Week 11

On Friday night, as I meandered toward the beach to listen to the white feet of the sea paw at the rocks near Jaffa's old city, and savored one of my last days living alone, I passed a band warming up at the end of Rothschild Street.  A few blocks later, my feet left the concrete and breathed into the sand.  A cluster of people sat on a stone wall nearby, smoking hookahs and grilling meat, and I savored the unregulated chaos that sometimes leaks into the seams of this place.  A beach shower behind a cafe splattered the dark sands with water hours after someone had used it to rinse off their sandy feet.  I walked up from my wordless conversation with the sea, and tugged the chain into silence.  In the distance, Jaffa's Old City pulsed above its blinking blue and white footlights, like a stage set for some childhood dream - a dream of stone alleys, clock-towers and bats.

The endlessly searching sea knocked at the shore's rocky threshold, reached its fingers between the rocks, leaned in and whispered through a chink in the invisible walls of my solitude - and its soft roar began to echo into this sprawling concrete and glass city, the pulse of the street, the endless particularities of Mystery.  The water sung to me of softening, of slowing into a point of contact with the Other - of rededicating myself to paths of light and connection in this week of Hannukah (literally,
"dedication", "inauguration").  The sea's dance with the land evoked the truth that relationship often requires an Other: a sense of not just seeing the world, but being seen by the world.  Just as the mitzvah of Hannukah is not just to light the candles, but to see the flame of the candles - so our Divine spark isn't something that we simply emanate into the darkness, but a beacon that illuminates the eyes of someone else.

I'm writing from my new apartment, which I'm sharing with an Israeli roommate.  This is the place I'll live for the remainder of my time in Tel Aviv.  I have a cough, and our refrigerator just broke.  None the less, I feel like someone just removed sandbags from my shoulders and chest.  Like, on a deeper level - despite my cold, and my spoiling food - I'm actually healing from a sickness that started a little over two months ago when I came to a strange new city and began, for the first time in my life, to live alone.  There's a way that being around other people - their objects, their stories, their energy - plugs me in to a Presence much bigger than me, a field of being so immense that, at times, I can sense the contours of the Divine in this contact.  It's like reaching tentatively out in the dark and feeling the sweet touch of a warm hand offering support and affirmation: umitahat zra'ot olam ("And underneath are the everlasting arms") (Deut 33:27).

In some ways, these "snapshots" were initially my attempt to shine in the eyes of someone else - friends and strangers, alike.  Because I had no immediate human companionship (no roommates, no close friends) the first two months I was here, I lost my sense of any imminent or transcendent Other to open and shut doors to, to sleep and wake before, from which to hide and reveal my inner light.  Now that I'm living with a roommate, and beginning to weave together a community here, my sense of being alone, of being a thin straight unfurling of time, has transformed into a deeper experience of flow.  The wax of time is thicker and seems to burn longer.  Indeed, time itself feels less simply sequential and more wonderfully consequential in being bound up with other lives, other stories - other wicks burning away their minutes and hours and days...together.

Now, the moment I had imagined would come when I initially planned this semester abroad has arrived: at the same time that I'm finally beginning to feel the start of a community here, some twisting together of wicks into a network of light and warmth between home and world, between work and study - I know that I'll be leaving all of this in two months.  In eight weeks, I'll take this havdalah candle, and dip it into the ocean as I fly over it on my way to London, then Boston.  As the smoke of days past rises from this ceremony of separation, it will for a moment linger in the air, tracing the outline of the memories of these braided wicks into the sky: long bike rides through the desert on the Arava-Hazon ride, Havdalah on the beach with friends I made at a Shabbat gathering two weeks prior, sitting sometimes intrigued and often straining to engage in classes, dancing at nightclubs with flashing lights and Israeli celebrities, rolling on the floor of the Jewish-Arab community center for a contact jam, teaching hoop dance at Circus Galilee, offering a d'var Torah at a Hannukah gathering for the young professional Jewish community here - all of those moments that have begun to weave me into this world.

On my way back from the sea, the jam band was in full force, and people were taking turns break dancing in the street as cabs honked and narrowly missed them.  The trumpeter spoke to the drummer in brassy bursts and the drummer's sticks said "Yes!" in the most stunning way possible.  I stood surrounded in the familiar and unknowable language of music, and swayed in the freedom of collective offering.  The music became an ether that built connection to the world outside this corner as people gathered and danced on nearby street corners.  A sense of spontaneous arising drew each note into the shape of something larger, a word so true as to be silent, some invisible holy grid of energy that animated the cabs, the passers by, my clapping and laughter.