“Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” God is great, God is great, the women chant. They follow the armed escort, which is there to protect three Jewish men, and to prevent them from engaging in vandalism and prayer. We are on the Temple Mount, the spiritual epicenter of Arab-Israeli hatred, the focal point […]
Monthly archives for June, 2015
Hallelujah
I find no religion in churches. Temples leave me bemused at best, bored at worst. Mosques are nice to look at, but within their walls I feel no closer to God, divinity, spirituality, that great whatever-it-is in the sky. In the footsteps of poetic hoboes before me, I get my religion kicks from the echoes […]
Fortress of Vanity
The cultural treasures of Israel are sequestered by boundaries of politics and violence. One of the great tragedies of conflict is that it reduces access to the sum of human knowledge. A trip like Birthright, no matter how immersive, cannot be comprehensive, since much of the shared cultural heritage of this land is blocked off […]
Shabbas in the West Bank
It is Friday night in Tekoa, and my friend Nachshon’s mother lights the nerot shabbat. From the kitchen window, I can see the minarets of Beit Lechem—Bethlehem—where the muezzin sounds the evening prayer for the first Friday of Ramadan. Tekoa, an Israeli settlement considered illegal under international law, sits atop the Wadi Tekoa, a vast […]
Simultaneous Histories
Israel is a country where the forces of geological time and human history are frequently—often simultaneously—evident. At Rosh Hanikra, on the border with Lebanon, railways tunnels built under the British Mandate lie mere meters from ancient grottoes, hollowed out over millennia by the pounding of Mediterranean waves on limestone. These caves are home to fruit […]
Flipping off ISIS
We stand atop an extinct volcano watching a bomb detonate in a town just across the Disengagement Zone. We’re in the Golan Heights, where UN observers monitor the Israel-Syria border. This frontier was last defined in 1973, at the conclusion of the Yom Kippur War; currently, another war rages just across it, in territory now […]