I recently made a return trip to Jerusalem. When I was 19 years of age, 35 years ago, I spent a magical summer in Jerusalem working at the Temple Mount excavations conducted by Hebrew University. Returning to any city after that long reveals a number of changes. Jerusalem, however, is different. In Jerusalem there is a mixture of many old things that never change along with some new features that create major change.
Jerusalem has grown in the past three and a half decades. There is more traffic and new streets to accommodate the increase. New and larger hotels have sprung up to handle the increasing numbers of pilgrims coming to the city. I easily found the old hotel, which had been our home for the summer. It is closed and boarded up now. But what memories it held as I stood in the abandoned courtyard.
The Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif to Muslims, hasn't changed in hundreds of years. The al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock stand on the mount in all their beauty. Jews gather in prayer at the Western Wall, although when I first touched it years ago it was called the Wailing Wall. Further excavations finished the work I was part of back in 1971. Now the southern wall of the Temple Mount is cleared all the way down to the period of the first century, the time of Christ and the apostles. The Economist recently called this 35-acre site the "most explosive piece of real estate in the world." The platform and holy places are under the supervision of an Islamic authority. No one is happy with this arrangement. Constant irritants arise over Jewish access to the area and ongoing Muslim "improvements" that disturb valuable archaeological information.
The biggest change one sees in Jerusalem today is the winding wall being erected as a barrier between Palestinian and Israeli areas. The suicide bombings of recent years prompted this action by the Sharon administration. It was seen as the only way to stop this form of violence and has been effective in reducing the incidents. The wall cuts through Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods. One wonders, who is being shut out by the wall? Are the Israelis boxing themselves in or shutting the Palestinians out? It is like the question asked in Robert Frost's poem, "Before I build a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out..."
