There are two things that tell me I am indeed in the Promised Land — aside from the fact that I have just passed through immigration where I was asked: “What are you doing in Israel?”
It’s four in the morning on a Friday. If it was any other country, I would have deadpanned: “Oh, is that where I am?”
But I don’t. Because this is Israel. In transit at the Hong Kong airport before being given my boarding pass, I was asked by an Israeli security officer quite seriously: “Did anybody ask you to bring a gift or anything to Israel? It may look innocent but it could actually be a bomb.”
Really? How? These are things I am morbidly curious about. Instead, I said, “No.”
By the time we get out of Ben Gurion Airport and onto the highway going towards Jerusalem, the sky is no longer black but dark blue, and the crescent moon is accompanied by a single, big, bright star.
Maybe it’s the Star of Bethlehem. Maybe not. Maybe it’s hallucination brought about by 12 sleepless hours of trying to fit and fold your legs into an airline seat; reading about a fictionalized Che Guevara coming back to Cuba 32 years after he is repeatedly shot dead; and wondering if Sean Penn and James Franco kissing each other passionately in Milk is appropriate to watch while I am surrounded by hundreds of other passengers.
On the Yitzhak Rabin highway, the crescent moon and the star shine so brightly they grip me. You see the moon so luminous in Manila’s sky, hanging low and full and so beautiful at the start of the year, you think you have the best seat in the house — but rarely do you see a star this big in any other part of the world.
Anyway. The first thing that jolts me are the highway and street signs. You travel around the world and barely notice the green or blue reflectorized signs with their arrows pointing north to the airport, south to the city center, east to the highway, and west to the coastline. This time, the signs say: “Jerusalem,” “Dead Sea,” “Bethlehem,” “Jericho,” “Capernaum.”
These places are real.
I’ve known about them from the time I was baptized a Catholic, places I read about in religion class, places I had even planned to visit with friends in a heap of pinot noir withdrawal, and we declared, “Let’s go to Jordan and Egypt and Israel and Turkey.”
And here I am. In Jerusalem.
The second thing happens more than 24 hours after I arrive. I get out of my hotel room and walk to the elevators where one car is wide open that I don’t even have to press the down button. I get in, the doors close and I press “L” for the lobby but instead it goes one floor up. Then the doors open, and despite my pressing the close button they close only after half a minute, and the car goes up one floor again. I keep pressing “L” but the button doesn’t light up. The corridors are deserted until I reach two more floors and when the doors open I find two Hasidic Jews staring at me.
I step out and mutter, “Something’s wrong with that elevator.”
One of them says, “You’re in the wrong elevator.”
I think to myself: How can an elevator be wrong? It has only two routes, up and down.
“You’re in a Shabbat elevator,” the younger one says.
Toto, I’ve a feeling we really are not in Manila anymore.
It takes me exactly two seconds to react. Did he just say what I thought he said? The elevator has a religion? Naturally, I have to ask: “Dude, what’s a Shabbat elevator?”
Maybe it was my tone or maybe they haven’t been called “dude” in a while, at least not on Shabbat, the day of religious observance and abstinence from work (any kind of work, including cooking), but the older Jew explains kindly: “It’s an elevator that automatically stops at every floor going up and down on Shabbat.”
I feel like a stupid gentile.
Enter Exie Schlossberg. (“Like Caroline Kennedy-Schlossberg,” she says when I ask her to spell her married name.)
Exie learned Hebrew because of a seven-dollar chicken.
She is standing in line in the supermarket one day in 1988, carrying her frozen bird and people keep cutting in front of her and she never reaches the cashier. She wants to scold them in Hebrew but she doesn’t know how. I suppose, like any good Filipina, no matter how ebullient, the first words she learned in a foreign land were “thank you” and “please,” when what she actually needs right now in this supermarket queue is a very strong Hebrew word, something that would stop anyone in his tracks and beg her a thousand apologies.
So she dedicated herself to studying Hebrew. She learned to write in Hebrew before she could speak it fluently, even though the written language doesn’t use the alphabet she grew up with. Then like any foreigner learning to speak a new language, she got a breakthrough — that moment that author Elizabeth Gilbert describes when she finally spoke Italian in Rome as no longer translating in your head but actually speaking the language.
Exie now spoke Hebrew, and boy, did she speak it! The woman became a tour guide.
The moment we get on the van, she says, “Be careful with your bags. Here in the Holy Land, we also have Holy Thieves.”
Exie is, if you will, getting paid every working day of her life to tell stories, and in a place like Jerusalem storytelling takes on another dimension, a dreamlike state of getting to know your Bible characters. She’s talking about Jesus, about Peter, about Herod, about betrayal, a suicide, coming back from the dead, and how a donkey ride to adulation ends but a few days later in a crucifixion.
Oh, the twists and turns of events! How can you possibly top that? Even a tour guide in the fabulous Versailles Palace would keep her mouth shut about Napoleon when faced with such competition.
Exie will guide you through the olive gardens, whip out her tattered Bible and read passages and then tell the story as if she lived through the times. You feel it is that personal.
The only Filpina guide licensed by the Israel tourism bureau, Exie first came to Israel in 1984, a year after her father died in the Korean Airlines flight 007. The plane was en route from New York to Seoul and was shot down by the Soviets over the Sea of Japan after having strayed into Soviet airspace due to navigational error.
It was 1983. Her mother Roberta Espina was heartbroken. She told Exie she needed a “consolation trip”; she wanted to go to the Holy Land. Exie had only one request — could she bring her husband with her, a Jew named Bert Schlossberg whom she met in America when she was working in a bank in Westchester, New York.
So they flew to Israel. Exie fell in love with the country. At the end of the tour, she cried on the plane like she had never done before — she was crying leaving Israel more than she cried when she left the Philippines. There was this longing to go back to Israel even after she picked up her routine again in the US. She wanted to live there. Her husband wanted to live there, too, but he waited. What if it was a passing thing for Exie? You know, like when you spend a few days in Paris and your mind is convinced: I should be living in Paris and speaking French and kissing on the Left Bank and having a baguette at every meal.
But it didn’t pass. Three years of longing for Israel and finally they made the move to Jerusalem. This Filipina, trained as an accountant, traded her successful career in a New York bank to become a tourist guide in Israel.
One of the most memorable tours she has conducted involves a Filpina government bureaucrat who had heard about her. The lady was in Israel and called Exie for a tour. Twice she asked, and Exie said no both times because she was busy. Finally, their schedules coincided. In one of the many churches they visited, the lady began crying and prostrated herself on the ground.
“Maybe she was carrying something heavy,” says Exie. “Those are the most memorable tours for me, when people are touched in the heart, when they receive the Holy Spirit.”
There is an old joke in Israel that goes: Why are there so many public phones in Jerusalem? Because when you call God it’s a local call.
The truth is, I do not see a single pay phone during my three days there.
So I pray. In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in the Church at the Garden of Gethsemane, in the Church of the Nativity. And in the Church of the Shepherd’s Fields where we sing Christmas carols by the way (we are in Bethlehem, so shut your trap about it being June).
I pray a prayer I have held in my heart for the past two years. I prayed this in a church in Budapest, Hungary, on a secret vacation I took in February when I just had to get out of Manila if only for a week. I walked six blocks under heavy snow and asked a passerby who the cathedral’s patron saint was. I forget now who it is, but I was told it was the patron saint of the oppressed. I had to laugh at that. What prayer doesn’t come from somebody who felt oppressed either by the fates or by her own hand? I’ve said the same prayer in every church I’ve visited for the past two years.
But this time, in Jerusalem and Bethlehem’s churches, I do not ask. I offer. Please take this. It is yours because I don’t know what to do with it anymore. I am not here to negotiate. Take it and do with it what you will.
Everywhere you turn, it seems, is a place of great history, from one great war and conquest to another, and also of immense sadness.
At Dominus Flevit atop the Mt. of Olives, the chapel is shaped like a teardrop. Jesus Christ wept here for the city of Jerusalem — for its beauty, its destruction, and the diaspora of the Jews that he predicted. The mountain is surrounded by cemeteries — Christian, Jewish, Islamic — and from the viewing deck you see the walled city of Old Jerusalem and the domes of churches vying for your attention: Orthodox Armenian, Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and the Dome of the Rock.
Then there is the Wailing Wall or the Western Wall on Temple Mount, which is said to be closest to the Holy of Holies and when you pray here it is as if you are praying directly to the heavens. Accounts differ but they all seem to agree that when the Temple was destroyed, God moved his presence to the Western Wall.
It is literally a wall, not a church. Yet it seems holier than the churches that are filled with noisy tourists. And everyone seems to be here: Jews, Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians; maybe even the atheists are calling on God by His 72 names in Hebrew.
On Shabbat (Friday noon to Saturday evening), you cannot take a picture here — or even smile, they say — because the Jews are praying.
I look at all the folded papers, the petitions stuck between the crevices in the Wailing Wall and I think: How many of these wishes have been fulfilled? I want to know as a journalist and as somebody who needs to find out what her chances are… then I stop myself. Here I go again.
I am not here to weigh the averages.
So I stand in front of the wall and read my little paper while waiting for the two-person line to thin. Then I stick my paper in a crack and touch the wall, and I pray.
It is a Sunday, the first day of the workweek, and the Wailing Wall is filled with young people in military uniform, which tells you this is the place for collective prayer. In 1994, 50,000 people gathered here to pray for an Israeli solder who was kidnapped and held by the Hamas for six days, and then murdered during the attempted rescue. Even Pope John Paul II inserted a prayer in the wall in 2000, so did Obama in 2008, and Pope Benedict in 2009.
On the day I am here, maybe the young soldiers are petitioning to pass their exams in the Israel Defense Force, a military force that in modern warfare has earned for itself a reputation of mythical proportion. Only a day after the declaration of independence of the State of Israel in 1948, armies of five Arab countries invaded Israel, and the IDS repelled them and every one since.
There is harshness in the light of Old Jerusalem. I don’t know why this surprises me because it is, after all, in the Middle East but I keep forgetting this because of the Arab connotation of the region.
The sun bounces off the limestone façades of the modern apartment buildings and the thousand-year-old temples, walls, and stone steps that Christ walked on. It is a city of mountains and valleys and hills with houses built in terrace-like fashion. They all look the same because the mayor of Jerusalem declared that all structures should be made of Jerusalem stone or at least their façades.
We are going from one church to another in Jerusalem and Bethlehem staying only minutes in each one — touching the rock where Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, the rock where the cross was impaled on Golgotha, his tomb, the manger where he was born, the dungeons where he was thrown after his arrest.
One dark place after another.
And every time I come out, I am blinded by the light, my skin burned by the sun.
Back in Manila, I tell a friend Jerusalem gave me a footing. I’m not really sure what I mean by that because she is simply asking me about somebody.
I know now what I meant. It feels good to be standing on solid ground.