Every So Often: The Making of History

The new Jerusalem light rail will force residents to at least to look at their neighbors.

By ELIEZER YAARI
light rail cartoon (photo credit: Avi Katz)
light rail cartoon
(photo credit: Avi Katz)
Every so often I write to you as a Jerusalemite. And I’m a real Jerusalemite. I’m a stubborn, aging man who was born in this city and still insists on living here, even though it’s been clear for quite some time now that this city is no longer a home for ordinary people and has become a shrine for those who worship the Almighty.
Take Glenn Beck, for example. He came to Jerusalem to express his love and admiration for the Jewish people. Now, as an Israeli, I’ve learned to appreciate any drop of love coming from just about anywhere. But his kind of love and admiration we can live without. I’m not comfortable with people whose faith is predicated on the idea that my life should end in Armageddon.
Some say that the real Jerusalem exists only in Heaven. But as for me, I’m an unrepentant ordinary person who pays attention to the smaller events of everyday life, down here.
One day, I believe, these small events will come to be seen as the prelude to something much larger. So from time to time, I will tell you ordinary stories that will, I think, one day be considered among the great events in Jerusalem’s history.
The story I will now tell you rivals the stories about King David, King Solomon, King Herod, the Crusaders and Salah a-Din. In the future, it will be recounted together with the pictures of General Sir Edmund Allenby, head of the British forces, who conquered Jerusalem in 1917, marking Jerusalem’s transition from a poor village at the end of the road into a poor city at the end of the road.
It is a story that is more significant than the years of the partition of Jerusalem between Israel and Jordan. This story will hold its listeners spellbound, just as the sound of the ram’s horn on Mount Moriah captivated us, when Israel reunited Jerusalem as its undivided capital in 1967. (Glenn Beck tried to blow the shofar there, too – but we are still waiting to see what impact that will have.)
Most of Jerusalem’s stories are accompanied by tunes of grief and anger, sung throughout the city’s momentous history by those who claimed to love this city but turned it into a capital of terrorism and pain as they fought over whose god is more important.
This story has a happy tune.
It is the story of how, in the middle of the Hebrew month of Av and the middle of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan – or, in ordinary language, in the middle of August 2011 – the new light rail was inaugurated in Jerusalem.
Don’t laugh.
We Jerusalemites have been waiting for this event ever since the time of King Herod, the greatest builder in history. We have been dreaming about it ever since the first time we were caught in a traffic jam in downtown Jerusalem, and since we lost the unforgettable longtime mayor Teddy Kollek, the legendary lover of Jerusalem.
True, it took Jerusalem’s modern builders about ten years to build one route that crosses the city from the north to the southwest and it may take them another ten years to actually finish the project.
But the facts cannot be denied: a new, shiny, silent tube-like vehicle now slithers its way through Jerusalem’s impossibly narrow streets and alleyways along tracks of steel, crawling over the ancient hills.
It transports people from one side of the city to the other. Ah, the 20th century has paid us a visit. (Yes, I do mean the 20th. We haven’t reached the 21st yet. Jerusalem has its own timeframe.) And the entire city watches, transfixed by the mixed emotions of joy and embarrassment. All these years, none of us really believed that this day would come. None of us really believed that the light rail would become a mass-transportation vehicle.
We were wrong. It’s here.
And now some Jerusalemites ask themselves: How far will it go? Literally and figuratively. After all, the train may look nice, and it may even serve a practical purpose, but practicality is not something that the people who are looking for redemption really care very much about. Their heads are stuck in the seventh heaven of holiness and light trains run on tracks stuck in the ground.
You see, my dear friends, in the summer of 2011, Jerusalem was faced with a new challenge, perhaps the most important challenge in its history. The new light rail is much more than a mere train that travels at walking-speed next to ancient walls and old stone buildings.
The train binds the city in an iron web. It is a political and social clarion call, a resounding open invitation to all the citizens of this city to begin to meet one another.
Now all of this may sound like a real cliché to someone who lives in a city with a viable mass transportation system. If you ride the subway in New York, you’re used to sharing your transportation space with people that you don’t see anywhere else in your life. So it may seem to you that we are reinventing the wheel about 100 years too late.
But remember, this is Jerusalem. This has never happened before. Jerusalem has always been known for its social and geographical divisions, based on religion, place of origin, or being a second or third generation Jerusalemite, who is willing to cross the Green Line and live in one of the neighborhoods that Israel unilaterally established after 1967. Jerusalemites are used to taking the bus from their neighborhood to the shuk and back, riding along with other people just like them who belong to the same community and faith.
Sure, politicians – especially those who live in Tel Aviv – have been telling us that Jerusalem has been united for eternity and unified forever. But ordinary Jerusalemites know that the city is at best an unstable coalition of closed communities, divided by unseen borders. You can live here forever and never know anything about the people who live on the other side of those borders. I know Jerusalemites who have lived here for years but have never even set foot in the northern parts of the city, where some 200,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews live. And they haven’t visited the Old City for decades.
But now the light rail will force them to at least to look at their neighbors. The Palestinian who lives in Beit Hanina will look – and maybe even talk – to the new immigrant from Russia who lives in Pisgat Zeev, a neighborhood with a population of 40,000 that some consider to be an illegal settlement because it is over the Green Line. And on the next stop, they just might see an ultra-Orthodox family with nine children going to the city market or to schools on the other side of the city. Not to mention the upscale resident of Rehavia, who will finally have to meet all of them.
A new discourse will develop. People will look at the other and wonder – what does that other person think? What was his reaction to the news last night? What does she think about the peace process, or about the mayor? Or about those soccer players from Barcelona – aren’t they awesome? Maybe these people will make eye contact. Maybe they will begin to form some sort of urban relationship. Maybe they will create a new era, one with better communication in which we can demolish old conceptions and build a new city.
We, ordinary Jerusalemites that we are, know that there is probably no chance of reaching a political agreement in our lifetime, so we believe in “de facto” agreements and the “make it work” way of life.
Too often, “events” in Jerusalem have turned out to be just part of a slow slide towards Glenn Beck’s Day of Judgment. There are too many people out there who will do anything they can to stop this new mode of transportation and this new way of thinking, before people get used to it As the light rail was inaugurated, the police had blocked off almost the entire city because of a “hot alert” about a possible impending terrorist attack. And then there are the ultra- Orthodox who are worried about what will happen to their closed communities and their way of life, if their adherents are exposed to modern society! Oy vey!
For those who would rather fight than coexist, West Side Story is nice on Broadway, but not here.
Every so often – every millennium or so – Jerusalem faces a new challenge. Every so often – every several hundred years or so – Jerusalem embarks on a new adventure. The spiffy light rail moves slowly and change comes slowly to this city. But 500 people get on every train and the trains come every 10 minutes.
I’m sure that none of the engineers who planned the light rail really thought this through. But that’s why ordinary Jerusalem is so momentous.