Gates of Yerushalayim
Stories by Janusz Makuch
“Gate” is the theme of this year’s Jewish Culture Festival. However, we will not be talking about architecture or form, but about the symbolism, meanings, and contexts that gates carry for each of us. Before we invite you on a festival journey through gates, we’d like to take you on a walk through the gates of Jerusalem with Janusz Makuch—the gates that inspired this year’s edition of FKŻ.
Every few days, we will publish a story about another gate—follow our social media (links below) to find out when the next story will appear.
Introduction
He has founded his city on the holy mountain.
The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the other dwellings of Jacob.
(…) All my fountains are in you
Psalm 87;1-2, 7
At the Jaffa Gate, where guided tours of the Old City usually start, groups of multilingual tourists surround the guides, and once the visitors have formed separate circles, the history whisperer, with a confident gesture, turns the wheel of time; then the lights over the city fade, and the journey back to the past begins. From this moment onwards, all stories will talk about the past. Facts, millions of facts strung, like beads on the thread of human fate… Thousands of years of history. Symbols, archetypes, myths, tales from the depths of dark valleys, “And this is the sarcophagus of King David himself”— (does it really matter that in fact some knight Templar rests in this sarcophagus?) “And this is the tomb of Jesus Christ”— (yet nearby lies another tomb of the same Jesus Christ). Yerushalayim, “the city and mother of Israel,” a cemetery where, unlike in any other city in the world, peace means—“we hate them with all our hearts, but because we still live side by side, we smile at them warmly” (overheard on Cardo Maximus Street). Every day I pass through each of the gates and I know that “what has been is now, and what is to be, has already been”, because linear time is pure fiction here; there, on the other side of the gate, time and space undergo—alternately—condensation and expansion, and the events that make up the city’s living history get “entangled.” I see everyone who lived here centuries ago. And who still live here. I don’t mean that I see them in my thoughts; this is not a metaphor. I see them—so to speak—“in person,” on the street, face to face. I cannot explain this in any way; it’s just like that. Don’t make me believe that this is some “syndrome”; come live in this stone city, and you’ll see that I’m telling the truth.
When you want to meet someone, you arrange to meet at the gate; Whether you like it or not—in the gateway you will brush shoulder to shoulder with your mortal enemy, fall into the arms of friends, evade the judge’s verdict, steal a pita from a vendor absorbed in an argument, pray, bend down to a beggar, pay homage to the king, unveil your face to your destined one, dodge out of the way of speeding delivery carts and tractors piled high with the city’s trash; you hesitate, listening to the voice of your frightened heart; hidden in the cool shade, you create yet another tribute to eternity, and, significantly, whilst living here you do not grow attached to dates or history—you are history yourself- you pay no attention to the architecture, either —you are one of the gates – your hands are worn by labor; your gaze is alert; you carry a gun tucked into your belt. You have lived here only for a moment, and you die endlessly.
Much of what humans do and call by name actually means something entirely different. We ourselves willingly accept this semantic lie. We say “Jerusalem—the city of peace,” whilst Yerushalayim is a classic example of a city where—except for moments too fleeting to grasp—there has never been peace. We say this either unaware or, on the contrary, fully aware that the word “peace” has no right to refer to the reality of the here and now, because this reality contradicts it with all its centuries-old cruelty. It is a utopia which—it is true—is much easier to believe in than to accept the painful reality held together by greed, hatred, and death. Only humans kill in the name of delusional ideas and religions. There is no other city in the world—and there never has been or will be— where, because of a belief in the exclusivity of grace, on a patch of stone smaller than one square kilometer, armies of God’s paladins incessantly make bloody sacrifices of themselves and their own families for salvation.
Yet, on the other hand, reality is the only parameter of the times in which we live, and despite the beauty of metaphors evoking the spirit of the past or the end times, we have no other reality. And we will not have one.
When describing individual “gates,” I often turn to metaphors that make it easier to explore the robust symbolism of this word. I am putting aside the knowledge that can be retrieved from a computer with a single click. Dates, facts, etc.—you may ask CHAT GPT about all these. For example – that the word “gate”/“sha’ar” appears 368 times in the Bible. There is (almost, almost…) everything that can be swept away from the surface of events. By choosing “gate” as the central theme of the Festival, I treat it as a metaphor for our festival Home, and ultimately – for myself – a passage between one dimension of reality and another. Between one corner of the room and another. In between – always in between.
As one of those who brought the Festival to life and continues to create it, I am, in fact, grappling with time, which wounds me deeply. For many years, I had been fascinated by the metaphor of a “bridge.” A bridge of encounters, a bridge of mutual respect, understanding, and reconciliation, however, turned out to be a fragile structure with an insufficient load-bearing capacity; its spans have cracked with the passage of time and the change of generations; now the bridge is swaying, and it is only a matter of time before it collapses into a dark abyss.
I am not heading towards the unattainable. One the “bridge” I see no one whom I would like to encounter in order to engage in fruitless discussions about a nonexistent past or future across the river of History. I prefer the apparent randomness of encounters at the “gate” – encounters either full of tenderness or aversion, yet always genuine. These encounters presuppose nothing, do not seek reconciliation, neither do they pursue any lofty and empty ideas – they simply are. In all their spontaneity, unpredictability, and truth – they just are. And perhaps it is from these encounters that something will be born, a shared value that will give the metaphor of the “gate” a close, real meaning. I do not know.
Damascus Gate
I will no longer hide my face from them,
for I will pour out my Spirit on the people of Israel,
declares the Sovereign Lord.”
Book of Ezekiel: 39;29
In Yerushalayim, it is very often impossible to tell distinguish truth from myth. Thanks to astonishingly advanced technology, we are now able to follow relentlessly the story of the world with relentless attention. More than that…, we can be almost everywhere at once and hold opinions about everything. But can we really? Take one example: the war waged by Russia against Ukraine has been going on for more than four years. We have access to information, and yet we know only as much as we happen to read here and there. The war with Iran, which was supposed to last no longer than the Earth’s journey around the Sun, has already been going on for over a month, and still we know nothing.
At the root of all disinformation lies a strategic lie. You are meant to believe what I want you to believe. Information chaos is so overwhelming that it becomes easier to adopt the version handed to you than to seek the truth for yourself. The machinery of lies does not function because it is so perfect. It functions because into its design human stupidity and the willingness to submit to manipulation are woven. That stupidity is disastrously coupled with an unshaken sense of one’s own value, which makes a lie once swallowed, and not spat out in time, dissolves into a someone’s intellectual and moral ecosystem and quickly hardens into the form called “dogma.” And dogma, once set, is rock-solid.
I live some two hundred meters from the Damascus Gate, and so I walk through it every day. Several times a day. During the day and at night. Sometimes, with a coffee in a paper cup, I sit on its broad, amphitheater-like steps and watch the fascinating documentary projected day and night upon the screen of the Damascus Gate. This is a film about the history of people in this City, that is to say, about an unending war. Sometimes – very rarely though – it happens that a white dove gets tangled in the beam of the projector, fluttering its wings in terror. Fortunately, there is always a sniper keeping watch from the window above the portal, so you can hear a dry crack, and a moment later we all breathe with relief returning the story told about the protagonists.
In the year 132 of the Common Era, Simon bar Kokhba led a revolt which was then brutally crushed by Emperor Hadrian in 135. It was a tragic turning point in the history of Yerushalayim and of the Jewish people.
In short, Yerushalayim was almost completely leveled to the ground, while the Temple Mount was ploughed over. The Romans built an entirely different city, strictly subordinated to their own architectural plans. The city of the times of the Second Temple and of Jesus almost completely ceased to exist. If today’s pilgrim or tourist believes that they are walking precisely in the footsteps of Jesus, they are mistaken.
The sources have it that Emperor Hadrian was a good man — intelligent, educated, a lover of art, a philosopher disinclined toward conquest and a builder. In short, Hadrian was said to be wise and virtuous. And yet — why did Hadrian destroy Jerusalem? Why did he carry out the humiliating “ceremony of ploughing” upon the Temple Mount, and then why did he erect a pagan sanctuary dedicated to Jupiter Capitolinus upon the site of the Temple? Why did he decree death for any Jew who dared pass through the gates of the city? And finally – why, in vengeance for the rebellion, did he slaughter nearly half a million Jews of Judea, while punishing the survivors by erasing the very word “Judea,” replacing it with the name “Palestine,” originating from the Philistines, the ancient mortal enemies of the Israelites? Does anyone still have any doubt as to why? This was so that not even the faintest trace of the Jews would remain upon the earth, not even the memory of that trace. So that they would cease to exist, and it would be as though they had never existed at all. So that Judaism itself would burn and turn to ash, from which nothing could ever rise again.
I was always taught that it is only numbers that do not lie. Before the closing credits appear upon the vast screen stretched across the façade of the Damascus Gate, it is worth remembering a few figures, all the more so because they flash by for only a few seconds, almost as though designed not to be remembered:
Today, the world’s population stands at roughly 8.3 billion people. Out of these, more than 2 billion are Muslims, 2.3 billion are Christians, 1.17 billion are Hindus, and more than 25 million are Sikhs. And… approximately 15.7 million are Jews. That is to say: barely 0.2 percent of humanity. Statistically speaking then, the Jewish people therefore are facing existential danger. Especially since the so-called “world” so often seems intent on their destruction. Yet in vain.
For as long as there exists the “antisemitism of gentle and decent people,” (those who have not read the lecture delivered by Tadeusz Mazowiecki in 1960 (PL) – should do that and think over), the once called “the spirit of Haman, Hadrian, Hitler, Khomeini, and the other heralds of the destruction of the Jewish people will continue to hover with impunity above the gates of one of the last bastions of freedom and democracy — Israel.
On the ruins of Yerushalayim, in the inner courtyard of the former Roman gate which had risen like a triumphal arch upon the site of the today’s Damascus Gate, whose very stones had been taken from the Temple of Herod — Emperor Hadrian erected, in the newly built Roman city of Aelia Capitolina, a column crowned with his own statue, which loomed above the city as a sign of the eternal and imperishable power of the Roman Empire.
And yet the Roman Empire no longer exists. Its emperors and their countless gods are no longer here. The shattered fragments of that column, like the stones of the temple of Jupiter, were reused by later “conquerors” of the City, who raised new temples and new columns upon the ruins of the old ones. With time, they perished, too, leaving behind only memories and traces carved into stone. Many learned men, many who considered themselves “good and gentle,” followed in Hadrian’s footsteps: they murdered, violated, burned people alive; the wind scattered these ashes, and in the end they themselves turned to ash, while the Jews endured. And not only did they endure, but they returned to their homeland, to Yerushalayim. They reunited the city and restored it as the eternal capital of Israel.
At the Damascus Gate, I often think about how little it ultimately matters what the so-called “world” says, or how it reacts to Israel today or tomorrow: this is a world that would probably breathe a sigh of relief upon hearing that the Jews no longer exist. In the final reckoning, Israel can rely only upon itself.
The gates of the “temple of those who worship dead Jews” stand wide open. Since October 7, 2023, millions of “good and gentle” people have been passing through them. No one forces them; no one threatens them. Their hatred of Jews sanctifies what they believe to be a free choice. They are utterly convinced that their consciences remain pure.
