Berkley Center

I finally managed to find my way to Jerusalem. While stunning, fascinating, and particular, Jerusalem did not make me feel any more spiritual that Venice, Berlin, or even my university dorm. However, it was, by far, the most beautifully absurd place I have ever visited.

The crow’s flight distance from Amman, Jordan, to Jerusalem is no more than 44 miles. Yet, as similar as this may be to the distance between Washington, DC and Baltimore, the journey can take an entire day. The slow, multi-layered, and intimidating border is in itself an experience. A quite tragic one, too.

On the Jordanian side, you are likely to witness terrible disorganization. On the Israeli side, sheer discrimination. While white Western men and women have a relatively easy time going through the checks and avoiding an Israeli stamp on their passports, Arab nationals, ethnic Arabs, and Palestinian citizens in particular are systematically subject to seclusion, rejection, and humiliation. Many do not make it through at all, even after multiple attempts and no reasonable ground for suspicion. In fact, it is harder for my host-father, who was born in Jerusalem, to visit his hometown, than it is for me, a random and uninformed foreign student.

Once you pass the border and begin your bus ride, you reach a second border, which separates West Bank Palestinians from East Jerusalem and Israeli territory. The concrete wall that surrounds the entire West Bank comes to sight after driving through a set of hills and spaces filled with much more vegetation than in Jordan, where water is very scarce. On top of these same hills you can see surreal Israeli settlements that look as if somebody cut out pieces of Northern Virginia and placed them on top of arid Middle Eastern hills.

Once you finally reach the third wall, the beautiful ancient one surrounding the Old City of Jerusalem, you are overwhelmed by the complexity and ethnic-religious mixture that characterizes the city. Starting from inside the ancient walls and the Armenian, Arab, and Jewish quarters you can see the sharp contrast between the Holy Sepulcher, populated by European, Russian, Philippine, and Latin American pilgrims, the Wailing Wall and its side chambers, where only a few English-speaking visitors stand out among the predominantly Jewish Orthodox crowd praying and collecting money to fund their synagogues, and the Dome of the Rock (the al-Aqsa Mosque), where non-Muslims are not allowed in on Fridays by two Israeli soldiers standing at the gate.

Yet, the most formidable tour can be done outside of the Old City in Measharim, the Jewish Orthodox quarter where people dedicate their lives to the study of scripture and hardly accept visitors who do not comply with the quarter’s customs. The area, abandoned more or less to itself, mostly by the choice of its own inhabitants, is by far the dirtiest in Jerusalem, and walking through it you can perceive a blunt feeling of non-acceptance.

After spending very few hours in Jerusalem it seems to me as if it remains a weird puzzle that, forcefully put together by circumstances, proves that while religious groups can disdainfully tolerate each other, they can also maintain divisive lines in society that intertwine with political and geographical conflict and deepen tensions.

After just one day in Jerusalem I could grasp that faith and practice in the city is intricate and multi-faceted. I have barely scraped the surface during my short time in the city and the region. However, Jerusalem gave me the impression of being a hub for different and incompatible systems of collective folly. Yet, by considering it folly, I do not wish to demean or over-simplify what are fascinating and complex moral and political systems. Even folly, in its removal from reality, can be beautiful and intricate, and places like Jerusalem should only encourage people to further explore religious worldviews in order to engage in dialogue, however different your opinions and convictions may be.