Sidewalk's End

It's sometimes disturbing to reflect on the fact that there is a smorgasbord of belief systems here, all of which wave their flag, sometimes stridently and even belligerently. Finding one's own path through a tangled and frequently contradictory clamour of voices, each with their own vocal champion waving a version of the banner of truth is sometimes like cutting a path through a thorn bush, or wading through a glutinous, almost impassable quicksand.

Far from reinforcing one's own set of beliefs, one often finds oneself questioning their validity in the face of so much strident certainty. I listened to a speaker at a 'healing meeting' who was manifestly not healed. I spoke the other day with someone for whom the Word, emphatically capitalised, was the beginning and the end of their belief system and all preaching without it as the primary focus was of no value. I murmured unthreateningly about the perils of translation and interpretation in the light of modern findings. I was rounded upon and accused of 'Greek thinking' as compared to 'Jewish thinking'. I pondered this for awhile and came to the conclusion that a Jewish way of approaching the world is well wrapped in Shel Silverstein's poem. 'Where the Sidewalk Ends'.

"There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends." 

There's a metaphor implicit in his writing. The place where the sidewalk ends is intellectually messy, confused and sometimes appears to lack meaning. It's a turbulent, uncomfortable place where the smoke blows black, obscuring the view of the horizon. Sometimes, all that is left to us is to try as best we can in the twilight of our doubt to follow the white arrows, not really knowing where they might lead us.
I wondered , if my 'religion' had lost its lustre, my lampstand removed from its place, whether this was my fault, not God's. Had I held others to blame for my own strange bewilderment? 

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote at length about man's metaphysical loneliness, with which to some extent - even as a non-Jew,  I can identify. He opens his major philosophical work, 'God in Search of Man', with sharp words.

'It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.'

Enough, then, of religion with all its false certainty, behaviourism and external piety. Pursuing the chalk arrows is less predictable, but perhaps more like it's supposed to be.

Coming Out

This is a strange time. Having followed its politics and listened to its heartbeat with the long stethoscope of distance, it is a different and otherworldly experience to be back. I have a job again, which means I rise regularly to a soothingly melodic alarm, the poetry of the city in my ears like a half-remembered song, resonating gently at the back of my mind.

The city is full. Full of contrast, opinion and the suppressed violence of abundant dialectic, the pulse of which is almost palpable, like an adrenalin-fuelled artery, close to the surface. The haredim move uneasily, weak-eyed with study, hurrying past the goyim, the less religious, the reformed and the seculars, as if to touch would be to contaminate, their slight variations in clothing proclaiming their rabbinical allegiances. Young, bright-eyed, confident people laugh and sometimes dance in the streets to the music of whomever is playing there, drink arak and grapefruit juice in the bars, curly black-haired girls shriek at the tram stops. The Old City, eternally patient, throws open her ancient doors to the world, her marbled streets once rough now worn smooth, polished and slippery with pilgrims' sandals, as they follow crosses down the Via Dolorosa. Queues still form at dusk to enter the tiny sanctuary inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, guarded by unsmiling, black-cowled Orthodox monks. Tiny, ragged bookshops, exchange and new, are full of welcome and freedom to browse. I buy rather fewer hard copy books these days - the encroachment of technology allows me to buy whatever I need online and read it on an iPad, slim and luminous. Yet, the smell of old books - everything from leather bound volumes on Jewish thought in Hebrew to dog-eared copies of ten-year-old Stephen King novels reminds me of school libraries and the fustiness of long-abandoned rooms. A book caught my eye. It is not often that one chances upon a masterpiece, peeping shyly out between the poetry and travel sections. Not since Brigid Brophy's "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept" have I been so moved.
This is no Tolstoy, great with pages. Thin with hungry prose, "Yosl Rakover Talks To God" begins with this, found inscribed on the wall of a cellar in Cologne, where some Jews remained hidden for the whole of the war.

I believe in the sun, even when it doesn't shine
I believe in love, even when I don't feel it
I believe in God, even when He is silent.

Truly, this is a city of cursed believers, of poets, artists, thinkers and dreamers, pregnant with optimism, rage and fragile hope.

There is no place like it in the world.