Normalcy is back on track, so it seems. Shops are opening, the horizon is less clear because of cars' pollution, and people are once again flocking to the streets, although they are fewer than the number of cabinet ministers in the newly installed mega-size government.
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Jerusalem Day is going to be celebrated against the backdrop of the coronavirus' last throes, and people from outside the city once again ask the question they always ask: How can I live in this city, where writers hardly have a communal atmosphere, a city that doesn't have the degree of cafés and cultural venues you would expect in a capital.
Indeed, it seems that as soon as Jerusalem was born it has done everything it could to avoid being a real, life-size capital city. Even in ancient times, it was far away from the King's Highway. If you wanted to visit the city, you would have to make a detour. It's modern-day transportation issues are the butt of jokes. In fact, trains have had a hard time reaching the city and leaving it as early as the Ottoman period.
The end of the pandemic provides me with another opportunity to think about the travails of living in the city. During my lifetime I have had lived in two small rural communities in which people kept talking about co-existence and quality of life, about nature and ecology, and about the sanctity of the individual as a paramount value.
In Jerusalem, there is no coexistence. The city imposes existence on its residents, however fragile and cracked this existence may be. In a bus stop, you can see an Arab student, a Christian monk, and a haredi woman waiting together. Now that the pandemic is receding, seeing such gatherings is heartening.
In Jerusalem, the individual may not be above everything else, but it is the only city that breeds its own version of individualism. Anyone who has the Jerusalem Syndrome is crazy in their own way. You are welcome here regardless of who you are: the beggars, those who sing on the street, the prophets of doom, and the outcast poets. If this is not the sanctity of individual then I do not know what individualism is.
During the days in which I wandered its empty streets, I knew how big and powerful Jerusalem can be despite its navel-gazing. It is a city of various tribes, small nations. A lot of small cocoons, a whole slew of communities, big and small.
This week I remembered that when I lived in Iowa, as part of a writers' program, the organizers took us on a field trip and promised us that we would have to hike a very tough trail up a very high mountain. We drove three and a half hours only to reach a small hill whose elevation is well below that of my bank in Jerusalem. Iowans, needless to say, had shortness of breath throughout the hike and were all but expecting a medal to honor their sacrifice at the end. Topography, it turns out, influences the depth of your thinking. You think differently when your Jerusalem horizon oscillates between highs and lows, unlike the flat horizon in Iowa that has nothing but cornfields to display.
Living in this city is hard. The sidewalks are narrow, the dumpsters overflow, and the cafes and restaurants are way too expensive. Going out for a drink, a cup of wine, with a friend is a rarity. Even the cultural scene is shallow and stale. The plans to develop the city are taken right out of science fiction, but it is wrong to assume that photogenic marathons and a lucrative bicycle race will sweep away the city's problems.
Meanwhile, it doesn't matter how splendid the sunset and sunrise in Tel Aviv can be, Jerusalem provides a different take on things, and puts the present in perspective. The city has an almost infinite scope and depth, and wherever you throw a stone you will get an echo dating thousands of years.
When life is hard, and the daily demands are becoming too hard when being sociable with others becomes hard, I tend to dive into the city's deep end; I walk among a great many relics and gardens, the embassies and churches. At the Jaffa Gate, a harp player sings, and people from around the world – Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, and British – pass him by on their way to the place Jesus was crucified. Some wacko screams his screams of a heart being broken, and the city looks on with its patient eyes, absorbing him as well under its grand history as if nothing has changed in its chronicles.
Perhaps tomorrow and or two days from now, when the heatwave subsides, I will go to the old city and put my head to rest on that big stone, the one that weighs 600 tons. Maybe tomorrow.
