JewsByChoice.Org

cross-posted on True Ancestor

I’ve sometimes thought that Judaism cannot make sense to you if you’ve never been to Jerusalem. And it follows that neither can Islam, or even Christianity — in its elemental, formative, rebellious beginnings — really make sense if you’ve never been to the one city in the world that has loosed more radical thinking, and more love, and more violence upon the world than any other.

I revisited that thought after I read this stunning, rambling piece by Richard Rodriguez in the January ‘08 issue of Harper’s (a piece sent to me, of course, by that great literary omnivore, me True Ann-Sister). The sun-blasted warrens of that great and bewildering city have been fought over, partitioned, bombed, bulldozed, consecrated, desecrated and celebrated so completely, and so repeatedly, that it’s hard to understand what lies under the detritus of all that dogma and delirium. Everywhere you look, every stone you step on, has been in the presence of an occurrence or a person of such significance, a force of such magnitude, that it’s beyond our dull comprehension.

And yet those same stones and walls are rumbled over by buses, trod upon by tourists and commuters; lives go on there with the same precarious monotony and the same fevered bliss and bottled fury that Jerusalem has fostered for millennia.

I’ve been to Jerusalem four times in my life. In each visit after the first (1979), it is so unchanged upon first inspection from the previous visit, and appears so completely transformed after just a day, that it seems like a chameleon or a mirage. You can’t believe what you’re seeing; you can’t believe that what you didn’t see hours earlier now seems to proclaim itself to you. The scales literally fall from your eyes.

Jerusalem is a place of polar opposites, a place that radiates polarization into the world. But it is also a place that constantly transmits signals of radical hope, of messianic madness, and of the merest sliver of the possibility that you really can live in a place where one mundane existence touches another, more unseen, more miraculous one.

Jerusalem is bipolar: it is love and hate, madness and wisdom. Whenever I go, some part of me can’t wait to get the hell out of there. That very same part of me — that loves the Divine, that yearns for the Transcendent, but that also just wants some peace and quiet — then cannot wait to return.

Jerusalem — its pecularity, not its politics — is why peace will always be possible in the Middle East, and why it will never be fully realized. It’s why there will always be proselytizers, dogmatists and fanatical dreamers, and why there will be people who want no more dogma or dreaming. Jerusalem is a proof-text for unity and for chaos at the same time, in the same instant, and within the same atom.

And it’s why, once you’ve been to Jerusalem, and been through a blast-furnace of a day, and the afternoon light starts to glow and that afternoon breeze redeems you from desert madness, you cannot see anything the same way, ever again.

Including your faith, or lack thereof.