by Geoffrey Clarfield (July 2025)
Jewish life is noisy and as Israel is the Jewish state par excellence, Israelis are noisy. But it is a joyful noise.
It is the noise of grandchildren, children, relatives, and friends. It is the noise of an “immediate” family of let us say fifteen people, a grandfather and grandmother, three children and ten grandchildren plus married, unmarried, or divorced brothers, sisters and in laws who have become family.
This joyful noise cannot be separated from food and talk about food. “What do we want to eat?” “Once we decide, who is going to make it?” “How is the division of labor going to be carried out?” “Will we order in, in whole or in part?”
And when it is all over one asks, “Was it any good and can it be compared to other meals that one has had in the past, in Israel or abroad?”
I can swear as a loyal Israeli that the humus north of Haifa is better than south of it and the bread of Jerusalem (especially its Iraqi Jewish versions which are like an enormous Indian chapati) is better than the pitta bread of the north.
But there are times in Israel when I want the quiet of a monastery and they are never far away. My favorite is the Monastery of John the Baptist in Ein Kerem, a uniquely beautiful village, walking distance from Jerusalem proper.
If Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, the source of its religious national institutions, the seat of the government, the place of its parliament and ministries, its museums, concert halls and archives with all that implies, then Ein Kerem is its opposite.
It is filled with Jewish families who were expelled from Yemen and Morocco by the Arab League after Israel gained its independence in 1948. It is also home to all sorts of writers, musicians, painters and potters and alternative healers and such. In Israeli parlance this is called “Bohemian.”
And since it is the town where John the Baptist was born, it is peppered with churches and monasteries. At times it sounds like a Swiss village for the church bells ring regularly and punctuate the hours of the day.
Because its public and private dwellings are low rise and many of the structures go back to Ottoman and pre Ottoman times, there is the echo of a Mediterranean Spanish or Italian village that makes you feel that Jerusalem with its very near eastern Synagogues, Churches, Mosques and Biblical presence is hundreds if not thousands of miles away.
One permanent resident, a foreign-born cellist who makes her home in Ein Kerem once told me, “Every time I drive back from the city of Jerusalem, I breathe a sigh of relief for I feel life is slower in Ein Kerem.” I fully agree.
And that is why occasionally, I spend time at the monastery drafting my annual report. The monastery feels like it is off the beaten track, but it is not. If you are in the center of the village, where the cafes and restaurants are located, just beside the public parking lot and you walk up one of the small streets, all of a sudden you find that you are on the left side of a large and very old Ottoman stone wall.
This is one of the outer walls of the church/monastery compound. Then there is a side entrance with an intercom and if you have a reservation, they let you in. You immediately enter a stone courtyard beside a large dormitory.
As you enter the dormitory you see that the building is two stories of gothic-like high-arched halls with rooms on either side. Each room has one or two beds, a small writing table and a washroom/shower. The ceilings are high and some of them have windows that open onto the monastery garden or, the main street outside where you can hear the Hebrew of the Orthodox Jews who live in the neighborhood. There is a Chabad House next door.
Apart from that and because of its location and the massive thick and high walls, the noise of the town is remarkably diminished. When you close the door of your room you find yourself in medieval like cloisters with light, high ceilings and quiet. Just my kind of thing.
And so each day I would wake up to the sounds of the domestic animals in the monastery garden, get washed and dressed and walk outside to the dormitory courtyard beside the communal kitchen. There I would make my Turkish coffee, mix it with milk, and sit in the stone courtyard at the entrance to the dormitory.
There I would chat with the mostly Christian Arab female residents of the dormitory, for I discovered it is the preferred residence for those of that community studying nursing and medicine at the Hebrew University and Hadassah hospital just up the road.
No doubt the parents of these young women from still Christian Nazareth and the other Christian villages of the Galilee feel safe and protected here. And so, bathed in the early morning Mediterranean light I would finish my coffee, put on my hat and knapsack, pick up my walking stick and head for the hills. No doubt I walked on paths that John the Baptist trod two thousand years earlier.
Here is what Wikipedia tells us about this marvelous site:
The Church of Saint John the Baptist is a Catholic church in Ein Karem, Jerusalem, that belongs to the Franciscan order. It was built at the site where Saint John the Baptist is believed to have been born.
In 1941–42 the Franciscans excavated the area west of the church and monastery. Here they discovered graves, rock-cut chambers, wine presses and small chapels with mosaic tiling. The southern rock-cut chamber contained ceramic datable to a period stretching from approximately the first century BC till 70 AD, an interval that includes the presumed lifetime of Zechariah, Elizabeth and John. The community living here has been dated by the archaeological findings back to the Roman, Byzantine and Early Muslim periods.
Most of the current church structure probably dates back to the 11th century, with the lower courses possibly dating to the Byzantine period (4th-7th century).
James Silk Buckingham visited in the early 1800s and found the convent “appeared to be superior in comfort and arrangement to that of Jerusalem, and equal to that of Nazareth. The church is one of the most simply beautiful throughout the Holy Land. As the friars are all Spaniards, it partakes more of the style of that nation than any other, in its ornaments.
More than two centuries later, I agree with Mr. Buckingham.
Israel is a crowded country with crowded cities. There is a charm in all this, but you must connect with your touchy Mediterranean side to appreciate it, and it does have its magic.
Life is lived cheek by jowl. You will never die of loneliness here and people talk to each other, not only talk to each other but if you do not watch out, you can get stuck hearing the full life story of the man or woman checking you out at the local supermarket. Sometimes these are remarkable tales, like the elderly Yemenite grocer in Ein Kerem whose family walked to Israel from Yemen in 1948.
When I asked him to tell me about the fanatical Houthis who are running Yemen into the ground, he gestured to me to look out at the hills of Jerusalem that surrounded us. He laughed and said, “You can see why we left can’t you? There is nothing like Jerusalem. It was not what we imagined when we were in Yemen, but I for one have never been disappointed by the move. My children are free here and do not live under the yoke of some ISIS inspired Jihadi regime.”
And so each day, I would walk up the street, turn right to the path near Mary’s Well and soon I would be trekking up the steep wooded sides of a hill. Some of it is officially park land and some just government land.
It is wooded, littered with ancient and medieval ruins, mostly unexcavated, pine trees, olive trees, light, shadow, sun, and silence. Yes, you can see cars on roads across the valley, but you are alone and all around you are unpaved paths, ancient stone wall terraces that have been farmed for millennia and relative quiet.
I would occasionally meet other hikers. Once I met some young girls who were perched on the branches of a large tree playing old lilting Israeli melodies on their recorders. Here is the lyric of just one of the songs that I recognized. It is a piece from the 1950s:
As dawn appears on the hills
The shepherdess walks down the path
Her flock surrounds the trough
Bleating out its thanks
To the spring the shepherd goes
To meet his longed-for love
I stopped walking and sang along. The girls stopped playing and laughed at me.
“That song is as old as you are,” they blurted out.
I answered, “Well that may be true but add a few years. I was born in 1959!”
I then continued walking and made it back to the monastery in time for lunch. I made myself a classically Israeli sandwich. I took a large piece of fresh Iraqi pitta which I filled with Turkish salad, eggplant, pitted olives, slices of Tofu and Kosher salami.
I washed it down with a bottle of Malt Nesher, a peculiarly Israeli soft drink that has the flavor of a malt whiskey without the alcohol. Understandably, it is not exported. There are some charming Israeli customs which are local, like enjoying Malt Nesher. I celebrate them and finished my sandwich with a second cup of Turkish coffee. Then I went to my room and took a nap.
When I woke up, I closed the door of my room and strolled down the hall. There, there is a small Catholic chapel. The door was open, and a man was sitting on a mat on the floor chanting in what I realized was Aramaic (Syriac).
He was six feet tall. His head was shaven. He wore a long Tibetan style Buddhist robe with a necklace of wooden beads. He was chanting a prayer, repeatedly. I watched with some interest and then I realized that this was a private meditation and so went down the hall to the library, set up my lap top, put my headphones on, tapped into a recording of Turkish classical music and started writing up my annual report as I had just finished my first year as Israeli Cultural Attache to the Kingdom of Morrocco. I had been brought back to Jerusalem to meet with my superiors in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem.
For the next week, my mysterious neighbor continued his daily prayers and meditations but was quite consistent about leaving the door of the chapel open, so that his mild chants could be heard wafting down the corridor.
After a week I quietly stuck my head in the door, introduced myself and invited him to join me for coffee in the courtyard. He spoke good basic Hebrew but preferred to speak English when we talked.
Once we got settled and sat around the table he said. “My name is Chang, and I am a…” I could not control myself and burst out laughing. I apologized profusely and he did not seem to mind. I told him that that was the name of the holy man who headed the Tibetan monastery in the remote Himalayas as described in the pre-WWII bestselling novel and then film, Lost Horizon.
He laughed as well and told me sheepishly that that is not his real name but an adopted name which he had intentionally taken from the film and novel to spark conversations with European and other Christians from the English-speaking world.
He added, “I am a missionary, but I am not here to convert Jews. I have read your history. I know about the Holocaust, and Judaism and Christianity are equally valid paths to the truth.”
I was fascinated and said, “Tell me where you come from.”
He took another sip from his coffee and said:
“I was born in the mountains of Eastern Tibet in a small village. We were isolated from the surrounding villages by deep valleys and age-old prejudices. Although by that time we spoke Tibetan, we never became Buddhists but knew their scriptures. We are Christians, and our oral traditions say we came from Syria centuries ago and spread east across the silk road until we arrived in China and were welcomed by the Emperor some time during the European middle ages. Marco Polo mentioned us in his book.
We also have our own scriptures which we have passed down through oral tradition. Interestingly, the French central Asian explorer Paul Pelliot discovered most of them in a cave in Dunhuang at the edge of the Gobi desert more than a century ago and they have been slowly translated by scholars during the last one hundred years.
Our community has been following this trend and our elders believe that now is the time to share them with Western Christians who have become enamored of Bhuddism and Taoism, for we believe that our scriptures are so influenced by the style of these traditions that we can bring these lost souls back to the true faith.”
I asked him, “Do you announce that you are a Christian missionary?”
“No,” he said. “We are bearers of the Luminous Religion that was brought by the Nestorian preacher Aleben to China centuries ago. We escaped Tibet when the Chinese Communists took over and moved to Ladakh in Buddhist India where we fit right in.”
“Tell me about your faith,” I asked him sincerely.
He picked up a small paperback book called the Lost Sutras of Jesus and read to me the following. Before doing so he added, “We call our religious writings Sutras like the Buddhists and because, like the Taoists, we believe that the way is not the constant way and there are many paths to God.”
“Give me an example,” I said, and he then recited this passage in English, Aramaic and Tibetan. I had more than enough patience to listen:
Here is an example:
The body and the soul are manifested in the five skandhas, (forms, feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness) and are linked through the Skandhas. There is no eye that does not see, no hands that do not work, no feet that do not walk. So are the body and soul combined in the skandhas … We find identity in difference and difference in what is the same…”
I asked him how long he will stay at the monastery. He said not long for he will begin his missionary work in southern California quite soon. “Why there?” I asked.
He answered, “There are two hundred and fifty thousand Buddhists and 50,00 Taoists in California. Most of them come from formerly Christian families who have lost their way. They do not like the fire and brimstone of evangelical Christianity, and they detest the materialism of the mainstream churches and so they look to Bhuddism and Taoism for their spiritual food. Our brand of Christianity speaks in this idiom, and I think they will respond to our message.”
“So let me get this right,” I said to him, “You are a descendant of the Nestorian Christians of the Silk Road, you survived for the last six centuries as a hidden community in Tibet, you escaped to India and now you are here in Ein Kerem preparing yourself to go to California to preach your version of the Gospel to Anglo American former Christian practitioners of Bhuddism and Taoism?’
“Yes.” he said.
“Welcome to Israel,” I said.
After a week I invited Chang to join me on my morning walks. Each morning I would ask him to recite one of his Sutras and we would then discuss them.
My favorite was the following:
Who has seen the face of God? No one can see God. The face of God is like the wind. Who can see the wind? Always present God never stops circulating throughout the world.
Or consider this:
The One spirit cannot be seen in heaven and earth just as the human soul cannot be seen in the body. The one spirit alone resides everywhere just as the soul permeates every place in our body.
Chang was a great hiker and often left me winded after a good two-hour hike. He laughed and told me that the hills in Ein Kerem were like a children’s jungle gym compared to the 14,000-foot-high wooded hills of the Himalayas. I once read that Tibetans had a gene that helped them breathe at high altitudes. I do not have it.
And so went our routine for two weeks. I enjoyed all and everything that Chang had to say and he asked me wonderful questions about Jewish culture and being Israeli.
Then one morning as I was about to wait for Chang to finish his prayers before our hike, I entered the chapel and found Ned (T.E. Lawrence), as is often the case, sitting by himself on one of the benches.
“And good morning to you squire,” he smiled as he was dressed in civilian clothes and without a tie. He has a habit of showing up in the most unlikely places and times. I appreciate his company but sometimes he can be a nuisance.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. He said, “I wanted to know what you think of Chang?” I said, “In a month of Sundays I would find it difficult to conceive of the survival of such a character.
“Yes,” he said, “Those Syrian Christians certainly did get around and I have to say I feel guilty about them. Like the Jews in the land of Israel, we promised them their own state with the Yazidi in Northern Iraq and then we let the surrounding Muslim Arabs slaughter them in the scores of thousands. It weighs on my conscience.”
I snapped back, “Well you did not come here today to tell me that you Brits feel badly that you almost allowed that to happen to the Jewish people here and that you did let it happen in Europe. You could have prevented millions of innocent Jewish deaths.”
“You are right” he said, “But I always felt that you would somehow rise up and secure your own state and thank God for that. I just wanted to tell you that there is part of being a modern state that is challenging such as when you have persecuted religious minorities, just outside your borders.
The Syrian Christians and the Yazidi monotheists are having a hard time today and anything you could do to help them would be much appreciated. I only got to do as much as I could when I was around. I wish I could have done more. It is your turn now. That is what I wanted to tell you.”
Well that was annoying, I thought to myself. And as I was about to open my mouth and give him a good tongue lashing, like the intriguing Irishman that he was, he had disappeared into thin air.
Before doing so he gave me a book called the Jesus Sutras. Ned told me, “Chang asked me to leave this for you.” It was inscribed, “From Chang with gratitude and appreciation for our interfaith talks and walks around Ein Kerem.” This softened my mood.
The next day, hoping that Chang might have stayed on for just one more day, I went to the chapel to look for him. He was nowhere to be found.
I asked the girls from Nazareth if they had seen him and they gave me puzzled looks. I went to the priest who runs the place and described what Chang looked like and asked when he might have checked out of the hostel.
No one had any idea about whom I was talking.
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Geoffrey Clarfield is an anthropologist at large. For twenty years he lived in, worked among and explored the cultures and societies of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. As a development anthropologist he has worked for the following clients: the UN, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Norwegian, Canadian, Italian, Swiss and Kenyan governments as well international NGOs. His essays largely focus on the translation of cultures.
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast
