Of another bush: “These have water. If you crush them, you will get water. These could save your life.” He crushes a fistful of leaves and tears spill from his hand.
• • •
The child of Abraham and Sarah is named Isaac, which means “He Laughs.” Sarah proclaims an earthy Magnificat: God has made laughter for me, and all who hear of it will laugh for me. From the loins of these two deserts—Abraham, Sarah—God yanks a wet, an iridescent, caul: a people as numerous as the stars. From the line of Sarah, royal David. From King David’s line will come Jesus.
• • •
One’s sense of elision begins with the map. Many tourist maps include the perimeters of the city at the time of Herod’s temple, the time of Christ. This once was . . . Built over the site . . . All that remains . . . This site resembles . . .
This is not the room of the Last Supper; this is a Crusader structure built over the room, later converted to a mosque—note the mihrab, the niche in the wall.
The empty room is white—not white, golden. Is the air really golden? As a child in Omaha, my friend Ahuva was ravished by the thought—told her by an old man in a black hat—that the light of Jerusalem is golden. An ultra-Orthodox boy wanders into the room (a few paces from this room is the Tomb of King David, the anteroom to which is dense with the smell of men at prayer; upstairs is a minaret); the boy is eating something, some kind of bun. He appears transfixed by a small group of evangelical Christian pilgrims who have begun to sing a song, what in America we would call an old song.
• • •
I am alone in the early morning at St. Anne’s, a Romanesque church built in the twelfth century. The original church was damaged by the Persians; restored in the time of Charlemagne; destroyed, probably by the Caliph al-Hakim, in 1010. The present church was built by the Crusaders. Sultan Salah ad-Din captured the city in 1192 and converted the church to a madrassa. The Ottoman Turks neglected the structure; it fell to ruin. The Turks offered the church to France. The French order of White Fathers now administers St. Anne’s. Desert sun pours through a window over the altar.
Not only is the light golden, Ahuva, but I must mention a specific grace. Around four o’clock, the most delightful breeze comes upon Jerusalem, I suppose from the Mediterranean, miles away. It begins at the tops of the tallest trees, the date palm trees; shakes them like feather dusters; rides under the bellies of the lazy red hawks; snaps the flags on the consulate roofs; lifts the curtains of the tall windows of my room at the hotel—sheer curtains embroidered with an arabesque design—lifts them until they are suspended perpendicularly in midair like the veil of a bride tormented by a playful page, who then lets them fall. And then lifts. And then again.
I walk around the wall of the city to the Mount of Olives, to a Christian sensibility the most evocative remnant of Jerusalem, for it matches—even including the garbage—one’s imagination of Christ’s regard for the city he approached from Bethany, which was from the desert. The desert begins immediately to the east of Jerusalem.
All the empty spaces of the Holy City—all courts, Tabernacles, tombs, and reliquaries—are resemblances and references to the emptiness of the desert. All the silences of women and men who proclaim the desert God throughout the world, throughout the ages, are references and resemblances to this—to the Holy City, to the hope of a Holy City. Jerusalem is the Bride of the Desert.
The desert prowls like a lion. I am fatigued from the heat, and I look about for some shade and a bottle of water. Having procured both at an outdoor stand (from a young man whose father kneels in prayer), I grow curious about an entrance I can see from the courtyard where I rest. Perhaps it is a chapel. An old man is sitting on the steps near the entrance. I approach him. What is this place?
“The Tomb of Mary,” he answers.
Inside the door I perceive there are steps from wall to wall, leading downward. I can discern only the flickering of red lamps below, as if at the bottom of a well. When I reach the level of the tomb, an Orthodox priest throws a switch and the tomb is illuminated. It is a shelf of rock. The legend of the Dormition of Mary and the Catholic doctrine of the Assumption—neither of which I understand very well—lead me to wonder whether this is a spurious site. I decide I will accept all sites in this junk room of faith as true sites. I kneel.
A few years ago the bone box of James, the brother of Jesus, was raised from the shady world of the antiquities market. I believe the box has been discredited (dust not of the proper age within the incising of the letters). Authenticity is not my point. The stone box is my point. For it creates emptiness. Jerusalem is just such a box—within its anachronistic walls—a city of ossuaries, buried, reburied, hallowed, smashed, reconstructed, then called spurious or probable in guidebooks.
I have brought five guidebooks to Jerusalem: The Archeological. The Historical. The Illustrated. The Practical. The Self-Absorbed. Each afternoon, when I return to my hotel, I convene a colloquy among them—the chatter of guidebooks. I read one and then another.
The closed nature of the city frustrates my interest. My mind is oppressed by the inaccessibility of the hive of empty chambers, empty churches, empty tombs. The city that exists is superimposed in some meaty way over the bone city I long to enter. The streets are choked and impassible with life, the air stifling, the merchandise appalling. I feel feverish, but I think it is only the heat. I make the rounds of all the gates to the Temple Mount until at last I find the entrance that Israeli security will let me through—the passageway for infidels.
The sun is blazing on the courtyard. Even the faithful have gone away. Elsewhere the city is vertiginously sunken—resentments and miracles parfaited. Here there is a horizontal prospect.
The Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock have been closed to non-Muslims since my last visit. I stand outside the shrine and try to reconstruct the interior from memory—the pillars, tiles, meadows of carpet. The vast Muslim space is what I remember. Islamic architecture attempts the sublime feat of emptiness. It is the sense of emptiness enclosed that is marvelous. The dome is the sky that is made. The sky is nothing—the real sky—and beggars have more of it than others.
Muslims own Jerusalem sky. This gold-leafed dome identifies Jerusalem on any postcard, the conspicuous jewel. Jews own the ground. The enshrined rock was the foundation for the Holy of Holies of Solomon’s temple, the room that enclosed the Ark of the Covenant. The rock is also the traditional site of the near sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. God commanded Moses to commission Bezalel the artisan to make the ark. The Book of Exodus describes two golden cherubim whose wings were to form above the ark a Seat of Mercy—a space reserved for the presence of the Lord. The architecture for the presence of G-D has been conceptualized ever after as emptiness.
The paradox of monotheism is that the desert God, refuting all other gods, demands acknowledgment within emptiness. The paradox of monotheism is that there is no paradox—only unfathomable singularity.
May I explain to you some features of the shrine?
A man has approached as I stand gazing toward the dome. He looks to be in his sixties; he is neatly dressed in a worn suit. The formality of syntax extends to his demeanor. Obviously he is one of the hundreds of men, conversant in three faiths, who haunt the shrines of Jerusalem, hoping to earn something as informal guides.
No thank you.
This is the Dome of the Rock, he continues.
No thank you.
Why are you so afraid to speak to a guide? (The perfected, implicating question.)
I am not afraid. I don’t have much time.
He lowers his eyes. Perhaps another time. He withdraws.
My diffidence is purely reflexive. One cannot pause for a moment on one’s path through any of the crowded streets or souks without a young man—the son, the nephew, the son-in-law of some shopkeeper—asking, often with the courtliness of a prince, often with the stridency of a
suitor: May I show you my shop?
Emptiness clings to these young men as well—the mermen of green-lit grottoes piled with cheap treasure—men with nothing to do but fiddle with their cell phones or yawn in their unconscious beauty and only occasionally swim up to someone caught in the unending tide of humanity that passes before them.
May I show you my shop?
No thank you.
• • •
To speak of the desert God is to risk blasphemy, because the God of the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims is unbounded by time or space, is everywhere present—exists as much in a high mountain village in sixteenth-century Mexico as in tomorrow’s Jakarta, where Islam thrives as a tropical religion. Yet it was within the ecology of the Middle Eastern desert that the mystery of monotheism blazed. And it is the faith of the Abrahamic religions that the desert God penetrated time and revealed Himself first—thus condescending to sequence—to the Jews.
Behind the wall of my hotel in East Jerusalem are a gasoline station and a small mosque. The tower of the mosque—it is barely a tower—is outfitted with tubes of green neon. Five times in twenty-four hours the tubes of neon flicker and sizzle; the muezzin begins his cry. Our crier has the voice of an old man, a voice that gnaws on its beard. I ask everyone I meet if the voice is recorded or live. Some say recorded and some say real.
I believe God is great. I believe God is greatest.
The God of the Jews penetrated time. The Christian and the Muslim celebrated that fact ever after with noise. In the medieval town, Christian bells sounded the hours. Bells called the dawn and the noon and the coming night.
In the secular West, church bells have been stilled by discretion and by ordinance. In my neighborhood of San Francisco, the announcement of dawn comes from the groaning belly of a garbage truck.
No one at the hotel seems to pay the voice any mind. The waiters serve. Cocktails are shaken and poured. People in the courtyard and in the restaurant continue their conversations. The proprietress of the place turns a page of the book she is reading.
At four o’clock in the morning, the swimming pool is black. The hotel is asleep and dreaming. The neon ignites. The old man picks up his microphone to rend our dream asunder.
It is better to pray than to sleep.
The voice is not hectoring; it is simply oblivious. It is not like one’s father, up early and dressing in the dark; it is like a selfish old man who can’t sleep. The voice takes its permission from the desert—from the distance—but it is the modern city it wakes with enforced intimacy.
The old man’s chant follows a tune; it is always the same tune, like a path worn through a carpet. And each day the old man becomes confused by the ornamental line—his voice is not agile enough to assay it. His voice turns ruminative, then puzzled. Finally, a nasal moan:
Muhammad is the prophet of Allah.
• • •
River Jordan water runs between my toes—a breathtakingly comfortable sensation. I have taken a bus tour of Galilee; the bus has stopped at the Yardenit Baptismal Site, which resembles a state picnic grounds. I watch a procession of Protestant pilgrims in rented white smocks descend some steps into the comfortable brown water.
Protestantism is the least oriental of the desert faiths. Protestants own little real estate within the walls of Jerusalem. They own nothing of ancient squabbles between the Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire. Protestants are free to memorialize sacred events without any compulsion to stand guard over mythic ground.
For example, the traditionally venerated site of Christ’s baptism is near Jericho. After the Six-Day War in 1967, that location was declared off-limits to tourists. And so this place—Yardenit—of no historical or religious significance, was developed as a place to which Christians might come for baptism ceremonies. The faith of evangelical pilgrims at Yardenit overrides the commercialism that attaches to the enterprise (Your Baptism videotaped by a professional). One bank or the other, it is the same river, and pilgrims at Yardenit step confidently into the Bible.
• • •
Distance enters Abraham’s seed with God’s intimacy. A birth precedes the birth of Isaac. There is domestic strife of God’s manufacture. For God also arranges that Sarah’s Egyptian servant, Hagar, will bear Abraham a son. That son is Ishmael; the name means “He Listens.” Sarah soon demands that Abraham send Hagar and her son away. I cannot abide that woman. She mocks me.
So Hagar and Ishmael are cast into the desert of Beersheba as Abraham and Sarah and the camels and tents and servants and flocks flow slowly away from them like a receding lake of dust.
Abruptly Haim tells me to stop. “Listen! The desert has a silence like no other,” he says. “Do you hear a ringing in your ear? It is the bell of existence.”
Not far from here, in Gaza, missiles are pitched through a blue sky. People who will be identified in news reports this evening as terrorists will shortly be killed or the innocent will be killed, people who even now are stirring pots with favored spoons or folding the last page of the morning paper to line the bird’s cage.
I hear. What do I hear? I hear a truck shifting gears on a highway, miles away.
God hears the cry of Ishmael: God finds Hagar in the desert and rescues her dying child by tapping a spring of water—a green silk scarf pulled from a snake hole. God promises Hagar that Ishmael, too, will be a nation. From Ishmael’s line will come the Arab tribes, and from the Arab tribes, the Prophet Muhammad.
• • •
Mahdi, my Palestinian guide, pulls off the main road so I can see the Monastery of the Temptation in the distance. (Mahdi has been telling me about the years he lived in Riverside, California.) The monastery was built upon the mountain where Christ was tempted by Satan to consider the Kingdoms of the World. And here are we, tourists from the Kingdoms of the World, two thousand years later, regarding the mountain.
A figure approaches from the distance, surrounded by a nimbus of moisture. The figure is a Bedouin on foot. A young man but not a boy, as I first thought. He is very handsome, very thin, very small, utterly humorless. He extends, with his two hands, a skein of perhaps twenty-five bead necklaces. He speaks English—a few words like beads. “Camel,” he says. “For your wife, your girlfriend.”
“This is camel,” he says again, fingering some elongated beads. I ask him who made the necklaces. His mother.
There is no sentimentality to this encounter. Sentimentality is an expenditure of moisture. The Bedouin’s beseeching eyes are dry; they are the practice of centuries. He sits down a short distance away from us while we contemplate the monastery. He looks into the distance, and, as he does so, he becomes the desert.
• • •
Moses, Jesus, Muhammad—each ran afoul of cities: Moses of the court of Egypt, Jesus of Jerusalem, Muhammad of Mecca. The desert hid them, emptied them, came to represent a period of trial before they emerged as vessels of revelation. Did they, any of them, experience the desert as habitable—I mean, in the manner of Haim, in the manner of the Bedouin?
After he fled Egypt, Moses took a wife; he took the nomadic life of his wife’s people as a disguise. Moses led his father-in-law’s flock across the desert to Mount Horeb, where God waited for him.
As a boy, Muhammad crossed the desert in Meccan caravans with his uncle Abu Talib. Muhammad acquired the language of the Bedouin and Bedouin ways. As a middle-aged man, Muhammad was accustomed to retire with his family to a cave in the desert to meditate. During one such retreat Muhammad was addressed by God.
The Jews became a people by the will of God, for He drove them through the desert for forty years. God fed the people Israel with manna. Ravens fed Elijah during his forty days in the desert. After his ordeal of forty days, Jesus accepted the ministrations of angels. Such supernatural nourishments of the body suggest a reliance on God rather than an embrace of the desert.
In The Desert Fathers, Helen Waddell writes that the early Christian monks of the desert gave a single intellectual concept to Europe—eternity. The desert monks saw the life of the body as “most brief and poor.” But the life of the spirit lies beyond the light of day. The light of day conceals “a starlit darkness into which a man steps and becomes suddenly aware of a whole universe, except that part of it which is beneath his feet.”
There are people in every age who come early or late to a sense of the futility of the world. Some people, such as the monks of the desert, flee the entanglements of the world to rush toward eternity. But even for those who remain in the world, the approach of eternity is implacable. “The glacier knocks in the cupboard, / The desert sighs in the bed,” was W. H. Auden’s mock-prophetic forecast. He meant the desert is incipient in the human condition. Time melts away from us. Even in luxuriant weather, even in luxuriant wealth, even in luxuriant youth, we know our bodies will fail; our buildings will fall to ruin.
• • •
If the desert beckons the solitary, it also, inevitably, gives birth to the tribe. The ecology of the desert requires that humans form communities for mutual protection from extreme weathers, from bandits, from rival chieftains. Warfare among Arab tribes impinged often upon the life of the Prophet Muhammad. In response to the tyranny of kinship, Muhammad preached a spiritual brotherhood—discipleship under Allah—that was as binding as blood, as expansive as sky.
The Christian monastic movement in the Judaean wilderness reached its peak in the sixth century, by which time there were so many monks, so many monasteries in the desert (as many as eight hundred monks in some of the larger communities), that it became a commonplace of monastic chronicles, a monkish conceit, to describe the desert as a city.
• • •
I am driving with Mahdi through Bethlehem, then several Bedouin settlements to the east, leading into the desert. The road narrows, climbs, eventually runs out at the gates of Mar Saba, a Greek Orthodox monastery.
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