End of Kipple #7

February 19, 2011
Let me begin with the way it is.

I am on a bus. A boy sits next to me. Yedidiah. He is fifteen years old. We exchange a few sentences and he helps me with my Hebrew homework. He does what all of us of the digital generation do: stuffs his ears with headphones and sinks into the music.

I know how it feels.

He smiles at me and then turn into himself. The world disappears and the bus keeps driving. It carries all of us forward, each in our own private universe with the volume turned up. He falls asleep on my shoulder.

This doesn't bother me like it would where I come from. We are already friends. Distant cousins. The bond is strong. Soul is thicker than water, not blood. We have had too much of that and know there will be more, so we thicken the substance of ourselves, layer upon layer. Breath mingles in the air and we are sure to keep ourselves aware of deeper connections than those of red rivers running through our veins.

Yedidiah wakes up and asks me for my contact information. We exchange. Now we check up on each other every once in a while. It is nice to know that strangers aren't strangers here, that no one ascends alone.

At home in Jerusalem, life is difficult. I feel like I am five years old again because I'm learning the basics. Hebrew is different from English in so many ways. The grammatical structure, the letters, the conjugation of verbs. I am frustrated because language is my specialty and Hebrew is never going to be a language that I own. It will always own me. I will never be able to mold it like clay with my eyes closed. It will always be ever-so-slightly just beyond my reach.

At home, in Jerusalem, life is lonely. In order to make friends, I listen to people talk. But in general, I don't talk about anything that is really important to me. In order to make friends, I sacrifice being known. I've got to get out more. This is my situation amongst the other Olim. We all have at least one thing in common: being insane enough to move here and become citizens. This is where the commonalities end. I am getting out more. I am making some Israeli friends. Developing older ones.

I wonder how it's possible to have more in common with people who grew up half a world away from me than my own compatriots. I wonder how's possible to be born so out of place.

At home, in Jerusalem, I tell my teacher that she has a horrible teaching style and what to do to change it. She listens for a little while and then she forgets. I decide to move down a level. I need the review and better teachers. It is not worth the frustration.

I deal with the medical system. I start early with scheduling appointments because I know it's going to take forever. How wrong I was. It doesn't take forever. It takes a million forevers. Eight days out of ten I'm in some office or other. It drives me insane. But if you live here, you have to learn to just go-with-the-flow. You have to learn to be assertive.

When the nurse refuses to do your blood test three days in a row for no apparent reason, you yell back. When she tells you to take home a cup for a urinalysis and cart your pee across a city twice when you're standing in the lab: you don't comply. You scream and throw the (empty) cup in her face until she gets the point. You don't try to conceive of logic. There is no logic to anything here. Chaos is the natural order of things.


So you don't ask why the window doesn't quite fit the window frame. And you don't ask why the lights in the bathroom vanity don't turn on. You don't ask why they're not even wired to an electrical outlet. But they sure do look pretty.

You also don't ask why the city has shut down a main traffic artery to motor vehicles for a train that never opens to the public for whom it was built. You don't ask why you can see this train running back and forth constantly filled with workers in yellow vests taking naps with their feet up on the plastic-covered seats. You don't ask why the bridge built for the train can't support the train's weight and why it thus serves no purpose whatsoever. You don't bring up the point that this causes the whole line to lead nowhere.

You just don't ask.

You come up with theories: they're running it back-and-forth to convince us that they're "working on it". No problem. There's no problem. We fix later.

Jerusalem crawls with the mundane commingled with the Holy. Holiness is a practicality here, like the rule to let everything slide. Holiness drips off people like rain and floods the streets.

Jerusalem is slippery when it rains because Jerusalem stone has no traction. Thankfully, it has rained a lot this year. May it rain, may it rain, may it rain.

Jerusalem is not my city--but for now, it'll have to do.