Jerusalem. -- On a ledge overlooking the Wailing Wall, a group of Jews sit silently in the rain behind a banner proclaiming the imminent arrival of the messiah. They shouldn't bother: the Messiah, when He comes, won't be coming to Jerusalem. He'll go directly to CNN headquarters in Atlanta. Jerusalem is too complicated.
At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum, in a room full of an infinity of lights, voices read without surcease the names of the million and a half children murdered by the Nazis. It's unbearable, one name after another, some familiar, some strange, and their ages, that's all. My friend Benny Hendel, who is one of the voices reading these names, took me here first. This is Israel, a place for the Jews, he said by this gesture.
At the Wailing Wall, the metal detectors let the worshipers in one by one. Men to the left, women to the right. The pilgrims lay their foreheads on the cold stone, its cracks filled with a myriad prayers on tightly-rolled paper strips.
Beyond the Wall, the Dome of the Rock, covered in gold, glitters with Muhammad's dream of heaven. It's the Muslims' holiest place.
At the holiest site of Christendom, the site of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus Christ, an ancient Copt weeps into his Bible. An Australian woman on her knees kisses the myrrh-scented stone where his body was prepared for burial. A Japanese tourist snaps pictures.
In the Old City, where only the occasional tourist ventures now, young Arab boys move quickly between the narrow stalls groaning with unsold saffron and fragrant oils. On top of the Damascus Gate an Israeli soldier with a machine-gun carefully watches them.
On the Via Dolorosa a mule laden with gasoline cans ascends the hill past the graves of Jewish kings and prophets, past the Byzantine churches, the Crusader forts, the mosques -- led by an old man wrapped in his keffiyeh. And on the horizon, beyond the layered graves of four millennia, shines the white harmonica of the new Mormon Temple. And beyond that, like fine hairs etched on the sky over the Mount of Olives, stand construction cranes, at work on new subdivisions.
In this palimpsest of graves and stone, everyone waits for the Messiah to come, the intifada to end, a political solution or just a miracle. While waiting, there is a great vegetarian restaurant on Emek Refaim Street with hip, punk-do'ed waitresses who speak, like everyone else, six languages. And next door is a bakery and a movie theater, and just past the walled-in, barbed-wired, abandoned cemetery of the German Templars, is a great cafe and nightclub.
The Messiah, in my opinion, would find this place confusing, but it's heaven for the philosopher.
Andrei Codrescu teaches at Louisiana State University.