Jerusalem Day

I loved and hated Jerusalem. Loved and hated. These were the two sides of myself I had to reckon with from my bedsit on Yafo Street: the side that was quiet and easy, no fuss; and the side that was alien, terse and unforgiving. What I loved, I also hated. And what I hated, I somehow loved. I had never felt freer, nor more trapped. Never more sated, nor more hungry. Never more lost, nor more found. I was a stranger there, even to myself, just a brooding shadow following the body of a girl. “Where will the girl go today?” I would wonder, tying up her boot laces, too hot for the desert climate. I hated being an outsider but I loved that it felt like a secret. My secret loving lead to a refuge made of secrets: whispered prayers between the cracks in The Wall; a passage of white where the crowds would not go. My secret loving brought me beauty—antique chairs made of glass mosaics; brass chandeliers to hold flickering candles; tattered, sun-bleached cloths like flags, waving in the wind. Behind a door, there was love. Every door, love and love and love and love.  But in turning back to take the path the opposite way, hate and hate and hate and hate. I was missing something, then. Couldn’t hear its sound in the chatter of the shuk, or see its look on the limestone bricks. God Himself was all concealed and out in the open at once, blessing His city or watching it fall, as He watched me, too, rising and falling as I wrestled to get free from Him.
On Ben Yehuda Street, a young woman came and sat beside me on a bench. “Are you writing a book?” she asked me in Hebrew, my notebook lying open on my knees, pen scratching furiously. I smiled sheepishly and she translated. “A kind of a book, I guess,” I replied. I looked at the writing. All rubbish, I thought. “You are making something beautiful,” she said, “and I will love to be able to support you someday.” And there He was. God. Not a pocket lacking coins or a soldier with a gun or a hungry look in the market. Not a cold shoulder or a favorite pen lost or a barren room in the back of a house. Not a door with two sides, or a Temple Mount or a border wall. Just God and a city and a chance to choose again.