Noah Alexander Isaac Stein

Unknown date

In Akko I find the places of my dreams, winding corridors, and open expanses, naked stones and presences that I partially recall, half-remembered, half imagined. We sleep that first night beneath the stars, high above the city on decayed walls, awkwardly huddled. She sleeps in an new sleeping bag, layered above an inflatable, sleeping pad, and her childhood pillow. I lay beside her on the ground, among the weeds and stones, covered, mostly symbolically, in her large, purple travel towel. It carries the fresh smells of the first flowers of spring.

She is young, pretty, stubborn, German, and deeply open. Come across the sky to this desolate place for some private reason, unknown perhaps even to her, this is her first great adventure. We meet as I am tieing a bandage around my ruined and blistered feet, stained in iodine. Despite a spattering of eastern Europeans, and the odd American, the hostel has been conquered by Germans. Here neither English nor Hebrew is the common language, but the dark guttural tones of central Europe abound. And in her inexhaustible pursuit of electronic dance and synthetic drugs, she is not alone.

The rhythms of Tel Aviv are seductive, and the truths, history, and lifeblood of this dry land are quickly drowned out by the cascading rhythms and delirium of the hot night. Is the connection so easily accounted for by the economics of international air travel, or is there something darker in this link? If the restless ghosts of Polish forests and abandoned cattle cars still so profoundly haunt this modern country, what then of the grandchildren of the perpetrators? What stains of the collective soul draw them here, into the Judean wastes of history?

Inside her exhausted heart; too open, too abused by cocaine and MDMA, too innocent and well-intentioned for these cold expanses of conflict and suffering, my companion nurtures deep reserves of Christian faith. Though she revels in the hedonistic extremes of Tel Aviv, the ancient names of Galilee and Nazareth draw out something perhaps not altogether disconnected. Her ecstatic descriptions of the drug and exhaustion fueled unity of dance are almost religious in their undertones. And most significantly, she carries with her sacred treasures; the written prayers and notes of loved ones. The scraps, are not destined for any monastic house or church however, she will deliver them instead into the yawning cracks of the Western Wall.

-Alex

9.05.16

In my return to the Holy City I feel like a lost desert prophet, returned to the world of men, altered, perhaps inextricably in parallel, still in some remote waste. It is disorienting and intangibly uncomfortable. Oh tragic Jerusalem! So near the center, always at the intersection; of insubstantial spirit and manifest political necessity, of just peace and the defilement of war, of Israel and Palestine.

The divides are mirrored in the landscape, where the ancient walls and cobbles of the old city quickly and inexplicably dissolve into the blinding modernity of West Jerusalem. The global commonalities of communal culture and minor poverty, found in variants marked by their character, not their utility, from Beijing to Cairo. Hanging meat, finger food, toilet paper bins, undrinkable water, sleeping mats, and the same small plastic chairs. The same sterile glass and metal stretching into empty heavens, the same dreams of safety and fear, the same efficiency, and the same isolation.

The history of this city is written with clarity on its walls. The empires, revolts, conquests, and genocidal massacres. The Ottaman-era walls are a patchwork marked by ever constant razing and rebuilding; the city has been destroyed to its foundations twice. Cananite, Egyptian, Hebrew, Babalonian, Macedonian, Seleucian, Hasmonean, Roman, Persian, Byzantine, Umayyad, Turkish, Fatimid, crusader, Ayyubid, Tartar, Ayyubid, Ottoman, English, Israeli, Jordanian, Isreali; confronted by such roiling successions, it is difficult to believe in the solidity of the current victors.

Stasis is an alluring concept in places with a more linear history. Here the lies of national narratives are made clear. Even as they struggle to find new life, expulsion and conquest mar the clean stories of the growth of a people, and the indulgences of common culture are in constant threat as culture expands, merges, and fades, leaving us to sift for some dim shred of meaning in the bloodshed and ash that accompanied their heraldic arrival. There is little to be found. Instead, the stories we tell, of struggles and victory, mask a darker truth; the violence we inflict is, in its final moment, naked and devoid of greater meaning. The battle-lines of chimpanzees, forgotten in the chaos. They will be buried and forgotten, like bones in the desert wastes, leaving only the momentary imprint of their suffering.

-Alex