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Day 55: Who really won?

I set off today, my last full day, on a walk. I kind of had some ideas about where I was going, but I really just let the not-so-straight streets of Jerusalem take me.

I wanted to go see an Ethiopian Church, which just so happens to be between where I am and the old neighborhood that I wanted to see. I have to say it was amazing and simple. The design is after architecture in Ethiopia, the roundness I mean. There is some connection between the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, but I don't know the story. I never realized until I looked on a map that Ethiopia is just on the other side of a small sea, really quite close.

This inside is lavishly (some may say garishly) decorated. Everything is brightly colored in paint or covered by some kind of cloth. There were many paintings, various saints, around the place, too. Saint George was the most represented, although I've no idea why.

There were plenty of other characters, too, I think that this image is of St. Martin, but really I don't know.

There were a couple of entrances to a "room" in the center, a Holy place because the uninitiated could not get there--unless you hop the chain, which I had no interest in. Why profane their sacred?

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This will be laid out kind of funky, but if you follow the four images to the right hand side you can get an idea of the power of the church. The vaulted ceilings holding up the painted dome are really gorgeous. It is easy to tell that the church has been re-painted by loving hands that were not necessarily professional painters or artists. But it is clear that those hands laid the paint on with the utmost love and respect for the church.

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My brother was born in Ethiopia. My dad was stationed there in late 60s and into the 70s. You probably know that there was civil unrest in Ethiopia just as there was in much of the world. The more I learn about the world of that time the more I understand how afraid the governments became. They sure put us under their thumbs today, though, a bit of a compensation I think, which will certainly come back to break the thumb and probably the government. So the Derg was led by this guy that was probably from Eritrea, and this guy overthrew the Ethiopian government and murdered too many people. Clearly my dad didn't fight hard enough to stop this. I didn't win my war either.

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There is a neighborhood called Me'a She'arim. It is like a nineteenth century European town. They may even still think that way. There is not a huge concern with the wealth of the place, material wealth that is.

 They wealth lies in the God stuff, where according to themselves I'm sure they are wealthy beyond imagining.

I've always wondered what it would be like to believe in something so fundamentally that I would fly a plane full of people into a building as a cry out. How endangered must my beliefs be before walk into a mosque and murder praying people? Remember the guy who shot up the Sikh Temple a year ago? (An army veteran, the murderer was.)

There is nothing that I can think of that I believe in so much to do these things. I cannot even comprehend how these actions will further any cause ever. This is how far the chasm is between people I think, with the ghosts of those who came before them whispering, or screaming, in the ears of the fundamentalists to do harm and damage--revenge and avenge! I can never hear the voices of those ghosts because I never knew the people alive.

 And then I had lunch. I'd heard about this bookstore/cafe, which turned out to be much more cafe than bookstore. But dang it was good food. They are well known for their breakfast but I just couldn't do breakfast after all of the walking around town. There is great public transportation here, don't get me wrong. I know I walk everywhere, but I do so because I want to.

So to get to this place I had to go through this tunnel on the right. Then when I emerged I took a hunch and went left. Good call, Mark. But I was still a bit unclear as to exactly where I was going; I did see that there was an end to the alley, so I just kept going. I finally saw a sign for the place, and once I went up that last flight of stairs I was home free for some good eating!

 I've been eating really well, and, perhaps way too much, so it seems. But the Israeli food must be good for me because I had to put another new hole in my belt. I'm definitely not as fat as I was, and, after all of the hard work I can say that I am a bit stronger. But an inch and a half a month? Maybe.

I wanted to get a book or two for the flight home and my time in Madison, because I'm sure Madison doesn't have any bookstores. So I heard about this place that you have to get to by secret means, which was almost the case. I had to find the stairs leading down to this particular alley, which weren't very visible or big, and then once in the alley find the entrance to the bookstore. I had to duck into this small portal off the the alley and then make my way up two flights of stairs. Worth it? Oh yeah.

 My last night here in Jerusalem--in Israel! Wow. So I wanted to celebrate with some good food, and I went to this place that I heard about. Well, the food was pretty enough, but I'm not this kind of fancy. I'm more of an eat-in-the-street kind of guy, just like these two policemen.

Days 53 and 54: The language of childhood.

I woke up and at a leisurely pace started the day. I had my two pieces of toast and tea for breakfast. This swanky hostel provides those. There are two cafes at the museum, so I'm going to wait until I'm there to eat lunch. I'll walk around the museum for a couple of hours, eat, and then go back to it.

The walk was nice. There were no people and nothing was opened. If you saw the post from a couple of days ago you remember how crowded this now vacant market was. But there were still lots of interesting things to see.

Just as anywhere there is graffiti around the city. Some really good and some really bad. I really liked this little tidbit, though. Walking to the museum was really fun because I knew the general direction and the major streets I should cross but just kept going down the small side streets to see what I could see. The town reminds me a lot of Baltimore, older in some places and newer in others.

I walked passed this huge park where the Knesset and Supreme Court live. It was still a bit early and there were not many people there. There were a couple of joggers and people riding bikes, but not much else.

Then I saw this hole in the fence with a path that led up to the woods behind the Knesset; that would be safe to take, right?


I finally found the road that led to the museum, and then I saw the building itself. I was really excited to come here because there is art, you know, the modern stuff. But I ended up liking that part of the museum the least. Sure there are artists who did new and fantastic things, but their work is still pretty damned ugly.

One of the first things that I saw was this book from the middle ages. I was in awe, for sure. First, it is from the middle ages. Second, the penmanship is so good that if I could read it I could read it. And it was just a work of art, true, high art. I think they must have known this even back in the day because they made libraries, like in Alexandria. So libraries were the first museums.

The Shrine of the Book tells a great story through some really nice visual aides, but it'd be great to try to read one of the original scrolls, right? Nope. There were a bunch of noisy kids there--middle school sized. While I was on the farm it came up that I didn't care for young children because to me they are like dealing with drunk people--they cannot be reasoned with, no body control, sassy beyond necessity; you get it. The Arazuni's thought it hilarious that I was a teacher who didn't like kids. But I finally made them see that I love my age group; they still chuckled.

There were four synagogues that were reconstructed in the museum. They were amazing to see. Two were from southwest Asia and two from Europe in the 19th century. The differences in materials and construction were markedly different, but the feel of all four, each from a disparate place, was the same. Sometimes Holy is Holy.

There is an amazing model of what Jerusalem looked like in the Second Temple Period. The scale is 1:50. It was made for some bible museum place that is now gone. The child in me loved it and wanted to go play in it. But the adult in my won over as it voiced through reason and logic why we shouldn't. Leave it to an adult to stifl a child's creative voice. I have to say that in our house we learned to speak the language of childhood, but for a variety of reasons we never got the whole alphabet.

As I was walking back to my part of town I had a couple of options. I could go through the tunnel of darkiness or the path of really brightiness. I went with the path of brightiness and it led to a nice part of the city that I'd not been. It is still Saturday, so there was nothing opened. I mean that there was nothing opened. I had planned on walking to the museum and eating in one of the cafes there. Not opened. So the two pieces of bread that I had in the morning where what I ate for the entire Saturday.


Yeah, I fasted in Jerusalem. I got to break my fast with some Chinese food, which was the most delicious Chinese food that I've had since the last time I starved myself and then ate Chinese food. The food was really just mediocre. It was authentic, to be sure. It was fun to order in Chinese because I can do so in a restaurant better than I can in Hebrew. But the servers spoke Hebrew to the tables around me. Then they let me off of the hook by speaking English to me. These were some diverse language speakers, for sure. Nobody else came in that spoke another language that I could hear, but I bet they'd have covered them, too.

This happens in every city, I'm sure, where the naming of streets becomes just fun. I'm sure that there really was a dude named Yosef Trumpeldor, but really, don't kid me. I know you thought of Albus Dumbledore. And George Washington? Really?

Yesterday I had to walk down to the south side of the city, where I had a meeting with the Keshet people. These are the guys who are helping me put together the service trip for March, where a group of kids and me will come to Israel for ten days. We met for about two hours, and the meeting was very fruitful. We are going to change the itinerary around a bit so that there will be more contiguous service rather than some here or there.

On my way back there were some cops waiving people over who had expired tags so that they could give them tickets. Three uniformed girls with M16s doing traffic stops. Is it really bad that it was exciting?

Then I walked back to the Old City, to the Jaffa Gate, which I missed the first time that I went. I was thinking of buying gifts for people and realized that it was all shit made in China. I'm sorry, mom, but this crap ain't Holy. If I find something authentic or meaningful I'll buy it. But know that I'm thinking about you here. I think Val just knows she won't get anything but love when I get back. It's not that I don't like to gift her stuff, but I don't like to gift her worthless crap. Plus, she just wears my love so well.

Then I went to a bookstore and pretended that I could read better-than-a-baby Hebrew. But the shopkeeper was astute, and found me out quickly. I wonder what I picked up that tipped him off? So I went on to find some books in English, and I found this cool book that has only reinforced a theme that has been with me my entire time here: Lot's wife. Why am I so smitten with that lovely human act of looking back? I've long been a bridge burner. I know that I can never not be what I was, but I will always be something different, too. I found a park to contemplate my new relationship with another man's wife.

Then it was more time walking around town. There is always much to see here. I'll admit that this clown-type fellow was nice enough to give balloons to kids, but he still creeped me out.

Even, or maybe especially, in the night there is always something to see. It is hard to tell from the image on the left, but there are six cops riding horses in the background--I couldn't get the camera out quick enough as they rode by. And the store on the right has one of my favorite signs, the middle neon one, which reads "6/24".

I finally got to meet up with Mitio, a long-time friend and yehsiva boker. I'd not seen Mitio since he finished college at Eckerd and went off to Japan and India for a year each and did wonderful social work in LA and CT. He is an amazing young man and it was wonderful to catch up with him after seven years.


We walked through Nacholot, the place that I loved so much and got lost
in, because one of his friend's daughter had just turned one. Mitio wanted to wish them happy birthday. They weren't home so we just continued to walk around the city and catch up. It turned into a late night and I had to say goodnight. I'll see him again in March when I return, perhaps.