Homeward Bound, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

March 29, 2014 Martha Thomases 1 Comment

Everything I’d ever read by Jews about Jerusalem made me think it would be a religious experience.  I would be moved by the history, by the centuries of evidence that my people belonged in this geographical space.  Just as I had been moved at my son’s Bar Mitzvah, to see him reading from the same handwritten texts handed down by my people for millennia, I would be moved to walk the ancient streets of the Old City.

And then, for me, at least, not so much.

Here’s the thing:  Jerusalem is filled with ultra-orthodox people of several different religions.  I tried counting the different kinds of Jews, and gave up.  Some wear yalmakas, some wear big black  hats.  Among those who wear big black hats, there are hatbands of different colors, all of them dark.  Some wear black suits, and some wear black suits with what looks like beige bathrobes over them.  Some have beards, and some don’t.  Some have side-curls, and some don’t.  Some who have side-curls have beards, but some don’t.  Some observant women wear wigs, and some wear scarves.

I’m not as attuned to the different holy criteria that the Muslims are trying to obey, but there are similar differences in their attire.

There are so many different Christian sects that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (thought to be the place where Jesus was crucified and buried) is not only divided up into many tiny rooms for each, but a bunch of other Christians, perhaps feeling crowded out, claimed another location and built another church, which is also divided up a bunch.

Jerusalem became a holy city because it contained the First, and then the Second Temple.  This capital-T Temple was not like a modern synagogue.  It was the place that faithful Jews came to sacrifice, to bring an animal offering tot God to be burned by the priests.  The Western Wall became sacred when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, because it was closest to the building where these sacrifices took place.  That building contained a room that faced west, which only priests could enter, and then only once a year.  That room was where God lived.

All the fighting over thousands of years is about who can be closest to this spot.  It’s where the Muslims built one of their own holy places, the Temple Mount.  Everybody wants to be near God, the cosmic version of the Cool Kid’s table.

When there was no longer a Temple at which to make sacrifices, Jews had to find new ways to think about God and what was expected of them.  Since we were chased out of country after country, continent after continent, we had to adapt to a deity who didn’t live in one room.  We had to find ways to function in communities that might differ from our own, and from each other.

This phenomenon is known as the Diaspora.  In my mind, this might be the best thing that ever happened to the Jewish people (except for, you know, the killing and the plundering and the persecution that went along with it).  It forced us to find ways to live as a minority community while retaining our own identity.  It forced us to consider new ideas and new ways of thinking.

It proved that the God in whom we believe is not limited to one physical space, but hears us wherever we are.  As time went on, we began to understand that we could live a godly life without the promise of heaven (nor the threat of hell), and without necessarily believing in a God.  We could be good Jews — even excellent Jews — and still be atheists or agnostics.

These are not things that the Jews of many hats in Jerusalem necessarily believe.  (The way it is with Jews, these are not things that the hatless Jews of my own synagogue necessarily believe. ) Most of them think Jews should be in Israel, maybe only in Israel.  They think it’s the only way to be neighbors with God, and they think that is the most important part of being Jewish.  They think it will bring about the Messiah.

Not me.  I think the most important thing about being Jewish is to leave the world better than I found it, and to get into some really interesting arguments along the way.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, also thinks that any life worth living has more hummus in it than she had been eating before this trip.