The Jerusalem Syndrome (Electronic book text)

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During the summer of 1998 my wife and I took a trip to Israel. I know what you're thinking: Israel? Is this going to be heavy? I understand. That's what our friends thought when we told them about our trip. When you tell people you are going to Israel it makes them nervous. It somehow implicates their lack of religion and they want to know why you're going. They get worried. "Are you going to get Jewy?"
They don't know what you're going to be like when you get back. People change. Am I going to walk off the plane davening down the gateway wearing a tallit and a yarmulke with payes bouncing beside my ears? Then they're going to think, Now it's weird. We can't go to their house anymore, certainly not on Saturdays. That pretorn toilet paper thing gives me the creeps.
We didn't go to Israel to get Jewy. We went because a friend of mine invited us.
It was only after we got back from Israel that I read about Jerusalem Syndrome. This is a psychological condition that occurs in some visitors to the Middle East. They get to Israel and just snap. They think they are a biblical or religious figure like Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad. Some think that they are in a direct communication with God on a one-to-one level. Some think that their being in the Middle East is one of the keys that unlocks the final unfolding, which is what I like to call Armageddon.
In retrospect, I'm pretty sure I had a full-blown case of Jerusalem Syndrome. The catch is, I actually think I had it long before I left. It's hard for me to tell, because I always felt like I was special.
I was the first child of my parents and the first grandchild for both sets of grandparents. So, needless to say, I was special. For my entire life, until the day she died a few years ago, my Grandma Goldy would pull me aside from the rest of the brood, look me in the eyes, smiling, and say, "Marc-y, you're my number one." Then she would slip me a piece of dietetic coffee candy.
The other reason I believe I'm special is mystical. I was born on Kol Nidre, the eve of Yom Kippur. It is the holiest night in the Jewish religion. It was 8:10 p.m., September 27, 1963. A somber mood rippled through the Judaic collective unconscious. Jews around the world were repenting for their sins in shame, guilt, and fear. They were all asking God to write their names into the book of life for one more year as I slid out of my mother, covered in blood and crying in a Jersey City hospital. What does it mean? I don't know, but Jesus was born on Christmas--what are the odds? And if there is any core to my faith at all it is in that there are no coincidences. There is no word in Hebrew for "coincidence."] Nothing happens in God's world by chance.
My father-in-law, Marty, wanted to be a rabbi but instead became a psychiatrist, thus cutting out the middleman, God. I asked him if he had heard of Jerusalem Syndrome and told him the symptoms. He said he had never come across it but it sounded to him like a decompensating borderline personality disorder, paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of grandeur or mania, which is what I like to call the fun side of bipolarity. He was, all and all, very clinical.
Maybe if he had become a rabbi it would've been a longer conversation, had over a stack of sacred texts revolving around how God manifests himself in this world and how all Jews that follow the rules want and e