Jerusalem's Windmill

There is a green hill far away outside a city wall.  And on it there stands the windmill.  This is not at all what we expect.  It is one thing to find a windmill in the Netherlands or Kent, quite another to find one outside the walls of Old Jerusalem.

This windmill was both a success and a failure.  

It was a success in that it was built as part of a project to get Jews to move out of their enclave in the old city onto the more spacious land outside.  This seems a simple enough idea now, but in the insecurities of of the nineteenth century with about 20,000 Jews in this enclave of the great Ottoman Empire, moving outside the walls was a daunting idea.  With the help of the windmill a colony was successfully formed outside the cramped squalor of the Old City.

Moses Montefiore, a British Jewish banker provided the funds, but its familiarity to an English eye is down to the fact it was designed in Kent.  And that is why it has survived (more later).

It wasn't a success as a windmill once it encouraged the Jews out of the enclave.  The photo contains a clue for there is a Jerusalem summer sky.  Of course it might be blowing a gale with a blue Middle Eastern sky - that's not unheard of, but rare.  The Kentish windmill lacked the Kentish wind.

But as history turns out (and nothing in Jerusalem is ever simple) its Kentishness saved it.  After the Second World War the Jews were organising themselves to form a homeland State and their enemy was the British.  The British determined to destroy the windmill which was functioning as a gun turret.  But the men sent to destroy it found that it had been designed in Kent - their home county.  So they simply blew the top off it to make it unusable but preserved.

And on another hill near the city the Maker of All showed greater mercy to those he had made.

Zion's Gate

Psalm 87

On the holy mount stands the city he founded;

    the Lord loves the gates of Zion
    more than all the dwelling places of Jacob.
Glorious things of you are spoken,
    O city of God. 

As part of my Sabbatical I have spent some days in Jerusalem.  Previous days in Jerusalem had been hurried pilgrimages but due to a combination of plans and unexpected circumstantial changes this time I was had days to explore.  

Here is Zion's Gate.  Like many things in Jerusalem it is not what you first assume it to be - or perhaps more accurately want it to be.  For this gate is, as might be expected by the name, next to Zion's hill but the hill is outside the Old City wall, not inside it.

Walls are human constructs and cause confusion in many ways.  Today's international political hot potato a couple of miles from here is the wall (you can see it from this wall) built between Israel and the West Bank.

This Old City wall had many stories but until 50 years ago this year it had, since the modern founding of the State of Israel, formed the border between that State and Jordan.  The marks in the wall are not the result of weather but of bullets.  The Israelis were outside on Zion's hill and the Jordanians inside on the Old City wall, a tense stand off that in other places nearby required the UN to intervene to rescue, for example, stray footballs and family pets caught between the two sides.

It is ironic and thought-provoking that having (joyfully) dispensed with this wall as a barrier the Israelis have felt it necessary in this century to build another one between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.  It is a metaphor of the human condition - a metaphor written into the First Story when Adam and Eve are walled out of the garden.

God loves the gates.

This is because he IS a gate (John 10).