Jerusalem, the Earthly

5 AM, I’m shivering. The icy February 2022 fog wraps around the deserted Terminal 2, closed for renovations, on the outskirts of which my hotel stands. I wait alone at the stop in the pitch-black night for the first shuttle of the day, which is supposed to take me to T1. I have no idea where I’m going. All I know is the name: Jerusalem. I’m entirely goy, just as entirely atheist, but I’ve been visiting that imaginary city for decades. It haunts, fantastical, the medieval images that once occupied me for so long. It regularly creeps into my ears through the misfortune of news reports from radios around the world. It crystallizes so many of humanity’s delusions, of which I’m a part. I know nothing about it, haven’t read a single guidebook. But I want to see it, walk its streets, live it for a few days. Make it real, tangible.

The flight is on time. This is the era of mandatory FFP2 masks on all flights landing in Italy (Europe?). The crew valiantly fights against passengers’ ingenious attempts to remove them: sipping their drinks milliliter by milliliter, nibbling their snacks cubic millimeter by cubic millimeter, feigning breathing difficulties, yanking off the elastic bands... A rabbi passes through the rows collecting donations. Men put on their tefillin, drape their prayer shawls, and rock to the rhythm of their prayers. Already, the sense of elsewhere.

Ben Gurion Airport is a stunning airport—monumental, bright, functional, adorned with archaeological remnants and enormous photographs showcasing the country’s great leader in its works. I collect my visa from a kiosk, quickly endure the routine interrogation from a military officer slumped in his seat, withdraw some shekels from an ATM, get my nostrils swabbed at one of the many molecular testing stations in exchange for a yellow all-inclusive resort-style wristband that grants me passage through the outer doors. I spend ages (I think I’m just not good at this) in the crowd trying to find a sherut heading to Jerusalem, then lose myself in the landscape. Mediterranean-style—red earth, stunted vegetation, overrun with sprawling construction. I do glute exercises in this traffic, where a Neapolitan driver would embody road indolence. Endless traffic jams signal the city’s approach. The sherut drops me a few steps from my hotel, the Saint George’s Cathedral Pilgrim Guest House, right on the edge of the dotted lines on maps marking the divide between Jewish and Arab Jerusalem. It’s a pleasant complex with an inner garden and beautiful rooms featuring exposed stone vaults—and thank goodness, because I’m not allowed to leave until I get my test results. The reception staff, incredibly helpful, guide me through the myriad of meal delivery options. A roof over my head, a full stomach—all that’s left is to wait. Read Caillois, check the increasingly precise, increasingly ominous rumors of war brewing, yet again, in Europe, and navigate the city’s virtual map to get a sense of where to head once freed.

The next day, it’s done, and my first destination is, quite naturally, the Old City. The first gate I come across is Jaffa Gate, so Jaffa Gate it is—leading from the chaos of vehicles of all kinds into the labyrinth of alleys packed with goods of all kinds.

A travel journal that’ll bring back memories! Even if the period would’ve been better suited for a peaceful stay. (No COVID, no wall, some relaxation between the different communities...)

Good evening! 🙂,

I was there too during a relatively calm period in terms of coexistence among the very diverse population. As a carefree tourist, I didn’t sense any palpable tensions. The military and police presence was even lighter than in France under *Vigipirate*, or at least more discreet.

Wandering aimlessly, I strolled through this city of stone, its narrow and often dimly lit alleys. And the slopes! That was my first discovery: Jerusalem is a mountain city.



It has the charming side of Oriental cities, with its tiny shops overflowing with everything and often anything. It smells of spices and sesame.



It’s also ever-changing. While the architecture—beyond the religious buildings that are everywhere (who would’ve thought!)—is very uniform, it’s not hard to tell which neighborhood you’re in just by observing the people around you. Step by step, calves burning, I wander. Oh, look—the Church of the Holy Sepulchre! A man is riding a scooter inside, while another, whose ankles I can see under his cassock since he’s on a ladder, adjusts a lightbulb in the edicule housing Christ’s tomb. Doesn’t exactly scream mysticism...

Endless security checkpoints later, I emerge in front of the Western Wall, strictly divided in two: a large space for men, a small one for women. I walk along the Al-Aqsa wall. The labyrinthine paths won’t lead me to the Dome of the Rock, whose gleaming dome I’ll only see from afar.

Yesterday I walked, crisscrossed the Old City; today I’ll circle it. A piano plays at Zion Gate. An old man rests, or meditates, at the Moroccans’ Gate. I get lost, descend into an impassable ravine, retrace my steps, can’t find the path that would let me follow the ramparts. I completely backtrack—back to Zion, back to Jaffa—then climb up to the New Gate, then Damascus Gate, Herod’s Gate, zigzag between cars parked every which way to reach Lions’ Gate, see the Golden Gate below, walled up (they’re waiting for the Messiah to open it), and end up strolling through the cemetery that runs alongside it (to be the first to welcome the Messiah, if I understood the plan correctly).

Far more humbly, what I’m really missing is a Google Maps plan (hence my fall into the ravine). The paper map of the city I got at the hotel shows the main lines and axes but isn’t nearly detailed enough. Plus, it’s so convenient not to worry about anything, to wander aimlessly and, when you’ve had enough, let the compassionate satellite guide you back home. My Israel plan extension appears active to the Vodafone employees I contact, but the internet disappears completely when I move away from the hotel’s Wi-Fi orbit, and as for my phone—it’s simply vanished.

On top of the internet technical glitch, there’s the camera charger breaking down.



Off to the modern part of the city to try and sort things out. Wide avenues with trams that look just like the ones in Bordeaux. Shops like anywhere else in Europe—same brands, same storefronts. What stands out is the intense mix of buildings from the 19th century to today, with no clearly defined neighborhoods, as if the city first developed in a very open way, then filled in, each space getting whatever architecture was current at the time it was built, no order, no overall plan. Another standout is the sheer number of languages you hear everywhere and how they blend with Hebrew in a single conversation. And then there’s the food—you eat *well* here: soups simmering in huge cauldrons lined up outside, enjoyed at tables set up on the sidewalks, and absolutely massive stalls of everything that can go into a salad (all the dried veggies, all the greens, every kind of dried or fresh fruit, every seed imaginable—*everything*), tossed together on the spot. I think I went into every camera shop in vain, only to finally find a supposedly universal charger in a basement hardware store that never worked. I also think I went into half the mobile phone shops, equally in vain, since I couldn’t bring myself—maybe wrongly—to get a local SIM card, which the employees, with infinite patience for my stumbling English and clearly too limited for a technical conversation, kept pushing. A day away from synagogues, mosques, and churches, in Jerusalem.

The guy who single-handedly takes down Siberian tigers while simultaneously piloting four fighter jets (myth-making isn’t just for bygone eras...) is amassing troops at the Ukrainian border, according to this morning’s papers.

No phone, so Petra—so close, where local agencies offer day trips—will have to wait.

So what?

I really don’t feel like chasing down places where old geezers ogled the young and plump Suzanne, where King Lyre did the same with Uri’s wife, where the Hope of Christians agonized on a cross to atone for the first man’s sin and open the gates of salvation to his followers, where he told a pretty repentant prostitute "Noli me tangere"... It’ll stay a heavy mental topography, nothing more.

There *is* one place that tempts me, though—a place that, in the life of a preppy teen forming their worldview through literature, had a certain weight:

The just will respond to absence with disdain and answer only with cold silence to the eternal silence of the Divinity.

It’s solemn, it hits hard, and it’s got style. Well done, Alfred! Let’s go for the Mount of Olives.

The elevation isn’t just intellectual and moral. It climbs steeply from Jaffa Gate, drops deep into a narrow valley, then rises again in a sharp slope. The white terraces lining the hillsides—so visible from the Old City—aren’t a quarry but a massive cemetery. The panoramic view of the layered city is stunning.



And it’s beautiful to lose yourself in contemplating the light on the gnarled trunk of such an ancient olive tree, dreaming of peace—impossible.

A third of my battery left, even with drastic power-saving, before my camera dies. I have to make a strategic choice about what visual memories I want to take with me.

The market, Mahane Yehuda, is a must. I skirt around Mea Shearim (I read that women are required to wear long skirts there, like mermaid fish, and I’m happily mobile in pants, with two legs and a crotch between them).

A stroll through the colorful, cacophonous abundance, filled with accessible promises of textures and flavors.















In the afternoon, a long walk toward the "Greek colony" I spotted on the map, passing through the "German colony" along the perfectly straight Emek Efraim and the winding adjacent streets. Wide sidewalks, lush gardens, the shade of pine trees, old houses and small recent buildings—it’s a pleasure to wander away from the busy downtown avenues, even if I get lost.

This is my last full day: tomorrow will be dedicated to taking the mandatory PCR test to be allowed into Italy, far away in an Arab hospital since it’ll be Shabbat in the Jewish part of the city, followed by the transfer to the airport.

I have to decide whether to go or not. The overwhelming terror that engulfed the very young adult when she realized that inhumanity is inherent to humanity, that the unthinkable can be meticulously planned, has become marginal in my life, but it’s still intact. I know I won’t return to Jerusalem, now a real city where I have nothing left to do, and I think I’ll regret it later if I don’t go. So I tremble, and I go.

Yad Vashem is a vast park on Mount Herzl.

Trees, grasses, pathways,

a museum displaying documents and artifacts, tracing the history of the annihilation of the Jews (I’m not Jewish, I won’t write Shoah or Holocaust, adopting, as a European, the German translation "Die Vernichtung des Judens"), where teachers guide distracted, noisy high school students.

and memorial monuments:

a freight car that the tracks lead into the void,

the Garden of the Righteous, where each has a tree and a plaque,

a massive sculpture dedicated to Jewish soldiers who fought against the Nazis,

a Pillar of Heroism,

a vast bare room where the eternal flame burns,

....

the memorial to the 1,500,000 murdered children. A dark room, mirrors where an infinite multitude of candles shimmer, and neutral voices reciting: A name, a first name, an age, a place A name, a first name, an age, a place A name, a first name, an age, a place A name, a first name, an age, a place A name, a first name, an age, a place A name, a first name, an age, a place A name, a first name, an age, a place A name, a first name, an age, a place A name, a first name, an age, a place A name, a first name, an age, a place A name, a first name, an age, a place A name, a first name, an age, a place .... .... ....

A man in uniform stops the taxi—Arab, of course, since it's Shabbat—near the airport. He carefully checks the papers, the driver’s first, then mine. - Where are you coming from? - Jerusalem. You know, it’s a pretty well-known city in the world, and I wanted to see it.

😐

If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand wither! May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not make Jerusalem the chief joy of my heart!

If I forget you, Jerusalem, it’s because I don’t know you. I’ve never lost myself in your dust, immersed in your colors, your scents, your flavors. I’ve never brushed my fingers against your stone walls, silent witnesses to so many tears, so much blood.

If I forget you, Jerusalem, it’s because I know you poorly. All that reaches me here is the fury, the rumblings, the hatred of some, of others, leaving you no hope of ever being what you are, what you’ve always been—the cradle of cultures so close yet unable, or no longer able, or never able to be together.

If I forget you, Jerusalem, I’ll seek you in books...

If I forget you, Jerusalem, then I’ll wander through enticing or striking images, through the words of this travel journal (which managed to overcome so many hassles and petty troubles)... sensitive strolls through your colorful alleys, poignant wanderings through your allegorical places.

Like a lament on Golgotha, whose stigmata you’d find on your calves and glutes.

A via dolorosa. What was I thinking, not reading any guidebook beforehand but packing Vigny and Caillois (not his *Ponce Pilate*, though)? Jerusalem—a mental construct?

Should I have let the adult make real, materialize the little girl’s fantasy?

And for the technical hiccups, if only you’d had the phone number of the supreme organizer!

A delightful read.

The Alpheus River, a man who once embraced vast swaths of human knowledge, now cares only for stones. That said, *Ponce Pilate*, which I read a very long time ago, is a beautiful and painful text.

The little girl knew nothing of Jerusalem. The "Holy City" dates back to my third decade, to the surprise of realizing that Christianity hadn’t vanished with the Middle Ages and the study that followed. This city had become anger, the absolute of anger. Faced with the overwhelming pride of bipeds who claim to carry out against others—just as convinced as they are—the mission entrusted by their God, as if He weren’t capable of accomplishing it Himself without their pitiful and all-too-often deadly help. Anger is cumbersome. And the only way to get rid of it was to sweep away the city’s mental power with the broom of its reality: its streets, its chaotic traffic, its cosmopolitan flavors, its diverse religious figures walking its streets among thousands of other people just living there with their ordinary—or nearly ordinary—problems, its cacophony...

It became sadness. Sadness is more flexible.

Kola, thank you for this beautiful text. The unwritten continuation of this psalm is a call for cruel vengeance, however.

Hello UM,

he imposed a Noli me tangere on a pretty repentant prostitute

Given the delicate song whose lyrics serve as your incipit, we rather expected him to reply: I'm tempted…

where the Roi Lyre did the same with Uri’s wife.

Are you sure about the spelling of the name? 😉

Hi, Yes, absolutely sure about the spelling. Not entirely sure about the instrument in question, though. Apparently, it looked like this: https://youtu.be/B4jyh7a1WyE?si=qqdfVZhye5QmgKPl Catherine

Hello, Yes, absolutely sure about the spelling. Not entirely sure about the instrument in question, though. Apparently, it looked like this: https://youtu.be/B4jyh7a1WyE?si=qqdfVZhye5QmgKPl Catherine

I thought you were talking about King Lear. My mistake.

Not exactly the same skies... But if you think about it... an old king wants to divide his kingdom among his 3 daughters, but for that, they must adore him with *a lot* of ostentation... a faint echo is possible 🙂

Not exactly the same skies... But if you think about it... an old king wants to divide his kingdom among his 3 daughters, but for that, they must adore him with a lot of ostentation... a faint echo is possible 🙂

I didn’t understand the connection between King David and his Lyre and the other King Lear. The concept of the "Lyre King" was new to me. Where does this similarity come from? A well-known historian?

And where does this similarity come from?

From the game.

Catherine