It's been one week since I arrived independently in Jerusalem, and I've gone on a naked run, heard a few Holocaust jokes and a serious suggestion to nuke the Kotel "so that all the compulsively religious will be forced to think rationally about their faith." So now I'm wondering: is it something about me that seeks out blasphemers, or have I stumbled into a hotbed of rebellion?
One of my aims in traveling is to give myself to a place, never say no to anything. I thought this philosophy would lead me on a skullcapped, sunburned desert wander, but it hasn't. Instead, I've come into a shade and darkness of nightlife and belief.
I've come upon deep, indissoluble questions here, that concern my new friends with an immediacy I've never considered and an urgency I've never felt. Like: what does it mean to be a Jew? My first Israeli friend is a gay girl from Tel Aviv who I tried to pick up. It didn't work out to my plan. But now she has become some kind of great friend, the kind I like to have with me at all times, especially during the in between times of a strange pilgrimage like this. I tried to convince her to join me in Jerusalem, and she said, "No, I hate it there!" I asked her why. She said, with a sensitivity I hadn't considered, "They think they're more Jewish than me."
In history, the wandering Jew practices dissent by maintaining his identity in a foreign place. But what form does this iconoclasm take in the land of the Jews? And it occurs to me that this is the most powerful thing in our tradition, dissent and nonconformity and, as Mort Saul says, acting as the conscience of the world. So, when the brilliant atheist whose couch I'm crashing on suggests a moment of memorial day silence among the secular Jews here when the Shabbat air raid siren goes off (Memorial Day being the only other time, besides for air raids, that the siren blasts), I listen.
But what will happen to us secular Jews in a world without anti-Semitism and our fathers' religion?–which, admittedly, is only and maybe not even a future possibility. Will we lose the powerful culture of Spinoza, Kafka and Lou Reed? Is a world without boundaries preferable, a world with more possibilities than just for or against? Should we install malfunctioning nuclear cores at the Kotel, Mecca and all of the major televangelism studios, and build the whole thing up from the quarks?
It's an experiment I'd like to try if there were more than one world.
1 comment:
That's the logo used by Shemspeed.com. The guy who runs it, Erez, is a cool dude. I didn't know there was a Diwon club out there. Coooooooooool. Awesome to see a blog up and running. Wish I could have had more of a chance to blog from the road while we were there.
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