Star in the East



Star in the East

It was just after 5 AM.  At that moment, I was barefoot on our glassed-in porch fumbling for a towel on the line to take a shower when I noticed it.  Out through the glass, like a pinprick in a slate blue almost black but brightening sky, just above Mount Vulture on the horizon, hung a solitary star in the east.  Give us time, and we would follow that star.

For days the weather had been a mixed blessing.  Sun in the morning, brooding rain-grey clouds by early afternoon, later turning to a depressing cold rain.  But by Easter (Pasque) morning spirits rose with the rising sun along with the awakening colors of nature.  It had begun for us on Friday, Good Friday, with a procession led by church members dressed in white costumes reminiscent of clan members but with crowns of thorns replacing cone-shaped hats.  How vastly different the message in their symbology.  From Calitri’s Immacolata Concezione Church, they led off with three crosses carried on the shoulders of willing acolytes followed by a statue of slain Jesus and close behind, one of His mother, ever Madonna.  Traversing the town, then passing down through the Borgo, this snaking solemn parade, chanting every step of the way, eventually climbed the steep trail to Calvario, their local version of Golgotha on Mount Calvary.

We had swooped into Italia only days earlier, most likely on the heels of a cold front.  Some townsfolk joked that our arrival had been responsible for the weather suddenly turning cold.  Not surprisingly, they may have been close to the truth for when we left the States there was plenty of snow in our yard.  Even in Calitri, it seemed more like Christmas than Easter.  Strangely, even our iPod, on shuffle, appeared to favor Christmas music!  Unprepared for this turn in temperature, our clothing was equally unsuited.  Layers of clothing would have to do for in Italy there is the concept of La Bella Figura.  Fortunately for Italians, it covers everything, even extending to the weather.  How could the weather ever be off?  No, there is never bad weather in Italy, only inappropriate clothing!  We’d have to get by at 62 degrees Fahrenheit in the house until the weather, I mean our clothing, improved.  Getting dressed for Easter Mass, our clothes were so cold, they felt damp.  And here I’d always cautioned, even when taking into account how far south Calitri lies, not to head over until at least the 15th of May!  There was motivation behind our early arrival, however.

Sinner myself, Easter and Christmas Catholics filled the church that morning seeking redemption.  We had arrived early to ensure a seat.  For thirty minutes before Mass, we listened but understood little of what was being read from the lectern other than repetitive references to Isreale, Galilea and Gerusalemme, familiar sounding words of yet unfamiliar places.  Sitting there, we watched as families filtered in and exchanged hugs, Italian-style double cheek kisses and greetings of Buona Pasque (Happy Easter).  It seemed that Easter in Italy is more significant than Christmas.  It had a far less commercial air, with shops featuring chocolate eggs and special panettone style cakes in the shape of a cross (colomba).

The e-World had also arrived for the service was being broadcast via live video to the world outside.  All would notice the long-stemmed lilies adorning the altar.  Their backdrop was an altar seemingly miraculously bathed in a brilliant flood of morning sunshine, which accentuated the faux green marble, everywhere gilded with filigree.  A crucifix with its familiar though particularly large “INRI” rested atop the tabernacle.  Women draped in ritual black, with black headscarves as opposed to the traditional Easter bonnets we’re used to, sat to one side, while men took up the opposite side of the main isle.  Church elders in an enclosed closeted space, all their own, overlooked both groups, remindful of my days in grammar school when nuns watched over their charge’s behavior, ready to pounce.  Three lit oil lamps on long pendular chains stretched from the ceiling to a point where the sanctum of the altar met the gathered congregation.

Mass began with the clang of a bell and a procession down the main aisle.  It was led by Dometrio in a short blue cape, a young lad we oftentimes pick grapes with in the fall, his hair particularly spiked that morning like the dorsal fin of a fish.  Behind him our good friend Antonio carried a ceremonial candle, lighting the way for the parish priest, Don Pasquale (the name itself linked to Easter).  Later Don Pasquale began his sermon by saying this was a day of creation, from death to life.  Full circle - the circle of life’s birth (Christmas) to victory over death (Easter), with all its new beginnings.  He kept repeating a word I could understand, Israel, Israel, Israel.  How timely, for begun here in Calitri, not too different from the Wise Men of old following a star in the East, our passion trail would lead us in a matter of days, full circle, to Israel.

As I said, we’d come to Italy early this year.  Hopping military flights as we do, it was all about having a time pad – insurance just in case needed to assure we’d arrive in time for a commercial flight a week later from Rome to Tel Aviv.  That portion of our adventure had begun at the Rome airport when passengers to Tel Aviv were vectored to security scanners at the far end of the room.  Simple, subtle, but still slightly out of the ordinary.  Why a special screening area?  Later, aboard our Alitalia flight, though very interesting to watch, it wasn’t the presence of numerous Hasidic Jews doffed in seemingly undersized, black, Italian fedoras resting precariously well above their ears or their continuous bobbing at prayer under lengthy shawls that was out of the ordinary either.  Not at all in this part of the world.  We expected these kinds of cultural differences.  It was something else.  The captain’s announcement about thirty minutes before landing not to use binoculars or take any video footage until after we’d landed, however, was peculiar.  Had we entered Area 51?  It was gradually becoming clear that things were different in this corner of the world.

We had arrived at a special moment.  Holocaust Day had been only days earlier.  Then, while we were there, came Remembrance Day in honor of their war dead, followed the day after by the 66^th celebration of their independence, their 4^th of July.  The Star of David flew everywhere even from Rony and Malca’s car when our hosts met us at the airport.  Streamers and flags draped balconies, and patios lined the streets.  Continually, the TV had broadcast stories of their heroes, real heroes, and their heroic moments recounted at times by tearful mothers.  Busy they are here at nation building for though theirs is a common religion, their population is diverse.  People still arrive daily from all over the world, from places like Ethiopia, France, Russia, and even the United States.  Many of those returning from the endless scattering of the Jewish people, referred to as the Diaspora, had ‘earned’ Israel and appreciated its existence.  It is doubtful that one day out of the blue, while just sitting around, one of them had said, “It would be a nice change, let’s move to Israel!”  For the majority, including our host, things were different.  Theirs had been a forced migration, and they would remain forever grateful for this small strip of land beside the sea.  It will be interesting to see if future generations, the sabras, those born in Israel, will harbor the same sentiment and thankfulness for this retreat from suspicion, hatred, and persecution.  For a chosen people, you might wonder, what had they been chosen for?  Clearly, theirs is a story of survival and sacrifice begun centuries ago and continued to the day we arrived.  We have no idea, no real comprehension of what it means to be a Jew.

Reinforcing their history, their story of survival is not just of these past 66 years on this strip of sand no more than the size of New Jersey.  Our broader understanding of this fact began when we visited Masada (Hebrew for fortress).  It was here on this desolate desert plateau in the middle of nowhere where approximately 1000 Jews took refuge from the Roman army in one of Herod the Great’s former vacation palaces.  In a marvel of technology, a cable car ride whooshed us in an ear-popping ascent from the level of the nearby Dead Sea, 1300 feet below sea level, to 190 feet above sea level and deposited us at the top.  Before us lay a broad rectangular expanse where graphic depictions and portable audio devices tried their best to put us in the moment, 2000 years earlier.  Its once kingly architecture had eroded down to a few stones upon stone.  Like frosting, a casemate wall with many towers had once adorned the top of the plateau.  Though there is little evidence there today, this fortress once included storehouses, barracks, an armory, Herod’s palace, and cisterns eager for rain that would fill on those rare occasions when it might have rained.  Three narrow, winding paths led from the Judean Desert far below up to fortified gates overlooking the Dead Sea off to the east and beyond into neighboring Jordan.  Today the entire complex is a World Heritage Site, remembered for what happened there on 16 April 73 AD.

In several places around the base of this lofty natural fortress, you can clearly make out the distinct square shapes of the Roman army camps.  Now frozen in time, they were purposely positioned there for a reason.  According to the Jewish-Roman historian Titus Flavius Josephus, a three-month siege of Masada by troops of the Roman Tenth Legion occurred toward the end of the First Jewish–Roman War.  It ended on this spot when its fortress walls were eventually breached triggering the mass suicide of the 960 zealots, called rebels by the Romans, of the Sicari revolutionary party and their families who had been hiding there for the past eight years.  This party was intent on driving the Romans out of Judea.  Interestingly, some think that Judas Iscariot may have been an early member of this faction.

Walking there in the oppressive heat of early afternoon, I happened to cut cross-country across the barren terrain from one gravel path to another.  Ever so strangely, it occurred to me that I might come across something along the way.  I was shocked when it actually happened.  It was something right out of James Michener’s historical fiction, The Source.  In this must-read story, archeologists dig down to the base of an Israel hill, called a Tel, created by many generations of people living and rebuilding on the same spot.  As each layer was peeled back, artifacts from ever earlier ages are unearthed in a sort of chronology of what had happened there over the centuries.  Beginning at the bottom, the story of the lives of the people involved with each artifact unfolds until at the top we arrive at then modern-day Israel.  By this point in the story, at the top layer, the object discovered was a bullet from the ‘48 Israeli War of Independence and that is exactly what I came upon - an unfired, completely intact bullet in its brass casing with the tiny markings IMI (Israel Military Industries) along the base of its flared rim.  Looking around first for whomever may have been watching, I bent down and as if part of the Michener story recovered the object.  All the while the archeologist in me wondered what it might signify.  What was its story?  Had there been some armed struggle on this very spot or had some soldier simply dropped a round while on patrol?  I’d never know.  Yet a bullet it remained, recovered here of all places at a bloodied and historical spot right out of Jewish antiquity.  For me at least, it would serve as a visual metaphor to the Jewish people’s staunch resistance to oppression.  A seeming willingness to choose death over surrender or a life of slavery.  Self-sacrifice, we’d soon realize, would be the recurring theme we’d discover when we ‘dug’ just below the surface, whether it be in the form of sacrificial Messiah, willingly giving his life for the redemption of others, or freedom fighter, seeking personal independence from domination and oppression.  But sacrifice in the future would not come without extracting a fearsome price.

We passed through Meggido on our way to a Golan Heights winery.  This broad agricultural valley is better known as the Valley of Armageddon.  We were soon hedged in by borders, the unfriendly kind.  Far too close, to our right, was Syria.  A little to the north of us and also all along our left flank lay Lebanon.  Army camps for artillery, infantry, and armor pocked the sides of the road.  In what would normally be the breakdown lane by the side of the road you could make out churned soil but of a kind not due to cultivation.  This was a rare form of tillage, the kind resulting from the repeated passage of tank treads!  There were apparently sunken trails, deep enough to hide a tank’s chaise yet still allow its barrel targeting visibility.  These ran here and there like fissures across the landscape.  Farther off the road, sprinkled here and there, we could make out concrete pill-box type fortifications.  Clearly previously used, they were no doubt ready for new occupants, if needed.  About this time, our only desire was to move out of there faster than flapjacks from a House of Pancakes.  In this contested soil, judging from the wines we sampled, grapes thrived, caring little for those who might be in control.

Our dialog with the past continued when days later our feet tread the historic streets of old Jerusalem and just outside the old walls, the adjacent biblical City of David.  As part of a tour, we practically took a dip, or maybe it was closer to a baptism, in Hezekiah’s Tunnel.  Just about everyone has a story to tell about tunnels and caves.  Here briefly is ours.

When the city was defending itself from an approaching Assyrian army around the year 900 BC, King Hezekiah of Judah decided to protect the water supply by diverting its flow into the city with an impressive tunnel system.  And so it is written in Second Chronicles: "Hezekiah also plugged the upper watercourse of the Gihon waters and brought it straight down to the west side of the City of David.  And Hezekiah prospered in all his works."  We “prospered” ourselves from the experience, getting to walk this 1,750-foot engineering feat situated deep inside Mount Zion, the mountain Jerusalem rests upon.  It is something I know Mare will not soon forget and will forever remain a highlight of our visit to Jerusalem.  The thing was, it was pitch black inside that tunnel.  We were advised to buy flashlights in the gift shop just before heading off.  We were glad we had for these tiny, key-ring size lights, just above the status of a toy, were lifesavers.  One hand on the wall, the other clutching the light, we pressed on.  Somehow the group ahead of us had disappeared.  The only sounds were the loud rush of the water.  In my haste to get through this claustrophobic adventure, Mare was behind me imploring in God’s name that I slow down!  We were alone, deep in the earth wondering what the “he_ _” we were doing!  Would they ever find our bodies?  At times, the walls narrowed so much that the sides touched my hips.  At other spots along this winding trek, the ceiling came down low enough that we had to bend over to get through and stay that way for some distance.  As we moved along, I took frequent soundings of the ceiling with repeated knocks to my head.  The burrowing troglodytes who had chiseled and picked their way through this stone had to have been short guys!  All the while knee-high water rushed through the tunnel.  I’d given up trying to hold up my trousers early on.  The only thing going for us was that luckily there were no bats!  We were relieved when we finally saw a glimmer of light, that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, then some stairs, and finally emerged in the Shiloah Pool inside the city walls to eventually drip dry.  While the City of David never fell to the Assyrians, the Jews suffered other atrocities.

No doubt all of us are familiar with the Holocaust.  It is in the Holocaust Museum outside of Old Jerusalem, however, like no other place in the world, where this story of inhumanity unfolds, like a scroll, slowly, for the fullest impact.  The story depicts how a scattered people were brought together once again only to be murdered.  Beyond its graphic story, along with us were large groups of young soldiers, both men and women.  Following High School, with few exceptions, every young Israeli is expected to serve in the military for three years.  It is part of every recruit’s training to visit this museum at least once during their careers.  Surprisingly, even visiting dignitaries are brought there.  Indoctrination, training, brainwashing, a civics lesson, history, call it what you may.  Instilling the history of their greatest persecution instills in each of them a lasting message.  After 2000 years of wandering, exile, and near annihilation, no longer would they allow their destiny to be determined by the whim of others, simply because they were Jewish. Their message is clear, never again.

Now close to that magical self-proclaimed day, 15 May, it was the appointed time to return to Italia.  Ours had been a two-week dreamlike journey in the footsteps of kings and prophets.  Theirs is a quilt of micro-regions - some mountainous, some hosting modern-day kibbutz, some predominately Arab, some totally Israeli, some a combination of mosque and synagogue, some contentious, some with towering skyscrapers, some with salt-like, Blue Flag, sandy beaches, some still desolate desert, far more transformed into thriving greenery and lush vine.  Ever artful, we will always remember the solo cellist playing Shostakovich’s Concerto #1 in E Flat Major, op 10, and that rarest of performances, one of “Carmina Burana”.  Their art extended beyond their museums to include the simple artistry of a souk-like labyrinth of streets in Old Jaffa, seemingly concealing an endless flee market of treasured rubbish, its aroma that of thick Turkish coffee, its caviar simple hummus, and tahini.  These ingrained memories along with many others, like the man who only knew ‘right’ to one side and ‘not right’ on the other, will forever remain our Israel.  In a blur, we had covered much of Israel, from the NYC-style hum of Tel Aviv to the religious intensity of Jerusalem, from the contested ground of the Golan to the edges of the Negev desert looking for the face of Israel.

On the Mount of Olives Mare recognized a face.  It had the swarthy, dark, leathery complexion of a shepherd.  Strange though it sounded, she swore she had seen this same face earlier that day in a truck somewhere along Via Dolorosa in Old Jerusalem.  We had to wait as he led his flock of sheep around our car and on through a parking lot.  She was in the car while I was outside dodging sheep!  It was one of those moments when two people say the same thing at the same time, for when I finally get inside, we simultaneously remarked that his face was most likely like that of Jesus.  His was not the blue-eyed, blond-haired Yanni-like face of the westernized Jesus we’d grown up seeing in portraits.  About the right age of Jesus, his was the weathered face of a real Middle Easterner.  His nose seemed sharply bent an inch or so from his brow, as though once broken.  The dark skin of his face was shrouded by a hood.  In his hand, he held a long staff with which he prodded his flock, reinforced with shouts only sheep could understand.  The juxtaposition in time was eerie, his of maybe then, ours of definitely now.

But its face may also have been sitting right beside us.  One day a maintenance worker was sitting next to Mare as she rested on a bench in a quiet corner inside the massively crowded Church of the Holy Sepulcher, a place that encapsulates so much of Christ’s last hours on Earth.  Early on he asked where she was from and from there began a fragmented conservation, a little from her, a little from him.  At one point I heard him ask, “Are you Catholic?” to which she acknowledged, “Yes.”  There was a brief pause and then, through the confusion, turning to her he said, “You know, this is your home.”

Our star in the east, the one we’d followed, turned out to be the Star of David, flanked by blue stripes on a white field.  Now, whenever I look at the morning sky, brightening by imperceptible degrees outside our Calitri window and chance to glimpse that star on the eastern horizon, I will always be drawn to Israel, a land plowed by streaming sunbeams and a people who choose to worship under that star.  A mystery within a mystery, this place, which breathes the history of a people thought chosen to convey God’s message, will forever remain reminiscent of the aching torment endured by the Jewish people and of Christ, himself a Jew, who through his own suffering and death leads ever to the rebirth Father Pasquale aptly espoused that resplendent Calitri Easter morning.

From That Rogue Tourist

Paolo

For related photos, click here on Eyes Over Italy Then look for and click on a photo album entitled “Star in the east”.