Tale of Two Cities

If you did not know that they are separated by only a handful of kilometers and by a fourty minute bus ride, you could probably end up believing that Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are in different countries. In some cases, you could even end up believing that they are different planets. Jerusalem is one of the oldest cities in the world. Burdened and marked by the endless battles that have refreshed its walls with a new color of red every time: Jebusite and Hebrew, Assyrian and Jewish, Greek and Roman, Byzantine and Arab, Crusader and Turk, European and Levantine, Israeli and Palestinian. Its stones are worth more in words and prayers of millions of souls who every day carry it in their lips and in their hearts and by reinventing it in their minds, betray it. Its alleyways are crooked and made of white slippery stone, like lipidous veins of an enormous lythic animal. No other city is Jewish as Jerusalem is Jewish. Tel Aviv is the among the newest cities in the world. Barely one hundred years old, it grows like a cancer on the side of the oldest port in the world: Jaffa, the city of Casiopea and Andromeda, the Kraken's playhouse. The only purpose of this city was to create the new Jew, unencumbered by the dust and the stones of old Jerusalem. Moreover, the only purpose of Tel Aviv was to be Jerusalem's antithesis, its brilliant new replacement. It's streets are wide and full of trees. The only old thing in Tel Aviv is the lottery signs that get washed with the new rains. Tel Aviv's shore is forever young and changing, ebbing with the tides, while Jerusalem holds with its stone talons the sides of the unalterable mountains of Judea. Jerusalem has monasterys and synagogues. Tel Aviv has massage-parlors and discotheques. Jerusalem has the Wall. Tel Aviv has the beach. Jerusalem has the stubborness of the faithful. Tel Aviv has the carelessness of the cosmopolitan. Jerusalem is an old woman, beautiful and wise but set in her ways. Tel Aviv is a friendly coquette, voluptous and inviting. Jerusalem looks perpetually to the past. Tel Aviv is the future, running away from yesterday.

And yet, there are also synagogues in Tel Aviv- hidden in the small plazas and the streets with the name of honored heretics. And to them a handful of faithful flock on Shabbat, quietly almost surreptitiously as if not to make any noise and disturb the noise of the city with their prayers. They know their place, they are humble penitents in the city of sin. And, yes, Jerusalem has its discos too- hidden among the dusty roads of the abandoned industrial park of Talpiyot. The carrousers arrive also silently, in cabs and mopeds, covered by the evening fog. Trying to savour the contained rebelliousness of their dancing. Pouring their pagan joy in the dusty walls of the compound that muffle the beat of the music and protects the city outside. These are wary bacchanals, self-conscious menads. Somewhere in the middle of these two extremes there is life to be had. There is a road and fourty minutes and a country. Sometimes, when the rain stops, there are also cows.

Vorspeis for next post, travelling through the Judean desert