Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

  The scene was eerily quiet. I could hear worshipers milling about on the esplanade above. The air smelled of citrus, evergreen, and charcoal embers. A bell tower on the Mount of Olives sounded once, then quieted. Thousands of tombstones lined the face of the hill.

  “There have been tombs on the Mount of Olives since the time of David,” Avner said. “Near the street is a mausoleum that once had a pyramid on top; it’s called the Tomb of the Daughter of the Pharaoh. Another is a memorial to Absalom. Pilgrims used to throw rocks at Absalom’s shrine to show that leading a revolt against your father is not the way to behave.”

  “So if this was a cemetery, why did Jesus come here the night before he died?”

  “It was a haven, outside the city walls, away from the people and religious institutions he did not agree with. The Kidron had always been the end of the city. The Mount of Olives was filled with orchards, and one of them was Gethsemane, which means ‘oil press.’ ”

  “So if the Mount of Olives was known as a place of death, would his coming here indicate that he had some foreknowledge that he was going to die?”

  “The story suggests that, but there were cemeteries all around the city, 360 degrees. I think it’s more because he wanted peace for his soul—and because the prophets say the messiah will come from the east.”

  We were walking along the stone path at the base of the wall. Some Palestinian workers were chiseling stones. A woman in a head scarf walked by, looking down to avoid eye contact. “You’re being watched from the top of the wall,” Avner said. “They have guns.”

  “Israelis?”

  “No, Palestinians.”

  “I’m not going to look.”

  Soon we came upon a double-vaulted stone gateway. The top of the gate sticks up beyond the top of the retaining wall. The entrances are stoned in—and have been for a thousand years. The effect was grand but empty, like someone offering you a gift, then pulling back his hands. This is the Golden Gate, perhaps the most famous portal in Jerusalem. The gate has two archways: the Gate of Repentance and the Gate of Mercy. The prophet Zechariah suggests that the messiah would enter Jerusalem from the east. As the Golden Gate is the only entrance to the Temple Mount from the east, many Jews consider it the messiah’s entrance point. The Gospels suggest Jesus fulfilled this prophecy and entered the city on Palm Sunday through this gate.

  The side-by-side gates rest on stone pillars that are said to have been a gift to Solomon from the Queen of Sheba. But wasn’t Solomon’s Temple destroyed? Maybe not entirely. Josephus writes that the eastern wall was the only one not rebuilt by Herod. In 1969 the American archaeologist Jim Fleming was investigating the wall following a heavy rainstorm. In front of the Golden Gate the ground opened up, and he fell into a hole about eight feet deep. He found himself knee-deep in bones. “Then I noticed with astonishment,” he said later, “that on the eastern face of the wall, directly beneath the Golden Gate, were five wedge-shaped stones neatly set in a massive arch. Here were the remains of an earlier gate to Jerusalem, one that apparently had never been fully documented.”

  The Wakf quickly cemented the hole and placed an iron fence around the Golden Gate.

  The reason Fleming landed in a puddle of bones is that death is everywhere around the Golden Gate. Hundreds of graves crowd the eastern wall. Muslims believe that on judgment day, a knife’s edge will stretch over a valley from a mountain to heaven’s gate. If that mountain is the Mount of Olives, as legend suggests, then the Golden Gate would be the entrance to eternity, and anyone buried here would have a presumed advantage. Jewish legend, however, holds that the messiah is forbidden from traversing a cemetery, which means those buried here would be hindering everyone’s salvation. Jews and Muslims can’t even agree on whether it’s good or bad to be buried near heaven’s door.

  Whoever is right, the image of a perilous ravine serving as the final frontier between life on earth and life ever after has become one of the most haunting images to emerge from these hills. Like so many other ideas from the Bible, what once was physical has become metaphoric. The Kidron is the Valley of Death.

  “The Lord is my shepherd,” reads the King James rendition of Psalm 23.

  I shall not want.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

  He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

  A few steps beyond the Golden Gate, we reached an even larger gate with medieval doors. The doors were open. Arab vendors were selling fruits and vegetables. Little boys were kicking soccer balls. This is Lion’s Gate, also called St. Stephen’s Gate, one of seven active gates into the Old City. The Israeli Army used this entrance to capture the city in 1967. The doors are still broken from that encounter. It’s the same direction the Romans used to capture the city nineteen centuries earlier.

  “Why is it so much easier for everyone to take the city from the north?” I asked.

  “It’s flat,” Avner said. “There’s no Kidron. And you don’t have to fight up a hill. It’s the same reason Herod built his cistern here. It’s the highest point in the Old City.”

  Avner led us through the gate, back into the Old City. We were now in the Muslim Quarter, at the northern entrance to the Temple Mount plaza. Washing stations with stone basins lined the inside of the wall. Vendors hawked postcards and prayer beads. Worshipers streamed through a portal onto the plaza, which was guarded by Israeli police. We had a spectacular view of the hexagonal Dome of the Rock, with its cobalt, turquoise, and mustard-colored arches, intricate sixteenth-century tile work, and bold, golden dome. The dome, often photographed in pink dawn light, has become so associated with Jerusalem, even in Jewish iconography, that it seems emblematic of the larger holiness of the place. Whenever I see it pictured behind Palestinian spokesmen—photographed from this angle, which is its view from the Arab-dominated neighborhoods—I am jolted into remembering its political potency.

  We continued along the outside of the northern wall, which is largely hidden by modern buildings, until we reached the heart of the Muslim souk, a warren of clothing stalls, religious schools, spice vendors, and trinket shops. We ducked down a deserted alley, stepped through a doorway, and climbed a dark set of stairs. Inside a bare, whitewashed room, we waited to meet an old friend, the chief archaeologist for the Wakf, and Eilat Mazar’s doppelgänger during the brushup over the southern wall.

  Yusef Natsheh is as moderate a Muslim as one can find in Jerusalem. He’s short in the manner of an overgrown schoolboy, bespectacled, and was dressed this morning in a green plaid sport jacket that seemed fresh off the rack from High Street in Oxford. His eyes brightened as he welcomed us back. He ordered tea. After a while, I asked about the idea some Jews have of building a Third Temple on the Haram.

  “In my opinion, it’s a small idea so far,” he said. “But this idea is like a piece of snow, whenever it starts rolling it becomes bigger.”

  “There is another small idea,” I said, “on the Palestinian side, which is that the Temple was never there. Do you believe that?”

  “Let me speak for myself,” Dr. Natsheh said. “From an archaeological point of view, I believe there are many remains which could be identified with developments that took place before Islam. And I think, surely, one of these developments could be what you talk about.”

  “Could be?” I said. “Or was?”

  “Could be. I am not expert in this field. But this is my knowledge as a person who reads and hears and sees. So I am not going to tell you was, because I’m not an expert.”

  I was surprised to hear this coming from someone so open-minded. “So that part of the wall where Jews pray now,” I said, “the Western Wall—”

  “Or, according to our views, the El-Buraq,” he said, using the Arabic name for Mohammed’s horse, who is said t
o have been tethered there during the Prophet’s nighttime ascension to heaven.

  “The El-Buraq,” I said. “If there was no Temple, why do Jews pray in this spot?”

  “According to research, this only began in the sixteenth century,” he said. “Before that, Jews prayed on the Mount of Olives. And allowing the Jews to pray at El-Buraq was an act of Muslim tolerance.”

  “Jews think this wall was connected to Herod’s Temple. Do you agree?”

  “As I told you before, exactly, yes. Most people think this was built by Herod. But that doesn’t indicate that it is Jewish. It’s Roman. It could be for our tribe. But even if it is Herod’s Temple, does that give people the right to diminish, destroy, or extinguish other cultures, which are still living and have been for fourteen hundred years?”

  “So when I, as a peace-loving Jew, come to this wall, and touch it, what do you think I should feel?”

  “You have to feel what is in your heart,” he said. “You feel your culture, your past. And you have the right to feel that, as long as you don’t threaten other people. This also applies to Muslims. I don’t think it’s a big issue for Muslims to admit that there was an old culture here.”

  “So if you don’t think it’s a big deal, then why do most Palestinians disagree?”

  “Because they are feeling threatened. I’m sorry, but it’s what we feel when a group of Jews approach the Haram with arms. If you are in my position, what is your reaction? You ask my feeling when a peaceful Jew wants to pray. He wants to reach God. There are different paths to God. So what about a Palestinian who is living here for generations and generations and seeing his path neglected, deserted, destroyed?”

  The tea came, and we took a second to enjoy a break. I’ve never been a fan of Arab tea, which I find too bitter without sugar and too sweet with it. But the rules of hospitality often compel me to sample it, as I did this morning. Eventually I asked Dr. Natsheh if he believed we were in a religious war.

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “But religion is used to serve the people. If we were true religious people, we would sit together and reach an agreement that was different from a political one.”

  “But aren’t religious people part of the problem?” I said. “Wasn’t it religious people who built the new mosque on top of the Haram?”

  “Never,” he said. “We expanded, maybe, an area that already existed. We, what we called, rehabilitated some place. We have needs, you know, just as you do. Now it’s cold. If people come this Friday and it’s raining, how will they perform their prayers in open spaces?”

  “But what about the destruction?” I said.

  “They accused us of using bulldozers. Give me one Israeli excavation in the early 1960s and ’70s in the country that did not use bulldozers. What happened in 1967 when the Israelis leveled the plaza in front of the Wailing Wall? Why do you have the right to do certain things and we don’t? Sure, if the situation were different, we would like to do it in a different way. But do you want religious people to wait for three seasons while we excavate? Religious people are not so happy with archaeology. And I understand them.”

  He sat back in his chair.

  “May I speak as a friend?” I said.

  He nodded silently.

  “You seem sad,” I said. “Do you feel the voices of hate are overwhelming now, and the voices of moderation are drowned out?”

  “Unfortunately, I do. It really makes me feel that hope is so far for any of us.”

  “Have you lost hope?”

  “Not yet. If I lost hope, I would lose life.”

  “But why don’t you start crying, throw your arms up, and say, ‘It’s too much! God, I can’t do it.’ ”

  “Because I belong here,” he said. “I was born in Jerusalem. When I was seven years old, I used to cross the Haram every day on my way to school. I would have a sack of books, and I used to play here for ten minutes before going to school. We have a difficult situation, but that is no excuse to leave.”

  “And do you feel that God is looking out for what you are doing?”

  “God created us, and I believe that we have to do as much good as we can. In the Koran there is a verse which I repeat sometimes with friends. ‘For a human being, there is nothing but his work.’ I believe in that. After all the politics, God will come and judge Yusef Natsheh, whether I was serious.”

  “And what will he say?”

  “I don’t know. I myself am never satisfied. I am a human being, and I have my deficiencies.”

  We had one more wall to traverse. Around the corner from Yusef Natsheh’s office, a small doorway opens onto the Via Dolorosa. Two Israeli guards sat protecting it. We stepped inside, descended a staircase, and found ourselves at the start of what may be the bloodiest stretch of the Wall. The Western Wall Tunnels comprise an intricate network of underground caverns, passageways, and secret excavations that run the entire fifteen-hundred-foot length of the western perimeter of Herod’s compound. Covered by debris for centuries, this stretch of wall was excavated following the Six-Day War.

  The northern end of the tunnel, where we were standing, consists of a subterranean channel, carved into bedrock, that once supplied water to Herod’s complex. First discovered by Warren, it was reexcavated in the 1980s and opened to tourists. The Wakf would not allow visitors to exit into the Muslim Quarter, so tourists were obliged to retrace their steps, thus limiting the number of guests. Fed up, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hastily ordered an exit opened without permission after midnight on September 25, 1996. Yasser Arafat went ballistic, accused the Israelis of destabilizing the Haram, and set off riots that killed at least a dozen Israelis and five dozen Palestinians. The Jordanians and Egyptians threatened to join the scuffle before the Clinton administration brokered a cooling off.

  Today the passageway was nearly empty, victim to the larger degradation of the region. The tunnel has a dank, timeless quality to it that reminded me of climbing into the pyramids in Giza. After a few hundred yards the channel ends, and we arrived in a vaulted chamber the size of a Romanesque church. Dramatic lighting shimmered up the walls. A handful of worshipers, mostly women, sat inches from the wall, which looks exactly like the Western Wall, only unbleached by the sun.

  “For religious Jews, this spot is even holier than the Western Wall,” Avner said, “because it’s closer to where the Holy of Holies would have been.”

  “Why is the Western Wall more famous than the Eastern,” I said, “considering that if you were standing here during Solomon’s time you’d have been facing the back of the building?”

  “All temples in the ancient world faced east,” he said, “because they wanted to front the rising sun. But the Holy of Holies was in the rear of the building, so it’s holier than the façade.”

  Next to the wall a section of Herod’s masonry was missing, and the gap was filled by a concrete slab. This patch was nearly the trip wire of World War III. In 1981, Yehuda Meir Getz, the rabbi of the Western Wall, led an unauthorized mission to burrow eastward from this spot, underneath the Haram, to find the Holy of Holies. Getz was a mystic who prayed every morning in the Tunnels dressed in a black robe and white headdress, with a Bible in his pocket and a pistol on his hip. He was joined in his brinkmanship by Rafi Eitan, an adviser on terrorism to three Israeli prime ministers, who later recruited the American Jonathan Pollard to spy against the United States.

  Breaking through the sacred barrier, Getz and Eitan discovered a cavernous tunnel, which they believed was a spring used by priests before entering the Temple. “We were of the view that without heavy tools,” Eitan said, “using a delicate chisel, we could chip away at the soft limestone walls. We thought we could advance quietly and secretly to discover the hiding place where the priests had concealed the Temple artifacts and arrive at the spot, just under the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was hidden.”

  Getz and Eitan believed that finding the Ark, which has been missing since the death of Solomon, would heral
d the return of the messiah. Instead, their chiseling raised the hackles of worshipers on the Temple Mount, who sent youths on ropes into the excavation. A conflagration ensued: the Muslims prepared water cannons to shoo away the diggers; Getz’s wife summoned students from the nearby Jewish school; both sides scuffled until the police arrived. Prime Minister Menachem Begin promptly ordered the illegal passageway filled with concrete.

  “I will now retire from the project with a bitter taste in my mouth,” Rabbi Getz confided in his diary. “I have never felt the humiliation of Judaism that I felt today in our own sovereign country. I pray that this is the end of exile.”

  We reached the end of the tunnel and burst back into the sun. Before us now was the familiar face of the Western Wall, the eighty-five-foot-long limestone façade, no longer than a basketball court, that for centuries has served as the steadfast core of Jewish identity. The twenty-four layers of stones, each a different size, reach a height of fifty feet and stand as an indomitable patchwork quilt of pain and perseverance. Each row of stones is set back a few millimeters from the layer beneath it, meaning the entire wall slopes slightly eastward, contributing to its stability. When Jews began tucking notes into crevices, the absence of mortar, once a mark of Herod’s mastery, became a physical manifestation of Jewish spirituality: squeezed out by larger forces, with no space left to thrive, Jews nuzzled their prayers into the forgotten recesses of history. Just out of reach, the notes give way to carob bushes that drip between the seams like icing between layers of a birthday cake. What allows plants to survive in stone with no soil and little water, yet produce tender fruit? What allows a people to endure through affliction with no land and little sustenance, yet produce a thriving seed?