“You just tell your visiting tourist,” my ex-Israeli friend tells me from NY, “to take an alternative tour of Jerusalem, and then he can walk around alone and see for himself.” I know what she means – that the ‘real’ Jerusalem is not the one the Jews show their guests. But there are many Jerusalems and as much as we try, we can’t hold all the perspectives at one time. You can never take THE tour, only A tour.
She was. She’s fine and so is her family. But the number of dead are rising because we haven’t been able to get there fast enough.
Why are we in Tel Aviv so obsessed with Haiti? It is not totally empathic – because after all we can be pretty insensitive when it’s too close. But there is a great sympathy.
We have a pretty great fear of similar earthquakes, you know, living as we do on the Syrian-African rift. A few years ago I made a big fuss in our building about the weakness of our structure and we got some engineer to design something that would strengthen the place, without breaking the municipal laws. Because our house is on stilts (the mistaken theory then being that stilts would increase the flexibility of the structure in case of earthquake) we wanted to fill out the spaces between the stilts with concrete walls. But that would have looked suspiciously like we were adding on rooms and the city would have had us tear them down and pay a fine. So we made some crazy kind of lattice-like support that probably won’t help when the earth opens up. But when I think of it I’m very proud to have convinced my neighbors of anything.
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