Day 34: Sunday, May 25, Jerusalem

A view of the slum across the valley from David's palace and the Temple Mount.

Today we headed to an excavation site on the side of a hill in Jerusalem. They think it might be near David’s palace because of some writing and other clues they found in the ruins of a house. Unfortunately, since I’m not writing this soon after like I expected, I don’t remember the name of the person to whom the house belonged. Part of the reason they know it was a rich and important official is that it had… a toilet. In conversation with our guide later that day about Bathsheba he argued that David’s affair with Bathsheba wasn’t technically adultery. It centered around a Jewish concept of conditional divorce; I don’t remember the whole explanation, but I do remember thinking that even if I accepted his starting assumptions, it was a very technical argument and iffy even then. I was more interested in the fact that Jethro felt compelled to argue that Israel’s hero king didn’t have any flaws, as opposed to Christians who look on that and can accept David’s flaws because being a “man after God’s own heart” doesn’t mean being perfect.

Before we left, I asked about some Arab houses on the other side of the small valley. The houses looked like prime property – they had a clear view of the old city and a nice valley and were right next to everything in Jerusalem. However, they looked like slums, and people obviously dumped garbage over the wall and into the valley below. Our guide said they belonged to some poor Arabs who were stuck in a hard place. They are “land rich” – they have no cash, but their property is worth a lot. For legal reasons they can’t sell to an Arab, but if they sell to a Jew then they risk being killed by other Arabs simply because they don’t want that area going to the Jews. As a result, they continue to live in poverty there.

From there we went through Hezekiah’s tunnel, a half-kilometer underground aqueduct built during King Hezekiah’s reign. Its purpose was to bring water into Jerusalem during a siege. It’s pretty amazing that they could successfully dig this tunnel from both ends simultaneously and meet – today we use lasers and other tech to be sure our tunnel diggers meet in the middle. The tunnel is narrow, short, and still has water flowing through it, so you spend most of your time walking slightly hunched with ice-cold water up to your knees.

For lunch we went through a local open-air market. This was for the locals, unlike markets in some places that are aimed at tourists. Offerings included fruit, hodge-podge electronics/household goods, baked goods, meats, and a few miscellaneous stalls. The dried apricots were irresistible, so my brother got some and we shared them on the bus. The apricots were neither cheap nor expensive. We also got some great (and cheap) cinnamon buns.

Backgammon is the new bingo.

While looking for some restrooms I came across a great sight in the back of the market. About 10 backgammon tables were lined up with older men playing, betting, and slapping each other on the back. It was like the AARP social. I wandered over and watched for a while. One spoke marginal English (and even that is stretching it). Through signs I asked if I could take some pictures, to which they readily agreed – so long as I showed them the results. Some chests puffed out, guts got sucked in, and serious thinking faces went on as I took pictures, which was actually too bad. The one quasi-English speaker “talked” with me for a while, and I got out of it that he had been born in NYC, moved to Israel when he was a little kid, and had a grandson or other young relative in NYC. When a board freed up I asked if he wanted to play backgammon, but he didn’t, which was disappointing. I’m not sure if he didn’t quite get it, or if I should have put out money and then we would have played, but it didn’t work.

That afternoon we headed to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial/museum. It is actually a compound with several different buildings, a monument garden, etc. Everything means something, and it is obvious that they put an incredible amount of both thought and money into this, which is in some ways an explanation of a big part of the purpose behind the modern state of Israel. The Holocaust is still the defining chapter in cultural Judaism.

The Pillar of Heroism: "Now and forever in memory of those who rebelled in the camps and ghettos, fought in the woods, in the underground and with the Allied forces; braved their way to Eretz Israel; and died sanctifying the name of God."

One monument we went through was dedicated to the children killed in the Holocaust. You enter a room that is pitch black save for a single candle in the center of the room, and the walkway splits and goes around this. However, the interior is constructed of glass and mirrors, so the single candle is reflected thousands of times all around the room. In the background a voice reads the name, nationality, and age of children killed in the Holocaust. In an odd way, the memorial to what might be the most revolting aspect of the Holocaust is also the most peaceful, but haunting.

The other primary building is the actual museum, though it is also a memorial. The architecture is something else, with the museum housed in a concrete triangular tube that juts out from the hillside and into the air. The museum zig-zags down the length of the structure, with a narrow skylight down the apex providing some natural light. The museum starts before the war and spends a large portion of its space chronicling a part of the Holocaust that isn’t as well known – the forced ghettos and ghetto wars, for example. There is story after story of death in just about every form, of Jews being flushed out of burning ghettos, of people recounting how they survived a mass shooting because they were hidden under the bodies of their friends, of the starvation that was the norm, and of the more infamous gas chambers. The museum superficially wrestles with some issues – the decision of some Jews to run ghettos for the Germans in an attempt to shield its occupants from worse fates, for example, but each one ends with the “mediator” finding out that he was truly a pawn. Much of the story is told through a patchwork of personal stories, and the personal stories serve to keep the reader’s heart open while the body count numbs the mind. (Interestingly, Corrie ten Boom did not get a panel, but she is referenced in one. The parents of this person, a child at the time, had been told that if anything happened to the parents, they were to go to the ten Booms. One day the Germans came and took away the parents while the children hid in a closet, and they then went and found the ten Booms.) Our guide had a personal story of his own: Jethro’s grandfather had been in one of the concentration camps, and it was his responsibility to drag the lifeless bodies out of the gas chamber and burn them – only after doing a body cavity search to be sure the dead hadn’t hidden anything valuable. His grandfather was one of the very few in such roles to survive, because when the Nazis knew the game was up they did not want these people around to tell the stories.

The end of the museum is a glass wall at one end of the tubular building that opens onto a very pretty view of a surprisingly green valley. It is the needed breath of fresh air.

I had about three hours if I remember correctly, and I was rushed through the second half by the time limit. It was a place where you could spend a whole day – part of it in the museum, but part of it on the rest of the grounds thinking about the horrors in the concrete structure while surrounded by the peaceful green of natural life. However, would I want to? Do I need to? I don’t know.

That evening we had dinner with some Israeli home schoolers. I had a good time and enjoyed talking with them. The house is, in many ways, a stereotypical “granola home school” house – messy (this one much messier than normal), books and educational toys everywhere, a skeleton hanging on the front porch, and a big totem pole in the center of their living room to top it all off. (The house previously belonged to a consul from the West Indies, if I remember correctly, and hence the totem pole.) Apparently the mess was due to their interpretation of the Old Testament of letting fields lie fallow every 7 years; they weren’t cleaning the house or weeding the garden for that seventh year. That explains the huge cobwebs on the ceiling. Their daughter, Rose, is the first home schooled kid in the army. Home schooling is sort of a shadow movement in Israel where most things are socialized. They are having the debate that existed here twenty years ago – do we seek legal recognition that might lead to restrictions, or do we just do our thing and lie low until someone bothers us?