You got to see the light shining up in the eyes of Yekhezkiel and Israel! They love this German and happily point to him the store that sells the black ice magic known as Coke.
My thirst quenched, I go to meet the two biggest rabbis of the neighborhood. Not an easy task, let me tell you.
The first rabbi I want to meet is not around. Where is he? “In America, in a hotel,” his followers tell me. The second rabbi, what a surprise, is also not around. Where is he? “In an Austrian hotel.”
The holy men are vacationing. They don’t make movies, their life is a movie: gorgeous landscapes and delicious meals. The people of this neighborhood, who are forbidden to study anything but sacred books, don’t have professional jobs and most of them are very poor. How come the rabbis can afford expensive hotels overseas? I ask one of the followers, who points to heaven in reply: “He who created heaven and earth knows how to get a hotel for the righteous!”
If Yoav had any sense of humor he would have made a film about these people.
When holy men are vacationing at places such as Interalpen-Tyrol, the little children of their community stay behind in Meah Shearim to study the alphabet and I go to join them. In their eyes, if I remember from my childhood years in the Haredi world, a man dressed like I am these days must be a creature from the local zoo, a damned Zionist, a cursed goy, a gentile, or a fugitive on the run from a mental hospital.
A bunch of kids, between twenty and thirty, congregate around this stranger the moment he walks in and shower him with love. They chose the zoo option, I can tell; they think I’m a lovely bear.
“Who are you?” they ask.
I respond in Yiddish, a language they never imagined creatures like me speak: And who are you? They love this bear. I must come from a kosher zoo.
Their teacher chats with me and tells me that he’s an anti-Zionist “just like you.”
How did you find this out about me so fast?
“You wouldn’t come to visit us if you were a Zionist!”
We laugh. And the children laugh too. They all try to touch me, a lovely bear on two legs, while shouting with pleasure.
The teacher and the kids communicate with each other in Yiddish, a language that is 80 percent German, and he teaches them the Holy Tongue, Hebrew.
I sit with them and watch how they learn to recognize letters. It takes me back many years, to the foundations of my knowledge, and I close my eyes.
Alef. Beis. Gimmel. (A. B. C.)
Letters are images; A looks like this, B looks like that. Letters are strange creatures, and they lack any esthetics. Why can’t letters be more picturesque? Letters are cold, rough, old-fashioned creatures that somehow survived the concentration camps. Letters are powerful, cruel, manipulative, and very smart. I want to control them; I don’t want them to control me.
Alef! Beis! Gimmel!
The teacher wakes me up from my daydream. Would I like to see his angelic creatures play? he asks.
It is a marvel to the eye and ear. As they play I ask them to sing. I don’t know how they will respond to my request, but the kids and their teacher think this is a hilarious idea and promptly start with songs. They look, and sound, like angels. So inspiring!
What will become of these sweet creatures when they grow up? I ask myself. A clue to the answer I can see on the street outside.
“To the women passing through our neighborhood,” a big sign on the street outside says, “please do not pass in our neighborhood in immodest clothes.” The parts of a woman’s flesh that are not required to be covered are: face and fingers. Some women here, I see and cannot believe my eyes, take “modesty” one step further: they are showing not one iota of flesh, not even their eyes, and when they walk on the street they look like huge black trash bags in movement. Are they the Jewish Taliban?
In my day women like these did not exist. Jerusalem has gotten holier, I think.
Should I try the JFF again, just in case? Maybe later; now I need beer.
I walk out of Meah Shearim and go to settle in Uganda.
* * *
The Uganda bar.
I have been told about this Uganda before, and more than I really cared to know, but today it shall be my refuge from the walking trash bags, the Jewish Nazis, and the aging bank robbers.
It is in this Uganda, people in the know say, that you can get Palestinian beer and the best hummus. I want both.
One of the first items I see upon walking into Uganda is not a beer bottle with an “Allah” logo on it, which I had hoped for, but the German soft drink Bionade. I ask Jula, the bartender, why they import this particular brand.
People around me immediately recognize that I’m a first-timer and so they explain the basics to me: most foreigners who frequent this place, which is named in honor of Theodor Herzl’s acceptance of the British proposal to settle European Jews in Africa, are from Germany, primarily Berliners.
Besides Bionade, there are two other images that capture my eyes: a picture of Theodor Herzl on the left side and the Taybeh fountain on the right.
“You have to try the Taybeh,” an older man advises me. “It’s a Palestinian beer!”
What does it mean Palestinian – was it made by a Palestinian or sold by a Palestinian?
“Made! Made!”
What kind of Palestinian – Muslim?
“Yes! What else?”
Sure?
“One hundred percent!”
Aren’t Muslims forbidden to drink alcohol?
“Ah. Maybe he’s Christian.”
I sit down to have a Taybeh, and Alon, a friend of the owner’s and a frequent guest here, starts talking to me. “I’m not a Jew, I’m a Hebrew,” he declares while still sober.
He is also “a musician, and I have a band that’s called ‘Mujahideen,’” meaning people engaged in Jihad. “I am a post-Zionist. No, take that back. I am a post-post-Zionist. I see myself as an Israelite; I like the Bible. A Hebrew, not a Jew. You have to understand: Judaism, as we now know it, only developed about four hundred years ago, and I’m against it. There are maybe ten people on earth who think like me, but this doesn’t matter. To me, today’s Judaism is like Islam and Christianity, none of which I care about.”
There are people Alon likes in particular, he tells me. Who are they? The Germans. Why? “The Germans are the nicest people in Europe.” I tell him I’m a German from Berlin and he falls in love with me on the spot.
How easy it is to make people happy.
I drink more beer – after all, I’m German – and enjoy all the mess in this country. With beer in my mouth and belly, I look at them all with a certain distance: they are Jews, I am German, and, sorry for saying this, I am the better of the two.
I get up and the German in me decides to conquer this land with real German pride. No, I’m not from the Germany of old, those who were into conquering other peoples’ lands with tanks; I’m a new German, the good German, a contemporary German who is a do-gooder. I’ll conquer this land by teaching its residents a better way. Who knows, maybe I will even revive the Uganda scheme and free the Palestinians of their eternal suffering by explaining to the Jews that Uganda would be better for them. I have learned much from history – my own history – and the moral sense that I have acquired will force a new order in this part of the world. I’ll be the messenger of peace and change, peace and love.
As I start my conquest outside Uganda, I get a message from the Cinematheque people. Would you like to go to Yad Vashem tomorrow? This invitation, sent to other festivalgoers as well, strikes my newly found German soul very deeply and very personally. Yad Vashem is Israel’s Holocaust Museum, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what I might find there: my grandparents. “Germany of old” is remote; grandparents is personal.
It takes this one little message from the Cinematheque for my moral superiority to sink to the deepest bottom of my being. Being German, how sad, is not fun.
I respond that I’ll attend. My conquest of the land has jus
t ended.
Back home, the stray cats in my backyard garden stare at me with spiteful eyes. They don’t like me. I don’t know if they think that I’m a German, an Arab, a Jew, or whatever. Bottom line: they hate me. But I’m determined not to let any of the mess I have been through today get to me and I walk out to get some sweets. In Israel they have these rugelakh, and I buy four of them. Rugelakh are little cakes, and when I eat them I know that I’m a religious person too: a Rugaleh (singular of rugelakh) Follower. I believe in rugelakh and will kill anybody who does not let me worship them.
* * *
Yad Vashem.
A representative of the museum greets the festival people, sharing some statistics with us. Before WWII there were 18 million Jews in the world, now there are 13.5 million.
Yad Vashem is shaped like a triangle representing one half of the Star of David. The other half, the missing half, represents the Jews that were killed. They are no longer, nor the second triangle.
We walk by the horrible pictures of dead Jews and all I can think of is this: some of the people here are – were – my own relatives and this is how they ended their lives.
I don’t want to see this. I would rather see a movie at the Cinematheque.
* * *
Minutes later I’m at the JFF at the Cinematheque. Films offered today:
Hitler’s Madman. The Longest Journey: The Last Days of the Jews of Rhodes. Bureau 06 (the bureau that handled the case against Adolf Eichmann).
Damn. Don’t they have anything else? Hey, you: the War is Over! But oh, here’s one non-Holocaust film: The Gardener, a film that takes place at the Bahá’í Gardens in Haifa. I go to see it.
The film starts with a young, white, beautiful lady performing rituals. She’s walking about, hopping between green trees and red and yellow flowers, fresh grass and white stones, and she mumbles prayers of love and peace. Then, after the white, pale-skinned female, it’s time for the black man, the African gardener. He is dressed not in the soft, flowing garments of the white lady, but in worker’s garb. He’s rough and dirty, yet his mouth is full of peace and his hands lovingly caress flowers.
The film is extremely boring, having no plot whatsoever. But the people around me, secular folks, are wet with pleasure. If this film represents the essence of the secular, I quietly say to myself, I’m happy I’m a religious Rugaleh.
In an adjacent room, the Cinematheque offers a press conference with the film’s director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who tries to instill love for Iran in the heart of the Jews. “Iranian people love the Israelis,” he says, among some other similar treasures. His country, at least according to Western accounts, is soon to have the capacity to manufacture glowing atomic bombs, and the people here, many of whom are German journalists, enthusiastically applaud this director. God knows why they do.
When the press conference ends, I meet Alesia Weston, executive director of this festival. This is a good opportunity for me to solve a puzzle I have no clue how to decipher on my own.
Tell me, Alesia, how many of the films at the festival were produced with German cooperation?
She takes her time, thinks of it, and finally says: “This is an interesting question. I promise I’ll get back to you on this.”
What’s the film you like most in this festival?
“The Gardener.”
What’s in it that makes you like it?
“Its incredibly playful way to treat some of the most serious questions we have. I have never thought of the interaction between nature, humans, and religion through a prism quite so gentle, forceful at the same time, and the way they reflect and impact one another.”
Give me a moment in the film that best describes what you say.
“One line in it.”
Give me the line!
“I will paraphrase, if you don’t mind.
” Go ahead.
“The flower can judge and respond to a man’s character.”
Wow.
I again need religious people to offer me a break from the heady, humorless secular high class. I hear that in another part of this city rabbinical graduates are having their final exams today. Maybe I should hook up with one or two future rabbis. Could be nice.
I go out and stop a taxi.
* * *
Mahmoud, the driver, tells me to put on the safety belt. I tell him belts are against my religion. He gives up and we talk religion, this and that, and then I tell him I want to know everything there is to know about the Prophet’s heavenly horse, al-Buraq.
Mahmoud: “No, no. Al-Buraq was no horse.”
No horse?
“No. No horse.”
What was it?
“Camel.”
Normal camel?
“Heavenly camel!”
Good. I accept. So, the Prophet arrived here, in Al-Quds, with the camel and then, just before he flew up –
“With angel Jibril!”
Yes, of course. I was trying to find out about the camel. As I remember, the Prophet tied the camel to that wall, the al-Buraq Wall, the same wall that the Jews claim is part of their holy –
“The Jews dug deep and deep in the earth, for years, for many years, to prove they were here before and they found nothing!”
The Jews were never here, but the camel was?
“Yes.”
Other than that, is everything okay?
“Where?”
In Jerusalem. How do you, the Arabs and the Jews, get along with each other?
“Just now, today, just before, two hundred settlers stormed into al-Aqsa, desecrating the holy mosque!”
What are you talking about?
“It’s all over the news. On the radio.”
Today? Now?
“Yes, yes! The Israeli government sent them!”
I check the news on my iPad – American, Israeli and European sites – but find nothing about al-Aqsa. This man must be dreaming. Having no alcohol can make a man hallucinate.
I get off his taxi and I think of the camel story. The truth is, according to the authorized Hadith, Sahih al-Bukhari, al-Buraq is no horse and no camel. When Prophet Muhammad was lying down the other day, he is quoted as saying, “suddenly” someone came to him and cut his body from his throat to his penis, took out his heart and washed it, put his heart back into his body “and a white animal, smaller than a mule and bigger than a donkey was brought to me.”
Bingo.
In Islamic visual art, notwithstanding, and as author Timothy Insoll notes in The Archeology of Islam: “The established representation of al-Buraq comprises a crowned head, often of a young woman, attached to a winged horse.”
* * *
Ahead of me, right before the entrance door to a huge convention center, there’s a bunch of Jewish sacred books lying on tables. The books deal with menstruating women. I read: “It is the tradition of the Daughters of Israel that they check their vagina, using two witnesses, one for him and one for her. The modest of the Jewish women use a third witness. Should a woman check herself if she is menstruating with her husband? No. He might incredibly playful get afraid and then not sleep with her.”
Honestly, this material is too deep for a recovering intellectual like me, especially coming off the story of the camel and the penis.
I ask the man who seems to be in charge here: Are we going to have naked women coming over soon to better illustrate the issue?
“Where are you from?”
USA, Germany, and Saudi Arabia.
I really don’t know how it happened that my lips uttered these words but this guy likes what he hears, for whatever reason, and he teaches me about women, menstruation, blood, sex, and vaginas. Not exactly in this order, but almost. Women are forbidden to have sexual relations with their spouses during menstruation and these books deal with the big question: What is menstruation? How do you check it? How do you know it?
I get confused. These particular religious Jews start reminding me of the heady secular people and soon enough the i
mages and experiences I have had so far in this land mix up in my head and I ask myself: What will happen if a menstruating woman rides a camel into the Bahá’í Garden, where two hundred settlers, five Greek monks, and three German Taybeh drinkers wait for her? Will King Herod build for her a nice castle made of one huge stone?
The best way to answer this question, most likely, is by becoming a rabbi myself. I walk to the exam room, determined to take the test and become a big rabbi of a huge menstruating community.
A security man blocks my way. No one can take the exam unless he has the right papers; he wants me to show him my papers. I have no papers, just an iPad, and I leave.
I walk around the city of Jerusalem to find a learned person to discuss with me lofty issues such as rabbinical men and menstruating women and I wander into a local bookstore, where I assume I’ll find learned people. I see Tirtsa, the store manager.
“I think,” she tells me when I just open my mouth, “that all people are fascists: right-wingers, left-wingers, everybody.”
What’s going on with her? Is she menstruating?
Tirtsa is a secular lady and I can’t ask her this question. Instead, I tell her that two hundred settlers, obviously all fascists, stormed into al-Aqsa a few hours ago. She looks at me in amazement. “I listened to the news earlier and I heard nothing about this. If something like this happened, every news media would be talking about it.”
This sounds quite reasonable and so I check once more on my iPhone. I get on the Al-Jazeera website, the one in Arabic, and sure enough I see it right there. Top of the news. Dozens of settlers, it says without giving an exact number, stormed into al-Aqsa earlier in the day. They even have a photo of al-Aqsa with about five seemingly non-Muslim men in the foreground. I show it to Tirtsa, but she is totally unimpressed. “That’s five people,” she counts. “Where are the hundreds?”
This land is too intense for me. So far I’ve only been to Jerusalem but it’s more intense than all of the US of A. I need something to eat, before I fall.
Following a tip in some tourist guide I go to the Makhne Yehudah market to a restaurant called Makhneyidah. Very creative. I sit down and check the menu.
Catch The Jew! Page 5