The Jerusalem Taliban
We left our hotel, holding hands, and walked north along King David Street. It was dinner time, the air had a chilly edge to it, and the sidewalk thrummed with residents and tourists. Our destination: the shops and cafes of the Nahalat Shiva neighborhood in Jerusalem’s “New City” – new as in hundreds, not thousands of years old. As we turned uphill onto Hillel Street, a black mini-van slowed in oncoming traffic. It pulled near to the curb. A bearded man leaned out the passenger window. “Lo na’im,” he said to me. “Lo na’im.”
I stopped, stared at him. His beard was scraggly and he wore a white, buttoned-down accountant’s shirt and a broad, black-rimmed hat. “Lo na’im,” he said a third time, with no greater or lesser force. I knew what the words meant – not nice – but I couldn’t decipher or acknowledge what wasn’t nice, and then the mini-van slid away and I realized that it was our hands, one held in the other, that had gained his roving censure. The touching of flesh to flesh on the street, he chided, was not nice. Two middle-aged Americans, husband and wife if that should matter, holding hands on King David Street in Jerusalem – for this he felt compelled to lean out his window, into our lives, and pronounce “Lo na’im.”
Elahna’s hand had fallen from mine. I took it again, squeezed it tight. She started walking up the hill and I followed, our hands locked, and in moments my jaw unfroze and the comebacks sparked late and loose from my tongue. “Screw you,” I spat. “Leave us alone.” No, counseled Elahna, that doesn’t work. You can’t give them the satisfaction. “You’re not nice,” I tried. “Ata lo na’im, ata lo na’im.” But that sounded ridiculous. Nice? It wasn’t about nice! “Look, honey,” I announced in a loud voice. “The Taliban have come to town.” But it wasn’t just the theocratic thugs, the morals police on the prowl; it was the oblivious city that my wife loved so much. No one seemed to care about or even notice our drive-by scolding – or my careless Taliban declaration. Israelis, Elahna suggested, had adjusted to the craziness.
“At their peril,” I said, feeling a bit superior and stupid for stating this. And yet I wish I had yelled: “Jerusalem – what’s wrong with you?” My wife was much hungrier than outraged, however, so we verged onto a pedestrian promenade and ate falafel and pita at a takeout joint. I vowed to shrug off the incident, call it a cultural kerfuffle and move on. Stop taking everything so personally. The U.S. is filled with ideologues and fanatics, I reminded myself.
We had visited this neighborhood together years ago, in 2009, searching for Richie’s New York Pizza, a haven where Elahna and her father often ate during the family’s year in Israel when she was nine year’s old in 1973. A storekeeper, next to a rack of yarmulkes that included tie-dyed and Boston Celtics models, had informed me: “Richie picked up and went to Argentina.” He didn’t know why. So many scenarios: Richie left town on a whim; Richie got in trouble with the Russian mob; Richie fell for a beautiful Argentinean woman and pursued her to the exotic ends of the earth. (Maybe he just got fed up with “lo na’im.”) We wondered if there was a Richie’s New York Pizza in Buenos Aires.
That summer of 2009, we settled for Big Apple Pizza on Jaffa Street. At the table next to ours, two black Israeli soldiers drank Cokes over their pizza remains. I shook za’atar on my slice and pronounced the combination delicious. The restaurant’s supply of za’atar – a spice mixture of dried sumac, hyssop, toasted sesame seeds and salt – was kept in a heavy metal shaker attached to a chain secured to the condiment table bolted to the sidewalk. You should tell your father about Richie, about Argentina, I suggested. Maybe, Elahna replied, but he won’t remember. No, I said, he will. Dads remember that kind of thing. Of course I was thinking of all the funky places where my daughter and I had eaten when she was little – ice cream shops on Cape Cod, diners in Arizona and Mexico, a Star Trek-themed restaurant in Las Vegas. What was it called, the Warp Core? Quark’s Café?
When I had spoken to Kelsey a few days ago – and now we’re back in 2012, the years whacking back and forth like a matkot ball on the beach in Tel Aviv – she told me all about her new life in Pittsburgh, where she’d moved during my Shvil Yisrael hike. I traveled east, she went west. Everything was going great, she said. Excellent, I responded, but it still rankled me that she’d relocated to her mother’s hometown, into her mother’s house no less, and at the same time I registered the pettiness of my reaction. I was supposed to step aside, let her figure things out…and she might return someday, I could tell myself that. There’s a homing device inside each of us, I believe, seeking the places we most belong.
For dessert: the T’mol Shilsom bookstore café. (To get there we walked across a square where, two months later, a mob of Jewish teenagers would taunt an Arab boy, chase him, and nearly beat him to death. Must I now mention that a 1994 shooting in the same neighborhood by a Hamas terrorist killed two and wounded 16 Jewish innocents?) T’mol Shilsom’s chocolate soiree was a volcanic soufflé filled with warm, chocolate cream and ringed with ice cream islands – just right with a latte and your favorite human being come round the world to find you. Ah, the cozy confines, the old, hardcover books tilted on shelves and stacked on windowsills, the brick walls and roughed-up wood floor, the tippy tables and bohemian bric-a-brac abounding. Nested inside a 130-year old building, I sat in a marinade of sensations and connotations custom spiced for my shabby, elitist palette, and almost instantly it became one of my favorite places on the planet. The incident with the nattering nabobs of ultra-orthodoxy – forgotten, almost.
According to Elahna, t’mol shilsom means “the day before yesterday” in a poetic, high-falutin’ way. However the café’s website says t’mol shilsom translates to “those were the days,” which to an American’s ear sounds sweetly wistful and nostalgic. T’mol Shilsom is also the title of a S.Y. Agnon novel, commonly translated as Only Yesterday. The book is set during the Second Aliyah (1904-1914) and takes Isaac, its schlemiel-everyman, from Poland to Jaffa to Jerusalem, from exile Outside the Land to the hedonistic, secular world of Tel Aviv to the pious grip of what Agnon calls the “too holy” city. Open-hearted, naïve Isaac loses his bearings more than a bit in Jerusalem, “for you don’t have a single hour in Jerusalem,” Agnon writes, “that doesn’t have something of eternal life.” The place can simply overwhelm; just two days here and I could relate.
Since the café’s opening in 1994, many prominent Israeli writers have read from their works at T’mol Shilsom, including Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Etgar Kerit and Meir Shalev. I said to Elahna, during our chocolate soiree, that it would be a great day if I, too, could put on a reading here, perhaps from a travel book about Shviel Yisrael and joints like T’mol Shilsom. She laughed a little, nervously. Elahna is very supportive and not one to mock a flight of fancy, but she also harbors superstitions that belie her scientific training; in this case, don’t tempt cruel fate and never invite your dream bubble’s bursting. After all, we were married on a Tuesday. This may have been inconvenient for guests, but on that day of creation G-d blessed the earth twice, a blessing doubleheader.
We sipped our lattes. At my elbow, I leafed through a children’s book about what lives under the universal bed. It was written in German, but I could tell from the drawings.
After dark, we walked down to the Festival of Light in the Old City and met Elahna’s cousin Pnina, her husband Yossi and their sons. Our group would soon go into the Old City to follow light trails strung along the ancient walls. We’d watch amazing light shows of no religious intent projected on nearly every ancient stone face – except for the Western Wall which, evidently, cannot withstand the frivolity of photons – but first we stepped under the Cupola erected on the grass outside the Jaffa Gate. Designed by an Italian company, Luminaire De Cagna, the Cupola was an enormous, airy dome made of wooden slats spaced far apart and adorned with 63,000 colored LED lights. It was like being inside a hi-tech Faberge egg, the LEDs arranged in baroque patterns that evoked, simultaneously, the Italian Renaissance, the 1933 World’s Fair, and the latest iDevice. A few trees grew under the dome, snaking skyward. Scores of people stood on the grass, among the trees, and looked up, up, up, and so we raised our chins and looked up, too.
Our eyes made aliyah.
Indulgently glowing, yet energy-efficient, the Cupola was there for eight days and then gone. A half mile away there’s another dome – The Dome of the Rock, leafed in gold, enveloped in sacredness– that has existed for 1,322 years and isn’t going anywhere soon. The dome we stood within, however, on this chilly June evening in Jerusalem, seemed no less holy for its impermanence; swept by gentle winds, this placeless place contained no ancient scrolls, no foundation stone and nobody bleating “Lo na’im, lo na’im.” Nothing here but space to breathe and wandering folks gazing through light into darkness.
@ @ @
We left our hotel, holding hands, and walked north along King David Street. It was dinner time, the air had a chilly edge to it, and the sidewalk thrummed with residents and tourists. Our destination: the shops and cafes of the Nahalat Shiva neighborhood in Jerusalem’s “New City” – new as in hundreds, not thousands of years old. As we turned uphill onto Hillel Street, a black mini-van slowed in oncoming traffic. It pulled near to the curb. A bearded man leaned out the passenger window. “Lo na’im,” he said to me. “Lo na’im.”
I stopped, stared at him. His beard was scraggly and he wore a white, buttoned-down accountant’s shirt and a broad, black-rimmed hat. “Lo na’im,” he said a third time, with no greater or lesser force. I knew what the words meant – not nice – but I couldn’t decipher or acknowledge what wasn’t nice, and then the mini-van slid away and I realized that it was our hands, one held in the other, that had gained his roving censure. The touching of flesh to flesh on the street, he chided, was not nice. Two middle-aged Americans, husband and wife if that should matter, holding hands on King David Street in Jerusalem – for this he felt compelled to lean out his window, into our lives, and pronounce “Lo na’im.”
Elahna’s hand had fallen from mine. I took it again, squeezed it tight. She started walking up the hill and I followed, our hands locked, and in moments my jaw unfroze and the comebacks sparked late and loose from my tongue. “Screw you,” I spat. “Leave us alone.” No, counseled Elahna, that doesn’t work. You can’t give them the satisfaction. “You’re not nice,” I tried. “Ata lo na’im, ata lo na’im.” But that sounded ridiculous. Nice? It wasn’t about nice! “Look, honey,” I announced in a loud voice. “The Taliban have come to town.” But it wasn’t just the theocratic thugs, the morals police on the prowl; it was the oblivious city that my wife loved so much. No one seemed to care about or even notice our drive-by scolding – or my careless Taliban declaration. Israelis, Elahna suggested, had adjusted to the craziness.
“At their peril,” I said, feeling a bit superior and stupid for stating this. And yet I wish I had yelled: “Jerusalem – what’s wrong with you?” My wife was much hungrier than outraged, however, so we verged onto a pedestrian promenade and ate falafel and pita at a takeout joint. I vowed to shrug off the incident, call it a cultural kerfuffle and move on. Stop taking everything so personally. The U.S. is filled with ideologues and fanatics, I reminded myself.
We had visited this neighborhood together years ago, in 2009, searching for Richie’s New York Pizza, a haven where Elahna and her father often ate during the family’s year in Israel when she was nine year’s old in 1973. A storekeeper, next to a rack of yarmulkes that included tie-dyed and Boston Celtics models, had informed me: “Richie picked up and went to Argentina.” He didn’t know why. So many scenarios: Richie left town on a whim; Richie got in trouble with the Russian mob; Richie fell for a beautiful Argentinean woman and pursued her to the exotic ends of the earth. (Maybe he just got fed up with “lo na’im.”) We wondered if there was a Richie’s New York Pizza in Buenos Aires.
That summer of 2009, we settled for Big Apple Pizza on Jaffa Street. At the table next to ours, two black Israeli soldiers drank Cokes over their pizza remains. I shook za’atar on my slice and pronounced the combination delicious. The restaurant’s supply of za’atar – a spice mixture of dried sumac, hyssop, toasted sesame seeds and salt – was kept in a heavy metal shaker attached to a chain secured to the condiment table bolted to the sidewalk. You should tell your father about Richie, about Argentina, I suggested. Maybe, Elahna replied, but he won’t remember. No, I said, he will. Dads remember that kind of thing. Of course I was thinking of all the funky places where my daughter and I had eaten when she was little – ice cream shops on Cape Cod, diners in Arizona and Mexico, a Star Trek-themed restaurant in Las Vegas. What was it called, the Warp Core? Quark’s Café?
When I had spoken to Kelsey a few days ago – and now we’re back in 2012, the years whacking back and forth like a matkot ball on the beach in Tel Aviv – she told me all about her new life in Pittsburgh, where she’d moved during my Shvil Yisrael hike. I traveled east, she went west. Everything was going great, she said. Excellent, I responded, but it still rankled me that she’d relocated to her mother’s hometown, into her mother’s house no less, and at the same time I registered the pettiness of my reaction. I was supposed to step aside, let her figure things out…and she might return someday, I could tell myself that. There’s a homing device inside each of us, I believe, seeking the places we most belong.
For dessert: the T’mol Shilsom bookstore café. (To get there we walked across a square where, two months later, a mob of Jewish teenagers would taunt an Arab boy, chase him, and nearly beat him to death. Must I now mention that a 1994 shooting in the same neighborhood by a Hamas terrorist killed two and wounded 16 Jewish innocents?) T’mol Shilsom’s chocolate soiree was a volcanic soufflé filled with warm, chocolate cream and ringed with ice cream islands – just right with a latte and your favorite human being come round the world to find you. Ah, the cozy confines, the old, hardcover books tilted on shelves and stacked on windowsills, the brick walls and roughed-up wood floor, the tippy tables and bohemian bric-a-brac abounding. Nested inside a 130-year old building, I sat in a marinade of sensations and connotations custom spiced for my shabby, elitist palette, and almost instantly it became one of my favorite places on the planet. The incident with the nattering nabobs of ultra-orthodoxy – forgotten, almost.
According to Elahna, t’mol shilsom means “the day before yesterday” in a poetic, high-falutin’ way. However the café’s website says t’mol shilsom translates to “those were the days,” which to an American’s ear sounds sweetly wistful and nostalgic. T’mol Shilsom is also the title of a S.Y. Agnon novel, commonly translated as Only Yesterday. The book is set during the Second Aliyah (1904-1914) and takes Isaac, its schlemiel-everyman, from Poland to Jaffa to Jerusalem, from exile Outside the Land to the hedonistic, secular world of Tel Aviv to the pious grip of what Agnon calls the “too holy” city. Open-hearted, naïve Isaac loses his bearings more than a bit in Jerusalem, “for you don’t have a single hour in Jerusalem,” Agnon writes, “that doesn’t have something of eternal life.” The place can simply overwhelm; just two days here and I could relate.
Since the café’s opening in 1994, many prominent Israeli writers have read from their works at T’mol Shilsom, including Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Etgar Kerit and Meir Shalev. I said to Elahna, during our chocolate soiree, that it would be a great day if I, too, could put on a reading here, perhaps from a travel book about Shviel Yisrael and joints like T’mol Shilsom. She laughed a little, nervously. Elahna is very supportive and not one to mock a flight of fancy, but she also harbors superstitions that belie her scientific training; in this case, don’t tempt cruel fate and never invite your dream bubble’s bursting. After all, we were married on a Tuesday. This may have been inconvenient for guests, but on that day of creation G-d blessed the earth twice, a blessing doubleheader.
We sipped our lattes. At my elbow, I leafed through a children’s book about what lives under the universal bed. It was written in German, but I could tell from the drawings.
After dark, we walked down to the Festival of Light in the Old City and met Elahna’s cousin Pnina, her husband Yossi and their sons. Our group would soon go into the Old City to follow light trails strung along the ancient walls. We’d watch amazing light shows of no religious intent projected on nearly every ancient stone face – except for the Western Wall which, evidently, cannot withstand the frivolity of photons – but first we stepped under the Cupola erected on the grass outside the Jaffa Gate. Designed by an Italian company, Luminaire De Cagna, the Cupola was an enormous, airy dome made of wooden slats spaced far apart and adorned with 63,000 colored LED lights. It was like being inside a hi-tech Faberge egg, the LEDs arranged in baroque patterns that evoked, simultaneously, the Italian Renaissance, the 1933 World’s Fair, and the latest iDevice. A few trees grew under the dome, snaking skyward. Scores of people stood on the grass, among the trees, and looked up, up, up, and so we raised our chins and looked up, too.
Our eyes made aliyah.
Indulgently glowing, yet energy-efficient, the Cupola was there for eight days and then gone. A half mile away there’s another dome – The Dome of the Rock, leafed in gold, enveloped in sacredness– that has existed for 1,322 years and isn’t going anywhere soon. The dome we stood within, however, on this chilly June evening in Jerusalem, seemed no less holy for its impermanence; swept by gentle winds, this placeless place contained no ancient scrolls, no foundation stone and nobody bleating “Lo na’im, lo na’im.” Nothing here but space to breathe and wandering folks gazing through light into darkness.
@ @ @