Holy stumps

Warhol from the Israel Museum

Melissa and I carry three different maps around with us when we venture out. The first is one the hotel gave me: helpfully bolding major streets with a big red line where the Light Rail runs and a list of interesting places. Another is one of the entire country of Israel we bought at the gift shop before realizing the hotel gives a free one. The last was purchased by my dear companion in the Old City, where a booth vendor saw her looking at the map, exclaimed excitedly that it was the best map ever and would fulfill her every wish and dream, and his aggressive exuberance frightened her enough to want buy and run away. "How much?" she asked. "Ten shekel," was his answer, and to my shock she handed it over without haggling and we skittered off.


We opened it up after the day was through to find it written entirely in Spanish.

Luckily, she has spent an entire semester in Spain. The problem with even the readable maps is that there is no such thing as a grid or even a four-way stop in Jerusalem. A simplified hotel map doesn't give the sense of the spiderweb of interlocking streets that change names every other block.

We get lost a lot. Taxis beep and yell accusingly, "WHERE YOU WANT TO GO?" as we stand, brows furrowed over maps, on the street corner -- obviously confused westerners. I wave them off irritably and head off in the wrong direction. All who wander are not lost, right, vague gurus of the pseudo-church of optimism?

The Montefiori Windmill

On one of those times, I stumbled our way over to a landmark -- the Montefiori Windmill.

We were on our way to the Israel Museum -- which we reached successfully! -- where we saw everything from 14,000-year-old artifacts of early civilization, a fascinating archaeological exhibit about the relationship between Canaan and Egypt tied to the historicity of the Exodus event, a rather schizophrenic collection of art (one wall of impressionism, the next wall of Christian religious imagery, the next door, SURPRISE! A replica of an 18th-century French bedroom), modern Israeli art, and the Shrine of the Book. Melissa and I had a long conversation about the sterilization of sacred objects in museums and how uneasy it makes me. I might write more about this later.

Museums put my mind in a stupor and I'm reminded of the limited RAM my brain has. The day balanced out when we visited the Monastery of the Holy Cross.

It was a crumbling old building guarded by one typical unsmiling guy chain-smoking at the entrance, who collected our shekels and let us free to, I kid you not, wander around an entirely abandoned old Greek Orthodox monastery. We were alone in the place and crept around the infirmaries, a refectory with a massive marble communal table, a kitchen with old fire ovens that hadn't been lit in any recent past, various rooms with altars and birds' nests and Greek graffiti chiseled into the stone walls, until tiptoeing down to the main entrance of the church nave.

There, a story awaited us. The Monastery of the Holy Cross dates back to the Byzantine Era. Moreover, Helen, Constantine's undoubtedly zealous and surely imaginative mother, had found the tree from which Christ's cross had been hewn! And this church stood upon that ancient stump.

The story goes that when Lot had fallen into sin by committing incest with his two daughters, Abraham gave him the three staffs of his visitors at the oaks of Mamre. Lot was to plant them and water them with water from the Jordan, and as they grew, his sins would be expiated. Now the devil appeared and tempted Lot away from his task, but in the end he succeeded and a tree of cypress, cedar, and pine grew from the three staffs. This tree would be cut down and formed into the cross upon which Jesus was crucified.

We made our way to the site of the stump, past a splendor of decoration mixed with decrepit vestments and graffitied frescoes that put another light on our discussion of preservation of sacred objects. I prayed, like pilgrims before, as we peered into a gold-rimmed hole at the earth where a tree had once grown -- the most adored stump in the world.

Kitchen in the monastery