Heathen Christmas '10

Sitting in the sun in Tel Aviv, I can confirm that travel in Jordan and Israel has really agreed with me. Between the sun, the fresh produce, the magnificent ruins, and that wonderful thing the Dead Sea mud does to your skin that makes it feel deliciously smooth, I have been a very happy girl for the past fortnight—especially when I hear about the highs of -1 in the UK or the rain apparently bucketing down in Marin.

But I can’t help thinking that there’s something ever so slightly ironic about three very secular people travelling to the Holy Land for Christmas, of all places at all times. You could probably find tree stumps that are more religious than I, yet here I am in the heart of Abrahamic spirituality, somewhat guiltily. Walking through the Old City of Jerusalem, you can practically feel the piety radiating off the Franciscan monks, nuns and ultra-Orthodox Jews. And I can’t help but be a tiny bit fearful that passersby will take one look at me and immediately know that I’m a heathen and chase me all the way out to Jaffa Gate with a flaming torch…or more realistically, shake their heads and tsk-tsk.

It all began a few months ago when I became aware of the fact that, when speaking to people who I knew to be religious—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Druze, Sufi, whatever…though to be fair I don’t actually know any Druze or Sufi—I would go out of my way not to mention my family’s Christmas plans. I had this horrible image of letting slip that I would be in Jerusalem on Jesus’s birthday and some deeply Christian person looking at me, widening their eyes, and hissing, ‘Unbelievers have no place there!’ It’s ridiculous, I know, and you can call me paranoid, but we atheists do take a lot of crap. (I believe that George Bush, Sr once had the audacity to say that atheists weren’t real American citizens because the US is meant to be ‘one nation under God’. I was only twelve when I heard about that gem but I remember being royally pissed off.)

Refreshingly, in Jordan no one really seemed to give that much of a crap about religion or lack thereof. The north, especially, is full of biblical sights—places like Mt Nebo, where Moses looked upon the Holy Land, and Bethany-Beyond-the-Jordan, where John the Baptist was born. But, all things considered, they’re presented with a minimum of hullabaloo. You’ve got your informational signs explaining what supposedly happened in these places, so straightforward as to be funny, and maybe two or three tourists murmuring something along the lines of ‘that’s nice/interesting/pleasant/[positive but bland adjective]’. Then there are places like Madaba, (a market town outside of Amman that was our first port of call), which is sixty-something per cent Christian, but all that really meant was that the town council had whacked up a Christmas tree on the central roundabout. As far as I know, nobody has thrown eggs at it or tried to kick it down or anything—everyone seemed pretty laid-back. Moreover, every time The Question of Faith came up in conversation with Jordanians we met, whether they were Muslim, Christian, or something else, the response from my mom, brother or me that we ‘erm…aren’t really anything’ was met with little more than a shrug. Although you’re more than likely to get woken up by the muzzein’s call to prayer at an unsociable hour of the morning, Jordan is hardly what you would call a religious country. If you’re looking for one of those, try Saudi.

It was the same story when we crossed the Israeli border into in Eilat, a Red Sea port city at the southern tip of the Negev; in Eilat, the only things people seem to worship are the year-round sun and terrible but curiously appealing techno. After my mom and brother made perfunctory comments on how all the signs were now in a different non-Roman script, the three of us heaved our luggage aboard an Egged bus bound for Jerusalem and spent the next half hour or so wondering at how exactly one is meant to pronounce Egged. Is it like the past tense of the verb ‘to egg’, as in ‘I hate my neighbour so I egged his house’? Does it rhyme with the ‘legged’ in ‘three-legged dog’? Does the emphasis fall on the last syllable, ie Eg-GED? Anyway, after a while we all shut up and settled back for our five-hour journey.

As we made our way past Be’er Sheva, I noticed that the land started looking a lot more…biblical (for lack of a better word). The southern half of Israel is a dramatic mountainous desert that is best described as unforgiving; in other words, exactly the sort of place one can envision an old bearded man leading his increasingly grumpy peoples back in the day. And of course a good number of the places mentioned in the Bible and Old Testament lie within this area. We started passing brown signs pointing the way to Mt Sodom and Lot’s cave, not to mention Bethlehem, Nazareth, Hebron and oh, right, Jerusalem. There might as well have been a sign that read, ‘WELCOME TO BIBLE COUNTRY!’ But real Bible Country! Different from, say, Oklahoma. Even as a secular person, seeing those place names was mind-blowing simply because they’re central to the cultural foundations of the Western world. Everyone knows them and has at least a vague idea of each one’s significance…though I’ll admit I’ve forgotten what exactly went down in Hebron with regards to biblical history.

Jerusalem itself is, in many ways, a city unlike any other simply because it is so very sacred to the world’s major monotheistic faiths, and on Christmas Day, the Christians are really and truly out in force. Not just local Christian Jerusalemites (is that right?) either—countless pilgrims from all corners of the earth descend upon the Holy Land for the holidays. In a great show of naivety, our family of secular humanists ventured into the Christian Quarter of the Old City on the 25th so we could look upon the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (built over Golgotha, where Jesus was supposedly crucified) and the Via Dolorosa (Jesus’s last very painful walk). We arrived at the church to find a veritable mob of tour groups, nuns and religious wackjobs all jostling each other and screaming at the top of their lungs. So many candles were being lit that men in long black robes (monks? friars? some other kind of special church employee?) had to bustle in and sweep away the burnt wicks and hardened wax droppings every few minutes. The church itself is quite interesting, as it’s developed into a simultaneously ridiculous and magnificent patchwork of Armenian, Coptic, Syrian and Greek Orthodox influences, but I personally found the whole mass migration thing more intriguing. It made me think—imagine if you could harness the will, the devotion, the determination, the conviction of all those Christians who had made the effort to be in the Holy Land for a 2000-year-old political dissident’s birthday! The potential for that kind of thing sort of makes me want my own religious following, but I won’t get into that now.

Oddly enough, though, I couldn’t help but feel a bit left out. It was as though everyone knew some massive wonderful secret and I didn’t. Like they had all received invites to a fabulous party that I had happened to stumble across without the faintest idea of what was going on. I didn’t grow up under a roc—I know what Christianity is, of course—but I couldn’t actually believe in it no matter how hard I tried, which I think is a pretty crucial part of the whole religion thing. And because it is a place that is so steeped in holiness, I’m inclined to think that my visit to Jerusalem is, in a way, much less significant to me than it is for Christians, Jews or Muslims. As an historian and as someone who is generally interested in humans, Jerusalem is fascinating, but I imagine that religious pilgrims’ experiences are infused with a kind of meaning I will never understand as an atheist.

(Before you start feeling sorry for me, I’m fine with it. Seriously, I am. I’m more than perfectly happy to eat pork, keep my head uncovered and spend my Sunday mornings drinking coffee and reading the paper, thanks very much.)

One of the other funny things about Jerusalem is that it is precisely where ‘the conflict’ to which we all refer when talking about the Israel-Palestine ‘situation’—that whole Judeo-Christian vs Muslim East-West Orientalist thing—comes to a head. East Jerusalem, which refers to the bit east of Route 1 (ie the pre-1967 frontier), is Muslim. West Jerusalem is unequivocally Jewish, particularly in ultra-Orthodox Mea Sharim. It is a city full of very different people living practically on top of one another, and if you let your mind wander, you can cross from one Jerusalem to another in the blink of an eye. So my secular family and I wove our way out of the Christmas crowds towards Damascus gate and into an ambient hole in the wall that served fresh hummus and falafel. Through the doorway I could glimpse the Christian pilgrims streaming by on their way out of the Old City, their faces portraits of a kind of awe I doubt I’ll ever experience or understand.