Israel Museum and Monastery of the Holy Cross

     It's hot here.  We are averaging 10-15 miles a day and I remember so clearly stating on the first day to my Mom that it was "really quite mild" and that there was a "light cooling breeze and not as hot as I imagined."  That was a total load.  It's hot.  It's at least 20 degrees cooler in the shade at all times and other than my new rugged ,winded desert complexion my hair is turning sandy.  It now means something very different to me when the good book says that the Jews wandered the desert for 40 years.  They must have had some serious calf muscles and you just know they complained of the gnarliest vericose veins.  At least they didn't have to deal with vendors at every corner trying to hustle you.  At least that....  
Don't get me wrong though.  I adore walking.  When on trips to far off, exotic places I stumble onto wonderful things while on foot.  Here, we've seen tiny bits of protest art like large ceramic bandaids covering broken bricks on public walkway walls and graffiti exposing sentiments about the Palestine/Israeli conflict.  We've been lost in Jewish and Muslim neighborhoods avoided by tourists.  There have been cats, so many cats, and I mean SO MANY CATS.  The strange convoluted signage that is oddly specific in its rendering like a dog hunched over his own droppings we chuckle at, and of course the smells.  The smells range from the most heavenly pastries, spices and skewered meats to the personal musks so popular in the rest of the world and under appreciated by Americans.  I always stumble into the most wonderful places when I take the long way, and Amber always makes sure I'm hydrated.

      So Amber and I disagree on something.  We had this long, somewhat tense conversation about Museums after she said was exhausted from our trip to the Israel Museum.  After having visited the Israel Museum on the far end of Jerusalem yesterday she said that museums were like zoos.  Museums often shepherd large groups of loud and obnoxious tourists and have more accompaniment to the exhibitions that is either audio/visual or textual that one doesn't actually spend time beholding the actual objects.  She stated that these places defile the often holy objects which are meant to be experienced in their original contexts.  She gave an example of a few reliquaries that we found in a corner of the Art Institute of Chicago recently.  That they now exists as novelties.  Amber reminded me that a reliquary would sanctify the presence of the alter at one time in history.  I say that these institutions protect irreplaceable, priceless objects and keep them collectively in an environment that are most often public and non-elitist.  To me, they are secular spaces that employ specialized curators who educate the public on the histories, traditions and cultural importance of what could be considered "objects reflecting our cultural values."  We went back and forth for a while and agreed to disagree.  But I'll come back to it.

     The museum as a whole was average, holding a fairly schizophrenic collection that moved from one culture to the next and bouncing from prehistoric to contemporary Israeli art.  It held a fairly good sculpture garden with beautiful views of Jerusalem but also holds a few of the Dead Sea Scrolls in a specially constructed shrine.  But what I want to note here that it seems that Israel LOVES modernism.  Picasso is alive and well here.  Mostly I hate public art because it's like an illustration of Modernism. It's benign, never political.  It's large, always metal or stone.  It's colorful because it's art! And it's abstract, because in public places, Modern is the way to go.  And they LOVE it here.  But I think it's important to illustrate why it's still alive and well here, why Picasso and the like just won't die.  Israel has such a worldly and expansive collection of European art because of the fact that the settlement was often diaspora from Europe after WWII.  The Nazis understood the cultural significance of art fully and knew it's coercive potential.  So they stole A LOT of art from wealthy Jewish families.  They condemned modern art as "degenerate" and even curated an exhibition of those artists to publicly humiliate.  Interestingly enough it was one of the most widely attended exhibitions in Europe in the period, traveling from one venue to another.  So this movement "Modernism" is meant to embody a type of individualism while divorcing itself  from the traditional and stodgy art academy.  I get it.  But I've moved on, and I think Jerusalem should too.  There's so much left to be said.

    To counter that experience we also made a trek to the Monastery of the Holy Cross, an eleventh century Eastern Orthodox Monastery believed to be the sight of the trees used to make the wood of the cross. We hiked through the city,  an olive tree grove and pedestrian park to finally land in a truly quit place.  Off the beaten path, this space was a delight and truly a polar experience to the Israel Museum.  There were only a few tourists in the entire monastery.  Amber and I were allowed to explore almost everything in this gem.  From the old kitchens, the dining hall, the wash rooms, the quarters to the breathtaking church.  Nothing disappointed.  The sunlight kissed potted flowers, whitewashed stone and illuminated dark interiors in such a transportive way.  I felt as though I had stepped into a space living a thousand years ago.  I could imagine cooking bread or pulling water from the well as I lived a life of cloistered solitude and prayer.  A squawking parrot guarded the entry and warned the attendant of our entry.  I have a feeling there has always been a bird there to serve that function.  The mosaic floor of the church dated to Byzantium and the paintings painted in the same style although much later. Pilgrims left their mark everywhere however, scrawling their names and dates into the reachable parts of the sanctuary.  I saw scratched graffiti that dated to 1837.  We both made the joke "Kids today" and shook our heads in disapproval.

All in all, I feel like all of these places are artifacts.  They are remnants of another time- with vastly different values and practices difficult to understand today.  I agree with Amber, but the museum is not just a white walled space with docents and irritating tourists.  It can be a walled off cloister with sacred rituals hidden from public view.  It's just our responsibility to respect and protect it for centuries to come.