First of all, there were no signs in English directly at the site of Elijah's cave; the woman at the hostel had warned me that it was "not obvious" where the entrance was. I saw several tour buses parked by the side of the road and crowds of Jewish people with yarmulkes walking down the mountain on an elevated pathway. "Well, that must be it," I thought. I found my way to an entrance to a walkway and made my way up the mountain, following the flow of people.
As I neared the top of the ramp, I heard loud Middle Eastern music playing (it wasn't clear if it was Hebrew or Arabic to me) and smelled food cooking. Suddenly I worried that I was in the wrong place; perhaps I was headed to a restaurant or some kind of park area where these folks were all having a big cook-out party! I cautiously continued up the last flight of stairs, and spotted a small plaque to the right of the gate that had an English translation: "Elijah's Cave," it said. "O-kaaaay," I thought, and headed on in.
The courtyard area indeed looked like it was a public picnic area, with kids running up and down and a large grill area with some kind of food smoking on it and lots of people sitting down eating at tables. I followed the stairs up to the next level and saw a large elaborate chair with Hebrew written all over it -- "Ah!" I thought, "This must be Elijah's chair -- the chair that is left empty at every Passover dinner with the expectations that the prophet might return." There were stations for lighting memorial candles, although I'm not sure for what, since everything was in Hebrew.
I followed the steps up to the entrance to the cave area, and saw a large room with a divider down the middle of it. "Women Side / Men Side" said the sign, in Hebrew, Arabic, and English -- and that was the extent that there was anything written in anything other than Hebrew in the entire place. There was a box of scarfs by the entrance, and since I'd forgotten to bring mine (it was in my backpack back at the hostel), I picked one up and put it on and entered the women's side.
The area where the actual cave space was was covered with a thick velvet cloth, with a Star of David on the front of it. I assumed this meant that it was off-limits, that people weren't allowed to go in there. I looked at the displays on the dividing walls, since there were many pictures, even though I couldn't read the descriptions. There were depictions of Elijah from various biblical stories, and against the wall where the cave was, several tablets with the tetragrammon -- the four consonants of the Name of God in Hebrew.
Off to the left side of the large room was a smaller nook with an area where there was a Torah scroll, with a curtain drawn in front of it as well. Women were going into that space and resting their hands and faces against the curtain, saying prayers. There were pieces of paper shoved into the cracks in the walls -- like at the Western Wall in Jerusalem -- representing prayers offered by the pilgrims who had visited here. There were also all kinds of scarves and hair pieces -- clips, rubber bands, etc -- tied to the metal wires in the ceiling of this cave area. I wasn't sure what the significance of that practice was, but clearly it was a "thing" that people did here.
I sat down in the Torah nook area to read the story of Elijah fighting the prophets of Ba'al from 1 Kings, along with the prayers and reflections in my Jewish pilgrimage guide. After a while, a young woman in an Israeli military uniform joined me, sitting on the rug facing the Torah area and reading her prayer book, rocking back and forth in the methodical way Jews do at prayer. On the other side of the dividing wall, a group of men were praying together, loudly, a leader shouting phrases in Hebrew punctuated by the group's vigorous "AMEN!!"s. In the background, the blasting music from the courtyard drifted in on top of it all.
As I sat, some new women walked into the larger room area, and I watched them walk up to the curtain that I had assumed was sacrosanct and untouchable and grab it and fling it back with all the hutzpah and casualness as if they were pushing past someone that was in their way in a shopping mall, and step right inside the cave. "Oh!" I thought. "I guess we CAN go in there after all!" I watched as a whole group of women came in, a few at a time, paying their respects to this place where Elijah was said to have stayed, some with deep reverence, others casually, with a plate of food in one hand even as they stepped inside the cave.
After the crowd cleared away, I went and stepped in the cave myself. It was just me and one another woman, who was leaning against the wall and praying with her Hebrew prayer book or Bible. As I placed my hand on the wall, I felt the same shiver of holiness that I had felt as I stood beside Baha'u'llah's grave in Akko.
I was struck by how opposite this was from the utter silence and stillness that the Baha'is were so careful to protect around the shrine of Baha'u'llah in Akko. In place of structured, beautifully manicured and landscaped gardens, there was dirt and grime and trash and the scent of food. Instead of silence, there was shouting prayers and throbbing music. The Baha'i site reminded me of the "frozen chosen" denominations of Christianity -- valuing silence and stillness and order and beauty -- and Elijah's Cave reminded me of the Pentecostal or more spirit-led denominations of Christianity.
In reflecting on one of my "guiding questions" for the trip -- "How do I experience God in the sacred spaces of other traditions?" -- I found that I experienced both places to be sacred, in their different ways. The structure and order and meticulous attention to detail were beautiful, but so was the chaos. Just as I am not satisfied with one kind of liturgy or experience of the Christian faith, I would not have wanted to have visited all sites like the Baha'i gardens or all sites like Elijah's Cave. I like both… I need both.
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