Living Waters and the Dream of Return
Jerusalem’s old city, at first, feels no different from Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, or Fes’ medina, or Granada’s old gypsy market: avenues of tourist chintz, the locals looking to make a quick buck, acres of plastic molded in China and carried to Israel in massive container ships.
(I see these ships passing through the strait that bisects Istanbul, the ships that lumber and loam while the city’s ferries flit around them like flies flit around elephants. At night, their lights turned off, these ships loom like some silent terror, lightless beasts gliding soundlessly across the water. Sometimes, I see men - boys, really - on their decks, smoking cigarettes. I wonder about their lives on those boats, their dreams confined by open sea, the promise of some distant port, strange and detached women, stolen or bought from their villages, who will do whatever the men want for the price of a few drinks. One summer morning, two boys were on the back of a ship, smoking, and I held up a hand. They waved back, smiling, and then our whole little congregation - Istanbulus headed to work - waved back, too, and this made me happy for basically the whole day.)
But there’s life in the old city, yet. Not in the Jewish quarter, which feels like a new strip mall in Brooklyn, full of Kosher organic food shops, soft sandstone shopping centers where girls in white and blue skirts and knee high stockings smoke indifferently beneath plane trees. Not in the Armenian quarter, which has been lost beneath the piles of tourist junk. And certainly not the Christian quarter, its lone residents the bishops and patriarchs in their uniforms, stone faced men who fight esoteric battles over the administrative role their sect should play in this divided city.
For life in the old city, head to the Muslim quarter, where women in headscarves haggle over bruised fruit and soft dates, where old men push carts loaded high with pastries, an Arab girl dressed in rags weaves between the delivery boys who balance stacks of bread loaves on their heads, a teenager in hijab smiles furtively at me, an old woman sits on the ground with a mountain of herbs between her legs.
And everywhere, soldiers. Young boys standing on corners with assault weapons, fingers always on the trigger.
On my flight in, I sat beside a young Palestinian man who was studying in London. He’d grown up on these streets.
“You know,” he told me, “you don’t realize how fucked up it is when you’re here. It’s a narrative you grow up with; it’s always there. Being occupied, being watched. You just assume it’s normal. Then you leave, and you realize it’s not normal. You realize that there are places in the world where you can walk the streets without guns being pointed at you, without being stopped and asked to show identification. I guess it had never occurred to me how much this surveillance shaped me until I got away from it. I can understand why some people react so violently to it. It’s not freedom, it’s not justice. But it’s our normal.”
Looking into their faces, these soldier are kids. Most of them have acne. Barely older than I was when I snuck into the woods, with liquor stolen from my parents, to kiss girls with braces. They’re fucking kids.
~
One of the things I’ve learned to love about Islam is the sense of community it fosters and encourages. American Christianity, especially in the last fifty years, has become less community based. It’s very much about the idea of personal faith. This, I think, is a direct result of the American ethos of individualism, of course. We like to think of ourselves as explored and individuals, men and women of possibility, lone narrators with the opportunity to shape our own story.
This is partly because of our isolation. Coming to America meant breaking with the old lands, the old stories. It meant a blank slate - a new land and a new people to fill with any identity we wanted. This very possibility is why we still travel; it’s why after L left me, I moved to Istanbul. I could be re-born. And the American myth is nothing less than a myth of communal re-birth.
It makes sense, then, that our practice of faith is more fractured. The places where it is still relatively community based - the south, the upper Midwest - are the places where homogenous communities survive, where the populace shares a sense of identity and narrative. The diversity of American communities, the commoditization of our lives, the material opportunities that tempt us, have all combined to make our practice of faith less communal and more lonely.
But Islam, for many reasons, is still a religion of communities. Not all of these are reasons I’m comfortable with. For instance, the endurance of patriarchal societies within a lot of Islamic communities has a lot to do with this; as does the homogeneity of many Islamic communities (for an example, see the exclusion of non-Muslims from Friday prayers on the Temple mount, or examine Turkey’s half century of ethnic cleansing - gone are the Jews, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Armenians, etcetera.)
Whatever the reasons, the generosity of Turks and Istanbulus has moved me, deeply. They’ve invited me into their homes. They’ve given me clothes. They’ve leant me money. The patriarchal desire to look out for the flock can be a very beautiful thing. A faith’s commandment to treat others with kindness is wonderful.
I witness this same generosity within the Muslim quarter …A man selling carpets invites me in for tea. We sit, and speak in broken English. He doesn’t try to sell me anything. A man selling pastries takes me beneath his arm, and gives me a hug before giving me a free fig-pastry.
Not everyone is so generous, of course. Three young boys - maybe seven or eight years old - offer to show me how to get onto the city walls.
“We show you secret gate,” they chatter excitedly.
“Oh yeah?”
“Very special, very secret. Only for our friends.”
I look them over, their nappy hair matted to their foreheads, their second or third-hand clothes smudged with dirt.
“How much?” I ask.
The one in the middle - the ring leader - brings his hand to his heart, as if I’ve just mortally wounded him. Where do kids learn these performances? There’s an emotional intelligence to children that can’t possibly be transmuted; it’s something innate in us, the ability to manipulate and lie. I remember how adeptly my brother and I would torment our sister when we were kids. It’s possible we’re all born with this survival instinct, the desire to look out only for ourselves. And maybe adulthood is nothing more than learning to suppress it, to supersede it, to care for others instead. Maybe we are never at our purest as when we are self-interested children. I wonder what this says about us as a species; that when pressed, most of us revert to this purity: me, me, me.
“No price! You, me: friends,” he says, emphatically patting his chest, taking my wrist in his hand. I calculate which pocket holds my 20 shekel note and which holds my 100 shekel note, then accept his offer.
The three of them lead me through a series of winding alleyways, whispering to each other in Arabic, looking back, whispering some more, giggling. One of their friends calls down to me from his roof:
“Thief! He wants your money.”
My guide shouts to him in Arabic, then shrugs his shoulders to me: “He crazy talk!”
Sure enough, they lead me through a trash strewn courtyard to a rusted, spiral staircase and a broken gate, which all four of us shimmy through. And suddenly we’re atop the city, looking down on the terraced homes of the Muslim quarter, some of them gutted, roofs collapsed; some of them augmented by satellite dishes and laundry. In the distance, the dome of the rock reflects late afternoon sunshine.
“How much?” I ask again.
This time, a smirk.
“Ticket is 50 shekel.”
“50! All I’ve got is 20.”
“No, no, no. Ticket is 50 shekel. Special gate, special price!”
I hand him the 20 and he takes my wrist again.
“30 shekel. 10 for each.”
“I don’t have 30 shekel. I have 20.”
“Well, maybe we see what police say…”
I laugh. “OK. Let’s do that.”
They descend the stairs, cursing me in Arabic.
I am alone up here, the holy city at my feet. I remember a night, many springs ago, in Philadelphia. I picked up R and we drove to the art museum, climbing to the base of a statue of George Washington.
“Philadelphia,” she said, gesturing dramatically, “is at our feet.”
I’d been in love with R for years then; or, I’d thought I was in love with R. I guess I didn’t have any idea what love was then - that to love someone, truly, is to finally shed that childhood self interest. I hadn’t yet done that. R, in so many ways, was self interest - the yearning for completeness that we all feel as we get older, that we’re often led to believe is the desire for love, for our other half.
But that night in Philadelphia? I do believe that was love, or something intimating it‘s larger shape. Or as close to love as we can get. We sat in the cold, watching our breath disappear into the night, looking down the parkway to the skyscrapers of Center City. Philadelphia seemed so big then, to a Midwestern kid. Now, after Istanbul, it seems so minor.
For weeks afterward, I could remember our whole conversation. It had seemed so important. It seemed, to me, that my whole life had been building up to that moment - to being with this woman on this night on this statue, Philadelphia at our feet. Now, I remember so little of what we said. I remember the way the wind took her hair - jet black, very straight - and threw it across the whiteness of her cheeks, and how she spent all night battling to keep it out of her eyes. I remember her advice about my writing:
“You can’t be Updike, or Kundera, or Garcia Marquez. You can only be you. You can only tell your stories in the way you tell them. So stop trying to be them. Just write.”
I smiled at that. She wanted to be a doctor then; now she’s in her final year of Med school and I know almost nothing of her life. In that moment, I’d imagined a life together in Philadelphia - a row home in Queen’s Village, Sunday brunch at Morning Glory diner, late night walks through Rittenhouse, two kids (we’d raise them Jewish; I’d convert). I wonder now how close or far I might have been from that life; if, had I kissed her then, I might be sitting in my study in South Philadelphia right now, wondering if I would ever write a novel, if I would ever see Jerusalem by the light of the setting sun?
“You’ll find love again,” she told me near the end of the night. “I don’t doubt that you’ll find love again.”
It’s strange to me how our definition of love changes with time. And how the old definition lingers and lingers - a kind of mould that traps you, like those sailors trapped on their big ships - until you suddenly break free of it, come ashore in a new country, ready to learn a new language. To redefine the boundaries.
What I’m saying is I have expectations and I can’t quite shake those expectations. For how love is supposed to look. For how home is supposed to feel. And we all have these expectations, I think, and it’s very hard to let go of them, or to recalibrate them. It’s difficult work.
~
As the day fades, a flock of pigeons wheels in unison across from the Dome of the Rock. Each time they turn, their bellies catch the sun and flicker - suddenly, luminously - white. They soar like this, together, for minutes on end, like some organism contracting and exploding in the florid light of sundown.
I walk until I come to a football pitch nestled right beneath the wall, whose long shadow falls across most of the field. Boys are down there, calling to one another, playing in the last light. I watch for a while, appreciating this simplicity: boys in t-shirts, a game. There are no soldiers with guns. There is no border fence demarcating their world from another world. There are universal boundaries here: two goals, an end line.
“Abbi, what’s your name?” one of them calls up to me.
“Justin. What’s yours?”
“Mohammad.”
“That’s a good name.”
“So is Justin. Where are you from?”
“America.”
A long, low whistle from the boys, then laughter, then questions.
“Do you play football?”
“Sometimes. But I’m not very good.”
It’s beautiful to watch them down there, half in sun, half in shadow. But then I ask what it does to kids, growing up in the shadow of these walls, with boys not much older than them carrying guns in their markets, stopping them with impunity and, if they happen to be in the wrong place, taking them back to the right place. They learn early, the right and wrong places. Their learn their boundaries. They learn early that the guns are normal.
I think back to my friend from the flight: “This is what we grow up with, thinking it’s how everyone grows up. That you just avoid your neighbors and that armed men are going to patrol your street.”
Walking further, I stop above the rubble of a ruined home. Stones, earth, and garbage. At its heart is a small cherry tree, which is already blossoming. Pale pink. It reminds me of H, who once called this city home, many years ago now. There was a courtyard in our hometown outside of Philadelphia, and for a week every spring, it’s a forest of color - cherry trees and apricots and magnolias, all unfurled. And one day, me and H went there and lay on the cool grass and closed our eyes and listened to the wind pluck the flowers from the trees, one by one, and they rained down around us.
In my dreams, I’ve traveled half of Europe with H. And now I imagine exploring Jerusalem with her, too. Past the butchers and the bakers, through the cigarette haze, and the curtains of saffron and silk. The two of us walking aside each other, shoulder to shoulder, her bemused as I haggled with the boys over how much to pay them at the broken gate. When the path up here narrows, we would take turns leading. When she leads, I watch the wind take her hair, exposing slivers of her neck; when I lead, I glance back to make sure she’s still there.
We sit for a while and watch the day die. The mountains in the distance coming into focus. The deepening of color and lengthening of shadow.
I wonder if she’s seen this before, maybe alone – like I am now – or maybe with the boy in her class, the one she said reminded her of me. She was seventeen then, a kid. Living halfway around the world. I was twenty-four, also a kid. Writing shallow articles
about mediocre restaurants in the mediocre city that I tell everyone is my home, the city I love, the city I spent years imagining a life within.
I was twenty-four. Sitting in a cubicle in an office full of cubicles, two-thirds of them empty because print is a dying industry in America. A ghostly office of ghostly cubicles, full of spooked writers writing callow essays for a magazine that was 70% advertisements – for condos and clothes. My editor spoke like a valley girl but once pulled me into an empty elevator so we could be alone
“Get out of here while you’re young. This place will suck you in, and when you’re my age, you’re fucked. You realize your dreams are gone.”
The other editor, on the other side of my row of cubicles, had a full bar in his office, and on Fridays, he and the Valley Girl – we all thought they were fucking – would close his door and drink until the rest of us left.
I ran into him once, a year later, after I’d been unceremoniously shown the door. It was at a noodle house in Chinatown. I was with L then – we must have been in that period after Gettysburg and before Spain, that year when we both thought we were going to spend our lives together and when we would’ve eaten the other one for dinner, if possible. Anyway, I was there with L – she had her hair in pigtails – some late night after we’d been driving around and making out in graveyards and churches, and then my old editor came in, looking pallid but boisterous, a phalanx of trannies in tow. They sat a table behind me and L, and he and I pretended not to know each other.
That was also the year I imagined H and I got snowed in in Prague, and played the piano naked and ate out-of-season fruits flown in from Morocco for breakfast and romped through the empty, snowy plazas.
I wonder, now, how happy L and I really could’ve been if I was imagining myself in Prague with H; if once a week, I was driving to Wilmington for dinner and wine with C. I wonder if there’s something in me that’s incapable of letting go of the childhood solipsism, that desire to get everything I want. It scares me: as much as I loved L, we only worked because she was just as selfish as I was. Because both of us were unwilling to let go of that selfishness.
The day before H left for Jerusalem, I bought us a pack of cigarettes – menthol, like my brother smokes; this was also the year he was returned to us, the year his odyssey ended – and we sat on the swing set at her old elementary school and smoked them, one at a time, passing them between us, and talked about nothing much.
Six months later, in that same parking lot, I would kiss L for the first time; three years later, in that same parking lot, L would tell me she didn’t love me anymore.
I still haven’t been to Prague, but I spent a couple nights in bed with a woman from Prague, a lonely, beautiful woman with the most extraordinary lapis eyes I’ve ever seen. But I feel bad talking about her beauty. Because everyone does that. And what I loved about her, on those finite nights, was her intelligence, her resigned brilliance, her weary perseverance. Those things she’d buried beneath her beauty, or had let other people bury beneath her beauty. Now, when I think about Prague, I think about her. How she wanted her mother to see the beauty in how she played piano. How she planned to commit suicide by the age of thirty.
But I’m here in Jerusalem thinking about H. Wondering where she is, why so much of our relationship – if you can call it that – seems to be our shadows overlapping, or one of us stumbling upon the other’s trail, years later, in these far flung locales. And wondering why the only times our paths seem to cross we’re both such a mess.
I last saw her the October before L left me. H came over to my apartment, which is no longer my apartment, its rooms now the stage for someone else’s narrative, and we sat on the sun porch and she read me poems she’d written in German. She discovered the book L had given me for my birthday, read the inscription, smiled wryly:
“Sounds serious, kid.”
I knew she’d had some issues, though I didn’t know what. I knew she was on lithium, though I didn’t know what lithium did. I knew she didn’t want anyone to see her, but that she let me see her, and I’m still not sure why. I guess sometimes we need other people. I guess we need people in our lives who can see us at our worst and still love us.
And I guess I could say that’s what H has been. A shadow that I know will always be there, even if she’s never more than a shadow.
After she read her poems, I took her to a diner and we shared chicken fingers and gravy fries and she told me about a lover she’d driven away, and she told me about plenty of other lovers, and she leaned her head against the cold window but she always looked
right into my eyes.
“I’m glad I’m with you, kid,” she said.
Me, too, kid.
We shared a cigarette on the ride home, and then she bolted out of my car before I could come up with a justification for not kissing her – I was in love with L; what she (H) needed wasn’t a lover but a friend; that she was still too young – because I’ve spent half a decade coming up with excuses to not kiss H, choosing instead to imagine me into Jerusalem, or her into Istanbul, or both of us into Prague.
I’m not sure it’s healthy to live this way, in fantasy and dreams, with a woman I see maybe once every two years, when one of us is guaranteed to be in some state of emergency – despair or heartbreak.
But then, all of us do this, don’t we? I once heard a story about the Israeli general who let his position be overrun during the Yom Kippur War. He was relieved of his duty, his whole career gone to shame in one night. After the position was recovered by another general - he would become Prime Minister - the disgraced general went into exile, like his ancestors, retreating to the jungles of central Africa, pursuing diamonds and a fortune that would allow him to re-write the narrative of that battle, to vindicate himself. When he died, having burned through two separate fortunes, they found his room full of old battle maps from the Yom Kippur War. He spent the rest of his life re-fighting that battle.
To some extent, we all spend our lives in dreams and fantasies. We create whole lives with women passed on the street. We imagine showing up on the doorsteps of lovers who have spurned us, with published novels. We turn real events into fictional events; transpose real people, real love, into something not quite real. H and I never lay in that field of flowers together; I simply imagined we did for long enough that now the line between truth and imagination has blurred.
I guess I’m not sure it’s healthy to live any way. It’s a dangerous business. To love or to believe. To sacrifice your dreams for your family or to pursue your dreams at their expense. To sacrifice your conscience for money. Or to sacrifice your comfort for virtue. People get hurt. We get hurt. We wound those we love most and then never speak to them again. We chase shadows.
The pigeons flex and contract. Their bellies capture the sun for a moment. How do they move in unison like that?
~
When I saw my father for the first time after leaving home - in a cafeteria in Tirana, Albania - I didn’t cry. I’d imagined the meeting so many times in my head, cried so many times at its thought - that by the time it actually happened, I held myself together. Life so rarely matches the fantasy. But in moments, it does. And we spend our days searching for those moments.
This time, Dad and I reunite in a hotel room in Jerusalem. We laugh and hug one another. These reunions have become something of common place; the new order, the new boundaries of our relationship.
“Let’s get a beer,” he says.
~
The next morning, we tour the Temple Mount. It’s a clear day, flush with sun. Our guide is a South African Jew who studied literature under J.M. Coetzee at university - “an absolutely awful son of a bitch, but a fucking genius” - with a shaved head. We tour the base of the mount, its two thousand year old stones worn round, dormant wisteria seeping from its cracks, pigeons circling overhead, immune to the laws of religion - no Jews on the mount; no non-Muslims in Al-Aqsa mosque.
Our guide talks to us about exile and identity. What happens to a group when their whole identity has been informed by exile - by a desire for a homeland that has been taken away? What happens when, suddenly, that homeland is returned? What happens to the wander when he sets down roots? The dream of return, I’m reminded, is so often more powerful than the actual return. The dream brings us to tears, while the return leaves us confused, disoriented, uncertain of our place within a new order. There are no boundaries to dreams, no realities to contend with. The shadow girl remains perfect in her silhouette.
“My grandmother didn’t return, after 1948,” he tells us. “She spent her whole life dreaming of this place - her people’s homeland. And when the opportunity finally came to return, she couldn’t do it. ‘I’ve spent my whole life living as an exile. I wouldn’t know how to live any other way.’”
And yet, place does matter. Having that genesis to mythologize. We all want to be prodigal sons. Walking through the Old City, one of the ministers on the tour with us tells me the story of his parents. They’d died without leaving behind any wishes for their burial. The son was living in Philadelphia by then, but he’d grown up on a farmhouse in Central Ontario, Canada.
“For seven years, their ashes sat in a box in my bedroom closet. I thought of where I could scatter them, but I didn’t know of any place that mattered. Their parents were buried in the same cemetery, in Ontario, but the government had declared the cemetery historical and wasn’t accepting any new burials. Our church bought a massive plot at Laurel Hill cemetery, along the river in Philly - if you ever want to be buried with a view, let me know; I can get you in -” here I think of A, who’s married now, living in the Philly burbs. I remember walking with her through the mausoleums of Laurel Hill, beneath bright May sunshine - very much like this light, actually - her face flushed with color, her hair wild in the wind coming off the river, a hint of red in it. A, the only woman I’ve managed to lose with grace; who still won’t talk to me because my very presence threatens the stability of her new narrative, her quiet narrative. There’s rarely justice in how we treat one another, is there?
“Anyway, I didn’t want to bury them there. They had absolutely no attachment to Philadelphia. No one would come to see them. They’d be a forgotten grave. Maybe no one will come to see them anyway. But I wanted to at least give them a space that mattered, that meant something to their story.”
“What did you do?”
“I spent seven years gathering signatures. From distant cousins, people I hadn’t spoken to in decades, people I only knew as kids from those long ago summers on the farm, girls with ribbons in their hair that I chased through the barn. I had to get everyone in my family to sign a petition saying they wouldn’t seek to be buried in the cemetery if Mom and Dad were buried there. It took me years to find some of them. It was amazing to me - here I was using the internet, this thing I couldn’t have imagined as a boy on that farm - to find the people I’d grown up with, the foundation of my own family story. How incredible, right?”
“Right.”
“And then I had to prove that my grandparents were actually buried there. My grandfather’s grave was unmarked except for his last name and the name of his first wife, who’d died in childbirth. So I had to find the record of his burial, to prove he was buried there, too. Luckily, I was able to find the funeral records from 1965, when he died, which verified he was buried there. After all of that, the cemetery agreed to give me a waiver to bury mom and dad there. So this May, I’ll go up there with my wife and we’ll have a small service.”
“That’s beautiful. That must give you a real sense of closure.”
He shrugs. “What is closure, right? Life doesn’t work in neat thresholds. Especially with grief. But we tell stories that allow us to go on journeys, and those stories and journeys don’t end - they just lead into new stories, new journeys. And at some point we realize we’ve changed, that our grief has changed, become manageable. This is why stories are so important to us. They allow us to move, to keep moving. But it made me happy to get mom and dad a place. We all need a place, even if it‘s only a myth.”
~
We need stories. We need places. Through movement, we shape our identity - the myths of return and exile; the phantoms that haunt our dreams. In Istanbul, I dream of Philadelphia. But it is the Philadelphia of my adolescence - the ruins where we drank illicit booze and kissed young girls; the bedroom where I made love to L; the diner where I sat with H. That Philadelphia is nothing more than a myth, the force that has cast me out into the world in search of it once again. Will I find another home? Will I find love again? Will I learn to recalibrate my boundaries - to not search for Philadelphia in Istanbul; to not search for L in G? Or will my identity become one of being forever lost? Given the chance to return, will I choose exile? These are choices we make. To live within fact, or to live within fiction. The line that demarcates the two is never clear or neat; it’s smudged and worn by passage. It’s impossible know when we’ve crossed from one into the other. Just as it’s impossible to pinpoint the moment when love becomes love, or when love stops being love. One day, we’re in a bedroom in Philadelphia. Another day, years later, we’re in a crowd on its way to Friday prayer in the streets of Jerusalem. The line that separates them is difficult to delineate or to make sense of. Its meaning or importance is immense, but unclear.
~
The barrier that separates Israel from Palestine winds its way through Jerusalem like a dead snake - grey, insipid, the color of life blanched by death. On one side - the Israeli side - it is buffered by open space. The wall, here, is not an oppressive force. It is distant, made smaller by the open ground. But over there - across that open space - it is immediate. Its shadow falls onto homes. Its height blots out the horizon.
“When designing the wall, I had to compromise,” says the general who designed all 437 miles of this boundary. “We did not want to separate cousins from cousins, or a farmer from his land. But sometimes, in these things, you have no choice. If possible, I make a gate in each town so farmers can reach crops. But, terrorists exploit this gate. They sneak through. So, we must close those gates to keep out the terrorists.”
Within a narrative, language must be chosen carefully. Terrorists, freedom fighters. There’s a difference in the image that is shaped depending on what word you choose. A friend of mine, in Istanbul, works for the government-controlled newspaper. She’s commanded, by her superiors, to refer to protestors as ‘rioters.’ Language, you see, matters. If you call a woman a cunt - it’s just a word, right? how much power can it have? - it can undo years of sacrifice. One word can overwhelm a hundred acts of good will. It can undo years of love. One word can start a war, end a life. Language matters.
“This wall must be closer to their side so that we have time to catch terrorists who climb the wall. If the wall was close to our side, by the time they climbed the wall, they would already be in our homes, where they could blow us up. This wall is about safety. It does not keep out honest people. It is to keep away the terrorists.”
It’s possible, of course, that such a boundary - such a neat boundary drawn between reality and possibility - is the kind of thing that could cause a young man to desire to destroy that boundary, to demolish the neat line between the confines of his narrative and the future confines of his people‘s narrative.
We drive along the wall for a few miles. A soft rain falls. A snarl of traffic crawls toward the checkpoint into Palestine. Large black water heaters peek their heads over the immense, monolithic wall. Enormous red signs - in Arabic, English, and Hebrew - lay out the stakes:
Beyond this line you are entering the Palestinian territories. It is illegal for any
Israeli citizen to enter. Doing so endangers your life.
Before the checkpoint, our guide and the general get off the bus to catch a taxi.
“Let me remind you,” the General says, “that Palestinians are freely allowed to come and go into Israel. Is it a slight inconvenience? Sure. But they are free to come. Free to worship. But we are not allowed in Palestine. Is this freedom?”
After he’s gone, one of my father’s friends - a Presbyterian minister - turns to me:
“I call bullshit on 80% of what he said. Maybe 90%.”
~
No story is unbiased, of course. There is always a narrator. That narrator has been shaped by his surroundings - say, a border fence that he played football in the shadow of, or a soldier who put a gun in his face - just as he’s shaped by the stories his ancestors told him - say, a story of a land forcibly taken from his kin, and a millennia long journey to rectify an injustice done to entire group of people. And it’s very difficult to break from those narrative foundations, at least in our own stories. It’s very difficult to find the line between truth and fiction when your narrators have been so thoroughly blinded by history and circumstance. It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder if there really is any truth or justice.
~
The wall in Israel is bare. The wall, in Palestine, is art. Not always good art, or easy art - there are slogans of war; there are children brandishing machine guns - but art nonetheless. Faced with stone, people have chosen to tell stories in their own language. To create beauty from boundaries.
We all do this, in our own ways. I think about how after L left me, I decided to write a novel. It seemed the only way for me to make a story that was, in real life, about failure and humiliation - she left me; she created a story in which I controlled her and tried to repress her - into something beautiful. It allowed me to take events that ended in despair and, through fiction, turn them into something that ended in hope and rebirth.
But it was also preservation. It allowed me to capture her voice before it was lost to me forever. And, despite the pain, I felt that voice was worth capturing. In her narrative, of course, this is just another example of my selfishness, of my efforts to co-opt her identity and subsume it beneath my own. And I suppose I understand this: it’s telling her voice, our shared memories, through my aperture. But this is how our personal narratives work: we’re always stuck with the narrator. Should we stop telling stories because we’re biased?
Despite the art, Palestine is also, I must report, full of trash. There are many empty lots, and each one of them seems full of discarded junk - old cars, empty bottles, wrappers of all sizes and colors. Even I here, I see competing languages at work:
They can’t even keep their own country clean; why should we trust them? They don’t even value their own land!
How can we be expected to keep our country clean when they deny us even basic services? They don’t give us enough money for routine garbage pickup. They don’t give us enough economic opportunity to build a stable government. They deny us even the right of cleaning up our own land.
On the street, my father points out, the revealing garments of Israeli women - sun dresses and yoga pants - have given way to headscarves and abayas. Nine out of ten women are covered, by my count.
And within my narrative, from my biased view, this is complicated. It’s been explained to me many times, by women and men. Modesty is a requirement of faith, for both genders. The body and sex are sacred things, and should be treated as sacred. Not just anyone should see a person’s figure. Those things are gifts from God and must be treated carefully. A woman once told me - an educated, brilliant woman whose opinions I deeply respect - that she felt closer to God when she covered. That before, when she was uncovered, she felt ashamed, competitive, objectified. And now, covered, she feels whole.
It’s forced me to realize that when I look at women, I have a bad habit of breaking them into parts: Great ass, but small tits; great face, but no ass; great tits, great ass, but her face could be better. I don’t do this with men. It’s reflexive at this point, a separation I make automatically, one that my culture and my history has conditioned me to do, against my own better impulses.
And I don’t do this when I look at women who are covered. There’s nothing to break down. There is a monolithic person, a blank slate - like an empty wall - and she’s free to cover that slate with any narrative she chooses.
Our first stop in Palestine is a coffee shop, where a priest talks to us about justice.
“The only thing that matters to me,” he says, “is whether an action brings about more justice or less justice. That’s all that matters.”
Last week, in Istanbul, I woke up early and went for a run. It was a warm morning, with full sun and a gentle breeze coming off the sea. I ran along the Golden Horn, up a steep hill to an old ramparts overlooking the shipyards. From there, I could see most of the old city - Fatih mosque, where I knew old men would be sitting in circles, studying the Qur’an; Suleymaniye mosque, where the salep vendors would just be beginning their rounds; in the far distance, Aya Sofia, which was just opening its doors to the tourists, and Sultanahmet, which probably had its windows open for the first time all year, letting in the wind from the sea.
After catching my breath, I jogged back down the hill. At its bottom was a park, where a group of older women were sitting and feeding the pigeons. They were all covered. They talked among themselves quietly.
As I approached them, I felt the sun on my arms, the wind in my hair. And it was such a joy to me - such a simple, easy, God-given grace. Light and air. To feel my body in unencumbered motion, blessed by the elements. It occurred to me that these women, and millions like them, had no idea what this felt like. Had no idea how wonderful it felt to come to the end of a run with the wind in your hair. I could feel this anytime I wanted to, at any moment - I could step outside and run and feel my body exposed to the world.
And I consider that a gift from God. I consider that grace. And I think that any God worth believing in would want every one of His people to feel that grace.
When the woman who told me that she felt “free” when covered left Istanbul, she came into my office to say good bye to me. My boss was out of town, so we had to leave the door open, lest anyone get the wrong impression. We sat across from one another and talked about art. She was leaving to get married, to a man who wouldn’t let her be out after dark on her own because he worried about her safety.
“I used to walk a lot at night,” she told me. “I’ll miss those walks. But this is how marriage works, right?”
I thought about L. She’d gone to Spain, the last year we were together, for six months. During the application process, she’d sat in my car and burst into tears. “What’s going to happen to us?” she asked. “I can’t imagine being away from you. If I go, what happens? Will things change? What if I come back and we’re different people?”
I told her what I thought was right: that she had to make this decision for herself, regardless of our relationship, regardless of my needs. I told her that she needed to do what was right for her, independent of me. And I do believe that those six months eventually brought about the end of our relationship. But I also believe it was the right thing to do.
The woman who was leaving to get married walked across the room to show me a picture on her phone: it was of the Ebru she did when she felt stressed. Ebru is an Islamic art, a very meticulous form of calligraphy. Intertwining lines. She held the camera out to me, and I could see a sliver of her forearm; it occurred to me I had no idea what her hair looked like, and yet I cared about her, in some real way. Our wrists were so close that a simple twitch - a flutter of my nervous system, or hers - would have brought them together. But we didn’t touch. We couldn’t touch.
When it was time for her to leave, I asked if we could hug, or even shake hands.
“No,” she said, smiling sadly. “We can’t touch. Ever.”
We talk about justice and we talk about freedom and we objectify women and we go for runs in the open air and we let lovers leave knowing it will ruin us and we create stories to help us get over those lovers and we build walls and we paint over those walls to make them beautiful. And it all means different things to different people. Freedom for one person is oppression to another. Terrorists in one story, told by one narrator, are freedom fighters in the same story, told by a different narrator.
After our meeting with the priest, we drive into the hills of Palestine. The top of one of these hills has been blasted away, and on this flat ridge, a city is being built. We approach its entrance, and a beautiful, young, uncovered woman - gorgeous face (straight dark hair, square jaw, dark eyes), great ass, but no chest - gets on the bus. My father, the seminarian, elbows me in the ribs:
“Check out the babe-age.”
Behind me, the former tobacco exec swoons.
“What I wouldn’t give to be your age again,” he whispers in my ear.
The woman is an engineer. She drives us through the construction site, pointing out the different neighborhoods. She shows us the foundation of the community’s mosque, the base stone for its Greek Orthodox church, the space where its football field will be.
“This is Palestine’s first city built from scratch,” she tells us. “30,000 people will live here when it’s done. It will be a totally secular, open community. People will be free to live as they want. There will be a shopping mall, an entertainment center, and places for all faiths to worship.”
The bus, full of ministers and rabbis, oohs and aahs. Heavy construction equipment steamrolls past us, Palestinian flags hanging from their windows.
We ascend to the site’s headquarters, built on top of the hill, overlooking not just the whole site, but much of Israel, too. From its balcony, the hills of Judea are visible, all the way to the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv, the Mediterranean beyond. On both flanking hills are Israeli settlements, statements - just as this city will be a different statement - of Israeli indifference to the Palestinian’s boundaries and narrative, violent incursions into the story.
Up here, the site’s developer meets us. He’s a Palestinian man, lean and torsional, who wears western clothes and speaks with a slow, refined lilt to his English. His answers to our questions are thoughtful, composed, careful. He is a consummate businessman. It’s how, I suspect, he convinced the Qatari government to give him 500 million dollars to begin this project.
When my father asks him about his own personal faith, he demurs. Instead, he cites his history in the Philadelphia area - his wife is from West Chester; his daughter did her study abroad at a Quaker school in the Philly burbs - before talking about how this city will be completely secular.
“When designing this, we weren’t worried about the presence of the majority - which is, obviously, Muslim. Any settlement in this country will have Muslims. It’s a given. What we worried about was the presence, and acceptance, of minorities. It’s why the first stone we laid was the corner stone for this city’s church. To send a message.”
Later, when asked about the Israeli government, he is candid, but measured.
“Let me be clear: occupation is evil. There’s no other word for it. It is evil. But that’s a systemic evil, not a personal evil. And many of my partners are Israeli. Systemic violence does not mean that individuals, living within those systems, can’t find ways to pursue mutual goals of peace and prosperity. Many Israeli architects have helped me with this project, even as the government has tried to thwart us at every turn. You see that settlement over there?”
He pointed out the window, across the valley.
“That’s an Israeli settlement for 1200 people. And they have running water. Right now, we have no water. We’ve been requesting water for 2 years, and they still haven’t cleared our request. All we have to do is build a pipe between our settlement and theirs, and we’ll have enough water for people to start living here. For now, we have to truck in water every morning, and it’s barely enough for us to function. And that’s another thing. Our road? It’s 7 meters wide. Barely wide enough for two normal sized cars. It took me a year of fighting and begging to get that road built - and it’s still illegal! They gave me permission to build a 4 meter wide road for a construction site building homes for 30,000 people. So I made it 7 meters and pray every day they won’t shut this down. All it would take is two rogue soldiers, and this entire project - 500 million dollars, 30,000 people - would literally come crashing down. All because of 3 meters of concrete. But that’s a risk I have to take.”
He leans forward in his chair, smiles at another one of the beautiful - uncovered - women who works at the site.
“Look, I don’t want to focus on the negative. Too often, people in this country focus on the negative. There is negativity everywhere in the world. What are you going to do with that negativity? How are you going to turn it into a positive? I say, we need to shut up and build. So that’s what we do here. We work harder. And that’s a choice we make. Whatever they choose to do, we cannot control.”
After the discussion, we’re shown a promotional video - in 3-D, no less - highlighting what life in the community will be like. It’s six minutes long. By my count, within the entire six minutes, there are exactly three women wearing headscarves. There are at least three dozen who are uncovered, walking around the hypothetical city in sun dresses and yoga pants, as if they were on the other side of the boundary-line. This is a narrative tool, of course - to frame this story within a more familiar context for us. The people living here, it says, will be like you. Middle class and aspirational. They will value personal liberties and gender equality. They will not be dogmatic. Religion will be a portion of their identity, but not the entirety. These will be people that you can relate to, who will not force you to question your preconceptions. They will reinforce your personal history.
~
It’s about the sacredness of the body - faith, that is. Headscarves, baptisms. Water and flesh and blood. It’s about the sacredness of the body. What my Muslim friends decry most about Western culture is that the body has been desacralized. Alcohol and cigarettes devour it from without; casual sexual degrades it from within.
“Think,” my boss always tells me, “about your body. What control do you have over it? Can you command your heart to beat or to stop? Can you command your stomach to devour food?” He pauses for effect. “This is a gift, and it’s our job to treat that gift with respect.”
Hunter S. Thompson famously said, “I don’t want to be the prettiest corpse in the graveyard. I want to roll into the grave sideways, liver ravaged, heart exploded.”
How do we define what is sacred? How do we celebrate what is sacred? Is it through covering it, protecting it, exposing it only to those closest to you - the few chosen by God? Or is it to use up the grace we’ve been given? To pay homage to our gift through the full range of sensory experiences? To fuck and to drink and to eat with abandon? To run in the wind, to jump from a high bridge into a cold lake?
Nature, we’re constantly reminded, takes us apart, piece by piece, without any help from us. Nothing we do will stop that.
I suppose it comes down to a question of faith. Is there another life, one where we can utilize our bodies better? Or is this the only body? The answer matters. It dictates how we live. I’ve spent twenty-eight years shouting the question into the void. And the only answer I’ve gotten is silence.
~
The answer matters because it isn’t just about how we relate to our own bodies; it’s how we relate to other bodies, too. How do we define justice when it comes to a body? Is it building a wall that children must play in the shadow of - a wall to preserve the state‘s body? Is it covering one’s head, one’s body, so as to stay whole in a world that insists on breaking you into separate pieces? Is it the freedom to choose what we consider sacred and how we worship that sacredness?
Is it just that when I see a woman, I break her into parts? Is it just that two friends cannot even shake hands when one of them is leaving? And who is making the judgment - your God, my God, or no God?
~
The next day, our guide takes us out of Jerusalem, on the road that falls from the old city to the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth. The fecund hills of Jerusalem give way to the barren, chalky mountains of the Judean desert. The dried wadis are populated by shanties and Bedouin shacks. Homes of brick, cement, and sheet metal. Impermanent settlements, donkeys tied to old tires, herds of camels roaming.
Children run barefoot between the huts. A tractor trundles behind them, belching black diesel smoke into the sky. In front of one hut, an old woman sits in front of an oil drum fire. There are ways of life in this world that, no matter how hard I try, I cannot imagine. People survive lifetimes in places I could not imagine surviving an hour.
We head for Mosada, Herod’s fortress atop a monolith of stone. The Dead Sea curls beneath us, a lapis tapestry gouged from the desert, the high rugged plateaus of red, brown, and beige. This, I think, is the land of Prophets - monumental, immense, elemental.
“This reminds me of New Mexico,” says the minister who fought seven years to bury his parents. “I was there many years ago, staying at a monastery. It was me and five monks in the middle of the desert. The monastery was cut from the rock at the bottom of a canyon, and I remember at night you could stand outside, and the stars were unlike anything I’d ever seen. The canyon walls provided a frame for them.”
He smiles to himself. He has a soft, quiet face - observant eyes the color of slate, and a timid demeanor that, I suspect, serves him well as a minister. He’s the kind of man you feel safe talking to.
“Our neighbor - you won’t believe this - was Georgia O’Keefe. The artist. And she gave us an old transistor radio. It was the only connection to the world we had. We spent most of our days in silence and prayer, anyway. Surrounded by rock and stone. But once a week, we’d turn on the radio for news of the outside world. One Sunday - and this is really going to date me, here - we turned it on and listened to Nixon resign. It was such a strange moment. There was the President, his voice crackly with static, resigning, and it had absolutely no effect on us whatsoever. We were totally removed from that world at the time. We just turned off the radio and went back to prayer.”
He looks out the window - impenetrable cliffs to our right, their faces gouged by wind and water, the Dead Sea opalescent to our left. “It makes you understand certain things, doesn’t it? Being here. Seeing this landscape.”
It does. We pass an oases, a small cluster of palm fronds. And at its heart, I know: water. To discover water in such a place would seem a miracle, an act of divinity. Water is no longer sacred to most of us. You turn on the faucet, and there it is. You go to the corner store and buy a bottle. But being here, you understand its power. Through absence, there is presence.
“This is why we fast,” my boss told me last Ramadan. “You see this date? You can’t touch it. All day. It’s right there, but I can’t touch it. And I want to so badly. We remember the sacredness of things through deprivation.”
Light through darkness. Love through loss. Silence through sound. Nudity through covering. Abundance through penury. Grace through evil.
One of my major issues with faith has always been this - the question of evil contrasted with grace. How do we deal with evil? Some of us build walls, or simply look away. Some of us tell ancient stories and put our faith in the next life - we accept children being murdered in Syria because it means they’re now on the plains of paradise.
But isn’t that too easy? It’s too easy to say that God gave humans free will, and thus we’re evil. It’s too easy to say that our suffering will be rewarded in a future life. We tell stories that make evil palatable, that allow us to sit on our air conditioned buses drinking bottled water while children are gassed in their bedrooms.
It’s much harder, I think, to be a non-believer, or a doubter, than it is to be a believer. Because then you’re forced to confront evil for what it is - a terminus, an omnipresent force that lurks behind every corner, in every dark space. How do we handle evil if we’re not sure that God exists? If we’re not sure that there’s balance to these things, that one life’s suffering is repaid tenfold in the next life?
These aren’t new question, but we’re so busy that we often forget to ask them.
We take a cable car to the top of Mosada, our bodies crammed against other bodies, ascending, held aloft by a tightly wound core of wire.
Once atop the windswept plateau, our guide tells us the history of the place. A Jewish garrison had retreated here to escape the Romans, who waged a siege against the fortress. Slowly, their earthen ramp moved closer to the top, and the settler’s water and food dwindled. Faced with slavery or death, the soldiers voted for death.
“For many years,” our guide says, “the Israeli army held its swearing in ceremony here. This was viewed as sacred ground - where Jews fought against tyranny.” He smiles. “Whenever I bring Jewish teenagers here, and hear them talking about the bravery of that garrison, I ask them: how many of you are descendants of the Masadans? Hm? How many?
“It’s strange that we’re so quick to call those who choose death over suffering brave. And it’s illuminating, I think, to the Jewish narrative. For millennia, enough of us have chosen life, even lives of suffering, over death, and thus we have survived. This is our story. Choosing life and hope over evil, even knowing that the hope we’re choosing is not hope for ourselves. It might not even be hope for our children, or our children’s children. It’s hope that someday, some generation in the future will be free, will return to their home. But for that hope to become a reality, we must survive. We must endure evil. We must endure slavery. And that’s what all this is about. It’s about all those generations that endured slavery and suffering and death so that we could one day be here. That is the Jewish story.”
I think, once again, about R. Her grandparents were Czechoslovakian Jews during World War II. They’d lived in a small village, and when the Nazis arrived, they’d lined up all the Jews in town along the village’s river. One by one, an officer went down the line, putting a bullet in the back of each person’s head. A finger moves an inch, a shot rings out, and a body goes from existence to non-existence. Boom, splash. Boom, splash. Boom, splash.
The Jews on the furthest end of the river, then, had to watch the bodies of their cousins and neighbors as they were carried downstream. They watched as the water turned a deep, beautiful crimson.
Seven people before R’s grandparents were shot, something happened. A truck pulled up, and someone said something to the officer. He motioned, and the rest of the Jews were loaded onto cattle cars, shipped off to suffer, to be slaves. But they survived. And because of that, I sat with their granddaughter one night on a statue atop Philadelphia. Because of that, their granddaughter is now going to be a doctor. The narrative continues.
This, I suppose, is how we grapple with evil. We tell stories and we have faith that the story does not end with us. We have faith that though our role in the story will end, will be snuffed out by evil or by nature, that our sentence is not the end of the book.
My father approaches me while I stand at the edge of the fortress, looking out over the stone and the sea, the ancient ramp the Romans built. He puts his arm around my shoulders.
“Life’s pretty good, huh?” he says.
Sometimes, indeed it is.
~
Being here, I’ve started to understand some other things more clearly, too.
For starters, I’m beginning to understand the weight of history on the Jewish people. I’m beginning to understand the role their narrative of exile and return plays, and how tightly it binds them. It is the culmination of justice over evil, and as such, they are entitled to fight for that justice, no matter how extreme that fight must be. They are all prodigal sons returning home.
I’m also beginning to understand the Palestinian’s anger. We aren’t alive in history. We’re alive in the present. We aren’t living through two millenniums of injustice. We’re talking about families being separated by a wall. We’re talking about men who can’t find a livelihood. We’re talking about children who grow up with guns pointed at them.
~
That night, back in Jerusalem, my father and I go out drinking with three Presbyterian ministers. We find a café near our hotel, inside the old city train station. It’s a simple space, a bar and a few tables. The bartender is a lovely Israeli woman, short with curly hair and a nose ring. I try not to think it, but I can’t help it: beautiful face, great ass, decent chest.
“Hey,” one of the ministers says, nudging me, “check over your left shoulder.”
I turn, and the bartender’s bending over to clean a table.
She’s new at the job. I teach her how to make a few drinks, going over to the bar with her, leaning over and helping her fix a Manhattan.
Back at the table, the conversation drifts between church politics, our meeting with the business developer, and our personal stories. One of them - an attractive, round man with blonde hair - spent years working for big tobacco. He tells us this after many drinks, the way one might confess some major sin. He regales us with stories about governors and corporate execs cavorting on yachts, and then the same politicians teaching classes on business ethics at Yale.
Another one of the ministers was a campaign manager in Philadelphia. He’s bald, with a beard, a gregarious, sarcastic laugh.
“I’ve seen the people running this city. They’re bastards, all of them. But it’s addictive, the campaign process. Your whole identity gets wrapped up in it. And when you win? There’s nothing like it. But I had to get out. I had to feel like I was doing something better.”
We argue about the role of faith in the peacemaking process - here, in Syria, everywhere.
My father argues for faith as a catalyst for peace.
“Think about Gandhi. Think about King. Think about Mandela. Every major instance of peace from this last century is under girded by personal faith.”
“Personal being the key word,” the former campaign manager says. “Look at every major act of violence, and a lot of them are also under girded by faith. The problem is whenever you get faith, you’re going to get enough people who turn dogmatic. And when that happens, faith becomes exclusive. Once faith becomes exclusive - and it’s impossible for dogmatic faith to not be exclusive - violence is inevitable. Whether that be overt violence of subtle violence, does it matter? It’s still violence.”
As we’re arguing, a song comes over the bar’s speakers. I recognize the opening synthesizers - an ethereal, primordial sonar step out of silence.
Music and scent are the wormholes that plunge us into memory, and this plunges me to a highway cutting through the New Jersey pine barrens, two winters ago. A low, grey northeastern afternoon. L was leaving for Spain in two days. We were taking a trip to the Jersey shore, to spend a night wandering the empty boardwalk of her childhood, to spend the night making love in a cheap ocean-side motel. The sacred ground of summer transfigured through the emptiness of winter.
She made a CD for the occasion, and this was the first song on it: The Shins, “Sleeping Lessons.”
“Shh,” she said, as she put it on, rolling the windows down, letting the cold air in.
The synths build, give way to a triumphant guitar. We hurtled toward the edge of our continent, together, in love, about to part. We spent the day walking the boards, got dinner at a local diner, made love in the shower.
That night, as we were sleeping, we were both woken up by a door slamming. In the next room, we heard shouting. I remember opening my eyes, looking beside me, and seeing L’s eyes turn white as she opened them in the dark.
In the next room, a young man ranted and raved while a woman protested. He threatened to kill her. He threw something - the remote, a book, her - against the wall and she shrieked. He berated her, and then something else collided with the wall, and then he burst into sobs.
“You cunt, you fucking cunt. You don’t love me. I hate you, I hate you so much,” he wailed.
What I remember is the silence between his sobs. Both L and I were holding our breath - we were holding each other, too - both of us petrified by the moment. I remember my mind whirring with the possibilities - Was he hitting her? Should we call the cops? If we called the cops, would he just hit her more when they left? Was he the kind of man who would come over here and kick my ass if I called the cops? Does he have a gun? What I felt, though, was not a sense of moral outrage. What I felt was an almost childhood sense of self preservation and fear. Stay quiet. Hold your breath. Don’t let him know you’re here.
She and I both did, I believe, though I don’t know what exactly she felt because after that night, we never spoke of it again.
I think most of us spend at least part of our lives wondering how we will react when faced with moments that demand moral courage. Being in Israel, of course - listening to the Jewish story - I’ve thought a lot about it. How could I not? In many ways, this place is a direct result of one of the greatest evils in human history.
I’ve often wondered about Germany during the war. My narrative begins there - my Lutheran ancestors from Prussia who migrated, many decades ago, to Wisconsin. But it seems likely distant relatives of mine were probably in Germany during the Holocaust. How did they respond? How would I have responded? Would I have sacrificed my own life to fight injustice? Or would I have stayed silent - choosing to find hope in survival and perseverance; hope in the longer narrative?
Many of us like to think that we build up reserves of moral fortitude over the years, which we will be called on to use a few times. We believe that life is little more than preparation for these tests, the moments when we are called to stand up for our ideals and principles, or when we choose to stay silent. What happens when we stay silent? When we fail? When we hold our breath, and hold our lover, silent in the next room, her heart beating with such strength you can feel it through her chest?
What if we fail when confronted with evil?
How do we absolve ourselves? Do we retreat to the jungle and re-fight the battle endlessly? Do we write novels? Do we turn to faith? Do we forgive ourselves?
The conversation has gone on without me, the question of faith’s role in perpetuating, or solving, violence still, shockingly, unanswered.
~
It’s my last day here. The morning begins with a trip to the church of the holy sepulcher. It’s believed, by some, to be the place where Christ was crucified and then buried. Controlled by five different denominations, it feels like something a collage. The place where the crucifixion supposedly took place - Golgotha - is controlled by the Armenians. It’s a smorgasbord of Slavic-faced idols, garish gold candelabras, and incense. The chamber directly next to it is Catholic. Void of gold and candelabras, its mosaics depict the crucifixion in gory detail - the desecration of the sacred body.
The sanctuary is Greek orthodox, and the chamber above the tomb feels Roman - it resembles the Pantheon in Rome. The Ethiopians control a small chapel at the back of the church; an ancient looking Ethiopian bishop sleeps in there, alone, beneath a faded fresco of Christ on the cross.
There are antechambers and tombs cut from the various cliffs the church has been carved from. One of these antechambers descends deep into the earth, its walls desecrated by graffiti from the Crusaders.
Walking into the main sanctuary, a pigeon alights above me, soaring through the stone arch, caught briefly in the sun.
Spaces like this so often leave me cold. And then I feel like somehow I’ve missed something; like there’s an emptiness at my heart where there‘s supposed to be … something. Old Greek women - who, I imagine, have saved money their whole life to come here - walk in the front doors and collapse in sobs on the slab where Christ’s body was supposedly washed, groping for something, anything, to grab on the slab, their bodies shaking with emotion. Old men emerge from the sepulcher, their faces red with tears.
I sit beneath the Greek dome - Christ flanked by the apostles, pigeons swarming in the columns of sun - and watch these pilgrims, wondering why it is that my narrative has never led me to pursue something like this. Is that really all they’re feeling? The culmination of a story, no different from the end of a novel? Because they feel something so deeply, just as my boss told me he felt something at Mecca, just as the Hassidic Jews 500 meters from here feel when they touch the Western Wall, just as Hindus feel when they bathe in the Ganges, or Tibetans feel when they reach Lhasa. We’ve filled this world with sacred spaces. Is it really just the power of a story that moves people so deeply? The weight of a historical narrative - of exile and the dream of return; of generations surviving so that justice might be realized? What gives people such certainty that their narrative is the right one? And why is that certainty so absent within me?
If I’m being honest, the only time I’ve felt anything as strongly as what these pilgrims feel is when love ends. Not in the midst of love - which is wonderful, too, but which is somehow restrained, somehow tenuous, a story midstream instead of at the end - but when it fails. When I found out, all those years ago, that A was with another man. When L called me in Greece and told me she loved someone else. Or all those years ago, in Michigan, when I watched my parents fight, their marriage in the balance. Or those family meals when my brother would implode, falling into spasms of pity and anger. The only time I’ve ever felt that strongly were in moments of failure, moments of loss. Only in those moments have I been able to lose the language of my story, to feel like I was no longer narrating something - like I’d fallen into a larger stream of language, lost beneath the weight of a bigger power. In some perverse way, the only time I haven’t felt like an exile in this world is when everything feels like it has been taken.
And it makes me wonder if I’ve done something wrong. Why, during all those years with L, did I never feel that kind of joy? Why, when any number of beautiful, brilliant women, have been in my bed - naked, generous - have I felt not elation but sorrow? Loneliness. Like my story was in a language they didn’t know and all I wanted was for it to make sense to them. Like their story was outside mine.
And maybe this is the power of faith. It’s a shared language. It’s a country, not of chance, but of choice.
Or maybe I’ve just fucked up. Maybe my body is no longer sacred. Maybe through abundance and consumption, I’ve forgotten what a gift another body is.
But I don’t think I believe this. Because these things - sex, violence, narratives, even faith - these things are about power. They are about who tells the story. Who uses their body for what and who gets access to it. They are about control. They are about who gets to build the wall and who lives in its shadow. Who gets to walk freely in the wind and who has to wonder what that feels like.
Justice, freedom - these are about the acquiescence of power and narrative. To see clearly is to be free of the biases of history, the prejudices of language that defines someone as an ’other.’ Love is about the acquiescence of power. These things are about vulnerability and about trust. And as long as there is a question of power, it’s impossible for there to be trust. When you have people competing over a narrative; when you have people competing over moral rectitude; when you have people competing over women’s bodies - these things make justice impossible. And though faith so often provides that trust and vulnerability at the personal level - look at those women on that stone; just look at them! - it also fails on a bigger level. Because one definition of justice is different from another definition of justice. And they are irreconcilable. When justice is elevated to the level of narrative, it makes peace impossible.
Maybe the best we can hope for is the freedom to choose - how to use our bodies, how to tell our stories, what places are sacred to us. To choose outside the constraints of larger narratives. To choose without fear of isolation or violence. But maybe that’s the American in me, the mythmaker of the open road and the frontier - the lost son who finds the dream of return more powerful than the actual return. I just don’t know. I don’t know a fucking thing. None of us do. What gets us into trouble is when we’re certain we do.
~
That’s not true, either; there are some things I know.
I know that I’ve been shown kindness by Jews, Christians, Muslims, and atheists. I know good people fighting for their ideas of justice. I don’t always agree with those definitions, just as they don’t agree with what I find sacred. But I suppose that kindness is a good place to start - the breaking of bread, the sharing of water, the coming together to celebrate having a body.
And the telling of stories, too; learning the different languages of other narratives, foreign as they may be; finding those moments where, against all odds, they do converge. Maybe we go from there.
~
Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him. But John forbade him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness. Then he suffered him. And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him…
Once more, we drive away from Jerusalem, sliding towards the Dead Sea. But instead of turning right, we turn left, toward the River Jordan. We descend onto a long plain. These are the occupied territories - the land of the Prophets, fought over and parceled out and covered in blood.
On our right, as we move closer to the water, the border fence becomes visible. Its top is covered in barbed wire. Every one hundred meters, there is a sign:
Beware: Land Mines. Crossing this fence means DEATH.
We are surrounded by sand and landmines.
We stop at a checkpoint, the ruins of monasteries flanking both sides of the watch tower. The guards take one look at us - seventeen white Americans - and wave us through. This mobility is a part of my narrative, of course. I am white and I am male; I can always move. And it gives me the freedom to talk about justice and faith and love, because I’m not trapped looking down the barrel of a gun; because I can turn on a faucet and water comes out. Because I can run down a hill in a foreign country on a sunny morning and feel the wind in my hair.
Beyond the checkpoint, we park. We’re in an open gravel lot, surrounded by barb wire. But in front of us, instead of desert, instead of land mines, there is water. There are trees, small little willows that rustle in the wind.
We descend a small wooden stair, and suddenly we’re in an oasis. The River Jordan is in front of us; a languorous, muddy stream, no more than ten meters wide. About the size of the developer’s illegal road. It’s surrounded, on both banks, by high grass and thin willows and poplars. The smell is that universal smell of water and foliage - the wet, fecund smell of life.
Very quickly I’m reminded of quite a few things. I’m walking barefoot up a creek with my grandfather; it’s on the farm where he grew up in Northern Wisconsin. Sun and shadows dance on the shallow water. I’m lying amongst falling cherry and apricot blossoms with H. I’m in a canoe with my father and my brother and we’re fishing. I’m walking through the Philadelphia suburbs with L on the 4th July, her pants rolled up to her knees.
That, you see, is my narrative. But it’s wrapped up within larger narratives. With Prussian Lutherans who got on a boat and came to Wisconsin and bought a farm along a creek. With a Jewish woman whose grandparents nearly died in a river a thousand miles from year. With a father who baptized his grandson.
I don’t know if Jesus was baptized here, or even if Jesus - or God - is real. But I know that the people who started my story do. And thus, it’s a part of my story, too - the living waters of my personal history.
It’s remarkable to feel convergence, isn’t it? To feel like life has transpired just to bring you to a certain point. It’s why love is so powerful - it feels like every sentence in our narrative has built to that encounter. And being here, what I feel is something like that - many streams becoming, momentarily, one.
And this is such a rare thing. More often than not, narratives don’t converge. Being here these last days, I have to wonder how we balance our own narrative with those of others. How do we pursue our own definitions of grace and justice without hurting others? Is it even possible? Long term, can we hope for anything more than building walls and parting ways - than failure and self preservation? Is our only hope in an uncertain coda - that the story continues beyond the period on our sentence? Is our job simply to move the story a little bit closer to that better ending?
My father and I take off our shoes and socks. We step into the water - the cold, murky water of the River Jordan. Dad laughs with disbelief. Above us - and I swear I’m not making this up - a dove flutters from the willows on the far bank and soars away, over the land mines and barbed wire.
I reach down, touch the water, bring it to my forehead. Maybe I forget what a miracle life sometimes is: water in the desert; my father and I, 5000 miles from home, two Midwestern boys baptized in the River Jordan. Maybe all we have is a body, nothing more. But there are also living waters. Their flow precedes us, and long after our sacred bodies have gone to dust, they will still tell their stories.
But there’s life in the old city, yet. Not in the Jewish quarter, which feels like a new strip mall in Brooklyn, full of Kosher organic food shops, soft sandstone shopping centers where girls in white and blue skirts and knee high stockings smoke indifferently beneath plane trees. Not in the Armenian quarter, which has been lost beneath the piles of tourist junk. And certainly not the Christian quarter, its lone residents the bishops and patriarchs in their uniforms, stone faced men who fight esoteric battles over the administrative role their sect should play in this divided city.
For life in the old city, head to the Muslim quarter, where women in headscarves haggle over bruised fruit and soft dates, where old men push carts loaded high with pastries, an Arab girl dressed in rags weaves between the delivery boys who balance stacks of bread loaves on their heads, a teenager in hijab smiles furtively at me, an old woman sits on the ground with a mountain of herbs between her legs.
And everywhere, soldiers. Young boys standing on corners with assault weapons, fingers always on the trigger.
On my flight in, I sat beside a young Palestinian man who was studying in London. He’d grown up on these streets.
“You know,” he told me, “you don’t realize how fucked up it is when you’re here. It’s a narrative you grow up with; it’s always there. Being occupied, being watched. You just assume it’s normal. Then you leave, and you realize it’s not normal. You realize that there are places in the world where you can walk the streets without guns being pointed at you, without being stopped and asked to show identification. I guess it had never occurred to me how much this surveillance shaped me until I got away from it. I can understand why some people react so violently to it. It’s not freedom, it’s not justice. But it’s our normal.”
Looking into their faces, these soldier are kids. Most of them have acne. Barely older than I was when I snuck into the woods, with liquor stolen from my parents, to kiss girls with braces. They’re fucking kids.
~
One of the things I’ve learned to love about Islam is the sense of community it fosters and encourages. American Christianity, especially in the last fifty years, has become less community based. It’s very much about the idea of personal faith. This, I think, is a direct result of the American ethos of individualism, of course. We like to think of ourselves as explored and individuals, men and women of possibility, lone narrators with the opportunity to shape our own story.
This is partly because of our isolation. Coming to America meant breaking with the old lands, the old stories. It meant a blank slate - a new land and a new people to fill with any identity we wanted. This very possibility is why we still travel; it’s why after L left me, I moved to Istanbul. I could be re-born. And the American myth is nothing less than a myth of communal re-birth.
It makes sense, then, that our practice of faith is more fractured. The places where it is still relatively community based - the south, the upper Midwest - are the places where homogenous communities survive, where the populace shares a sense of identity and narrative. The diversity of American communities, the commoditization of our lives, the material opportunities that tempt us, have all combined to make our practice of faith less communal and more lonely.
But Islam, for many reasons, is still a religion of communities. Not all of these are reasons I’m comfortable with. For instance, the endurance of patriarchal societies within a lot of Islamic communities has a lot to do with this; as does the homogeneity of many Islamic communities (for an example, see the exclusion of non-Muslims from Friday prayers on the Temple mount, or examine Turkey’s half century of ethnic cleansing - gone are the Jews, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Armenians, etcetera.)
Whatever the reasons, the generosity of Turks and Istanbulus has moved me, deeply. They’ve invited me into their homes. They’ve given me clothes. They’ve leant me money. The patriarchal desire to look out for the flock can be a very beautiful thing. A faith’s commandment to treat others with kindness is wonderful.
I witness this same generosity within the Muslim quarter …A man selling carpets invites me in for tea. We sit, and speak in broken English. He doesn’t try to sell me anything. A man selling pastries takes me beneath his arm, and gives me a hug before giving me a free fig-pastry.
Not everyone is so generous, of course. Three young boys - maybe seven or eight years old - offer to show me how to get onto the city walls.
“We show you secret gate,” they chatter excitedly.
“Oh yeah?”
“Very special, very secret. Only for our friends.”
I look them over, their nappy hair matted to their foreheads, their second or third-hand clothes smudged with dirt.
“How much?” I ask.
The one in the middle - the ring leader - brings his hand to his heart, as if I’ve just mortally wounded him. Where do kids learn these performances? There’s an emotional intelligence to children that can’t possibly be transmuted; it’s something innate in us, the ability to manipulate and lie. I remember how adeptly my brother and I would torment our sister when we were kids. It’s possible we’re all born with this survival instinct, the desire to look out only for ourselves. And maybe adulthood is nothing more than learning to suppress it, to supersede it, to care for others instead. Maybe we are never at our purest as when we are self-interested children. I wonder what this says about us as a species; that when pressed, most of us revert to this purity: me, me, me.
“No price! You, me: friends,” he says, emphatically patting his chest, taking my wrist in his hand. I calculate which pocket holds my 20 shekel note and which holds my 100 shekel note, then accept his offer.
The three of them lead me through a series of winding alleyways, whispering to each other in Arabic, looking back, whispering some more, giggling. One of their friends calls down to me from his roof:
“Thief! He wants your money.”
My guide shouts to him in Arabic, then shrugs his shoulders to me: “He crazy talk!”
Sure enough, they lead me through a trash strewn courtyard to a rusted, spiral staircase and a broken gate, which all four of us shimmy through. And suddenly we’re atop the city, looking down on the terraced homes of the Muslim quarter, some of them gutted, roofs collapsed; some of them augmented by satellite dishes and laundry. In the distance, the dome of the rock reflects late afternoon sunshine.
“How much?” I ask again.
This time, a smirk.
“Ticket is 50 shekel.”
“50! All I’ve got is 20.”
“No, no, no. Ticket is 50 shekel. Special gate, special price!”
I hand him the 20 and he takes my wrist again.
“30 shekel. 10 for each.”
“I don’t have 30 shekel. I have 20.”
“Well, maybe we see what police say…”
I laugh. “OK. Let’s do that.”
They descend the stairs, cursing me in Arabic.
I am alone up here, the holy city at my feet. I remember a night, many springs ago, in Philadelphia. I picked up R and we drove to the art museum, climbing to the base of a statue of George Washington.
“Philadelphia,” she said, gesturing dramatically, “is at our feet.”
I’d been in love with R for years then; or, I’d thought I was in love with R. I guess I didn’t have any idea what love was then - that to love someone, truly, is to finally shed that childhood self interest. I hadn’t yet done that. R, in so many ways, was self interest - the yearning for completeness that we all feel as we get older, that we’re often led to believe is the desire for love, for our other half.
But that night in Philadelphia? I do believe that was love, or something intimating it‘s larger shape. Or as close to love as we can get. We sat in the cold, watching our breath disappear into the night, looking down the parkway to the skyscrapers of Center City. Philadelphia seemed so big then, to a Midwestern kid. Now, after Istanbul, it seems so minor.
For weeks afterward, I could remember our whole conversation. It had seemed so important. It seemed, to me, that my whole life had been building up to that moment - to being with this woman on this night on this statue, Philadelphia at our feet. Now, I remember so little of what we said. I remember the way the wind took her hair - jet black, very straight - and threw it across the whiteness of her cheeks, and how she spent all night battling to keep it out of her eyes. I remember her advice about my writing:
“You can’t be Updike, or Kundera, or Garcia Marquez. You can only be you. You can only tell your stories in the way you tell them. So stop trying to be them. Just write.”
I smiled at that. She wanted to be a doctor then; now she’s in her final year of Med school and I know almost nothing of her life. In that moment, I’d imagined a life together in Philadelphia - a row home in Queen’s Village, Sunday brunch at Morning Glory diner, late night walks through Rittenhouse, two kids (we’d raise them Jewish; I’d convert). I wonder now how close or far I might have been from that life; if, had I kissed her then, I might be sitting in my study in South Philadelphia right now, wondering if I would ever write a novel, if I would ever see Jerusalem by the light of the setting sun?
“You’ll find love again,” she told me near the end of the night. “I don’t doubt that you’ll find love again.”
It’s strange to me how our definition of love changes with time. And how the old definition lingers and lingers - a kind of mould that traps you, like those sailors trapped on their big ships - until you suddenly break free of it, come ashore in a new country, ready to learn a new language. To redefine the boundaries.
What I’m saying is I have expectations and I can’t quite shake those expectations. For how love is supposed to look. For how home is supposed to feel. And we all have these expectations, I think, and it’s very hard to let go of them, or to recalibrate them. It’s difficult work.
~
As the day fades, a flock of pigeons wheels in unison across from the Dome of the Rock. Each time they turn, their bellies catch the sun and flicker - suddenly, luminously - white. They soar like this, together, for minutes on end, like some organism contracting and exploding in the florid light of sundown.
I walk until I come to a football pitch nestled right beneath the wall, whose long shadow falls across most of the field. Boys are down there, calling to one another, playing in the last light. I watch for a while, appreciating this simplicity: boys in t-shirts, a game. There are no soldiers with guns. There is no border fence demarcating their world from another world. There are universal boundaries here: two goals, an end line.
“Abbi, what’s your name?” one of them calls up to me.
“Justin. What’s yours?”
“Mohammad.”
“That’s a good name.”
“So is Justin. Where are you from?”
“America.”
A long, low whistle from the boys, then laughter, then questions.
“Do you play football?”
“Sometimes. But I’m not very good.”
It’s beautiful to watch them down there, half in sun, half in shadow. But then I ask what it does to kids, growing up in the shadow of these walls, with boys not much older than them carrying guns in their markets, stopping them with impunity and, if they happen to be in the wrong place, taking them back to the right place. They learn early, the right and wrong places. Their learn their boundaries. They learn early that the guns are normal.
I think back to my friend from the flight: “This is what we grow up with, thinking it’s how everyone grows up. That you just avoid your neighbors and that armed men are going to patrol your street.”
Walking further, I stop above the rubble of a ruined home. Stones, earth, and garbage. At its heart is a small cherry tree, which is already blossoming. Pale pink. It reminds me of H, who once called this city home, many years ago now. There was a courtyard in our hometown outside of Philadelphia, and for a week every spring, it’s a forest of color - cherry trees and apricots and magnolias, all unfurled. And one day, me and H went there and lay on the cool grass and closed our eyes and listened to the wind pluck the flowers from the trees, one by one, and they rained down around us.
In my dreams, I’ve traveled half of Europe with H. And now I imagine exploring Jerusalem with her, too. Past the butchers and the bakers, through the cigarette haze, and the curtains of saffron and silk. The two of us walking aside each other, shoulder to shoulder, her bemused as I haggled with the boys over how much to pay them at the broken gate. When the path up here narrows, we would take turns leading. When she leads, I watch the wind take her hair, exposing slivers of her neck; when I lead, I glance back to make sure she’s still there.
We sit for a while and watch the day die. The mountains in the distance coming into focus. The deepening of color and lengthening of shadow.
I wonder if she’s seen this before, maybe alone – like I am now – or maybe with the boy in her class, the one she said reminded her of me. She was seventeen then, a kid. Living halfway around the world. I was twenty-four, also a kid. Writing shallow articles
about mediocre restaurants in the mediocre city that I tell everyone is my home, the city I love, the city I spent years imagining a life within.
I was twenty-four. Sitting in a cubicle in an office full of cubicles, two-thirds of them empty because print is a dying industry in America. A ghostly office of ghostly cubicles, full of spooked writers writing callow essays for a magazine that was 70% advertisements – for condos and clothes. My editor spoke like a valley girl but once pulled me into an empty elevator so we could be alone
“Get out of here while you’re young. This place will suck you in, and when you’re my age, you’re fucked. You realize your dreams are gone.”
The other editor, on the other side of my row of cubicles, had a full bar in his office, and on Fridays, he and the Valley Girl – we all thought they were fucking – would close his door and drink until the rest of us left.
I ran into him once, a year later, after I’d been unceremoniously shown the door. It was at a noodle house in Chinatown. I was with L then – we must have been in that period after Gettysburg and before Spain, that year when we both thought we were going to spend our lives together and when we would’ve eaten the other one for dinner, if possible. Anyway, I was there with L – she had her hair in pigtails – some late night after we’d been driving around and making out in graveyards and churches, and then my old editor came in, looking pallid but boisterous, a phalanx of trannies in tow. They sat a table behind me and L, and he and I pretended not to know each other.
That was also the year I imagined H and I got snowed in in Prague, and played the piano naked and ate out-of-season fruits flown in from Morocco for breakfast and romped through the empty, snowy plazas.
I wonder, now, how happy L and I really could’ve been if I was imagining myself in Prague with H; if once a week, I was driving to Wilmington for dinner and wine with C. I wonder if there’s something in me that’s incapable of letting go of the childhood solipsism, that desire to get everything I want. It scares me: as much as I loved L, we only worked because she was just as selfish as I was. Because both of us were unwilling to let go of that selfishness.
The day before H left for Jerusalem, I bought us a pack of cigarettes – menthol, like my brother smokes; this was also the year he was returned to us, the year his odyssey ended – and we sat on the swing set at her old elementary school and smoked them, one at a time, passing them between us, and talked about nothing much.
Six months later, in that same parking lot, I would kiss L for the first time; three years later, in that same parking lot, L would tell me she didn’t love me anymore.
I still haven’t been to Prague, but I spent a couple nights in bed with a woman from Prague, a lonely, beautiful woman with the most extraordinary lapis eyes I’ve ever seen. But I feel bad talking about her beauty. Because everyone does that. And what I loved about her, on those finite nights, was her intelligence, her resigned brilliance, her weary perseverance. Those things she’d buried beneath her beauty, or had let other people bury beneath her beauty. Now, when I think about Prague, I think about her. How she wanted her mother to see the beauty in how she played piano. How she planned to commit suicide by the age of thirty.
But I’m here in Jerusalem thinking about H. Wondering where she is, why so much of our relationship – if you can call it that – seems to be our shadows overlapping, or one of us stumbling upon the other’s trail, years later, in these far flung locales. And wondering why the only times our paths seem to cross we’re both such a mess.
I last saw her the October before L left me. H came over to my apartment, which is no longer my apartment, its rooms now the stage for someone else’s narrative, and we sat on the sun porch and she read me poems she’d written in German. She discovered the book L had given me for my birthday, read the inscription, smiled wryly:
“Sounds serious, kid.”
I knew she’d had some issues, though I didn’t know what. I knew she was on lithium, though I didn’t know what lithium did. I knew she didn’t want anyone to see her, but that she let me see her, and I’m still not sure why. I guess sometimes we need other people. I guess we need people in our lives who can see us at our worst and still love us.
And I guess I could say that’s what H has been. A shadow that I know will always be there, even if she’s never more than a shadow.
After she read her poems, I took her to a diner and we shared chicken fingers and gravy fries and she told me about a lover she’d driven away, and she told me about plenty of other lovers, and she leaned her head against the cold window but she always looked
right into my eyes.
“I’m glad I’m with you, kid,” she said.
Me, too, kid.
We shared a cigarette on the ride home, and then she bolted out of my car before I could come up with a justification for not kissing her – I was in love with L; what she (H) needed wasn’t a lover but a friend; that she was still too young – because I’ve spent half a decade coming up with excuses to not kiss H, choosing instead to imagine me into Jerusalem, or her into Istanbul, or both of us into Prague.
I’m not sure it’s healthy to live this way, in fantasy and dreams, with a woman I see maybe once every two years, when one of us is guaranteed to be in some state of emergency – despair or heartbreak.
But then, all of us do this, don’t we? I once heard a story about the Israeli general who let his position be overrun during the Yom Kippur War. He was relieved of his duty, his whole career gone to shame in one night. After the position was recovered by another general - he would become Prime Minister - the disgraced general went into exile, like his ancestors, retreating to the jungles of central Africa, pursuing diamonds and a fortune that would allow him to re-write the narrative of that battle, to vindicate himself. When he died, having burned through two separate fortunes, they found his room full of old battle maps from the Yom Kippur War. He spent the rest of his life re-fighting that battle.
To some extent, we all spend our lives in dreams and fantasies. We create whole lives with women passed on the street. We imagine showing up on the doorsteps of lovers who have spurned us, with published novels. We turn real events into fictional events; transpose real people, real love, into something not quite real. H and I never lay in that field of flowers together; I simply imagined we did for long enough that now the line between truth and imagination has blurred.
I guess I’m not sure it’s healthy to live any way. It’s a dangerous business. To love or to believe. To sacrifice your dreams for your family or to pursue your dreams at their expense. To sacrifice your conscience for money. Or to sacrifice your comfort for virtue. People get hurt. We get hurt. We wound those we love most and then never speak to them again. We chase shadows.
The pigeons flex and contract. Their bellies capture the sun for a moment. How do they move in unison like that?
~
When I saw my father for the first time after leaving home - in a cafeteria in Tirana, Albania - I didn’t cry. I’d imagined the meeting so many times in my head, cried so many times at its thought - that by the time it actually happened, I held myself together. Life so rarely matches the fantasy. But in moments, it does. And we spend our days searching for those moments.
This time, Dad and I reunite in a hotel room in Jerusalem. We laugh and hug one another. These reunions have become something of common place; the new order, the new boundaries of our relationship.
“Let’s get a beer,” he says.
~
The next morning, we tour the Temple Mount. It’s a clear day, flush with sun. Our guide is a South African Jew who studied literature under J.M. Coetzee at university - “an absolutely awful son of a bitch, but a fucking genius” - with a shaved head. We tour the base of the mount, its two thousand year old stones worn round, dormant wisteria seeping from its cracks, pigeons circling overhead, immune to the laws of religion - no Jews on the mount; no non-Muslims in Al-Aqsa mosque.
Our guide talks to us about exile and identity. What happens to a group when their whole identity has been informed by exile - by a desire for a homeland that has been taken away? What happens when, suddenly, that homeland is returned? What happens to the wander when he sets down roots? The dream of return, I’m reminded, is so often more powerful than the actual return. The dream brings us to tears, while the return leaves us confused, disoriented, uncertain of our place within a new order. There are no boundaries to dreams, no realities to contend with. The shadow girl remains perfect in her silhouette.
“My grandmother didn’t return, after 1948,” he tells us. “She spent her whole life dreaming of this place - her people’s homeland. And when the opportunity finally came to return, she couldn’t do it. ‘I’ve spent my whole life living as an exile. I wouldn’t know how to live any other way.’”
And yet, place does matter. Having that genesis to mythologize. We all want to be prodigal sons. Walking through the Old City, one of the ministers on the tour with us tells me the story of his parents. They’d died without leaving behind any wishes for their burial. The son was living in Philadelphia by then, but he’d grown up on a farmhouse in Central Ontario, Canada.
“For seven years, their ashes sat in a box in my bedroom closet. I thought of where I could scatter them, but I didn’t know of any place that mattered. Their parents were buried in the same cemetery, in Ontario, but the government had declared the cemetery historical and wasn’t accepting any new burials. Our church bought a massive plot at Laurel Hill cemetery, along the river in Philly - if you ever want to be buried with a view, let me know; I can get you in -” here I think of A, who’s married now, living in the Philly burbs. I remember walking with her through the mausoleums of Laurel Hill, beneath bright May sunshine - very much like this light, actually - her face flushed with color, her hair wild in the wind coming off the river, a hint of red in it. A, the only woman I’ve managed to lose with grace; who still won’t talk to me because my very presence threatens the stability of her new narrative, her quiet narrative. There’s rarely justice in how we treat one another, is there?
“Anyway, I didn’t want to bury them there. They had absolutely no attachment to Philadelphia. No one would come to see them. They’d be a forgotten grave. Maybe no one will come to see them anyway. But I wanted to at least give them a space that mattered, that meant something to their story.”
“What did you do?”
“I spent seven years gathering signatures. From distant cousins, people I hadn’t spoken to in decades, people I only knew as kids from those long ago summers on the farm, girls with ribbons in their hair that I chased through the barn. I had to get everyone in my family to sign a petition saying they wouldn’t seek to be buried in the cemetery if Mom and Dad were buried there. It took me years to find some of them. It was amazing to me - here I was using the internet, this thing I couldn’t have imagined as a boy on that farm - to find the people I’d grown up with, the foundation of my own family story. How incredible, right?”
“Right.”
“And then I had to prove that my grandparents were actually buried there. My grandfather’s grave was unmarked except for his last name and the name of his first wife, who’d died in childbirth. So I had to find the record of his burial, to prove he was buried there, too. Luckily, I was able to find the funeral records from 1965, when he died, which verified he was buried there. After all of that, the cemetery agreed to give me a waiver to bury mom and dad there. So this May, I’ll go up there with my wife and we’ll have a small service.”
“That’s beautiful. That must give you a real sense of closure.”
He shrugs. “What is closure, right? Life doesn’t work in neat thresholds. Especially with grief. But we tell stories that allow us to go on journeys, and those stories and journeys don’t end - they just lead into new stories, new journeys. And at some point we realize we’ve changed, that our grief has changed, become manageable. This is why stories are so important to us. They allow us to move, to keep moving. But it made me happy to get mom and dad a place. We all need a place, even if it‘s only a myth.”
~
We need stories. We need places. Through movement, we shape our identity - the myths of return and exile; the phantoms that haunt our dreams. In Istanbul, I dream of Philadelphia. But it is the Philadelphia of my adolescence - the ruins where we drank illicit booze and kissed young girls; the bedroom where I made love to L; the diner where I sat with H. That Philadelphia is nothing more than a myth, the force that has cast me out into the world in search of it once again. Will I find another home? Will I find love again? Will I learn to recalibrate my boundaries - to not search for Philadelphia in Istanbul; to not search for L in G? Or will my identity become one of being forever lost? Given the chance to return, will I choose exile? These are choices we make. To live within fact, or to live within fiction. The line that demarcates the two is never clear or neat; it’s smudged and worn by passage. It’s impossible know when we’ve crossed from one into the other. Just as it’s impossible to pinpoint the moment when love becomes love, or when love stops being love. One day, we’re in a bedroom in Philadelphia. Another day, years later, we’re in a crowd on its way to Friday prayer in the streets of Jerusalem. The line that separates them is difficult to delineate or to make sense of. Its meaning or importance is immense, but unclear.
~
The barrier that separates Israel from Palestine winds its way through Jerusalem like a dead snake - grey, insipid, the color of life blanched by death. On one side - the Israeli side - it is buffered by open space. The wall, here, is not an oppressive force. It is distant, made smaller by the open ground. But over there - across that open space - it is immediate. Its shadow falls onto homes. Its height blots out the horizon.
“When designing the wall, I had to compromise,” says the general who designed all 437 miles of this boundary. “We did not want to separate cousins from cousins, or a farmer from his land. But sometimes, in these things, you have no choice. If possible, I make a gate in each town so farmers can reach crops. But, terrorists exploit this gate. They sneak through. So, we must close those gates to keep out the terrorists.”
Within a narrative, language must be chosen carefully. Terrorists, freedom fighters. There’s a difference in the image that is shaped depending on what word you choose. A friend of mine, in Istanbul, works for the government-controlled newspaper. She’s commanded, by her superiors, to refer to protestors as ‘rioters.’ Language, you see, matters. If you call a woman a cunt - it’s just a word, right? how much power can it have? - it can undo years of sacrifice. One word can overwhelm a hundred acts of good will. It can undo years of love. One word can start a war, end a life. Language matters.
“This wall must be closer to their side so that we have time to catch terrorists who climb the wall. If the wall was close to our side, by the time they climbed the wall, they would already be in our homes, where they could blow us up. This wall is about safety. It does not keep out honest people. It is to keep away the terrorists.”
It’s possible, of course, that such a boundary - such a neat boundary drawn between reality and possibility - is the kind of thing that could cause a young man to desire to destroy that boundary, to demolish the neat line between the confines of his narrative and the future confines of his people‘s narrative.
We drive along the wall for a few miles. A soft rain falls. A snarl of traffic crawls toward the checkpoint into Palestine. Large black water heaters peek their heads over the immense, monolithic wall. Enormous red signs - in Arabic, English, and Hebrew - lay out the stakes:
Beyond this line you are entering the Palestinian territories. It is illegal for any
Israeli citizen to enter. Doing so endangers your life.
Before the checkpoint, our guide and the general get off the bus to catch a taxi.
“Let me remind you,” the General says, “that Palestinians are freely allowed to come and go into Israel. Is it a slight inconvenience? Sure. But they are free to come. Free to worship. But we are not allowed in Palestine. Is this freedom?”
After he’s gone, one of my father’s friends - a Presbyterian minister - turns to me:
“I call bullshit on 80% of what he said. Maybe 90%.”
~
No story is unbiased, of course. There is always a narrator. That narrator has been shaped by his surroundings - say, a border fence that he played football in the shadow of, or a soldier who put a gun in his face - just as he’s shaped by the stories his ancestors told him - say, a story of a land forcibly taken from his kin, and a millennia long journey to rectify an injustice done to entire group of people. And it’s very difficult to break from those narrative foundations, at least in our own stories. It’s very difficult to find the line between truth and fiction when your narrators have been so thoroughly blinded by history and circumstance. It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder if there really is any truth or justice.
~
The wall in Israel is bare. The wall, in Palestine, is art. Not always good art, or easy art - there are slogans of war; there are children brandishing machine guns - but art nonetheless. Faced with stone, people have chosen to tell stories in their own language. To create beauty from boundaries.
We all do this, in our own ways. I think about how after L left me, I decided to write a novel. It seemed the only way for me to make a story that was, in real life, about failure and humiliation - she left me; she created a story in which I controlled her and tried to repress her - into something beautiful. It allowed me to take events that ended in despair and, through fiction, turn them into something that ended in hope and rebirth.
But it was also preservation. It allowed me to capture her voice before it was lost to me forever. And, despite the pain, I felt that voice was worth capturing. In her narrative, of course, this is just another example of my selfishness, of my efforts to co-opt her identity and subsume it beneath my own. And I suppose I understand this: it’s telling her voice, our shared memories, through my aperture. But this is how our personal narratives work: we’re always stuck with the narrator. Should we stop telling stories because we’re biased?
Despite the art, Palestine is also, I must report, full of trash. There are many empty lots, and each one of them seems full of discarded junk - old cars, empty bottles, wrappers of all sizes and colors. Even I here, I see competing languages at work:
They can’t even keep their own country clean; why should we trust them? They don’t even value their own land!
How can we be expected to keep our country clean when they deny us even basic services? They don’t give us enough money for routine garbage pickup. They don’t give us enough economic opportunity to build a stable government. They deny us even the right of cleaning up our own land.
On the street, my father points out, the revealing garments of Israeli women - sun dresses and yoga pants - have given way to headscarves and abayas. Nine out of ten women are covered, by my count.
And within my narrative, from my biased view, this is complicated. It’s been explained to me many times, by women and men. Modesty is a requirement of faith, for both genders. The body and sex are sacred things, and should be treated as sacred. Not just anyone should see a person’s figure. Those things are gifts from God and must be treated carefully. A woman once told me - an educated, brilliant woman whose opinions I deeply respect - that she felt closer to God when she covered. That before, when she was uncovered, she felt ashamed, competitive, objectified. And now, covered, she feels whole.
It’s forced me to realize that when I look at women, I have a bad habit of breaking them into parts: Great ass, but small tits; great face, but no ass; great tits, great ass, but her face could be better. I don’t do this with men. It’s reflexive at this point, a separation I make automatically, one that my culture and my history has conditioned me to do, against my own better impulses.
And I don’t do this when I look at women who are covered. There’s nothing to break down. There is a monolithic person, a blank slate - like an empty wall - and she’s free to cover that slate with any narrative she chooses.
Our first stop in Palestine is a coffee shop, where a priest talks to us about justice.
“The only thing that matters to me,” he says, “is whether an action brings about more justice or less justice. That’s all that matters.”
Last week, in Istanbul, I woke up early and went for a run. It was a warm morning, with full sun and a gentle breeze coming off the sea. I ran along the Golden Horn, up a steep hill to an old ramparts overlooking the shipyards. From there, I could see most of the old city - Fatih mosque, where I knew old men would be sitting in circles, studying the Qur’an; Suleymaniye mosque, where the salep vendors would just be beginning their rounds; in the far distance, Aya Sofia, which was just opening its doors to the tourists, and Sultanahmet, which probably had its windows open for the first time all year, letting in the wind from the sea.
After catching my breath, I jogged back down the hill. At its bottom was a park, where a group of older women were sitting and feeding the pigeons. They were all covered. They talked among themselves quietly.
As I approached them, I felt the sun on my arms, the wind in my hair. And it was such a joy to me - such a simple, easy, God-given grace. Light and air. To feel my body in unencumbered motion, blessed by the elements. It occurred to me that these women, and millions like them, had no idea what this felt like. Had no idea how wonderful it felt to come to the end of a run with the wind in your hair. I could feel this anytime I wanted to, at any moment - I could step outside and run and feel my body exposed to the world.
And I consider that a gift from God. I consider that grace. And I think that any God worth believing in would want every one of His people to feel that grace.
When the woman who told me that she felt “free” when covered left Istanbul, she came into my office to say good bye to me. My boss was out of town, so we had to leave the door open, lest anyone get the wrong impression. We sat across from one another and talked about art. She was leaving to get married, to a man who wouldn’t let her be out after dark on her own because he worried about her safety.
“I used to walk a lot at night,” she told me. “I’ll miss those walks. But this is how marriage works, right?”
I thought about L. She’d gone to Spain, the last year we were together, for six months. During the application process, she’d sat in my car and burst into tears. “What’s going to happen to us?” she asked. “I can’t imagine being away from you. If I go, what happens? Will things change? What if I come back and we’re different people?”
I told her what I thought was right: that she had to make this decision for herself, regardless of our relationship, regardless of my needs. I told her that she needed to do what was right for her, independent of me. And I do believe that those six months eventually brought about the end of our relationship. But I also believe it was the right thing to do.
The woman who was leaving to get married walked across the room to show me a picture on her phone: it was of the Ebru she did when she felt stressed. Ebru is an Islamic art, a very meticulous form of calligraphy. Intertwining lines. She held the camera out to me, and I could see a sliver of her forearm; it occurred to me I had no idea what her hair looked like, and yet I cared about her, in some real way. Our wrists were so close that a simple twitch - a flutter of my nervous system, or hers - would have brought them together. But we didn’t touch. We couldn’t touch.
When it was time for her to leave, I asked if we could hug, or even shake hands.
“No,” she said, smiling sadly. “We can’t touch. Ever.”
We talk about justice and we talk about freedom and we objectify women and we go for runs in the open air and we let lovers leave knowing it will ruin us and we create stories to help us get over those lovers and we build walls and we paint over those walls to make them beautiful. And it all means different things to different people. Freedom for one person is oppression to another. Terrorists in one story, told by one narrator, are freedom fighters in the same story, told by a different narrator.
After our meeting with the priest, we drive into the hills of Palestine. The top of one of these hills has been blasted away, and on this flat ridge, a city is being built. We approach its entrance, and a beautiful, young, uncovered woman - gorgeous face (straight dark hair, square jaw, dark eyes), great ass, but no chest - gets on the bus. My father, the seminarian, elbows me in the ribs:
“Check out the babe-age.”
Behind me, the former tobacco exec swoons.
“What I wouldn’t give to be your age again,” he whispers in my ear.
The woman is an engineer. She drives us through the construction site, pointing out the different neighborhoods. She shows us the foundation of the community’s mosque, the base stone for its Greek Orthodox church, the space where its football field will be.
“This is Palestine’s first city built from scratch,” she tells us. “30,000 people will live here when it’s done. It will be a totally secular, open community. People will be free to live as they want. There will be a shopping mall, an entertainment center, and places for all faiths to worship.”
The bus, full of ministers and rabbis, oohs and aahs. Heavy construction equipment steamrolls past us, Palestinian flags hanging from their windows.
We ascend to the site’s headquarters, built on top of the hill, overlooking not just the whole site, but much of Israel, too. From its balcony, the hills of Judea are visible, all the way to the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv, the Mediterranean beyond. On both flanking hills are Israeli settlements, statements - just as this city will be a different statement - of Israeli indifference to the Palestinian’s boundaries and narrative, violent incursions into the story.
Up here, the site’s developer meets us. He’s a Palestinian man, lean and torsional, who wears western clothes and speaks with a slow, refined lilt to his English. His answers to our questions are thoughtful, composed, careful. He is a consummate businessman. It’s how, I suspect, he convinced the Qatari government to give him 500 million dollars to begin this project.
When my father asks him about his own personal faith, he demurs. Instead, he cites his history in the Philadelphia area - his wife is from West Chester; his daughter did her study abroad at a Quaker school in the Philly burbs - before talking about how this city will be completely secular.
“When designing this, we weren’t worried about the presence of the majority - which is, obviously, Muslim. Any settlement in this country will have Muslims. It’s a given. What we worried about was the presence, and acceptance, of minorities. It’s why the first stone we laid was the corner stone for this city’s church. To send a message.”
Later, when asked about the Israeli government, he is candid, but measured.
“Let me be clear: occupation is evil. There’s no other word for it. It is evil. But that’s a systemic evil, not a personal evil. And many of my partners are Israeli. Systemic violence does not mean that individuals, living within those systems, can’t find ways to pursue mutual goals of peace and prosperity. Many Israeli architects have helped me with this project, even as the government has tried to thwart us at every turn. You see that settlement over there?”
He pointed out the window, across the valley.
“That’s an Israeli settlement for 1200 people. And they have running water. Right now, we have no water. We’ve been requesting water for 2 years, and they still haven’t cleared our request. All we have to do is build a pipe between our settlement and theirs, and we’ll have enough water for people to start living here. For now, we have to truck in water every morning, and it’s barely enough for us to function. And that’s another thing. Our road? It’s 7 meters wide. Barely wide enough for two normal sized cars. It took me a year of fighting and begging to get that road built - and it’s still illegal! They gave me permission to build a 4 meter wide road for a construction site building homes for 30,000 people. So I made it 7 meters and pray every day they won’t shut this down. All it would take is two rogue soldiers, and this entire project - 500 million dollars, 30,000 people - would literally come crashing down. All because of 3 meters of concrete. But that’s a risk I have to take.”
He leans forward in his chair, smiles at another one of the beautiful - uncovered - women who works at the site.
“Look, I don’t want to focus on the negative. Too often, people in this country focus on the negative. There is negativity everywhere in the world. What are you going to do with that negativity? How are you going to turn it into a positive? I say, we need to shut up and build. So that’s what we do here. We work harder. And that’s a choice we make. Whatever they choose to do, we cannot control.”
After the discussion, we’re shown a promotional video - in 3-D, no less - highlighting what life in the community will be like. It’s six minutes long. By my count, within the entire six minutes, there are exactly three women wearing headscarves. There are at least three dozen who are uncovered, walking around the hypothetical city in sun dresses and yoga pants, as if they were on the other side of the boundary-line. This is a narrative tool, of course - to frame this story within a more familiar context for us. The people living here, it says, will be like you. Middle class and aspirational. They will value personal liberties and gender equality. They will not be dogmatic. Religion will be a portion of their identity, but not the entirety. These will be people that you can relate to, who will not force you to question your preconceptions. They will reinforce your personal history.
~
It’s about the sacredness of the body - faith, that is. Headscarves, baptisms. Water and flesh and blood. It’s about the sacredness of the body. What my Muslim friends decry most about Western culture is that the body has been desacralized. Alcohol and cigarettes devour it from without; casual sexual degrades it from within.
“Think,” my boss always tells me, “about your body. What control do you have over it? Can you command your heart to beat or to stop? Can you command your stomach to devour food?” He pauses for effect. “This is a gift, and it’s our job to treat that gift with respect.”
Hunter S. Thompson famously said, “I don’t want to be the prettiest corpse in the graveyard. I want to roll into the grave sideways, liver ravaged, heart exploded.”
How do we define what is sacred? How do we celebrate what is sacred? Is it through covering it, protecting it, exposing it only to those closest to you - the few chosen by God? Or is it to use up the grace we’ve been given? To pay homage to our gift through the full range of sensory experiences? To fuck and to drink and to eat with abandon? To run in the wind, to jump from a high bridge into a cold lake?
Nature, we’re constantly reminded, takes us apart, piece by piece, without any help from us. Nothing we do will stop that.
I suppose it comes down to a question of faith. Is there another life, one where we can utilize our bodies better? Or is this the only body? The answer matters. It dictates how we live. I’ve spent twenty-eight years shouting the question into the void. And the only answer I’ve gotten is silence.
~
The answer matters because it isn’t just about how we relate to our own bodies; it’s how we relate to other bodies, too. How do we define justice when it comes to a body? Is it building a wall that children must play in the shadow of - a wall to preserve the state‘s body? Is it covering one’s head, one’s body, so as to stay whole in a world that insists on breaking you into separate pieces? Is it the freedom to choose what we consider sacred and how we worship that sacredness?
Is it just that when I see a woman, I break her into parts? Is it just that two friends cannot even shake hands when one of them is leaving? And who is making the judgment - your God, my God, or no God?
~
The next day, our guide takes us out of Jerusalem, on the road that falls from the old city to the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth. The fecund hills of Jerusalem give way to the barren, chalky mountains of the Judean desert. The dried wadis are populated by shanties and Bedouin shacks. Homes of brick, cement, and sheet metal. Impermanent settlements, donkeys tied to old tires, herds of camels roaming.
Children run barefoot between the huts. A tractor trundles behind them, belching black diesel smoke into the sky. In front of one hut, an old woman sits in front of an oil drum fire. There are ways of life in this world that, no matter how hard I try, I cannot imagine. People survive lifetimes in places I could not imagine surviving an hour.
We head for Mosada, Herod’s fortress atop a monolith of stone. The Dead Sea curls beneath us, a lapis tapestry gouged from the desert, the high rugged plateaus of red, brown, and beige. This, I think, is the land of Prophets - monumental, immense, elemental.
“This reminds me of New Mexico,” says the minister who fought seven years to bury his parents. “I was there many years ago, staying at a monastery. It was me and five monks in the middle of the desert. The monastery was cut from the rock at the bottom of a canyon, and I remember at night you could stand outside, and the stars were unlike anything I’d ever seen. The canyon walls provided a frame for them.”
He smiles to himself. He has a soft, quiet face - observant eyes the color of slate, and a timid demeanor that, I suspect, serves him well as a minister. He’s the kind of man you feel safe talking to.
“Our neighbor - you won’t believe this - was Georgia O’Keefe. The artist. And she gave us an old transistor radio. It was the only connection to the world we had. We spent most of our days in silence and prayer, anyway. Surrounded by rock and stone. But once a week, we’d turn on the radio for news of the outside world. One Sunday - and this is really going to date me, here - we turned it on and listened to Nixon resign. It was such a strange moment. There was the President, his voice crackly with static, resigning, and it had absolutely no effect on us whatsoever. We were totally removed from that world at the time. We just turned off the radio and went back to prayer.”
He looks out the window - impenetrable cliffs to our right, their faces gouged by wind and water, the Dead Sea opalescent to our left. “It makes you understand certain things, doesn’t it? Being here. Seeing this landscape.”
It does. We pass an oases, a small cluster of palm fronds. And at its heart, I know: water. To discover water in such a place would seem a miracle, an act of divinity. Water is no longer sacred to most of us. You turn on the faucet, and there it is. You go to the corner store and buy a bottle. But being here, you understand its power. Through absence, there is presence.
“This is why we fast,” my boss told me last Ramadan. “You see this date? You can’t touch it. All day. It’s right there, but I can’t touch it. And I want to so badly. We remember the sacredness of things through deprivation.”
Light through darkness. Love through loss. Silence through sound. Nudity through covering. Abundance through penury. Grace through evil.
One of my major issues with faith has always been this - the question of evil contrasted with grace. How do we deal with evil? Some of us build walls, or simply look away. Some of us tell ancient stories and put our faith in the next life - we accept children being murdered in Syria because it means they’re now on the plains of paradise.
But isn’t that too easy? It’s too easy to say that God gave humans free will, and thus we’re evil. It’s too easy to say that our suffering will be rewarded in a future life. We tell stories that make evil palatable, that allow us to sit on our air conditioned buses drinking bottled water while children are gassed in their bedrooms.
It’s much harder, I think, to be a non-believer, or a doubter, than it is to be a believer. Because then you’re forced to confront evil for what it is - a terminus, an omnipresent force that lurks behind every corner, in every dark space. How do we handle evil if we’re not sure that God exists? If we’re not sure that there’s balance to these things, that one life’s suffering is repaid tenfold in the next life?
These aren’t new question, but we’re so busy that we often forget to ask them.
We take a cable car to the top of Mosada, our bodies crammed against other bodies, ascending, held aloft by a tightly wound core of wire.
Once atop the windswept plateau, our guide tells us the history of the place. A Jewish garrison had retreated here to escape the Romans, who waged a siege against the fortress. Slowly, their earthen ramp moved closer to the top, and the settler’s water and food dwindled. Faced with slavery or death, the soldiers voted for death.
“For many years,” our guide says, “the Israeli army held its swearing in ceremony here. This was viewed as sacred ground - where Jews fought against tyranny.” He smiles. “Whenever I bring Jewish teenagers here, and hear them talking about the bravery of that garrison, I ask them: how many of you are descendants of the Masadans? Hm? How many?
“It’s strange that we’re so quick to call those who choose death over suffering brave. And it’s illuminating, I think, to the Jewish narrative. For millennia, enough of us have chosen life, even lives of suffering, over death, and thus we have survived. This is our story. Choosing life and hope over evil, even knowing that the hope we’re choosing is not hope for ourselves. It might not even be hope for our children, or our children’s children. It’s hope that someday, some generation in the future will be free, will return to their home. But for that hope to become a reality, we must survive. We must endure evil. We must endure slavery. And that’s what all this is about. It’s about all those generations that endured slavery and suffering and death so that we could one day be here. That is the Jewish story.”
I think, once again, about R. Her grandparents were Czechoslovakian Jews during World War II. They’d lived in a small village, and when the Nazis arrived, they’d lined up all the Jews in town along the village’s river. One by one, an officer went down the line, putting a bullet in the back of each person’s head. A finger moves an inch, a shot rings out, and a body goes from existence to non-existence. Boom, splash. Boom, splash. Boom, splash.
The Jews on the furthest end of the river, then, had to watch the bodies of their cousins and neighbors as they were carried downstream. They watched as the water turned a deep, beautiful crimson.
Seven people before R’s grandparents were shot, something happened. A truck pulled up, and someone said something to the officer. He motioned, and the rest of the Jews were loaded onto cattle cars, shipped off to suffer, to be slaves. But they survived. And because of that, I sat with their granddaughter one night on a statue atop Philadelphia. Because of that, their granddaughter is now going to be a doctor. The narrative continues.
This, I suppose, is how we grapple with evil. We tell stories and we have faith that the story does not end with us. We have faith that though our role in the story will end, will be snuffed out by evil or by nature, that our sentence is not the end of the book.
My father approaches me while I stand at the edge of the fortress, looking out over the stone and the sea, the ancient ramp the Romans built. He puts his arm around my shoulders.
“Life’s pretty good, huh?” he says.
Sometimes, indeed it is.
~
Being here, I’ve started to understand some other things more clearly, too.
For starters, I’m beginning to understand the weight of history on the Jewish people. I’m beginning to understand the role their narrative of exile and return plays, and how tightly it binds them. It is the culmination of justice over evil, and as such, they are entitled to fight for that justice, no matter how extreme that fight must be. They are all prodigal sons returning home.
I’m also beginning to understand the Palestinian’s anger. We aren’t alive in history. We’re alive in the present. We aren’t living through two millenniums of injustice. We’re talking about families being separated by a wall. We’re talking about men who can’t find a livelihood. We’re talking about children who grow up with guns pointed at them.
~
That night, back in Jerusalem, my father and I go out drinking with three Presbyterian ministers. We find a café near our hotel, inside the old city train station. It’s a simple space, a bar and a few tables. The bartender is a lovely Israeli woman, short with curly hair and a nose ring. I try not to think it, but I can’t help it: beautiful face, great ass, decent chest.
“Hey,” one of the ministers says, nudging me, “check over your left shoulder.”
I turn, and the bartender’s bending over to clean a table.
She’s new at the job. I teach her how to make a few drinks, going over to the bar with her, leaning over and helping her fix a Manhattan.
Back at the table, the conversation drifts between church politics, our meeting with the business developer, and our personal stories. One of them - an attractive, round man with blonde hair - spent years working for big tobacco. He tells us this after many drinks, the way one might confess some major sin. He regales us with stories about governors and corporate execs cavorting on yachts, and then the same politicians teaching classes on business ethics at Yale.
Another one of the ministers was a campaign manager in Philadelphia. He’s bald, with a beard, a gregarious, sarcastic laugh.
“I’ve seen the people running this city. They’re bastards, all of them. But it’s addictive, the campaign process. Your whole identity gets wrapped up in it. And when you win? There’s nothing like it. But I had to get out. I had to feel like I was doing something better.”
We argue about the role of faith in the peacemaking process - here, in Syria, everywhere.
My father argues for faith as a catalyst for peace.
“Think about Gandhi. Think about King. Think about Mandela. Every major instance of peace from this last century is under girded by personal faith.”
“Personal being the key word,” the former campaign manager says. “Look at every major act of violence, and a lot of them are also under girded by faith. The problem is whenever you get faith, you’re going to get enough people who turn dogmatic. And when that happens, faith becomes exclusive. Once faith becomes exclusive - and it’s impossible for dogmatic faith to not be exclusive - violence is inevitable. Whether that be overt violence of subtle violence, does it matter? It’s still violence.”
As we’re arguing, a song comes over the bar’s speakers. I recognize the opening synthesizers - an ethereal, primordial sonar step out of silence.
Music and scent are the wormholes that plunge us into memory, and this plunges me to a highway cutting through the New Jersey pine barrens, two winters ago. A low, grey northeastern afternoon. L was leaving for Spain in two days. We were taking a trip to the Jersey shore, to spend a night wandering the empty boardwalk of her childhood, to spend the night making love in a cheap ocean-side motel. The sacred ground of summer transfigured through the emptiness of winter.
She made a CD for the occasion, and this was the first song on it: The Shins, “Sleeping Lessons.”
“Shh,” she said, as she put it on, rolling the windows down, letting the cold air in.
The synths build, give way to a triumphant guitar. We hurtled toward the edge of our continent, together, in love, about to part. We spent the day walking the boards, got dinner at a local diner, made love in the shower.
That night, as we were sleeping, we were both woken up by a door slamming. In the next room, we heard shouting. I remember opening my eyes, looking beside me, and seeing L’s eyes turn white as she opened them in the dark.
In the next room, a young man ranted and raved while a woman protested. He threatened to kill her. He threw something - the remote, a book, her - against the wall and she shrieked. He berated her, and then something else collided with the wall, and then he burst into sobs.
“You cunt, you fucking cunt. You don’t love me. I hate you, I hate you so much,” he wailed.
What I remember is the silence between his sobs. Both L and I were holding our breath - we were holding each other, too - both of us petrified by the moment. I remember my mind whirring with the possibilities - Was he hitting her? Should we call the cops? If we called the cops, would he just hit her more when they left? Was he the kind of man who would come over here and kick my ass if I called the cops? Does he have a gun? What I felt, though, was not a sense of moral outrage. What I felt was an almost childhood sense of self preservation and fear. Stay quiet. Hold your breath. Don’t let him know you’re here.
She and I both did, I believe, though I don’t know what exactly she felt because after that night, we never spoke of it again.
I think most of us spend at least part of our lives wondering how we will react when faced with moments that demand moral courage. Being in Israel, of course - listening to the Jewish story - I’ve thought a lot about it. How could I not? In many ways, this place is a direct result of one of the greatest evils in human history.
I’ve often wondered about Germany during the war. My narrative begins there - my Lutheran ancestors from Prussia who migrated, many decades ago, to Wisconsin. But it seems likely distant relatives of mine were probably in Germany during the Holocaust. How did they respond? How would I have responded? Would I have sacrificed my own life to fight injustice? Or would I have stayed silent - choosing to find hope in survival and perseverance; hope in the longer narrative?
Many of us like to think that we build up reserves of moral fortitude over the years, which we will be called on to use a few times. We believe that life is little more than preparation for these tests, the moments when we are called to stand up for our ideals and principles, or when we choose to stay silent. What happens when we stay silent? When we fail? When we hold our breath, and hold our lover, silent in the next room, her heart beating with such strength you can feel it through her chest?
What if we fail when confronted with evil?
How do we absolve ourselves? Do we retreat to the jungle and re-fight the battle endlessly? Do we write novels? Do we turn to faith? Do we forgive ourselves?
The conversation has gone on without me, the question of faith’s role in perpetuating, or solving, violence still, shockingly, unanswered.
~
It’s my last day here. The morning begins with a trip to the church of the holy sepulcher. It’s believed, by some, to be the place where Christ was crucified and then buried. Controlled by five different denominations, it feels like something a collage. The place where the crucifixion supposedly took place - Golgotha - is controlled by the Armenians. It’s a smorgasbord of Slavic-faced idols, garish gold candelabras, and incense. The chamber directly next to it is Catholic. Void of gold and candelabras, its mosaics depict the crucifixion in gory detail - the desecration of the sacred body.
The sanctuary is Greek orthodox, and the chamber above the tomb feels Roman - it resembles the Pantheon in Rome. The Ethiopians control a small chapel at the back of the church; an ancient looking Ethiopian bishop sleeps in there, alone, beneath a faded fresco of Christ on the cross.
There are antechambers and tombs cut from the various cliffs the church has been carved from. One of these antechambers descends deep into the earth, its walls desecrated by graffiti from the Crusaders.
Walking into the main sanctuary, a pigeon alights above me, soaring through the stone arch, caught briefly in the sun.
Spaces like this so often leave me cold. And then I feel like somehow I’ve missed something; like there’s an emptiness at my heart where there‘s supposed to be … something. Old Greek women - who, I imagine, have saved money their whole life to come here - walk in the front doors and collapse in sobs on the slab where Christ’s body was supposedly washed, groping for something, anything, to grab on the slab, their bodies shaking with emotion. Old men emerge from the sepulcher, their faces red with tears.
I sit beneath the Greek dome - Christ flanked by the apostles, pigeons swarming in the columns of sun - and watch these pilgrims, wondering why it is that my narrative has never led me to pursue something like this. Is that really all they’re feeling? The culmination of a story, no different from the end of a novel? Because they feel something so deeply, just as my boss told me he felt something at Mecca, just as the Hassidic Jews 500 meters from here feel when they touch the Western Wall, just as Hindus feel when they bathe in the Ganges, or Tibetans feel when they reach Lhasa. We’ve filled this world with sacred spaces. Is it really just the power of a story that moves people so deeply? The weight of a historical narrative - of exile and the dream of return; of generations surviving so that justice might be realized? What gives people such certainty that their narrative is the right one? And why is that certainty so absent within me?
If I’m being honest, the only time I’ve felt anything as strongly as what these pilgrims feel is when love ends. Not in the midst of love - which is wonderful, too, but which is somehow restrained, somehow tenuous, a story midstream instead of at the end - but when it fails. When I found out, all those years ago, that A was with another man. When L called me in Greece and told me she loved someone else. Or all those years ago, in Michigan, when I watched my parents fight, their marriage in the balance. Or those family meals when my brother would implode, falling into spasms of pity and anger. The only time I’ve ever felt that strongly were in moments of failure, moments of loss. Only in those moments have I been able to lose the language of my story, to feel like I was no longer narrating something - like I’d fallen into a larger stream of language, lost beneath the weight of a bigger power. In some perverse way, the only time I haven’t felt like an exile in this world is when everything feels like it has been taken.
And it makes me wonder if I’ve done something wrong. Why, during all those years with L, did I never feel that kind of joy? Why, when any number of beautiful, brilliant women, have been in my bed - naked, generous - have I felt not elation but sorrow? Loneliness. Like my story was in a language they didn’t know and all I wanted was for it to make sense to them. Like their story was outside mine.
And maybe this is the power of faith. It’s a shared language. It’s a country, not of chance, but of choice.
Or maybe I’ve just fucked up. Maybe my body is no longer sacred. Maybe through abundance and consumption, I’ve forgotten what a gift another body is.
But I don’t think I believe this. Because these things - sex, violence, narratives, even faith - these things are about power. They are about who tells the story. Who uses their body for what and who gets access to it. They are about control. They are about who gets to build the wall and who lives in its shadow. Who gets to walk freely in the wind and who has to wonder what that feels like.
Justice, freedom - these are about the acquiescence of power and narrative. To see clearly is to be free of the biases of history, the prejudices of language that defines someone as an ’other.’ Love is about the acquiescence of power. These things are about vulnerability and about trust. And as long as there is a question of power, it’s impossible for there to be trust. When you have people competing over a narrative; when you have people competing over moral rectitude; when you have people competing over women’s bodies - these things make justice impossible. And though faith so often provides that trust and vulnerability at the personal level - look at those women on that stone; just look at them! - it also fails on a bigger level. Because one definition of justice is different from another definition of justice. And they are irreconcilable. When justice is elevated to the level of narrative, it makes peace impossible.
Maybe the best we can hope for is the freedom to choose - how to use our bodies, how to tell our stories, what places are sacred to us. To choose outside the constraints of larger narratives. To choose without fear of isolation or violence. But maybe that’s the American in me, the mythmaker of the open road and the frontier - the lost son who finds the dream of return more powerful than the actual return. I just don’t know. I don’t know a fucking thing. None of us do. What gets us into trouble is when we’re certain we do.
~
That’s not true, either; there are some things I know.
I know that I’ve been shown kindness by Jews, Christians, Muslims, and atheists. I know good people fighting for their ideas of justice. I don’t always agree with those definitions, just as they don’t agree with what I find sacred. But I suppose that kindness is a good place to start - the breaking of bread, the sharing of water, the coming together to celebrate having a body.
And the telling of stories, too; learning the different languages of other narratives, foreign as they may be; finding those moments where, against all odds, they do converge. Maybe we go from there.
~
Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him. But John forbade him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness. Then he suffered him. And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him…
Once more, we drive away from Jerusalem, sliding towards the Dead Sea. But instead of turning right, we turn left, toward the River Jordan. We descend onto a long plain. These are the occupied territories - the land of the Prophets, fought over and parceled out and covered in blood.
On our right, as we move closer to the water, the border fence becomes visible. Its top is covered in barbed wire. Every one hundred meters, there is a sign:
Beware: Land Mines. Crossing this fence means DEATH.
We are surrounded by sand and landmines.
We stop at a checkpoint, the ruins of monasteries flanking both sides of the watch tower. The guards take one look at us - seventeen white Americans - and wave us through. This mobility is a part of my narrative, of course. I am white and I am male; I can always move. And it gives me the freedom to talk about justice and faith and love, because I’m not trapped looking down the barrel of a gun; because I can turn on a faucet and water comes out. Because I can run down a hill in a foreign country on a sunny morning and feel the wind in my hair.
Beyond the checkpoint, we park. We’re in an open gravel lot, surrounded by barb wire. But in front of us, instead of desert, instead of land mines, there is water. There are trees, small little willows that rustle in the wind.
We descend a small wooden stair, and suddenly we’re in an oasis. The River Jordan is in front of us; a languorous, muddy stream, no more than ten meters wide. About the size of the developer’s illegal road. It’s surrounded, on both banks, by high grass and thin willows and poplars. The smell is that universal smell of water and foliage - the wet, fecund smell of life.
Very quickly I’m reminded of quite a few things. I’m walking barefoot up a creek with my grandfather; it’s on the farm where he grew up in Northern Wisconsin. Sun and shadows dance on the shallow water. I’m lying amongst falling cherry and apricot blossoms with H. I’m in a canoe with my father and my brother and we’re fishing. I’m walking through the Philadelphia suburbs with L on the 4th July, her pants rolled up to her knees.
That, you see, is my narrative. But it’s wrapped up within larger narratives. With Prussian Lutherans who got on a boat and came to Wisconsin and bought a farm along a creek. With a Jewish woman whose grandparents nearly died in a river a thousand miles from year. With a father who baptized his grandson.
I don’t know if Jesus was baptized here, or even if Jesus - or God - is real. But I know that the people who started my story do. And thus, it’s a part of my story, too - the living waters of my personal history.
It’s remarkable to feel convergence, isn’t it? To feel like life has transpired just to bring you to a certain point. It’s why love is so powerful - it feels like every sentence in our narrative has built to that encounter. And being here, what I feel is something like that - many streams becoming, momentarily, one.
And this is such a rare thing. More often than not, narratives don’t converge. Being here these last days, I have to wonder how we balance our own narrative with those of others. How do we pursue our own definitions of grace and justice without hurting others? Is it even possible? Long term, can we hope for anything more than building walls and parting ways - than failure and self preservation? Is our only hope in an uncertain coda - that the story continues beyond the period on our sentence? Is our job simply to move the story a little bit closer to that better ending?
My father and I take off our shoes and socks. We step into the water - the cold, murky water of the River Jordan. Dad laughs with disbelief. Above us - and I swear I’m not making this up - a dove flutters from the willows on the far bank and soars away, over the land mines and barbed wire.
I reach down, touch the water, bring it to my forehead. Maybe I forget what a miracle life sometimes is: water in the desert; my father and I, 5000 miles from home, two Midwestern boys baptized in the River Jordan. Maybe all we have is a body, nothing more. But there are also living waters. Their flow precedes us, and long after our sacred bodies have gone to dust, they will still tell their stories.
Really a lovely essay, Justin--you ask good questions, and your memory is clear: although I can't believe I said "babe-age" . . . :) Thanks for putting this into words--which is all we can do, after all, short of simply wading into the waters. . .