Growing up as I did, I
put a lot of energy and internal thought as to how I might feel if I should
ever reach the holy city of Jerusalem. And well, today I got a chance to
finally have those internal discussions and meditations answered. Yeah, it
wasn’t all I was expecting it to be. But then again, I couldn't kid myself into
expecting some revelatory ‘light bulb’ moment, where everything would just
click into place and the whole world would make sense. What instead I was
greeted with was a city that I knew that my history (that is to say the history
of my people, not me directly) was linked with.
Still, having the service
with the other birthright buses Mount Scopus observation point where I got a
chance to look at this enormous city that I’d seen in all the pictures was that
first moment that I really had a chance to reflect on what I was seeing, there
in front of me, and not on some small computer screen. Yes, it wasn’t what I
thought it would be. But it was something. Something I’d never seen or experienced
before (most certainly not with Hava Nagila playing in the background) nor with
the wind nearly blowing off my fedora. And those moments of expectations being
lost, but also experienced anew continued, with the climbing and walking of the
inner walls, to getting to put my own note into the cracks into the western
wall.
Not everything is as it
seems in this place, most certainly not in the heads of those coming to it with
expectations made ahead of time.
-Paul Barudin
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