Catch The Jew! Read online

  Could this work for Israel too?

  I take my time to eat and drink with some Tyrolean natives and after three “milk with water” (beer) and two of the most delicious portions of “Hitlerschmarrn,” they start screaming that they’ve been cheated by the damned Italians.

  I guess occupation doesn’t work.

  I take my Lederhosen, put them in my suitcase in case I’d need a reminder, and now I’m ready to go.

  Join me for the ride, bitte, and let us all hope that it will be exciting and enlightening indeed.

  Farewell and Welcome

  Armed with a wink and a smile from a beautiful Turkish lady, I start my journey to the Holy Land.

  IT IS IN HAMBURG, AT THE AIRPORT, THAT I BID FAREWELL TO GERMANY AND its culture. I’m at the Turkish Airlines counter, where I have just showed up with my suitcases. Surprise, surprise: I am more than ten kilos over the limit. I tell the beautiful lady at the desk, a person I have never before met and whose name I don’t even know, that a certain famous Turkish actor by the name of Mehmet is a great friend of mine.

  “Do you really know him?”

  What a question! I’m his director!

  She gives me a warm Turkish wink and smile, and lets me through at no additional cost or any other penalty.

  “Promise me you won’t tell anybody that I let you go with so many extra kilos!”

  Try sneaking in ten kilos over the limit at AirBerlin by telling them Lady Merkel is your best girlfriend, and you’ll stare at a sour face.

  Yes, I might be in Germany still, but I’m leaving it.

  Turkish Airlines, by the way, is an excellent airline. They don’t exactly come on time – these days few do – but their planes are spotless and the food, real Turkish, is a pure delight. No wonder everybody is smiling all the way to Istanbul Airport.

  Istanbul Airport. I love the place!

  Look here: ten ladies with niqabs beat the heat of their clothes by licking delicious-looking Turkish ice cream. This is delightfully sensual, believe you me. The men, crazy creatures of nature, go to a small area called Terrace to drag on their cigarettes in ecstatic body motions. Nonsmokers, with or without niqab, sip coffee at $5 a pop, as never-ending waves of women, with hijabs of every color, get busy shopping for merchandise they never knew they needed.

  It’s boarding time to Tel Aviv, but only about ten people are sitting at the lounge. I think I read about this situation in Israeli papers: Israeli citizens boycott Turkish Airlines because for the last few years the Turkish leader, Erdoğan, has constantly criticized Israel. I would never have believed Israelis would ever boycott anything Turkish, but now I see it. Israeli media, I can tell, are awesomely accurate.

  Ahead of me I see three guys engaged in a lively conversation and I sit next to them. I figure these guys know each other, why shouldn’t I know them too?

  What’s the first thing I should do once in Israel? I ask them.

  Michel, a Catholic architect married to a Jewish Israeli woman, is very excited to share his thoughts with me: “You want to know what’s the first thing you should do once you land in Israel? Get a plane ticket out!”

  Thank you, but I have to be there. What should I expect to see?

  “Heat!”

  And then there is Zaki, a Bahá’í, and he tells me that his family has lived in Israel longer than Israel has existed. One hundred fifty years, to be exact. Bahá’ís, he teaches me, are not allowed to live in Israel – it’s against their religion – but his family does. His great-great grandfather was Bahá’í’s cook! What an honor.

  With them is Hamudi, which in Hebrew means “sweetie,” who is an Arab Israeli and a Muslim. “Hamudi,” he corrects me, does not mean sweet. “It’s short for Muhammad.” Maybe I should also find a short nickname for myself. How does Tobi sound?

  There’s a loud announcement now that the gate is about to close. I walk over to the gate, but the three men here don’t move. At the gate, how strange, a zillion people are queuing. How did all these Jews sneak in here? And what are they doing in Istanbul to start with? Weren’t they boycotting this city? Maybe Israeli media are not awesomely accurate, after all.

  As I board the aircraft it appears to me that this plane is about to explode from all those Chosen People inside it. I never knew that so many Jews even existed.

  The aircraft is packed but for a couple of seats, and as its doors are just about to close the Three Musketeers from the lounge schlep themselves in. There’s one empty seat next to me, one behind me, and one in front of me. Guess where these three are going to sit? They look at me, with bewildered eyes, as if I were a CIA agent who all along has known the seating arrangement of this plane.

  Hamudi speaks unto me, important man that I am: “Israel doesn’t treat Muslims and Jews equally at the airport. Muslims are stopped and interrogated when they land in Israel.” I guess he’s preparing himself to be taken to the side upon landing.

  The plane lands shortly after 3:00 a.m., and the Israeli security personnel stop only one passenger for an interrogation. No, it’s not the brown Hamudi but a young blond lady.

  Hamudi and I exchange looks, and I can tell he’s quite disappointed. He has prepared for every possible question the security people could ask him, and all they care about is a young blonde.

  I walk out of the airport and it’s cool outside. The heat I was expecting went the way of the blond lady: disappeared.

  It’s quite a strange feeling to land in the country of your birth. I hear Hebrew, no German or English, and I can hear the sounds of my childhood. In an instant I transform into a baby, and see my life as in a short YouTube clip. Baby, boy, teenager: the person I once was and the years that have passed are now playing back.

  Slowly I wake up to reality and go to look for a cab that will take me to my abode for the next six months. My destination: a Templar house in the German Colony of Jerusalem.

  I learned about this house while in New York. It’s an old house, built by German Templars who long ago came to the Holy Land in the hope of personally greeting Jesus Christ. I like stories like this, and I took the house.

  From Germany to the German Colony. Sounds a bit strange, I know.

  As I reach my new home, I drop my suitcases, take a short rest, and then go out to walk the ground I left so many years ago.

  On a wall on a nearby street I see this note: “Excuse me: Is God satisfied with your clothes?” How should I know? And then I see this poster: “Merciful nation of Israel, please pray for my father that he gets rid of his iPhone and Internet so that our family remains whole.”

  I take my iPhone and capture this poster with it.

  This is not Hamburg, nor Istanbul; this is a Holy City. Yes, this is Jerusalem. “Yerushalayim” is how Jews call it in Hebrew, “Al-Quds” is how the Arabs call it in Arabic, and “Jerusalem” is how most others do.

  When I left Israel over three decades ago, my first stop was Amsterdam’s Red Light District. Now back here, I go to the Old City.

  Gate One

  What happens when the feminine side of God, the son of God, and the messenger of God meet a sexy German girl who helps the Arabs because she loves the Jews?

  “DON’T WORRY, BE JEWISH” AND “FREE PALESTINE” ARE TWO OF MANY CONTRAdicting T-shirts I see in a souvenir and clothing shop once I’m on the other side of the Old City’s walls built by Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman sultan, over the ruined walls of earlier periods.

  Inside the walls, as I walk, is the souk. What’s a souk? Most English dictionaries translate this word as market, but this is because English translators don’t have a healthy, vivid imagination. A better translation, if you’re an English speaker, is this: “an ancient shopping mall.” Yeah. But, please, don’t come here if you’re looking for a pink bikini or an iPhone, as this is not the best place to get these items. You should come here if you’re looking for the Virgin Mary made of virgin olive wood (don’t ask me what this means) or if you’re in the mood to smell spices usually a
vailable only in heaven.

  The architecture of this souk will capture your eyes and make you believe in legends and myths, which could be very beneficial to you. This souk is darkish, made of ancient holy stones, arches everywhere, and if the traders didn’t charge you imaginative prices for everything that meets your eye, you’d think you were in paradise.

  Come think of it, a Red Light District would fit here very nicely. I can vividly imagine it. Really.

  A few steps ahead of me I see a group of men and women who don’t move. They seem to be tourists with cameras and maps, and I join them. I have no idea where they’re planning to go but assume that since they paid for this tour, it’s probably worth something and I blend in.

  Soon their plan becomes clear to me. They want to go on a tour of the tunnels adjacent to the Western Wall, a remnant of the holiest Jewish shrine in history. Also known as the Wailing Wall, this is the place where the Shkhina, the Holy Presence, has resided for the past two thousand years. What is the Holy Presence? This is not totally clear, though it is usually referred to as the Feminine Side of God. Some mystics go a step further and say this is the Wife of God.

  A man, the tour guide I guess, takes us to archeological paths around the Wall, way beneath the ground.

  We are in Har Habayit (Temple Mount), where the Jewish Temple once stood on top of this mountain. Enemies of the Jews twice destroyed the Temple, the man says to us, but first he would like to tell us the history of the mountain itself, a history that precedes the Temple period by thousands of years.

  ***

  Genius that I am, I immediately realize: this is not Times Square. I’m in a different world. Totally and absolutely different, for the “show” I’m about to see is not a Broadway musical.

  The man speaks: “Everything was created from here. The universe was formed from a rock on this mountain, and it is here that God tested Abraham, when he asked him to sacrifice his only son.” The biblical Garden of Eden is here, and it is here that the first human being, Adam, was roaming aimlessly until God made him fall asleep and created a woman out of one of his bones. And it is here that Adam and Eve walked around naked, made love all day and all night and started humanity. It is on this Holy Mountain that the sexual hormones started being active. If you think of this in depth, here’s where the first Red Light District of history started.

  On a more serious side, it’s here that your culture and mine first started. No matter if you or I believe in God or do not, it is here that the foundation of our mutual culture started. If not for this very mountain and if not for this very land, there would be no Judaism, no Christianity, no Islam, no European culture, no American culture, no Western culture as we know it, and no Eastern culture as it is now practiced. If not for this mountain, and what’s on it and underneath it, Buddha still might have come into existence, and cannibals might still have existed, but today you and I could be fanatic worshippers of the elephant, the stone, the wind, or the sun.

  We are at the beginning of the tunnel and the man, who is a guide indeed, is using small pieces of wood in front of him and is aided by video animations behind him. He explains everything to us as images of the destroyed Temple show up on a screen and on a table with a model version of same. He speaks to us about the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, which was built on the ruins of the First Temple (destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE):

  “The Temple, right here, was destroyed, burned to the ground.”

  The screen shows fires consuming the Second Temple.

  “The Temple was built by King Herod, who employed an untold number of skilled workers to create a massive, magnificent, colossal structure.”

  The Temple slowly disappears on the video, crumbling to pieces – except for one wall. The guide takes a little wooden structure, a mosque, and puts it on top of the ruins.

  “Many years later the Muslims built a mosque right above the ruined Temple.”

  Yes, this is not Broadway. This is, if anything, an off-off-off-Broadway presentation. But this is not a show. The little images this guide is playing with have caused millions upon millions of people to lose their lives in the past, and many more millions are most likely to continue this tradition in the future.

  A man dressed in a “Peace” T-shirt is listening intensely. A teenage tourist is yawning; he’s probably missing his Facebook friends.

  “Any questions?” the guide asks.

  When I was a religious kid, I wondered about two biblical statues, the cherubs, stationed in a section of the Temple known as the Holy of Holies. Statues are totally forbidden in Judaism; why then did they exist in the Temple, God’s own house?

  I ask the guide, who’s now using wooden pieces resembling structures that existed two thousand years ago, if he also happened to have miniature models of the cherubs.

  The “Peace” tourist likes my question.

  “Where are you from?” he asks, as if he has just discovered the most amazing man in the world.

  Germany, I say.

  Yes, I have this strange habit: I enjoy playing with nationalities. By a chance of nature, I have an unidentifiable accent and miraculously people believe me when I tell them that I’m Austrian, Bulgarian, Chinese, or whatever country I happen to fancy at the moment. Recently I saw an international poll claiming that the majority of people interviewed believe Germany to be the greatest country on earth. Why shouldn’t I be a German these days?

  But Mr. Peace looks at me, totally disappointed. He doesn’t like Germany, I can tell, and I’m really offended.

  And you, where are you from?

  “Britain,” he says with pride as he moves away from this ugly German.

  Too bad we Germans lost World War II.

  Well, I’m not from Germany, I’m from Israel, and I’m into cherubs. But the guide doesn’t have cherubs. Sorry. Maybe the cherubs, which according to the biblical account are some kind of creature with wings, have just flown away.

  ***

  The guide leads us on a walk through tunnels that never end and he keeps on talking about the amazing skills with which King Herod built the place. He talks about Herod as if Herod still existed. “King Herod decides” and “King Herod builds” and “King Herod wants” – in present tense. King Herod, he also tells us, is a genius of geometry and a megalomaniac: he wants to build the most spectacular temple there ever was.

  As the tunnels get more freakish – no sun here and no place to stop for a Starbucks or Jacobs coffee – we’re told that Herod is also a very mean man. He kills almost all the rabbis around. “Almost” means that he leaves one rabbi alive, but not before he gouges his eyes out.

  A nice guy, no doubt.

  We pass by a portion of the Wall that is made of a huge stone, 13.3 meters long and weighing 580 tons. In those days there were no cranes, and I can’t even fathom how King Herod pulled this off.

  The length of the Western Wall, including the parts that you can see only from here: half a kilometer. Just amazing. Why did King Herod, a non-Jew, bother to build such a huge thing?

  “He was a Jew.”

  Is that why he killed all the rabbis, except for the one he blinded?

  “King Herod converted to Judaism!”

  This is an important answer: born Jews don’t gouge out the eyes of others, only gentiles do.

  Why would a rabbi killer and an eye gouger build a temple?

  “This is a long story.”

  Tell me!

  The guide gladly obliges.

  After King Herod had done what he did to the rabbis, he disguised himself as a simple man and walked past the rabbi he had joyfully blinded and asked him a question: Would the rabbi agree with him, this simpleton, that King Herod was a terrible man and therefore should not be obeyed? The blind rabbi answered: King Herod is our king and we have to obey him.

  Impressed and touched, he asked the rabbi what King Herod should do to absolve himself for the horrible things he had done to the rabbis. The rabbi answered tha
t if the king were to rebuild the Temple he would be forgiven.

  King Herod immediately moved into action. (King Herod reconstructed the Second Temple, which was in place as of 516 BCE.)

  Good story, I must admit.

  As the tour ends I speak with Osnat, one of the tourists.

  Tell me, in one sentence: What is “Israel”?

  “Oh, this is not a simple question. I have to think about it.”

  Don’t think. Just shoot!

  “Israelis care for each other.”

  Other nations, let’s say Germans, don’t?

  “No.”

  Only the Jews have this quality?

  “Yes.”

  Before I left Germany, a famous German gave me this tip: “Israelis,” he told me, “are the only people on Earth who don’t care for other people. When you are there, try to find out why.” He and this woman, I think, would make for a perfect match.

  Outside the tunnel is the Western Wall that we all know, the one you see in so many pictures: a wall where Jews pray. They stand here, awed by the Shkhina, and pray to God: “May You build the Temple soon, in our lifetime. Amen.” Hopefully, nobody will have to go blind for it to happen.

  Other people, more sophisticated, also write notes and stick them between the stones of the Wall. If you want to send a letter to God, this is better than FedEx because His Shkhina gets your letter directly.

  On the Western Wall plaza, a group of American Jews is passing me by. They love to speak Hebrew, their kind of Hebrew. Take a listen to this one, talking to his friend: “Let’s meet yesterday night. Okay?”

  ***

  The Western Wall is only a tiny part of the huge compound now known as al-Aqsa, named for al-Aqsa Mosque in al-Haram as-Sharif (what the Jews call “Temple Mount”) that was first built in roughly 679 CE, as the third-holiest place in Islam and where I go to pay my respects on the following day. It is from this place that the Messenger of God, the Prophet Muhammad, flew to heaven, after he had arrived there with a heavenly animal from Mecca. I arrive there by taxi.