Why I don't live in Jerusalem
(Page 2 of 2)
March/April 1996
By Hillel Halkin, Moment (www.momentmag.com)
And today? Today Jerusalem is a city of half a million people with suburbs and traffic jams and government offices and a university and some nice cafés and a few picturesque neighborhoods and too many tourists and the world's highest concentration of religious lunatics, and the real cultural and commercial work of the nation gets done in Tel Aviv, where Israel's productive life goes on.
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They open again on summer nights when the Jerusalem breeze riffles in my face, smelling of jasmine and pine needles, as cool after a hot day as spring water on a long hike.
On brilliant blue winter mornings when, walking on King George Street, I look up and am startled to see the Mountains of Moab across the Jordan, as clearly etched as if space no longer existed, the last veils stripped from the world.
On afternoons when I watch the sun go down from the Mount of Olives or Mount Scopus, the swelling city on one side and the Wilderness of Judaea on the other, each rising to meet the other and falling back again like surf, and I think: Here is the knife edge between man's busyness and God's emptiness; I am standing on it right now.
It is then that I think that the truth about Jerusalem is that it is everything it is said to be, the hard nodule from which the world was created. But it is too much for us and always has been. How do you live in a city that faces the gates of heaven? You seal their drafts as best you can with temples and synagogues and churches and mosques and walls and halls and pedestrian malls, and then you preen for the pilgrims in order to make a living like the rest of us. And they come, the pilgrims, and climb towers and descend steps and explore grottoes and run their hands wonderingly along the old stones, and now and then one of them feels the draft on his neck and runs about shouting that he is Jesus or King David.
It breaks my heart, Jerusalem. I'm happy I don't live there. I can't stand the pride of those who do. It's always a bit painful for me to visit. I suspect that's only because I'm jealous.
Reprinted from Moment, December 1995.
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