JOGGING IN JERUSALEM
RAMAT, CHARLES
JOGGING IN JERUSALEM CHARLES RAMAT There are mechanized ways to see any city, but Jerusalem is not any city. Jerusalem is a mirage which evaporates if hurried, an elder whose sagacious fables...
...Within the space of one city block I pass a chic outdoor cafe, a synagogue (Hechal Shlomo—the Seat of the Chief Rabbinate), a supermarket, a church school, another synagogue and a park...
...I feel that I have run this course before...
...the blood pounds in my ears...
...Just three miles in all...
...Other luminaries, such as Pablo Casals, played to a spellbound audience...
...A high-rise apartment house overlooks a field where Bedouin flocks graze...
...It was to be Don Pablo's last public performance...
...alert patrols, wearing the silver badge and green beret of Mishmar Hagvul (Border Patrol), smile and joke, never releasing their automatic weapons...
...Various government buildings face the park...
...For each evil deed an evil angel is created, for each good deed a good angel exists, and the result of a partially completed deed is a deformed angel...
...Chagall, Rubinstein, de Beauvoir, Rauschenberg: The signatures in Mishkenot's guest book read like a Who's Who of world culture...
...A century later, Sir Moses' low income housing project serves as the core of an internationally renowned cultural center...
...Mangy donkeys, dwarfed under immense loads of firewood twigs, compete for space along cobbled byways with Mercedes taxicabs...
...The wind picks up and sweeps across the valley, soughing as it smashes against the fortifications...
...The sun reigns in a faultless court—the sky is cloudless, royal blue paling at the horizon...
...A boyish paratrooper playfully double times alongside me...
...It is proof that we can do it...
...The windmill, together with new housing called Mishkenot Sha'ananim (Dwellings of Tranquility) were the gift of Sir Moses Montefiore to the impoverished Jewish community of the mid-nineteenth century...
...When I studied pre-dental in L.A...
...The Chassidim tell a tale...
...Christians, dedicated to the preservations of the holy shrines...
...And some day, if everyone wants it enough, we will...
...We shake hands and he too is gone...
...I am puffing...
...But the sparrow is gone...
...I seen running in Jaffa and maybe on the Jewish side," he says in stilted English...
...In Tel Aviv it will burn a while longer before drowning in the Mediterranean...
...Lodging is provided free— the only accepted payment, a Jerusalem-inspired work...
...For centuries this cemetery has been the Jews' most hallowed burial ground...
...To excavate the foundation numerous graves and tombstones were bulldozed...
...Is that part of your training...
...Arabs, black or light or olive, betraying roots from Africa to Turkey and beyond...
...He appears mildly surprised...
...That's the toughest...
...On hard exercises we run carrying comrades on alunkot (stretchers...
...In the States, where I run regularly, I've always felt a special bond with the places I run by, and so a run through Jerusalem seemed the perfect reunion...
...What a city of contrasts Jerusalem is...
...He pauses to look about the garden, then adds, "Anyway, other things seem more important here...
...He says he is a dental student...
...The parapets are passable, offering views of the valleys below...
...Inside the Old City, just beyond the Jaffa Gate, I have collided with Mahamoud, a burly—and heavily burdened—porter...
...Around me everything is delightfully jumbled, a typical Old City day...
...The ascent takes its toll...
...Saul Bellow, after a stay of several months, wrote To Jerusalem and Back, Alexander Calder stayed at Mishkenot while deciding onthe proper location for the stabile which he donated to the city, and the Egyptian writer, Sana Hassan, came to research a book on Israeli society and was welcomed despite her vocal criticism of the Jewish state...
...Father Nourhan, in the hooded cowl and flowing vestments of an Armenian prelate, looks up at me from his Jerusalem Post...
...Consulate lies hidden behind steel gates and stone walls...
...He was killed by a British bullet fired from the roof of the King David Hotel...
...The sun shines, a rooster crows, a bell tolls...
...Later, adjacent to Mishkenot, the Jerusalem Music Center was built...
...I close my eyes and listen, to the wind, to the silence...
...Immediately below, rising from the Temple Mount, are the silver domed Al-Aksa Mosque and the gold capped Dome of the Rock, ablaze in the sun's departing rays...
...its people, its history, its holy places...
...No, in training we run much more...
...FeW pedestrians crowd the sidewalks, yet they are worn smooth and make pleasant tracks for running...
...There world masters like Isaac Stern work individually with Israeli prodigies and also videotape master classes for larger groups...
...Yossi Cohen, a postal worker, is splicing phone lines outside the Consulate...
...They inhale deeply and stare at me vacuously...
...Gradually the wall becomes an outer wall...
...Abruptly I'm jolted alert...
...an ancient cemetery borders a playground, pensioners, gnarled as the olive trees under which they lie, doze while nearby young lovers stroll hand in hand amidst the flowering almonds...
...I run feflough during miluim (army resem duty...
...Many run in the morning and in the night," he says...
...Fat people are an embarrassment—we don't have money for sports, but running on the street—everybody should...
...a graduate of Columbia Law School and a non-practicing attorney, is an entrepreneur engaged in a variety of real estate and restaurant activities...
...I think it is very good...
...Behind Mishkenot is another monument, a garden...
...With the exception of the expulsion of the Jews by the Arab Legion from 1948 to 1967, Jews have resided in this Quarter for almost three thousand years...
...We take our leave, I on the garden path that leads to the road that crosses the Valley of Hinnom to reach Mount Zion...
...A sparrow's frail chirping is stifled by the amplified drone from a nearby minaret...
...And do you agree...
...I can almost hear the other sounds that this beauty conceals: trumpets heralding the approach of great hosts and steel clashing on steel, the shrieks of victims, the grunts of victors...
...The first right inside the Gate leads me to Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate Road, the Armenian Quarter's principal artery...
...Different, divided, yet uniformly proud to be Jerusalem-ites...
...Lavish in aiding distressed Jews throughout the world, Sir Moses particularly served the Holy Land's Jews, then under Ottoman rule, by acting as intermediary with his friend, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire...
...But evil angels lurk as well...
...Charles S. Ramat...
...Here life is too hard...
...Good boy...
...He glares incredulously at my bright green shoes...
...Situated at the approach to Judaism's holiest place, the Western Wall, the Jewish Quarter is dense with tourist traffic...
...And even a "stiff-necked" few who never left...
...The cold stones sooth my brow and warm my spirit...
...I kiss the Western Wall...
...Church bells chime, a child perched high atop flour sacks strapped to a donkey whips the beast toward the souk...
...I slow to a fast walk to watch a laborer patiently pounding a stone wall with a heavy multi-spiked mallet...
...The sun's warmth and the running's cadence begin to lull me...
...Warming, he adds, "But feel free and running here...
...And the results have been gratifying...
...Jerusalem is a city best experienced on foot...
...On King David Street the mammoth buildings give way to smaller houses...
...Architecturally pleasing, the hotel complements the skyline...
...Reconstructed and converted ihto spacious suites, Mishkenot Sha'ananim provides a serene working environment for artists invited from around the world...
...He spits and blurts, "Fakat Yahoud yarkou-doun" (only Jews run...
...On the other side only wrought-iron window guards and shutters relieve the severe stone walls...
...Proceeding north under Mount Zion's shadbw, I reach Jerusalem's version of Bpston's Heartbreak Hill, an uninterrupted half-mile of uphill agony...
...The eagle stuck out front looks lonely...
...I ask his portly partner, Shalom Baruch...
...Cars and even buses squeeze by me, but in the quiet moments a pastoral peace soothes the place...
...An unceremonious plunk and it falls behind the western mountains...
...Usually with gun, ammunition, and a pack...
...The road narrows briefly to tunnel through an arched building...
...As I crest a hill, a distinctly un-Levantine sight appears—the famous Jerusalem windmill...
...Yemin Moshe's angel must be wonderful to behold...
...A rotund fellow tourist, still munching some matjes herring from the breakfast smorgasbord, saw me off...
...To the south, naturally defended on three sides by the Kidron, Cheesemaker's and Hinnom valleys, lies the Arab village of Silwan...
...My legs and lungs ache but I'm sufficiently distracted by the view to continue—on my left, Yemin Moshe nestling into the landscape like a natural extension of the rock from which it is built, on my right, straddling Mt...
...And what do you think of this," I ask, "of the Arabs and Jews and Christians living here so close together...
...I strike up a conversation with Mickey Kirschenbaum, a young man who has come to sit in his uncle's garden...
...The reunion is complete...
...Welcome...
...A final spurt and a breathtaking panorama unfolds...
...I run ten kilometers every night," he informs me...
...I have never before been labeled a Jew by my shoes...
...The run has barely begun and already I'm confronted with Jerusalem's unique blend of old and new, materialist and spiritual, man-made and natural...
...Definitely...
...Jewsvfrom Yemen and Germany, Persia and Kurdistan, from India and Spain, Bokhara and Georgia, from Poland and Rhodesia and all the Americas...
...A little joggin' this mornin'—good boy...
...It commemorates the victims of discord, the dead killed defending this ground in the Six Day War...
...Around me tourists chatter in assorted languages...
...Its flat-roofed homes look like steps cut into the ravines...
...Jerusalem is a mirage which evaporates if hurried, an elder whose sagacious fables merit meticulous attention...
...Occasionally he inspects his handiwork by fingering the hollows and ridges in the richly beveled stone...
...Returning to visit for the first time since living there, I sought to reestablish contact with the Jerusalem I'd come to love...
...In the days of the Jewish Kings this and the other treacherous ravines surrounding the city were barely passable until the construction of viaducts, the engineering marVels of their day...
...Outside a small cafe old men languidly draw on their narghilas...
...The road, faithful to the wall, turns eastward, dips down into the Jewish Quarter...
...Wish F could join ya...
...B'hechJet," he says smiling...
...Alongside them the U.S...
...priests from Rome and Russia, monks from Greece and Ethiopia, clergymen from every nation where Christianity in any of its multiple forms has.achieved a foothold...
...All the structures, even the sidewalks, are built of Jerusalem limestone, an abundant resource...
...In the heart of Yemin Moshe, near the windmill, just outside the music center dedicated to the creation of harmonious sounds, a marble slab stands coldly upright amidst a clump of scraggly bushes...
...And Jews, regathered, from every corner...
...He is currently at work on a novel...
...The surrounding community, known as Vemin Moshe, has been faithfully reconstructed in its original nirtfcteenth century town-house style...
...The gift was part of Sir Moses' plan to lure Jews out of the securely walled but Squalid confines of the Old City to this site in order to create a New City...
...But now there is only silence, a blessed respite...
...Welcome...
...Supermarkets, equipped with computerized cash registers, punch out receipts only minutes from a souk, the Arab bazaar where purchases are still tallied by abacus...
...Inside Independence Park the contrast continues...
...The muezzin finishes his prayers...
...I apologize profusely and try to explain about running...
...The Communists force fat people to do sport...
...Zion, the Old City Wall, its crenolated battlements yawning like a gap-toothed dragon...
...To the southeast, across the Kidron Valley, the Mount of Olives is pockmarked with the horizontal tombstones peculiar to Jewish cemeteries in the Holy Land...
...And, of course, Jerusalem is people...
...The Jerusalem sun sets rapidly...
...The stone walls grow taller and closer, tomblike...
...I used to run a few miles a day," he continues, "but since I'm back there's no time...
...The Intercontinental Hotel, which sprawls across the summit, was constructed during the Jordanian occupation...
...His Hebrew epitaph, chiseled into a stone wall, ends simply, "He was twenty-two springs old...
...We pass some Talmud students lolling in a courtyard and he smiles at them in greeting...
...Clad in running gear, I embarked from my hotel eager to see and feel these things again...
...It is dedicated to Avraham Michael Kirschenbaum, a poor inhabitant of Yemin Moshe who, in 1948, held off the advancing Arabs long enough for his family and friends to escape...
...But three miles with Jerusalem...
...Like bureaucratic structures the world over, they are huge outside, cubbyholes Inside, and generally dingy...
...Mishkenot's opening was heralded as a major cultural event highlighted by an outdoor concert under the fullest of moons...
...The most incredible people...
...the muezzin is calling the Moslem faithful to prayer...
...Motorized traffic is banned and the stone streets even seem to have ruts for wagon wheels...
Vol. 5 • April 1980 • No. 4
