The Jerusalem Syndrome

by Marc Maron

  When we got to Sachnin, the road seemed to weave around for miles. There were no stores, no lights, no gas stations; no familiar brand logos lit up to show signs of life and hope. We pulled into a dirt driveway alongside a large three-story stucco house. The top floor of the house looked unfinished because there was no glass in the windows. A man came out to greet us. The “hostel” was the redone basement of his house.

  Everything seemed to be cushioned. The walls, floors, and ceiling all seemed to have a pillow-like feel to them. I couldn’t sleep. My heart was racing, my mind was pacing. It was like a hundred and ninety degrees and there were bugs crawling on my face. I felt like slamming my head against the wall, which would’ve been okay, since it was cushioned.

  In the morning we all went up to the top floor of the house, which, as it turned out, was intentionally unfinished. It was like a giant patio. The owner’s wife and daughter served us a breakfast of pita bread, a slice of sad-looking bologna, scrambled eggs that were overcooked and drenched in oil, and sweet stewed olives.

  The eight-year-old daughter of the man who owned the hostel walked us around the town. The streets were teeming with activity of day-to-day business. It felt festive, unlike the settlement. Everyone was out doing things. There were animals being butchered in the street. It was very homey. People were coming up to us, inviting us into their homes, giving us coffee, and trying to communicate with us. They were so nice. They don’t see many Americans.

  We left Sachnin the following morning and headed back to Tel Aviv. In the car I had a new mantra: “Gotta get the camcorder fixed, gotta get the camcorder fixed, gotta get the camcorder fixed.” That was all I could think about. The camcorder had to be functional when we went to Jerusalem. I thought that whatever was to happen between God and me would certainly happen in Jerusalem.

  When we got back to Jim’s apartment, I looked in the Tel Aviv yellow pages under “Sony.” I found a Sony repair center. I went alone to the Sony repair center. I walked in. I don’t know what was going on that day, or if every day was like that, but there were literally hundreds of people mobbed in front of the counter. It almost seemed like some sort of revolt against Sony. People were waving boom boxes, Walkmans, televisions, and camcorders above their heads. There was shouting. There was chaos. It almost seemed that all Sony products broke on the same day for everyone, and don’t think I didn’t think that.

  Behind the counter there were these four panicked, sweating Israeli geeks trying to accommodate the uprising. Behind the geeks, going back farther than the eye could see, were shelves upon shelves of unrepaired Sony products. It looked like a grand cathedral of broken electronic equipment. I tried to make my way through the crowd but couldn’t, so I mosh-pitted myself atop the crowd and was carried to the counter, where I delivered the camcorder into the sweaty hands of one of the geeks. He looked at the camcorder, he looked at the shelves behind him, and then he looked at me and shook his head and said, “Oh, no, eight weeks.”

  “No,” I said. “Today.”

  “No, no, I cannot,” he said.

  “I’m an American,” I said. “I’m here on vacation.”

  Somehow that translated to “Please don’t help me, ever,” as I was swallowed up by the crowd and spat back out onto the street, holding my crippled camcorder.

  We had to leave for Jerusalem the following day. I thought about buying another camcorder, but it would’ve cost a fortune and the machines there operate by different format. They take pictures right to left. It would’ve been useless in the States.

  I was really beginning to give up the struggle. I was trying to let go of the idea of the camera working again. I was trying to just adjust to being without it. I was trying to engage with and enjoy my wife and friends. It wasn’t sticking.

  When we got to Jerusalem I immediately looked up electronic repair in the yellow pages. I found Avram’s. I gave the phone book to Oriella to translate. “Does it say ’Sony’?”

  She said, “Yes, Marc, it says ’Sony.’ ”

  “Yes!” I yelped.

  We all went immediately to Avram’s. It was a small electronic repair shop. I walked in. My first thought was, Am I going to get fucked? On a smaller scale?

  Avram was a big, happy, gregarious Israeli. I showed him the camcorder. I was in a panic. “I don’t know what happened. I was just holding it. It’s very important to everyone that this works here.”

  “This is no problem,” he said. “I fix today. Come back, two hours.”

  “Thank you. You really don’t realize how important this is.”

  While we were waiting, we went to a market to get some fruit. It amazed me how people in Israel have their blinders up to just how scary it is to be there. As we stood there looking at fruit, my friend Jim told me that some people were killed in that market by a bomb a few weeks before. I said, “Well, put the fucking plum down. Let’s get out of here. I’m just not that committed. I can live without the fruit.”

  Two hours later, I was back at Avram’s. I ran in. He smiled big.

  “It is fixed, my friend.”

  “Thanks. You might have saved the world.”

  I paid him. He looked at me and said, “My friend, relax. Don’t worry. You’re in Israel.”

  I don’t know in what world those three phrases fit together, but I tried to relax. I couldn’t. I was elated that my camcorder was working. My head was tingling.

  It was working, but it didn’t have that organic Sony feel to it anymore. It felt as if he may have wedged a toothpick or a piece of gum into some mechanism. It was working, though, and we were in Jerusalem.

  Jerusalem was where I thought it was going to happen. Whatever I was waiting for would happen there. Jerusalem is the mystical navel of the universe. All of the corporate headquarters of the Western world’s religions are there. If they’re not there, they at least have a franchise there. Obviously the Vatican isn’t located there, but the Church of the Holy Sepulchre serves as an embassy. [That’s where they took Jesus off the cross after he was walked around in that awkward way.] The Wailing Wall is there for the Jews. It’s actually called the “Western Wall” now, because we’re not upset anymore. The reason the Jews pray at the Wall is because it’s as close as they can get to the Temple Mount, the site of Solomon’s Temple and the Second Temple, the holiest place in the Jewish religion. Once the temple is rebuilt, they can pray there once again. There will be no construction in the foreseeable future because the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest shrine of Islam, sits on the Temple Mount. The Messiahs for the Jews and the Christians can’t come back until that temple is rebuilt, and apparently, the Dome of the Rock is causing landing problems. These are ancient and seemingly unresolvable mystical problems that I have no solution for. I saw Jerusalem as a religious theme park where I wanted to go on all the rides. And I did.

  The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is chaos. When we walked in, there were hundreds of people mobbed around the many religious relics throughout the interior of the church. There were people and dangling Christian symbols everywhere. The last five Stations of the Cross are all within the church: where the Christ was stripped, where they nailed him up, where they lifted the cross, where they took him down, and where they laid him in a tomb. We took the tour and the last stop was the marble slab where Christ’s body was laid and anointed before it was placed in the tomb. People were surrounding the slab, some placing their jewelry and religious trinkets on the marble top and moving those items around. I guess the idea was to charge their stuff up with the power of the dead Christ. I placed my camcorder on the marble and moved it around a bit. I figured it couldn’t hurt.

  The Temple Mount is by far the most awesome place I visited in Israel. Time seemed to stand still when we were within the confines of the Temple Mount area. It is an expansive flat space that was clearly designated to accommodate a huge structure. In the center of the space stands the Dome of the Rock mosque. It is a beautiful building covered in mosaic and gold leaf. I walked around the
area surrounding the dome. I was taping. I felt the Gray come over me. I was standing on the holiest ground on Earth. God knew I was there. Soon, I will be contacted, I thought. Kim and I asked Jim to take our picture. I put my arm around her, and out of nowhere a Moslem man came over, removed my arm from my wife, and shook his head. No public displays of affection are allowed on the Temple Mount unless they are for Allah.

  The last ride I went on was the Western Wall.

  I stood at the wall with the davening Hasidim. I felt awkward standing there. I didn’t know what to do. I looked at the Hasidim. I’ve always thought they were arrogant. They think they’re the only real Jews. They do. It trickles down from there. The Orthodox don’t believe that the Conservative Jews are real Jews, and the Conservatives don’t believe that the Reform Jews are real Jews, but the people that hate and want to kill Jews think that we’re all the same, so why do we help them by dividing and conquering ourselves? There are no mild hate groups that only target the Reform, and if there were, they would be looked down upon in the hate-group community as not being a real hate group. “Why can’t you just hate everyone?” “We’re just not that religious.”

  That’s when I realized why the Hasidim were there. They are the extreme margin of Judaism. They justify the middle. There is no middle without them. They are there to keep the arcane channels to God open through prayer and ritual round the clock. On some level, they are there for all Jews, everywhere, whether they like it or not. What if one Hasid at the Wall were to one day say, mid-daven, “You know what?” They all stop davening to hear. “Fuck it. Let’s get out of here. Lose the hats, lose the beards, cut the curls. We’re gone.” And they all walk off forever.

  Once word got out, how long would it be before all Jews around the world said, “They stopped? Well, can we all stop? It would save me a thousand a year on seats.”

  They need to be there. That is why Jerusalem is a living, mystical city. The Zionist State of Israel would be meaningless if it didn’t have the heart of Judaism to protect. [The heart of Judaism would be vulnerable if the Zionist State of Israel didn’t exist.] If it did crumble, Jerusalem might become the ruins of a faded mystical city.

  I have no political solutions. I think the wrong negotiator might have been chosen for the peace talks. Instead of Clinton, maybe they should have used Michael Ovitz and brought in Michael Eisner and put Jerusalem under the nondenominational control of a secular corporate neo-deity like Disney. Jerusalem would then become one of the “Happiest Places on Earth.”

  People could enjoy Jewishland, with its mechanical Hasidim. Then they could go to Christianland and ride the cross; then Moslemland: “Gotta take your shoes off for Moslemland. Mom, you can’t come in.” Biblical characters could wander around in period costume. “Get your slings ready, kids, here comes Goliath.” And, of course, there would be Space Mountain. All Happiest Places on Earth have a Space Mountain, even if it doesn’t fit in with the theme. There’s always room for space and all the hope that it holds.

  As I stood at the Wall I realized that I was part of an ancient, mystical, and spiritual community. I have my own beliefs, but at the wall I felt that I was part of an eternal legacy. It was something other than the Internet, which might ultimately win out, as it slowly usurps the collective unconscious.

  I stopped taping because I wanted to put a note in the Wall. That’s what people do if they’re not Hasidim. You write a note to God and place it in a crack of the Wall. I wrote a very general note. HELP! I waited for a reply. Nothing.

  I swear the guy next to me put his business card in the Wall. So tacky. I thought, Do you have to live up to the stereotype here?

  I was so overwhelmed by the Wall that I had to immediately go out and buy a tallit. The tallit is the prayer shawl that most American Jews wear twice a year, if they can find it. On some level, Jerusalem is just a very large synagogue gift shop. If you don’t have some kind of religious catharsis, you will be overwhelmed with the pressing desire to buy menorahs, mezuzahs, yarmulkes, and whatever tchotchkes are necessary to make you feel superior to your Jewish friends and family. “Oh, really? You’ve never been?”

  When we left Jerusalem, I resumed taping. I knew I was close. I could feel God.

  We drove through the Negev and crossed over into Jordan to visit Petra. When we crossed the border we were in the real desert. There were miles and miles of nothing but the occasional amazing rock formation and camel.

  Petra is situated in the middle of the Jordanian desert. It encompasses the ruins of a very advanced ancient civilization. It was built thousands of years ago by the Nabataeans. Did you see the last Indiana Jones movie with Sean Connery? The Red City? That’s Petra. It is spread across miles of beautiful red rock cliffs that are riddled with cliff dwellings. Not your run-of-the-mill Pueblo Indian caves in the rock cliff dwellings. These were ornate, detailed, architectural wonders chiseled delicately into the face of pure hot rock. There are actual Greek-style columns chiseled into the rock. Which isn’t even necessary. Why? Someone must have come down from the north and said, “You know, they’re doing something new in Greece.” So the King probably said, “We must have these new columns.”

  The commitment that went into chiseling these things was intense. I mean, what could they have been using for tools? Spoons? It was either commitment or slavery. You don’t want to think about that when you are standing in front of something beautiful. It undermines your aesthetic experience, as a tourist, to think there might have been some guy with a whip, saying, “Build the pretty thing!” Unless you’re that kind of tourist.

  Petra was a great hub of mysticism and commerce. There are the ruins of an outdoor theater, a technologically advanced water distribution system, and temples of a lost religion. Petra was at the cutting edge of desert culture in its day. I’m sure people would stand on their terraces in Petra’s heyday and say, “We’ve got it all. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere but here. Let’s go to Zabar’s.”

  And now there’s nothing but ruins, artifacts.

  We walked through this mile-long ravine along the overhanging cliffs on a path called the Siq. It was the main road into Petra. I was taping everything. All along the cliff walls were small eroded square reliefs that had faded symbols on them. The tour guide said they were called “god rocks” and they most likely were depictions of the gods of the culture. They don’t know for sure, because to this day they don’t know what religion was practiced by the Nabataeans. Petra is the ruins of a faded, mystical city. I raised my hand and suggested, “Maybe these are actually ancient billboards advertising a popular soft drink of the time. Is that possible?”

  The guide looked at me the way an angry snake would and said, “No, it is not.”

  We arrived at the highest point in Petra, which is called the “altar point,” because it is an actual altar. The entire top of this hill was leveled off. In the center of the plane was a slab of red rock about the size of an adult male. It was surrounded by strange, geometrically aligned, pyramidal stair-like structures. It was believed that human sacrifices were made to appease the gods on that slab. I thought, Man, that’s deep. I walked slowly around the altar, filming. I was fascinated. The thought that people could be that brutal and possessed by faith and fear was hard to handle. A sacrifice is performed by a priest or holy man, the seer, the illuminated one who understands more deeply than the rest. He understands that the ritual act done with the knowledge or in the presence of the followers will guarantee the power of the illusion he purports to understand and, conversely, guarantee his power over the followers.

  A human sacrifice is the sacrifice of a life: a history of moments, movements, events, engagements, feelings, pains, pleasures, achievements, loves, visions, and hopes. Brought to an end on a slab of rock for the sake of something larger, a greater, godly agenda, a lie. The very possibility of such a thing was mind-blowing to me. As you know, I have a thing for altars. I stepped slowly around it. “They used to sacrifice human beings here. That’s so i
ntense.”

  I stepped onto the altar, pointed the camcorder skyward. Under my breath I said, “This would be a good time.” I waited. Nothing.

  Then, I stepped up onto a stone staircase above the altar. I put my camcorder in its bag and reached over to grab my wife’s still camera to take a picture of the mountain in front of me. As I turned to take the picture, I heard the sound of my camcorder bouncing down the steps of the stone staircase. I heard all the delicate machinery and components clanking down those steps. I turned around to see my camcorder bounce right out onto the sacrificial altar and stop. When it hit the altar, I heard a voice behind me say, “There goes a thousand dollars.” I turned to see who had said it. No one was there.

  It was the voice of God.

  I looked up and said, “Subtle.”

  It was over. The camera lay alone on the slab of rock. Other tourists began to gather around. I looked over at my wife and friends. They were glaring at me smugly, as if justice had at last been delivered.

  I went to pick up the camcorder. It was really broken. The start button was all bashed in. I couldn’t even shove it up Sony’s ass anymore. What would I say? “I was holding it and it just started crinkling in on itself. I don’t know. You take it. It’s creepy.”

  I was standing on the altar, cradling the camera as if it were a child. I looked up into the sky that once harnessed the gods and demons that have defined spiritual belief for millions of people for thousands of years, and it was empty and red and beautiful. My camcorder was dead. There was no face of God in sight. I realized deep within that I knew nothing. I stood on the altar and I felt naked, stupid, and a little used. I was a cosmic doofus, a sucker, a mark. Sony and God had been waiting for this to happen. I had been set up, caught in the middle; I was the catalyst and the punch line of a biblical struggle between good and evil. I blew the dust off of my camcorder, put it in the bag, and slouched slowly down from the altar point. It was done. I didn’t get the job. I was free.