From
the pond of wasted adolescent days to Jerusalem and back.
by P. David Hornik of PJ Media
In the first phase of my life my
“Jerusalem” was a pond. It lay along the golf course in Clifton Knolls, a
development near which I grew up. (It was in the town of Clifton Park, New YorkFor
the wild bunch I hung out with in my teens, the golf course was a haven—at
night. The cops—though their cars roamed the streets of the development assiduously,
the bright beams splitting the night—almost never bothered with the golf
course. You could get drunk out there under the stars, feeling the world was
yours, spacious, endless.
That wasn’t, though, what made the
pond a sacred place. That happened later at night—past midnight, when the
silence out there was total except a sound a frog made like a bass string being
slowly, pensively plucked. This was something even more clandestine than the
drinking with the buddies; it involved sneaking out of a bedroom window, a
tryst at a street corner, and making our way in the darkness to the “place by
the water” (a paraphrase).
This went on for a few weeks during
one of the summers. In an adolescence bedeviled by shyness and frustration, I
had somehow found someone to go there with, alone. The magnificence, for me, of
the intimacy; the beauty of the setting—breezes rustling the leaves along the pond—all
this was overwhelming. The girl went away; I never understood why, until
e-contact with her—over the past couple of years—provided some clues.
But the memories did not go away. A
sort of religion of the pond—of itself, without my prompting—formed in my mind:
the deep, ineffable tranquility, the sense of a different dimension, secluded,
peaceful, and final. In the coming years I would drift back to it often.
In the second phase of my life my
Jerusalem has been Jerusalem. I went to live in it in 1985, and continued to
live in or near it for 21 years. Its stone buildings, pines, mountain air,
incredibly soft, hushed dusks seeped into the inner terrain and conquered it.
Sometime in the late 1980s I read
the brilliant book The Zionist Revolution
by the late Israeli scholar Harold Fisch. Published in 1978, five years after
the Yom Kippur War, it argued that, to give the Israeli people the necessary
strength to cope with a hostile environment, Zionism needed to be an
essentially religious phenomenon.
Fisch wrote that the word Zion—a
synonym for Jerusalem and the land of Israel as a whole—had “inevitable
overtones” and was “semantically charged.” It was for me an arresting
observation. I couldn’t deny it: for me, there was no way Zion or Jerusalem
could be a word like Boston or Dallas. It was charged with a different content.
Those few words by Fisch—they’re on
page 26 of the book—crystallized for me more than anything else what I was
doing there in Zion. They didn’t turn me into what’s called an observant Jew;
but they confronted me with a question: “Is Jerusalem a place like other places,
or is it infused with something else, something outside of time?”
Already by then, having lived in it
for a few years, the answer was clear.
It has taken another twenty-five
years or so to start to see what links the pond and Jerusalem.
Perhaps, since the differences are
so vast, it’s not surprising that it’s taken so long. On the one hand, a
lonely, poetically sensitive kid responding to some stolen hours “by the
water.” On the other, a city whose name resonates through history and major
religions like no other.
But just as one could say that the
lonely kid imposed a significance on the pond, one could say the ancient
Israelites did the same with the mountain town. Just a pond beside a golf
course, like so many others; just a city, perhaps with some nice effects of
color, light, and mood, like so many others.
Or, one could say that certain
places have qualities that allow us to be touched by the transcendent, and so
become “holy places” for us. That those qualities inhere in the places already,
and aren’t something we invent.
True, my pond is not considered a
“holy place”—but I doubt that many people have known its more intimate self as
I have. As for Jerusalem, it’s been having that effect on many people for a
long time, and it keeps having it.
****
P. David
Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Beersheva and author of
the new book Choosing Life in Israel. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/
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