MAUD NEWTON
FROM The New York Times Magazine
A FRIEND AND I were beginning that strange dance of making plans to make plans when I mentioned that I’d be traveling to Jerusalem soon. “We should get together right away,” he joked, “before you come down with Messiah syndrome.” It was the kind of precision-targeted crack only an old friend can manage. I can’t remember whether I laughed or winced first.
When I was young, my mother had a feverish conversion and started a church in our living room. I’d always been a tiny bit anxious that I might one day follow suit, hear the calling myself, start roaming the streets, preaching salvation. A committed but fearful agnostic, I’d never intended to tempt fate by visiting the Holy Land. But I was going to the Jerusalem Book Fair, and my husband, Max, who grew up in the comparatively staid Eastern Orthodox tradition, was joining me.
When we arrived, at dusk, the sky was a pale, glowing blue— eerily biblical, which, I had to keep reminding myself, made sense. As we sped into the city, past rocky white hills and almond trees bursting with blooms, we were overwhelmed by incongruous feelings of intense foreignness and intimate familiarity. This was a landscape we knew, from Sunday-school lessons and iconography and bad Old Testament movies, and a place we did not know at all.
Even the mundane became extraordinary. The almonds were soft and sweet, delicate as fruit. When I caught an olive as it fell from a tree and crushed it between my fingers, it stained my skin a brilliant red I couldn’t scrub away.
At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, priests of different sects tried to pray more loudly than one another. The chambers reverberated with their chanting. As pilgrims knelt to kiss Christ’s tomb, we climbed a staircase to the area said to be Calvary, site of the Crucifixion. It was not particularly hill-like, that dark and crowded little platform, and when the woman next to me cried, I felt as if I were intruding on a wake for someone I didn’t know.
Back on the street, the doors to a nearby mosque were tightly guarded, preventing even a peek to us congregating infidels. We walked on to the Western Wall, where I stopped, spellbound, despite that same feeling of separateness from someone else’s passion. Max pointed out that the men had about three times more room than the women to pray. We decided against writing prayers to tuck into the cracks and left the Old City on foot. Above us roiling tufts of gray clouds swept across the pallid sky, out over the wall of separation.
Inside the gates of the Temple Mount, not far from the gleaming golden Dome of the Rock, stood a group of column capitals, some chiseled in intricate florals, some in delicate curlicues, others in a sturdy basket weave, all jumbled together, like rubble, at the mercy of the weather. Throughout the city, walls rested on other, older walls, often of disputed provenance. Among these ruins of failed occupiers and kings, I kept thinking of the stories of my childhood: Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, Esther supplicating herself before the Persian king, Daniel interpreting the dreams of Babylon’s Nebuchadnezzar, the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate declaring Jesus the king of the Jews and then washing his hands of the matter. At times the past seemed so immediate, I could hardly breathe.
On our last day, we visited the Garden of Gethsemane. The gnarled olive trees, ghostly in their cragginess, are said to date to Jesus’s time. It was in this place, according to the Gospels, that he passed his last night praying, willing to die because he believed that in doing so he could redeem the sins of the world. As we looked out from that tiny plot of land, contemplating the divisions of modern Jerusalem, the afterlife (by which I mean the legacy) of this man seemed both enormous and tenuous.
I’d been warned that visiting the Holy Land intensifies your deepest religious beliefs. That was unexpectedly true for even this ardent doubter. Seeing the remains of all the regimes and the people who had tried to infuse their faiths and customs and architecture into the place and then receded across the millennia, I couldn’t understand how anyone could feel sure of any belief, any way of being, in a place that is so constantly shifting. Like Jerusalem, I remained my own stubbornly uncertain self.