My savior died under a bus station.

We are back from a wonderful trip to Israel that was in many ways a sensory overload of history and culture as we voraciously ingested the sights, sounds and tastes of the Middle East. It will take some time to process all that we experienced but one thing that surprised me during our time there was just how spiritually empty I felt visiting the most holy place on the planet. As a christian, I had expectations that I would “walk in the footsteps of Jesus”. I would see the places that He saw, walk the same streets that He walked and feel in some mystical way more connected to my God and the stories told in the bible. I had visions of walking a desert path along the sea of Galilee, praying in the garden of Gethsemane and standing on the hill where Jesus was crucified.

When we arrived however, I found that things had changed significantly in the last 2000 years. (who would have thought?) As we drove into Nazareth, our first stop on the list of Jesus sites, I was filled with excitement to walk where Jesus had spent most of his life. Yet what I found was that Nazareth is now a modern town with falafel stands, cars billowing exhaust and souvenir shops lining the streets. There is an old town that dates back from the medieval period as much of the oldest standing places in Israel do, but these were not the same streets that Jesus walked. Jerusalem as well has been completely destroyed several times during the span of history and much of what is there now was built around 700 years ago. Being surrounded by modernity made it difficult to imagine the places as they once were and viscerally reminded me of the great chasm there is between the events of the bible and our present day.

Every significant site related to the life of Jesus has a church that was built where the “supposed” location was. I say “supposed” because no one really knows the exact location where these events took place and most of the churches were built twelve centuries after the fact. This also takes away from the sense of sacredness when you realize that the rock that everyone is crying over or kissing because they think it was the rock where Jesus prayed may have just been a random rock that Jesus never even came near to touching. There is also something about the commercialization of these religious sites that cheapens the experience. This is nothing new. People have been making money off of religious pilgrims for over 700 years.  There is almost always a gift shop near by every site you visit.  However, selling a religious experience is like selling air in a can (which they used to sell jars of Holy land air) the air may be the same but the fact that it is packaged morphs your experience.

One site that vividly expresses how I felt was the site of Golgotha. (one proposed site) I had expected to walk on a barren, rocky hill where Jesus died. Instead I am informed that the way I had seen the crucifixion in the movies as three crosses atop a large hill was not accurate and the place where Jesus died was most likely along the road near the hill or at the foot of the hill where now exists a modern bus station. Somehow seeing this bus station crystalized what I had been feeling the rest of the trip in a single picture, like striking two dissonant notes at the same time.  My savior died under a bus station.  How strange is that to say?

We have a good friend of Jewish ancestry who went to Israel and after touching the wailing wall, the holiest of sites for the Jewish faith, felt the cold, hard, emptiness of the stone, devoid of any spiritual energy or feeling and at that point decided to become an atheist. I can really understand how he felt. I went to the wailing wall and I too put my hand to the old stone and felt nothing. I went and touched the rock of agony, the place where Jesus prayed until he sweated blood, and felt nothing. I crawled under a table at the place where Jesus was born in Bethlehem (I have no idea why we were crawling under the table and kissing it, there was a line of Russians and we just did what everyone else was doing )and again felt nothing. I even went to one of the proposed sites where Jesus was buried and walked inside an empty tomb and felt nothing.

In the end Israel was not a “thin place” for me. Meaning, as the Celtic christians believe, places where the distance between the natural world and the spiritual world is so thin you can touch the other world. I find that I feel more connected to God along the rocky beaches of Lake Superior in my homeland as the waves rage under the moonlight or looking into the eyes of a recovering crack addict who’s face has been burned to disfigurement from an accident that occurred while he was high.

For me, it is not these historical or semi historical sites that are most important. It is the stories and teachings of Jesus that I find deeply meaningful. I can understand the importance of ritual and pilgrimage to some extent and I think it is helpful for some to connect to a physical place. Yet at the same time, it is good to remember that Jesus himself radically redefined our ideas of what is sacred space. That these places do not hold some kind of mystical power within themselves yet only serve to point to and remind us of something greater.

Chasing ghosts

When I lived in Kraków as a student, my apartment was in Józefa - the heart of what used to be the city’s Jewish neighborhood. There was evidence all around that Jews had lived in these streets since the 14th century – from synagogues and markings on the buildings to our landlord’s stories about our very own house. The building I lived in dated back to the 1400s, and it had originally been built as a rabbinical school.

For the whole time when I lived there, I had the feeling of moving among ghosts. For centuries before the Second World War, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world. By the time I moved to what used to be the cultural and spiritual center of this community, the synagogues and wall markings were almost all that was left. In the whole time I lived there, I never met a single descendant of what had been Poland’s largest minority – 3.5 million people by the outbreak of the war. At that point, Polish Jews made up 10% of our population – over 1000% more people than the Protestant minority of which I am a part. This is not ancient history – the complete destruction of this community happened within the lifetime of my grandfather, who recalls being put in detention with his Jewish classmates by the Catholic headmaster of their school. But unlike the history of my grandfather, their stories are ones I did not hear growing up.

Don’t get me wrong – I did learn about the Holocaust in history classes and visited the gas chambers at Auschwitz. I also heard from my landlord that when the Nazis were removing the people of Kazimierz to the ghetto, a disabled man who lived in our building was thrown out of the window together with his bed. I heard from my grandmother that there were rumors during the war that the Nazis were making soap out of humans, but nobody believed this could actually be happening in the middle of civilized Europe in the 20th century. What I did not hear were the stories of people who had lived here and perished, or lived here and miraculously survived. I knew the stories of my own grandparents – stuck between national boundaries, chased out of their ancestral homes, mourning first spouses lost to war. What I didn’t know were the stories of their neighbors - what were their names? Who were their first loves? What schemes of saving the world occupied them in their youth? Even in my very first college essay, I wrote about my streets and its inhabitants – the ghosts I could not catch.

Last week in Israel, I ran back into my ghosts. All the people we talked to about their families had at least one grandparent who was the sole survivor of a whole family. A grandfather who lost his first wife and seven kids; a grandmother who left before the war and saw none of her relatives again. On our last night in Israel, our host told me the story of his grandfather. He was saved by a Polish woman who hid him and three others under her house in the part of today’s Ukraine where my grandfather was born. The hideout was once discovered by the Nazis. Two of the men were killed, but the woman escaped with her life and proceeded to rebuild the hideout, saving the man’s life. Just as I’d looked at my grandfather’s face before and felt (not just knew) history, I now felt it as I looked at the man’s two beautiful children, whose all 25 cousins would not be alive if it wasn’t for a woman from the blurry photograph, whose name is uncertain and missing from the Garden of the Righteous. Then the man’s wife spoke about traveling to Poland and the feeling of walking on land soaked with the blood of her people. The miracle of survival; blood-soaked land that I walk on every day. Both, and – I will never comprehend it. What I do know is that after all these years, I finally looked my ghosts in the eyes. They were the eyes not of the dead, but of the living.

Couches of kind strangers

We spent the last week in Israel, visiting a college friend who lives in Haifa and traveling around the country. Amidst all the holy sites and amazing landscapes pictured in the gallery, the real highlight of our trip was getting to know two families we met through Couchsurfing. They were the first Israelis either of us had ever met, and we were just amazed with their kindness that in both cases went far beyond providing just a couch.

In Jerusalem, we were hosted for two nights by a young woman who picked us up in her car, showed us around, made us a bed in her spare room, and made us wonderful breakfast – all without ever having seen us before or expecting any reward. We spent hours talking about our countries and families, her upcoming wedding to a man from a more religious background, the expectations of his Orthodox relatives, and the patriotic dimension of deciding to have or not have children. A few days later, we stayed with a young family outside Tel Aviv who took us in last-minute, even though it was the middle of the week and they had to get up for work the next morning. The conversations of that night touched some of the deepest strings I’d heard in myself for a long time and sent us on our way with food for many months of thought. 

Being the recipient of such unexpected generosity reminded me of the biblical story of Abraham, the father of both our religions, preparing a sumptuous feast for visiting strangers who turn out to be disguised angels. There were no angels this time around, but the hospitality we received allowed us to glimpse the better angels of human nature. With all that we read in the daily news about the incredible cruelty we inflict on one another, sleeping on the couches of kind strangers and sharing their food gave us a taste of what is good and pure in our race. What we experienced at these distant tables was the embodiment of a core ethic of both Judaism and Christianity – welcoming the stranger and sharing of what we have, not to earn a reward but just because this is what we humans do. 

Spring Break in Israel

This gallery contains 15 photos.

Wiosna, Ach To Ty?

Spring has come at last here in Krakow! This week I was able to go without a coat for the first time as temperatures reached up to 20 degrees Celsius. The park that I walk through on my way to and from school is now crowded with people walking, biking, roller blading, and making out on park benches. Now that the temperature has risen above freezing, all of the sidewalk cafes on the main square are setting up their chairs and awnings with heatlamps and blankets, trying to capitalize on any business that a trace of warm weather may bring. There are also a lot more tourists and tour groups in the street, which is a somewhat jarring experience after walking occasionally empty streets in the winter.

I have noticed an extra bounce in my step and a lift in my general mood brought on by the weather. I have been thinking how moving here in the dead of winter was the perfecttiming for us.  By coming here at the worst time, the best weather was ahead of us. We timed it right at the three month mark when the honeymoon stage is starting to wear off and the loneliness is setting in, the days start to lengthen, it gets increasingly warmer, and the budding life around us counteracts the tendency towards depression.  If we were to have moved here in the fall, right at the time when everything is getting dark and cold, we would have been dealing with the mix of loneliness and seasonal affective disorder (SAD). So, my advice: If you are moving to a different country, make sure to move during the absolute worst season and then it can only get better from there

Excursion to Child Land

As a favor to our good friends, we offered to babysit their two kids while they went to Berlin to see Imagine Dragons in concert. We went to the park today and experienced one or two joys of the Polish kid culture.

The first case in point: Polish babcie (grandmas) seem to have a social mandate to dispense free advice. On our way to the park, the said advice referred to one of the boys’ shorts – a sure recipe for a cold if not covered with a blanket – this is, mind you, on a 22C/70F day. At the playground, I became the target of what is perhaps the babcias‘ favorite method of offering advice: addressing someone other than the intended target. As one of the boys began climbing a rope course, the babcia said to her (presumably) grandson: “See that boy over there? He is way too small to be climbing here. See, his mommy is watching him, but she’s holding another baby, so if he starts to fall, she will have no way to catch him.” Ehm… I’m right here! Well of course – that’s the point.

The positive side of the constant advice column is that it stems from a communal sense of responsibility for children that you no longer see in the US. There, it’s assumed that a child is their parents’ sole responsibility, and commenting on someone else’s parenting, telling their child how to behave, or even intervening in apparent danger is in bad taste. Not so in Poland – when a child is present, it’s assumed that whoever is closest will keep an eye on him or her, and intervene if anything bad is going on. There is not the fear of getting sued, or the assumption that if you are an adult stranger around other people’s kids, you’re most likely a child molester. Parents in the playground trust other adults to watch over their kids and even to tell them to stop if they’re misbehaving. As long as there is one person watching, it’s assumed that the kids are OK. So when one of the boys tried escaping the playground yesterday, one of the dads immediately noticed and offered to watch the other one as I ran after the fugitive. As Western individualism takes deeper root, I’m sure we’ll see less of this attitude towards children, but for now, with two toddlers in tow, it’s turning out to be quite handy – all disapproving babcia stares notwithstanding.

Conversing with strangers

Imagine you are sitting down to a meal with a group of friends. One of you brings someone nobody else has met. You sit down, begin to eat, and conversation proceeds with nobody asking the new guy a single question.

Does this scenario seem strange to you? If so, chances are that you are American. In America, questions dominate the style of communication between strangers: So where are you from? How do you know so-and-so? What do you do? Questions communicate interest and signal welcome. A style of conversation saturated with questions is so common that to do anything else runs the risk of appearing rude or inhospitable.

In Poland, conversation with strangers is governed by entirely different rules. As we’ve said before, it’s not common to talk to strangers at all – forget making friends easily with neighbors or fellow commuters. Try to make small talk with strangers without a legitimate excuse, and people will find you annoying at best and creepy at worst. The one socially acceptable way to meet new people is by being introduced by a mutual acquaintance, as in the scenario above. When such a new person gets brought to your table, the last thing you want to do is to put them on the spot by asking questions. A newcomer is usually greeted and left alone, with the conversation proceeding as it did before. Welcoming a stranger means giving him permission to sit back and jump in when he decides he is comfortable.

You can imagine how these different styles of welcoming strangers can complicate cross-cultural encounters. At an American table, the constant questions make a Pole feel like they are being interrogated. At a Polish one, the absence of questions makes an American feel ignored. A re-patriate like myself doesn’t feel one or the other -  but someone did tell me the other day that I sure ask a lot of questions. It will take a while to re-master the art of learning about others without the blunt interrogative.