Seders and Stations

What to say ... when too much speaking just sounds like a roar and achieves little!!  Who can work it out.  We are just sad.

Last night we went to a seder with a religious family.  The great grandmother (90 years old) told us she lost her whole family in Poland in the Shoah.  She stopped for a moment - grief still palpable.  The father spoke about survival and how Jewish people everywhere have always felt they had to fight to survive.  Any archaeological museum around here attests to that fact.  We ate and sang and tried to follow the Haggadah with the super fast Hebrew.  C. gallantly perservered through 3 hours of seder prayers (but his book did have pictures!!).  The mother was a translator and brought out her NJPS version of the Song in English.  It was interesting talking about the Song with religious people who speak Hebrew as a mother tongue.  Its completely different for them because the words are plain.  They read intuitively and comfortably where as I read speculatively, closely, complicatedly.  It was disconcerting.  I need to work harder on Hebrew but its an uphill, all- consuming commitment.

This morning we went down to the wall.  The men's praying section was awash with white prayer shawls and singing - all discordant - there appeared to be at least 5 shuls praying.  We walked down to Gethsemane (one of them) and revisited the 1000 year old olive trees.  We went up to the russian convent with the gold bell shaped spires.  very peaceful in there (you can tell its a woman's place).  There was a cave in the garden that they believe is Mary Magdalene's tomb.  Probably not, but it certainly once held a number of bodies.  All these churches seem to pivot around death - the dormition, the holy sepulchre.  I want to run back to those ever-living olive trees.  Ironically, the trees have lasted where people haven't.  I wondered if the kingdom on earth that creation groans for might involve no people at all.  There have been so many battles in Jerusalem.  I can't see peace when there is so many people with live-and-die-upon beliefs.  Peace may only descend when we all go away, when human civilization reaches its apogee and then fades away.  We visited Pharoah's daughter's tomb (its not but it has a pyramid so it was an easy connect), and Absalom's pillar (which apparently isn't) and is it Zechariah ben Jehoida's in between (or not)?  There are tombs and dank caves everywhere in this valley.  I wonder about death.  Seeing the tombs (?) of these biblical people (who seem to be still running with their beautiful long hair again and again in text) makes me confront my own mortality.  One life is a gasp, a breath.  Seeing the tomb challenges my fantasy with the text, the narrative.

We came back into the city via the Lion Gate.  It took us along the Via Dolorosa.  We saw the remnants of the crusaders, and the arch of Hadrian (Ecce Homo), we saw the ruins of the Antonia Fortress, huge cisterns, aquaducts, ancient canals, striated stone pathways.

Where is the Song?  She is buried underneath the rubble of a thousand conquerings, razings, and decimations.  She is entombed in rock, marked by plaques and pyramids.  She is a victim of grave robbers.  She is trodden upon by shield bearing legions.  She is prostrated upon by hordes that weep and clutch.  She is the holy grail of the middle east peace process continually smashed.  She is the 15 year old boy who died today on the Gaza Strip.  The two soldiers who will never hold their children.  She is a small, old woman who lost the entire world in 1939.

She has faded like Echo leaving only a whisper.