I fucking hate Bible thumpers. There is nothing worse than these vitriolic little photons coming together by the bajillions to comprise the highest-energy beam of celestial light, the gamma ray, effusively emitting the equivalent of the Sun’s entire lifetime energy in just 10 seconds.
Just like these gamma rays, the guiding luminescence of the Holy Spirit approaches from the deepest recesses of the universe, is mostly created by violent events, and is always biologically hazardous. The sublimely beautiful religious message that these elementary particles make up is in fact poisoned by each individual constituent unit.
Ironically we now use gamma rays medically to eliminate cancerous cells, those devious little bastard-building blocks of life, actively plotting to overthrow the entire organism hosting them. Thank God.
Yet despite this opinion, here I am in that hotbed of hate, that crossroads of cultural and religious misunderstandings, the place where Moses, JC, and Muhammad all looked to as most holy, and whose followers look to for an excuse to break someone’s face over: Jerusalem. But come on! I complain, yet visiting this city is a must, a centerpiece of world heritage….
OK, who the hell am I kidding? I just came to here to act out my Assassin’s Creed fantasies, getting strange looks from old men sporting sidelocks and women in headscarves as I sidle up next to them, hands in prayer, hoping to “blend” and wait out pursuing Templars.
I’m gonna get you, Talal
Interestingly enough, this land lacks the multitude of proselytizers that saturates the West, clawing its way into airports, hospitals, street corners, and your goddamn, front yard when you’re just trying to watch some freaking football on Sunday and some little old lady’s ringing your doorbell trying to get you to willingly sign off on not receiving life-saving blood transfusions in the name of God whose real name is apparently Jehovah. JESUS!
This is not to say that the situation is better here; rather it is far more sinister. Although your days in the warm Israeli sun will generally be passed pleasantly, you will come to cut through the pleasant surface floating above the endemic seething hatred, much as oil (both olive and petroleum) floats over water, obscuring the true root cause of the region’s hostilities. And you might instead get burned by that divine sun without the cooling shade of all those olive trees getting cut down….
Come on, guys….WTF, not here…don’t do this, but ESPECIALLY not here!
The beneficial-detrimental paradox of sunlight is analogous to the hypocrisy of the super religious. They are the most likely to do what they tell others not to, the most sinful, the most hate-filled, spewing despicable homophobic slurs and always casting the first stone while supposedly keeping four letters constantly on their mind: WWJD?
Make people put him in a dome, apparently.
The whole system here reeks of this hypocrisy, from the metal detectors you pass to visit the Western Wall, to the fire started inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque destroying a 1000-year-old artifact, to the monks in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre:
Yes, the most important church in Christianity is basically built into a wall
The clanging of a metal barrier, though completely incongruous with the tranquil surroundings, still needed several attempts to break my peaceful trance. My mental state was motivated by the spiraling smoke of candles which illuminated dark recesses and the throbbing religiosity of the milling tourists who had traveled across hemispheres, the equator, and any other arbitrary global dividing line to get to this very spot to honor the most famous individual of all time. I was in line to enter a tiny chapel contained entirely by the large dome of a cathedral with a strategically placed hole in the ceiling so that God’s shining light would always beam down and kiss this very location. You could almost hear the angels singing.
I was racking my brains through all the admittedly paltry religious knowledge I had amassed to figure out if I had been waiting to step in and visit Jesus’ tomb in vain (wasn’t he already in heaven?). Basically I was trying to see if I had spent half my day to get here to look at an empty stone box. This had caused my stupor, at which point I was rudely interrupted by the clamor of metal on marble.
The most famous stone box you might ever see.
Was it some douchy tourist, tired of waiting in line to see the stone box, and taking it out on the barrier? No, it was the goddamn man of God, a fucking monk in Jerusalem, working in the touristiest site in the touristiest city on the planet throwing a tantrum because he had to deal with tourists! In a church, no less! After that he screamed at people to take a few steps back and stormed off. He wasn’t even a Catholic monk, so the “not-getting-laid-so-I’m-perpetually-butthurt” explanation did not apply.
Make a mental note of the guy in black (a note to stay away from him)
I had a girlfriend back home who ran with a Bible study crowd. They would meet on Fridays and constantly berate her for nitpicky little things she had done during the week as sinful. She would cry back at home to me due to that treatment for weeks…and then she found out all her “church buddies” were cheating on their wives. And making passes at her.
There was a priest at my church growing up whose complete inability to smile silently communicated his superiority to all us regular folk. Every Sunday he sneered at us down his thin nose as he delivered eternal sermons engineered to show off his intellect. I noticed he had a nice, shiny new car one week…when your job is praying all day yet you just got a Mercedes, clearly the church coffers have been pilfered.
But now I had seen it all: this greasy, long-haired, Rasputin-looking piece of shit that you probably would give a wide berth on the sidewalk to had he not been wearing a long, black cassock, an “employee” of this veritable Disneyland of the worldwide church complex, the gatekeeper of the literal square of land where Jesus had demonstrated his triumph over death, couldn’t even stop himself from yelling at some little old ladies on vacation.
They say the Second Coming is near, but I wish it had happened right then so Jesus could have woken up, stepped out the door of the little tomb/chapel, and bitch-slapped that monk. Then made him turn the other cheek.
Only later did I learn that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is infamous for its perennial brawls that erupt between various factions of monks. Priests….fist-fighting…literally over Jesus’ tomb. Next time I don’t have an extra dollar or accidentally say “shit” in church, I’m not gonna feel so bad.
There exists a disorder known as Jerusalem Syndrome. Look it up, it’s totally a thing. I figured you’d be lazy, so I put in a link. Sufferers display an acute case of religious psychosis, thought to be caused by the city’s effect on visitors. It tends to afflict only tourists, and usually those with pre-existing mental conditions, but could it also be present in the residents, albeit in a chronic form? Could this explain the generally batshit status quo of this place?
The tunnel to get to the Western Wall, after the metal detectors
I got lost walking back to the hostel, and turned a corner to stop dead in my tracks: 7 or 8 youths sat in front of me in green uniforms, chatting loudly with each other, which I hardly noticed since my eyes were drawn to the glistening banana clips of their AK-47s. I wasn’t about to act suspicious and risk the possibility of spitting up bullets and carrying around a colostomy bag for the rest of my life, so I just kept on walking towards them. To smooth over an already awkward entrance, I decided to ask for directions. Each one of the men, all younger than me, stared at me with eyes that had either seen combat multiple times or had grown up desensitized to the reality that by simply taking the city bus, they were risking a whole lot of bomb-provoked busted intestines.
They clutched at their rifles a bit, and I perspired in the quiet alleyway. Waiting. One said something to the other in a harsh tone, and the other soldier responded in Hebrew just as harshly. Still waiting.
Right then, they all burst into smiles. “Yes, yes, we know. Go straight, make a right and you will be on the main road! Enjoy your stay!” They waved as I walked away, and I left perplexed that they had treated me with such warmth, when they clearly could have blown me away several times over and probably then returned to what they were doing just as nonchalantly. Yet instead they turned out to be just a group of cool guys. Apparently not everyone here is out of their minds.
Lesson learned: Holy/chosen/religious clearly does not mean jack in terms of decency or respect. Clergy can be dicks just like laypeople, even if Jesus is only 10 feet away.
-Miguel (LA), 29, gettin holy with zombie Jesus in Jerusalem