Story: Under the Shadow of These Rocks

To get to the West Bank from Jordan you must pass through three check points. Your passport is checked. You might be asked a couple of simple questions: “What is the reason for your visit?” or “How long will you be staying in the country?” (Vehicles that regularly cross the boarder have windows in their gas tanks for easy inspection; the underside is checked by guards holding mirrors mounted on long handles.) The “interviews” you submit to are perfunctory compared to what you experience once across the River Jordan. Crossing the Jordan—the symbolism does not fail to impress—is a political passage; and with quiet imagination it becomes a religious rite as well, a solemn procession, even a spiritual passage. For one who grew up thick in religion, reading of and thinking about this country, the imagination delivers easily.
In antiquity there were no bridges across the River Jordan. The act of crossing involved a passage of profound proportions: waters parted, a triumphant cleft formed. It was a covenanting ceremony. It is a common ancient theme: God pushing back water miraculously, providing places of safety. But the modern man crosses in steamy diesel buses while men with guns stare. I peer up at the machine gun turrets, topping the jungle of terebinth trees and shrubs. A hot sun filters through the leaves. I have arrived in the Middle East.
Once across the Jordan I am delivered to the West Bank customs station. The army personnel are young and fit, and the women remarkably handsome. They are sabras, Israeli-born and educated Jews. They wear tight beige uniforms and are hard-looking and serious. If they remove their sunglasses—this is a country of omnipresent glare—you can read in their eyes the solemn oath of Masada: Never Again. They flash perfunctory smiles. The work at hand is too important to be truly engaging. My baggage is inspected, passed to another, and then again inspected. A uniformed woman searches through my laundry, so carefully packed earlier that morning. She squeezes my rolled socks, and runs her hand around the inside corners of my bag. She searches my person with a metal detector and x-rays my shoes. She has dark eyes and olive skin. She smiles when she finishes and says she hopes I enjoy my visit, then turns to the next in line.
The day before my arrival in the West Bank I traveled to Petra, that grand palace carved out of the bowels of the Nabataean earth. Petra lay forgotten until one hundred and seventy-five years ago when the traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt “discovered” it. It became a rage in Victorian England. Shelley referred to it in a poem. Later Eliot evoked Petra in The Waste Land: “There is a shadow under this red rock/(Come in under the shadow of this red rock)….” I went to Petra, under the rare shadow, through the cleft in the red rock. I rode on horseback, led by an ancient dusty Arab who guided me for one dollar American. His horse shambled. I felt its ribs under my legs, and its ears twitched against the flies. Dismounting, my camera swung and hit the guide in the chest. He touched the spot and glanced at me with pain. I gave him another dollar. Petra is magnificent by any standard, yet it seemed hollow, extinguished under an ancient dust and covered in a sad monochromatic sameness. Like the Semitic peoples of 3000 years ago, I was seeking different pasture.
The countryside around Jerusalem is bitterly eroded. Once a lush forest it is now little but rock and scrub. Approaching Jerusalem you first see the walls of The Old City, then the gold Dome of the Rock—scene of Muhammad’s night visit to Heaven. “Glory be to Him who carried His servant by night from the Sacred Mosque to the Far-away Mosque,” declares the Koran. The Mosque attests to the triumph of the Muslim Arabs in a.d. 638. (You cannot touch one of the opposite sex in the temple area. There are guards posted to enforce this decree.) I do not enter the city on foot as caliph Omar triumphantly had thirteen hundred years before. I ride silently in a yellow bus. I lower my window and enjoy the evening breeze. The air is thick. The sun settles behind the hills surrounding the city. The light of the sky has dimmed and is losing its edge. The city looks indeed like the center of the world, as medieval man believed. The Dome glows in the last rays of day. Across the way the dome of the El Aqsa Mosque shines silver like a half moon. The walls of the Old City curve round and embrace the city. They are thick and follow the contours of the hills. Like a first impression, you are introduced to a city but once. Yet I have entered this city a million times since my youth. If Athens is a city of the mind, Jerusalem is a city of the spirit. I have dreamt of the city for as long as I can remember.
I arrived the first night of the High Holy Days, yamim noraim, Rosh Ha-Shonah, the beginning of the Jewish New Year, the first day in the month Tishri. For the Jew it is a time devoted to self examination, a time of introspection. I sensed the solemnity of the occasion. I observed it in the gait of the pedestrian and read it on the face of the soldier posted at the corner. It hung in the evening air like an aroma lingering after the day’s baking. As evening wore on the streets brimmed with the faithful. They marched gravely in the night. The dark Hasidim carried palms; their women walked several paces behind. Young and old, men and women, the streets were rivers of intent flowing to the source, to the Old City. They were going to the Wailing Wall, the Western Wall. They would pray at the remnant of the partition which two millennium ago surrounded the Temple of their ancestors. I stepped off the curb and filed in.
We approach the Old City through the Damascus Gate, and upon entering something unique occurs. I am forced to leave my world behind. Like the protagonist in a science fiction novel I enter another spectrum of reality. If time could be traveled it would be like this. It would push you like a driving wave of humanity upon a dark muggy night. It would offer you no sound except the shuffle of feet, no comfort but the whispered prayer behind you. It would deliver you to a new place. I doff my notions of modernity like a heavy jacket in summer. The shadow of the Gate, like a hollowed-out mountain, obscures the sky above. I time travel. It was through the Damascus Gate, on the 15th of July 1099, that the First Crusade entered the city. A forty-day siege had proved fruitless. But the Gate was at last secured and 12,000 footmen, 1300 knights, and their leaders, Godfrey de Buillon, Baldwin, Raymond of Toulouse and Robert of Normandy stormed the city, taking it from the Muslims. The Crusaders slaughtered the infidels. The Jews escaped to their synagogue, but the synagogue was set aflame and they were burnt alive. When the screams in the city stopped and all opposition was squelched—when the city was purged—William of Tyre wrote that the solders then “exchanged fresh clothes for those which were blood-stained, and walked barefoot with sighs and tears through the holy places of the city where the Savior Jesus Christ had trodden as a man, and sweetly kissed the ground which his feet had touched.”
The shops of the Muslim Quarter are shuttered; the dark Christian quarter to my right is silent. The air is damp and the stone walls I brush against are cold. I am on El Wad which leads to the Wall, and I notice that I have crossed the Via Dolorosa, the traditional path of Christ’s route to the crucifixion. History envelops me like a blanket of sound and smell. The closer I get to the Jewish Quarter the more apparent the press of the crowd, the narrower street becomes. I look overhead for relief. I spot a night star, and seek calm in the expanse of space. It is a fleeting illusion, and I am carried forward beneath obscuring arches and overhangs. I can no more battle against the current of the crowd than fly over it. If the city is a funnel and all its faithful are pouring into it, I am entering with them, en masse, into its narrowing neck. As I grow aware of a nascent claustrophobia, we spill out into a golden bath of light and space and low night air.
I stop and breathe deeply. The crowd closes forward around me. Across the paved plaza rises the 58 foot cliff of the Wailing Wall. It is illuminated and imposing; a great benign monolith. It beckons. No rabbi is needed at the Wall to mediate with God. Communication is direct at the Wall. The night is punctuated with the sharp blasts of the shofar. Shofar means “hollow” in Hebrew. The horn is sounded one hundred times each day of Rosh Ha-Shonah. Many are making their petition. The use of the shofar began as a primitive practice to scare demons away. It holds now an honored place in Jewish ritual. It is meant to awaken the slumbering soul to the passage of time. It asks the one great question: What have you done with your life? It echoes in the night air and rings in my ears.
The Talmud, not Scripture, is where you will find Rosh Ha-Shonah first mentioned. The words mean Days of Awe, or Awesome Days. I stand away from the practicing faithful, my back against a stone wall, watching. (“Observing” is too clinical a word for what I do. One simply watches events of awe; one does not observe them.) I have come very far for this. I pause in the shadows, shrinking from the glow of the Wall. The shofar rings. There is dancing. Some sway; others pray in silence. After a time, I feel I should leave. This is not my celebration. I no longer belong here and I want to leave while I cannot think about it, leave with it alive in my gut and in my heart, before it becomes a thing of my head. I turn back into the narrow street and walk from the Wall. Struggling against the arriving crowd, I leave the Old City as I arrived, through the Damascus Gate. I walk in silence. In the distance, behind the protective walls of the City, the shofar haunts me with its eternal question. What have I done with my life?