The city has got cool again, literally. We had a few days last week of almost unbearable heat, though nothing like the heavy clamminess of Tel Aviv, but then there were a couple of nights of strong cool winds and everything is back to warm sun, blue skies and a gentle breeze. Yesterday it was so nice outside that I decided to bunk off the second half of my Hebrew lesson and go and sit and doze under an olive tree in the park. Apart from the heavy traffic on a nearby road, the sound of the American consulate's security guards' radios, two teenage girls listening to Eminem on a mobile phone and a mangy dog looking at me weirdly, it was almost Biblical.
This is a funny time in the Jewish calendar. We are in the three weeks between two fast days that commemorate, respectively, the breaching of the walls of the first Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587BC and the date they finally broke through and razed it to the ground.
The Temple was built by King Solomon in 957BC and for nearly 400 years it put Jerusalem at the spiritual, political and cultural epicentre of Jewish life. Its destruction, and the subsequent exile of the Jews to Babylon, was a calamity for the Jewish race (although it led to some marvelous literature of longing, especially in the Psalms) and even today traditional Jews tend to lay low during this period. They don't celebrate weddings, they don't get their hair cut, they avoid eating meat (except on shabbat when it is obligatory) and they don't listen to music. In the religious areas of Jerusalem you can see that life goes on but it's all a little more subdued.
In the yeshiva we are more liberal but we have been marking this period by looking at the effect of fasts on modern life. For many modern Jews, fasting means Yom Kippur, when almost all Jews, even non-observant ones, go without food and water for at least some of the 24 hours between sunset and sunset. The effect is slightly hypnotic, especially when combined with the liturgy of that day in the synagogue, and it can take you into an otherworldly place, away from the ordinary pleasures and annoyances of everyday life. Muslims say the same thing about the fasting of Ramadan. But - and this will come as a surprise to many people stuck in the synagogue that day - Yom Kippur is not meant to be sad day. If nothing else, for a moment or two it edges us a little nearer that strangeness we call God.
By contrast, these fast days are days of mourning and they remind me of how funerals, and especially the wakes or parties after them, also take us away from the "real" world for a while and help us reflect on where we are and what we are up to. I don't feel particularly evangelical about fasting (or about God, really) but fasts do make a powerful contrast to the way we often live our lives in the west. Our 24-hour cities, with their work hard, play hard mantras and busy weekends, sometimes make it hard just to take time out and think. And I think we are poorer because of that. And even if that doesn't resonate with everyone, being hungry for a day can also put us back in touch with people for whom hunger is much more of an everyday experience - even in London. And that can't be a bad thing.
Back in the real world, I have found a Hebrew teacher who lives near my house and I am going to her for an hour's conversation three times a week until the course ends. It is incredibly difficult to practise your Hebrew here as everyone loves to speak English and the first time you fail to make an adjective agree with a noun or, in my case, reveal that you can't say anything in the past or the future, they switch languages and refuse to go back. I have had three lessons so far and they're going well. The teacher is patient with my attempts to say something a little more complicated than "The pen is on the table" and we end up, I think, having some pretty in-depth conversations about life, love and the universe. Or at least that's how it appears to me.
The yeshiva course is ending soon and I am starting to think of my journey back home. As I am trying not to fly, getting out of Israel is a bit of a problem. I can't go back through Syria now I have been here. Crossing the Lebanon border is impossible with Hizbollah on the other side. And the passenger ferries that used to sail between Israel and Cyprus stopped in 2002. So the only solution is to bag a place on a cargo ship and I have found one that will take me.
The ship sails from Haifa to Piraeus on August 25. I don't know what it is going to be like or what it is carrying but it seems legit and they are happy to take me. My plan is to hop from Patras by boat to Bari and then by train up through Italy to Paris and then London. It will take about a week, though I may have to put the brakes on slightly so as not to have to catch the Eurostar on September 1. The only fares available on that day (it's a Sunday) are at Business Super Executive level and, really, I just don't have the right clothes for First Class.
I'm looking forward to being on the cargo ship. It will be three days of doing almost nothing except sailing through the Med. You eat with the crew but otherwise your time is your own and I'm planning to find a little sunny corner of the deck and work my way through a pile of trashy books, preferably not about Israel, Palestine or Jewish philosophy.
In the meantime, the weekend beckons again and a bunch of us are planning a trip to the beach in Tel Aviv on Friday. I'll come home for the lovely Jerusalem shabbat again. And, after that, it will be the last week of our yeshiva programme, that second fast day (on Sunday 10) and then, I hope, a few days scuba diving in Dahab on the Red Sea. If anyone has any Dahab tips, they'd be more than welcome.
The pictures, from top: my neighbourhood; the view from my flat; the home of the Israeli Philharmonic (x 2); a typical local house; Brits were not always so welcome here; posters for Jerusalem's live music scene; hoarding around a building site - the Hebrew says, "How to climb the separation wall" (not really); spotted in a chemist - does what it says on the jar, I guess
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