Meta-discourse on blogs and gender (my favorite!!)

I did not believe them, but it is true once your pop you cannot stop.  While touring Israel all week, I have been looking forward to adding the second entry to my very nascent blog.  And there is so much to write about. 

1. I can write about articles I’ve read.

2. Stuff I’ve experienced.

3. Stuff I generally thing about all the time.

 For today, I’m going to stick to experience, since this is supposed to be a record of this season’s adventure, and thus I will continue rambling on about the settlers, and I a new topic – Christians.  After Shabbat with hard core settlers ( I mean actual territory-occupying-God-gave-us-the-land-and-it-is-a- sin-to-give-it-back settlers),  I headed on a tour of the  Church of holy Sepulchre build on the spot where it is said that Jesus was crucified and resurrected.  Only ten people at a time can enter the holiest place within the church – his “tomb,”and thus the line is intense, and people are pushy as hell. Being the good liberal that I am, I tried to understand the narrative of the other – pushing me to get to Jesus. People have been waiting decades to touch these stones that are standing in the place where their God once stood.

People are in trances, crying, kneeling,  crawling on their knees to the holiest places, while the majority of the people on the Russian Language tour (don’t ask  why i picked it,  I didn’t really, my cousins did and its half the price of other tours) are photographing, and even I couldn’t resist, and photographed a two monks praying in the spot of the last supper.

Overall, I understand intellectually that Jerusalem has been a holy spot long before Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Our temples where build on the ruins of others.  This land has been continually holy for thousands of years - it is an inherited holiness.  I just cannot get over the “ruins of others” part.

I experience it a bit like the way some people experience Modern Art. You know others appreciate it, and thus you go and pretend to appreciate it as well.  In Jerusalem I’m always a tourist, watching others pray, even as I pray. This is not to say that I don’t have moments of holiness – inspiration and such.  Yet those moment seem a  world away from a city that really should not belong to anyone, a city that breeds little intellectual or spiritual innovation because its members are worshiping the ancient, raising it on a pedestal above the current (for the most part).  

I cannot look beyond the politics of the Jerusalem, after all it is not a found city, it is not Tel Aviv, a place that was swamps until Jews drained those swamps and planted trees. Jerusalem already existed (before 1948) as a hyper-holy city, hell it already existed before Christ and before the Torah as a holy city.  It is true that under Jewish control, Jewish and Christians and Muslims can got to to the holy places, while under Muslim control that was not possible. I’m not blind to history; however, I also know that this holy city brings self-riotousness and violence into the world. The holy city is made political in absolute terms by becoming the capital of a modern state – the place of its courts and its Parliament instead of prayer of all traditions. The politics is not only interfaith.  Women cannot pray in minyan at the kotel because the Kotel belongs to israel, and in israel the ruling religion does not let women gather and pray.

 This actual and rhetorical  violence came to the forefront when I witness the swearing in ceremony of Israeli solders at the Kotel, I did not understand the speeches, all except for a single reference to the Book of Yehusha – the first of the books of the Prophets. In this book God commanded the Jews to  destroy or conqure the seven nations of Canaan. God gave the Jews a land already occupied by civilizations upon civilizations. Our Mount Zion, the location of our destroyed temples is also the location of the temple we destroyed.

In the Torah, God commands the following:

 ”Say to the people of Israel, When you pass over Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their figured stones, and destroy all their molten images, and demolish all their high places; and you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given the land to you to possess it” (Numbers 33: 50-53).

This was the ethic of the Bible -  and this continues to be the spirit of the ethic today, even if its translated into modern terms (The UN give it to us, the world sanctioned our presence,  instead of God gave it to us. We observe more human rights, we are democratic, instead of we are righteous and we are chosen. They are terrorists, instead of the they are pagans).  Ownership is no an unalienable absolute, and certainly not a catch all response. Thus, the politics of holiness do not impress me. 

 I find my holiness else where. If Torah in the code by which we should live our life – then I cannot say “Torah Tzia Tzion” (Torah goes out from Zion).  In many ways, despite it own troubles (they are huge and numerous) Torah Tzia Modernity, and Post-Modernity and even perhaps (I say it with my caution)Torah goes from from the emorphes concept that is the “west”. Just as in the time of the Talmud Torah Tzia Babylon- the authoritative Talmud, we study today.