ago, I arranged to meet a colleague from abroad who was staying at a certain Jerusalem hotel. On reaching the hotel, I saw a group of people gathered round a woman who was lying on the ground, singing prayers, whispering, and crying. A few minutes later, along came an ambulance and she was taken away gently by two men. “Another case of Jerusalem syndrome,” said the bellboy. That was the first time I heard of this syndrome. I later discovered that it was a well-known psychiatric disorder.

Indeed, spirituality can deteriorate into many kinds of superstition. The Jerusalem syndrome is a case in point. Yair Bar-El, who is probably the leading expert on the Jerusalem syndrome, works in the Kfar Shaul Hospital, a public psychiatric hospital. He argues that some people (often members of fringe Christian groups, and possibly slightly unbalanced before arriving in Jerusalem) come to believe they have a specific mission here related to Armageddon or the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. In addition, there is a more grounded group of people, who are completely sane before they arrive but something happens to them when they reach Jerusalem. The encounter with this city and its atmosphere brings out the Jerusalem syndrome. “The same clinical picture always emerges,” says Dr. Bar-El. “It begins with general anxiety and nervousness, and then the tourist feels a pressing need to visit the holy sites. First, he undertakes a series of purification rituals, like … washing himself over and over before he dons white clothes…. Then he begins to cry or to sing Biblical or religious songs in a very loud voice. The next step is an actual visit to the holy places, most often from the life of Jesus. The afflicted tourist then begins to deliver a sermon, demanding that humanity become calmer, purer, and less materialistic.”⁴¹ Interestingly, Protestants with ultra-Orthodox Jewish backgrounds are most likely to experience this syndrome. The character they most commonly identify with is John the Baptist, and the episodes usually occur after they visit the River Jordan, where they undergo a ceremony of purification. The syndrome is not pleasant, but neither is it dangerous, and it usually passes within a few days. However, some people with Jerusalem syndrome experience severe anxiety attacks and must be hospitalized. At least one case had serious political and religious implications: a young Australian, Dennis Rohan, set fire to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969. Many in the Muslim world were initially convinced an Israeli was responsible before the police arrested Rohan, who confessed.

CITY WITHOUT CITIZENS

“I am not interested in holy stones,” a former student of mine once told me when I asked why she was going to migrate to Tel Aviv. “I want to live in a secular liberal city,” she added. “I need work, nightclubs, pubs, restaurants where I can eat what I want to eat and not what the Bible wants me to eat,” she said, referring to Jerusalem’s relative lack of nonkosher restaurants. I am interested in where my former students end up living. I find that within three years after graduation, most of them leave Jerusalem. One reason they give is the lack of interesting jobs.

The average unemployment payment in Jerusalem in 2008 was 107 shekels (about U.S. $30) a day, a lot less than the average payment in Tel Aviv (140 shekels). The difference in unemployment payments is an indicator of the difference in affluence, as it compares not the richest populations but rather the more disadvantaged groups in society. At the start of 2010, 11.38 percent of Jerusalem businesses reported themselves at risk of bankruptcy or closure, compared to 7.02 percent in Tel Aviv.⁴² Many Jerusalemites do not work. Whereas many Palestinians in Jerusalem find it hard to obtain jobs, many ultra-Orthodox men do not want to work, preferring to spend their time studying the Bible and the Talmud. Children make up 40 percent of Jerusalem’s population, which is higher than the Israeli average because Orthodox Jews and many Arabs tend to have large families. Indeed, 31 percent of families in Jerusalem have four or more children.⁴³ Looking only at the Arab population of Jerusalem, the figure is 5.3 children per family. Fifty-five percent of families in Tel Aviv consist of two adults with no children, versus 19 percent in Jerusalem.⁴⁴

“Orthodox Jews throughout the world work. Why is it different in Jerusalem?” asked one of my students. Most students in Israel work to finance their studies. They go to college rather late, mostly because they are drafted for military service—two years of service for women and three years for men. By the time they go to college, they have to work and study at the same time. So they are quite resentful when they see Orthodox men who were exempted from military service by a historical political agreement between the ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties and the Israeli government. The typical complaint voiced by secular students at my university is: “These people are not drafted and they don’t work, but I am drafted and I have to work and pay my taxes so that they can study full-time in their yeshivas while I can afford to study only part-time at university!” This complaint usually ends, “So, I’ll finish my degree and go and rent a flat in Tel Aviv.” Noam, one of my PhD students, was politically very active in Jerusalem but finally gave up. He went to live in Tel Aviv and joined a local grassroots party, A City for Everyone, which ran candidates in the local elections and is now very active in the municipality. Anat, another PhD student, moved to Tel Aviv a few years ago after she found a good job there while still studying for her master’s. “It is such a fun city and so free,” she said, referring to Tel Aviv.

When young people leave Jerusalem in such numbers, it raises concerns that the body of taxpayers will be too small to meet the city’s needs. “Worshipping God is fine, but we also need citizens,” said another of my students. Indeed, the question this raises is: Can there be civicism without citizens?

Several people with whom I discuss the question of migration from Jerusalem say that this is a price Jerusalem perhaps has to pay for being a city where modesty prevails. “Modesty?!” interrupted another interviewee, a secular militant. “Jerusalem has become a twin city to Tehran.”

He was referring to the October 2008 dedication of the Chords Bridge at the Western entrance to Jerusalem, which dominates its landscape. The bridge was designed by the world-renowned architect Santiago Calatrava, who cites the Bible as the inspiration for his design, specifically Psalm 150:3, which reads, “Praise Him with a blast of the trumpet; praise Him with the lyre and harp!” The bridge resembles a harp pointing heavenward, signifying that Jerusalem is a meeting place between man and God.⁴⁵ But not only did the bridge cost nearly seventy million U.S. dollars, making it controversial in a city that is very poor, but a performance by a troupe of local dancers at the dedication ceremony ended up annoying many among the secular population. This is what the Washington Post said about the incident:

A troupe of dancers between the ages of 13 and 16 had rehearsed for weeks in anticipation of the opening ceremony…. Hours before the ceremony began, however, the dancers were told that they would need a new wardrobe. Their short-sleeve shirts and ankle-length white trousers were simply too revealing. And their dances—involving tambourines and balloons—were downright “promiscuous,” according to the city’s deputy mayor. So the girls took the stage instead in flowing brown cloaks and—despite the summer heat—black woolen caps. Forced to cut their most suggestive moves, they barely danced at all. “They stood like statues,” the group’s artistic director, Yaniv Hoffman, later told reporters. The city’s ultra-Orthodox community, which dominated the crowd, heartily approved. The reaction among secular Israelis was less enthusiastic. “The Taliban Are Here” was the banner headline in the next day’s Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest-circulation daily paper. “In the end, what we will remember from the ceremony that took place last night is sad and embarrassing and not at all respectable,” the paper intoned…. Yair Ettinger, writing in the daily Haaretz, said that for Jerusalem’s less devout, the night was “yet another stage in the city’s ongoing fall into the hands of ultra-Orthodox extremists.”⁴⁶

THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT: FROM RELIGION TO BENEVOLENCE

The management of the Israeli Basketball League is intent on having cheerleaders perform during timeouts. This bothers Hapoel Jerusalem fans, who express their displeasure with whistles while the girls dance. I always imagined that the girls’ seminaked outfits bothered them. But I found that the reason goes much deeper. “It is not only that many of the fans are religious and the league management should respect that,” explained one of the fans when I asked him why people were upset. “It is much more than that. You see, Jerusalem is a city where people dress modestly, and having cheerleaders is like showing off. We are not that kind of city.” Daniel and I go to a game and it reminds him of something he once read about Jerusalem: that Herod the Great, a Roman Jewish “client” king, wished to introduce entertainment to the city, and the “puritanical” locals refused to let him because physical purity was a metaphor for spiritual purity.

As discussed earlier, Jerusalem is a city of spirituality and culture. In 2008, there were twenty-five public libraries serving the general public in Jerusalem and eight public libraries serving the Orthodox community alone. In these Orthodox community libraries, most of the subscribers were children. The average loan was thirty-one books a year, compared to sixteen books in libraries frequented by non-Orthodox Jews. Library users are generally rather poor. In January 2008, a new national bill was passed making it illegal to charge for library membership. This resulted in rapid growth in the number of members, which soon became double the number of members in 2006.⁴⁷

An important question regarding Jerusalem is whether those with a wholly secular lifestyle can live in and enjoy Jerusalem to the same extent as people who accept religion and faith or are religious. My friend Dani thinks the city is divided anyway, so this question does not matter much: each group enjoys only part of the city. “We don’t talk to each other, we don’t mix; they live in their ghettos, we live in ours,” he says. Trying to find examples to counter this argument, I mention an ultra-Orthodox student we both teach. “Yes,” he replies, “he is one guy among thousands we have taught.” I mention the Orthodox guys I join when I go to basketball games. “Yes,” he answers, “about ten out of hundreds of thousands.” But then I think: Is this any different from, say, Detroit, where whites and blacks don’t always mix, or London, where upper-class and working-class people don’t mix? How often does someone from North Oxford ever visit South Oxford?

Suppose someone with an entirely secular lifestyle migrates to Jerusalem. Suppose this individual chooses this not because she likes the city’s ethos but because she or her spouse works there, or because she needs to take care of her elderly parents. Does this mean that she must accept the ethos? Does she have to respect ultra-Orthodox people and refrain from driving down their streets on Saturday? My answer would be yes. We often have to compromise in life. To some extent, people must respect the ethos of faith and religion in Jerusalem because living in the city denotes tacit acceptance of its ethos. At the time of the Salman Rushdie affair in England, a similar argument was made about Muslims who migrate to England: the act of migration implies their willingness to accept English mores and culture. This means that they must learn to accept the lack of censorship of books in England—even if they are insulted by the content (I have in mind Rushdie’s book Satanic Verses). The same goes for secular people who migrate to Jerusalem: they should accept its ethos and respect it. If I go to a city in Saudi Arabia, I am declaring that I agree not to consume alcoholic drinks in public. Settling in Jerusalem says something similar: that one accepts and respects the ethos of faith and religion in the city. But what about people born in the city who decide to follow a completely secular way of life? Well, life is not perfect, and I believe one has to respect the ethos of the city, provided that one’s basic rights are also respected (see our introduction, where we make this argument in detail).

Yet the picture is more complicated. Jerusalem and religious people have to learn a lesson, too. Simply, it is that the ethos of religion has to respect rights. Recently, a campaign started in the city to oppose mixed-gender buses on certain bus routes. The ultra-Orthodox community demanded that the buses used by their community should have separate seating for men and women; some of them even demanded that women not be allowed on certain buses. The bus company agreed to the demand, but the Supreme Court issued a restraining order against it. The Orthodox community also wanted bus drivers not to use the entertainment radio on their buses. July 21, 2009, saw clashes between secular and ultra-Orthodox groups after ultra-Orthodox people had thrown stones at non-gender-separated buses traveling through their neighborhood in April. It seems obvious that, since such discriminatory practice harms human rights, it should not be part of the Jerusalem ethos and secular people should not have to respect it. But refraining from driving down certain streets in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods on Saturdays does not infringe on any fundamental right or humiliate those required to respect it.

I would expect the Jewish ultra-Orthodox, Muslim, and Christian communities to respect the secular communities as well. More than once I have seen ultra-religious people spitting at other people to express disapproval of their dress, rather than bowing to the other’s contempt for their religious sensitivities. I think this devalues faith. If faith causes people to hate others or disrespect them to the point of spitting at them, then there must be something wrong with that faith. But if people can see the image of God in every person, then their faith is very worthy of respect. It would be tragic if Jerusalem were to deteriorate from being the City of God to become the city of people who have no God in their hearts.

Daniel and I drive to Jerusalem from a conference in northern Israel with the philosopher and Jerusalem resident Avishai Margalit. We tell him about our research for this book, and when the conversation turns to Jerusalem, he smiles and says, “I love Jerusalem; I don’t like it.” Later at home, I discover this story by Avishai in the New York Review of Books. It has in it the same eccentric woman mentioned earlier, Kesher La’echad, but I’ll focus on another part of the story.

When I was a child Jerusalem was more like a large village than a city. As in a village, there were some village idiots walking about, trailed by groups of giggling children…. Another village idiot called himself King David. He wore a black beret and had a round childish face and blue eyes expressing great innocence. As the King of Israel, he would grant us, his followers, various sections of Jerusalem. One day he decided to appoint me ruler of Mount Zion. He put his hand on my head and was about to bless me with his strange ceremony of investiture. At my side stood an Arab boy named Faras, who worked for a Greek Orthodox priest in our neighborhood.

“What about me?” asked Faras.

“He’s an Arab,” said one of the children.

King David thought for a moment, reconsidered, put his hand on both our heads, and appointed the two of us, his Jewish and Arab vassals, joint rulers of Mount Zion.⁴⁸

We learn from this story that for different groups to live together and truly respect Jerusalem, they must want it whole. They should feel that it is more important for everyone to enjoy Jerusalem, and for Jerusalem to remain whole, than to contemplate the alternative—tearing Jerusalem in two. In the Bible we find the same rationale in the story of the Judgment of King Solomon. I refer here to the story’s political wisdom. The Bible recounts the following incident:

Then there came into the king’s presence two women who were prostitutes and stood before him. The first said: “My lord, this woman and I share the same house, and I gave birth to a child when she was there with me. On the third day after my baby was born she too gave birth to a child…. During the night this woman’s child died because she overlaid it, and she got up in the middle of the night, took my baby from my side while I, your servant, was asleep, and laid it in her bosom, putting her dead child in mine. When I got up in the morning to feed my baby, I found him dead; but when I looked at him closely, I found that it was not the child that I had borne.” The other woman broke in: “no, the living child is mine; yours is the dead one.” So they went on arguing in the king’s presence. The king … said: “Fetch me a sword.” They brought in a sword and the king gave the order: Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other. At this the woman who was the mother of the living child, moved with love for her child, said to the king: “Oh, sir, let her have the baby; whatever you do, do not kill it.” The other said: “Let neither of us have it, cut it in two.” Thereupon the king gave judgment: “Give the living baby to the first woman; do not kill it, She is the mother.”⁴⁹

Those who want Jerusalem to be theirs and only theirs, those who desire to possess it, who interpret religion as legitimizing constraints on what others believe and do—such people, in my view, are not genuine Jerusalemites. Those who honestly love Jerusalem should be ready to let others enjoy it and envisage others enjoying it even if the others’ enjoyment meant that they themselves would enjoy it less, or enjoy less of it. They are like the real mother in the story, the mother who loves her child more than she loves herself. The effect of all these religious and political wars on Jerusalem is very similar to the effect of King Solomon’s sword: once the baby is cut up it will be dead; it can never become whole again. The way to prevent this is for different religions to be allowed to flourish in the city so that Jerusalem remains whole and lives on as the city of God and faith.⁵⁰

But for this to occur, the residents of Jerusalem would have to be not only modest but benevolent and compassionate as well.

It is late December 2009 and bitterly cold when I accompany a group of students on a trip to Ein Kerem. We enter one of the most beautiful convents imaginable: Notre Dame de Sion. Here we are met by one of the nuns, who takes us on a tour of the gardens. The convent was built in the nineteenth century by Alphonse Ratisbonne, son of a wealthy French Jewish family. When he was young, his brother converted to Christianity, which deeply hurt the young Alphonse. However, on January 20, 1852, he had a dream in which Mary (“Marie” in French), the mother of Jesus, appeared (he subsequently added Marie to his name). He felt his mission in life was to convert Jews to Christianity and traveled to Palestine in 1855 with this in mind. The Druze were fighting the Christians in Lebanon at the time and Ratisbonne went to Lebanon, returning to Palestine with a group of orphans. He decided to build a home for them, and on January 20 (again that date), 1861, while walking in Ein Kerem, he saw a rainbow stretching from Marie’s fountain to the hill where the convent now stands. He interpreted this as a sign that he should build the orphanage on the hill. Sister Catherine, our guide, has lived in Jerusalem for thirty years. Her mission is to build positive relationships between Christians and Jews and to explain to Christians that it is possible to be a good Christian and love Jews, too. She teaches Judaism at the University of Bethlehem, which is Palestinian. We stroll through the gardens: fifteen acres of beautiful gardens, trees, vegetables, and fruits grown by the nuns. We sit on one of the many benches where people can sit and contemplate.

My memories are sweet though not easy to look back on. Forty years ago exactly, my father died after a long illness. My mother, a very young widow with two children, was exhausted from caring for my father throughout his illness. After the seven days of ritual mourning, she looked for a peaceful place to relax. She brought my brother and me to this convent. In those days, the convent had a very modest and simple guest house. It was a very relaxing week for me, I recall. But I also remember being somewhat embarrassed. Surrounded by walls (except in one direction, which faced the gentle green Judean Hills) and by nuns, I felt rather out of place. Here was I, a young Jewish boy, and there on the wall above my bed was a cross and a picture of Jesus. At night I used to pray to God not to be angry with me for spending time in a convent. And yet I could feel the warm hospitality; I could see that my mother was soothed. I could feel the tranquility of the place entering her and the atmosphere of universal acceptance bringing her relief. Many years later, my mother told me that one of her worst fears about being such a young widow was that her friends were all couples whereas she was a single mother. This fear had a strong impact on her. Four years later, after the 1973 war between Israel and Egypt and Syria, my mother, who was a psychiatrist, devoted all her energy to treating the young widows of soldiers who had died in the war. And following the peace agreement with Egypt some years later, she joined Egyptian psychiatrists in studying ways to help war widows from both sides. When she died several years ago, we received a letter of condolence from a Palestinian psychologist with whom she had also worked.

    

It is late Sunday night when I wrap up my work at the university and hurry outside to catch a taxi. As I enter the taxi, the driver looks at me: “Hey, don’t you recognize me?” I peer at him through tired eyes, and in the dark I see B., a Jerusalem Arab who used to work at the university’s vegetarian cafeteria, where I often eat. After some nostalgic chit-chat about the university, gossip about the lecturers, and so on, he points to the windshield, and says: “Brand new, just had it fitted today.” “What happened?” I ask, and he recounts that the previous day, Saturday, he had picked up a tourist and driven through an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, down a main street. This street is supposed to be open to traffic on the Sabbath (in predominantly ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, some streets are closed on the Sabbath, but this one isn’t). To his astonishment, an ultra-Orthodox passerby threw a stone at his car, shattering his windshield. “I could have been killed,” he sighs. “It is so stupid.” “And so primitive, throwing stones at people,” I sympathize. I mention that the Bible talks about stoning sinners. “Yes,” he replies. “This is Jerusalem: Arabs stone Jews, Jews stone Arabs, and the ultra-Orthodox stone everybody.”