HEAVY PLACE

It’s thought that Herod the Great began construction on the second temple in around 19BC. Herod seems to have built everywhere he went actually, often in an attempt to impress the Romans and to ‘get in’ with their sophisticated crowd. I don’t know whether history records that they actually were impressed; I tend to think that kind of thing never goes down well. But then, I’ve never been exactly fashionable.

Either way, Herod encased the mountain in four walls, filled in the gaps and constructed an enormous temple on the place where the first one, Solomon’s Temple had previously been.

Then in AD70, the Romans knocked it down. So... maybe not that impressed, after all.

Of the 488 metres of wall that remain, the portion of it that would have been right underneath the temple, is called the Wailing or Western Wall, and yesterday, Paul and I were there, right there, in the bright sunlight of a February morning.

“Fancy popping on a skull cap and having a pray?” he asked, not seriously. I said no, and that you could pray anywhere. And anyway, (despite trying to be an atmosphere changer) at the time I was actually feeling extremely oppressed.

I can’t explain why, but that place, that wide courtyard in front of the wall, where Jews pray and recite the Torah and post prayers into the cracks between the stones while they rock backwards and forwards - that is a heavy, heavy place. There in the brilliant sun on a perfect Spring day of blue skies and cumulus clouds, I was feeling a deep depression - a swirling of sad, anxious weight was around me, there on that site that ought to be so holy. Peculiar. I cant explain it. I’ve seen that place in pictures, watched Prince William popping his own prayer in there as if it were God’s pigeon hole, and thought about it often. But being there in person made me queasy.

As soon as we were out of there, through the Dung Gate and back to walking around the walls I felt better. The view cheered me up. Beyond that Southern border, the valley of Ben Hinnom stretches out to the horizon in a rolling sea of dwellings across the hills, between the deep green cypresses and olive trees. To our left and in the East (beyond the grey dome of the Al Aqsa Mosque) was the lovely Mount of Olives, rising up and overlooking the city. That, I thought, would be more like it.

If you walk around that section of Wall northwards, you get to the grand-looking Zion Gate, where Paul and I accidentally joined a tour group. They were on the way to visit the Room of the Last Supper (which just couldn’t have been anything like it!) and David’s Tomb, a small room in a building which resembled a library. There were rabbis in there, mouthing the scriptures while tracing a finger over Hebrew letters.

I think Paul was just excited about the tea

One of them (hat, beard, curls, wide sparkly eyes) got chatting to us, asking us where we were from. We told him. Then he asked if there was anybody Jewish in my family line and whether it could be my mother’s or father’s heritage. Paul gave me a side-wink. I told the rabbi that I didn’t think so.

We found free tea in a place called ‘Abraham’s Tent’ (dodgy back room with a tea urn, plastic cups, and a donation box) and then supped it in the sunshine, discussing the ancient question of whether or not you should put milk in with a Lipton tea bag.

Then we found amazing pizza in a place called ‘Jacob’s Pizza’. I think we must have missed ‘Isaac’s Gelateria’ somehow in between.

Incredibly, there would be even more spiritual heaviness and oppression later on in the day, followed by late-evening birdsong and beauty. Jerusalem was having quite the effect, it seemed, and I was already feeling that processing it all would take quite some time. I was very quiet. And I needed to be.