Arriving at the restaurant, we found a thin man picking nervously at his beer mat. He had a large fluffy cloud of black curly hair that made “balding me” instantly jealous. Over three too small, too expensive, unnecessarily exotic beers, the three of us got to know each other. We asked for his opinion on our going to Jerusalem. “I was domiciled there for seven years,” he said. “I visit now, occasionally, when I can muster the courrrage.” Israeli’s roll their r’s in an extremely pleasing way that should come as standard with the English language, just as cars come with airbags. “Here… well… it is no picnic, sure, but there are fewer people foisting sharp objects at me. There are so many attacks now that we don’t even make major stories out of them. They appear only in the daily rrroundups, between adverts for insurance.”
Foisting sharp objects at me. Oded had a way with words. A way in general, actually. I found him hypnotic. Sometimes you meet someone and he’s such a brilliant, perfectly formed character that you can’t quite believe he can exist here, in highly flawed Real Life™. It’s like bumping into Hannibal Lecter in a newsagent buying Haribo. Were Oded a casserole, the ingredients would have been:
1x Eeyore
Half a cup of manically depressed Woody Allen
250g of David Foster Wallace
The hair of Robert Smith (from The Cure)
All cooked in deadpan, until lightly disorientated. I fell quickly into deep, platonic love with him. With a real-life Israeli here for my enjoyment, I began peppering him with questions. Here I had questions. I had my notepad with me because I always have a notepad with me. After the fourth question, he looked towards it and said, “I’m not rrreally enjoying being the Israeli corrrespondent.”
“No?” Humans usually love any chance to confetti other humans with their opinions. Especially in Israel. We’d only been here three days, but it seemed to me that many Israelis had long stopped waiting for a question before loudly shouting its answer at you.
“Your literary endeavourrr is completely futile,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It will fail. How do you explain a country? It’s impossible. Rrridiculous, even. It would be nothing more than a lie.”
I gripped the edge of the table. “But by that logic there would be almost nothing we’d be able to speak about. We couldn’t even discuss this table. I don’t even know what type of wood it is.”
He smirked. “Yes, so we should not. Or we should speak only of its function. It is a good table for rrresting our beer upon, no? My beer feels verrry supported upon it.”
“Okay, that’s the table done,” I said, slapping it with my palm. “Shall we talk about the glass I’m holding next?”
Oded nodded briskly. “A good glass. I think your beer feels verrry secure in it.” A wry smile crossed his lips. His first of the night. “I’m sorry, Adam, but I don’t want to be your opinion puppet. Also, I’m Isrrraeli. I’m absolutely soaked in this culture. So many people have tried to explain us. It is a fool’s errrand.”
He was right, of course, but I reserved the right to try anyway. Narcissism is the writer’s superpower. Even the very occasional writer. Three young soldiers in uniform walked past the restaurant’s open front. Annett’s gaze followed them. “Did you also do military service?” It was hard to imagine Oded with a gun.
He sighed. “No. I was neither for nor against it. As a seventeen-year-old, I was simply too ignorant to understand the rrramifications either way. They interviewed me for four hours and decided I was ‘mentally unfit to serve.’”
“Did that surprise you?” Annett asked.
He paused to consider this, stroking the bottom of his glass. “Not rrreally, no. Mostly because we had spent much of those four hours discussing how depressed I was and how much I wanted to blow my own brains out. Also, the day before the interview someone had kicked a football at my head. It left me with a nervous tick in one eye. That was probably verrry fortuitous.”
Only Oded could find being hit in the head with a football fortuitous. “At the end of the interview, they did ask if I would consider a job defusing bombs. I think they thought, ‘This kid wants to kill himself anyway. Let him do some good in the process.’” His wry smile returned. “I politely declined.”
Oded was the blackest of black comics. Someone so fused to his trauma, so honest and self-deprecating with it, that he wore it like a bow tie. This was not a man you wanted good things to happen to; he’d have no idea what to do with them. If he found a one-hundred-shekel bill on the floor, he’d bend down to pick it up, put his back out, and run up a five-hundred-shekel medical bill. He was wonderful. I wanted to surgically attach myself to his hip. “Do many people fake being mentally ill to avoid their military service?”
“Yes. I had one friend who didn’t want to serve and so every morning before roll call he would deliberately wet his bed. Eventually they let him go.”
“Is there long-term stigma for people who don’t serve in the military?” Annett asked, while signalling the waiter for another wine.
“In job interviews they always ask me if I served. I say I was found mentally unfit. Then they look at me and say, ‘You seem fine to me.’”
Oded seemed many things, but not fine. There was a lull in the conversation. I took some gulps of my well-supported beer thinking about how we live in a world where refusing to join the army makes you mentally ill. The people not dragged kicking and screaming into battle would be the ones I’d worry about.
“Are you still depressed now, Oded?” I asked.
“No. I have a good shrrrink now. She costs a third of my income. But she’s certainly worth it.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, when I first went to see her, I was absolutely drrrowning in self-loathing. I’m not anymore. You don’t go to a shrink, Adam?”
“No,” I said raising my palms. “I won’t even go to a doctor unless something is about to rot off.”
“Huh,” he said, with the sort of surprise one might have upon learning the new Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard was a black lesbian immigrant with disabilities. “All my friends go to a shrink. I think this is the true Isrrraeli national hobby.” He glanced down at my notepad. “You can put that in your book, if you like...” He said the word book as though it were something unfortunate he’d just stood in.
“Adam always thinks he knows best,” Annett interjected. “He’s totally un-helpable.”
Oded’s eyes narrowed to thin slits. “I’m verrry surprised. You are obviously sick, Adam. You need help.”
“YES!” said Annett. “I’ve been saying that!”
“What?” I said, slapping the tabletop. “Don’t you start, Oded. I’m not sick. I’m perfectly fine. If anything, I’m swimming in self-love, not self-loathing.”
“Exactly.” He nodded. “Exactly. That’s the problem. You are sick, Adam. Verrry sick. You should go see a shrrrink.”
Annett high-fived Oded. He was so startled by this happy human gesture of camaraderie that he spilt some of his no-longer-well-supported beer down himself.
We spent the walk home trying to decide if we should go to Jerusalem.
“I think we shouldn’t,” Annett said. “It just seems too risky and there’s plenty of other places we could go. How about Haifa?”
“Jerusalem is the main reason we wanted to come here.”
“Yeah, but that was when it was calm. Comparatively speaking.”
“I think we need to go. Going to Israel but not seeing Jerusalem is like going to the dentist but refusing to open your mouth.”
“That’s a strange analogy.”
“Thanks,” I said, as we waited at the curb for the light to change.
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“Oh. Well, I mean, Israelis live and function amongst these kinds of dangers every day. Surely we could handle just three of them?” The light changed. We stepped out into the street. Annett said nothing for a few steps. A bicycle whizzed past, ignoring our right of way.
“The risks are far higher
than within our normal lives, but I guess they’re still relatively low. Compared to a job defusing bombs anyway.”
I hugged her, nearly knocking her off her feet. “Great! I’m sure it will be worth it. You’ll see.”
The next day, our backpacks on, we headed for the train station. Two ambulances rushed past us, their sirens forcing us to put fingers in our ears. I felt a spike of adrenaline down my back. My pulse quickened. Directly ahead we saw police tape across the closed road that would have led to the station. On the ground behind the tape sat a girl crying hysterically, leaning against a railing. A metre from her was a large patch of blood. Someone approached the girl and embraced her. Whatever had happened here, had just happened here. We weren’t safe in Tel Aviv either. Neither were they. It explained a lot about them.
My hands trembled occasionally during that train ride. A discouraging development. There was a lot of security at Jerusalem station when we arrived. As we waited for the public bus that would take us to our hostel, I couldn’t help but eye everyone with suspicion, wondering if at any moment someone was going to pull a knife or gun. There had been numerous attacks on the buses in the previous weeks. Including at the very stop where we were waiting, which had only the frame of its glass shelter left.
“You’re doing it too, right?” Annett asked, as we took our seats in the bus. I took a deep breath. “Watching everyone suspiciously like they’re about to blow me up? Yes.”
I felt significantly lighter once we made it to the lobby of Abraham Hostel, and not because I got to remove my rucksack. We headed immediately to the bar to inebriate ourselves. Annett barely drinks in Germany, but as soon as we’re on holiday she morphs into some kind of WINE MONSTER. Especially if she’s stressed. “I think I’ll get another wine,” she said, standing up from our table in the large communal lounge area. “I think happy hour ends soon. You want something? Wine maybe? It’s two for one. I’ll get four.”
Abraham Hostel is the biggest and most famous hostel in Jerusalem. I looked around at the other travellers, trying to work out who comes to Jerusalem on holiday. I heard Annett at the bar. “No, this is just two. I want two plus the two for free. Oh sod it, how about I just take the bottle? Cut out the middleman…”
As Annett rejoined me, a tall, wiry, blond American called Larry had cornered a middle-aged English couple one table over from where we were sitting. Larry had the feel of a surfer who had never quite got around to actually surfing. He wore a red T-shirt two sizes too big, as if ready and waiting for excesses his mouth had never delivered.
“I don’t think there will be another election,” he said. “Obama will change the constitution. He’s the devil incarnate. Did you know he has a secret meeting every Thursday in the basement of the White House? Creates a kill list of people to be murdered that week.”
The man squirmed in his seat. “Erm. Hmm. Is that so.”
His wife stood up. “Well, we wanted to do that thing, hunny… In the room… We should get going…”
“Lovely to have met you,” said the man, rushing off after his wife.
“Yeah, I’ll send you some links,” Larry shouted after them. He got up and approached an Asian man washing up in the kitchen area. He stopped two steps closer to him than normal social etiquette allows. “They put chemicals in the water to keep us stupid,” he said. “I read it on this website—The Mind Unleashed. Do you know about The Mind Unleashed? Yeah, you won’t hear anything about it from the Western imperialist media machine. Oh no. Puppets for murderers they are.”
Larry put two fingertips into the soapy water and then rubbed them on the end of the Asian man’s nose. The man was frozen to the spot, holding a purple plastic plate dripping suds onto the floor tiles. He appeared to have gotten stuck trying to work out what was happening, and more importantly, how he could make it stop. Larry brushed some locks of blond hair back behind an ear. “Some people just believe everything they’re told. Me? I like to dig a little bit deeper. Find out what they’re not telling you.”
Who “they” were was not clarified before Larry walked off in the direction of the dorms. Annett waved at me from the other side of the room, where she’d been pretending to look at the hostel’s library. I took my wine with me. You can’t be too careful. Or drunk.
“Two seats down,” she whispered into my ear. “Trainee female rabbis talking to one of the organisers of something called the Gathering.”
If life were a game of Scrabble, finding trainee female rabbis would constitute a triple word score. We settled down into the free seat nearest to them, Annett hugging her wine bottle like an old friend for which her feelings were complicated and better expressed through actions rather than words. “Are there a lot of female rabbis?” the man asked. “I thought pretty much all rabbis were men?”
“The famous ones are,” replied one of the trainees. She had short hair dyed red, and a soft, button nose unwilling to make a point. “But women can also be rabbis.”
“Wow, fantastic,” the man said. His tone that of a talented used-car salesman who knew exactly how he would close this sale. “I’m humbled by your dedication and devotion. I’m actually one of the founders of the big Christian event called the Gathering. You’ll see a lot of people around here with purple wristbands. They’re all Gatherers.”
We had seen a lot of people with purple wristbands. One group of them had even broken out into an impromptu prayer circle one wine ago. Yes, it is perfectly okay to measure time in wines. I’m pretty sure that’s what the Greeks did.
“The Gathering is the biggest Christian festival in the world. We’re expecting around fifteen thousand worshippers. Every prayer is like a small call up to God, but when we band together it amplifies that sound.”
“It sure does,” the redhead said, authoritatively, like an experienced prayer-sound technician.
“I think we’re really close to a breakthrough now. To learning what He wants from us. Tomorrow’s going to be the day. The power of the Gathering is just… just amazing. After the first event in Singapore I was totally energised, just enraptured, right?”
“Right.” The trainee rabbis nodded.
“So I got into a taxi and on the way home I told its driver about the power of Christ. At the end of the journey I gave him my Bible, my personal Bible. I wrote my phone number in it, in case he ever wanted to talk. Three years later, I get this phone call.”
They inhaled sharply. “No way!”
The man winked. “Uh-huh. It was the taxi driver. He said, ‘I just want you to know that you changed my life that day. Three years later, I’m still following the way of Christ.’”
“Oh, wow,” said the redhead. “That’s really something.”
“Amen,” added the other.
“That’s the power of the Gathering,” said the man.
I was reminded of something called Jerusalem Syndrome, where visitors are so overwhelmed by the religiosity of the city that they stop believing they’re management consultants, golf instructors, or window cleaners and start believing they’re prophets. We’d not even left the hostel, but it seemed as if all the people around us had been touched by the city in some way. Overwhelmed, we went to bed. Not because of the power of the Gathering, but because of the power of the wine. We were both still very much following the Way of the Vineyard.
We awoke to yet another beautiful day in (highly strung) paradise. It was time to visit the old city; a spiderweb of narrow passageways and caverns that entangles every visitor. It was Shabbat, the Jewish weekly lo-fi holiday, a day mostly spent at home with family. Upon arrival, we found security at each major intersection, and the police outnumbering the visitors in parts. After a final security check we stepped out for our first glimpse of the Wailing Wall, and sitting above it, the Temple Mount—perhaps the most contested piece of real estate on earth and the centre of three major religions: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. To me, it seemed rational to conclude something from this, that maybe the major religions of the world had more sim
ilarities than differences. But, alas, humanity, in its infinite stubbornness, has elected to squabble and kill for this piece of land. As I wasn’t religious, the whole thing felt particularly absurd, like watching three kids on the playground argue about whose imaginary friend had been there first.
I walked into the section reserved for male worshippers, swapping my baseball cap for a white yarmulke, and stepped down the slope towards the wall, hearing the hum of the worshippers for the first time and seeing them rocking back and forth, a motion called shuckling that is unique to the Jewish faith: one hand on the wall, the rest of the body convulsing to the chanting of Torah verses. I found some empty space. A man to my left chanted louder; several men joined in, their words rippling along the wall. I couldn’t understand a word; it was ineffably beautiful. This wall divides, like so many others, but it also unites a whole religion and nation.
I really hoped I would feel something when I reached out to touch the wall. It didn’t have to be a lot. I wasn’t expecting to have a spiritual awakening from the trip. That said, experiencing just a tiny fraction of what the men around me felt would have been very welcome. The feeling that I wasn’t alone, perhaps; that there was a point to all of this; a plan, and a project manager in the sky overseeing it; that I was more than just the random outcome of numerous complex, indifferent systems. Systems that I moved through each day while kidding myself about the control and agency they offered me. That I would not just be here for a short while, having a reasonably nice time, before dying to little fanfare.
Standing at the wall it seemed, suddenly, that I’d been analysing religion incorrectly. I’d been getting too hung up on the but they’re wrong. That part isn’t really important, were it even knowable. I should have been focusing on the how does it feel to be part of that (probably wrong) thing. Quite good, a lot of the time, I bet. You get to be a small cog in a larger combine harvester of faith. You get structure, rules, great headwear, to be one of God’s chosen ones. Sure, you also have to give up a little free will, sanity, and bacon, but you get community, purpose, and sociality. I’d started this project because I realised how alone I was. How simple and easy my life had become. I was trying to change that. Trying to connect with something bigger than myself. It felt like a trade I might be willing to make.
Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places Page 9
