Crossposting!

[cremains]

Down the streets I often see priests, monks, and nuns, some of them Armenians, but many of them are just visiting for a few years of study. What I wonder is, the Christians from Western countries who just show up for awhile, what do they make of Israel, and of being, theoretically anyway, under a government mostly made of Jews? When they walk in the Old City, do they feel guilty? If they don't, why don't they? If they do, does anything in their behaviour or theology change? Or really do they assume it's all theirs anyway, and any Jews are besides the point?

I made some new art.

Recently and reluctantly I've been introspective, mostly on why I am such a Talmud fundamentalist to the point of being a bit like the Society for Creative Anacronisms, egalitarian edition. Is it a psychological difficulty I have? Is it a harmless impulse for truth that manifests in ways that are, as someone put it recently, religiously prideful? (The two probably most annoying things are that it seems right to me to pronounce things during prayer as the gemara thinks they should be pronounced, and when I can get away with it - eg at home or studying in yeshiva - sometimes wearing tefillin outside of morning prayers)

It's funny how the Gra-obsessed segment of Chareidi society, which I work so hard to undermine*, has influenced me, even to the point of occasionally resetting what kind of behaviour I intuit as normal or abnormal (e.g. tefillin use).


*most importantly the misogyny being internalised by my stepkids

Comments

[selenak]

I visited Jerusalem twice. There was tremendous guilt, but not about me being Christian; it was all about me being German. There was also a strong sense of history, the enormity of history through the millennia; the second time, we were staying in a hotel on Mount Olive, i.e. in Eastern Jerusalem, on the Palestinian side (mostly because of the spectacular view on the old city), and so you heard the calling from mosques throughout the day, you heard some bells depending on where you were in the old city, and of course you saw the wall of the old temple with the praying faithful. It felt a bit like going into the Dead Sea a few days later did, when instead of floating you attempt to swim; you can't do it because everything that surounds you is so heavy, you can't feel it all. You can just stay on the surface and get a mere brief glimpse of it.

[cremains]

I thought a lot about this comment. I can't imagine what it would be visiting as German. I definitely agree about the Old City feeling like too much to take in. Looking back I wish I had let it overwhelm me the first time, instead of trying to modulate how much I let myself perceive.

With the monks and nuns, though, surely it must be a different story? When they read all this stuff about the Pharisees being wicked, and the Temple being such a bad business, and many parts in John... I imagine if that's what a person studied and thought, it would be a very different experience seeing people cry at the Kotel.