by Jaimal Yogis
After meeting each extremist, I felt myself fall into fear and then into a common trap. The logic, according to this scared and angry part of my brain—and all these emotions seem to come from deep in the amygdala, the lizard brain—went something like this: Religious extremists are violent and insane. Therefore, religion is insane. Therefore, the spiritual experiences that were bringing me so much joy and hope were insane. And therefore, everything was hard, material, random, and cruel. There was no soul, no mindstream. No enlightenment. No uniting good. No God.
This is a flawed logic. Scientists have invented chemical warfare, DDT, and the atom bomb. Some of them do cruel tests on animals. But this did not mean science is cruel and insane or that the scientific experiments I’d learned from were insane. I’d met journalists who reported on nothing but celebrity gossip and often lied. But this did not mean journalism was shallow and dishonest.
This broad and fearful logic was easy to debunk once it was noticed. But when you are locked in fear, the brain starts to make these associations unconsciously. In Israel, because I was surrounded by wise professors and good friends, I had some insulation from the fear. I told myself I was not going to fall for it. I would, like the friars had recommended, listen to the God of my own heart. Trust my own experiences.
Or I hoped I could anyway. As the trip continued, the characters and situations of hope and faith one minute seemed to be followed by those of fear and hate the next. And for a few days, I found myself on a seesaw between the two.
15
After all this time,
The sun never says to the earth:
“You owe Me.”
Look what happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole Sky.
—Hafiz
Stanford anthropology professor T. M. Luhrmann writes that while visiting the Holy Land, “roughly 100 tourists a year become sufficiently overwhelmed by spiritual experiences that they end up in a mental health center. They see themselves as biblical characters or as messiahs, or they feel that they have been given a special task, like moving the Western Wall. Often, but not always, they have had previous psychiatric diagnoses. Some seem to lose touch with reality, and then never do so again. The sheer intensity of being in so holy a place is enough to bring some people to an apparently psychotic state.”
Other than finding the best hummus and baba ghanoush in Jerusalem, I did not think I had a particular calling here. I didn’t think I was a biblical character either. And given that I’d met a few crazies already, I was on the lookout for crazy in myself. But many psychologists say falling in love is a temporary state of psychosis too. And it was this state that I could relate to when, at sunset, I came to eat dinner alone on a perch above the Western Wall.
The Western Wall is the last standing wall of Solomon’s Temple, the most holy place in the universe for Jews. According to the Hebrew Bible, the First Temple was built in the tenth century BCE and contained, in its most sacred tabernacle, the ark of the covenant, which housed the Ten Commandments God handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai.
The Babylonians are believed to have destroyed the Temple in 586 BCE. But that most sacred tabernacle, the holy of holies, ark and all, is thought to still be buried beneath what is now the Dome of the Rock.
Our other professor—a kind and brilliant man named Rabbi Michael Paley who spoke Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek—had told us that during Roman and Christian rule of Jerusalem, Jews could only enter the city on a single day every year, Tisha B’Av, to mourn the destruction of both the First and Second Temples. “That’s why the Western Wall is sometimes called ‘the wailing wall,’” he’d said. But during Jerusalem’s Muslim rule (twelfth century to early twentieth), Jews were again allowed to live in the city and worship with relative degrees of freedom, freedom that was expanded when, in December 1917, British forces captured Jerusalem from the Turks, opening the possibility for the current Israeli state.
It was shortly after the capture that British field marshal Edmund Allenby pledged “that every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, pious bequest, or customary place of prayer of whatsoever form of the three religions will be maintained and protected according to the existing customs and beliefs of those to whose faith they are sacred.”
As the sinking sun turned gathering thunderheads purple and red, I could see that the sane majority of Israelis and Palestinians had maintained Field Marshal Allenby’s goal decently. The Muslim call to prayer—“Alluuuuuuu Akbar”—rang out from the Dome of the Rock while, just below the shimmering gold, a swarm of black-hatted Hasidim and other Jews collected by the wall to daven. Simultaneously, church bells tolled from the area that would have been the Temple’s northern wall and was now the Christian quarter.
Meanwhile, I was chowing down on pita and hummus and falafel, none of which I thought I even liked much before coming to the Holy Land. But you have really never had hummus or falafel until you’ve been to the Middle East. Comparing the dry, grainy American stuff that tastes a bit like chickpeas and dirt to Middle Eastern hummus is like comparing powdered milk to half-and-half. Anyhow, perhaps it was the dopamine explosion of good food mixed with the sounds of prayer, but I started to feel exceedingly pleasant. I thought of the Dalai Lama’s words, “People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.”
Yes, I thought, and the spiritual bazaar below looked like an interfaith utopia. It also hit me that the scene would be severely diminished—a bit boring even—with just the sights and sounds of a single faith. Why couldn’t radicals see that God and humanity were both more glorified by diversity—that diversity was the testament to grace?
And then I also thought, What the hell am I doing?
Some of my maternal ancestors were Jewish. And even if the only thing Jewish we’d ever done was eat matzo ball soup and light a menorah a few times, as one of the Columbia Chabad rabbis had told me, “You’d be Jewish to Hitler, kid. You’re Jewish.” Something in me was being called toward that wall.
I gobbled down the final crumbs of pita, licked the plate of hummus clean, then walked down the massive stairwell, blending into the sea of black hats and beards. I suddenly wanted nothing more than to touch the wall.
So, like being at my first rock concert—crowd surfing—I found myself lightly elbowing my way through a thick crowd of the faithful and wedging myself into the front row.
Gigantic limestone bricks, some the size of a small car and looking osseous as woolly mammoth bones, towered before me. In the cracks of those bricks, pilgrims had stuffed pieces of paper that looked like hand-rolled cigarettes: prayers to Adonai, Lord of the Universe.
Looking at the notes protruding from cracks—some on binder paper, others on old envelope scraps, others on handmade parchment—I thought there was something both beautiful and juvenile about this communication method. Could God—the original momo dough of reality—actually care if you wrote the prayers down on paper and stuck them in the cracks of these old bricks versus, say, thinking the prayers—or doing something to achieve those prayers?
I thought not. But then I thought of spinning prayer wheels with Sonam and how nice it had been to see those prayers whirling, tangible. So I took out my reporter’s notebook and scribbled down a plea.
“Dear God,” it read. “Please, I beg you, wake me up!”
I rolled up my prayer and slipped it into one of the stone cracks. Feeling satisfied, I then decided to push my way out of the prayer pit. I was still hoping to do some reporting on an interfaith Muslim-Jewish soccer team that played in the nearby suburb of Mevaseret Zion, my best chance, I thought, of getting a published clip in the New York Times. But when I turned to leave, a group of bearded rabbis holding an immense Torah that looked at least a millennium old had begun swaying behind me, shoulder to shoulder. Some of the men looked not much younger than the Torah they held. And they h
ad sealed me in pretty good. It seemed rude to elbow my way through. So I decided to stay until dark when Shabbat would begin (it was Friday) and the faithful would disperse, heading home for dinner.
I stood at the wall’s base feeling a little awkward. But then I decided to quietly chant the name of the bodhisattva of compassion, Guan Yin, one of the few chants I knew by heart.
“Naaaaammoooo Guan Shr Yin Pu Sa,” I sang softly under the Hebrew din.
Only it felt inappropriate to be reciting Chinese here as an American with Jewish and Catholic ancestors from Lithuania. I quieted down, deciding to just breathe. But in the silence that followed, my right hand on the limestone, the one legitimate line of Hebrew I’d learned from Ari popped into my head: Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech haolam—“Blessed are You, the Lord our God, King of the universe.” I started to repeat the phrase, and the sound of the Hebrew had a nice rhythm to it. So I began reciting with more vigor until I was eventually singing, full throated. Almost confident.
The more I sang, the more Baruch atah Adonai felt familiar. The recitation was also making me feel a bit more focused, a bit more part of the crowd, a bit more sane.
Then the madness hit.
Hands on the wall and rocking back and forth on my heels and toes like the professional Jews, something struck me that I won’t be able to do justice. But in hopes of conveying an epic quality, I will invoke the prophet Jonah to try.
When Jonah was cast overboard by his crew and swallowed into the belly of a whale, he said, “The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me forever.”
But just as Jonah felt most trapped by the ribs of the mighty fish, and just before he was spit out, “my soul fainted within me. I remembered the LORD: and my prayer came in unto thee.”
I did not think I was Jonah or, I swear, any biblical character. But Jonah’s description of remembering God, then being freed from the great whale, matched the way that I felt as my heart seemed to want to leap out from behind my own ribs. I began to cry, nearly delirious in the power that also compassed me about—even, yes, to the soul.
It was a power that collapsed in from all sides. The only appropriate response to this power was to wail as I had not wailed since I was in the Himalayas. Here at the Western Wall, however, I could not run to my private canvas tent and plunge my head in my pillow. The wall of rabbis barred me in like ribs of the whale.
So, even though the tears were ecstatic, I tried to resist. I thought of Jerusalem syndrome. Let’s not go psychotic right in the middle of your first real journalism trip. After all, perhaps this bawling was simply due to the subliminal messaging of being at the wailing wall. I also thought that I was somehow absorbing, by osmosis, the grief that had been left here through the millennia. I even thought of quantum entanglement, that mysterious principle of particle physics that says when a subatomic particle decays into an entangled pair of particles and those entangled particles separate, whatever subsequently happens to one particle—no matter how distant the two particles become—affects the other particle. They are like twin sisters who eerily know what the other is feeling on the opposite side of the earth.
Was I quantum-entangled with the Jewish people? Was every human? Was that why we all cared so much about this little dot of dirt in the middle of the desert?
But when the bawling became uncontrollable—the sort that feels like you’re finally crying for the pain of the whole cosmos—my intellect gave up.
I bawled there for quite some time. Then, as night fell, and the Hebrew died down, I remembered my note written only an hour ago—an hour that seemed like days and nights.
I’d asked God to wake me up. And somehow—seventh-grade note-passing technique and all—God had decided to swallow me up just long enough to peek backstage—back where Rumi’s words seemed logical:
I am neither Christian nor Jew, neither Magian nor Muslim,
I am not from east or west, not from land or sea,
not from the shafts of nature nor from the spheres of the firmament,
not of the earth, not of water, not of air, not of fire.
My place is placeless, my trace is traceless.
The sky was deep purple now, and the crowd was thinning. Shabbat was here, the day of rest. Almost as quickly as the rush of tears had begun, they shut off. I looked around and dried my cheeks with my button-down. I didn’t quite know what to do. But my feet said walk. So I walked, eventually finding myself back at our hotel, sitting on my balcony, looking out at the night sky.
After a shower and shave, I felt normal enough to speak again. I even ended up catching the tail end of soccer practice in Mevaseret, interviewing the Jewish and Muslim and Christian players about how soccer could save us from war. Then I went to have an evening beer with some classmates.
I slept, woke, ate eggs, toast, and coffee, and prepared for another day of interviews. Work was enough to get me thinking in relative terms again. I never uttered a word about the experience to my friends. (Your credentials as a journalist only go so far once you start spouting off about breaking under the weight of the divine.)
But I could not deny that I was changed. Instead of feeling angry at the American terrorist who wanted to explode the Dome of the Rock, the Israeli soldier who’d deleted my photos, the anti-Semite in Ramallah, I felt empathy, sadness, even love. The innocents these people might harm could always find a way to forgive. But the person who hates is frozen. The hateful are also part of the sea. Nothing escapes. But their hearts are so locked, so cold, so self-obsessed, it’s nearly impossible to recall the freedom of love.
Regarding the big questions of the soul, nothing had been proven here. But I had to chalk this one up for Sonam and Thurman. Call it mindstream. Call it soul. Call it nonduality. Call it God. I had heard the music in the Holy Land. I believed.
Maybe someday science would prove some soul exists. Maybe not. But unlike Gramp, I realized I didn’t need to wait around. After all, if some scientist said she had proven love was real right after the first time you’d fallen head over heels, lose-everything-you-thought-you-knew, drunk with the stuff—you know, like, high school prom in love—would it matter to you if you could see the spreadsheet?
16
. . . for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the British fantasy novel by Susanna Clarke, magic has disappeared completely from England. “Magicians” have become mere scholars who study the work of the practical wizards of old like Merlin.
Then, just as the Napoleonic Wars are beginning, a stodgy, hermetic, cranky old man named Mr. Norrell reluctantly decides to reveal that practical magicians haven’t completely disappeared. He gathers the scholar magicians at an old church and performs the first legitimate spell they’ve ever seen. He brings the statues to life.
England will never be the same.
Journalism school ended. I went back to San Francisco for the summer, and when I returned to New York for my degree in religion, I was thinking of this novel a lot. Clarke gave language to something I’d long felt about religion in academia. In almost all my classes to date—though they were each historically fascinating—I felt that we were scholars studying mystical practices that mystics said had to be experienced rather than researched. To quote Rumi again,
The intellectual is always showing off;
The lover is always getting lost.
The intellectual runs away, afraid of drowning;
the whole business of love is to drown in the sea.
Scholars seemed to recognize that “drowning” here meant losing our idea of small self or ego, surrendering to God, something all great faiths call for in one way or another. But since you couldn’t just go meditating and praying and Sufi dancing for homework, none of us scholars
ever approached such experiences in our study. Like the magicians in England, we just talked about how people maybe used to do something like that. Or thought they could.
As this became the way people learned about religion, mystics, it seemed to me, felt increasingly that they had to explain themselves through the language of institutions and logic—the language of the Muggles, as Harry Potter fans would put it. Mysticism—practical magic—became increasingly cloistered in secret monasteries while mainstream religious leaders, little by little, became pawns of the Muggles, forgetting their own mystical practices in favor of sounding in sync with the times. The more that happened, the more you wound up with religious leaders teaching laypeople that religion was just about rote memorization, a set of rules, politics. When folks tried to live just a set of rules, they ended up frustrated, judgmental, even angry because there is nothing liberating in identifying with rules alone. They became secret sexual deviants or angry radicals. The magic was gone.
This is of course a generalization. The history of religions is an important subject in and of itself. It should be separated from mysticism. But as I started the master’s in religion, I loved classes with Thurman because they felt like a mix of practical magic and scholastic rigor. My other classes, however, didn’t. I was beginning to realize that I had no interest in being a scholar. I didn’t want to write papers debating who really built the wailing wall. I wanted to understand the grace that had slapped me upside the head at the wailing wall—and to figure out how to get more of that magic in my ordinary life.