Week 9

The Thai woman sitting next to me on the sheirut today from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv intermittently broke into song, or perhaps it was one long half-uttered prayer triggered by the driver's heart-stopping halts.  Occasionally, I could hear the synthesized sound-byte of a mechanical camera, and eventually located its source - in the front seat, every two seconds during our departure from Jerusalem, someone was taking indiscriminate snapshots out his window: highway - click, hill of apartment buildings - click, prefabricated macolet - click....

A week ago, I brought a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to Hevron.  Knowing it was in my bag - perhaps a bit smashed, warmed by the heat of the day - provided some comfort as I gazed at spray painted Stars of David on sealed front doors of Palestinian households, leading to an empty street and an empty market place.  My mind turned these images over and over, trying to fit them into previous categories of experience, into more comfortable memories - but instead historical photographs of Jewish stores on kristallnacht came to mind...a mind, mind you, careful about not conflating other narratives because of how sticky and problematic that becomes.  Much like my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Before I returned to Tel Aviv, I walked into the worship area above the Cave of Machpelah, where in claustrophobic chandelier-lit chambers around the synagogue, mausoleums rested like heavily-frosted wedding cakes - and verses about Abraham purchasing the cave, and Sarah being buried there hung everywhere stitched in felt.  Various traditions have determined that, in addition to the three biblical patriarchs and matriarchs - Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah - Joseph, and perhaps even Esau's head are interred there.

As I write this, I'm doing so from the "halfway point" in my semester in Israel.  A week and a half ago, I passed through something dark, small and painful that I wasn't ready to talk about right away.  For a few days, I felt like the world was collapsing on me when I would arise in the morning, and the first waking breath each morning stung like smoke.  But I'm now beginning to feel the sharp brokenness of the everyday softening under me as I walk over the thresholds of previously uncertain experiences once and again.  Of course it's easy to take refuge in the relative joy of this moment, and from here to notice that when I'm depressed it's impossible to get perspective on this sudden, stark emotional compression.  From here, it's easy to see that the unbearable tightness and sense of choicelessness always has a way of bearing me through an existential birth canal of sorts to new kinds of embodiment, breath and space.

In any case, I'm deeply grateful to be breathing again.

On Sunday, I read a book on the train for an hour and a half until I arrived at Akko, then hopped on a shared taxi to the entrance to a small Arab village, where I was picked up and brought to a school gymnasium, which was filled with all different aged kids, who were balancing on their arms, tumbling, stretching.

This was Circus Galilee, a Jewish-Arab youth circus.  Dagan, their instructor, asked me to teach an off-the-cuff hoop workshop to them.  As I taught, the kids would call my name, "Adam, Adam!", and would show me wonderful improvisations on tricks I'd just taught them.  Watching the director instruct them to create duo and group performances with these moves was such a treat for me.  After they moved onto the last session of their practice, the silks, trapezes and lyra made their grand descent from their ceiling perches, and the kids began ascending into the air as suddenly as spiders - while Dagan taught me contact ball.  "It's all about staying under it, finding the under, just letting it go up and down", he instructed.

The next day, I walked back from my Spiritual Counseling class in which we talked about a chess game someone played recently, and the flood of associations, memories, and emotions that necessarily constitute any encounter with another person - even while playing a board game - and make us both subjects, both Buberian "Thous".  As I reflected on this, and walked down the stone pedestrian path in Jerusalem's city center, I began to feel a dizziness, like my head had gently broken open, and my third eye was shining at everyone like a lantern, and inviting the light of each person to shine back at me.  In that moment, I had an experiential encounter with those Eternal Divine Arms - Zra'ot Olam - that are always holding me up, a real sense of the myriad visible and invisible ways people are supporting me in pursuing the desires I articulate loudly and clearly enough.  And for a few brief seconds, I felt like I could relax into the gravity of this life, this world.