Walking the Bible by Bruce Feiler

days a year. Today was one of the Jewish days, which accounted for the thousands waiting by the metal detectors. After the first bank, there was a second, where visitors were asked if they had weapons, video equipment, plastic knives, even compacts for makeup. Compacts? “It could have a mirror,” the guard said. “Crack a mirror, it becomes a weapon.”
    Inside, the crowd was almost overbearing, spilling through a maze of small rooms, larger rooms, spiral staircases, and impromptu prayer circles. The atmosphere was as fervid as a medieval cathedral on pilgrimage day. In the smaller rooms, chairs were huddled and worshipers crowded in casual exchange. The covered courtyard was even more intense. In front of each shrine, men nodded in prayer, swaying in unison, but chanting in isolation. Behind them stood scores of women, hiding their faces in their books and generally swaying in a circle instead of front to back. Well behind the worshipers, and by far the majority, were the families, hundreds of them, sitting on the floor, mothers tending their children, children scampering away. One woman was spooning her young son kernels of corn from a can.
    I wandered from shrine to shrine, before arriving in the room dedicated to Isaac and Rebekah. There I saw Michel, the photographer I had met outside. We started talking when suddenly he interrupted himself, “Are you Jewish?” When I told him yes he asked why I wasn’t wearing a kippah . I explained that I hadn’t brought one and that they were out of temporary ones at the door. I continued my question. “But you need a kippah !” he exclaimed. I reached in my bag, pulled out a notebook, and ripped out a piece of paper. “How will you keep it on?” heasked. By this point several people were watching. “I’ll hold it,” I said. I did so and continued our conversation, but my pose was so awkward he quickly dismissed himself and went to pray somewhere else. I removed the piece of paper and walked toward the other side of the room; several more people hissed at me along the way. I returned the paper to my head. I could not remember feeling more naked—or chastened—as I slouched through the crowds toward the door.
    Outside I walked the few steps through the crowded Arab market that splits the Jewish Quarter in two. Up above was a sign: THIS MARKET IS BUILT ON LAND STOLEN FROM THE JEWS . The central square of the Jewish Quarter is hardly bigger than a city block, with several limestone apartment buildings crowded around a playground. Overshadowing the quadrangle were three enormous water towers, like booster rockets on the space shuttle, with Israeli flags painted on the side.
    “Sixty percent of our water comes from Arafat,” a man watching his children explained. He had a salt-and-pepper beard and knitted kippah . “We have to check it for poison. Every week we get a backup shipment from Jerusalem.”
    David Wilder was a resident of Hebron. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Israel in the 1970s, married an Israeli, and came to nearby Kiryat Arba. Six months earlier, he, his wife, and their seven children moved into the disputed neighborhood.
    “We had to think about it,” he said. “My wife and I had been discussing various options, when one day a terrorist jumped into the bedroom of a sixty-three-year-old rabbi who lived here and killed him. That convinced us to move.”
    “Why that?”
    “Because the whole act of terror is an attempt to push us out. They figure they kill enough people, eventually we’ll get up and leave. The only way to counter that is to do the opposite. Actually, the major problem we have is that we don’t have enough room. I’m not the only crazy one around here.”

    “And are you crazy?”
    “You tell me. I don’t think so. I think we’re about as normal as anybody can possibly be.”
    “But you’re choosing to put yourself into a tinderbox.”
    “We’re here as representatives. We have to remember why the Jewish people live in the