What’s the message here?

The Pope is all over the net.

Susan Hussein
Israel - Palestine
5 min readMay 26, 2014

--

He’s left now, but it’s hard to avoid knowing: The Pope has been traveling around that fulcrum of continents and human passions called the Middle East. Some of us claim he’s been visiting the Holy Land, others would prefer to ensure that it’s called Israel/Palestine, or just Israel, or, plain and simple, despite the scary plosive sound that starts it off in English, only Palestine. (Of course the Palestinians themselves don’t name it that way: in Palestinian Arabic the name starts in a softer way, with a fricative: Filastin.)

I don’t know what the Pope, in his heart of hearts, calls the place. As for what he makes public, anything a pope says or does risks being interpreted as symbolic spin, and all popes clearly know that. (So do all the online commentators, e.g. William Booth in the Washington Post; Jaweed Kaleem writing for The Huffington Post; and the crazies of every size, shape and color.) This Pope, Francis, has chosen the name of a saint who stands for simple truths, and prefers to dress simply, in papal white. In addition to simplicity, those choices presumably symbolize change, or, metaphorically speaking, the dawn of a new day. And he planned his trip in a new way, approaching his destination from the east, rather than the sunset west, as all previous papal visitors have done.

Of course we humans can over-interpret just about anything; that’s part of the joy of being human rather than, say, canine or bovine. The human mind does have some canine aspects, however: It’s like a yappy dog that keeps jumping at our legs and demanding attention. Therefore, just as we might take an annoying dog on a walk to burn off some of that disruptive energy, let’s take our human brains and let them rove around in some of the images that came out of the Pope’s visit, take our own symbolic trip to a troubled land.

William Booth has already discussed one of the crowd scenes for us, so we will focus on the closeups. My print issue of the New York Times for today, 12/15/14, featured Francis at the barrier wall in Bethlehem. (If the image does not come up from the link after a few seconds, it’s the first image in the NYT slide show at the bottom of this page.) Frances is seen from a low angle, and he presses his forehead to the graffiti-covered wall. The graffiti are all political, not sexual or self-referent; no Kilroys peer over this wall.

In the image, we see Francis coming from the right, the wall on our left. This is exactly opposite to the typical portrayal of visiting dignitaries who choose to, or are obliged to (because they are visiting dignitaries), visit the Western Wall in (yes) East Jerusalem. Are we to be reminded here of the Pope’s original arrival on the West Bank from the east? Or are we already too confused by the fact that the West Bank is to the east of Jerusalem and Israel, east, even, of East Jerusalem? It is not surprising that the Israelis persist in calling the area Judah and Samaria, thereby turning it from a place, part of the geography of the region, into a biblical symbol.

Francis himself will shortly be shown, after a helicopter ride that saves him from checkpoints or having to scale anything, greeting the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, at Ben Gurion airport. Sure enough, once again we see the Pope arriving from the symbolic east. Once again he presses his forehead into something, this time the forehead of Peres, who is on the viewer’s left. This is a switch from Benedict’s visit, where the participants are shown the other way around.

Having landed at Ben Gurion, Francis was forced to change direction and approach Jerusalem from the west. Sure enough, we soon see him about to tuck a prayer into the Western Wall. The wall is on his right, of course. We wonder how he approached the Dome of the Rock, which sits on a little prominence that is, like so many places in this land, difficult to name. Is it Mount Moriah, a name that appears in Genesis? Or the Temple Mount (now lacking its temple), a name that honors its symbolic connection to Judaism? Or is it the Haram el Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, a name that connects it to events sacred to Islam? There are others. Did the Pope politely refer to the place by the preferred name of his hosts? Or does he have his own name for it? And did he have to approach by the long temporary wooden tourist walkway that climbs up from the Western Wall Plaza to the Mughrabi gate on the west, or was he permitted to take an easier Muslim route?

Francis’ visit to the top of the mount did not lead to any viral shots, but we can enjoy this bit of fakery from a bible prophecy site: an apocryphal shot of Francis with Obama in front of the Dome of the Rock. At least it confirms and somewhat extends our previous ramblings by showing Francis in white, on the notional east, while Obama is all in black. Black vs. white, another nice piece of symbolism. It makes us wonder how we shall interpret a similarly frontal image of Francis, leader of the western church, with the Ecumenical Patriarch of the eastern church. Now we see our Pope, in white, on the left, looking down, while the eastern patriarch stands to the right with an almost triumphant look.

By now, our jumpy little dog of a mind hardly knows where she is going, east or west, backward or forward. She has a tendency to sniff out old smells, confirm her previous prejudices instead of organizing new knowledge. She does worry a little about the mental space between the Western Wall and the barrier. With the exception of the “prophetic” fake, she has not been able to penetrate that on our walk: the walls are too solid, too high.

Many on both sides of those constructions, as well as those actually squeezed in between them, have suffered and continue to suffer, with no end in sight. But is Francis not a man of God? Where is God in all this? When Francis prayed at the barrier and put his forehead to it was he subconsciously thinking of that wall as the forehead of his deity? Did any of those observing the scene imagine God trapped between the barrier and the Western Wall, unable to move? Our little dog doesn’t know.

--

--