As I Wrestle With History In A City Where There's Really Not Much Else

The air is so thick with history here -- you can almost choke on it if you're not careful.

I work around the corner from the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, which is said to be where it will all start/end when the end of the world gets rolling (That's why there's so many cemeteries around it -- gotta be first in line to be resurrected you know.)

The raised area in the back is the Mount of Olives (the middle and lowest of the three towers in this picture is the Church of the Ascension, which I pass by on my short walk to lunch.) 

 I don't think about it very often though -- the air of history there tends to be more subdued, only manifesting itself in sporadic groups of tourists interrupting my path to the cafe.


 Just the other week I was at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in the Old City, waiting for a friend to get off work, when I decided to walk the 100 feet over to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the traditional site of Jesus' death and burial, and hang out for a little while. It's a lot more crowded and tense than the Mount of Olives.

--Not least because the various churches represented here (Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, etc.?) can get pretty ornery about seemingly insignificant things. (Fist fights between priests of opposing factions are not altogether unheard of or shocking occurrences.)

But I guess if you devote your life to this stuff and spend the majority of your many years of existence living near and working in this one specific building, you might get pretty uptight and specific about a few things (e.g. how often the rock of Golgotha should be cleaned, to what extent the Greek Orthodox can put their weird gaudy gold candles everywhere, whether or not the Syriacs are allowed to renovate their burnt out chapel, the list goes on).

I'm currently standing on the hatch used by the church fathers to enter Jesus' tomb every once in a long, arbitrarily decided, traditionally delineated calendar tenuously agreed upon by the various churches. 

Inside that little alcove is a hole through which you can touch the rock of Golgotha, upon which Jesus was crucified and around and on top of which this church was built. That figure to the left is a priest of some variety of Orthodox (Cause no self-respecting Catholic would condone those garish bejeweled decorations) promptly stepping in for the periodic Windex-ing of the glass for viewing the rock and the wetwipe-wiping of the blessed armhole through which pilgrims can touch the rock. I felt incredibly blessed to bear witness to such a solemn and important ritual.

 Here the history is a little more palpable. There's the heavy smell of incense, the dark, germy rocks that had contact with Jesus somewhere along the line, and the cold, rough crosses carved into the stone walls by crusaders who hacked-and-slashed their way to the Holy Land and into Jerusalem so many years ago.

You feel it in the obnoxious throngs of tourists of all shapes and sizes and origins, and you feel it in the tension between the priests as they go about their meticulously structured routines and mind the strictly demarcated boundaries between denominations and sects. 



But that's just the beginning. I haven't even started on the history of Judaism and Islam in this place, and there are a couple more whole worlds of history outside the realm of religion too.

This is just a small taste of the backbone of history underlying and looming over this beautiful, complicated place. Thousands of years of Roman and Islamic and Crusader and Turkish and so many other histories overlapping and undergirding each other.

Then there are histories that define everyday life here more than any others. There is the history of Jews, filled with persecution and defiance, blood, loss, and exile in the face of an always stronger and oppressive power -- and there is the history of the Palestinians, filled with dispossession and resistance, death, fear, and pain, always at the mercy of some grander empire or ruler.

The air is thick with all of it mixed together, a thousand different stories remembered and countless lives touched and scarred forever by the past and now the present. The sour taste of endless cyclical violence and a blinding fog of irrational fears and hatreds. It fills the air and all of our lungs, and then it sits on the city, pinning it down beneath the tremendous weight of memory. 

I appreciate the history; I enjoy learning about Jesus' life and what we know about it. But I can't seem to ever be touched by it. No matter how often I walk the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Pain, the way Jesus walked under the weight of the cross, I can't seem to find meaning in it for my spirituality today. I don't get anything out of it.

I see the people around me as I walk and I can't make the disconnect. I can't find the beauty of this history because I can't see it apart from the people here now, who live with the weight of all this accumulated history on their backs day in and day out, year in and year out.

This is the history that brought about the reality of today: occupation, fear, deprivation and indignity -- and this is the history that makes the future look like more of the same: distrust, unrest, crippling stalemate and painful cycles. The accumulated weight of history keeps us in the past, and forbids us from progressing into a future of justice and peace.

It's not all of history that's to blame! And there's hope there too. But we have to unearth it. We have to keep walking the Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering, the way of weight -- until we find a way to redeem it. To reconcile it with the world I see around me. To bring this ancient history back to life and full communion with life as it is lived here, and free all those here burdened by its weight.


But that just got a lot more high-minded and rambly than it probably deserved to be. (And confusing because history means so many different things) This is as much a personal process as it is a hypothetically region-wide or possibly global one. I'm sorting through these histories, finding this weight, trying to reconcile all that I see and all that I know and all that I believe. I'm trying to find Jesus here.

But once I say that it seems pretty silly.

All I really need to do is look up. Those people aren't just watching me as I meander my way across Jesus' historic steps through the Old City and up to what is now the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on the rock of Golgotha. They're walking it too, and they've been walking it since before I was born.

I Bought a Coffee Mug Today. It Was Made in China.

What did most people occupy their lives with just a couple hundred years ago? Well that's easy, it seems to me like the majority of people would spend their days busily preparing and producing material goods, like food (totes obvi) or useful and important tools for living like chairs or clothes or any of a wide array of different instruments for making coffee.

Then we got all industrial and now most of those things are mass-produced -- lower costs, less time investment, and often better quality (with the primary loss as far as the actual good is concerned being only that EVERYONE'S EVERYTHING LOOKS EXACTLY THE SAME.)

Also there's no "love" or "compassion" or "the least bit of human contact" cooked into my twinkie or sewn into my polo, but whatever. 

But wait! That's a lot of displaced employees. People can't just sit and lazily enjoy the fruits of industry their whole lives! Money in modern economies doesn't work that way, and people seem to rapidly lose dignity and the capacity to not hate every aspect of their lives when they don't have something like work to do or the ability to "provide" in some sense. Plus, we spread like kudzu and cane toads, so there's a lot more of us now. What do all those people do?

Well it turns out a lot of them sell souvenirs.

"Prominent"

Which is kind of ironic -- or something -- because they're either the last remaining outlets for the actual handmade goods, or they sell the worst of the worst of the kitschiest, cheesiest, most mass-produced and uniform of the industrial goods -- and then attempt to pass it off as handmade.

That can be a good job, and it can be an easy job -- but it probably depends a lot on where you are, what the economy and political environment is like around you, that sort of thing.

If you're one of umpteen billion identical shops in the Old City of Jerusalem, and you happen to reside in a country where tourism and thus your income are entirely contingent on the thoroughly volatile geopolitical situation, you might have a pretty rough go of it.

And it only gets worse if you're in, say, Bethlehem. (Because giant concrete walls and security checkpoints might not deter violent extremists or contribute to political solutions, but one thing they sure are good at is scaring away tourists.)

Less than a day after Jesus changed water into wine: Local resident: "You know what, I bet if we charcoal that onto a crude 1st century equivalent of a postcard, goshdarn-it, people will buy it!"

So when it comes down to it, if you're forced to choose between A) lying to tourists' faces and trying every tactic in the book to trick or simply guilt them into buying a small coffee mug with a print of a mosaic on it for five times the standard sell price or B) not feeding your family -- then the choice is not a difficult one. 

And as far as selling out your conscience, soul, and intrinsic human dignity go, there's a lot lot lot lot lot lot lot lot lot lot worse you can do "just to get by" than trapping a tourist in your shop with free coffee and inventing stories about the "people" who "made" this factory-mug by hand (while you discreetly tear off the price tag from the bottom of the mug). 

And there's space for redemption and honor in there too! Because every friendly welcome into a shop and offer of coffee or tea doesn't have to be an empty commercial gesture. You can really touch people's lives that way! (Which I guess is part of the exchange, if we want to look at it economically.)

And there's some sort of cultural/national pride and empowerment thing that can go into that -- as long as you don't feel like the symbols of your heritage are cheapened to the point of meaninglessness by being mass-produced in foreign factories and aggressively hocked at foreigners.

But yeah. I can't imagine it feels good to lie to tourists every day, even if the hospitality is always genuine. But that's life -- it's out of your control! You do what you gotta do! No matter how it makes you feel about yourself afterward. 

Disclaimers: I do not intend to cast shame or color perceptions of either souvenir store pictured.

(They're just the ones I have pictures of.)

(Also if shame was cast on any individuals anywhere then I did something wrong.)

Also for the record: I did not overpay for a coffee mug. However, haggling was a long, arduous process.

And good language practice.   

Speaking of other ridiculous consequences of the post-industrial age... This was the most relevant picture I found before I realized I had pictures of actual souvenir stores. Jerusalem's Bus Stop Graveyard.

Bibliography:


blah blah something about service economies

gross generalizations

Anecdotes

probably Wikipedia

Out of the Mouths of Infants: Grunts and Incomprehensible Chattering

(Leaving out pictures and names for privacy reasons cause kids, sorry. But hey! Look forward to my next newsletter! And if you want that and aren't on a list for it/you want past newsletter, send me an email at miked3592@gmail.com)



I've worked with kids before. I'm by no means a stranger to playing with children, although the ones I'm playing with now are a little smaller than I'm used to. Being silly and playing games and dealing with tantrums and accidents isn't totally new to me, although it's true I am generally accustomed to children who can, given the proper space and time, successfully dress themselves with minimal assistance.

So that's new for me.

And as I sit here and reflect, holding crayons still as my 3-year-old companion meticulously peels the wrappers off like a conscientious matron polishing silver, I realize the daily joys and tribulations and oddities I'm facing here at my kindergarten/preschool/daycare hybrid in East Jerusalem are pretty irregular, actually. It's an environment both uncannily familiar and ridiculously different.

There's the age range, from nearly one all the way to five, which leads to some pretty silly interactions.

And then there's that whole language thing. Yikes.

There's a lot of overlap in comprehension with the kids, because if someone shouts "GET DOWN FROM THERE" at you enough in any language, you're going to understand it eventually. But to really effectively communicate fully with all these kids, you need to be competent in Arabic, English, German, and maybe Czech. That's not to say those are all the languages different kids there know, but it's enough to get by.

So in a single work-day I end up speaking a blurred, clumsy mix of English, Arabic, Norwegian, German (in steeply descending order of my actual competence), and sometimes even some Spanish by accident. One girl knows Italian, so Spanish is close enough, right? The crayon girl knows Norwegian, English, and Arabic, so I try to speak Norwegian to her -- just for the fun of it, and it grabs her attention a little better (you don't hear Norwegian very often here.)

There's a thick mix of local Palestinian children and children of internationals working with various NGOs and such -- not to mention a lot of mixed families that makes it even harder to spot the internationals versus the locals. 

I get a lot of chances to practice my Arabic though, because there's very little pressure when speaking to a 3-year-old. If I don't make any sense, maybe they just look at me funny -- which is whatever, because they were already gonna look at me funny. Or maybe they're crying about falling off the slide or I'm hurriedly carrying them to the bathroom -- regardless, they're not going to call me out on my bad grammar.

And the older kids even help teach me! Well, to an extent.

Some of them chatter endlessly and adorably to me in Arabic, not really caring whether I understand or not, while some speak Arabic but for some reason or another decide to communicate mostly in grunts. One particularly eloquent grunter likes to point to things and teach me vocabulary, but I know enough Arabic to know he's usually wrong. Maybe he's just messing with me?

Another girl is always super pumped to teach me more words, but whenever I point at an object and ask "shu hay?" she just tells me what color it is.

Most of the time though I just feel bad that I can't understand more of the incessant rambling and mumbling of the small Palestinian children as they play and wander about indulging their wild and vivid imaginations, beautifully unrestrained by all that "reality" and "knowledge" and "physics" that they'll pick up on as they continue growing. If only I knew a little more Arabic, that world of play and magical possibility wouldn't be so closed to me...

But then I hear the Canadian kid climb onto the slide and exclaim to no one in particular something like "You're a tomato -- mommy where fardinar!" And suddenly I feel a little less bad about my lack of comprehension.