Heaven on Earth

If heaven exists it must be exactly like Jerusalem. Not because Jerusalem is paradisaical but because there are so many religious people. On Friday night, the Muslim call to prayer is followed by church bells is followed by the closing of almost everything for Jewish Sabbath. The owner of the restaurant we eat at says it is like mixing three types of alcohol: “it can only make you crazy“ "God is the real estate broker here," he says his hands open to the sky. If ever there was a better argument for not wanting to go to heaven I have yet to hear it.


The first thing I encounter on entering Israel is a long security line. The lights in the building black out. There is shuffling, and all the guards disappear into a bomb shelter on the side of the building leaving hundreds of waiting travellers in the main hall alone. When the lights flicker back on, the guards file back in sheepishly. They are young. In Israel mandatory army service comes after high school so all the soldiers -- this includes the border patrol and security guards -- are teenagers. The girl checking my passport stops to put on lip gloss and laugh with her friend before continuing to question me. She leaves the booth for a bit and returns with the army jacket they all wear and readjusting her belt on her low riding standard khaki pants. When I leave the building, two boy guards outside are wrestling with each other.

I arrive in Jerusalem after five hours of border-crossing during which I develop the flu. If I believed in Allah I would think this was the way he would tell me not to enter Israel (where I was sick nearly the entire time). By the time I get off the bus at Damascus Gate I can barely walk. This however does not prevent me from noticing the palpable tension within the old city walls. In New York, people leave their houses and present themselves on the street at their most fashionable; in old Jerusalem at their most religious. Boys with curls and yarmulkes, girls with headscarves, and roving groups of Christian tourists touting bibles and beads all mix in the streets. In the Jewish Quarter, which was bombed in the sixties, new houses line the cobbled streets displaying plaques that say "Gift of the Lebowitz Family" etc and make me wonder if Israel might not even be sustainable without help from the West, and in particular America. On the roofs of the houses, children's toys and swings are enclosed by barbed wire. Finally we arrive at our hotel run by a friendly Palestinian man who, when we ask where to go in Palestine, says "Don't go to Palestine, just look at me! That is enough."

In the last hours before I leave, I head to see the sites. First over to the Dome of the Rock, which is closed, then Church of the Sepulchre, which is too crowded to enter, and finally the Wailing Wall--now the Western Wall. It is a Saturday morning and the wall is thronged. In books, moments like this always seem to inspire a religious experience. But I cannot feel anything but confusion at seeing the separate male and female prayer sides, hearing the loud moans of the bobbing men and the louder silence of the still women who have a smaller area of the wall and are not allowed to let the men hear their voices.

Whatever is so beautiful about religion that we fight to preserve it, cannot be seen in Jerusalem. What am I missing?