Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv

I've just returned to Tel Aviv after spending the past four days in Jerusalem. I went to spend Rosh Hashanah with a fellow Dorot fellow and got a glimpse into her life in the city of gold. Over the past four days I was reminded of what it is that makes Jerusalem so Jerusalemy.

Rosh Hashanah was really wonderful. I spent the meals hopping from friends' and friends of friends' homes and spent the services in a lovely synagogue in Jerusalem that felt strangely like KI. From the interactive d'vars (which sadly were in Hebrew - but I'm sure they were insightful!) to the children running in and out of the shul to the loud man in the back overpowering everyone during the torah service.

I even had a few exciting celebrity sightings! On the first day, after learning I was a friend of his cousin's and interested in human rights, the rabbi of the synagogue pulled me over to meet the director of Rabbis for Human Rights, of whom I am a little bit of a groupie. He was friendly as can be and told me to call him after the chag to find a time to meet and talk about how I can get involved! On the second day, I went to services alone as my friends were going to a more orthodox shul and I didn't think I could start the new year with a mechitza. I sat down in an empty seat next to an older man. An hour or so later, a friend of mine who had come in late came over and whispered to me that I was sitting next to the quite famous Israeli author, A.B. Yehoshua. So, I spent the rest of the service awkwardly glancing over until he left midway through the torah service.

I spent the weekend at the home of my friend Jess, a woman who is decidedly not a Zionist, who is orthodox practicing but not orthodox thinking, and who has complicated feelings about the role of women in Judaism. Jess has been living in Jerusalem and studying at a yeshiva for the past year, despite really hating Israelis and not loving living in Israel. As you know by now, part of what I am trying to understand is the need for Israel to exist. One of Jess's many issues with the creation of a Jewish state, is her feeling that throughout Jewish history, the longing for Zion has been the glue of Jewish peoplehood, and that now that we have it, we're falling to pieces.

During services, this theme came up again. Because there was no English to distract me and because I am actually attempting to learn Hebrew, I spent the services following along the Hebrew text probably closer than I have before. It was amazing to me how often Jerusalem and Israel came up in the text. During meals, which I spent with groups of Jews who end each meal "benching" aka, singing the blessing after the meal and many other songs that they all seem to know from Jewish summer camp and growing up in more religious homes than mine. These songs came in books that had translation accompanying them, and I was again surprised to see how many of the songs focused on the longing for Zion and the rebuilding of the temple and Jerusalem.

All this lead me to realizing something I've been trying to avoid for the past month. I am sorely lacking in the Jewish knowledge department and, while I feel very well versed in the political arguments about the conflict, I feel tragically unversed in the religious history and rhetoric of the conflict. A wonderful woman I know who is now a rabbi once told me that she went to rabbinical school because she liked to be right when she was arguing, and she was sick of now knowing enough and being told she didn't have the right background to make the arguments she believed in. Don't anybody panic, I'm not going to rabbinical school, but I am afraid that in order to keep making the arguments I believe in, I have to up my Jewish knowledge. And I'm a little bit afraid that in order to do that, in a real, whole-hearted, eye on the prize kind of way, I might have to move to Jerusalem. Yikes!

While we all ponder the frightening idea of me leaving the secular-embracing, beach-having, non-Shabbat keeping city of Tel Aviv for the hilly, long-skirt wearing, American Jewy filled city of Jerusalem, I leave you with a piece from Amos Oz's memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. Here he explains the difference between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and perhaps it will give you an idea of why I am so afraid to leave Tel Aviv:

Over the hills and far away, the city of Tel Aviv was also an exciting place, from which came the newspapers, rumors of theater, opera, ballet, and cabaret, as well as modern art, party politics, echoes of stormy debates, and indistinct snatches of gossip. There were great sportsmen in Tel Aviv. And there was the sea, full of bronzed Jews who could swim. Who in Jerusalem could swim? Who had ever heard of swimming Jews? These were different genes. A mutation. “Like the wondrous birth of a butterfly out of a worm.”

There was a special magic in the very name of Tel Aviv. As soon as I heard the word “Telaviv,” I conjured up in my mind’s eye a picture of a tough guy in a dark blue T-shirt, bronzed and broad-shouldered, a poetworker- revolutionary, a man made without fear, the type they called a Hevreman, with a cap worn at a careless yet provocative angle on his curly hair, smoking Matusians, someone who was at home in the world: all day long he worked hard on the land, or with sand and mortar, in the evening he played the violin, at night he danced with girls or sang them soulful songs amid the sand dunes by the light of the full moon, and in the early hours he took a handgun or a sten out of its hiding place and stole away into the darkness to guard the houses and fields.

How far away Tel Aviv was! In the whole of my childhood I visited it five or six times at most: we used to go occasionally to spend festivals with the aunts,my mother’s sisters. It’s not just that the light in Tel Aviv was different from the light in Jerusalem, more than it is today, even the laws of gravity were different. People didn’t walk in Tel Aviv: they leaped and floated, like Neil Armstrong on the moon.

In Jerusalem people always walked rather like mourners at a funeral, or latecomers at a concert. First they put down the tip of their shoe and tested the ground. Then, once they had lowered their foot, they were in no hurry to move it: we had waited two thousand years to gain a foothold in Jerusalem and were unwilling to give it up. If we picked up our foot, someone else might come along and snatch our little strip of land. On the other hand, once you have lifted your foot, do not be in a hurry to put it down again: who can tell what coil of vipers you might step on. For thousands of years we have paid with our blood for our impetuousness, time and time again we have fallen into the hands of our enemies because we put our feet down without looking where we were putting them. That, more or less, was the way people walked in Jerusalem. But Tel Aviv! The whole city was one big grasshopper. The people leaped by, and so did the houses, the streets, the squares, the sea breeze, the sand, the avenues, and even the clouds in the sky.

Once we went to Tel Aviv for Passover, and the morning after we arrived I got up early, while everyone was still asleep, got dressed, went out, and played on my own in a little square with a bench or two, a swing, a sandpit, and three or four young trees where the birds were already singing.A few months later, at New Year,we went back to Tel Aviv, and the square wasn’t there anymore. It had been moved, complete with its little trees, benches, sandpit, birds, and swing, to the other end of the road. I was astonished: I couldn’t understand how Ben Gurion and the duly constituted authorities could allow such a thing.How could somebody suddenly pick up a square and move it? What next—would they move the Mount of Olives, or the Tower of David? Would they shift the Wailing Wall?

People in Jerusalem talked about Tel Aviv with envy and pride, with admiration, but almost confidentially: as though the city were some kind of crucial secret project of the Jewish people that it was best not to discuss too much—after all, walls have ears, and spies and enemy agents could be lurking around every corner.

Telaviv. Sea. Light. Sand, scaffolding, kiosks on the avenues, a brand new white Hebrew city, with simple lines, growing up among the citrus groves and the dunes. Not just a place that you buy a ticket for and travel to on an Egged bus, but a different continent altogether.