The Jerusalem Syndrome (8 page)

12

W
E
flew to Israel on El Al airlines. If you go to Israel, you’ve got to fly El Al. It’s in the Talmud.

El Al is a very high-security operation. There are three or four security checkpoints. There are armed Mossad agents with Uzis. When you go through that much security, you actually have a moment when you say, “We don’t have a bomb, do we, honey? You packed. Is there anything that looks like a bomb? Honey, tell me, we’re almost at the guy with the gun.”

I stepped up to the counter. “We don’t have a bomb.” He motions me to the side. “Why do I have to step aside? She packed.”

This security ritual prepares you for entering a culture in which an abandoned gym bag is a national security threat. It’s
that
tense.

I generally have some fear of flying, but when you fly to Israel there are always at least two Hasidim davening in the back of the plane. I figured they’ve got the direct line to the Almighty. We were covered. Aside from that, God had to know
I
was on the plane.

We actually were seated next to a rabbi, and I told him about my vision. I told him God had chosen me and I showed him my shoes and my camera. He took the camera in his hands and looked it over for about five minutes. Then he looked at me earnestly and told me he had a brother-in-law who could have given me a better deal.

We spent ten hours on the plane. During those ten hours I read the camcorder manual cover to cover and made notes in the margins. I learned how to work every element of my camcorder
and
I skimmed the kabala. I wanted to cover all my bases.

Now, I hadn’t seen Jim in
three years
. I’d
never
met his girlfriend. When we arrived in Tel Aviv, I walked off the plane with the camera stuck to my eye socket. I saw Jim. “Hey, Jimmy, we’re here. Israel! No, stay there. Wave. I got a good shot here. Yeah, it’s a new camcorder. Is that Oriella? Hi, Marc, nice to meet you. Stay there. We’ll hug in a minute. Great shot. Okay, you guys just walk ahead. I want to get this. Where we going now? Baggage! That’ll be great.” We get to the luggage carousel.

My wife said, “Is that ours?”

“Hold on. I’ll check.”

I clicked the zoom button on the top of the camera. It slowly moved in on the bag. “Yep, that’s it. This is a great zoom. I can read the name tag.”

I followed the bag around the carousel with the camera. “Aren’t you going to get it, honey?”

Kim shot me the look, like a cobra.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” I put down the camera and picked up the bag.

We went to their apartment. It was a nice place. We spent two days in Tel Aviv and I decided God would definitely not hang out in Tel Aviv. It’s a big city. It’s not very interesting or ancient. It is right down the road from Jaffa, the oldest port in the world. It was where Jonah popped out of the fish onto the beach. Kim and I walked up there. I looked down at the beach, trying to imagine a busy port going about port business when, out of nowhere, this giant fish surfaces and spits out this guy who wipes the slime off himself and segues into a lecture about how everyone is doomed. What a great opening. What a day that must’ve been. People talking for years about the guy who was spit out of the fish to set up his bit about trouble and repentance. When Kim and I were in Jaffa, there wasn’t much to see. Just some ruins and an uninspired museum.

I was itching to get on the road.

Going on the road as an adult was a much different experience for me than it was when I was younger. Your Bohemian crew turns into “My wife and I and another couple.” It’s very humbling and much more predictable, as is much of adulthood.

The first day out we drove through the desert of the Holy Land. It’s
all
desert. It was beautiful. The first stop is the Jordan River, where Christ and many people bathed early on; the mighty River Jordan mentioned in many an old spiritual melody. I should make it clear at this point that I’m no biblical scholar. I have random facts about random places, some not even true. I choose to get my information secondhand, as opposed to from a reliable source. It’s more interesting that way and I’ve never liked doing homework.

We decided to bathe in the River Jordan ourselves. I was up to my waist, walking against the current. The camera was wedged into my face. I was thinking that camcorders should really come with an accessory that clamps the camera to your head, like a cybernetic digital claw that interfaces your consciousness with the machinery of the camera and sends the footage directly from your brain to your home computer via the Internet. Then you could use your hands, eat, and you would never need to stop taping. You know they’re working on it up at the campus.

I was in the water, zooming in on the reeds. I was panning along the river’s edge, I was shooting upstream, I was looking for babies in baskets, I was looking for some indication that I was on the trail of God. I got
nothing.
I did get a God tone, though, but that was easy to get in Israel.

We were all standing in the river talking when the strangest thing happened. A Hasid came floating down the river wearing his pants, shoes, tallit, pancho, and yarmulke, laughing. He got about thirty feet upstream from us, saw us, pulled himself to the side of the river, and climbed out, then disappeared into the bushes. This happened with about twenty Hasidim. I thought for a moment
Maybe that’s where Hasidim come from, a spring in the Jordan River
. We were baffled until we saw a few of them in the bushes gawking at Kim and Oriella, who were wearing bikinis, and we realized they’re not allowed to look upon women so scantily clad. It was a bit bizarre to see their excited faces with their payes dangling, peering through the reeds until we’d spot them and they’d scurry off and reappear about thirty feet downstream from us, emerge from the bushes, and get back into the water and continue floating.

I just couldn’t believe they were wearing their yarmulkes in the river. Why do they wear them all the time?
We get it
. They’re Jews. Maybe it’s so God doesn’t lose them in a crowd. “Where are the good Jews? Oh, there they are, with the hats. In the bushes, oh, those are a few bad good Jews. I’ll make note of it. I’m so glad I thought of the hats. I’m a genius. I am God.”

We all got out of the river and dried off. We were walking along the path beside the river to go back to the car when I heard a bunch of male voices yelling playfully from the water. I knew it was them. I turned on the camera and did a voice-over. “We are stalking the Hasidim in the wild. This is where you may find them, along the banks of the River Jordan.” We turned a corner on the path and there they were, about forty of them hanging from the trees, splashing in the water. It was a great shot.

“Where are we going now?” I asked as we all climbed into the car.

“Megiddo,” Jim said.

Onward then into Megiddo, the valley of Armageddon, where the big bad multiheaded beast of Revelation is to bring in the biblical period of darkness. (I like the Christian landmarks because that’s where things are still going to happen.) I stood and looked over the valley, waiting for something, seeing if my presence there was what was needed to get things rocking.

I was holding the camera in anticipation. I panned across the valley slowly, once, twice, three times.
Nothing
. I jumped up and down.
Nothing
. Kim said, “What are you doing?” I told her I was stretching. Then, some Greek tourists asked us to take their picture. “Who sent you here?” I asked suspiciously. They did not understand. I decided they were not a sign. They didn’t seem very menacing and they had the right number of heads between them. I took their picture and we moved on.

Oddly, right outside of the valley of Armageddon there’s a McDonald’s, the Megiddo McDonald’s. Which led me to believe that perhaps the apocalypse already happened. It just wasn’t as big as we thought it was going to be. Maybe it wasn’t
billions killed
—just eaten.

I generally don’t eat McDonald’s, because I don’t believe in it, but we hadn’t eaten in a while. So we went in. I had a Big Machh and fries and, of course, a Cokechh. Fueled, we went onward into the Golan Heights.

The Golan Heights is the border territory between Israel and Syria that has shifted back and forth over the years and continues to be a hot zone to this day. Many people have died there. There are hundreds of acres of unusable land because of live and unexcavated mines. That is where the reality of Israel started to seep from my camcorder to my head. The military necessities of Zionism have always made me nervous. It’s one of the reasons I had avoided going to Israel. It’s scary.

I understand Zionism, vaguely. My parents were sofa Zionists; the kind that sit on the couch watching the news and say, “Something’s wrong in Israel. Get the checkbook.”

I remember being in third grade in Hebrew school. The teacher came in and announced, “Okay, next week everyone needs to bring in five dollars. We’re sending the money to Israel to plant a tree for your grandparents. Don’t forget to wear your Purim costumes. Shalom, remember that means “hello” and “good-bye.” Shalom, Aaron. Shalom, Joshua. Shalom, Cheryl. Shalom, Joshua Two. Shalom, Marc with a ’c.’ ”

I thought when I got off the plane in Israel,
I want to see my grandpa’s tree.
But as an adult I realized there was probably no tree. There might be a Grandpa Jack artillery shell or a Grandma Goldy rocket launcher. Or perhaps they put all the money together to build Yahrzeit missiles that have commemorative plaques on the side of them that light up if they’re shot off on the day of that Yahrzeit.

Coming down through the Golan Heights, we came upon a bombed-out mosque. It was an Islamic shrine that had been hit by an artillery shell, probably during the Six-Day War. Half of the mosque was caved in. I got a camera angle on it. I was glib at first: “Muhammad has left the building.”

Then we went under the barbed-wire fence and entered the mosque itself. To see that type of destruction up close is devastating. It’s like the first time you go to an auto junkyard. To think that there might have been people in there when it hit. I stood in this mosque. I turned the camera off. I thought,
Am I a part of this? Am I? Is this where my five dollars went?

A fear set in. I was not only looking to the sky for the face of God but for missiles as well.

13

T
H
E next day we went to Masada. Thank God for ancient ruins. They can be a relief. Masada was the refuge for the Jews during the first revolt. Nine hundred plus Jews holed up in King Herod’s summer home and held their own against 15,000 Roman soldiers, and when they were about to be overrun, instead of captivity or death at the hands of the Romans, they chose mass suicide. Today the ruins stand as a monument to Jewish heroism. It’s also a very nice day hike.

We were hiking up the path to the top of Masada, where there is a breathtaking view of the Dead Sea. By this time, I was walking far ahead of my wife and friends. I was barely speaking to them. I spoke solely to my camcorder. My camcorder and I had bonded and were having a great time. I hiked up the path in my perfect shoes, taping everything and talking nonstop. “Look, I could fall here. That would be bad.” I zoomed to the ground. “Hey, a spider. A big Israeli spider.”

I had surrendered my will to a small 1
¹
/
₂
-by-2-inch viewfinder. That was the context of my experience. I was walking through an illusion that I controlled and could hold in my hand.
I
was the Jewish king of this very small land.

I got to the top before the others. I lit a cigarette. It was about 150 degrees outside. My skin was melting. I had the Dead Sea framed in my small square universe as I panned the region. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I asked the camera.

Then, a miracle happened.
The camera just broke!
It made a clicking sound, followed by a breaking apart of the image on the screen, followed by a whirring noise, and then it just fizzled out. I screamed, “You gotta be kidding. This isn’t happening. We’re only four days out.”

My wife walked up. “What’s the matter, baby?” she asked innocently.

“The fucking camera broke,” I squalled. “There’s no point now. We gotta go home.” I was pacing and looking at the camera.

“What are you talking about?” She was immediately irritated.

“I was gonna look God in the face,” I yelled. “And get it on tape.”

“Maybe we should get you into the shade,” she said, concerned.

Then I had that moment when I just wanted to throw the camera over the edge. You know, when something mechanical breaks and you just want to break it more to show it who’s boss? Then I thought ahead and pictured the humiliation of looking over the edge and saying, “It’s really broken now, honey. I can see it down there. Maybe I should go down and get it.”

I didn’t do that. I dropped down to my knees and prayed to Sony.

“Please work, Sony. I know you’re a good product. Please, Sony, bring the camcorder back to me.”

I shook the camcorder. I pushed all of the buttons. I coddled it. I even kissed it. I tried to blow the digital breath of life into the camera, but I don’t have it in me. I hunched over the camera in my hands, defeated.

Then I realized,
Hey, wait a minute
. This might be exactly what I was waiting for. Maybe this was God saying, “Put the camera down. Don’t have a mediated experience. Look at Israel through your own eyes and your heart. Get down on your hands and knees and kiss the ground of the homeland as a Jew.”

That’s what I thought God was saying. So, I said, “Okay, I get it. I hear you. Hang on a minute. Sony is fucking me! Not just
Sony
but
The Wiz
is fucking me! The Wiz is an evil wizard! I knew I was going to get fucked! No warranty, of course. My camera came off of the no-warranty-shit shelf!”

So, then I astral-projected myself back to The Wiz. I didn’t know if I still could, but it’s like riding a bike. You never forget how. I flew over deserts, mountains, oceans, and continents in a matter of seconds. I flew right through the doors of The Wiz and grabbed Groovy Guy by the ponytail and began bashing his head against the counter. I dragged him around the store by the hair. I screamed, “Is there a camera in here that works so I can tape you crying, you fucking asshole?!”

Then I flew out of the store, up Madison to Fifty-fifth Street to the Sony headquarters. Right past security. “I got a problem with a product. Put the guns down!” On into the corner office and into the face of the executive in charge of ruining my vacation who stood between me and the Almighty. “I believed in your product. I had faith in the quality of your product. I had hope for spiritual enlightenment through your product, and it fucking broke. Now you have to reckon with me!”

Then, everything started spinning. Apparently I had been out of my body too long. I heard my old friend Nancy’s voice from the Green House echoing in my head: “That’s called astral projection. Don’t fuck with that. Don’t fuck with that. Don’t fuck with that.” Then, like Dorothy, I was back on the top of Masada, holding my camcorder like Hamlet held the skull. “Where be your jibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?”

I was so sad. My wife and friends tried to comfort me, but I was inconsolable. They had no idea of the scope of the problem. How it could affect the future of the world.

The next day we stopped at the Sea of Galilee. It’s more like a lake. They have waterskiing and bars and restaurants on the beach. We waded out into the water and went swimming. While no one was looking I made a sad attempt to walk on water. It didn’t work. The people who were sitting at the bar on the patio behind me laughed. It’s a very awkward thing to be caught trying something like that.

I felt vulnerable and scared without my camcorder. I felt out of control, ungrounded as we headed up into the north again to visit my wife’s friend Elana, who lives on a settlement.

As best I can tell, settlers, whether they are secular or nonsecular, are basically pioneering nationalists who go up into the middle of nowhere, build a few houses, call it a town, and enable the Israeli government to say, “We can’t have Arabs up there. There are already Jews in place.”

We get to the town of four houses. It’s up on a ridge. It’s isolated and desolate. We get to their house, where the mood is somber and full of a commitment I don’t get. I wanted my camcorder to work. It protected me from engaging with my immediate experience. It gave me purpose. I couldn’t handle the unmediated reality of Israel. I realized I’d much rather watch it at home on my VCR in my apartment in Queens. There, where Christians, Jews, and Muslims live under one roof with very little difficulty, unless there’s a boiler problem, when we rise up against the Dominican landlord, but that’s a completely different political struggle.

I was really beginning to unravel.

“Why do you live up here? Is it safe? What do you guys do for fun? How do you get food up here? Do they fly it in? I didn’t see any restaurants. Where do you rent videos? Where’s the mall? I don’t understand why you live like this. Where are we going to sleep?” I ranted on in mild panic.

“We have no room here because of the kids,” Elana said, “but we’ve reserved you guys a room at a hostel in Sachnin, the Arab city down the road.”

“Arab city?” I said. “Arabs? Aren’t they the bad guys?” I’m not racist. I was just nervous and ill informed.

“They’re Israeli Arabs, not Palestinians,” Jim said. “It’ll be fine.”

“Fine. Right.”

On the way to Sachnin I kept picturing how easy it is to die in Israel. We could be driving down an isolated road and some masked men could stop the car and drag us out. “Bism Allah! Bism Allah!” There would be guns pressed to the backs of our heads and we’d all be executed and left to rot as a political statement.

I didn’t want to go out that way. I don’t want that kind of press. “Funnyman Marc Maron dies in mysterious Israeli border dispute outside Palestinian territories. Everything was just finally starting to turn around for Marc when he was caught in an ambush dot-dot-dot.” I’m not that committed.

When we got to Sachnin, the road seemed to weave around for miles. There were no stores, no lights, no gas stations; no familiar brand logos lit up to show signs of life and hope. We pulled into a dirt driveway alongside a large three-story stucco house. The top floor of the house looked unfinished because there was no glass in the windows. A man came out to greet us. The “hostel” was the redone basement of his house.

Everything seemed to be cushioned. The walls, floors, and ceiling all seemed to have a pillow-like feel to them. I couldn’t sleep. My heart was racing, my mind was pacing. It was like a hundred and ninety degrees and there were bugs crawling on my face. I felt like slamming my head against the wall, which would’ve been okay, since it was cushioned.

In the morning we all went up to the top floor of the house, which, as it turned out, was intentionally unfinished. It was like a giant patio. The owner’s wife and daughter served us a breakfast of pita bread, a slice of sad-looking bologna, scrambled eggs that were overcooked and drenched in oil, and sweet stewed olives.

The eight-year-old daughter of the man who owned the hostel walked us around the town. The streets were teeming with activity of day-to-day business. It felt festive, unlike the settlement. Everyone was out doing things. There were animals being butchered in the street. It was very homey. People were coming up to us, inviting us into their homes, giving us coffee, and trying to communicate with us. They were so nice. They don’t see many Americans.

We left Sachnin the following morning and headed back to Tel Aviv. In the car I had a new mantra: “Gotta get the camcorder fixed, gotta get the camcorder fixed, gotta get the camcorder fixed.” That was all I could think about. The camcorder had to be functional when we went to Jerusalem. I thought that whatever was to happen between God and me would certainly happen in Jerusalem.

When we got back to Jim’s apartment, I looked in the Tel Aviv yellow pages under “Sony.” I found a Sony repair center. I went alone to the Sony repair center. I walked in. I don’t know what was going on that day, or if every day was like that, but there were literally hundreds of people mobbed in front of the counter. It almost seemed like some sort of revolt against Sony. People were waving boom boxes, Walkmans, televisions, and camcorders above their heads. There was shouting. There was chaos. It almost seemed that all Sony products broke on the same day for everyone, and don’t think I didn’t think that.

Behind the counter there were these four panicked, sweating Israeli geeks trying to accommodate the uprising. Behind the geeks, going back farther than the eye could see, were shelves upon shelves of unrepaired Sony products. It looked like a grand cathedral of broken electronic equipment. I tried to make my way through the crowd but couldn’t, so I mosh-pitted myself atop the crowd and was carried to the counter, where I delivered the camcorder into the sweaty hands of one of the geeks. He looked at the camcorder, he looked at the shelves behind him, and then he looked at me and shook his head and said, “Oh, no, eight weeks.”

“No,” I said. “Today.”

“No, no, I cannot,” he said.

“I’m an American,” I said. “I’m here on vacation.”

Somehow that translated to “Please don’t help me, ever,” as I was swallowed up by the crowd and spat back out onto the street, holding my crippled camcorder.

We had to leave for Jerusalem the following day. I thought about buying another camcorder, but it would’ve cost a fortune and the machines there operate by different format. They take pictures right to left. It would’ve been useless in the States.

I was really beginning to give up the struggle. I was trying to let go of the idea of the camera working again. I was trying to just adjust to being without it. I was trying to engage with and enjoy my wife and friends. It wasn’t sticking.

When we got to Jerusalem I immediately looked up electronic repair in the yellow pages. I found Avram’s. I gave the phone book to Oriella to translate. “Does it say ’Sony’?”

She said, “Yes, Marc, it says ’Sony.’ ”

“Yes!” I yelped.

We all went immediately to Avram’s. It was a small electronic repair shop. I walked in. My first thought was,
Am I going to get fucked? On a smaller scale?

Avram was a big, happy, gregarious Israeli. I showed him the camcorder. I was in a panic. “I don’t know what happened. I was just holding it. It’s very important to everyone that this works here.”

“This is no problem,” he said. “I fix today. Come back, two hours.”

“Thank you. You really don’t realize how important this is.”

While we were waiting, we went to a market to get some fruit. It amazed me how people in Israel have their blinders up to just how scary it is to be there. As we stood there looking at fruit, my friend Jim told me that some people were killed in that market by a bomb a few weeks before. I said, “Well, put the fucking plum down. Let’s get out of here. I’m just not that committed. I can live without the fruit.”

Two hours later, I was back at Avram’s. I ran in. He smiled big.

“It is fixed, my friend.”

“Thanks. You might have saved the world.”

I paid him. He looked at me and said, “My friend, relax. Don’t worry. You’re in Israel.”

I don’t know in what world those three phrases fit together, but I tried to relax. I couldn’t. I was elated that my camcorder was working. My head was tingling.

It
was
working, but it didn’t have that organic Sony feel to it anymore. It felt as if he may have wedged a toothpick or a piece of gum into some mechanism. It
was
working, though, and we
were
in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was where I thought it was going to happen. Whatever I was waiting for would happen there. Jerusalem is the mystical navel of the universe. All of the corporate headquarters of the Western world’s religions are there. If they’re not there, they at least have a franchise there. Obviously the Vatican isn’t located there, but the Church of the Holy Sepulchre serves as an embassy. [That’s where they took Jesus off the cross after he was walked around in that awkward way.] The Wailing Wall is there for the Jews. It’s actually called the “Western Wall” now, because we’re not upset anymore. The reason the Jews pray at the Wall is because it’s as close as they can get to the Temple Mount, the site of Solomon’s Temple and the Second Temple, the holiest place in the Jewish religion. Once the temple is rebuilt, they can pray there once again. There will be no construction in the foreseeable future because the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest shrine of Islam, sits on the Temple Mount. The Messiahs for the Jews and the Christians can’t come back until that temple is rebuilt, and apparently, the Dome of the Rock is causing landing problems. These are ancient and seemingly unresolvable mystical problems that I have no solution for. I saw Jerusalem as a religious theme park where I wanted to go on all the rides. And I did.