Jerusalem leaves me inadequate....with fragments

October 8, 2009

I’ve just spent the day in Jerusalem…  on pilgrimage I suppose for Succot. Jerusalem truly is a feast for the senses the imagination and the spectacular. The sheer magnitude of people, the faces the languages the sects and the awed. We wandered through M… the shuk of all shuks for authenticity and raw essence. I’m finding now my sensation to be profoundly rich and my words to be plainly inadequate. Jerusalem can do that to you.  To keep treasured… the ride to the train station with the furry hats and old me boys, the kind woman who taught me all the way home about Polish men and living without fear and fed me homemade snacked ….the Rocky figure of the sweaty and bouncing boxer crossing himself across the Ayalon, and the man who responded warmly to my stretching at the eternal traffic light at the intersection of Jabotinsky and Arlozorov, rak Ivrit he taught me all the way across and welcomed me to Israel. All the way home. All the way. From one handed to the next.

Yesterday October 7 all over the streets of Tel Aviv on my bicycle…. three Russian giggling woman…..I’ll have to come back to all of this…..

How can I fall in love with my life

October 3

How can I fall in love with my life?  Falling in love with a human hasn’t been so successful. How can I be fully in love with my life? My new home? My new sense of home?  To be a Jew in the Diaspora is very different than to be a Jew in Israel. The yearning is replaced by a dizzying candy store of possibilities. The loneliness is replaced by the labyrinth of faces and cultures that leaves the identification of a fellow Jew elusive.  The effort to satisfy needs and wants screaming from my Jewish soul are irrelevant here in a place where satisfaction is possible, probable, and in every inch of existence here.   My searching has been the beehive of my existence. Now I find. How to shift all consciousness to finding. To rid myself of the slave mentality. To believe I am no longer slave to the closed the distant and the not knowing. No longer slave to alienation. To separation. To the wandering of a misplaced person. What now? How now? From where inside me does this construction come? Binyan. I am tired. And weary. From the dying of old structures of being. The beings are fighting for their survival, but I no longer want them. How to sever your limbs and your rhythm? How to deny the reaching out that has been the driving force of creation in my life. How do you tame the anger for so much time in pain? How do you justify the anger and resolve to love life. I want to love my life. Every challenging chaotic bit of it. How can I evade the darkness of repetition? The familiarity of struggle? How can I fall in love with my life?