Coming Back and Coming Home

I am writing at my kitchen table on Gad Tedeschi Street in Yerushalayim. It is 6:15 AM, still last night in New York. The cloudless sky is already bright blue and sunny. The air still has a bit of nighttime chill in it, but the sunlight is warm and lovely. Birds of some sort are twittering around in the trees just beneath our balcony. (Joan’s cousin down the road actually has hummingbirds in the trees off her balcony, but we just have something like the Israeli version of pigeons.) I can see the no. 78 bus pulling into the bus stop across the street to pick up the dozen or so people already on their way somewhere at this hour of the morning. The first few days we were here, I woke up each morning at 4:30 when the muezzin in one of the mosques in Jabal Al-mukkaber, the Arab town on the other side of our neighborhood, cranked up the volume to announce morning prayers. But by the fourth or fifth day, I became able to sleep right through it and barely, if at all, to notice it. When I asked some neighbors about it, they appeared not even to know what I was talking about.

By noon, we hope to be on our way. Our tenant is returning in a few days from her summer back home in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. (She works for the U.N. and is stationed here in Jerusalem.) The cleaning guy is coming tomorrow morning to make the place perfect for her return; we ourselves are spending the night in Tel Aviv in a nice hotel on the beach (which we saved up the points on our Visa card all year to pay for), then heading to the airport tomorrow evening to fly home. So we leave here in stages—which is probably all for the best, since the kind of adjustment the whole re-entry thing requires is a process best undertaken one step at a time. It’s been a fabulous summer, a rich and rewarding stay in one of the world’s truly great cities. We’ve spent time—and lots of it—with Joan’s Israeli family and with friends of ours from back home and from all sorts of other places too. And we’ve had tine to go exploring on our own too, mostly extendedly on a lovely three-day trip north to the Upper Galilee where we went to all sorts of places we hadn’t ever been. I’d like to write specifically today to you about one of them.

Some of you may recall reading James Michener’s book, The Source, either when it came out in 1965 or later on. The story from the Stone Age through the mid-twentieth century of a single archeological site in Israel, the book somehow manages to engage the reader in the pageant of Jewish (and pre-Jewish) history without getting bogged down in endless dates and details. The book is a masterpiece and was surely one of the two of three most important books I read as a teenager fantasizing about a career in the rabbinate. (To this day it is the first book I suggest to people I meet who have come to see me because they are considering conversion to Judaism.) But the site, called Makor in the book, is fictional, a kind of composite of several different real-life sites that Michener created so as to be able to focus the action he wished to describe on one specific place. On the other hand, Tzipori, the city I want to describe to you today, is completely real.

Just reviewing its names will give you the general idea. The Jews in ancient times called the place Tzipori because the way its setting is perched atop a large hill suggested the way a bird (Hebrew: tzipor) might be perched on a branch. The Greeks called it Sepphoris, a Greek version of the Hebrew name. The Romans called it Diocaesaraea, but that name didn’t stick: the Crusaders restored the original name and called it La Saphorie and, eventually, the local Arabs called it Saffuriya. And the names it bore reflect its history: in one archeological site are visible remains of Hellenistic, Jewish, Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, Mamluke, and Ottoman towns. Christians revered it once as the birthplace of Mary, mother of Jesus, and built a huge church on the site they assigned to her birth. But for Jews, the importance of the place lies in the role it played in rabbinic history: after the crushing defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, many famous rabbis established schools in Tzipori, which became known as a center of learning and culture. Rabbi Judah Ha-nasi, the compiler of the Mishnah himself, moved there after the revolt. (He eventually relocated to Tiberias.) For most of the ensuing centuries, Tzipori was a Jewish town exclusively. But the earthquake of 363, combined with anti-Roman unrest on which the Jews found themselves (again!) on the losing side, prompted the decline of the place. When Muslims invaded from the east in the seventh century, they found the place almost deserted and built a village on the remains of the ancient town. When the local Arabs fled rather than embrace citizenship in the nascent State of Israel in 1948, the place was abandoned entirely for the first time in millennia.

And now it is a huge site, a giant archeological site in which visitors are free to wander around and try to fathom the almost unimaginable history of the place. And there we were, trying to take it all in and only partially succeeding.

In a sense, our visit to Tzipi symbolizes our stay here in Israel. There’s a timelessness to this place that is hard to describe. The past feels real here, more like an actual presence than a mere memory. As I wandered aimlessly around the streets of ancient Tzipori and considered that not centuries but millennia before my people landed in our decrepit, unmissed Polish town (which I only am alive because my grandparents had the good idea to leave before everyone left behind was murdered in 1942), my people were wandering around these very streets, pausing in the cool shade of the buildings that lined those thoroughfares to catch their breath or to drink some cold water before venturing out again into the midday heat. To imagine Rebbi himself—the editor of the Mishnah and thus the father of all rabbinic learning—to imagine Rabbi Judah Ha-nasi himself strolling past the now-mostly-restored but once-fully-intact amphitheater on his way to teach or to learn, that would be a remarkable experience under any circumstances at all. But to feel the past as a palpable, real presence in a place that Maccabean king Alexander Jannaeus wrested from the Syrian Greeks in 104 BCE and no doubt visited personally as part of his campaign, to feel his presence and Rabbi Judah’s no less palpably than I felt Joan’s or the cousins with whom we were visited the place that July day just a few weeks ago—that was a truly remarkable, once-in-a-lifetime experience for me. And that is what I wanted to share with you all today—experiences like that are part and parcel of life here, the tangible, fully real, part of being a Jew in Eretz Ha-kodesh, in the Holy Land.

For those of you who haven’t experienced Israel, I can’t stress enough how fabulous an experience is awaiting you. For those of you who have been here before, including even those who have been here many times—there are places, as Tzipori was for me, that simply have to be experienced in person rather than read about in a book. To say that Jewish history—and, in a sense, Jewishness itself—comes alive in this place is barely to say anything at all. I return home not only invigorated intellectually and spiritually, but also emotionally. I’ve had a magnificent summer!