City of Stone and Flowers

A Postcard from Jerusalem.

It's less like other cities in Israel, and more like Burning Man, I explained to our 14-year old as we headed to Jerusalem on Wednesday. We had stopped for a nosh in Herzliya at a branch of a sophisticated Israeli coffee chain, our last swig of stainless-steel modernity before beginning the climb to bewilderment that the Old Jerusalem Road has come to represent.

What I mean by it being like Burning Man, I explained (since for him Burning Man is a reasonable and friendly point of reference) is that everything in Jerusalem is notched up one. People who visit here are tourists-plus. People who live here are residents-plus. Plus what? They're Seekers. Or Pilgrims. Or Professional Jews. Or Chasidim. Or Artists. Or Poets. Or Peace Workers. Or Little Old Ladies who Immigrated Against All Odds. Like at Burning Man, everything - necessarily - has intentionality. There is nothing casual. Even trying to live normally requires a romantic idea and considerable effort. A seemingly simple life in an orderly Rechavia apartment, taking the bus to concerts and sipping ice coffee in a corner cafe, is a normalcy that must be fashioned. Not making a statement here is itself a statement. See? I live in Jerusalem, and I'm not a crackpot like those others.

This city mystifies me. I arrive here each time and fail to find my way around. I lived here for a full year in college. I've had 7 other occasions to spend time in and out of Jerusalem. But each time, when I roll in, the streets rearrange themselves so that I'm always walking the long way when the most direct route is right where I'd been standing to begin with. Something I'd remembered as next door turns out to be many blocks away; something I'd remembered as prohibitively remote suddenly looms in front of me. Finally today I gave up altogether and left the map in my pocket, letting the 14-year old's best friend do the navigating, quite efficiently, using the impressive internal compass he's somehow developed in just two days.

I'm always at a loss for where I stand in Jerusalem, and not just geographically. I don't know how to represent myself. I'm an American Jewish tourist, but I mostly shy away from American Jewish tourists for internalized Anti-Semitic reasons that I have yet to fully own. My Hebrew is fluent and I have a smattering of Arabic, so I prefer to be taken for an unidentifiable foreigner when possible, an international secret agent rather than someone for whom Israel was the next logical step after summer camp.

But this is a city where people clearly represent themselves. Everyone has a specific role in the social disorder, and they wear associated uniforms so as to be easily identifiable to others and to each other. The height of the hat. The pattern on the scarf. Long coat. Short coat. Wig. White kippah. Leggings. My friend Amichai has stood with me in Jerusalem, identifying branch of Chasid, city of origin in the Old Country and specific Yeshivah based entirely on the particulars of the costume. I am not so expert, and the 14-year-olds are complete novices. I pointed out two dark-robed, bearded men to them in the Old City, and they cycled through every flavor of Chasid they'd heard of before realizing that they were actually Russian Orthodox priests.

I would like to wear a kippah here. I have a gut desire to somehow convey that like others of louder costuming, I take my place in Judaism seriously. But I don't understand the ideological iconography of kippot well enough to know and control what statement I may or may not be making in the process. (See this essay by my cousin Alden Solovy for a sense of why.)

Like many of the people in this city, I engage with Torah. But I don't know how to engage with them about Torah. I don't know the rules here and I'm afraid of being proselytized or patronized or even - my deepest unspoken fear - bullied. So, for instance, the Chasid next to me on the bus today coming from the Western Wall (long black coat, brimmed hat, pants-not-stockings), who kept dozing off and falling into me, was at first trying to study this week's Torah portion - Balak (as I could see by covertly eying his reading material). I wanted to strike up a conversation. I wanted to say, I think Balaam knew all along he was going to bless the Children of Israel; he just had some personal process and political wrinkles to work out, don't you think? Maybe he would have been surprised and delighted. But I was afraid of scorn. So despite Pirkei Avot telling us that where two people exchange words of Torah, the Divine Presence rests, I kept silent and left a restless God hovering somewhere outside of the bus, breathing exhaust.

Maybe if I could be here longer, more than a few days every few years, I could find an entry point, a crack in the stone. This is a city of stone, after all: Jerusalem stone. An off-white limestone that every building, by custom and law, is made of, giving the city a silvery glow at night and its famed "Jerusalem of Gold" radiance by day. And out of the cracks grow scrubby, flowering things. Lantana, bougainvillea, sage. Stone and flower are how this city looks, dust and rosemary its smells.

It is also a place of blazing white heat. Not just solar heat but political heat. Ethnic heat. Religious heat. I went with the kids today to the Western Wall to tour the tunnels underneath. This excavation reveals the full western side of the Roman-era Temple Mount, of which the Western Wall where Jews pray constitutes only one eighth or so.

To do this we breezed past the compact women's prayer section and the much more spacious men's section, aware that while before the State of Israel men and women mingled freely at this holiest of spots, the division of the sexes is now zealously enforced by a politically empowered religious authority, with the bulk of rights and privileges denied to women altogether. We descended into the Jewishly characterized tunnels, which were mined under the 1400-year old Muslim Quarter, and it belatedly dawned on me how this very excavation is meant, at least in part, to undermine Muslim authority in this much too holy, much too earthly place.

You see, every stone here is claimed, and every  claim is refuted. And so it has been since Jerusalem's earliest history. Jebusites, Israelites, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Mamluks, Crusaders, Ottomans, British and Jews again. We tend to imagine clean lines of ownership, like a chart in a textbook looking like a layer cake. But the struggle for Jerusalem has always been stone by stone, street by street, tunnel by tunnel. Small aggressions only occasionally punctuated by outright conquest.

At the end of the tour we reversed course and retraced the entire route to the Jewish-run and heavily policed Western Wall plaza. There would be no exit today through the Muslim Quarter. The Old City was to be closed to tourists at noon, because it is the one-year anniversary of Jewish hoodlums kidnapping and killing an Arab boy in retaliation for the abduction and murder of three Jewish Yeshivah boys, and it was feared tensions would be high.

Conflict hangs in the Jerusalem air like pollen, like dust, like humidity. You feel like you are complicit in something by breathing it, but breathe you must.

But here's the thing: I still love this place. With all its intensity, with its beyond-cliche contradictions. It is a place where uncanny things happen to me. Where on my first night here, at age 16, I unexpectedly bump into my home rabbi at the Western Wall. And today, at age 54, I bump into him again at virtually the same spot. A place where I once decided to seek out the grave of the Maiden of Ludmir on the Mount of Olives and - would you ever believe me if I told you? - a bird led me to it. This place is thick with uncanny, living unremarkably alongside the prosaic: dust and noise and soldiers and vendors and bus drivers and shouting children. I can't explain how this happens. Do the overlapping dreams that thousands of people bring here somehow congeal to form some mystical field? Magic happens everywhere, perhaps. But here, like at Burning Man, everyone is looking for it all at once.

Clearly, life is simpler anywhere else than here. When I leave Jerusalem, I always feel a mixture of sadness and relief.

But right now I'm here. Welcoming Shabbat with the music-making hip Jews, both Israeli and American, down at the old train station. Walking neighborhoods that are probably quieter in my mind than they are in actuality. At some point tonight, despite a fumbled rendezvous and a botched picnic and the 14-year olds, with no real knowledge of Hebrew, managing to organize neighborhood children into what is undoubtedly a junior crime ring; at some point, this city indeed got quieter and gentler, snippets of zmirot poured out of windows, laughter could be heard, calm could be felt; at some point the Shechinah, earlier kicked off a crowded bus, now robed in purple night, settled at last on a city of flowers and stone.

Parashat Pinchas - The Naked Truth About Identity

From the banks of the Susquehanna.


This week I write from the Maryland-Pennsyvalnia border, from an old house that was the northernmost southern stop on the Underground Railroad, where I am surrounded by 312 or so naked gay men.

Not pictured: 312 naked men.

It is a naturist retreat and I'm here to perform - in costume of course - with the Kinsey Sicks. In eighteen years of performance, it's our first nudist gig (how many people ever get to say that sentence?). But Debbie Reynolds once said to us (this is also true), "Never turn down work, girls. I never have." And so we always say yes, and every gig is an adventure, this one perhaps more than many.

I'd like to think I am no prude. I make much of my living on stage with a group that sings some of the bawdiest lyrics I've ever heard. And as for nudity, I'm no stranger to the various hot springs of Northern California. And I've attended queer retreats that were relaxed in their dress code, with nudity breathing easily alongside feather headdresses and crinoline petticoats. But this is the first environment I've ever been in where nudity has been the norm and the requirement, and I'm finding myself more squeamish than I'd like to admit. I confess I've struggled most at meal times, seeing the men lined up to take food in the dining hall. I try not think it, but the thoughts come unbidden: too many genitalia at the buffet; too much pubic hair at chafing dish level. Yes, I talk a good game against body shame, but when it boils down to it I am deeply grateful for the layer of denim that typically separates me from dinner.

More of concern is that I find myself unexpectedly judgmental about this whole enterprise. Being in just your skin in the open air feels great; while walking from hot tub to cold plunge it seems logical. But organizing a 10-day retreat around the principle of not wearing clothes seems a little, well, immoderate to me. Yes, your clothes are off, I think, but what next? What is it about this experience that makes it worth the money and the travel? Is it just about breaking with convention? The fun and triumph of being a bad boy? Can nudity in itself really form the basis of a group identity? Enough so that you'll show up year after year to strip down to your tattoos?

Group identity, the quality of "belonging," is a tricky thing. This week's parashah is called Pinchas (which in Biblical Hebrew probably means "mouth of brass" but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out this week that in Modern Hebrew it could be read as "Penis? Heaven forbid!"). The portion has a variety of components to it, but in a certain way they all point toward the sometimes ritualistic and sometimes brutal project of forging group identity.

The portion opens on the heels of the vicious slaying of an Israelite man and his Midianite wife by Aharon's grandson, Pinchas. This murder comes during a terrible plague among the Israelites, and also during a period of some significant potential social change. There is boundary blur between the Israelites and the neighboring Moabites, a blur that involves both sex and idolatry. God, a rather formidable wounded spouse, demands recompense for the infidelities, and requires that the offenders literally be hung out to dry (and whan I say "literally" I mean "literally"). But when this particular Israelite and his Midianite wife sashay past the tent of meeting where the Israelites are gathered, Pinchas takes justice into his own hands, following them into their chamber and impaling them together on his javelin, in an unmistakably sexual gesture. Shocking poetic justice for the crime of cultural interpenetration.

The plague immediately stops and Pinchas is now a hero and God's favorite. The reward of eternal priesthood is given him and his heirs for reinforcing the border fence around Israel's sexuality and theology, which he was apparently qualified to do as the cohen with the biggest stick.

So in this episode we see the first example of enforcing group identity: punishing those who violate it. After all, offered a choice between faithfulness to the group or death, faithfulness to the group or bodily harm, who wouldn't honestly choose the group? This is not just ancient history; we all see how identity continues to be enforced this way in gangs and in cults. But more invisible to the culture as a whole is how through violence against women, gay people, and transgender people, gender roles and norms are enforced. Those who deviate from the group identity, even in this day and age, know they run the risk of retributive justice.

As the adrenaline and the testosterone of this episode ebb, the portion moves on to another means of fostering identity: the simple act of counting. A census is held in which the tribes and clans are all named and numbered. Identifying the children of Israel and how they're connected with each other, shouting the roll call of our people, noting our numbers and our connectedness, getting a sense of group composition and continuity (these are now the descendants of those who left Egypt; not the generation of the Exodus anymore) - these seem to have real effect in any project of community building.

The portion then touches on a way to secure group identity for those most hungry for it. As the character of Roy Cohn says in Angels in America: "Hire a lawyer; sue somebody; it's good for the soul." We read here the famous story of the daughters of Tzlafchad, whose father died without leaving any male heirs to inherit his land, a situation not contemplated by the laws handed to Moshe at Sinai. The daughters bring a suit that reaches the Supreme Court: Moshe and God. This is not just a suit about particular property. It is about identity: who is an Israelite and who is not? Women had not been counted in the previous verses' census. Were these women part of the tribe or no? Belonging is their demand; real estate is just shorthand for it.

Finally, Torah illustrates one last mechanism for building group identity: the cycle of ritual. Days when pilgrimages are required; days for sacrifices; the elements of those sacrifices. The rituals involved are complicated; they involve relinquishment of meaningful property - bulls and rams and goats. Through this year-in, year-out calendar of ritual activity not shared by non-Israelite nations, a sense of identity emerges. Just as Jews sitting annually in synagogue for Yom Kippur feel Jewish, and as Jews having their annual defiant Kol Nidre cheeseburger feel Jewish. Ritual establishes and deepens group identity; it marks you as part of a people and places you safely (one hopes) within that community's arms.

Which brings me back to this gaggle of naked men whose sense of group identity I at first mistrusted. I began having some conversations with attendees. Most are my senior by fifteen years at least. One had had a promising career in the arts in New York when he was young, but gave it up to return to rural Pennsylvania to care for his ailing mother. He became a contractor and would get jobs through the union. He saw quickly the nature of group identity in that world, and how the ones perceived as gay wouldn't get the contracts or would get laid off of jobs first. Even without Pinchas and a javelin, those who didn't fit in were punished, and punished publicly. My new friend, to evade such retributive justice, invented what he called "a ghost family." I asked what he meant. He told me he invented the fiction of a wife and children who had been killed in an accident. He knew that after finding that out, no one would ask him again about his personal life, and no one did.

I thought about the fear that someone must feel to invent that particular fiction. The storyline was invented, but I suspect the pain described was not fictional at all. The implied threat against his livelihood and, probably, his personal safety, was significant. Spending decades cloaked in this story of tragedy was in itself tragic. No, he hadn't lost a family. But he had sacrificed his own truth in order to be offered the group's benefits and protection.

He retired over a decade ago and started a new era in his life. He doesn't care who knows he's gay. In this new wave of openness he found love. And he began coming to this annual retreat, where he sheds not only his clothing, but anything that remains of the lies in his life. His story may be unique. But there are 311 other unique stories here, all equally surprising and compelling: men who served in the military in the early 1960s, men who tried to be straight, men who live in small towns, men who are farmers among farmers. They come here and offer up their garb and with it all vestiges of pretense, of posturing, and of self-protection. The ghost families are released to the spheres.

And they do this every year like clockwork. This week in the woods is a mo'ed. It's a designated ritual time as real as any festival on the Jewish calendar, and more eagerly anticipated than many of them. Their sacrifices happen every year at the appointed hour. And in this ritual, in the annual get-together, in the annual accounting of who is still here and who is now gone and what is their legacy, community - identity - is formed. An outsider might wonder how not eating is sufficient to form the organizing principle of a Jewish holiday, but we on the inside know that fasting is a bodily mechanism to support work of the soul. And here, in the wilds of rural Maryland, on land surrounding a house that was a stop in the Underground Railroad, where black Americans fled retributive justice in search of real belonging, nudity itself is secondary. Here, in this spot, it is 312 souls that are bared.