Zion, part II

I read a lot of travel guides before heading to Israel. There’s a lot to see, you know, and I wanted to make sure I knew what I was looking at. But on Sunday morning when I got up to board the bus for my one-day tour of Jerusalem, I realized there was one thing I didn’t know. I had no idea what time zone I was in. This made for a confusing two-shower, short-nap morning, but I figured it out and in no time was on the road to see some history. Yerushaláyim, as it’s called in Hebrew, is Israel’s capital and largest city. It was a little over an hour from my hotel which allowed me to get to know a couple people sitting near me, including a Taiwanese fellow who worked for Texas Instruments, an Argentinian woman who was staying at an apartment with a couple of her New York City Jewish friends’ families, and a young couple from Latvia. Quite the international crowd.

The first sight we saw upon arrival after a couple enterprising Arabs tried to get us to pay to ride a camel was the Mount of Olives, a mountain ridge overlooking the Old City that has many biblical references, including where Jesus lived, taught, and prophesized.To me, the coolest thing about the Mount of Olives is that the Book of Zechariah foretells that, at the end of days, God will bring back to life all the “dry bones” buried here. As such, there are an estimated 150,000 Jews who are buried here, dating back to biblical time. Although you can’t see it clearly, the graves go all the way down the mountain, past the Garden of Gethsemane to the city walls.
Here’s a better picture of the graves themselves.
Afterward we went into the city to see several sights, including the alleged King David’s Tomb, done in a traditional Muslim way of making it look like the body is actually 20 feet long (which makes him seem more godlike). Here’s me in front of the massive tomb wearing a Kippah, also known as a yarmulka or as I like to call it, a Jew hat.
Next we went to the appropriately-named “Room of The Last Supper,” where Jesus celebrated Passover with a bunch of his Jewish buddies and, most likely while having a little too much vino, came up with the grand idea of symbolically eating his body and drinking his blood as a remembrance of him. Pretty morose commemoration if you ask me.

Here’s the Taiwanese guy getting attacked by his camera in there, which apparently wanted to eat his flesh and drink his blood.
Fittingly, the columns in the room are topped with this strange image of two birds eating the flesh of another. (Cue Twilight Zone tune). Next we went into the Old City where we witnessed firsthand a bit of discrimination. Sure, Israel is a county unashamedly founded on prejudice. But apparently this deliberate favoritism for Jews over everyone else has found its way into the psyche of the citizens of the country, one of whom (our guide, Ruvin) blatantly told us not to shop in any of the souqs or bazaars along the way into the Old City. No, no, he said. We’ll get a chance to shop later…in the Jewish Quarter.
Well, so be it. Who am I to say anything? I’m sure if I were on an Arab-language tour of the city it would be the opposite. Here’s me shopping in the Jewish Quarter.
We then made our way through some Roman ruins left over from the short-lived but devastating Roman rule, which ultimately led to the dispersion of the Jews around the world (as they weren’t allowed back in the city) and the destruction of the “Second Temple,” their holiest of holies.
From here, we went to the holiest of spots for Christians, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This site has many names: Place of the Skull…some reference to Adam’s skull; Golgotha (Aramaic for The Skull); the Church of the Resurrection (so say Eastern/Orthodox Christians); and Calvary (nothing to do with the Army). It’s here that the tomb of Jesus and a segment of the true cross are said to be. That is, at least according to Emperor Constantine’s mother, Saint Helena, a crazy Christian advocate who was the first to “discover” these sites (without doing much research) in the mid fourth century and claim them to be the Real McCoy. Helena, by the way, was the one most likely to convince her son to accept Christianity and mandate it as the new religion of the Roman Empire, which had, until then, been Pagan. Were it not for her, many scholars argue, Christianity would have been an esoteric, abortive religion.

So, it’s here in this gilded Byzantine-looking church that is now but wasn’t previously within the Old City walls, that Helena took several different sites (stations of the cross, if you will) and put them under one room:

1) The site crucifixion of Christ, which is stations 10-13, including where he was stripped (#10), nailed (#11), died (#12), and taken down (#13). 2) The Stone of Unction is where the body of Jesus was said to have been anointed and prepared for burial. An interesting fact here is that the rock smells like roses, which is an eerie connection to the Rose Line (Roslin) made famous in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Here you can see me sniffing dead Jesus. 3) The tomb where Jesus was buried and from which he disappeared. This had a long line to get in.
As I’m not a religious person, I stood nearby all these sites and waited for others, taking pictures of things like this: the Rotunda, which looks like it’s casting down love from heaven.
And this Brazilian guy arm wrestling Jesus.

Afterward, we walked down the Via Dolorosa (the opposite way Jesus went) and saw a bunch of other stations of the cross.

Including this one where Veronica (meaning True (Vera) Face (Icon) in Latin) wiped Jesus’s dirty face.
And this one, where Jesus put his hand on the wall. Apparently this isn’t a station, but it sure is old. Then we were on our way to the Western Wall (also known as the Wailing Wall), the last site on our tour. But first, we walked by some Jewish stands selling these funny-looking but traditional sesame seed bagels.
Finally, we were at the wall, which is the only remaining wall of the Second Temple, which housed the Ark of the Covenant – the Holy of Holies to Jews. Here’s me placing a prayer in the wall (tradition, I hear) way above the grime line which no doubt developed from hundreds of years of touching.
Before calling it a day, we drove by another western wall, this one the very prison-like wall that divides the West Bank from Israel. After that, we had lunch and spent about 1.5 hours at the newly built holocaust museum. The day was busy, but I still had a week of work ahead of me. Oy vey!