Lost in Jerusalem

In fact, of all the world’s roughly 200 nations, there was only one — besides Afghanistan and Iraq (which my wife has deemed too dangerous) — that I had absolutely zero interest in ever visiting: Israel. This surprised friends and mildly annoyed my parents, who had visited quite happily. As a Jew, especially one who travels constantly, I was expected at least to have the Jewish state on my radar, if not to be planning a pilgrimage in the very near future. Tel Aviv, they’d say, has wonderful food! But to me, a deeply secular Jew, Israel has always felt less like a country than a politically iffy burden. For decades I’d tried to put as much distance between myself and Judaism as possible, and the idea that I was supposed to feel some connection to my ostensible homeland seemed ridiculous. Give me Montenegro, Chiapas, Iran even. But Israel was like Christmas: something I’d never do. Then, last fall, my friend Theodore Ross — author of the forthcoming book “Am I a Jew?” — suggested I see Jerusalem. And suddenly feeling life calling my bluff, I booked a flight. I’d spend six December days in the holiest place on the planet and, surrounded by the Old City’s 500-year-old stone walls and legions of Christians, Jews and Muslims, I would be the lone unbeliever, walking a tightrope between belonging and individualism, observing not necessarily my faith but the faithful. The Old City itself, however, turned out to be, at least in terms of geography and architecture, exactly the kind of place where I feel comfortable. Within those 40-foot-high walls was the dense warren I’d expected, laid out with seemingly no sense of order — or perhaps an order I couldn’t yet perceive. Either way, it was a visceral pleasure to master its paths, to dart down the covered, crowded market streets, past the char-grilled lamb-kebab shop (name? “Kebab Shop,” said its chef) and then up the easily missed stairs off Habad Street to the empty roofs above the market itself, where the noise of commerce barely filtered through. I loved the feeling of worn stones slipping under my sneakers, and the astringent smell of herbs as I passed Palestinian women selling bundles of sage near Damascus Gate. The boundary between the modern and the medieval was shaky here. Cybercafes were ensconced in cavelike nooks; market stalls sold plush rams, lions and donkeys (actually Donkey, from “Shrek”); Israeli soldiers lurked with their machine guns inside ancient fortified gates. And just as fluid — to me, if not to residents — were the lines between neighborhoods. I’d turn a corner and suddenly find myself in the new construction of the Jewish Quarter, where informational plaques spelled out the history of rebuilt synagogues. Another corner, and I’d wind up in the too-quiet Armenian Quarter, whose closed-off courtyards allegedly held networks of secret streets I’d never penetrate. My own secret hideout became the Austrian Hospice, a huge, mid-19th-century guesthouse visited by everyone from Franz Joseph I to the musician Nick Cave and whose unassuming ground-floor walls you’d pass right by unless you knew it was there. My room, up on the second floor, was a comfortably large space with black-and-white checkerboard floors, simple wood furniture and highly functional Wi-Fi. From its windows I’d gaze out at church towers to the west and — almost close enough to touch — the golden Dome of the Rock, reflecting the raw sun at midday and the moon at midnight. Every time I turned my key in the hospice door and ascended from the street, I marveled at my luck: The place had been recommended by a German doctor, Christoph Geissler, whom I’d met in the shared taxi from Tel Aviv airport. (When I asked his specialty, he’d told me, grinning, “I am anesthetized!”) The Old City did present one problem: I couldn’t get out of it. Not that I couldn’t find the way, but I kept getting distracted, and happily so. I’d come to this place to wander its winding streets without benefit of map or guidebook to let me know what was where, and every discovery of a world-famous landmark stopped me in my tracks. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher? Holy cow, it was right here, mere steps from the Kebab Shop, a vast, stern emblem of Christianity, with none of that Renaissance sentimentality that turns me off churches in Western Europe. A tumult of visitors swarmed through — Poles and Spaniards and Greeks and Ukrainians. They rubbed their scarves on the Stone of Unction where Jesus’ body was said to have been prepared for burial, and they lighted candles next to the sepulcher itself before immediately snuffing them out. Why? Tradition, they explained without elaborating. Nearby lay the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, now my favorite church in the world. Built at the very end of the 19th century, it is impossibly elegant and spare, all pale gray stone arches, with almost no ornamentation aside from small, jagged, brightly colored stained-glass windows. Several times I returned to the church just to ogle its curves, and once to attend Sunday-morning services — in unfamiliar Arabic. “All the languages are in God’s light,” said Rafiq, the old man who greeted me. Translation: Even if I didn’t understand the words, the meaning would filter through.