Special guest blogger for Motzei Shabbat

This blog entry was contributed by JCA member Eliza Gouverneur [with bracketed glossing by rddb]:

Moments from the day. 5/23.

At services at HUC [Reconstructionist Minyan led by Recon rabbinical students on their Israel year] the teaching included words about commitment that are on our [her and Richard Cohen's] ketubah, and today is our 33rd anniversary.

In the first church we visited [in the Old City], built by Anglicans in the mid 19th c., the church guide first apologized to us as Jews for the bad behavior of the British after the Balfour Declaration.

We saw the Meronite Center, for mostly Lebanese Meronite Catholics. It is built like a fortress, with a well in the courtyard. We climbed to the roof for panoramic views of the Old City and spoke about how each group in the city wants to have the tallest or the largest shrine. The walls were of the usual creamy, soft Jerusalem stone, and the trim paint was a wonderful robin's egg blue, like a morning sky.

The Syrian Orthodox Church was an experience. It is said to be the oldest church anywhere, built on the place where some say the last supper was held. Justina, the peppery and passionate church guide, told stories of the miracles she had witnessed there and sang for us in Aramaic both the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 150. Her sweet ardor was very moving.

In a deep, huge cistern, Queen Helena's Well [to which we gained access from the top of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre], we climbed down steep stairs through low doorways and emerged 1600 years below where we entered. The cistern was dug to provide water for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre when it was built. The rabbi sang Kol haneshamah and the echoes and reverberations were like answering voices.

We walked again and again through the vivid, crowded, fragrant, and colorful streets of the markets in the Arab Quarter, jostling crowds and being distracted by every kind of tourist loot, from dates and spices to t-shirts (my favorite: a picture of a phantom jet that said, "America, don't worry, Israel is behind you") to ancient (?) coins to icons to kiddush cups to snack foods to oranges. We trotted along, taking turns to mark the corners we'd turned for stragglers in our group. In the Via Dolorosa we opened a non-descript door and climbed to the home of Sheik Abdul Aziz El Buchari. He truly welcomed us, told us of his family's history, father to son, of Sufi sheiks dating back 1000 years to and ancestor, Imam Al Buchari, who wrote the first book of commentary on the Koran. He was a sufi authority on Koran, equivalent to the Rambam on Torah.

He spoke of Sufi worship coming from the heart, that you can't worship without love. His order of Sufis is called in Uzbecki "carved on stone" and to 'carve' on their heart the love of God, they repeat the name of God in a zikor (like the Hebrew zicharon, remembrance) twice a week, where they call God's name, repeating and repeating until they reach a meditative high, a state between heaven and earth. He says the leave the circle feeling drunk with joy and awaken still singing. His group works for peace and emphasizes our obligation (like all religions, he said) to thank, appreciate, love, honor, and obey God, and to love the other as yourself.

He said that all humans are one family, and asked "If your sone is arrested for committing a crime, what do you do? You go to get him out of jail and help him to become a better person." Sufis, he said, try to love everyone as their family and reach out to them.

As we left, Kylar, Alisha Clarke's son-in-law, who works for the US Consulate here, mentioned that the Sheik works with other groups in Jerusalem toward achieving peace. The Sheik radiated great warmth and centeredness, qualities that will be needed in that effort.