10.50 p.m. Nazareth, Galilee. Betharram Institute.
I write by the outmoded window of my cell. The view is of downtown Nazareth, a carpet of lights in the distance inhabited by the Muslim community. I sleep on the hillside, where Jews and Catholics live. I can hear Shabbat celebrations in the distance, it is a Friday night in October, and the scent of summer is still intoxicating.
I reach Betharram Institute on the last overcrowded Friday-night sharut. Every Friday of the year the Holy Land succumbs to a sweet lethargy: Jewish, Islamic, Christian religious celebrations begin, work time expires. ‘Shabbat’ in the Hebrew language means “to stop”, it is the day of rest, of respite from routine. Therefore, in this time getting a taxi on duty at the Tel Aviv airport is practically impossible. Accidentally, I happened to join the company of Australians, Jamaican Jews and hippies chasing the last sharut on duty to Haifa.
We leave the Judea of boisterous Tel Aviv, pass through the Samaria of Haifa, and land in the Galilee region. Time to dine in the hospice, take a walk in the forecourt, spy on a festive flat, taste two fresh pears offered by the corner greengrocer, and I am already in my spartan bed. The Institute, renovated during the 2000 Jubilee, was founded in 1880 by a couple of nuns: a Christian-Palestinian and a Carmelite aiming at providing a meeting place for all Bethharramite religious, a male clerical congregation of pontifical right.
Today I learnt a few words in Arabic while chatting with the driver, here they are:
Oud: Middle Eastern stringed instrument, similar to the Greek ‘bouzouki’.
Qahwa:coffee, I tasted it in the hospice with a cardamom flavour.
Merhaba: hello
21-22 October 2017
Pilgrim life has its pros and cons. The alarm clock normally goes off at 6.45am and the day ends around 9pm. The mundane life is not really part of the routine. In the evenings one meditates, writes, chats with some fellow hospice members. One wanders softly through the corridors of this aged building, breathes in the coolness and silence of the cloister, attends oud performances in the refectory, listens to stories. Among the more exotic stories are those of two Christian girls from Mumbai: a young psychologist and a sailor girl. Us, we are three peers living far apart, but extremely close, our own. Every now and then I converse with Badia, the porter. Yesterday she pointed out the ease with which I confused ethnicity and religion, as I asked how the population of Jews and Arabs was distributed in Nazareth. ‘Mind you Claudia, here we are all Arabs, there is no distinction between the parties. The difference is determined by the God you believe in’. In Nazareth, every day the ringing of the bells of the Basilica of the Annunciation and the singing of the muezzin alternate, Israeli Jews cross paths with Muslim Israelis over ancient and recent disagreements. On the road to Zippori, one encounters neighbourhoods inhabited by former Muslim Bedouins of the desert, who have now obtained a house and a job from the Israeli state in exchange for military service. This causes deep resentment within the Muslim community itself, which has accused its “brothers” of high treason.
Nazareth is a symbol of the stunted coexistence that characterises the state of Israel, where the God of money crosses the interests of Muslim and Jewish merchants, who in spite of controversy sell souvenirs of both religions indiscriminately. In the same streets, murals appear in memory of the Palestinian Nakba (‘catastrophe’) massacre, right in the city centre, under the eyes of the Israeli administration.
Commemorated by Palestinians every 15 May, the Nakba remembers the Palestinian exodus that occurred in 1948, at the end of the British Mandate and during the first Arab-Israeli war, breaking out at the founding of the State of Israel. More than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs abandoned towns and villages, or were expelled from them, and were subsequently denied any right to return to their lands, both during and at the end of the conflict. In February 2010, the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) passed a law forbidding public displays of mourning and grief in Israel on 15 May.
The centre of Nazareth enshrines the elegant and imposing buildings of the British Mandate, which line the gradually more intricate lanes of the old city, where rudimentary bakeries and street vendors of dates, figs and corn on the cob abound near the Palestinian-run covered market. Here is the White Mosque, a hotbed of Muslim strife and resistance in the city’s tumultuous past, right behind one of the caves where Jesus is said to have preached. To access it, one has to wade through ibrik (Middle Eastern coffee pot) vendors and souvenirs of all sorts, which I only manage to distract by mentioning Koko Asayan, an Armenian singer-songwriter revered in the Middle Eastern community and apparently by the entire Nazareth covered market, who broadcasts it non-stop from loudspeakers. Further on, the Basilica of the Annunciation gathers masses of worshippers who line up to visit the famous Annunciation grotto. The young Basilica (1969) is part of a remarkable monumental complex and is now the city’s landmark, visible from almost every corner of the city, and the focus of the main tourist industry.
Outside Nazareth reigns the desolate and silent plain of Galilee.
The pilgrim’s visits begin at 8 am. At this hour, in Zippori, all is silent. The faint morning light gives an amber colour to the stone of the city that once was.
Excavations at the archaeological site were carried out by the University of Turin, which uncovered remains dating back to the 4th century BC. The history and architecture of this ancient city reproduce Hellenistic, Jewish, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader and Ottoman influences. Among the notable structures we find a Roman theatre, two early Christian churches, a Crusader fortress (later passed into Ottoman and British hands), and forty wonderful mosaics. All abandoned as lonely remnants of past greatness. The only site in operation today is an ancient synagogue, where we attend a bar mitzvah, the religious celebration through which young Jews receive the laws of the Torah and enter adulthood (at 13 for boys, at1 12 for girls).
Also dating back to the Crusader period is the nearby sanctuary on Mount Tabor, where the Transfiguration of Christ is said to have taken place. The first in a long series of shrines that have been distinguished more for their symbolic value than for their mysticism, despite their idyllic location, amidst cypress and olive trees, overlooking the Galilee valley.
Emptied of their religious significance, the sacred places of Galilee are packaged into kitsch and aseptic shrines, destined to host huge crowds of worshippers from all over the world who feed a well-established tourist business machine. The only way to experience their sacredness is to escape the masses of the faithful, where the solitude and silence of these untamed, wild and evocative lands reign. Lake Tiberias, 200 m below sea level, early in the morning, blazing in the sun, is all this. I have the opportunity to witness it during a visit to the Basilica of the Primacy, erected in memory of the Gospel episode of the distribution of the loaves and fishes. It is perhaps one of the few episodes I remember hearing from the years I was sent to catechism. The blinding light emanating from the morning sun spreads all around, filtering through the mist, reflecting in the shimmering waters of Lake Tiberias. I am suspended. At 9 a.m. it is already almost 30 degrees, and the shores of the lake are decorated with the glow of a few bathers. They are my travelling companions in this floating paradise. This is perhaps faith. Not the architectural container used for worship, but the transcendental wonder of nature that seizes me on such an ordinary, if seemingly timeless, morning. Who knows, perhaps at some unspecified time in the past, a prophet witnessed the same muffled morning dawns in the company of some disciples at the foot of the Mount of Beatitudes.
And of a disciple, Peter, I visited the ancient mansion in the city of Capernaum, discovered during the 20th century. The origins of the thousand-year-old settlement date back to the 2nd century B.C., when the splendid Corinthian columns of the synagogue and the basalt dwellings, derived from the lava stone of the Sea of Galilee area, were built. Capernaum is said to have been the Prophet’s refuge and the place where he began preaching and proselytising. Cana of Galilee, on the other hand, is today an ordinary village with a Muslim majority, based mostly on commercial activities related to religious tourism. Of particular note are the ubiquitous pomegranate juice shacks, a must-have throughout Galilee, Judea and Palestine. The main sites are the Greek Orthodox Shrine of St George and the Wedding at Cana Shrine, where the Prophet turned the chalice of water into wine. A secluded chapel shaded by a few palm trees is used by the faithful, who can renew their marriage vows here, just like my fellow travellers.
Our next stop is Bethlehem, where we stay for five nights. As we drive along the coast of Haifa, the sun is fading away on the horizon, along with my initial travel purposes.
On the threshold of departure, every traveller sets out with his own baggage of expectations, wishes to be fulfilled, myths to be dispelled. Perhaps before I left, I thought I would find faith, or at least feel its foundation. However, it is not possible for me to focus on finding or professing faith when reality has so much to tell. The truth is that in these lands faith is a metaphor for domination, identity, survival instinct. The curious tourist will never be won over by the supposedly evocative places propounded by the elaborate tourist packages, so much as by the contradictory nature of the everyday, of the neighbour one may find on his/her side. I continue to follow the course of the moon even on the motorway that skims Tel Aviv, whose skyscrapers I glimpse in the distance, the same ones that had made me breathe a I don’t know what flavour of freedom, soon changed, in just three days in the Israel of Galilee, which on the contrary modest, eastern, difficult, sincere. By evening we will pass the checkpoints to enter the West Bank, the area of ‘occupied Palestine’ fenced off since 2002 by the ‘security closure’, a concrete wall separating, imprisoning and controlling the West Bank areas.
