Sometimes living in this crazy city is so rich and overstimulating, that the best way to make sense of it all is to extract a few key moments – a symphony of moments from the past month.
Sonata
Things were slow enough in the criminal world that police decided they could concentrate on rounding up some key rabbis who have endorsed an incendiary book, The King’s Bible (Torat HaMelech). The book has been problematic since it’s publication for encouraging violence against non-Jews, and when major rabbis endorse it they are called in for questioning by the police, to determine if the rabbi in question has engaged in hate speech or not.
In June, when a few important rabbis refused to answer the police’s summons, they were arrested. First was Rabbi Dov Lior, next, was Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, son of Shas spiritual leader Ovadya Yosef. Lior’s arrest caused widespread rioting, and Yosef’s arrest would be sure to light off a powder keg, pundits, haredim, and reporters believed. The Jpost religion reporter and I went into “Yosef arrest watch.” Haredi riots can spontaneously erupt and collapse in a matter of moments, depending on what the rabbis tell the demonstrators to do, so timing is essential.
On Thursday morning, SMS messages raced around the haredi community to the Knesset, and then from the Knesset spokespeople to the reporters. “Yosef’s house surrounded by police cars, arrest imminent,” read the text message. I threw on a long skirt, long sleeves, and closed-toed shoes, jumped on my bike, and sprinted to Yosef’s house, about 8 km away, through the ultra-orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem, helplessly grabbing at my skirt to make sure it didn’t get stuck in the wheels.
I arrived at Yosef’s house to see the mass of Jerusalem reporters, my “coworkers,” standing around, looking bored. Apparently, one of the neighbors, frustrated with the media city that had set up shop outside the apartment waiting for the arrest, had complained to the police. When the police arrived, haredi students in a nearby yeshiva assumed they were coming to arrest the rabbi (who, it turned out, was not even at home). Their text messages snowballed to mobilize thousands of haredim and right-wing Knesset members, and within minutes hundreds of people had gathered outside of the apartment, much to the chagrin of the neighbors who just wanted some peace and quiet.
Three days later, Yosef was briefly arrested, prompting an afternoon of riots. Haredi riots are a breath of fresh air – I never feel worried during haredi riots, because there’s always someone in control – an important rabbi calling the shots who has absolute control over the situation, telling the demonstrators what to chant and when to use violence. It’s a challenge reporting on haredi riots as a woman (“You’re bothering us by standing here,” one man said to me, despite my modest dress. “Funny,” I answered sarcastically, and perhaps lacking the impartiality of true journalists, “you’re bothering me by not working and living off my taxes.”)
It was one of those Jerusalem days: the morning spent mirred in unbridled hatred of the state in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, and then suddenly I was in Tel Aviv, enjoying White Night, an all-night cultural festival, under the stars in the city that never sleeps. Around 3:30 am, we found ourselves walking toward a free sunrise concert of Motti Caspi/Shlomo Gronich. I only know a few of their songs, but the concert was just phenomenal. As the sky was turning pink, I looked around at the beach-side concert – Israelis of all shapes and sizes, no one thinking about rioting or violence or water cannons or hate-filled bibles or land rights or the impossibility of peace. Everyone here, 4:45 am and up and dancing, was furiously living in this wonderful moment and not caring about the day to come or the impossible political future.
The music washed over us as the pounding waves added their rhythm to the bass line, and little by little the sky grew pinker and brighter. I was so happy to be there, to be able to experience those extremes and still enjoy the moment for everything that’s important. The show ended and we ran into the surf in our clothes just as the sun peeked over the horizon, salt water mixing with our exhaustion. I had been up for 23 hours, from ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem in long skirts to tank tops in secular Tel Aviv, the sun was rising, the whole weekend was in front of us, and life was beautiful.
Adagio
In Jerusalem, there are moments that won’t let you forget that we’re living in a “matzav,” (situation) even when you’re just going about the most mundane actions. After a three-year hiatus, I’ve returned to the frisbee field, to play pick-up with some Australian Christian volunteers and Israeli friends I met at the climbing wall in Teddy Stadium. The public parks and playgrounds in Jerusalem are one of the few places where regular Israelis and Arabs interact, sometimes politely, sometimes, less so.
In any other country, we could have just asked the family of Arab children to stop kicking their soccer ball through our game, and that would have been the end of the story. But here in Jerusalem, it took on awkward proportions. “This is our area,” we tried explaining to them, somewhat guiltily, aware of the layers of our words. “You can play over there, but you can’t play here.”
In any other country, when the kids kept kicking their soccer ball through our game, we would have told them to get lost, or appealed to their parents. Instead, the kids yelled back at us, who knows what they said, but it sure felt like they were yelling about the occupation and soldiers and the “matzav.”
It was awkwardly understood by all sides that this wasn’t any other place, this was Jerusalem, where questions of space and ownership, even during an innocent sports game, are steeped in politics and tinged with guilt.
Scherzo
Jerusalem’s cinema community is a decidedly left-wing group, so the Jerusalem Film Archives must walk a fine line to ensure that they don’t strike too nationalistic of a tone and alienate the very artists they’re trying to support. The montage that was made by the film archives in honor of the 28th annual Jerusalem Film Festival accomplished that goal: it started with patriotic snapshots of Jews in the 1930s toiling under a Middle Eastern sun, moved to grinning, gangly models in a fashion show in Tel Aviv in 1945, and included the typical scenes of the founding of the state and David Ben Gurion striding through Sde Boker, shots of heroism in the war of Independence, the Six Day, and the Yom Kippur War.
But after the Yom Kippur War, the political shots abruptly stopped. From 1973 to 2011, the film archives jumped across genres and showed cultural struggles of poverty, immigrants, sports victories, classic Israeli movies.
The message was clear: after 1973, it gets messy. To me, it seems that before the Yom Kippur War, Israel was more or less united in the belief that they were headed in the right direction. After 1973, Israel was no longer the struggling victim, but an international powerhouse. And with prosperity and success came complexity.
Some days I would trade anything to live in the Israel before the state’s establishment, to be sure in my convictions, to have a clear enemy and a clear goal: to build the Jewish state. Today, nothing is clear, everything is complicated and has multiple sides and reasons, and there’s no way to unite the majority of the cinematic audience, or really any audience, behind a political movement or idea.
It’s exhausting, this second-guessing, this uncertainty. It’s messy, and it doesn’t fit well into video montages.
Rondo
Thursday night, 9:53 pm. It’s been a long week, which started with a forest fire (more on that later) and just didn’t seem to end. I’d long turned in my articles for the day, and was cooking dinner with a beer in hand when the phone rang, with the spokesperson for the City of David, who also represents the Jews living in Beit Yehonatan, a heavily-fortified apartment building in the middle of Silwan. Immediately, my stomach dropped – this could not be good news.
“Alo?” I answered, tentatively.
“Stop the presses! Stop the presses! Make room on page 1!” Udi said breathlessly in Hebrew. Having never heard the phrase “stop the press!” or Udi’s phrase for page one (“Amud HaSha’ar,” the gate page) I had no idea what was going on. I assumed someone had been murdered at the gate to the Old City.
“What gate?!”
“No gate! The gate page!”
“Wait, what gate page? What am I stopping? What’s going on?!” I was getting more and more worked up, worried that I was going to have a major breaking news story at 10:00 pm on a Thursday, every reporter’s worst nightmare.
It took us about two full minutes for me to understand. Then Udi laid down the bombshell: archaeologists had “just” discovered a small golden bell in an ancient drainage channel, about the size of a thumb, which they believe could have belonged to a high priest, or Cohanim.
Only in Jerusalem would an archaeological find be breaking news an hour before deadline on Thursday night. It was a major find, something that scholars can use to prove the bible existed and that Jewish people have been on this land for thousands of years.
The press release was also breathlessly excited in its wording. It seems that an important man or high priest was walking down the road, when a bell came off his robe and rolled into the drainage pipe, where it lay for 2,o00 years, the press release stated, inviting readers to picture the poor bell, bouncing down the ancient street, before it rolled to a stop in an ancient sewage pipe, where it would be discovered 2,000 years later, late on a Thursday night.
I tend to think that the spokesman was playing a game with the reporters, keeping it till the last minute so we were forced to put it on prominent pages. It was on the front page of many newspapers the next day. I only have one question: if it waited for 2,000 years, why couldn’t we have waited until Sunday?
2,000-year old golden bell discovered in Jerusalem
By MELANIE LIDMAN
07/22/2011 15:25
Notes in the Cracks 