Forward, March!

There no cure for what ails you like a brisk hot through a sweltering hot day! Despite grumbles about shaky legs and still queasy tummies, we launched ourselves into the Roman heat in the early afternoon with the objective of visiting the Jewish Museum and Great Synagogue of Rome.  We had decided to prioritize this trip as an "antidote" to the healthy dose of catholicism which has saturated this trip.  Time to take a look around and find out about other points of views.  Rome, as it turns out, is home to the oldest continuous Jewish community in Europe, with about 13,500 self-identifying jews living the city today.  Jews have been here about 2300 years, and despite efforts by various popes to convert them and drive them out and Nazi's to exterminate them, they have lived, survived and even thrived, against the odds.  The museum was actually quite interesting, and we all learned a lot. The English-speaking guide was knowledgeable, but a little tough to understand, due to a fairly thick accent that was hard on the girls.  Still, we were wowed by the vast space that is the Great Synagogue, especially the beautiful soaring alabaster columns at the high altar and the soaring square dome--the only one with that shape in Rome.  All the girls noticed the absence of any statues or religious paintings, and Cecily actually asked a question about it.  The girls were horrified by Nazi perfidy, perpetrated against Rome's Jews in the form of a demand for 50 kilograms of gold in exchange for a safe-conduct promise--a promise promptly broken, leading the round-up of more than 1,300 mostly women, children, elderly and disabled Jews, almost of all of whom perished at Auschwitz. We also heard an interesting explanation for Catholic persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages--that it was a function of the CounterReformation, which was itself a response to the need to purify the church as a result of the Reformation.  According to the Roman version, persecution of the Jews was just a natural outgrowth of this theological necessity--something I never learned in any of my history classes and which conveniently ignores a millennia of persecution before the CounterReformaion, but apparently is the accepted version of events here. Maybe the most interesting part of the day, was the girls' reaction to a colloquy between an elderly Jewish man on our tour (most of our fellow tourists were Jewish) and our guide; the elderly gentleman disputed several points with the guide, who was happy to shoot back with her own opinions.  The girls were offended by what they thought was a rude and disrespectful exchange, and it took quite a bit of talking about cultural differences to get them to understand that people have different ways of disputing with each other and that what is acceptable in one culture may not be acceptable in another. Post tour, we spent a couple of hours in the museum, delving deeper into Jewish culture and theology.  How to describe the next few hours?  The experience was akin to our visit in London to the Imperial War Museum:  Questions, questions, questions, questions, questions--until both Laura and I were ready to flee and never come back!  These three when fully engaged in a learning mission are intellectually exhausting!  Post-museum, as we exited, we decided to walk through the archeological excavations of the Porto Ottavio, Teatro Marcello and Flavian Amphitheater adjacent.  Cecily was fascinated to learn that the medieval fishermen who later turned this area into Rome's fish market had used the marble slabs they found lying around as display counters (and we all remembered with amusement Cecily's earlier acid epithet, spat out with a wrinkled nose while wandering down the grocery aisle, "I smell PESCE! (fish in Italian, a food Cecily thinks should pretty much be banned from the universe.)  We thought we would rest our brains by taking the elevator to the top of the Vittorio Emanuele monument for the panoramic view of Rome.  Unfortunately, we were distracted by the Emigration Museum as we walked by.  The result was a deep dive into family history and the immigrant experience, specifically, the experience of Laura's Italian great grandfather, great grandmother and grandmother (who was two at the time.)   Tears were shed--and more questions were asked.  Emotionally wrung out, we made a quick visit to Trajan's column and the nearby Sacred Name of Mary Church, and then went for pizza at our favorite local spot (stopping along the way to take a second look at the site where Julius Caesar was murdered ).  Over pizza, we discussed the day, and the girls shared what had impressed them.  We then asked them whether they though they might most identify with Catholicism, Protestantism or  Judaism.  Interestingly, they split three ways, although their reasoning was a little shaky (beautiful churches vs. intellectual rigor vs. familiarity). It was an interesting conversation, and it will be interesting to see where life takes them. We headed home to drop Olivia and Cecily before parents and Meredith headed to mass at St. Maria di Scala (only to find that we had the time wrong, and it had ended two hours earlier.  So we went to Vespers at Maria di Trastevere instead, where we encountered one of the nicest Italians we have yet met--a lovely lady, who helped us find our places in the prayerbook and psalter.  Afterwards, home where we found Olivia wanting to take the BeliefNet Faith O Matic test on the internet, to discover her religious identify.  That conversation was followed by her taking a political test to find out her leanings (She's a Ross Perot populist.)   In all, an unexpectedly intellectual and thoroughly satisfying day, despite the late start, Cecily's blood nose in the night which soaked her bed sheets (causing a morning laundry uproar) and the continuing challenges of getting over an illness quickly.  I continue in my core belief:  no matter how you feel, the only way through is, FORWARD, MARCH!