Word count: 1102 | Reading time: 5 min read
Pretzel Logic
Will there ever be peace in the Holy City?
I am not what you would call a religious man.
Neither Orthodox, Conservative or even Reformed, I am what a friend once dubbed a “gastronomic Jew” — he who celebrates his heritage not through the reading of the Torah, but through the eating of the matzoh balls and the bitter herbs and the brisket at the appropriate times of the year.
Yet, in one of those biblical paradoxes that define my people, I often find myself thinking about the Holy City of Jerusalem.
Maybe it’s because my little brother was a sergeant in the Israeli army, or that he and my parents maintain dual citizenship.
Maybe it’s because my folks still maintain a warm relationship with a family of Israeli Arabs with whom they own a business.
Or maybe it’s just the pictures on my wall, taken during my visits to Jerusalem. Pictures of holy men of various religions. A picture of two peddler women, bored and unable to sell their wares. A picture of Israeli soldiers like my brother standing on a bluff above Arab East Jerusalem, and another of troopers firing tear gas during the intifadah.
Pictures that serve as a constant reminder to me that there is no place like it, this ancient city atop an ancient hill occupied by some of the most meshugina people on earth. There is no other place with a holy wall and a Holy Sepulcher and a holy Dome of the Rock.
After several long bus rides from my parents’ home to Jerusalem, I developed a routine.
My first stop, always, was the Wall, where I would watch the men in black covered by white prayer shawls bob up and down like shrouded sax players in a massive jam while, on the other side, the women would do the same.
Then, walking through an old, green wooden door, I would wander the plaza of the Dome of the Rock, third holiest site in the religion of Islam. The old green door was like a portal into another dimension, one inhabited by men in khaffiehs and women in chadors.
The interior of the Dome, where both Jews and Muslims believe that Abraham offered up his boy as a sacrifice to God, is a place of splendor. A huge hunk of stone sits inside walls of meticulously carved marble and intricately drawn Islamic art.
After leaving the plaza, I would go back through the green door, and back into the Jewish dimension, where I would find a seat and just watch as the soldiers paced back and forth on top of the holy wall, the ancient feat of stonemasonry that divides the dimensions of Muslim and Jew.
The last time I was in Jerusalem, I looked up at the soldiers on the wall and daydreamed about what it would be like if they didn’t need to be there.
I thought that dream was on the verge of becoming a reality.
And then Yigal Amir pumped three shots into Yitzhak Rabin. And the dream of peace was trampled by the nightmare of religious fanatacism that has kept the Middle East a region of turmoil since The Beginning.
I didn’t much care for the Yigal Amirs of Israel when I was there.
I remember one trip that I took with my father and my soldier-boy brother to a grand West Bank settlement known as Ariel.
The city is huge, built on hilltops overlooking Arab villages.
We were there to visit Ariel Mayor Ron Nachman. As always on my trips to Israel, I was mixing the pleasure of seeing my parents and brother with the business of reporting about events in the Holy Land.
In his office, Nachman has a number of exquisite orchids. I will always remember the orchids, because to me, they symbolized two things.
The first was that the orchids, delicate and in need of much care, were about as out of place in this harsh environment as the settlers of Ariel.
The second was that the fragile orchids of Ariel, thriving where they shouldn’t, were like the peace process itself; unnatural, beautiful, but in constant need of nurturing.
Any illusions that Nachman was a man of peace were quickly dashed during a ride around the barbed-wired city’s perimeter.
A young boy from one of the Arab villages had the nerve to walk his donkey in front of Nachman’s jeep. Nachman, like all settlers armed to the teeth, jumped out of the jeep, began cursing the boy and shook a stick at him.
Nachman then returned to the vehicle and talked with pride about how you have to constantly keep these people in line. The boy, meanwhile, pulled his donkey out of the road. His eyes were filled with the hatred of the oppressed, a hatred my people have known in our history and a hatred that, all too often in Israel, my people have engendered.
My father, a true believer that there can be no peace without justice, was horrified. I am not sure about my brother, whose views on Mideast politics run closer, I think, to those of Nachman. I may be wrong.
To me, Nachman’s fascistic display was further evidence that these holy rollers of the Judaic hills must be reigned in if Israel can ever expect to have a future.
That feeling was reinforced a few years later, when I had the dubious pleasure of lunch with Benjamin Netanyahu, the handsome, smooth-talking darling of the Israeli right. Netanyahu, then a member of Likudnik Yitzhak Shamir’s government, was telling a group of American mayors his view of the way things should be. That way left little room for a just peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors and even less room for a just peace with Israel’s Palestinian residents.
Netanyahu scares me, because he has that pretty-boy veneer that appeals greatly to the yahoos in Congress, who would much prefer listening to the silky tones of the Westernized Netanyahu than the gravelly voices of peace belonging to Yitzhak Rabin or Shimon Peres.
But now Rabin’s voice has been silenced. And Shimon Peres, a man Rabin chided for lack of military experience, must convince pro-peace Israelis and Arabs that he has the stones to finish the job.
A very tall order in a region where only a warrior could bring Israel to the brink of peace.
Like I said before, I am no man of piety.
But that won’t stop me from sidling up to a bowl of matzoh ball soup and saying a little prayer for Peres — and peace.
