EXECUTIVE EDITOR BRANDON GEIST: PUTTING THE “UN” IN HOLY LAND (PART 2)

The morning before my flight to Israel about three weeks ago, I received the following message in my MySpace inbox from some guy named Sam:

Subject: welcome to Israel!!!
Hey, man!!
Just saw on revolvermag.com that you are coming down for a vacation. I'm a huge fan of Revolver for 3.5 years now. Would be pretty cool to meet you. Just to say hi and may be couple pictures. If you're cool with that and will be in Jerusalem… Also when you gonna be in the Old City in Jerusalem make sure you check out Lina's. It's a humus place. Anyone in the Old City will give you directions. It's the best humus in the world and a true middle eastern experience.
Peace, Sam

I had a mix of thoughts and emotions reading the message (among them, Wow, they know Revolver in Israel! I need to delete my MySpace page. And, what if this dude turns out to be a total psycho stalker?), but mostly I was pretty psyched, in no small part because Jerusalem was the one major Israeli city in which my wife Maya and I didn’t really have any contacts, and we had heard that the Old City area, in particular, is positively labyrinthine to navigate. Here was someone who might be able to help us find our way around. So I shot Sam an email back and set up a tentative rendezvous.

A few days into our trip, the wife and I took the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and met up with this Sam character. He turned out to be right around our age, married, from the former Soviet Union (as is Maya), and totally cool. He knew the Old City well and was more than willing to show us around. He took us to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where most Christians believe Christ was crucified and buried. He took us to the Wailing Wall, perhaps the holiest site in Judaism.

And he led us through the Muslim quarter and its bustling middle-eastern bazaar. Here we are outside the Damascus Gate of the Old City.

He also took us to what he claims is the best hummus place in all of Israel (every Israeli we talked to had a different, but no-less-passionate recommendation for the country’s best hummus). Later, the three of us sat down in a coffee shop over some cold drinks and shot the shit about religion, traveling, Russia, the U.S., and most of all, metal. By the time Maya and I bid Sam farewell at the end of the day, we both felt that far from engaging some “total psycho stalker,” we had made a new friend.

Excited by our exploration of Jerusalem, the ol’ lady and I decided to enlist an actual professional guide to lead us through more of the country. One of Maya’s other cousins, Zhenya, works in the tourism industry in Israel and he hooked us up with a good friend of his, Sergei. For two days, Sergei—a portly Russian with a motor mouth and a wealth of knowledge—drove us through northern Israel, acting as our private guide, leading us to amazing spots off the beaten trail. We rumbled up into the Golan Heights, exploring abandoned tanks and bunkers from the Six-Day War of 1967.

We passed minefields along the borders with Israel’s mortal enemies Lebanon and, below, Syria.

We clambered through the ruins of an old Crusader fortress that was conquered and co-opted by Arabs…

…and climbed down precarious mountain faces to explore a bandit captain’s ancient hideout built right into the cliffs.

Talking to Sergei, we learned that, while not exactly a metalhead, he is a big fan of hard rock, and so on our second day he brought along some of his CDs, and as we roared through the Israeli landscape, we blasted Guns N’ Roses.

But as cool as the sites were that Sergei led us to, by far the strangest and craziest adventure of our time in Israel came when we got together with Sam again. It was the fateful Thursday of the bulldozer attack in Jerusalem, but when that shit actually went down, we—just the three of us with our flashlights—were a good 45 minutes outside the city, deep inside the near-total darkness of a manmade subterranean cave. 2,000 years ago, Jews used the cave as a hiding place from Roman soldiers, and it was full of secret rooms, crawl spaces, nooks, and crannies. At one point we crossed a narrow rock bridge some six feet off the floor; this led to a wall with shallow hand- and foot-holds carved into it. Climbing these another eight feet up from the bridge, we pulled ourselves through a hole in the wall barely big enough for us to fit through and scrambled into a small chamber.

The rock bridge and climbing wall, shot with flash (hence my closed eyes).

What it actually was like.

In the corner of this there was a square hole in the floor, which led to a tunnel just big enough to allow a person to crawl on hands and knees into it. Sam explained that this was the final hiding place for those in the cave—should the Romans have breached the refuge, everyone there would have crawled into the tunnel, packing in as many as 50 people in the tight, claustrophobia-inducing space.

Maya, on her way to hide from the Romans.

Maya and I crawled in; Sam, having been in already once before, understandably declined. The tunnel wound deep into the rock, maybe 50 feet, hitting more than a few blind corners. Reaching the dead end, we lay there, turned off our flashlights, and imagined, in the utter darkness, what it would have been like to be hiding there with no light and almost no air, packed in with friends and relatives, hunted by Romans eager for your blood. Needless to say, it was a very intense experience.

What is maybe the most striking thing about Israel is how deep the history is there—sometimes literally, deep into the Earth—and how much shit hasn’t changed, even from those ancient days 2,000 years ago. Where once there were refuge caves and tunnels, there are the military bunkers of 1967, and bomb shelters, and now there is a wall between Jerusalem and the West Bank. Where once there were murderous Roman troops, now there are suicide bombers and killers in bulldozers.

But as much as Israel is surrounded by and besieged by its many enemies, Maya and I came here for family, and we left with new friends—Sam and Sergei. And I also left with one sick souvenir—this Metallica T-shirt, bought in a shop off of Zion Square in Old City, Jerusalem, which says “Metallica” in motherfucking Hebrew. How badass is that?