Come to Jerusalem, see the messiah
Pastor Dale Morgan
Come to Jerusalem, see the messiah*
By Ari Rabinovitch
Reuters
Sunday, December 16, 2007; 7:46 PM
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - As Christmas approaches, Christians around the
world turn to thoughts of the Holy Land and the great figures in the Bible.
For some who come on a visit, the religious energy is enough to make
them recite scriptures on the street or claim to be King David or Jesus.
The phenomenon is known as the Jerusalem Syndrome, though psychiatrists
disagree whether it can affect otherwise healthy people, or causes only
those predisposed to psychoses to believe they have seen the Messiah.
The police set up a unit in the city -- sacred to Jews, Muslims and
Christians -- to deal with the minority of tourists each year who
believe they are characters from the Bible, and hospitals have special
wards to treat wayward travelers.
During a walking tour of Jerusalem's Old City in 2003, tour operator Avi
Green said a 19-year-old American participant saw the stones of the
Western Wall, one of Judaism's holiest sites, open up and reveal the
Messiah.
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"He had a vision that the stones of the wall opened and the Messiah
appeared and spoke to him," Green said. "He became delusional and
violent and had to be hospitalized."
Between 30 and 40 tourists each year are admitted to hospital for
similar behavior, said Dr. Gregory Katz, head of the emergency unit at
Givat Shaul Mental Health Centre. Of those, only a few are diagnosed
with "true" Jerusalem Syndrome.
"It's extremely rare. It's only Jerusalem Syndrome if the person has had
no prior psychiatric problems," Katz said. "It usually occurs on their
first trip to the Holy Land. They see a meeting of the real Jerusalem
and the Jerusalem from the Bible."
Most patients are middle-aged with strong religious foundations, hailing
from small towns in the United States or Scandinavia, Katz said. They
are usually on organized tours with religious groups and develop a
feeling of ecstasy when they see holy places mentioned in the Bible.
"Add jet lag and not sleeping for a few nights, and they begin to
identify with biblical characters," Katz said. "You might see them
dressed in white and preaching at holy sites. Such behavior can be
dangerous."
Katz described the syndrome's progression in an article published in the
British Journal of Psychiatry in 2000. It starts with agitation and an
urge to visit the city alone and ends with the need to don a toga and
deliver a sermon at a holy place.
He described a 35-year-old woman from a Christian tour group who, after
three or four days without sleep, believed she was the Virgin Mary. The
woman walked out of her hotel room dressed in a white sheet and began
preaching about not committing sins.
The episode lasts a few days, after which the person usually does not
remember what happened, Katz said.
TOURIST POLICE
In 1986, Victor Wadhawkar helped form the Israeli police tourism unit to
deal with foreign travelers. Whenever there was a report of a ranting
tourist, his team was sent.
"We dealt with about a dozen delusional tourists a year ... with a spike
during Christmas and Passover holidays when more tourists walk around
and visit holy places," said Wadhawkar, who retired after working 14
years in the unit.
He told how several years ago, a woman in her 60s went missing during
Passover when her tour group visited Jerusalem. Her frantic husband
called the police.
"We found her the next morning in Bethlehem near (the biblical
matriarch) Rachel's tomb. She had walked through the night about nine km
by herself," he said. "She told us she didn't remember a thing, only
that she had gotten a sign."
Other psychiatrists say Jerusalem Syndrome is not a disorder in itself
but a manifestation of other psychoses.
"It's not Jerusalem that made them psychotic. They have previous
disturbances and the exhilaration (of Jerusalem) augments their
behavior," said Moshe Kalian, District Psychiatrist of Jerusalem.
In most cases, the delusional travelers came with a messianic mission in
mind and Jerusalem was just a stage to act it out, Kalian said.
In two articles published in mental-health journals, Kalian recounts
numerous cases of erratic behavior in pilgrims visiting Jerusalem from
as far back as the Middle Ages. In most cases the travelers' delusions
began elsewhere.
He wrote: "The eccentric conduct and bizarre performance of those
colorful yet psychotic visitors become dramatically overt once they
reached the Holy City -- a geographical locus containing the 'axis
mundi' of their religious beliefs."
(Editing by Sara Ledwith)