On the road again (and some old pics)


This is my last weekend in Jerusalem - or at least the last one in my flat. Term ended on Thursday (I've posted our Hebrew class end-of-term pic below, with me in my customary I-hate-having-my-picture-taken gawky pose) and since then I have been cleaning and packing and, because today is a special fast day, eating up what's left in my fridge. I can't really recommend lentil salad, tuna bake, pickled herring and yogurt washed down with tonic water but, hey, at least nothing went to waste.


The fast is held to commemorate a number of calamaties in Jewish history, most especially the days in 587BC and 70AD when the first and second Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed (by the Babylonians and the Romans respectively), the city was all but razed to the ground and the Jews were sent into exile. Jerusalem in those days was the crown of the Middle East and it had been the centre of Jewish life since 1000BC. To lose it must have been catastrophic and the book we read on this day - the Lamentations of Jeremiah - is a bleak description of palaces destroyed, men and women slaughtered in the street, people selling themselves for food and mothers eating their children. It's traditionally read to an unsurprisingly mournful chant, by low light, on the eve of the fast and last night we went to the Wailing Wall, the only part of the Temple that remains, to hear it and dwell on the destruction that overtook the Jewish people in those days.



Well, we went to part of the Wailing Wall. As men and women can't pray together at the main part of the Wall, which is controlled by the ultra-Orthodox, we gathered in a small area to the south where, if anything, the effect is even more palpable. (Veteran readers of this blog, if there are any, will remember that this was where I went for morning prayers in the first or second week of my time here.) You sit on the stones of an old Roman road that functioned as a shopping arcade next to one of the Temple entrances. (There are still little stone booths where the merchants kept their stock, just like the souks of many Middle Eastern cities today. I like to think this is where Jesus overturned the tables of the moneychangers, but I'm probably wrong). In front of you, the Wall rises up maybe 30 or 40 feet to the huge platform that is now the location of the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. And all around are enormous blocks of stone, some measuring four or five feet, which were thrown down into the street, and still lie exactly where they landed, during that second destruction in AD70.


It would be easy to find all of this too distant and historical. I have never really been one for archaeological sites and, to be honest, last night left me a little cold. But a picture I saw in this morning's paper, as I was walking to prayers at the yeshiva, put it all into a grim, more modern, context. It showed a man somewhere in Georgia or South Ossetia (I don't know the city, I'm afraid), his face twisted with despair, holding the body of another man killed in the conflict that has just erupted there. Around him, his city also lay in ruins and when I got to the yeshiva I looked again at the Book of Lamentations and found, sadly, that in the 2,500 years since it was written, very little seems to have changed.


Yet, for many Jews - cautiously, gently, delicately - there is also something celebratory about today. The exile that began in AD70, it could be argued, has now ended - in 1948, maybe, or 1967. And, today of all days, the Jewish love for, and attachment to, Jerusalem is very much in the air. For many people, especially those on the right here, this fast day underlines the centrality of Jerusalem to Jewish identity. And it shows up how problematic the idea of dividing Jerusalem again really is. I can't think of many other places in the world that are so steeped in longing, rhetoric and significance - for Christians and Muslims, as well as for Jews. And I can't think of many other days in the year when you can feel the Jewish connection to this city so potently.


For me, leaving tomorrow morning on a bus to, of all places, Egypt, today has left me with a bittersweet set of feelings about Jerusalem. I long for a peaceful two-state solution to the conflict here and I think that will include a capital in East Jerusalem for the Palestinians. But I also feel a strong Jewish connection to a place that, for six weeks, has been a wonderful home. Here I have been, for want of a better word, more observant. I have been going to prayers more or less twice every day. I have been wearing my kippa most of the time. I have been discovered texts and had many discussions that have been both inspiring and challenging. And I have studied with, and made friends with, some remarkable people.



Yet I have also loved the summer nights here, with their gentle breeze that means you can leave all the windows open and ignore the air con. I'll miss the shwarmas and felafel in Ben Yehuda Street. I'll miss the gangs of American teenagers, here on subsidised trips from the States, discovering a kind of Judaism that is based as much on the bronzed and handsome men and women in the Israeli army as it is on Talmud and prayers in the synagogue. (Well, rather more, to be honest; I think many of them could probably skip the synagogue part altogether.) I'll miss the crazy, pedestrian-unfriendly traffic lights that take you halfway across a busy intersection and then leave you stranded on a little island in the middle. I'll miss the cats. And I'll miss the quiet of shabbat and the sounds of the muezzin calling out from the mosques in the east of the city. This is a place where, even if you are not religious, you feel religion. In traditional Judaism, this is where the Shechinah - the female, worldly attribute of God - still resides and, although, I don't totally subscribe to that idea, I will miss the way the geography here inspires in you something very spiritual. And I will have to find some way of carrying all of that with me back to London.



A clue to how to do that came on Friday when a friend at the yeshiva suggested we spend a day at the beach in Tel Aviv and then go to a shabbat service in the evening that was being held not in Jerusalem, not in a synagogue even, but on the promenade looking out over the sea.


We got there around 6pm, salty and slightly burnt, to find maybe 100 people sitting around in white plastic chairs, chatting and listening to Jewish-ish music performed by a keyboard player, a flautist, a drummer and a couple of singers. In front of us was the sea, the sun beginning to set on the horizon and, rather wonderfully (see below) a jet-skier riding the waves. To begin with, if I'm honest, the service wasn't really my kind of thing. (I am a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to liturgy.) But once I had climbed down from by hoity-toity high horse it was possibly one of the best shabbat evening services I have been to for a long time. We sang songs, we sang the prayers, we prayed out over the sea, the sun set (which marked the start of the shabbat) and it all felt somehow cosmic even. And then, as if the whole thing had been choreographed by Disney, at the point when we stood to welcome the shabbat as if it/she were a bride coming to her wedding (a Kabbalistic idea - the Shechinah again), the jet-skier did a superb leap over a wave that looked as if this particular bride was already on her tropical honeymoon package, which included free watersports at the resort.


Tomorrow I will go to Dahab for some scuba diving. I have found a small resort that I hope will be suitably hippy-ish and low-key. And I have borrowed a pile of low-grade books from the non-Jewish, non-Israel, non-serious part of the yeshiva library that I am hoping to plough through with a beer or two by the sea. I'll be back here briefly next weekend but really this is my farewell to the city - for now at least. I've had a great time and I've been looking through some of the pictures that give me fond memories and which I have uploaded here before. So, because I don't really have any new ones, I've posted a few of them here again.