Where encounters create beauty
When a chance encounter creates a unique experience…
The musician who chose this spot for her harp, the Ultra Orthodox guy who was moved by her music and joined her with an Yiddish song, the Arab juice-seller who set down his merchandise and applauded them at the end of the song, and everyone who happened to be there in that moment, and chose to listen.
And us, too.
One unique moment of togetherness.
Jerusalem’s Moments
In the past 50 days, we celebrated Jerusalem as we experience it.
We celebrated the beauty of this city, which shines throughout the day – and night.
We didn’t shy away from Jerusalem’s challenges: We thought about terror and borders and the differences between us, and why some people don’t stand for the siren, while others do.
But we also delved into Jerusalem’s quirky, fun moments, its dressed-up dogs and its graffiti and its open-mic nights.
We watched sheep joining the Jerusalem Marathon, soldiers knitting, and old men playing music by Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station.
Last-Minute in the Sunshine
I’ve described Jerusalem by the shining white stones of its buildings. I’ve tried to capture Jerusalem in words like “intense” and “holy” and “diverse.” I’ve made friends out of the acquaintances on Jerusalem’s buses and in her cafes. And I even introduced a sabra to the Jewish people in the hills of Jerusalem’s Ein Karem (his passport has no country, but we know).
Still, it’s the wee hours before Pesach that showcase quintessential Jerusalem for me (how appropriate, as we near Shavuot). After midnight, the city is dark. The streets are nearly empty (it’s a city that doesn’t fully sleep). Cafes are finishing their final scrub-down before the holiday, sponga water cascading into the gutters. Homes stand empty of leavening for the holiday (or it’s been sold…or so we trust). And the florists…well, the florists are open. Because Jerusalem is in the final throes of preparation for Pesach, and everyone needs flowers. It’s almost the last minute, and the florists don’t close until right before candlelighting.
The port city of Jerusalem
(Artwork by Daphne Odjig)
Most countries that are not landlocked have their capitals on a coastline. Jerusalem is the rare exception, a capital city that does not flow into an ocean, river or sea. But in a poem created by Yehuda Amichai, Jerusalem is a port city, where the ebb and flow is prayer—the tide between heaven and earth. The flow is vertical, rather than horizontal.
I asked the Canadian literary journal, KI1N, if they could acquire permission to use a painting by Daphne Odjig, a First Nation Canadian artist, to illustrate my English translation of Amichai’s poem. I felt her silkscreen of Jaffa Gate brought to life the nautical spirit that Yehuda Amichai evoked in his poem. When I discovered her art, I learned that El Al had commissioned Odjig to paint Jerusalem from her perspective in 1976.
Giving birth in Jerusalem
“We already sealed the womb itself,” explained Professor Elchalal. “Now we’re stitching the tissues around it.”
The professor’s voice rose, oddly disembodied, from behind the curtain that separated my head from the rest of my body. A C-section, I thought, is all about separations – we separate tissue from tissue, baby from womb. Under these circumstances, a curtain cutting the body in two is only fitting.
“And how do you stitch the tissues together, professor?”
Noticing the Everyday Miracles in Jerusalem
Neighborhood playground (Ir Ganim- Kiryat Menachem facebook page)
Not a dry eye in the hall. Bet you’ve heard that phrase before, but how often do you really see a room full of guests sniveling collectively to keep composure at a seemingly routine family event?
Eleven years of waiting, hoping, praying for a child came to an apex at a recent brit milah in an obscure Jerusalem neighborhood synagogue.
Ir Ganim- Kiryat Menachem is best known for the culture clash between the old-timers and the new-comers. The older residents are comprised of Jewish families from Arab countries which had been forced out after centuries of living in thriving communities. In Israel’s infancy they were settled in quickly-constructed shikun buildings in the 50’s and 60’s and have since been joined by Russian immigrants who came in the big waves of aliya from the former Soviet Union. They have carefully guarded their secular lifestyles. The new faces on the blocks are the young, sincerely observant families lacking the means to choose more established religious neighborhoods.
Jerusalem Stone
God pulsed beneath my fingertips
I loved not His city, but His stones
Cool marble pressed against my forehead
The ancient past rose up to greet me
Silken stones against my cheek
My hands held the memory of a House
Remembered the stories, smelled the smoke,
Heard the baying horn, saw the teeming crowds
I stroked my child’s cheek tonight
He slept beneath my tears. In his skin
I felt the ancient stones once more
A miracle on the seam
There’s this place on the seam between the Quarters, and it’s my favorite place – it’s the one with the bombass view, with the room with the giant bed with the wrought iron posts, and the purple glass windows and a view looking onto the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The building grew out of a an old cistern 700 years ago.
And there’s wifi and hot water so basically #HappyPlace
The people who run it are Palestinians from Beit Hanina — we speak English when I come in — maybe “shwei Arabi.” I don’t hide that I’m Jewish or Israeli – ( I stayed here on Purim and paraded through in my mask and beads and shit, and wished everyone Chag Samayach and explained to the baffled backpackers from Holland WTF was going on) but once when I asked something in Hebrew, the guy running the desk said “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
From the mouth of babes
Erev Yom Yerushalayim.
I walk an hour from work to pick up my two year old from daycare, still no buses even though Trump is already in the air. The frustration of a city stuck begins to give way to an air of celebration.
At home, my four year old daughter and her friend sit on the floor, coloring and sticking stickers. She tells her friend that the gold stickers are “כמו ירושלים של זהב,” and the two of them burst into song:
ירושלים של זהב
ושל נחושת ושל אור
הלא לכל שירייך
אני כינור
Hooked
One of my earliest memories is the first time I cast eyes on the Kotel.
I was 5 years old, and I was already under Her spell. After experiencing the Kotel, though, I was hooked.
I was hooked on the vibrancy of Jewish people of all different kinds coming together to pray.
I was hooked because of the technology protecting us juxtaposed with this ancient wall that reminds us of who we were, who we are, and what we have the potential to become.
That was the moment I knew. I knew that my life would be ruled by Her, dedicated to bettering Her, and that my I would raise my children to feel the same.
A Jerusalem Vision, Jerusalem Day–Yom Yerushalayim
Aaron Ettinger was one of the paratroopers who fought in Jerusalem during the Six Day War, and was severely wounded on Salah e-Din Street near Damascus Gate.
A few years ago, at a Jerusalem Day sing-along at a synagogue around the corner from the President’s Residence, Aaron was given the microphone to recount his experiences during the two hellish days of the battle to liberate the city in June 1967.
The elderly, slightly portly man with a full head of white hair topped with a knitted kipa, spoke about the number of his comrades (mostly reservists from kibbutzim) who fell in the worst of the fighting that took place on the northern side of the Old City on Nablus Road, Salah e-Din Street and in front of Damascus Gate.
Jerusalem in my thoughts
There is something special about touching old stone structures. I feel their textures and think of the ancient hands that shaped and placed them there. Walking around Jerusalem, where there are no shortage of building stones from bygone days, thoughts swirl and a little imagination turns my head to poetry.
“If I forget thee” was our motto,
For many years words of sorrow.
Now shining golden and full of life,
Jerusalem moments, pleasure and strife.
Her every sight, gladness and delight
Beautiful arches and stones declare her might.
The people’s joy and sighs reverberate,
A million reasons for which we celebrate.
Our beautiful city, may it never be split apart
It is our joy, our strength, our heart.
The Jewish Spring, Jerusalem Style
Ask a Jew when the highest stress time on the Jewish calendar is, and the answer undoubtedly will be Passover . Add to the spring frenzy of house-cleaning and changing kitchenware, grocery orders, and extra preparations, and throw in the unusual wrench of a rare U.S. Presidential visit to Jerusalem in the days before the chag (holiday), and you have a recipe for city-wide High Anxiety of Olympic proportions. These preparations are replicated by the observant all over the world, but somehow the concentration seems heightened in Jerusalem.
Where we tell it like it is
I’ve been living in Jerusalem for nearly 9 years now. Ironically, the very thing that drove me nuts about living here is something I’ve come to value and appreciate.
Living here, I am struck by the realness of the way that we deal with life.
I don’t mean to say that life in other places is somehow superficial. I’ve had some incredibly rich life experiences both in NY and Melbourne, and a very brief stint in the Ukraine many years ago.
It’s just that living in Jerusalem feels somehow more real than anywhere else I’ve been. When I say real, I mean in your face. You-can’t-run-away-from-it kind of real.
Home Run
Would the rabbis of the ancient world have given their blessing to the twenty-first century Jerusalem Marathon?
It’s a question I ponder each March, on that designated Friday when traffic in the Holy City comes to a grinding halt. Barricades are set up to block cars and buses, and their place is taken by some 25,000 runners (and chilled-out walkers) who make their way along Jerusalem’s cleared roads. It’s a marathon, but it feels like a festival.
When I wrote my first children’s book a couple of years ago, I asked eleven-year-old Gabi, who ran with her sisters, to describe the day. In her words:
The most Jerusalem funeral ever
You know when you start your day visiting your parents and then the man who lives alone in their building is found dead in his apartment and your sister tries to resuscitate him to no avail, and he barely has family and what family he has doesn’t know how to organize a funeral so you and your sisters and the local amazing Chabad rabbi organize his funeral, and you get in touch with your righteous former neighbors from the Mount of Olives area to help secure the funeral and complete the minyan, and the deceased man’s Tel Aviv relatives are terrified to go to the funeral because they are afraid they’ll be attacked and you tell them it will be fine and then it’s not fine because the local Arabs decide to throw stones at them during the funeral, and then after the burial you get to learn more about the deceased and how he was born in Hebron 84 years ago, lived in the Old City and then moved to Katamon after 1948, served as a paratrooper in the six day war and worked for the government for forty years, retired and became a recluse in your parent’s building until he passed away this morning and was privileged to be buried in the world’s oldest Jewish cemetery facing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem this evening?
Jerusalem’s faces
Almost alone among cities, Jerusalem transcends its physical essence to reach exalted spiritual and metaphorical levels. The many faces of Jerusalem are reflected in the rich and complex personality of King David who established his sovereignty there. As Rabbi David Silber, the great teacher of Bible notes, there is the David of the Book of Samuel, the David of the Book of Psalms and the David of our liturgy. Corresponding to these three aspects of this monumental king, there is the political Jerusalem, the loving Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem of eternal spiritual transcendence.
Those dreams, this city
It came to me in my dreams as a child. Maybe it was the stories of King David and Solomon’s Temple when I was in Hebrew school. Maybe it was the images in picture books from the library with the Temple shining in the sun and sheep grazing on the hills of the city. Maybe it was just there, some genetic link dating back centuries that brought Jerusalem into my dreams. And now this city is my home, in every sense of the word. When you love something from afar, without knowing the reality of snuggling in its arms, there is much to learn when first surrounded by your object of desire. And this city teaches, as no other city in the world does. History and modernity tied together, and we learn from both that they are not mutually exclusive. Jerusalem is a city of ancient dreams and legends, always with new dreams and legends joining the ancient.
Splashing together
Just outside the Old City of Jerusalem is the delightful Teddy Park.
This free attraction comes to life in the summer on a regular schedule that has children of all ages – and some adults too – ready and waiting for it to start each time. What struck me was how it was a total mix of Jews and Arabs, religious and secular, all enjoying the fountains together. No one cared who was who, everyone was just having fun, cooling off on a hot summer night in Israel. A pure, happy Israeli moment. So beautiful!
