Goy-child in the Promised Land.

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After even the tamest of weeks in Tel Aviv, you expect your feet to be scorched by the pavement in the holiest city on the planet. But my entrance into Jerusalem is a bit of an anti-climax, greeted by neither thunderbolts on the one hand nor palm fronds on the other. The haredim bustle about in their black hats and heavy coats, trailing a gaggle of kids behind; the soldiers patrol the bus station and rifle through my backpack - business as usual in this high-strung city. In fact, I’ll quickly learn that to be an American - and even a New Yorker - is hardly news in a town that practically runs a daily Airbus to the Upper East Side. And if there’s anything not likely to raise an eyebrow in Jerusalem’s early-summer swoon, it’s another goy with a zoom lens in one hand and a falafel in the other, touring the holy sites and schvitzing into his bandana.

I’m spending a few days with Yair and Danielle, a young CouchSurfing couple living in Nahloat - a pretty neighborhood of stone houses and sunny courtyards and narrow, flower-filled lanes. On my first day Yair takes me into the Old City, with the late-afternoon sunlight bathing the ramparts. We walk through the cluttered souvenir stalls of David Street, past Arab kids kicking soccer balls and dangling from shoddy scaffolding, turning down blind alleys until we’re suddenly upon the Western Wall. There are dozens of men in black hats and long coats, women in chaste, ankle-length skirts, their hair tightly swaddled. You get the sense that these pious, trembling souls - standing on the spot from which Judaism’s holiest temple once rose - are still communing with the spirits of antiquity. The white-haired heads bobbing and jerking, the low drone of prayer filling the air. A man approaches with leather straps that he proceeds to wrap around Yair’s forearm - we’ve arrived just in time to “lay tefillin” - and in the movements of his pale hands and his stooped shoulders, there’s a suggestion of rites so grave and archaic that even my best Jackie Mason impersonation wouldn’t crack a smile across his solemn mug.

But this hallowed ground is also home to some high-holy hucksters - fast-talking guys with shifty eyes who nervously tug at the tzitzit dangling beneath their coats. They make hard-luck appeals, though some are wearing fancy wristwatches worth a good deal more than the loose shekel jangling around in my pocket. One even makes a plaintive case that I’d be doing a mitzvah - something that, to a guy who doesn’t know better, sounds a bit like what might happen if you ate too much cabbage at Bubbie’s Buffet and Kosher Kitchen.

Even the old-timers are getting into the act. It’s hard to tell if these are beggars or hustlers or a combination of the two: men who have turned so many cons they’re starting to fool themselves. You look past those marvelous, crow’s-nest beards and Old-World rabbinical clothes, and in the wry, wrinkled eyes is a look that’s so New York you can practically serve it with a schmear.

Sure enough, once they’ve tried their luck in Hebrew and failed to wring so much as a “shalom” out of me, they hit me with an accented English that’s more Boro Park than Be’er Sheva. One man approaches with a slow, solemn gait, a black hat resting heavily on his brow. He has broad, square shoulders and a long gray beard that tapers to a point above his chest. You can almost picture him as a minor figure in the Old Testament: Solomon the tinkerer or Abraham the blacksmith, who spaketh thusly against the Lord, and got a locust-plague’s worth of whoop-ass unleashed upon his household. But there’s a playfulness about his eyes, a suggestion that he’s the first one to break out the dreidel once the kids have gathered on Hannukah Eve. He asks me where I’m from.

“New York,” I say.

“Which part?”

“Brooklyn.”

“Which part?” he asks again. You can tell the old guy’s gotten a lot of mileage out of this schtick. You think an old Jew doesn’t know New York? is sort of implicit in the questioning. I tell him my neighborhood, right down to the block, and he nods sagely. “Where were you in 1972?” he asks, almost accusatory, as if I’d left him standing at the altar. I admit I wasn’t so much as a bump in my mother’s womb.

“I was on the corner of 86th Street and Central Park West,” he says. “I was sitting on a bench and picking my nose in the rain, and I had people from all around the world coming to see me. Allen Ginsberg was worshiping at my feet. Gabe Pressman and Connie Chung” - two pillars of New York media, it should be noted - “interviewed me for Channel 2 news.”

“Wow,” I observe, then adding, “Huh!”

“You can find my books on Amazon.com. I’ve written five books, and people write to me from all around the world, ‘This is incredible! You’ve changed my life!’ From Germany, Japan.”

I tell him that I’m also a writer and he points a finger in my face. “How many books?” When I tell him none, he wrinkles his nose with distaste. “Then you’re not really a writer,” he says. I wonder why he has to be such a dick about it. When I tell him I write for a travel website - and get paid for the privilege - he pauses to reconsider. Finally, grudgingly, he concedes, “Well that’s not so bad, then.” I agree and thank him for his time, suspecting that he was worth a whole lot more veneration in the days when he kept his mouth shut.

After the pandemonium of the Western Wall, the kosher chaos of the shouk, I’m hardly prepared for my first shabat in Jerusalem. The city’s wheels grind to a halt on Friday afternoon, and by nightfall the streets have emptied. A few packs of teens sulk around Zion Square; the crosswalk signals click-clack like metronomes, though there’s hardly a pedestrian in sight. The next day, slogging through the heat past rows of shuttered shops, I’m greeted by a hot wind that seems to be blowing desolation itself through the streets.

And yet there are signs of life, even if you have to cock your ear to catch them. You can hear the clatter of dishes from open windows, the familiar tumult of families gathered around the dinner table. I’m reminded of Sunday afternoons in my old Italian neighborhood back home: the clanging of cookery, the domestic clamor, boisterous voices rising and spilling out onto the street. Briefly I feel something surging in my breast - a note of longing, its timbre as pure as a church bell’s - though whether it’s a pang for home or for a nice hunk of schwarma, I’m not entirely sure.

Quickly I’ve discovered why the locals went scurrying to the market on Friday morning, stocking up on canned goods and rugalah the way the rest of us brace for hurricanes back home. The streets are empty, the shouk is empty - an impressive sight, given the Orthodox bedlam that was unleashed here just 24 hours ago. I turn onto Agrippas and again onto Ben Yehuda - the pedestrian promenade that was swelling with pre-teens when I saw it on Thursday night - and apart from a pair of young lovers and a homeless guy muttering into his beard, the place is deserted.

Things are beginning to take a turn for the Biblical. I’m reminded of the exodus from Egypt, of a certain wandering tribe roaming the scorched sands in search of the Promised Land. A powerful, empathic wave shakes me; though hardly Jewish, I feel - if only for this luckless shabat - somewhat Jew…ish. At my favorite falafel haunts on King George and Jaffa, I’m thrice denied. Hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? Only after a fruitless hour do I see a convenience store shining in the distance, its crammed aisles promising sweet, chocolatey salvation. And on my way back to Nahloat, fattened on peanuts and nougat, I’m making mental notes to hit the shouk with religious fervor before braving another shabat.

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hi chris
hi chris, im using your blog as an example of the medium. so step up... -erik