Читать книгу Pilgrim in the Palace of Words - Glenn Dixon - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThe airport security guard hauled me into a back room. “Step behind the curtain, please, and take off your clothes.”
“What do you mean?” I asked helplessly. “Everything?”
“Everything.”
I stripped clumsily, my two pale feet hopscotching behind the thin curtain. Outside I could hear the guard flipping through my passport. I was sure he was eyeing the stamps from the Muslim countries I’d been to, and could well imagine his lips pursing in disapproval.
It’s not so easy getting into Jerusalem. The whole place can be something like a war zone. The guard returned, took a quick look, and then asked me to dress and come out to identify my belongings. My backpack had already been hauled out of the plane and its contents had been placed on a long metal table. There was my toothbrush and my underpants neatly stacked in front of me. I’d flown in on the Israeli national airline — El Al — and it wasn’t taking any chances. El Al has yet to have an “accident,” and these extreme measures were one of the reasons why.
The plane had landed at Ben Gurion Airport in the desert past Tel Aviv. It’s not actually near anything, so it’s somewhere you want to get out of as soon as possible. Actually, any airport is a place you want to leave quickly. I snatched my backpack off the table and hustled toward the buses.
I’ve been travelling now for more than ten years, slipping in and out of countries, poking my nose into where I probably shouldn’t be. I’ve been attacked by wild dogs on a high mountain pass. I’ve heard jaguars roar in the deep jungle foliage. And once, in the calm blue waters above a coral reef, a shark angled in at me. But in every case the wildlife was protecting its territory, and I was the one who didn’t belong.
Humans, of course, tend to section off their land with borders, guns, and barbed wire. But these are only surface markers. In reality we claim our territory with a much more powerful and ancient tool. We mark our place in the world, and even ourselves, with language.
About six thousand languages are spoken around the globe today, and each is a whole world in itself. Before I went off travelling, I was studying linguistics. In fact, I’d been doing graduate work and had just been accepted to do my doctorate.
I turned the offer down.
Languages, as one philosopher said, are the Houses of Being. And I wanted to journey to these houses. I wanted to strut up their sidewalks. I wanted to knock on their doors and peek in their windows. I wanted to see what they were hiding in their basements … even if it meant a little bit of trouble.
The bus took me into Tel Aviv, the most modern city in the Middle East. It sits on a long beach and could easily pass for a metropolis on California’s coast except that here people carry even more guns than Californians. I saw a young man and his girlfriend walking along a tree-lined street. They were holding hands and obviously much in love, and the whole picture would have made me sigh were it not for the Uzi machine guns draped over their shoulders.
Near the bus station I found a bank to change my money into shekels. In the line something quite strange happened. The windows of the bank began to rattle quite noticeably. It felt as if a minor earthquake was shaking the ground. Then it stopped, and five minutes later it started again. Very odd.
When I got to the cashier, I asked her what had happened. “Oh,” she said, “that means a jet has just broken the sound barrier.” Somewhere ten thousand metres above us the cutting edge of military technology was knifing through the slipstream, arcing over some of the most ancient cities on Earth.
But listen, shekels, can you believe it? I know it’s only a name, but it conjures up a world that’s long gone, something quite old. I miss such things in Europe now that the European Union countries have gone over to the euro. Euros themselves are dull pieces of paper adorned with nondescript images. I miss counting out drachmas in Greece. I miss the schillings of Austria. I miss the drawing of the little prince on the fifty-franc note in France. When the world becomes homogenized, something is lost. Even if it’s only a name, we lose a little part of the soul of that place.
No matter. There I was on the doorstep of Jerusalem, hands dripping with shekels. I caught another bus that took me into the Judean hills, up into one of the world’s most disputed regions.
And so … Jerusalem … Jeru-salam. The name rolls off the tongue like a poem. Five thousand years of history in four short syllables. A Canaanite city is mentioned in an ancient Egyptian papyrus scroll dating from the second millennium B.C. Then, in ancient Semitic, it was called Ursalem.
My first glimpse of the old city was of its massive walls gleaming in the sunlight. Everyone must feel like a pilgrim here. It’s impossible not to. I’m not very religious, but this city wallops you on the chest and really gets to you.
I spent a few days clambering down dark passageways, finding my way from one holy site to another. One early morning I went up to see the Temple Mount long before the crowds arrived. Even that early, sunlight splashed onto the stones and in the desert air, the blue tiles of the Dome of the Rock standing out vividly. The roof of the Dome is coated in gold and shimmers and dazzles.
The first and second Jewish Temples stood here. Christ was whipped here. Muhammad ascended to heaven here. All of it here in an area no larger than a soccer pitch. These are events people kill and die for — and they have for thousands of years in great numbers on this very spot.
On this particular morning, though, I had the whole place to myself except for one old Palestinian man who was sweeping the steps. I wandered aimlessly for a while around the geometric tiles of the Dome and eventually made my way to the back wall where a small set of steps dropped to the Golden Gate. Of the eight gates in the walls of Jerusalem, this is the only one that is sealed and permanently closed. The door has been bricked in because of an ancient legend that says the Jewish messiah will arrive through this gate. So the current keepers of the Temple Mount have blocked it up.
The Golden Gate was one of the ancient entrances to Jerusalem, and almost certainly Jesus Christ, on his first palm-waving entry into Jerusalem, accessed the city here. So I stood and gazed at the steps, the very ones Jesus would have strolled up. They were roped off, but soon enough the old man who had been sweeping came over. At first he said it was forbidden to go closer, to actually walk down the steps and touch the fabled gate, but after looking both ways he removed the rope and swept his arm forward in invitation. I descended and placed my hand on the gate. It was cold. In the dark shadows, however, there was only decaying masonry and the acrid smell of urine.
Wbutchers line the alleyways hen I came back up the steps, the old man held out his hand for baksheesh. This translates as a kind of a tip. If someone has done a service for you, you’re obliged to reciprocate by giving baksheesh, usually in the form of money. I didn’t begrudge him, and he seemed perfectly happy with the single shekel I doled into his old broom-callused hand. He flashed a cracked-tooth grin, and I left the Temple Mount, disappointed because, in the heart of three of the world’s major religions, I hadn’t felt anything.
The streets of old Jerusalem are narrow and dark. Spice shops and halal butchers line the alleyways, and in one doorway I spied two elderly shopkeepers arguing with each other. Standing nose to nose, they shook their fists in the air, then, after a few hot moments, ambled down the street arm in arm. I watched them disappear around a corner, and I couldn’t understand it. How could they go from confrontation to friendship so quickly?
I was forgetting that their House of Being, their Palace of Words, was different. In English we frame arguments within the metaphor of a battle. We “defend our positions.” We “shoot down” the ideas of others. It’s a metaphorical fight, and the whole point is that there will be winners and losers. It’s not necessarily like that in Arabic. Different languages work under different metaphors. An argument could, for example, be a performance, or a dance, if you like. There are steps to be learned. It’s a delicate interplay of give and take, a thing to be engaged in and even enjoyed.
All in all, Arabic has received a bad rap in the West. We tend to think of it as a harsh language filled with crackling, angry consonants. The truth is that these consonants float on a bed of honey. They drip with vowels.
Most Arabic words are constructed from three-letter “roots.” For example, k-t-b conveys the idea of writing. The addition of other sounds before, between, and after the roots produces a whole family of related words such as book (kitab) and writer (katib). Kataba forms the past tense, and yaktuba yields the future. And maktub takes everything a step farther. It carries the concept of fate, the hand of Allah, and a whole way of being. Literally, it means “it is written.”
In English we, too, have words that shift meaning, or at least tense, with the change of a vowel: drink, drank, drunk; sing, sang, sung. I once taught English to a student who did well on these irregular verbs. For sit she wrote sat. For swim she wrote swam. For think she paused for a moment, confused, and then pencilled in the word thank.
My favourite triad in Arabic consists of the letters s-l-m. From these you get the word salam or peace. All through the Muslim world you are greeted with salam aleikum — “peace be with you.”
If you listen closely, you’ll hear salam everywhere. Even the very word Islam comes with these fine sounds: I-salam. Quite often Islam is translated in English as “surrender to God,” and a Muslim mu-salam is “one who surrenders to God.” But to me those English translations are loaded with baggage. We’re still working here with negative connotations. Another translation I often hear is “submission.” That’s even worse. It carries the idea that Muslims are forced into something, which isn’t true. All these translations only serve to reveal the West’s own prejudices and ignorance.
Among the alim — the scholars of the Quran — there is much discussion about such subtle distinctions. A proper understanding of the word Muslim must carry the flavour of the word salam, so that in English it should translate as something along the lines of “one who is pacified by God,” or even “one to whom God has brought peace.”
And I like that very much.
Now imagine a voice … deep and resonant, biblical even. “Behold,” it booms, “the whole Earth had one language and one speech … and it came to pass that the people found a plain and they dwelt there.
“Then they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly. Let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole Earth.’”
The above passage concerns the Tower of Babel, of course, the story of the formation of languages. It’s found in Genesis 11:1–9.
Babel almost certainly refers to Babylon, though the forgotten scribe who wrote this particular tale had probably never seen that fabled city. He would have lived somewhere in ancient Israel, quite likely in Jerusalem, and anyway, he was already writing about something long ago and far away.
“Let us make a name for ourselves,” the people of Babel said. That was arrogance, obviously, and it didn’t go unnoticed by God. He didn’t like the idea of people coming up to see him. In fact, he didn’t like it at all.
“Behold,” said God, “they are one people and they have one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do.” He considered the tower. “Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” This worried God greatly, and after deep deliberation, he made his plan: “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
Confuse in the ancient Hebrew texts is the word balal, an archaic root that actually means “to overflow or spill.” And that’s what God let loose. He turned up the heat until the pot spilled over, mixing up the languages of these first people and “scattering them from there over the face of all the Earth.” After that, God thought, the troublesome creatures wouldn’t be a problem.
Boy, was God wrong!
Today there seems to be a sort of reverse Tower of Babel effect. Of the six thousand languages spoken around the world, it is estimated that only five hundred will be left by the year 2100, and even then only about twenty will still be in solid shape. The rest will have simply withered away. And another century after that the world may be down to three or four superpower languages and a handful more that have simply refused to die.
Arabic is one of the Big Twenty. It’s spoken by almost two hundred million people in more than twenty-two countries, though it has separated into a number of dialects that vary greatly from nation to nation. The Arabic spoken in Morocco, for example, is virtually incomprehensible to Saudis.
The written language is the same, however, and that’s what anchors everything. The Quran retains the seventh-century Arabic script of Muhammad, and according to Islamic thought, it simply can’t be translated without losing something. The sacred book of Islam can only be read in the original Arabic. Even in Muslim countries such as Malaysia and Pakistan where Arabic isn’t spoken, the faithful must learn the old Arabic. The Quran can’t be reproduced in Malay or Urdu. Something of the nuance would be lost, it’s claimed, or something of its power — a very interesting idea indeed.
Of course, one can translate even the most complex of ideas from one language into another. That’s a fact. But it’s true that something more subtle might well be lost. Imagine William Shakespeare translated into Chinese. The plot would certainly remain, but the colour of Shakespeare’s words, the very thing that gives them their beauty, their identity, would surely be lost.
The Christian world, however, freely translates the Bible. Some factions even pride themselves on how many languages they’ve translated it into — Swahili and Blackfoot, Finnish and Korean. But for me the colour of the Bible is always in the thees and begats of the King James Version. “Thou shalt be scattered over the face of the Earth” — there’s a certain power in that kind of voice, a terrible magic. It’s so powerful that it’s easy to get confused and imagine that the original texts must have sounded like that. The original Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic must somehow have had that sort of flavour. But did they?
In the Quran there’s no doubt. That book sings only in Arabic.
I’d been staying for a week in a dirty little pension in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem. I shared a room with Arno and Berhitte, a Dutch couple. Arno fancied himself a photographer. One day he took three hundred pictures. We would go our separate ways, and in the evening we’d meet for beer and discuss our photographic exploits, each trying to outdo the other.
One afternoon, knowing full well I could challenge Arno with the adventure, I climbed a wall in the Arab quarter. I’d seen some Israeli soldiers sitting on the edge of a roof. They were watching the crowds below, and I figured if I climbed the wall and stuck my head above the far side of the roof they were on, I could get a great shot of them silhouetted against the Dome of the Rock.
I figured out all the angles and scampered up for the shot. It’s only now, in retrospect, that I realize how foolish I was. Sneaking up on two soldiers armed with machine guns isn’t a smart thing to do. But I went, anyway, and snapped the photo without the pair ever realizing I was there. I still think about it. What if a chunk of rock had broken off under my feet? What if I had startled them? Sometimes, I guess, you think that because you’re a tourist, you’re bulletproof and not really part of what’s going on.
One evening, poring over maps with Arno and Berhitte, we came up with our craziest escapade. We decided to tunnel under Jerusalem. That’s not as daft as it sounds — a tunnel really does exist. There aren’t many references to it, but we managed to find it. We were going to go through Hezekial’s Tunnel.
Okay, I thought, here we go. It was a sort of metaphor for the whole trip. A tunnel, all Freudian analysis aside, is a dark place through which one emerges into the light. The real Hezekial’s Tunnel begins at a pool of water, and it was there, at that pool, that Jesus is said to have washed the eyes of a blind man and made him see again. That’s the metaphor exactly: to come through the tunnel into the light, to see clearly, to understand.
In King Hezekial’s time the water supply of Jerusalem was outside the city walls. No river runs through Jerusalem and never has. Instead, the first settlements were built around a little artesian well, a pool of water that has bubbled faithfully up from the ground throughout the long years of the city’s existence.
Now, when King Hezekial got word that an Assyrian army was advancing on his city, he wisely ordained that a tunnel should be built to bring water to a reservoir inside the walls. Work on the tunnel commenced. One party dug in from the pool, while another dug out from inside the city walls. And almost thirty centuries ago water flowed through the tunnel for the first time, the Assyrians were thwarted, and Jerusalem, the city of peace, survived to live another day.
The tunnel is still there, carrying a stream of water through its dark shaft. Outside St. Stephen’s Gate an unmarked path winds down into a valley. Arno, Birhitte, and I descended it wordlessly, and at the bottom of the path, still within sight of the city walls, we saw an unremarkable concrete building. Inside it was the ancient spring.
There, too, a group of young Palestinian boys appeared from nowhere and began pulling at our sleeves. “You go? You go?” They held flashlights so that we knew we had reached the place. Hezekial’s Tunnel starts at the bottom of a decrepit set of concrete stairs, and the boys’ faces quickly reflected disappointment when we declared forcefully that we would go through it without guides.
Berhitte, though, took one look at the pitch-black entrance and chickened out. She couldn’t do it, she said. Too claustrophobic. Big Arno glanced at her sheepishly. I’d like to think he was feeling a little doubtful himself. “Berhitte,” he said, “I can’t leave you here by yourself. It’s not safe.” He was probably right. I’d already seen one young woman being followed ominously by a man with less than honourable intentions. The tunnel’s entrance wasn’t a safe place for a lone woman. Arno shrugged and said to me, “I can’t leave her alone.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll do it myself.”
“You are sure?”
For a moment I, too, was unsure. I hadn’t really planned on going solo, but there I was and there it was.
Berhitte and Arno said they’d meet me at the other end, and I ventured forward into the water, switching on my flashlight. The boys were still calling, their voices echoing in the darkness. Within a few steps the water was around my knees, gurgling and splashing as it has for three thousand years. The stone resembled unpolished marble, and the thin lance of my flashlight swept over rock that was a gentle pink like the hue of a seashell’s interior.
I could see how the tunnel was carved out by hand chisels. The marks were still visible in the rock, and again I wondered how anyone could possibly have managed the feat. The water was crystal-clear, and the only sound was my own breathing and the slosh of my two pale legs, diffracted and determinedly striding beneath the surface. Literally, I was tunnelling through history, plunging deep below the meaning-heavy city above.
At first the ceiling was a full metre over my head, and I could extend both arms and touch the walls on either side. Farther into the tunnel the walls began to squeeze in and the roof descended. Then, of course, the water was forced higher, and I had to crouch with only my head and shoulders and desperately precious flashlight free of the flowing stream.
Somewhere above Christ had been crucified. Somewhere above Muhammad had ascended to heaven on a silvery steed. The tunnel stretched on, seemingly winding and bending toward the very roots of the world.
In time I came to the point where the two parties of diggers had met all those years ago. There was once an inscription here in archaic Hebrew. It had read simply: BEHOLD … THE EXCAVATION.
I continued on, a heartbeat from panic, knowing there were hundreds of tonnes of rock overhead. Hurrying, I tipped my flashlight occasionally to see if something was in the water. I didn’t know what I expected to see lurking in the depths — perhaps something unknown and terrifying, something scuttling along the bottom in the murk.
There were also rumbles several times as if the earth was still settling around me. I hustled a bit more, jittery at the thought of being trapped in a cave-in. The thundering, I rationalized later, must have been the noise of trucks passing overhead — either that or more jets breaking the sound barrier.
Finally, the tunnel started to weave back and forth, and it seemed that the ceiling was growing higher. I turned another bend and heard a voice calling. It was indistinct, but I had little choice but to forge toward it. Then I realized my name was being shouted. It was Berhitte. She was quite worried. I’d been underground for maybe forty-five minutes. Her voice became louder until all at once I emerged at the Pool of Siloah and into the light.
A gang of boys was there, as well, but they were older than those at the entrance. They offered to take my picture as I arrived, but I didn’t trust them with my camera. These boys had a menacing air, laughed at my soaked T-shirt, and probably wondered why anyone would want to clamber through a three-thousand-year-old tunnel.
I shook them off, and Arno slapped my back and grinned. Together we three trudged back up to re-enter Jerusalem by the Dung Gate, which was given its unpleasant name because ancient villagers had once tossed their refuse there.
Today the Dung Gate leads into one of the most famous of all the sites of Jerusalem. In my wet clothes I was alarmingly out of place among the long white beards and black robes rocking gently in prayer. Directly in front was the legendary Wailing Wall.
A few hundred metres away, in the Arab quarter, one is greeted with “Salam aleikum,” but at the Wailing Wall only Hebrew is heard, and for Israelis the salutation is that most Jewish of words — shalom.
Salam, shalom — they are brother words from an ancient Semitic root. The name of the city, Jerusalem, literally means City of Peace. Now there’s a misnomer.
In 1947, when the United Nations mandated Israel into existence, a number of things happened with amazing speed. A war broke out, of course, but also the beginnings of a most remarkable language story occurred. Across Central and Eastern Europe a Jewish language, Yiddish, had already been in place for hundreds of years. For a while it was assumed Yiddish would become the official tongue of the new Israel. In those heady early days it was even proposed that Albert Einstein should become the first prime minister. Neither of these two things came to pass.
Yiddish is a Germanic language related to Old German with a smattering of Slavic thrown in. We know Yiddish for such words as putz, verklemmt, and schmooze, which evoke something of the world of those lost northern Jews, a hint of the colour, rhythm, and humour of their lives.
During the Holocaust, several million Yiddish speakers perished, and the language has never fully recovered. So in 1948, in one of the first sessions of the new Israeli parliament, a most extraordinary decision was made: the official language of the new state would be Hebrew. However, for almost two thousand years hardly a living soul had spoken that language in everyday situations. It’s true that Hebrew was well-known in its biblical context, but for people on the street it had about as much use as Latin. That meant it was a fossil language, a remnant of a long-ago time.
Nevertheless, the movement to revive Hebrew has been incredibly successful in Israel. In fact, even before the United Nations mandate, groups of people had been working on adapting Classical Hebrew to the twentieth century. They certainly had some problems describing technology. Bicycles, for example, are most definitely not mentioned in the Torah. And how about airplanes?
To deal with such modern inventions, Hebrew has adopted the word , written in the Roman alphabet as matos. The root ma basically means “a tool.” If we attach it to the verb to move (pronounced lanor), we get the word for machine (manor), and if we wed it with the verb to fly (latus), we wind up with matos, or airplane.
Languages are pliable entities. They’re infinitely creative in their solutions to problems such as dealing with new ideas and new ways of thinking. Hebrew is a perfect example. Resurrected when it was all but extinct, it’s now spoken as a mother tongue by nearly six million people. Remarkable.
One reason for the success of today’s Hebrew is that the flood of Jewish immigrants to Israel hailed from many different language groups — a sort of Tower of Babel in reverse. Moreover, while the choice of Hebrew as the official language was initiated by the Israeli government, it was the heartfelt choice of the people, as well. The language is as intimately linked to the Jewish religion as Arabic is to Islam, and therefore it became one’s duty to learn Hebrew and to pass it on to children, not only as a language of religion but as the language employed for all things.
So for me this story is one of the most powerful of all in the annals of language. It is the one and only time in history that a language has been successfully resurrected from the dead, not just as a museum piece but as a fully functioning modern tongue.
In West Jerusalem, the new city, there’s a museum that holds the Dead Sea Scrolls. When I went to see them, I merged behind a group of people on a tour. Not that I like organized tours. It was just a cheap way of getting a free guided commentary.
The little guide was a passionate fellow, and at one point we stood in front of a large fragment of the Scrolls. Most of the group’s members were Israeli, I think, and could read ancient Hebrew. The guide told us to go ahead and read the fragment, and I studied it solemnly as if I could actually decipher it.
“What is this text?” he finally asked after a few moments of silence. Some keener in the crowd said it was from Isaiah, and the guide beamed. “That’s right. This piece of sheepskin is two thousand years old. It’s almost a thousand years older than any previously known copy of the Book of Isaiah. And what do you notice about it?”
Again I stood shamefaced, hoping the guide wouldn’t notice I didn’t have a clue. Those around me seemed a bit confused, as well. “Do you remember,” he continued, “when you were children and played the whispering game?”
The whispering game?
“Yes, where children get in a line and the teacher gives something to whisper in the ear of the first. That first child whispers to the next and then that one to the next. The fun is when you see how much it changes. ‘I want French perfume for my birthday’ eventually becomes ‘I wore frog pajamas that burned my dog.’ Now what do you notice here?” His hand swept over the glass-enclosed manuscript. He paused dramatically, then answered himself. “There’s no change. Two thousand years of copying and there’s no change at all. Look, you can read it yourself.”
The first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad Ahmed el-Hamed. One of his goats climbed into a cave along the Dead Sea to escape the searing heat, and he picked up a rock and threw it in to get the animal out. When he tossed in the stone, he heard the tinkle of pottery breaking. Up there in the caves he found the Scrolls hidden in ceramic jars. This, our guide told us, happened on the same day the United Nations created the State of Israel. “Now you can believe whatever you want about such a coincidence,” he said, “but I know what I believe.”
My last day in Jerusalem was a Friday which, as it happens, is when Franciscan monks walk in procession down the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows. Arno and I got our cameras ready, Berhitte sighed, and off we went.
The winding path of the Via Dolorosa leads from the Temple Mount to a Crusader church built over the site where it’s thought Christ was crucified. On July 15, 1099, the knights of the First Crusade entered Jerusalem and slaughtered almost all of the inhabitants. Forty thousand people, Jews and Muslims alike, were cut down until the streets were knee-deep in blood. And then the Crusasders built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the place where Christ was said to have died for humanity’s sins — one more profoundly ironic bit of history in Jerusalem where meanings easily become tangled, where belief sometimes obscures reality.
There are some wonderful accounts of the Muslim reaction to this First Crusade. There was a sense of confusion and dismay. The city had been open to everyone and was peaceful for five hundred years. One Muslim writer, in an attempt to make sense of these acts of barbarism, set out to understand what had happened, so he read the Christian books. In Islam, of course, there’s only one god, but in reading about the Holy Trinity, it seemed to him that the Crusaders worshipped three divinities: a father, a son, and a holy ghost. Moreover, Christians appeared to cannibalize their god — eating his body and drinking his blood. To top it off, this same god created his own mother who then created him … immaculately. No wonder the scholar was confused. All of this demonstrates how difficult it is to truly understand the nuances of another culture. It doesn’t help, either, when that new culture is intent on slaughtering you and all of your family.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is somewhat gaudy, which I admit is a terrible pun, but it’s true. The building is ornate to a fault and is run by six different sects, which is a big problem. The different sects are often not on speaking terms, and the church is strictly divided into areas of influence. Changing a light bulb or even moving a carpet a few centimetres can spark fistfights between monks from the different groups. Up on the roof, out of the fray, is the Ethiopian sect. It laid claim to the top of the church and has, in fact, lived in crumbling wooden shacks on the roof for more than a hundred years.
Christ himself spoke a language called Aramaic. It’s neither Hebrew nor Arabic but a cousin of the two. Salam in Aramaic, for example, is shela’m (the apostrophe denotes a glottal stop, a sort of gulping pop of breath). Aramaic began as a pidgin language in the Middle East a few hundred years before Christ and had become the standard tongue in Jerusalem by the first century of the current era.
On the main floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a little grotto. Visitors line up to go into it because only a half-dozen people can fit at a time. It was dark when I entered. Candles flickered in the shadows, and an old priest, Greek Orthodox by the look of his clothes, stood guard. Behind him was a small rocky space, smooth with all the hands that have reached out for it. It is said to be the tomb of Christ. I waited for a moment, hoping for a revelation. I waited for the light of understanding to hit me, but there was nothing. Not for me at least. I still couldn’t feel a thing.
Later that same afternoon, sick of the crowds, dirt, and heat, I went for a walk outside the old city walls. There, up ahead, was a garden, almost a park. I could see the tree branches poking above the dusty walls, and in this desert land I was drawn toward the greenery. The only problem was that an old nun was standing at the gate. What belief system was she going to foist on me? I wondered. I walked up, still desperate to sit among the flowers, and she smiled and simply said, “Welcome.” That was it. I actually hesitated, expecting her to say more. Didn’t she want to ask if I’d found Jesus in my heart? Didn’t she want to tell me that fire and brimstone would rain down on me for eternity?
Well, apparently, she didn’t. She invited me in with a graceful movement of her hand, didn’t say another word, and continued to smile.
The place is called the Garden Tomb. Charles Gordon, a British general, discovered it in 1883. He had come to Jerusalem with some doubts about the true location of the religious sites. Golgotha, in ancient Hebrew, means “place of the skull,” and Gordon couldn’t help but notice a strange rock formation outside the old walls several hundred metres from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And here, in the Garden Tomb, I saw it, too. On a little rise there is a tumble of rocks and a crevice that looks like the eye sockets and jawbone of a skull. At the bottom there is, indeed, another small tomb carved out of the rock. There is no church here, only a garden, but of all my time in Jerusalem, this was the first occasion I actually felt something click. That was what I’d been waiting for. Not enough to make me become celibate perhaps. Not enough to inspire me to wander into the desert for forty days and forty nights. But there it was.
Something, finally, had touched me. For all the anger and turmoil of this holy city, for all its guns and wars and violence, for all its crowded, desperate clawing for territory, there is something grand here. Something like the sense of wonder a child feels gazing into a starry sky for the first time. Jerusalem really is like no other place on the planet. Elie Wiesel, the writer, survivor of the Holocaust, and Nobel Prize laureate, said: “You don’t go to Jerusalem. You return to it.”
That means, I guess, a part of us has always been there. Metaphorically, at least, our hearts are all in the same place, and though we’ve been “scattered across the face of the Earth,” though our languages have been “confused” so that we can no longer understand one another, we need to find our way back. We need to understand one another again. We need to start building a new Tower of Babel.
