A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
If you knew all that I knew, my poor Jerusalem
You'd see the truth, but you close your eyes
But you close your eyes
While you live your troubles are many, poor Jerusalem
To conquer death you only have to die
You only have to die
-- Jesus, in Jesus Christ Superstar, lyrics by Tim Rice
A few weeks ago, just as I was reading the final chapters of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s compelling Jerusalem: The Biography, Secretary of State John Kerry was wrapping a visit to the secular Muslim republic of Turkey, where he urged rapprochement with Israel following what the Guardian newspaper called yet another “Zionism row.”
If it seems as though you’ve been hearing this refrain your entire life, it’s only because you have.
Furthermore, if in 2013 you were as old as Methuselah, the same observation would hold true, extending past the point in the 19th century when Zionism was conceived as an organized movement, further backwards for more than a millennium, long before there was Islam to be referenced as an antagonist, and leaving Hittites and Romans in the historical dust. It ends approximately where it began, with the dinosaurs – but let’s leave the Creation Museum out of it.
This “row” seems to have existed forever, always preceded by numerous others too numerous to recall, and as Montefiore aptly posits, the epicenter inevitably remains Jerusalem, every bit as much the “eternal city” in actual fact as Rome touts itself on postcards.
Having one holy city per major world religion seems reasonable enough, witness the Vatican, but having one otherwise mundane municipality declared unreservedly holy for a whopping three Abrahamic faiths, all at once, poses certain logistical challenges quite apart from the tendency of each to devolve into more sects and subdivisions than the Internet has Obama conspiracies.
Montefiore attempts to unravel these competing claims, in the process mapping Jerusalem by the square meter, because this might be the only way to determine whose temple was built atop the ruins of the shrine that came before it. There are hills and tunnels. There are hidden watercourses beneath the rubble, and buzzards flying in formation above them – lots and lots of buzzards, because the bloodshed in this holiest of places is perhaps the most constant presence of all.
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As numerous historians and affiliated scholars have accurately noted, mankind’s traceable presence includes so few periods of actual peace on earth that those rare times when wars have not been raging are far more noteworthy than long, predictable centuries reeking of violence, destruction and pestilence. So it would seem that surviving records of Jerusalem as a city were written for little other reason than documenting the sheer scale and depravity of incessant and ceaseless bedlam.
The story is nothing if not repetitive: Five short minutes of serenity, to be followed by invasions, sieges, starvation, surrender, pillage, torture, rapes, executions, depopulation… and then, after five more brief moments of rebuilding and frantic, perhaps even voluntary copulation to enable new mouths to feed, a fresh cast of potential victims mounts the next assault. The pattern is repeated again and again to the present day – actually, to the 1967 war and the military victory of the Israelis over a dysfunctional coalition of Arabs, which is where Montefiore’s epic history finally stops.
And yet … there is another essential stage in these looping, endless, sadistic cycles of murder; it’s the part where the respective sides – native and invader, overlord and stable boy, soldier and charwoman – never fail to petition their gods to assist in the most holy task of all, that of liquefying their enemies, who also request the helpful benevolence of their deities.
For most of my adult life, my reaction to this tableau has been somewhat uniform: What possible value might there be in any religious doctrine springing from constant localized bestiality in this tiny slice of a very large planet, particularly after flawed writs are transplanted to far-flung corners of the globe among peoples with their own traditions of spiritual impairment?
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At this juncture, the typical local yokel in New Albany nods, takes a deep drag off his unfiltered Chesterfield, glances across Pearl Street at the grandiose, evolving, and lavishly expensive edifice of Caesar’s Folly, and mumbles, “Them people been fighting each other forever. It’s in the Bible. It’s in their blood. Nothing we can do about it ‘cept let ‘em kill each other.”
It’s hard to disagree with such unlettered sentiments when the pure historical narrative provides so little substance to dispute them.
However, let’s not permit my cynical paganism to detract from the considerable merits of Montefiore’s recounting of the life and times of Jerusalem. In terms of my normal reading fare, this book was a departure. Jerusalem has never been a bucket list type of place for me, and as I’ve demonstrated, the various pieties (if any) attached to the city are meaningless in my personal lexicon.
It is a fascinating read, just the same. Passages describing mankind’s latently peaceful, cooperative, poetic side, as managing somehow to poke through the propensity of the species to aggression and cruelty, provide at least some hope amid the rampant terror. Yes, plenty of ordinary humans (and some Americans, too) have been able to rest in the shade of a venerable olive tree, smell the fragrance of flowers, and contemplate the eternal. Some have felt the motivation of scripture, while others have been as atheistic as my cats.
Either way, what then compels them to rise from prayer and ignite pressure cooker bombs is a mystery to me, as it has been to others, in a lamentation that predates so very much … even Jerusalem itself.
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