Celestial city
THIS should have been written in Jerusalem. I was booked on a flight to Tel Aviv, to report on the Bishop of Gloucester’s recent visit to Jerusalem and the West Bank (News, 6 June) but, after the flights had been cancelled, rebooked, and cancelled again, the plug had to be pulled on my involvement. While airlines might let you down, a promise to the editor is a promise best kept; so I set out to write about a visit to Jerusalem without actually setting foot there.
There is a long history of journeying to the Holy Land in spirit, but not in body, including the bidding prayer in the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols — “in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem” — and the hopeful exhortation at the end of Passover prayers: “next year in Jerusalem”. In the very earliest days of Islam, Muslims would pray in the direction of Jerusalem, before the qibla (direction of prayer) was changed to Mecca.
For all three faiths, Jerusalem is an aspiration, an icon, a symbol of something ineffable, half-removed from the physical reality of the city. As A.B. Yehoshua wrote in 1981, “Thousands of books have been written about Jerusalem, and thousands more are still to be written. . . It is fixed in the consciousness of millions who have never set foot there and never will.”
Some of those who will never set foot in the city live just a few miles away. For Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank, reaching Jerusalem is at the mercy of permit-granters and border guards, and their mercy is not always bountiful. I once asked the Archbishop in Jerusalem, Dr Hosam Naoum, how he felt about the inability of many Christians in his diocese to visit Jerusalem. Re-reading his answer (News, 18 August 2023), I find my regret about being unable to travel put into sharp and shamefaced perspective: yes, it made him angry that so many Palestinians couldn’t visit, but “half the world cannot come, because of the challenges of getting an Israeli visa in Africa, the Arab countries, South-East Asia.”
Hearing voices
AN ALBUM of sound recordings from Jerusalem has helped to transport me to the city. One track captured the soundscape of a bank in the business district of West Jerusalem; another, the sounds of the souk in the Old City, in the occupied east.
Some years ago, I made a two-month journey around the Black Sea with a hand-held recorder, trying to capture a portrait of the diversity of communities that all have a share (however contested) in that coastline. Listening to the sounds from Jerusalem, I was struck that — except for the breaking of waves on the shore — all the sounds that I heard beside the Black Sea are there on a walk through the city: the mixing of Russian and Hebrew outside the synagogue in Odesa; the muezzin’s plaintive call in Trabazon; the universal music of children at play.
There were other resonances, though, that were not in the recordings. When I was in Odesa last year (Diary, 1 March 2024), an unwelcome addition to the soundscape was the wail of air-raid sirens. I did not hear the explosion of which they warned, but few in Gaza have been so fortunate over the past two years, and, at the time of writing, many in Israel, in occupied east Jerusalem and elsewhere, are sheltering from the prospect of Iranian strikes.
One track, “Restaurant Ambience with Hum of Hebrew Voices”, took on a different dimension after I had read Apeirogon by Colum McCann, which tells the real-life story of Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, an Israeli and a Palestinian who each lost a young child, and became peace activists. Aramin’s daughter, Abir, was shot dead by an IDF soldier after buying some sweets on her way home from school; Elhanan’s daughter, Smadar, was killed by a suicide bomber in a Jerusalem café. The last thing that she heard would have been similar to that peaceful hum of voices and clinking cutlery, before her eardrums were ruptured by the blast.
Thyme travel
WHEN I was in Jerusalem in the summer of 2023 (Diary, 25 August 2023), I was robbed of my appetite by the after-effects of a dodgy kebab. For several days, the only thing that I could stomach was boiled eggs, thankfully in plentiful supply at the Anglican centre, St George’s College.
I recall sitting on a shaded rooftop, looking across at the tower of the Anglican cathedral and the unromantic skyline of west Jerusalem (the Anglican compound stands just on the eastern side of the Green Line and is therefore, under international law, in land illegally occupied by Israel), eating a meal of egg with ka’ak al-Quds (a squashed ring of bread coated with sesame seeds, named after the city), the plain dish only enlivened with za’atar.
The aroma of za’atar — a blend of crushed thyme, sumac, and sesame seeds — is somehow more evocative than the taste. I first smelled it a decade ago, when a friend brought me a bag of the stuff from Jerusalem, and, in my mind, the smell is inseparable from the stories she told of a summer working in a hospice in the Old City. Matthew Teller, whose book Nine Quarters of Jerusalem has quickly become the must-have guide to the city, writes of a similar Proustian association, in his case with the smell of cumin, discovered on his first childhood visit: “Then as now, cumin’s crimson-brown sniff of old warmth would plant me mentally in the middle of Jerusalem’s walled Old City.”
Hunger pains
“JERUSALEM works, one way or another, in the service of religion, and when the pilgrims fail, the people are poor,” Colin Thubron wrote in his own richly evocative book about the city. Before the current war in Gaza, St George’s hosted a steady stream of pilgrimage groups. The flow of pilgrims was cut off after the 7 October attacks later that year, and the College hasn’t hosted a single group since, leaving the institution reliant on fund-raising.
The city has suffered from the dearth of tourist-pilgrims who have always been, for good or ill, part of its lifeblood, pulsing along the capillaries of the Old City’s narrow streets. In 1898, Edouard Schuré, French writer and collector of the esoteric, described the traffic of “Bedouins and camels” pushing their way through the “immense intestine” of the Old City. By all accounts, it is now more often an empty stomach. A city being starved in this way is a tragedy, though it cannot bear comparison with the horror of famine less than 50 miles away in Gaza.
Written in stone
IN MY reading, descriptions of the city echoed between books set in different times and written in different genres. In a novel set shortly after the 1948 war that divided Jerusalem between Jordanian-controlled east and Israeli-controlled west, Amos Oz’s narrator, Hannah, says: “This isn’t a city . . . it’s an illusion. . . All of a sudden the city seems very insubstantial.”
And then Thubron, writing about a spell in Jerusalem after the settlement reached at the end of the 1948 war had been violated by the Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel occupied east Jerusalem, observes: “The city was not built with hands. The imagined lay close above the material and drenched it in the mists and hues of faith.”
Thubron took an interest in Jerusalem’s archaeology, and spent a lot of time searching for the remnants of earlier, deeper layers of the city, buried by later structures. To know a city, you have to examine the substrata of stories on which the present illusions are built.
Francis Martin is a staff writer for the Church Times.