You might find it a little too on the nose for me to tell you that, in Jericho, there is an all-you-can-eat buffet at the foot of the Mount of Temptation, called “Temptation Restaurant.”
I was there as part of ten days in Israel & Palestine, and it was just over thirty years ago, so I thought I’d check my recollection online, and sure enough:
http://temptationrestaurant.com/
My recollections were triggered back in September, when the ancient city of Jericho, the Tell es-Sultan, entered the World Heritage List alongside of Ohio’s Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. Obviously, the horrors of Oct. 7th’s attack out of Gaza by Hamas and now the ongoing tragedy of the resulting clearing operations by Israel Defense Forces have made many of us think more about that part of the world than we had been previously.
What I have rolling around in my head is no deep insight, dated as it is, nor does it point towards any useful suggestions for how a two-state solution might sort out. But the exchange in the parking lot of the delightfully incongruous all-you-can-eat buffet just won’t leave me, and that’s the kind of situation when I start to write.
In February of 1993, I was tired of eating, and hungry to know more about a place I knew I’d not be back to soon, if ever. We forty ministers and our Israeli tour guide had been well fed at breakfast back in Jerusalem, and frankly I wasn’t hungry, I was curious. Tell es-Sultan, the archaeological site of arguably the oldest city in the world, was right behind the restaurant, and across the parking lot was a clear view of the other side of the Jordan River, and the hills beyond. Those hills are the district of Gilead, in Biblical terms, where green growing plants and shrubs grew as the uplift of moving fronts kept those slopes well watered in sight of both desert and Dead Sea. You could pick the ingredients for ointments and unguents and various balms there.
A balm in Gilead, you know.
Ezra, our amazing guide, had become accommodating over time, now about five days into our tour. I’d proven to him at a number of sites I knew my history & archaeology, and I was the youngest of the group at 31, by decades in most cases. So when I asked if I could run out of his sight for a bit, he had become more willing to let me go. He was very much the mother hen, or perhaps sheepdog is more accurate, but when I said getting off the bus “Can I skip the meal and go look at the tell?” Ezra said “sure, be back here in thirty minutes, okay?”
The bus vanished around a corner into a more distant parking area, and the other 39 preachers piled into Temptation Restaurant. I turned, walked to the edge of the pavement, and looked to the east, into Gilead. I dug my camera out (pre-phones, you know), and took a few shots of those legendary slopes, also thinking through the map in my head and the left turn I needed to make to get to the tell. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder.
He was about my height, and twice as broad, dark curly hair and a truly impressive mustache. He held out a tray covered with jewelry, and said “You buy something, no?”
I smiled at him and said “I’m Jeff. Good to meet you, sir; I’m going to see the tell.”
“I am Mohammed; would you like to see what else I have?” He gestured to a hatchback parked in the shade of some palm trees along one side of the parking area. “I have many kinds of jewelry, and I can get more quickly while you eat.” I explained I was not going in to eat, but walking on down to Ancient Jericho, to which he waved his hands. “You see what I have.”
Mohammed was right, he had many kinds of jewelry, and in fact I saw something almost immediately that struck me as perfect for Joyce. At least in my mind’s eye. I reached out, and picked up the particular necklace.
“Yes, good pick. That is only $10 American.”
I smiled sadly, pulled my lonely $5 out of my pocket. “Sorry, this is all I have on me.” Now, to be perfectly honest, with you if not Mohammed, I had learned to leave on the bus most of my money, and only carry each stop on me the amount I was willing to spend that day. Because at most of our stops, it was not unusual for vendors to get rather, personal…
Mohammed reached over, slapped my thighs, saying “You must have more money than that. I will make it $7.”
With at least immediate candor, I very carefully pulled both my pockets out, showing cloth. And held up my $5.
Mohammed shook his head. “No, no, I pay that to buy this. Something more?”
“I’m afraid that’s all I can spend. But I understand; best of luck with the group as they come out!” And I turned to go back to the road.
“Well, well, well, okay then. You give me $5, and tell the others to buy from Mohammed?” I said certainly. He wrapped up the necklace in white tissue paper, and handed it to me with a bow in return for my American money. I bowed in return. We both smiled.
“Do you live in Jericho, Mohammed?”
“Yes, the oldest city on Earth! A very good place indeed.” He went on to tell me of his children, which at risk of being on the nose again I believe was seven. Then he said “do you know . . . Zacchaeus?” It took me a moment, it was as if he was asking me if, being from Ohio, I knew Woody Hayes. “Oh, Zacchaeus! Yes, yes.”
“I have climbed his tree. All my children, they climbed Zacchaeus’s tree. It is here in Jericho.”
I congratulated Mohammed on his tree, and his climb. I pointed up to the looming Mount of Temptation to our west. “Have you been up there?” He shook his head.
“It is much better down here, in Jericho. The Jordan, the people. Up there it is dry and hard.”
Then I pointed at the restaurant’s “all-you-can-eat” sign, and asked him if he thought it was at all funny. “Why?” asked Mohammed. “Well, because of the story about Jesus, hungry and tempted up there,” I replied, pointing at the Mount above us, “and here we are with a buffet down right below it.” He looked puzzled. His English was perfectly good in most respects, but the context was not something we shared in common.
A few of my fellow passengers were already coming out of the door, and I thanked Mohammed again for the necklace, and said I would go in and promote his business. He smiled broadly. “Thank you, and bless you.” Inside, a cluster of our tour group was milling around in the small gift shop, and I held up my wrapped purchase and said with total sincerity the fellow in the parking lot, named Mohammed, had some very nice necklaces and other jewelry. They were out like a shot.
Ezra came over; I would say in ten days, thirty some meals, I never saw Ezra actually sitting and eating once. He’d grab something off your plate and smile, and occasionally he’d have a plate as he walked around checking in on all forty of us. “Jeff, did you see the tell already?” I explained I had been stopped in the parking lot and Ezra sighed. “No, no,” I added, “it was a pleasant interaction. But how much time do I have now.” Ezra sighed again, and looked at his watch. “You have twenty minutes, don’t make me hate you. Go!”
I went back outside, and Mohammed had a group around him looking at his hatchback trays; he smiled and waved and pointed at the group, nodding his head. I waved back, then jumped into a trot heading left down the road.
Closed, Tell es-Sultan is, from outside of the enclosure, a large pile of mud. Very historic mud. I saw it, and had ten minutes to trot back. Because I’d shown so much interest, the bus driver actually made an unnecessary & unplanned loop to drive around it, and you could see a bit more from the elevated seats into the ruins and archaeological dig.
We did not see Zacchaeus’s tree, but I felt like I had a very clear picture of it in my mind. After the loop, we rolled past Temptation Restaurant, where Mohammed was packing up his vehicle in the shady side of the parking lot, his back facing us so I did not wave. On the other side of the bus, out the windows, the afternoon sun was shining directly onto Gilead across the Jordan; then Gilead swung out of view as the bus turned up the road to Jerusalem, into the Judean hills, where in a half hour we would reach the Inn of the Good Samaritan, where the door had — I am not making this up — a Diners Club sticker, and American Express.
It was a brief and in many ways one sided connection. When I see the necklace in Joyce’s jewelry box of a morning, I think about that afternoon in Jericho. He had a goal of how much to sell for how many dollars, because that was his job. I evaded giving him as much as I could have, because I wasn’t sure what else I might want to get on down the road, and out of an innate caution about spending too much. Mohammed might have bought a hundred such necklaces for $100, but that may also be rationalization.
Our tour group was cautioned before we even gathered, in handouts mailed in advance helping us prepare for the trip, about the importance of having dollar bills, American, with us and also about the results in certain settings of handing them to children. “You will be amazed at how quickly a crowd will gather” cautioned the tip sheet.
The closest I came to seeing that in practice was later that night. On the bus I told Charlie, an Episcopal minister I’d befriended along the way, about my conversation, such as it was. He cursed himself saying he didn’t even like the food all that much, and he wished he’d followed me. Then he made a suggestion.
7:00 pm after supper at the hotel we were sent back to our rooms to rest up for an early start tomorrow, and pack for leaving in the morning having stayed there four nights. At 8:00 pm, four of us met in the coffee shop adjoining the lobby, and left the hotel heading for the Damascus Gate of the Old City. We hadn’t been told we couldn’t go out without our guide, just to not go “far.” A matter of interpretation.
Without making a detailed travelogue of this, we got a ride on “the Ramallah Taxi.” It was a station wagon. Charlie flashed inadvertently a stack of American money, and we had a wide range of Ramallah taxi drivers to choose from, all very vocally expressing their interest. How Charlie decided on the one we rode in, I don’t know. The four of us followed the lucky winner to his vehicle, climbed in . . . and then were joined by four or five more riders. We were close packed, and the others were obviously used to it. Adjustments were made, and north we hurtled through the night.
Until we got to the checkpoint. Now, keep in mind, this is February 1993. Before many of the portions of wall were built between the West Bank and Israel, before rounds of suicide bombings that raised anxieties and created harsher conditions on transit between Palestinian controlled territory and the State of Israel.
Even so, it was jarring to feel the tension all around us as the white station wagon slowed and stopped to be met at a gate by a squad of soldiers armed with Uzis and M16A1s, held at the ready.
The sergeant in charge was leaning over, peering into the vehicle, clearly puzzled by what he was looking at. Which is to say four US clergymembers, fat and happy if you will, seated among another four or five Palestinians heading home from work.
Charlie was in the front seat, had paid for our ride, and was the one questioned; he handled himself well. Why are you in this vehicle? My friends and I are visiting Ramallah. When are you returning to Israel? Later tonight. Who are you visiting in Ramallah? We’re looking to have some coffee and talk to locals before we return for the night. You mean this is just a social call? Yes, that’s right.
A quick scrutiny of our passports, and we were waved through. One of the Palestinian riders smiled, slapped Charlie and a couple of us on the back, and said “That was twice as fast as it would have gone if you guys weren’t here with us!”
Again, there’s no big reveal waiting here, no bolt of insight. We got to downtown Ramallah, were let out with a promise to return in a half hour, and our fellow riders scattered, to their homes, but with friendly waves and cordial smiles over their shoulders. We were in Al-Manara Square, lion statues in front of us, traffic wheeling around us, apparently as close to a Piccadilly Circus as we’d find in the Palestinian Authority area. As I recall, there was an IDF command post on one side, and they watched us, warily, wondering what we were doing there. That question did occur to me, as well.
The problem, of course, was on a Monday (I think?) night, at 9:30 pm, pretty much everything was closed. One fellow came up, Charlie talked to him, asked if anywhere was selling coffee or tea, and he said he could get his cousin to open up a place just a few blocks away. As we were talking about the wisdom of that course of action (wisdom really having been left behind some time ago), our taxi drove up. The driver said “I take you for sno-cones!” Without another hesitation, we jumped back in, now just the four of us.
The sno-cone place was closed. Everyone got out, and we looked at the darkened store front, and a small crowd gathered around us. Someone shouted “USA!” and the ironic laughter was unmistakable. A fellow walked up to us and said if we came back tomorrow night, there could be a meal and some real conversation; Charlie and I explained our group was moving on up to the Galilee the next day. Then the taxi driver said “We really need to be going.”
That was it. I can’t say I learned a blessed thing about Fatah, who was ostensibly in charge, or Hamas, which was just getting rolling in Palestinian affairs at that time. I just experienced the borders, the boundaries, the divisions, the tension, in the smallest of ways. I saw Al-Manara Square, and a bit of Ramallah, which is still the effective capital of the West Bank, and Fatah’s base of authority. In theory, Fatah was in charge in Jericho, but it was a very different feeling. However, we were in a tourist bus there in the Jordan Valley, and those went through barriers and checkpoints without hesitation. The Ramallah taxi, not so much.
On our way back, we came to the checkpoint, and the same soldiers were on duty, now looking all of them into the vehicle, at these strange visitors. Clearly, American tourists didn’t take the Ramallah taxi often, or ever. We were waved through; the driver said what a passenger had said on the way north: “That was much easier because you were here.”
A weaving passage through the streets of northern Jerusalem, then back to the brightly lit area around Damascus Gate. We got out, Charlie tipped generously, and the driver squealed off: I don’t think he normally made a 10 pm trip back to Israel after his last run to Ramallah. We trudged our way through darkened, almost silent streets, from Damascus Gate to the New Gate within the Old City’s walls, along the Mamilla and back to our hotel, where we regained our rooms and were asleep by 11:30 pm, ready for our 6:30 am call.
Though all of us had our gear packed and in line at the lobby door on time, in our breakfast room, there was a reckoning. Someone, likely the front desk staff, had reported that four of our group returned “late.” Ezra asked where we went; Charlie spoke up first, saying “Just to Ramallah and back.” Ezra was . . . not happy. He collected everyone’s passports, and I got no slack at any stop until our last day, at Caesarea Maritima, which is a story on its own. But Ezra was not happy; he wasn’t angry, but he was sincerely disturbed. Each of us got pulled aside at some point in the next few days, and were grilled by him as to where we went and what we did. Once he realized our stories were in complete and (relatively) innocent agreement, he let it go.
In fact, our motley quartet did have one more venture on a short evening, when we were at Nof Ginosar Kibbutz. My roommate was content with watching “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” in Hebrew on cable, but the four of us again ventured out in an official Nof Ginosar taxi to Tiberias, which was about ten miles south along the Sea of Galilee. That’s a story for another day.
A few nights later, we were in Tel Aviv, preparing to embark for our El Al flight back to New York City. Our waitress that final meal was from Ukraine, which in 1993 I had to stop and think about for a minute as to where that even was, and the Mediterranean was before us, a “wine dark sea” with the setting sun.
Do I know anything about the situation in Gaza today? I do not. But I have some sense of the complexity, the history, the tensions, that keep people apart. And of our, which is to say my place, which is one of privilege, yes, and of a certain measure of comfort and security in the middle of uncertainty and danger, even as people like me play a role both in how the tension is maintained, and might yet be part of a solution.
Not as those imposing a solution from without, but understanding that our participation has something to do with the difficulties of finding a solution between parties, peoples, with long history and even longer memories, in a place we visit with vast and muddled preconceptions. And where even more of us have nothing more than our assumptions and associations to work with.
Again, I wish I could end this with a piercing interpretation of who is right, who is wrong, and what is to be done. I’m just sharing for now some of the scenes which flicker in my mind as I try to understand what’s going on, in a place where we have responsibilities, if not an actual role in finding a place where we can, with Psalm 122, “pray for the peace of Jerusalem” — shalu shalom Yerushalayim.