An Attempt
How do you write a kaleidoscope into words? That’s next-level ekphrasis I’m definitely not qualified to tackle.
Alas!
I might as well try.
(After all, if this piece weren’t something of a kombina, would it really be an authentic reflection on the time I spent in Israel?)
At 5:54 am, as seen from the top of a salt-and-sand pillar that felt like Styrofoam, the sun punctured the Judean Desert skyline, and the mountains bled gold.
The Garden of Gethsemane was about the size of the Garden Street courtyard in Currier House, 64 Linnaean Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. A legion of cameras and raincoats squeezed around the fenced-off grove. Did it really happen here, between these sentinel olive trees and these plastic oversized umbrellas?
Everything was blue and silent at the Sea of Galilee. God rubbed his thumb into the horizon, and the sky poured into the sea.
At 7:46 am, as seen about a quarter of a mile from the Damascus Gate, an Irishman popped his head out of the door to the compound that guarded the Garden Tomb. “Sorry! We don’t open until 8:00. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!”
The Dome of the Rock was bright blue at high noon. An artist from Russia gave me her sunglasses and made me the star of an impromptu photoshoot. She straightened my stubborn shoulder slump and told me to look directly into the sun. I was still blinking away the blindness when we hugged goodbye.
Tal Becker stood in front of us with an easy smile and practiced eyes. How much had they seen? I was on second-to-front row, asking the second-to-last question. What do you do when the past makes too many demands on the present? Sometimes peace has to come before justice.
Mark Zuckerberg stared at me with lizard-green eyes. The bus crawled past the wall, inching away from Jerusalem, into the West Bank. A concrete curtain, painted with American icons. Was it a billboard? Why did it almost feel like a tourist trap?
I will never look at triangles the same way again. Not after I stepped down into Yad Vashem, treading across the gray carpet like it was broken glass, and looked to my right.
I stood with straight legs and locked arms and floating feet, touching nothing but the water and the salt. I’d never felt like I was flying until I went swimming in the Dead Sea.
I’ve eaten hummus incorrectly my whole life. It’s not a dip; it’s a meal.
Riding on the back of a motorized scooter on the fourth night of Purim in Tel Aviv when three dozen Freddie Mercuries are staring at you from the blurry streets and the music is chasing you from the night clubs and the bus is leaving in a few minutes and you’re not exactly sure how the brakes work on this thing is — L’Chaim!
At 1:43am in the morning of our last night in the center of the world, as seen from a rusty telescope at the corner of a concrete promenade, Jerusalem is the most beautiful city in the universe. I swung the telescope upwards and found the moon. It must have followed us when we left Jerusalem. The next night, I was running across a desert moonscape, feeling weightless, bounding to the top of a salty dune, looking out across a valley flushed in light. “This means nothing to me” — I think I said, or at least I’ll say I thought — “if there isn’t a God behind it.”
Israel was a kaleidoscope of beautiful, bright, confusing, permanent moments. It was infinite worlds rolled up into one country, infinite stories squeezed into nine days. It was like scooping up the sand-shells at the shore of the Sea of Galilee, each palmful teeming with infinite variety, shouting with infinite life.
