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Sunday
Sunday morning we visited Yad L'Kashish, which I thought from the description was going to be some sort of elder-care facility (nursing home, hospital, or the like). What it really is is a crafts shop, set up specifically to give older people jobs, responsibility, skills, and dignity. I've never heard of anything like it back home.
It was started by a schoolteacher (I think in the 40s?). What inspired a schoolteacher to do something like this? There were at the time a lot of immigrants who couldn't find jobs and had resorted to begging. One day she took her class out somewhere, and one girl ran home crying and didn't return. After two days the teacher visited the girl's home and spoke to the parents, who told her their daughter couldn't come back to that school any more. It turned out that she had seen her grandfather begging in the streets and she was embarrassed in front of her classmates.
Yad K'Kashish gives people real jobs, not handouts. They work from 8 to 12 each day; they have assigned roles and assigned work areas. Over time the center has grown in scope; there are now, I think, 15 different types of hand-craft work going on there. We saw bookbinding, silk painting (scarves, wall-hangings, etc), paper-making, painting (cards, boxes, etc), embroidery, knitting, metalwork (cut-work), and others I'm blanking on. This definitely is not a "give the poor old guy something to do"; these people are talented. They encouraged us to talk to the workers, and some of them were very enthusiastic. (I wouldn't be surprised if level of enthusiasm affects where they seat people, but even so, they seemed happy.)
(They do tours frequently. I do wonder what it's like to work in a place with frequent tourists peering over your shoulder. They know it up front, I assume.)
This is the Rambam's highest level of tzedakah in action. He outlines eight levels of dealing with the needy, ranging from giving them money (non-anonymously) up to giving them skills and a job. Would that this were more common!
They get 40% of their income from sales of the goods they produce (prices are quite reasonable, by the way) and the rest from private sources. The government is not involved. (I don't know if Israel has favorable tax status for non-profit institutions like the US does, so I don't know if they even get that.) As a Jew I'm impressed; as a libertarian I'm happy for the demonstration of what some say is impossible.
Next we went to the western wall, which I wrote about in an earlier
entry. After a lunch of falafel and another simplistic conversation
in Hebrew, we headed to the excavations under the wall. They're called
"tunnels", but that implies that someone dug out a hill. Actually,
the layers above the bottom of the wall were designed in from the start.
The full wall is very high; access via a bridge of sorts was originally
possible. (I'm fuzzing on the details now, but I'll bet I can find
a decent explanation online later.)
We saw the arches that support those layers. Because the wall is built on a slope (Mount Moriah), as you go along its length you see fashioned stone replaced with bedrock. Our guide showed us one stone that is huge -- easily 20 feet wide and 6 or 7 feet tall, and I don't know how deep. One wonders just how these stones were moved and precisely placed. Yes, there are things you can do with rollers and slave-power, but it's still enormous. Oh, and about that placement: the wall is dry construction -- no mortar.
We then went to the Davidson Center, a small museum where we saw a video and model explaining what the original construction was like. (We're talking about the second temple, built by Herod, not the first.) Seeing this made some things much clearer for me than reading about it had.
We then went back to the area of Robinson's arch, at the southern end of the wall, and walked around to what remains of the southern wall. We could see the Al-Asqa mosque above; I was surprised at how far its mineret is. (I thought they were usually just outside the mosque.) While we were there we heard the muslim call to prayer; I was a little surprised that the imam has been replaced by a cassette recording. Nobody wants to shlep all the way up there five times a day, apparently.
Next we went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
lorimelton,
no postcards but I took lots of pictures.) This is the traditional
burial place of Jesus at, err, Gilgoa? (Something like that; will look
up and edit later.) That word means "skull", because the rock looks
kind of like a skull. Having seen it I can understand how they got that,
though I might not have come up with it on my own.
Inside the church is somewhat cavernous and dark. They have four of the stations of the cross. Someone more versed in this than I will have to explain this; I'm used to churches having small plaques for all fourteen stations, but what this church has are large shrines for four of them.
As you walk in the main door you see the last of the stations (I'll get back to it). There is a circular stone staircase just inside the door; when you come out on the second floor you're facing the first of their stations, Jesus being nailed to the cross. This is depicted in a huge painting, in front of which is a table (altar?) with candles and flowers. (Altars with candles and flowers will turn out to be a theme.) Next is a painting of Jesus on the cross, with a shrine showing Mary. The last (on this level) is a smaller shrine that people had to crawl into; there were actual worshippers there and I didn't want to interfere, so I never got a good look. Later I'll upload a photo and maybe someone can translate the Greek inscription.
The final station is the one that is visible on first entering, which is preparing the body for burial. This one also has a huge painting (maybe the largest of all) to accompany it. This station isn't an altar like the others; it has a long, low horizontal surface, presumably where the body was laid, and some sort of bottles (incense holders? something else?) suspended above it. I missed the guide's explanation because I was slow in getting down the steps.
It was the day before Christmas, and that might have had something to do with the number of non-tourist visitors we saw. Some of the women wore headscarves in what I think of as a Muslim style; do Muslims adore Jesus in the way Catholics do? (I know they consider him important and not God, so I don't know where the crucifixion falls out in their beliefs.)
I was struck by how devout the worshippers seemed to be. That kind of emotion and seriousness was not part of my upbringing. In my parents' church I don't think I ever saw someone weep at the stations or in front of the crucifix. Maybe that's an orthodox-versus-catholic thing, or maybe it says something about one or both of these specific churches.
Later that night I was talking with my rabbi about the wall (telling him what I posted here, basically), and he asked about my reaction to the church. I shared my observations about devotion, as well as commenting on the impressive nature (beauty, size) of it. He said one of the kids on the tour had been squicked by the paintings, which are a little graphic. I've studied medieval and renaissance art some, so that didn't really register on my "might not be normal" meter. This was mild compared to some of the saints' depictons you see in books of hours. (Hint: they frequently depict the martyrdom.)
After the church we made a short visit to Cardo Street in the Jewish quarter, with time to shop. There weren't as many shops as I expected; I guess I was envisioning something not unlike Pennsic merchants, with rows upon rows of small merchants in an open-air market. Cardo Street is under another street (so roofed but not fully enclosed), and there were maybe 15 shops selling mostly high-end silver/gold Judaica. I was specifically looking for Armenean pottery (which is gorgeous), but, it turns out, there's an Aremenean quarter you have to go to for that. Oops.
On the way out we saw a large menorah behin glass. I asked about it; it turns out to be one of the implements made by the Holy Mount Faithful, the people who are preparing for the building of the third temple. I didn't expect to see their stuff out in the open like that, given that they're not overly popular.
After a nice dinner (at a dairy restaurant called Montifiore), a few people headed to Beit Lechem (Bethlehem) with a hired guide. It sounded like it could be interesting, but maybe a zoo on Christmas eve and maybe a late night when we had an extremely-early start the next day. I heard today that they were pretty overwhelmed and that their guide apparently knew all the right people to get them past all the Palestinian checkpoints. I'm looking forward to hearing more details from them.
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Close...Golgotha.
As I recall, many of the Christian holy sites are disputed...the Roman Catholic church claims it is one location, the Orthodox church claims it is another. As I recall, the conventional wisdom is that the Orthodox church locations are probably the most accurate, as the history of the Orthodox church traces its roots back to the Byzantine Empire, which was originally the eastern Roman empire, and they were there before the Roman Catholics came along to the Holy Land. When the Roman Catholics came along much much later, legend has it that they received "divine inspiration" that revealed to them that all the Orthodox locations were wrong, and so the Catholics say that they were able to build churches in the "right" locations.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is apparently the only site that both churches agree on.
However, things being as they are of course there is another location reputed to have been the site of the crucifixion. I saw it, decades ago, at the time it was a bus station just outside the old city walls near the Damascus gate (see link above). It does look like a skull, and the interesting argument in its favor is that it doesn't seem reasonable that Jerusalem would have included an execution and burial site within the city walls.
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