ROADS TO HOLY
TO ISRAEL
AND
TO INDIA
BY
JIM CHAPMAN
“Get me another glass o’ whiskey,
darlin’,
this clarity’s frightenin’.”
Peter McNaughton
THE ROADS TO HOLY ©
ROAD TO HOLY
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JERUSALEM
-On the way to the airport,
from inside the darkness of the taxi,
I see a baby,
running naked, down the middle of the highway,
in front of us.
-I yell at the cab driver to stop.
-He snorts inside his white beard, confused.
-In his decrepit car and next-to-worthless headlights, he doesn’t see what looks to be a very young child in front of us. This could only happen at 4:30 in the morning, completely in the dark. There are no other cars on the road.
That I had chosen to sit in the front seat, where I could see the road, saved the little child’s life.
-I yell at him to stop, again. I can tell that he still doesn’t understand what I’m yelling about, but he does stop.
-I jump out of the taxi and pick up the child, maybe three years old, while the driver (he says that his name is Mike, the Santa Man) calls 911. I stand in the middle of the street with this little weight in my arms and except for a small shirt, he has nothing on and he is crying and shaking.
-One fortunate thing, among many other fortunate things that morning, we find ourselves stopped in front of a small motel. I bang on the dark window of the door. An Indian couple, the owners of the motel as it turns out, appear and offer to help out, after I try to explain what has happened.
-They are as nonplussed as I am.
I must have awakened them, while certain that I am dreaming.
-Mike runs into the motel lobby, where I am holding the child (wondering if I am going to be peed upon in my crisp airplane clothes) and asks me if it's a boy or a girl?
-I think, or rather, don’t think, “How am I supposed to know?”
-But for only a moment I wonder, and then, oh, yeah, I just hold him up (a him as it turns out) and look. He’s so small and so like a little puppy.
-Vague thoughts about missing my flight crowd in.
-Incredibly, the police arrive within minutes.
-As we leave, I tell the officer to wrap up the naked little guy, whom he has riding on top of the gun in his belt. The little boy is shivering and crying and very tiny and as we drive away the cabbie yells out his open window, back at the cops, "Getta a blanket!”
-None of this seems real to me as we head to the airport. Mike and I try to piece it all together as we ride on in the darkness.
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Of all the small stars
In the deep night sky
This one that falls here
Has me asking why
The small warm star stuff
Scared of aloneness
Left his firmament
And landed in mine
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-A child, untimely torn from his mother and father by drugs, or abuse, or some other lurking flaw, runs.
–In the airport, I share all this with the woman at the newsstand who tells me that she has seen enough cop shows, CSI especially, to know that both the parents must certainly be dead, that the door had been left unlocked on purpose and the child found his way out that way.
-There really is no other explanation.
-Really, the way people, all around us, every day, explain life to themselves.
-Maybe she’s right, I think, but the way out of this conundrum sounds as crazy as the way in, yet I was there to see the way in myself.
-I am no position to counter her suggestion. I promise myself to find out what happened when I return.
-An unnerving way to begin.
-The lovely, wonderful clouds of Oregon and the rising sun offer a transcendent way out of the darkness.
-The sparkling waves off the Bay welcome me to San Francisco. Then, entering the long, strange tube from which I will wondrously emerge in Israel, I leave America.
-I'm on the plane to Tel Aviv, sitting next to Ehud, an Israeli who lives near the old city of Jerusalem and, while trying to explain why I am going to Israel, I tell him that one of my daughters is marrying a Jew.
-He asks if that is all right with me.
-I have to shake my head at that comment. Whatever makes the Middle East the complicated place that I have always suspected is already becoming apparent.
-I say that I couldn’t be happier, and that that is only the half of it, that another daughter has married a Muslim and that we are, all of us, proud to be one big family.
-That slows the conversation down a bit, and we remain silent for a period of time, but over dinner we agree that a glass of wine solves many problems. Probably, if the flight were shorter and we were not forced to be together for the duration, we might never have restarted the dialog. But we do.
-A tactic for negotiations in the Middle East?
-The flight is reminiscent of a trip taken long ago across the English Channel, in a hovercraft, with the choppy sea rattling my teeth.
-Returning again and again to the child running down the street, it so reminds me of the famous picture from Vietnam, of the naked little girl running to escape the horror of napalm, another flaw, another tragedy.
-An hour outside Tel Aviv, jewishly, muslimly groggy, I marvel at the difficulty of sitting still for so long, waiting for the beginning of the journey to end.
How long it must seem to all the various people here.
-I arrive in the afternoon, find my hotel, and start walking.
-I am one of those people who believe that the world lends itself to being examined intently, on foot.
Minutiae add up to hours that add up to our lives.
-The Right Now unites us all.
-There seems nothing appropriate to say to a dirty woman who asks for money.
-OK?
-OK.
-Nothing separates the grain of sand from the galaxy.
-Walking brings me to my senses.
-When I can walk, I try to hold my eyes wide open and allow the effervescence of life to tumble and foam all about me, sometimes tingling, sometimes blinding, sometimes mingling with and washing away my tears.
-With the right pair of sunglasses, I have learned to walk and cry at the same time, without stepping in front of a bus.
-Walking is a long, languid lunch in the open.
-The boardwalk along the coast extends for miles and miles (kilometers and kilometers now) affording the perfect palliative for my jetlag, viz., just keep moving. I collapse in an outdoor restaurant adjacent to the beach and the Mediterranean Sea, and order labane and eggplant.
-Listening to the muezzin, the Muslim call to prayers, texting Deb, I rest my eyes on the calmness of the water that stretches from here to Rhodes, and beyond.
-Labane is a Middle Eastern-style cheese, made of yoghurt, not unlike a cheese version of hummus, served in a circle with the tomatoes and eggplant and spices and olive oil in the center. On the sound system in the background, "I give him all my love, that's all I do", just these words, go on and on and on, techno style.
-Civilized little restaurant, as the sun goes down and the wind rises, they hand out blankets.
-In a touch of home away from home, I find Columbia crest, an Oregon wine, on the menu.
-Is it important to Israelis, this feeling that they are able to distinguish the good from the bad, what’s right from what’s evil?
-Are they sure that they have this ability?
-Infallibly, like the Pope?
-Infallibility does seem to come more naturally to religion than to politics.
-Is it possible to have the ability to criticize a good poem from a bad poem, to be absolutely certain, and yet, to be unable to tell good from evil itself?
-Amazing for what I’ve heard of the Middle East, young people hang on each other, lying on top of one another in the sand, kissing.
-Do Israelis feel that they are exceptional? Because they are Israelis, or Jewish or immigrants or outcasts or democratic or what?
-What about the exceptionalism of America? Immigration? Wide-open spaces? Room to dream? Do we still believe in all that? What trauma might it take, to undo our personal myths?
-No one wants to know.
-In the Carmel market in Tel Aviv, seeing how hard people have to work to make a living in what is probably the most successful city in the most successful country in the Middle East makes me realize how independently we Americans can afford to live as families, without extended family relationships, whereas here, hanging together, depending on one another, puts a survivor’s exigencies before personal indulgences.
-Bit of luck with the visa to Jordan. If I hadn't gotten to their embassy today, they wouldn't have been open again until Sunday. Whew. And there are no more hotel rooms to be had in Tel Aviv.
-I actually find the "hassle" of trying to get a visa as interesting as going to a museum or seeing old buildings. In order to get a visa, I had to find a photographer who would take a passport photo and so I found myself prowling around in alleys and tentatively entering small, non-descript doorways to make it happen. I enjoy seeing how countries work. Tours deprive a traveler of that.
-Having lunch in front of my hotel.
-Waiter says, "Enjoy"
-How can I not?
-"I realize the view is a bit 'arsh but we are working on it"
-Here, unlike in Oregon and looking west and imagining China or Japan, I look over the horizon and see Rhodes, Malta and Venice, and Crusader ships arriving more than a thousand years ago for some ungodly, godly reason.
-It borders on the inconceivable that Israelis aren't trying harder to solve the mess that they are in; the country is so undeniably wonderful, as an example of the resiliency of the human spirit. But for a people this dedicated to survival not to figure out an answer to this conundrum is ridiculous. While I sit here in a streetside cafe and read the Jerusalem Post, with story after story of rockets smuggled and nuclear weapons debated and settlements built, even though ordered dismantled, it's hard to believe that it's not some sort of trumpet call.
-Gideon, where are you?
-There are certainly walls that need bringing down.
-Arak and grapefruit juice. Good stuff.
-A distinct feeling of being in Brooklyn, with palm trees.
-The Palestinians are like the people in Orlando who have seen Walt Disney come into their sleepy backwater and who then transformed orange groves into un-dreamed of architecture and then resented how well it turned out. They continue to imagine that they can simply send Walt home and replant the orange trees.
-If only the Israelis had paid cash for this land.
-What would have been the price?
-What will be the price now?
-With the pot boiling furiously on the stove, will they scald themselves grievously, or will they eventually sit down to share tea?
-A beautiful spring evening
in Tel Aviv.
-I find strawberries lying on the beach. Why would anyone abandon these strawberries?
-Cats.
-Cats everywhere.
-In fact, one of them just pooped in the potted plant near me in restaurant.
-Downwind. Fortunately.
-The best cappuccino since Italy.
-A big, hulking, smiling guy walks by on the promenade, with an armful of roses, maybe for his girlfriend, while the next persons to pass by, a couple, look very disappointed in each other. The first guy doesn’t notice them and they don’t notice him. Just a difference of a few meters separates them, but they are in entirely different universes, unaware of the other’s existence.
-Watching them, I feel myself to be the glue that unites their lives before they fleet away.
-We all live next to each other, back to back in some people’s eyes, face to face in others.
-Deb, I am indulging my penchant for interrogating waiters.
-It might just come down to this: who wants this land more?
-Are Palestinians more of this land than they are Arab? Are Jews more a part of this land than they are Israeli? Who is most a part of this land?
-What bestows the most legitimacy?
-Time?
-Guns?
-God?
-Patience?
-Walking away from the beach, it's hard to leave this sybaritic outpost for the ascetic interior.
-Who are the Israelis who deny the Israeli-Arabs the vote, refuse to give any tax money that the state collects from the Palestinians back to their community and will not allow some of the most common goods, like cilantro, into the occupied areas on the excuse that it might compromise national security and then are perplexed when some people condemn them as oppressors. I haven't met those Israelis.
-To paraphrase an old rabbi, l'chaim's a beach.
-In a taxi, on the way to Jerusalem, I can now say that I have, indeed, met one of the Israelis who thinks of Palestinians as animals and can hardly believe that other people consider Israelis to be oppressors. In the time it took to drive to Jerusalem, I got into a long discussion with my cab driver, an Israeli named Shimon Levy. He joined the army years ago and now his son does military service, and for him, the army must and will protect Israel from all its enemies, of which there are many.
-We talked long and hard about the Jews and the Arabs ("garbage") and whether Obama is a friend of the Jews or not. He thinks not. He has no use for Arabs, but scorns, also, the Haredim (one who trembles in awe at the word of God), the ultraconservative Jews who refuse to serve, and who even refuse to recognize the state of Israel as a spiritual authority.
-He says that he has a lot of American friends and I asked him if they agreed with him or me. They all seemed to work for Goldman Sachs and were, surprise, on his side. I told him that most of the people at my local country club were on his side too.
-I told him that I had a lot of opinions, my wife thinks too many.
-He liked that. He feels that Obama is weak. I tried to make the point that it difficult to convince someone who doubts that you would die for them, without actually dying for them.
-Our conversation almost came to a complete halt when I told him that I did not support America in the Vietnam War. The word “peace”, I will discover, curls many a lip in this part of the world.
- He feels more comfortable with war than with peace. Simplicity trumps nuance. One needn’t trust the person in one’s gun-sight. After all, the reason we shake right hands is to prove that we don’t have a knife.
-As we drive up and away from the coastal lushness, I am entranced by all the rock, and the barrenness.
-Where’s the milk?
-Where’s the honey?
-All is light. Nothing is clear.
-Having left Tel Aviv and approaching Jerusalem, the centuries seem to whiz past like roadside mileposts.
-My little, funky hotel, an Arab hotel as it turns out, in East Jerusalem, has an endearing characteristic in that of all the people I've run into in Israel, here, they speak the best English.
-Everywhere is stone; everywhere is hard.
-Shimon asked me " why can't they just leave us alone?" That seems so naive. I couldn't decide if he thought that Arabs were evil, or just stupid. And right after this discussion, I walk into the Alcazar Hotel and meet the Arab proprietor and he is perfectly reasonable and accommodating.
-The mind boggles.
-Shimon, the cab driver, as soon as he sees where I plan to stay, says I should try to do better. Any plan that he may have entertained of inviting me home to dinner, now felt unlikely. I do admit that I am surprised at the location of the hotel. I remember, now, that I had trouble finding the hotel on the map as I made my reservation. I intended to stay the entire time inside the Old City’s walls, but I decide to give this place a try. I am shown to my simple room and notice a mosque and its distinctive tower directly across the street.
Is there such a place as a poor, clean country? When I leave the Alcazar and walk down through the neighborhood between here and the old city, I pass lines of old cars parked higgledy I on the sidewalk, which forces everyone to walk in the street, with cars and buses honking and swerving around us. The little stores that line the street, with their open fronts crammed with cases of plastic water bottles and soda, a signs advertising all kinds of ice cream, and the bored guy on a cell phone sitting on the steps, with cardboard boxes and dirty smelling water in puddles everywhere, all this might be anywhere, Martinique, Kuala Lumpur, outside Cancun, Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, Naples, all places where the people in any one of those places have never seen anything of the lives of people in any of the others and assume that they have all independently created their lives.
Ascending Al Wad Street I am thinking that the only more confusing city I have ever tried to know is Venice. Just at that moment a blind man, alone, passes me. Descending. He can only count on other people and sounds to help him. There's not much else.
So, with no air conditioning and a very loud demonstration going on down in front of my hotel, I feel like I'm in a scene of Year Of Living Dangerously.
-Well, Richard told me to see something other than modern Jerusalem and this area is it. If this hotel were anywhere else, it would rate moderately well, but being in the industrial area and with the call to prayers being sung at all hours outside my window, I have to rate it lower. The demonstration and fireworks last night, rather than being political, was a marriage celebration. The owner of the hotel told me not to worry, " Old habits, you know". Maybe he was reassuring me about the explosions.
-I decided, based on my inability to identify any of the dishes set out for breakfast at the hotel, to treat myself to breakfast at the American Colony Hotel. I walk over here and sit down in the most wonderful, Middle Eastern courtyard, all large painted tiles and fruit trees. Probably costs as much to eat here as a night's stay at the Alcazar.
As an example of how far off the beaten track the Alcazar hotel is, whenever I ask directions from an Arab, I get this look as in "what!" and then they can't be more helpful. I seem to be in the industrial district. Going to move into the Armenian hospice tomorrow, to be inside the old city walls. Gotta try it all.
-Inside the walls, there seem to be hordes of people coming from somewhere and no matter which way I walk, I feel myself swimming upstream, against ancient currents.
-I think they are Arabs, praying,
though, Ossis, clerk at The Armenian Hospice, says that they are, in fact, Christians, on the Via Dolorosa.
-Having stumbled on The Armenian Hospice, and because, when I had first booked myself into the Alcazar Hotel and had thought that it lay inside the city walls where I really wanted to be, I decide to change hotels. That the Via Dolorosa passes directly by the front door seemed an added bonus, and that it costs less.
-I opt to start walking, putting my map away. Not a single person in the world knows where I am, and I have no place I need to be, at any particular time. Even to imagine adhering to a schedule or an itinerary in this cascading torrent of languages and smells and music and hopes, both realistic and not, seems self-defeating.
-Rather to be a cork and float.
-Naturally, I become completely lost.
But it is said that to be lost in one’s own city is to be close to God.
-Corks can’t lose their way.
-I'm not sure I have ever seen a place quite like Jerusalem. The noise is deafening and the bargaining, exhausting.
-The covered streets bubble and churn with life.
-For a little solitude, I just have to go into a church. Funny.
-What is it that makes this place different from, say, Piazza San Marco on a similar day? While there is the same crush of people, there is not the same grittiness and intensity of purpose. No one lets go here.
-Everyone's fingernails here are hard, old, and pulled out too many times.
-Stopped for a beer. 0.0 percent. Surprise. Muslims prefer that there be no alcohol inside the old city, at least in their part.
-Walking down, or up, it's kind of hard to tell, I helped a Bedouin write a "going out of business" sign. When I asked where he was going, he said "Basle". We shared a glass of orange juice, but I had to leave, feeling claustrophobic. I want to get out side the walls, to see what it looks like from a more open perspective. It's going to take some time to crack this city open.
-It's Shabbat, Friday. Haredim day.
-Everywhere is stone; everywhere is hard.
-Sitting outside the old city walls, having a salad, considering a return to my hotel by going back into the ancientness, but knowing I will again get lost.
-How many peoples have Jews feared?
Contrast that with the number of peoples that America has had to fear.
-Remembering that Shimon said that the basis of the Jews claim to Jerusalem is that King David built the city and thus, it is part of their covenant with God. Except that, it was after that point that God, because the Jews had reverted to worshipping the gods of antiquity, that God exiled the Jews and destroyed the walls of Jerusalem. Is it too simplistic to consider this a revocation of their title to this place, this city, Jerusalem?
-Did they abandon Jerusalem when they abandoned God?
-A tour bus just passed, "Eternity Travel".
-In the Garden of the Tomb, one of two possible places where they buried Jesus, people are praying right and left. The other place is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, inside the walls of the old city. I suppose you have to go to both in order to be sure you’ve gotten to the right one.
-In spite of all the praying, people do tend to look a bit more familiar to me, an American, than at other sites.
-No matter in which quarter I find myself, deemed holy by whichever faith, there is a palpable Presence in all the smoothly dirty stones, and in the eyes of all those about me, though the Christians seem to be in more the vacation mode.
-That is, until I am run over by a group of Brazilians carrying a cross and chanting and whom I followed into the Coptic Patriarchate Church.
-When I sat down in the shade to jot this down, I found myself completely alone, a rarity in the old city, but before I wrote one sentence, I was surrounded by a group of Germans.
-As an example of navel-gazing, there is a woman painting a picture of the Coptic Church and the tourists all taking pictures of her, not of the church. I am too close to be able to take a picture of them taking a picture of the picture of the church in front of them that she is painting.
No one's really looking at the church.
Art swallowing Reality.
ARealiTy.
I am in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
I touched the entrance stone and put in a prayer for Mitch.
This place couldn't be any more different in feel from the garden tomb,
which was so peaceful. Given all the incense, mysterious light and crowds, I would say that the people are voting for this spot as Jesus' tomb.
I'm listening in to this guide who is saying that the mother of Constantine, who came to Jerusalem with an unlimited American Express card, constructed this church in 360 C. E. Sumptuous.
Reminds me of St. Marks in Venice.
I light a candle for Mitch. His candle is the first one in line.
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Wanting
Everybody Wanting
So Much
Everybody Wanting
For Everything
Everybody
Finding Themselves
Wanting
God
Wanting
Nothing Else
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-I walked over to the Plaza of the Western Wall, the Wailing Wall, the holiest site in Judaism. Instead of candles, to pray here you write your prayer on a slip of paper and stick it in the cracks of the hot stones under a clear, azure sky that extends above me to forever, the stones of the remains of the original temple that David built 3000 years ago. Under the pitiless sun, in the open air and white rock, this Sanctus Sanctorum couldn't be more unlike the Church of the Holy Sepulcher with it's sense of smoky, deeply buried mystery.
-And in the background, looming over the Wailing Wall is the golden dome of the Al Aqsa Mosque.
-Three faiths, all convinced that they are right.
-There is a strange jealousy on the part of all these versions, and even within all these versions, of the same
God.
-You cannot belong to anyone else.
-There is no room here for the small, self-contained vision of the Individual.
No place for saying to God, "I don't need You. I know what I'm doing. "
-Hooray. A small victory. I found Jaffa Gate all by myself.
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Walking
Brings me
To my senses.
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-A modest rule of thumb: in Israel, resist eating near a potted plant in an outdoor restaurant, with cats around.
-Jerusalem, swamped with garbage, may be the navel of the world, but there is much too much bellybutton lint.
-First night inside the old city.
-Sure is noisy.
–Surprising number of cars.
-The streets just aren't that wide.
- I venture outside the walls to the David Citadel Hotel to sign up for a tour to Masada and the Dead Sea for tomorrow. The concierge asked where I was staying. When I said, inside the old city, I thought he asked me if I had a sofa. I was offended. We eventually figured out that he meant cellphone.
-This is going to be a really hot day to head for the Mount of Olives, Gethsemane.
-I walked all the way around the walls of the city and when I got to the bottom of the Mount of Olives, a cabby asked me if I wanted a ride to the top. I had intended to hike to the summit, but, when I’m by myself, I enjoy changing my plans, enjoy interacting with the flow of time and circumstances. I took him up on it.
-He wanted to know if I was a believer. I said no. He said he wasn't either. He wanted me to hire him to take me all over Israel. I settled on 15 shekels to the top.
-When I got there, Jerusalem lay off in the distance like a faded oriental carpet spread out on the dirt. The bad air (which I thought was smog but turned out to be a storm of desert dust) rendered it all the more indistinct.
-I get an old Arab to let me have a picture with him and his donkey.
"Kiss, kiss" he tells the donkey as he takes my hand and sticks it in the donkey's face. It has big, soft lips and as it smiles, I involuntarily shy away from its huge teeth. I hope my sunburned fingers didn't look like little carrots.
-Having a coffee, a cappuccino in the little Arab village of El Tur. Good coffee but a fellow customer sets this big water pipe next to me and prepares to light it. I ask him what's in the pipe, as he sits there with a cigarette in his one hand and holding the mouthpiece up to me with the other. I manage not to take it, but it takes a lot of nodding and bobbing and smiling.
We part friends.
-Unlike Deb, I didn't read the guidebook until I had already climbed the mountain and, only then, do I discover that all the churches close at noon (it's now 2:00) and you can't go in wearing shorts anyway. Someday I'll learn.
-Leaving the Mount of Olives, I re-enter the coolness inside the walls. Walking through the old city, besides the sheer number of people, is the almost crushing waves of smells: saffron, coriander, mint, cooking meat, tobacco smoke from giant hookahs, green spices, red spices, purple pickled cauliflower, and above it all- "mister, mister, come into my shop!"
-There are many articles in the Israeli press about the ultra-orthodox and how they are so far outside mainstream thinking. In fact, the paper says, if you include the Arab population, 1/2 of all the first graders in Israel are not receiving an education that is in any way supportive of the state of Israel.
There are many articles here about not wanting to be the new South Africa, but there are a lot of similarities between the Haredim and the Boers. SA made a choice and Israel must choose, also.
Reading the Israeli papers, I have to say that everyone here appreciates the immense problems and the articles that I have read are unanimous in a desire to solve them. In circumstances this extreme, I can only applaud them. Throughout history, Jews, considering their small numbers, have influenced human experience more than any other group I can think of. Now, the awkward question is, can the Israeli experiment further the Jewish future?
-An Israeli cab driver called the Arabs "garbage", a group of people who, for good or bad, represent 20 per cent of the population of Israel. In America, if we were to say that about a large part of our own people, it would be condemned.
-It has to be condemned here.
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-Israel juxtaposes existential angst with mundane impatience.
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-I love the vibrancy of this place. Right outside the restaurant there is a large group dancing. How can you not love it? They can't all do the dance, but everyone is trying.
-I do have to admit that while watching the people dance, if this were America, I wouldn't be worried about being blown up. I walk here, not on solid ground, but on a tightrope.
-Why do people hate other people?
-I snarl at my inability to understand.
-We're here for such a short amount of time, (tears in my eyes).
-And even if one believes this to be only a stop on the way to God, why the hatred?
-People still dance. Go People!
-One comes to Jerusalem to feel.
-So far, so good.
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Deb, you are the one, you're the one in my heart, and you’re my darling, my life's greatest thrill!
(More tears)
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ARABS AND ISRAELIS ARE COUSINS
-I was asked the directions to St. Georges Cathedral by the spitting image of Dorothy Sayers’s Miss Marples.
-It's difficult to appear crisp in this heat, only the Jewish men and the Arab women pull it off. There is a slightly bewildered look to everyone else.
-I had a long talk with an Arab man this morning, and he said that the Israelis and the Arabs are cousins, descendents of Moses but of two different wives.
-Later, getting a chance to engage a Jewish acolyte in the Ohel Yitzhak Synagogue, I asked him why he was studying and discussing a book that is so many thousands of years old, and which so many people have picked apart in so many different ways and in which the words themselves haven't changed in all that time. Hadn't it all been figured out by now?
He gives me the impression that they are just getting started.
"Hey, we're Jews," you says, " You know what they say, two Jews, three opinions.” "
-He confirmed that Arabs and Jews really are, according to the story, first cousins.
-All the more puzzling in that he doesn’t seem puzzled that this extended family is at each other’s throats.
-Here, the waters of life mix badly with the blood of generations.
-He even doubts, somewhat, my Walt Disney analogy, but more because he considers Uncle Walt an anti-Semite.
-Rather than wonder, we wander.
-Points easily get lost here.
-To enter the area of the mosque is astonishingly difficult. No one makes it easy, the harsh sun least of all.
-On the vast (for Jerusalem) plateau of the Al Aqsa Mosque, the identification of all these religions with light and heat, with the starkness of loss and redemption, and the terror of insignificance slams into me.
-I try to personalize Eternity.
I like how the women and children use the Dome of Chains as a picnic area.
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-Christianity is smoke.
-Islam is light.
-Judaism is conversation.
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-This plaza is so big, and so flat, and so hot.
-Back in the Armenian Hospice, I get my room key and an expostulation on how the Christians have many problems with the Muslims and the Muslims with the Jews and the Jews with the Christians and the Muslims with the Christians, etc., but of them all, the Druze are the worst.
-They are extra, extra bad.
-Even worse than the Syriacs.
-In fact, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, there are so many factions represented there: Catholic, Orthodox, Copt, Armenian, and others that in order to open the church every day, they've turned the job over to a Muslim because no one trusts anyone else.
-Good Grief!
-I just noticed that it is 91° here in Jerusalem and 45 at home.
-Time to do some laundry.
-I've come back to Holy Sepulcher Church to get a picture of the candle that I lit for Mitch. It makes the third time today that I have been in the Presence of God according to some major faith. They are all less than a mile from each other! Come on, people, it can't be this hard to make it work!
-I must be gaining that otherworldly look in my eye; people are starting to ask me for directions.
-I've always noticed that overseas there are so many more shops catering to men's fashions, than at home, where women’s shops predominate.
-Why does anyone even want this old city?
-“Holy” affords people such rationales for the madness of not-knowing for sure.
+
-I love Arabs for their simplicity.
-I love Jews for their complexity.
-Love for Christians, it's all one.
+
-According to Joseph Campbell, the hero of Christianity is Jesus, but the hero of Judaism is the Jewish people.
-Big difference.
-For Jews, you achieve redemption as a race, rather than as an individual.
Someone asked the rabbinical student why Jews have been so reviled and he replied that it was because they have been so successful and other people resent that, but that seems so simplistic. Jews have not always been successful. What are the roots of anti- Semitism? What are the roots of racism, for that matter?
-Maybe the next trip is to India, this monotheism stuff is wearing me out.
MASADA
-Up early to go to Masada, all the shops are closed and schoolchildren fill the streets.
-Just getting started with this tour, I can see why I don't do it this way more often: so much confusion, standing around, everyone looking at everyone else, puzzled, the inevitable missing person.
-I read in the local paper that Jerusalem qualifies as the poorest city in Israel. It does seem scruffy, but I thought it was because of the crush of tourists. It seems that all those tourists don't translate into dollars, or shekels as the case may be. 1/3 of the Jews and 2/3 of the Arabs live under the poverty level.
-Being part of a tour, even for this small amount of time, I feel ever so much like a sheep, following a shepherd. Which may be why sheep appear so placid. They are spared the need to think. True, because I travel alone so often and must think on my own, I often make mistakes. It would sound appropriate to say here that undoing mistakes is part of traveling, but I still kick myself later for some of my wrong turns and missed opportunities.
-But it’s about stories I bring back with me.
-For as long as I live, it will be my experiences, as a husband, as a father, as a traveler and seeker that will define me.
-And as a golfer, oh yeah.
-I would never have found the glaciated valleys of northern Scotland, otherwise.
-Those rocks, barren and rounded by ice, reside in a different star system from the cracked-and-broken-by-sun rocks of Masada. Here, near the lowest point on Earth, Masada towers above a desolate, impossible landscape.
-Herod chose this place for his palace.
-Without water then, without water now, Masada will remain forever meaningfully nonsensical.
-I was planning on walking down from the fortress, in effect breaking put of the group, when the guide began to make the case that to walk would be to inconvenience everyone else. And if that reason were insufficient, he let us know that people have died doing this, though it does occur to me that people died here for not walking down, too.
-That thought gets no traction.
-Eventually, sheep-like, I muttered a little baaaaaaa, and ambled along with the flock. I did want to get an answer to how they got water to the fortress. Evidently, that question was on everyone’s mind and he saved the answer until we were at the end of the tour. It wasn’t easy and involved channels, ingenuity, reservoirs and luck, but no wells.
-He resolved the questions of the idly curious.
-That the Jews would choose to defend this place, and eventually commit mass suicide and the Romans would go to such trouble and time to breach their defenses leaves me staring at this implacable rock plateau, imagining one of the many small, black birds pecking away at it, and asking how long before it’s gone, before it’s all gone?
-We're down at the Dead Sea now where people cover themselves in mud and float in the water, where you can't sink.
-Sorely not tempted, I forgo the experience.
-The bathers walk around in swim suits so ill fitted to their bodies, and dripping with mud, that I think that they probably shouldn't.
-I walk towards the Dead Sea, to a sign announcing the lowest point on Earth, except, that since the installation of the sign, the water had receded another half mile and the water level itself had dropped fifty more feet.
-But for the fact that it is already dead, this sea would be on life-support.
-Yet amid all this hard rock, sulphurously smelling mud and undrinkable water, an industry has arisen devoted to beauty.
-Corpore sano.
-On the way back, a woman sitting in front of the bus asked me where I was from. I said Oregon and she said California. Close enough when you're 11 time zones away. She and her friend had stayed in Tel Aviv and were seeing Israel by bus. She lives in San Diego and wants to be on TV, in Survivor, or The Amazing Race, or The Mole. She's tried out for all of them.
-They ate at McDonalds the
night before. I did the best I could. I recommended a restaurant in Jaffa, the beautiful Crusader city near where they are staying, but they had never heard of it, of Jaffa, I mean.
-They were fun to talk to, but...
I can see why other travelers just shake their heads at Americans.
-Still, as a way to pass time, it is much more fun talking to the women from San Diego.
-I can't believe how much I've learned, here in Jerusalem, not being part of a group. Exploring, looking, poking, probing, stumbling, asking, stopping, thinking, I've learned so much.
Especially how to type on this damned, small keyboard!
-Back to the Old City, I look around at all the Haredim, the Ultra-orthodox and, for all their piss and vinegar because they are real pains in the butt for everyone, you have to admire their culture which, like Buddhism, respects and encourages a part of that culture to seek what they believe to be the highest good.
-Theirs is the courage of doubt-free commitment.
-They are in this place to know God, and they demand that Israel acknowledge this.
-Nothing else matters.
-After the martyrs of Masada, came the Romans, and after the Romans, came the Christians, and after the Christians, came the Muslims.
-It’s a big, big rock and a small, small bird.
-I'm not really sure that I'm on the same page as the Jewish Zealots committing suicide at Masada. The two women and three children who hid themselve and saved themselves appeal to a part of me.
-The women from San Diego had never heard of Petra, in Jordan. I had to start from scratch.
-On how many different levels do we all see the world?
The first woman said that she understands that she is a very forceful personality, that that's why they didn't pick her for Survivor; too powerful. The other one said that her friend couldn't even remember her last name. Chuckles.
Speaking of chuckles, as I am typing this, my friend Steve calls from home asking if I want to go golfing. Blast from the other world. Mobile phones are so weird. No one knows where you are.
What universe am I calling?
JERUSALEM DAY
-It is a beautiful, fragile place.
Today is Jerusalem Day, the anniversary of the acquiring, or should I say, "return", of the city to Israeli possession.
-Kids everywhere wave every size of national flag.
-Not something you would see at home.
-So this is an amazing night to be in Jerusalem. There are Jews everywhere celebrating astonishingly, yet a young Arab woman passed by and we exchanged big smiles. What a wonderful experience.
With all the turmoil, I am still tearing up mightily.
-I wouldn't have missed this for the world.
-Of course, coming back from the restaurant, I pass through the bus terminal where all the shuttle buses are heading back to the Palestinian towns of Bethlehem, and Jericho and they are not celebrating, but I carry that Arab woman's smile with me as a small token of hope.
-Back at the hotel, I'm surprised to see that no one seems to know about all the excitement among the Jews, not so far from here. Especially since, trust me, these Armenian Christians don't see things the Palestinian way, either.
-Bubble People.
-One item that I love in the International Herald Tribune is the "in our pages" years ago. Today is the 50th anniversary of the winning of the West Virginia primary by John Kennedy. I remember that. In fact, he came back to Wheeling later to thank West Virginia for the victory, upon which occasion I managed to smack him in the face while I ran alongside his car as he left our football stadium. Couldn't get that close to the president now. Probably shouldn't have been able to then, as it turned out.
-I just left the old city hotel and transferred here, to the American Colony Hotel.
What a change! The way I like it: leaving my little insect-infested monk’s cell and coming to where, as I check in, the fellow says, " I'm sorry, Mr. Chapman but the room is not quite ready. Would you like a glass of champagne while you wait?"
-Days of fleas, and days of wine and roses.
-While walking here, I passed through a demonstration outside the American consulate, an Israeli demonstration against Obama. With the Israelis, Obama lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Actually, I do sais quoi. He’s trying for a certain evenhandedness in the Middle East, a region of the world where uneven is the only even.
-I walked further on and passing me in the opposite direction was an older Arab woman teaching a younger one to drive: eyes straight ahead, hands clutching the wheel, all so familiar. The only problem for them is that I don't think that they appreciated the fact of the demonstration back the way they were headed.
-On the way here, on Nablus road, a woman, distraught and weeping, supported by two burley men, came straggling out of the alternative burial place of Jesus. No one seemed overly concerned. I think they call it Jerusalem Syndrome.
You're never far from a drama here.
Eating at the same restaurant every night, and here again tonight, I tell the waitress that I really like Jerusalem (she's from here and agrees with me) and I tell her that I'm from Oregon, in the USA. I realize that when I say I like it here, it means a lot to her, but when someone tells me that they like Oregon, I don't have her reaction. I realize that I don't need someone else's friendship as much as Jerusalemites feel that they need mine.
JERUSALEM TO AMMAN
Sitting on al-Nijmeh taxi depot, waiting for the mini-bus to the Allenby Bridge where we cross into Jordan. Arabs, not Jews, seem to run the taxi services here, at least, taxis for the people. This is one of those taxis that departs when it is full. So we sit. The hotel offered the idea of a private car to the bridge, for $80 but this mini-bus only costs $10. I figured that the difference would come in handy later.
-Older Arab women and Arab music surround me. Tres tipique.
-The tourist lifestyle entices you to insulate yourself from the Arab world of Jerusalem, assumes that you would rather avoid all the "unpleasantness."
-For all the Jewish self-satisfaction about the "return" of Jerusalem to them, I don't think we've seen the last of regime change.
-Well, we're full and we're off.
Uh oh. Everyone takes great pains to buckle seatbelts.
-One of the women just offered me a Hall's cough drop.
-Just went through into Jordan.
Costs $50 to leave Israel.
-I don't think that this is the way most people get to Petra.
-There's a lot to be said for having the paperwork in order.
-This land is as desolate on this side of the border as on the other.
-Not having a tour guide to handle all the protocol certainly requires staying alert to many more nuanced interactions, like the fact that the bus driver just takes away my passport. My wife, Deb, is a lot better at making sense of mildly inscrutable situations.
-I sit next to an English couple who are talking to some Americans. We all go through the gates together. Then they split up. They hug each other, probably at the instigation of the Americans, because the English woman exclaims, " I don't think I have ever hugged so many people in my life!"
-I go on to look for transportation into Amman and am discovered by both a cab driver and a bus driver. The cab driver wins the bidding war; the bus driver looks disgruntled. 7 dinars/ 10 dollars, not bad. As I get in the cab I tell him his tire needs air. He says that if I hire him to drive to Petra, he will put air in tire, saying "I know Americans like to be safe". I tell him it would be good for him, too. Anyway, on the way into town, he puts air into the tire. I can’t decide if I want him to drive me all the way to Petra. He assures me that if we don't make it, I don't pay him. Hmmm.
-The cab is decrepit, even worse than Santa’s cab back in Eugene. Shabby, but I get to ride with the window down. I give thanks to the Lord of Open Air. On the highway, we pass the English couple in a nice new car with a driver, and the windows closed.
-They are probably not going to Petra in a cab like this one.
-Checking into the Marriott, it's funny to see, where everywhere else you see pictures of King Hussein and his son, here the pictures are of J. W. Marriott and his son, the rulers of their own domain.
-I tell the concierge that I want to walk down to the Roman amphitheater, to which he replies "not possible", to which I thank him and walk there. Truly, you have to be careful what decisions you want other people to make for you. Someone's always willing, especially if there's money to be made, to take choices out of your hands.
-On the other hand, you can't always say "no".
-With stubbornness comes an opportunity cost.
-I walk down into the main part of town, and then, when I decide to return to the hotel, I opt for a taxi.
-Khaled (the name of the cab driver) comes out of nowhere; they can just tell.
-He says to pay him anything I like, nothing even. Right. We settle on 3 dinars before leaving the amphitheater. He's a good guy. He asks what I do and I tell him my job is to be a tourist so I can hire a guy like him. His job is to be a cab driver and my job is to pay him, and that my wife sends me money so I can pass it along to him.
-He says that I am funny guy and that he likes me. We are both laughing. He shows a picture of his wife and daughter on his mobile and I show the picture of my wife, Deb," very beautiful ", he says, "you are indeed a lucky man".
-He says that he gives all his money to his wife.
-I tell him that my wife sends me money so that I can give it to him so that he can, in turn, give it to his wife. We decide it would be simpler to give her address to Deb.
-We laughed some more.
-We start to talk about how much a cab costs. 41000 Jordanian dinars. He says that if I give him the money, he would pay it back in 8 years. I suggest that he could also, the next time that I return to Amman, give me free taxi rides. I tell him that I don't have that much money right now, but I will ask my wife to work harder.
-We laugh again.
-By this time we reach the hotel and he says, as I get out, "I think we could be good friends".
-This guy at the hotel tells me I need to try Jordanian wine, "baitutti", which is made here, unlike the Jordanian wine in restaurants, where they buy grapes from France or South Africa and then make the wine here. The real stuff, "baitutti", you need to go to the store and order and they bring it the next day. Somehow, they make it in their homes.
-I’ll look for it in Petra.
-I hope this all comes across, Deb, as a testament to my love for you. You are as much a part of this trip as I am. In my thoughts, you are never far away.
-I decide to go with the taxi guy, instead of renting a car myself, partly because I would like to give the bucks directly to a local guy instead of a big car company. I'll try to keep him on the right side of the highway.
-Deb, reading an article on how couples stay committed and that the important thing is to do "challenging and important things together". That's what I feel about this trip and this journal. It feels like I taking this trip with you.
My love for you is the most important part of my life. Period. Double period.
Can you believe that this hotel has no wireless Internet? I tell them that it is ridiculous. They sigh and say that everyone is complaining.
-
Imagine complaining that there is no Internet connection in Jordan, in the middle of the Middle East! How did T.E.Lawrence make do!
-A wedding takes over the hotel.
-Just to mix it up, the groom is dancing with the men and the bride dances with the women. And then they are both together.
-I ask one of the guys in the hotel if this is a big (it looks big) wedding or a small one. "Small". Whew.
PETRA
-Make it to Petra. Brain worn out. Three hours of trying to talk to and understand the cab driver from Amman has been fatiguing.
-Waiting to check-in.
-Can't get the Internet to work on my phone. Comimg to take it for granted.
I figure out how to stay in touch using the phone system. It costs money but I will be prudent.
-I decide to take a preliminary walk down into Petra this evening and then go through it more extensively tomorrow. Heading up and out, many people ride out in carts pulled by bedraggled horses. The owners hit them with switches going down and hit them with switches again heading back uphill to the entrance.
-This is somewhat like hiking into the Grand Canyon, easy to go down, difficult to climb out after a hot day in the desert sun.
-Petra, in all its spectacular, barren brutality, compares so oddly with Jerusalem. On the one hand, the divisive elements have long since disappeared. No one is going to die to claim this piece of ground, but it feels so much like the Damascus Gate entrance to the Old City. The overarching, claustrophobic path leads downwards into the earth, funneling hordes of people past the vendors of "antique", "museum quality!" doodads. But missing are the smells.
-.As I sit in the shade high on the hill overlooking the Inner Valley of Petra, in a cave carved into the hill’s rock face, I answer my phone.
-My brother begins telling me that my mother is sick, very sick. That she has been sickly for so long, I’m not surprised at a turn for the worse. I ask him if he thinks that I should come home immediately.
-“Where are you?”
- He can’t quite grasp that I am talking to him from a cave in the Jordanian desert, needless to say, quite isolated. –He wants me to accede to him having the power of attorney over her health status. She and all the children have already agreed on her end-of-life request to use no extraordinary means to stay alive.
-If we can’t be alive, we might as well be dead.
-One minute I am silently contemplating the remains of a thousands-of-years-old city, and the next, “power of attorney”.
-In the blowing sand, the vestiges of a civilization’s long life and long-ago death mix with the flowing images of my mother’s own long life, and impending parting.
-A concurrency of existences, and not.
-Coincident because of me.
-Ariadne grants each of us enough thread to bind our lives together in any and all ways that we need in order to confront our Minotaur, and helps us to unravel it at the end.
-We construct our own web.
-Perched so high above the valley, I can see the dry riverbed and the restored columns of the old city.
-Once the water disappeared, so did the people.
-With my eyes I can follow the path through the ruins and up into the mountains on the other side of the valley, a path that leads to what everyone calls the “Monastery”, a climb of eight hundred steps, long, hard steps up into the high desert. Possibly it served as a retreat for monks, or earlier, as a palace for some wealthy merchant. This city is, after all, on the original Silk Route and had established itself as a city of considerable wealth even before the Romans discovered it. They captured and held it for several centuries, and then left.
-They forgot about it.
-Everyone forgot about it.
-Without water, it withered away, of little use to anyone.
-I decide to climb the mountain to the “Monastery”. I buy a bottle of water from one of the many stands that line the old riverbed.
-800 steps are a formidable climb, as is sharing the narrow path with cantankerous French tourists on their beleaguered donkeys, yelling at the Donkeys to slow down while the handlers yell and swat the donkeys with their switches, doing everything in their power to speed them up, and young boys running up and down the trail wanting to be “guides”, groups of tourists ascending with me, or others, smugly satisfied, now descending.
-I get the idea that the number 800 resembles the “7x7” in the Bible, maybe a very large number, but not necessarily accurate.
-The experience reminds me of trekking down to the Colorado River and back up out of the Grand Canyon to the Rim Village and having had to share the path with mules.
When I reached the top of the climb out of Petra’s valley, I found a small snack shop full of young Italians with their cameras and backpacks, laughing at the French for using donkeys.
-Americans are scarce in Petra.
-Different peoples do different countries in different ways and at different times:
the Japanese in Piazza San Marco,
French with their own backpacks in Katmandu,
Russians on the beaches of Tel Aviv,
Italians here, far from Italy’s prodigal largess.
-After taking a few pictures, I start down the path, finding the descent on the irregular stones to be every bit as difficult as the ascent, though seeing the path before me and the valley stretching out to the horizon reminds me that I am a long way from home.
-Along the path, at the occasional wide spot, people have set up small souvenir stands to sell all manner of “authentic, rare” trinkets. Mostly, I walk by without stopping, but this one striking and assertive woman with her small child tells me that I can have any item; I need only name a price. Now this is what everyone says, “Just name a price! Any price!” Normally, I simply ignore them. Once you utter a price, you are dragged into the haggling process and it’s very difficult to extricate yourself without rudeness, or buying something you don’t really want. But this woman intrigues me because, unlike most of the vendors, she speaks English well.
-I decide to explore an observation of mine with her.
-I asked her, rather that my pointing out something that I would like, would she point all the items that she would be willing to sell for one Jordanian Dinar.
-In the Middle East, this is not how business transactions work. Trust me.
I might as well have reached down and grabbed a handful of sand from beneath my feet and put it directly into her gas tank. Her merchant engine ground to a halt.
-She refuses.
-She wouldn’t do it.
-Maybe she couldn’t do it.
-Crazy foreigners.
-I try to tell her that large part of the world does business using price tags as a model, with no bargaining.
-We talk at length until she finally, reluctantly, she points out a few things that she will part with for one JD.
-Beginning to feel that she would rather just get rid of me, I buy one of her offerings.
-I headed on down the path, mulling over the way that the Middle East does business.
-And politics.
-Everyone wants the other person to make the first offer so that they can then begin bargaining it down. All opening offers, in this scenario, are unrealistic. But here, once a bid becomes public, bargaining doesn’t work. It’s as if the entire bus of tourists want to haggle, en masse, with the all the members of the merchant’s family, simultaneously, to be certain that no one cheats.
-The point remains that everyone assumes that, on every level, bargaining offers the best way of finding an acceptable price in whatever transaction. The unnerving part about haggling is the fear, after all is decided, that both sides feel that if they had only bargained harder, they would have gotten more. Eventually, the negatives around losing outweigh the possibilities of any gains to be won.
-It aggravates a person used to price tags.
As I continue to descend into back into the valley, I notice that most of my fellow walkers ignore the numerous hawkers by the roadside. To my mind, people shy away from starting a process that, by now, everyone knows will be difficult to end.
-I think that I might make a more serious effort to remake the culture of commerce in the Middle East, by starting with one convert.
-I walk further along the path to where it widens and affords more room for larger retail operations. Then I pass slowly by the merchants until one guy, speaking English, accosts me. He is relatively well-dressed, and because he has a large tent full of tourist items and therefore seems ambitious, I stop. I take the initiative and approach him directly. This surprises him.
-I ask him, pointblank, why he doesn’t use fixed prices.
-He just looked at me.
-I start to explain.
-I pick up a green and blue plate and ask him what was the lowest price that he had ever accepted for this particular style of plate. I might as well be trying to pry a Jordanian state secret out of him. Reluctantly, he admits to 8 JD, Jordanian Dinars. Then I ask for the highest price that he had ever been able to get for the same style. Smugly, he tells me, 12 JD.
-I tell him that many Western tourists feel uncomfortable with the haggling process, that the effort to buy even one thing precludes multiple purchases. Impulse buying is out of the question.
-Instead, I suggest that he set a firm price somewhere between the lowest and highest prices that he has received. Then, he should put up a sign extolling “Fairest Prices in Petra”, rather than simply yelling to everyone who passes his store that he has the lowest prices, which every other storekeeper does and no tourist believes.
-He has a difficult time with this idea. He keeps saying that people like to bargain. But I counter that he misses all the people who are put off by haggling and, instead, buy their souvenirs from hotel gift shops, paying more but not needing to haggle.
-Then I ask him where he acquires all the merchandise that he sells. He surely didn’t make it. No, he says, he goes to a wholesale dealer and buys what he thinks he can most readily resell.
-“Does he insist upon set prices?”, I ask him.
-“Yes”, he tells me.
-“Why don’t you haggle with him?”
-“I don’t like to haggle”, he says.
We both start laughing.
-We parted with a handshake.
-Who knows, maybe it will eventually lead to peace in the Middle East.
-What a wonderful walk back out of Petra, through the stretching, arching, muscular rock, hewn by thousands of years of patience.
-It would be hard to look forward to anything after this; I’m glad I saved it until last.
-It’s a good thing that it is this impressive because I am getting tired of traveling.
-I am eating outside, in the roof garden restaurant of the hotel. One thing that I have avoided doing is being very adventurous in finding little, out of the way, Arabic spots.
I like eating outside, if I'm eating alone, because the sky and the breezes, and as the sky darkens, the stars, all are like eating out with old friends.
-Well, the music changes from soft Arabian to soft easy-listening.
"I can't help falling in love with you" and then on to "My way". Shameless.
Just in time, back to soft Arabic.
I scheduled with Mahmod, the cab driver who drove me down here, to call him and tell him if I need him to come and take me back to Amman. I asked one of the waiters if he would help me call. He wants to know what it is all about. When I explain, he says his father will do it. Same price.
-Cutthroat world, this.
-I'm glad that I am in the going-home process.
PETRA TO TEL AVIV
-I check out of the hotel. Ouch! I think that when I booked the room I must have mistaken dinars for dollars. Way more expensive than I expected.
-I wait for the cab driver. He doesn't know what I look like and I don't know him. One more little bit of uncertainty.
-It actually goes remarkably well, but then Ahmad's father, the cab driver looks a little like me, to wit, short grayish-white hair and scraggly beard. Except that he doesn't have any teeth and I do, inshallah. He doesn't speak much English so it will be a quiet trip, at least in that sense.
Petra to Tel Aviv in one day, with a border crossing thrown in, plus transferring in Jerusalem.
-All with public transportation.
-Unless he kills a few people on the way, two pedestrians, unbeknownst to them, having already escaped with their lives, we might make the Allenby (King Hussein) Bridge by noon.
-I can see why they say "inshallah (if God wills it)", so much in this country.
Which make me wonder, does “Inshallah” engender a slippery sense throughout society of an underlying uncertainty about any fact, process, or possibility, or did the uncertainty predate the phrase? And if it did so, what word might they have used before Mohammed invented Islam?
-I wish that this driver would stop waving his arms around and stay on our side of the road.
-I can't tell if it's because of the heat that my palms are wet, or from abject fear.
-This trip appears to be less routine, and more subject to the will of God, than I had originally imagined.
-In the middle of Jordanian nowhere, the engine stops for no reason that I can tell.
-And then restarts.
-I'm not sure I can adequately describe how desolate this landscape is. And, the more often the car drifts to a dismal, dying stop and, wondrously, jerks back to life, the more desolate the landscape becomes.
-Death Valley, with a lake.
-I suggest bad gasoline.
He offers "pompa? Like this?" and holds up a cylinder of some sort.
-Bad sign.
-The engine continues to cut in and out, even at 140 kph.
-Sweating profusely. Must be the heat.
-We drift down from 140 to 2, and just before we come to a complete stop, the old beast resurrects itself once again.
-His thought, it seems, is to outrun the evil gas genie.
-Back to 140.
-At least, at 140 the motor has a longer time to rally before we reach 0.
-Not sure if panic is yet in order, but sweaty palms sure are.
-Still might just be the heat.
-Somewhat comforting to see that even down here, by the shore of the Dead Sea, the guy has cell service, as he tries to use his phone at this speed, while the car jumps and shakes.
-That humans can live both in this country, with this landscape where rocks grow on more rocks, and also in verdant Oregon, amazes me.
-We coast almost to a stop again.
-I dread coming to a complete stop. Which we do.
-I was wrong. There's no cell service.
-I am now wondering if this is the moment to panic.
-First, I have to ditch this cab.
-A taxi, an old, old Toyota van, like I owned twenty years ago, a taxi even lower on the scale of taxis than this one paralyzed on the side of the road with me in it, stops to help us. It doesn't look like I’m going anywhere waiting for cab #1 to figure this out. I’m thinking that my plane leaves from Tel Aviv tomorrow at 1:00 A.M. I decide to abandon this cab. I pay the first guy something and agree to pay taxi #2 the remainder, if he can get me to the border at King Hussein Bridge.
-No one, remember, speaks English at all well.
Even though we are less than half way to the bridge, the driver of cab #1 can’t stop yelling that I am cheating him out of his fare, that the cab that stopped is cheating him too.
-I don’t turn my back on him as I climb into their old bus, leaving taxi driver #1 fuming by the side of the road. I feel like this has probably happened to him before, witness the spare pump. I didn’t want him to hit me with it.
-We them proceed to drive up into the hills delivering bags of pita bread and a pile of plastic chairs.
-I'm feeling very patient, stoic even.
-This taxi driver #2 then drops me on the side of the road, where taxi driver # 3 (who speaks ever so slightly more English), tells me to get in. Deciding that I don't have much choice, in I get.
-For 20 dinars, i.e., twenty fingers and then pointing north down the road, we arrange that he will take me to the Allenby Bridge (King Hussein Bridge, depending on who you're talking to).
-So, we are putting up the road when taxi #1, at his normal 140 kph, passes us. I still feel better where I am.
-I'm even starting to think that I may be getting pretty good at surviving the vicissitudes of off-piste travel.
-That's when I remember that I left my passport back in Petra.
-Finally, panic seems appropriate.
-I take refuge in catatonia.
-I stare out the front window.
-I look around and see that I’m sitting among four Arabs who speak very, very little English. I’m going to hope that they know a little bit more than they admit to.
-I start to assemble my train of explanation.
-Sitting in the middle of the rear seat, I lean forward, up between the guys in the front seat, while dodging all the fringe and medals and icons hanging from the ceiling.
-Using mostly nouns, I manage to get the idea of stupidity and no passport across.
-Except for the rumble of the highway, silence.
-Nothing is said and nothing much happens for a while.
-Hoping that their silence might mean that they are considering my predicament, I consider my predicament.
-We are moving in precisely the opposite direction from my passport. I can, at this early moment in the crisis, only imagine that I will need to return to Petra, many hours now behind us.
-Feeling awfully alone, I imagine only that I have to get myself out of this by myself. I can’t see how it might be possible to get back to Petra and then return north again to reach the Allenby Bridge before it closes for the night.
-In the meantime, the little bus putted along. I had said about all I could say to the guys around me, though they did seem to be talking among themselves.
-About me, maybe, but who knows.
-Inshallah.
-At some point they pull off to the side of the road. They get out and I do, too. A big guy comes over and asks me, in English, what the problem is. I try to explain that I need a fast car to take me back to Petra and then return to the King Hussein Bridge.
-He says he can do it.
-He has a brother who lives in New Jersey. So, of course, he can do it. Things can, therefore, happen.
-Small world.
-This will cost a lot. I know this and he knows this.
-But have they found the passport back in Petra? I feel like I want to know this before committing to this plan.
-I ask to use his phone. We eventually get through and, yes, the passport's there and I explain my plan and the time problem and the concierge of the hotel, becoming my new best friend in the world, says they will send it up immediately by courier and meet me at Allenby Bridge in plenty of time and I am elated and I tell the man, whose brother lives in New Jersey, which therefore, makes us best friends,
-He's not elated at all.
-Vast sums just vanished from his plans. -I say that I will pay him to take me to the bridge, but he's not happy.
-I offer him more than the now short trip is worth, but I am not feeling sorry.
-I realize that this has worked out so much better than I might ever have hoped, and I appreciate what he has done for me and I tell him so, many times.
He's not impressed but I get into his nephew's car, with Arab hip-hop music blaring, and head out for the bridge.
-Omar, his nephew, leaves me at the entrance to the Jordanian border control and I give him a big tip because I realize that uncle is going to take everything for himself. Omar’s a good guy and we shake hands warmly.
-I wait in the Jordanian exit lounge a long time
-Finally, the courier’s eyes meet the frazzled eyes of the only white guy in the lounge, and he hands me my passport. -I pay him, with a big tip.
-Any problem that can be solved with ready cash is a small one.
- I board the bus to cross the bridge into Israel.
There, I meet these three German guys who have just completed the Germany-to-Jordan car rally. 6000 K. The idea is to drive a car that is at least 20 years old, spend very little on food, bring something from every country you pass through, like a bottle of water, stay somewhere for less than 15 euros a night, and, at the end of the trip, donate the car to charity.
-Took'em 20 days.
-There’s always a better adventure story out there.
I now have to get a mini-bus to Jerusalem, cross the city somehow, get another bus to Tel Aviv, then get cab to my hotel, all in all, a trip that is still only an inchoate dream but no longer a nightmare.
-It's hard to describe what happens next, because it seems so improbable. I am asking if there is a taxi going directly to Tel Aviv from the Allenby Bridge when this very pretty woman, an Arab woman in full head scarf, very stylish, with the cutest daughter, walks up to me and says," Come with me, we are going to Tel Aviv, also. We can share a cab in Jerusalem."
-I say yes, without knowing what else to say. Her English is great, and there is no misunderstanding her forceful offer.
-My stereotyped image of Arab women is that they don't talk to men outside their family.
-Well, that opinion changed in about five seconds, though I am still not sure how this will work. We're not talking about a pick-up here, but rather a woman who seems to know where she’s going, and who might be needing some help.
-Nothing is said as she and her daughter, and then I, board the bus. As we prepare to leave and the driver asks where I am going, she, sitting up front, turns around looks at me and says that we are together.
-I must have looked puzzled because she smiles and says, "Trust me".
-It has been a long, puzzling day and my puzzler is sore.
-"Well, okay, why not?” I think.
-We reach Jerusalem. I grab her bag. She changes money. We get a taxi. She gives directions. I pay for us. She finds the bus. I grab her bag. We board the bus. She pays for us.
-And off we go.
-To extend the surreality, the Arab taxi driver speaks Italian to me (I can speak Italian), all the way across Jerusalem, to the bus station and the bus to Tel Aviv.
-Maybe the righter word is "magical".
-So, we are sitting together on the trip to Tel Aviv and she tells me that, back there, we were in run-down East Jerusalem. I tell her that I know where we were because my first hotel was near there, the Alcazar Hotel. She not only knows it but her grandparents live nearby.
-This kind of thing doesn't usually happen to me. Deb finds all kinds of connections with people, but me, not so much.
-We talk about how difficult it is for her as a young woman, even with a baby, to travel without a man.
-I feel useful.
-Her husband comes from the occupied territories and can't come into Israel. They now live in Qatar. But she has to come back every 6 mos. to maintain some kind of residency relationship with Israel. She is a civil engineer, as is her husband.
-For as much as bureaucracy and politics seem to impinge on her daily life, she loves her life and laughs very easily. -It's hard to understand why Israel doesn't want this family to be citizens.
-She says not to worry about my Mom, and how sick she is, that Allah will care for her.
-When we reach the Tel Aviv main bus station, we run to catch her bus, she carrying her sleeping baby and with me dragging her substantial bag. We arrive at the last moment. They hop on and we wave, like real friends.
-I head off to a cab to the hotel, out near the airport.
-That's how I find myself sitting in the hotel room, eating Chinese takeout.
-One of the most miraculous days in my history of travel!
-Escaped from a nutty cab driver.
-Found by a group of wonderful Jordanian hangers-about.
-Got my passport back.
-Rescued by an Arab woman and her beautiful child.
-In Jerusalem, discussed Rome with an Arab cab driver speaking Italian.
-It goes on and on.
Looking back I feel it was no so much that I got lucky, but that I trusted people, that I let go
LEAVING FRANKFURT
Now I am in the plane from Frankfurt, on the way to Washington D. C., and then on to Jacksonville. To see my mother who is very sick, but anymore than that I don't know.
-We'll see.
-She has recovered before.
-In any event, this trip to the Middle East is over and another trip is beginning.
-I am now in Airline World, which is a subset of the real world.
-Everyone sit silently.
-One seeks, simply, to emerge intact.
-I imagine religions in sporting terms.
-Primitive religions are like baseball teams, each team a different city state with their own local religions: the Yankees, Redsox, Dodgers, with their own pantheon of local gods, and each fan wearing the symbol, the jersey, of his favorite god and when city states fight one another, their gods do battle. Religions wax and wane as the fortunes of their gods do. Within each religion, every fan has a personal connection to one or another of the major gods within the world of baseball.
-At some point, the religion of football comes out of the east, a different sport, more brutal, more primitive, more vigorous and proceeds to overcome the religion of baseball, sweeping all before it. Yet, while it manages to supercede baseball as a religion, on a deeper level it is still a religion based on local religions: Cowboys, Bears, Giants, under the big umbrella-idea of Primitive Religion, with the same affinity for local gods.
In primitive society, fans, adherents, might worship differing gods in multiple religions.
The gods don't care.
-The Jews did it differently.
-They organized themselves as a People. -They did not have a personal relationship with gods outside the context of themselves as a group. In fact, this was forbidden.
-Judaism became Sport itself, and Yahweh was their god and they were the chosen Fanbase.
-They did not (or weren't supposed to) have individual idols before them.
-Sometimes the sports idols of Primitivism seduced them, though ultimately they would come back to the realization of themselves as the People of Sport, the one True God, and the Torah is the writings of the NCAA.
-Christians took the primitive idea of participatory belief and the Judaic idea of the one true fan and combined it into the religion of the triathlon, where the fan is also the celebrant and each fan must establish his/her own personal relationship with the divine. Christians compete as members of a community, yet remain responsible for their own, individual salvation
-It's instructive that the entire commitment starts with baptism, as the triathlon begins in the water.
-Everyone runs at his or her own speed. -The fan and the adherent become one.
-Islam, meanwhile, is golf.
-The People of the Book.
-The individual submits to the rule of Law.
- Worship takes place in the blinding light of Fairness.
- There is no compromise.
- To cheat is to be condemned for all eternity.
- Bobby Jones is the Prophet and St. Andrews is Mecca.
-The world is experiencing a population boom. When a population expands, it is usually because conditions are conducive for growth. If humanity is growing than human life is finding itself in a propitious environment and is responding accordingly.
-Humans want to be born.
-Something good is happening in this world and souls want to participate by being born.
-The universe is encouraging humans to procreate.
-Is it a sign of wishful thinking to imagine that the proliferation of births and the overall increase in population might be due to more optimistic souls wanting to enter the physical plane? That they are being enticed by a generally ameliorating climate for spiritual improvement?
-The plane of the physical offers opportunities for working beyond stasis, beyond Karma.
-Souls choose to be born, or not to be born, depending whether there are possibilities for movement towards ultimate unification with the Eternal Godhead.
-Baby steps.
-We all sometimes fall back, but we know, deep down, what we have to do.
And how we have to do it.
-We have to get ourselves born, but on terms that favor our advancement spiritually.
-And then we must make the most of every opportunity to grow.
-We will, of course, have all the opportunities that we need to reincarnate but the joys of progress are so palpable that once one catches hold of the process, a certain impatience asserts itself, an impatience that, irritatingly, may make progress more difficult.
-My brother (younger by a year) has decided to have a face lift, lose weight, and have hair transplants. We choose our own reincarnations.
-Back in Oregon.
-I've been away long enough to be intrigued by the water simply falling out of our sky, unbidden.
-To have come from the Middle East, the land of miracles, we take this one for granted.
In every God I met
In Jerusalem,
I came to believe
I came to believe
In every God
In Jerusalem
-My mother is, was, and for me will always be, the most wonderful and sweetest human being, but it's even more mysterious than that, but I'm out of words.
-Everyday seems to have a narrative, when I pay attention and it takes me with it.
-My mom is no longer fighting for her life but easing into death.
-A woman from Oregon said, who was taking advantage of our states’ right-to-die law, that she was not so much afraid of dying, but that she would be sorry to be no longer alive.
-My brother called to say that the doctors have increased my mother's dosage of morphine and that he thinks that she is soon to go, but she seems to think otherwise. She is a tough old bird and I love her for it.
She has said so many time that she doesn't even want to be alive, to the extent that she has tried to commit suicide twice, that to be this determined to live only says that, ultimately, she is afraid to die. Afraid of what she will find when she walks through that door, though if you aren't sure of the existence of god, there's no point in worrying about hell.
-This is about three hours later.
-Mom died.
-Bob just called me and, even though we knew that it couldn't have ended any other way, still it seems lonelier in this world all of a sudden.
-It's really easy to look up at the big, white, fluffy clouds and the warm sun and imagine her spirit as free, and part of all this light.
-I called my sister Barbara, who was there when she finally let go, not easily, but at last. My Mom had a desire to stick around and wasn't going to leave until she was assured that the time was right. Barbara told her that she was safe and then took this little moisture applicator, used to wet lips, and dipped it in some Pinot Grigio and wiped her lips with it and she said "ok" ten minutes later.
-What a dear sweet person.
-An idea seems so ephemeral, a slight mist over a morning landscape, all too easily dissipated by the breezes of time passing.
To write
To disappear
Maybe, to be remembered
-Barbara moistened her lips with a little white wine instead of water.
-My Mom, with her eyes closed, said, in effect, "I'm done" ten minutes later.
-On some level or other, she felt safe to let go.
-She lived in a nervous skin with nerve endings on the outside of her body. No longer. She’s at rest, now.
-I hope she passed on her will to live to the family line.
-It hardly is a coincidence that this trip of mine to such a religiously centered place as Jerusalem, where death and the past are the warp, and life and the present are the weft of the fabric of the city, ended with the death of my mother.
-It didn't start out that way; in fact, when I left she wasn't even sick.
-After I returned and as I visited her on her deathbed, I told her that I loved her and appreciated that she waited for me, so that I could say goodbye.
She opened and then closed her eyes.
-I like to think that she heard me.
-In Eugene, getting up early to walk and finding no one on the streets, I see not a single donkey, hear not a single call to prayers, find not a soul sitting on the curb selling grape leaves.
-It is raining.
-I never saw that in Israel.
-Ruminations are the chewing on life’s narratives.
-I went back to the motel where I left the little naked boy that I found running down the middle of the street at 4:00 A. M. so long ago. The young Indian woman, the owner of the motel, was only too willing to tell me how stupid she thought the parents were.
-"Hello! They were out partying! What were they thinking? You want a baby? Take care of the baby! I can't even stand to see the way some of the people in this neighborhood treat their dogs, but their own child!!!?”
-That night, she said, from somewhere a grandmother showed up, very quickly, to get the child. So she assumed that they lived nearby.
-I thanked her and she thanked me.
-I found out later that the little boy had spent a week in the hospital, with some damage to his lungs because of the parent’s lifestyle. I never found out more than that, though I did come across Mike, the taxi driver, and told him that, last I heard, the little guy was getting some help.
Reading David Brooks today in The Times, he posits the life of someone who "did all the right things, not doing the things he wanted to do, but the things he felt he had to do to live, and how, now, he feels cheated by the fecklessness of his society".
I say who gave this invented person any right at all to be born into this world at all? Where he could assume that the people who surround him would always be making decisions in his best interests?
I just came back from Israel and Jordan where you get screwed from the time you wake up in the morning until the sun goes down, a world that has, in no way whatsoever, your best interests in mind.
-Just to dodge the constant drizzle of bird droppings all day long counts as success.
-Who in the hell does Brooks think he is and how can he presume to invent a man who feels that he has a right to anger, and whose response then is to join with other people who consider themselves entirely blameless and who say that they choose to want no part of the "down" of the "ups and downs" of existence.
I find Brooks, his straw man, and the whole notion of self- righteous selfishness, repellent.
-Jerusalem belongs to the Jews until someone takes it from them.
-They can hurry the process, or not.
-20,000 miles ago and three weeks, I sat right here on this couch and wondered what I might find so far away, and now I sit here and wonder what I did find.
-Trying to put the last few weeks in perspective, I can only believe that my trip to Jerusalem and Petra is all of a piece with Mom's passing on from this world and my managing to be a part of it.
-Life is as strange as death.
-I am a coin, a circle with two sides, life and death. Flip me and I live, flip me again and I still live, or maybe I die. Flip me enough times and, at some point, I will die. But again, continue flipping and I get another opportunity to live. And on and on, until, finally, this spinning, expanding coin that is me becomes a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is infinite.
-Death is a larger, more pregnant experience than life, which is more circumscribed, more difficult to see past.
-As being awake is more circumscribed than dreaming.
_Might dreaming be, in fact, our highest state of being?
_Might our conscious, everyday existence serve only to maintain our body, mind and soul so that we dream?
-Why must we devote so much time to sleep? Why can we absolutely not survive without sleep, without dreaming?
-In our battle for survival, sleep is precarious.
-Early in our history, being so fraught with the possibility of being eaten in our sleep, accommodating the need to dream must have been of the utmost importance to our survival.
+
We eat to live.
We live to sleep.
We sleep to dream.
We dream to truly live.
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-We fear dreams because they seem undisciplined, and for the opposite reason, trust conscious existence.
-And alive, we quake at death.
It needn’t be that way.
-Every one of us would admit that we don't know everything but that we learn something new every second and that there is no real limit to our imagination. The only proscriptions are those that we place on ourselves.
-If I say, "where is my Mom right now?” is there any sense to the word “now”, to somebody who has died?
-When I look out any window now and I see rain and large green maples, instead of scrub and rock, I know that I am in Oregon and not the middle east, but my mind, and even my body because of the time lag, insist that it's not that easy to separate then from right now.
-Life unfolds concurrently.
-Many people wonder about my trip, and I do, too.
-"Did you ever feel threatened?" they always want to know.
-They never quite believe me when I say "No".
-In their minds, I came back from the Holy Land looking like an old testament prophet and speaking in tongues, when in reality, I simply didn’t shave, and I used words like: " trusting people”, “liking Arabs and Jews and Christians”, “traveling alone”, “wife staying home”, “not being afraid”, “all religions essentially seem the same".
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Thanks, Socrates.
He did not say that the figured-out life is not worth examining.
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