Jerusalem: A Snapshot

There goes bus 21 again, bearing its brightly colored advertisement for MSN on its bright white side. As the traffic light turns green, the double-length bus lurches forward into the surging traffic of a Sunday morning: it's the bustling life at the beginning of the work week on Jaffa Street, in Jerusalem.

On the one hand, as I sit here I can almost imagine I'm in the United States in any big city. After the weekend, everyone is back into the busy swing of the work week--pedestrians everywhere are scurrying to jobs: men in nice shirts and slacks, women in silky tops and strappy heels. Buses roar by and buildings rise high to the sky. And I am sitting in a plush leather chair at "The Coffee Bean and the Tea Leaf," sipping my mocha (the drinks here rival Starbucks') and listening to Louis Armstrong's deep voice crooning through the high-ceilinged coffee shop.

But despite some elements that seem so much like home, some things just have to be different. Like the yellow-vested security guared who sifts through my purses and runs an explosives-checker wand over me before granting me entrance to the coffee shop. Or the Old City--just up the street and through the Jaffa Gate. The Old City is quartered--Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Armenian--an ever-present reminder that religious views run deep in the this coutnry, and that the tensions do too.

Just below the sacred Dome of the Rock where Muslims pray five times a day, Jews come to pray at the Western Wall. The Wall is all that remains now of the outer wall of the temple court. The place that the mosque stands now used to be home to the Temple, where the Jews came to worship and sacrifice. And they believe the Temple will stand there again one day.

Two people lay claim to the same ground, and their longing for the pieces of the earth goes back thousands of years. That's something an American can't quite grasp: what it means to have truly holy ground, that God has promised and given to you. What it means to have someone else occupying the land you are sure is meant to be yours. What it means to have intense loves and hatreds that have been passed down through generations of thousands of years.

Jerusalem is a city full of intensity, worship and conflict. But after a few weeks of just observing and meeting people, I start to realize that it is like anywhere else in this way: it is full of people whose lives are intertwining as people's lives do everywhere. Here you live like you live anywhere--you go to work, you worship, you love your family, and you lose people you love--either to accidents, to natural causes, or to atrocities. This is life, and life everywhere has its pleasures and its agonies.

Today I talked with Ahmoud at his cheese and bagel stand. He has seven children, "Four sons and two daughters...and one son who I lost when he was twenty." I didn't ask how Ahmoud lost his son, just told him how sorry I was. But what I did ask is what his life is like:

"What's it like living here? Have you always been in Jerusalem?"

"Yes, always. I do have friends all around the world though," he told me. "A couple years ago I went to visit my friend in Greece. He had a room in his house and I knew that I could stay there and get a job. I told him, 'I want to stay here in Greece,' but he told me, 'You will forget your family. You will forget your home. You will lose yourself.' So I came home.

"Business is better now than a few years ago," he says, his face brightening. But then his eyes darken again and he pounds his fists together: "You know, we are always, always asking for...for..." He seems to be grasping for the right word... "Salaam..."

"Peace?" I ask.

"Yes, yes! Peace." He answers. "You know, Palestinian and Israeli--always fighting, and every day I am asking for salaam, for peace. You ask God for it too--every day!"

I walk on from there to the coffee shop and as I stand getting checked for explosives, I think about the people who live out their lives in this place. We are all put in some place for a brief span of years. And how do we spend the years we are given? Partly, I guess, in pursuing our own dreams, as we step over the ruins of civilizations whose collective dreams lie under hills of dust. And partly too, we spend our lives carrying on the dreams and the warfare that have outlives generations before us--and that will outlive us as well.

To read more articles by A. Kalyani, click here: http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/10966/a_kalyani.html