Seven views of Jerusalem /6 ·
In the early morning of the last day of our short trip to Jerusalem we packed our luggage, we left it at the hotel’s reception, and we went back to the Old City for one more attempt at entering the Holy Esplanade / the Temple Mount / Haram ash-Sharif. And this time we were lucky!
We queued for a few minutes in the gangway that leads to the Moors’ Gate – the only available entrance for tourists – and we got checked at the turnstiles by the IDF soldiers who controlled the access to the site, which is maintained by a Jordanian foundation.
The Esplanade is a spotless place of white stone walls and Mediterranean trees. It instills quietness and, I guess, a sense of the Ineffable for those who are prone to that. We roamed freely among the few other tourists and the Muslim pilgrims who had been let in the sanctuary; many children gathered in circles in religious activities under supervision of adults, just like Christian kids do at Sunday school.
Gatekeepers denied us entrance to the Dome of the Rock, but the exterior octagonal walls of the shrine alone are a marvel of marble and tiles. And then there is the dome itself, the golden cap that shines in sharp contrast with the barren landscape of the Holy City.
Of course we didn’t even try to enter the al-Aqsa Mosque. It is a much more sober building with a rectangular plan, the sight of which is eased by a porch and by its own grey dome. Loads of women, dressed in all kinds of Muslim garments, took shelter from the sun in the shadows of its majestic walls.
On our way out, through the Ablution Gate, we stopped to have one last look in our earthly life at the Esplanade, and we asked something to one of the Israeli soldiers who were peacefully in charge of security. He replied to us in Italian, because he had been raised in… Naples.
I returned to the Western Wall for a silly thing I had in mind. I took a free kippah from a box of the Heritage Foundation [1] and I got closer to the stones. There I was approached by a Jewish-American man who asked me to take his picture while leaving a message to G-d that had been written by his 12-year-old grand-daughter. I kindly obliged, and I asked him to return the favour while I placed mine.
Later that year my piece of paper must have been removed and then buried in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote to G-d, something about peace on Earth? I hope that one day She will read it.
I completed my tour to please the monotheistic G-ds with one final visit to the Holy Sepulchre. Outside there were as many soldiers – cadets, still teenagers, at lazy ease – as Christian pilgrims. I backed away and I walked towards our meeting point, out of the Damascus Gate.
It took us a while to find a taxi that would fetch us to the Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv: the driver was a kind Palestinian man.
We spent about three hours in line for security control. All five of us were asked if during the day we had ever lost sight of our luggage: I knew we had left it unguarded at the hotel’s reception, I knew this would cause further nuisance, therefore I had instructed my companions to lie. Two of them, including my mother’s colleague who was born in Cairo (not that Cairo) were asked anyway to open their luggage and explain the nature of its content. (How in 2022 an American family managed to take an unexploded artillery shell into the airport, without being shot to death on the spot, is beyond me.) In the end we safely boarded our uneventful El Al return flight to Milan Malpensa.
[To be continued…]
- During Shabbat and holidays their website is inaccessible and redirects to another website called Holy Clock, which counts down to sunset then redirects back to the original website. I am not making this up. ↩