My wife met some pilgrims from England the other day in the Old City of Jerusalem, three serious women in their 60s, and they invited her to do the Stations of the Cross yesterday. I went along.
The last three stations are in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We were standing near a sunken chamber a few feet away from the mobs of other pilgrims when an older guy with a mane of silver hair gave me an elbow. “What happened here?”
I said, “Ask Margaret.” Margaret told him that this was a Byzantine shrine to the spot where the Resurrection “possibly took place.”
“Possibly?” he said with a slightly satirical tone.
“Well I believe in my heart in the Resurrection,” she said, unbaited, “but I am saying that this is one of the sites it possibly occurred.”
The old guy gave me a look and walked away. I was sure he was Jewish.
I saw him later near the holy sepulchre, which is a large wooden structure in the middle of an ancient rotunda. The room was thronged with European pilgrims, some praying, some taking pictures, some singing or reading Scripture, some filing into the tomb, lighting tapers and snuffing them, to be brought back home as sacred objects.
My guy stood back, wearing a neat dress shirt. I said to him, “Are you from the States?”
“Yes. Where are you from?”
“New York,” I said. “And you?”
“Los Angeles.” He gave me a sly look. “And what are you— are you a Christian, Muslim or Jew?”
“One of the three,” I said.
He got his satirical smile. “But you’re not going to tell me.”
“Jewish.”
“I thought so,” he said.
“And you?”
“Jewish Jewish Jewish,” he declared.
We smiled at one another, with that look of tribal recognition. Then he touched me on the shoulder and gestured toward the spectacle.
“And just look what one Jew accomplished.”
