the superpower of turning a megatropolis into a village: ruminations before cairo

Earlier this month, I went home to celebrate my grandmother's 80th birthday. On a frigid weekday in Manhattan during the trip, I walked through Times Square. "Don't take me here again!" I screamed at my boyfriend, as if I didn't know that we would be walking through Midtown. But I couldn't have predicted such a strong visceral reaction.

Jerusalem is a village of a city. You see the same people on the street all the time. There are no outdoor televisions. Times Square put me into a mild state of shock and anger. Because there is something that I want to preserve.

Last night, I went to the Jerusalem Cinemateque to see Rachel Getting Married, a tragicomedy about a dysfunctional family at a moment when joy and pain both rear their heads at once. It was set at a lavish home in Connecticut. One sister was getting a PhD in psychology and marrying a musician; one sister had come home from rehab the day before her sister's wedding. It seemed to fit into a genre of films about dysfunctional people and relationships--Igby Goes Down, The Royal Tannenbaums, Magnolia--there was a time in high school when I felt subjected to these films, all of which I had seen thinking that there would be more narrative, more character development, more inspiration, less tragedy.

The movie jarred me like Times Square. Why was everyone in the movie screaming at each other? Why were the characters fighting about who got to be the maid of honor? There is something, in stark distinction to this kind of life, that I want to preserve.

Today I saw this New York Times review about a trio of muezzins, describing their lives calling worshippers to prayer from their respective minarets in Cairo (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/theater/19abroad.html?8dpc). In three days, I will be going to Cairo, my first time to an Arab country. But I have heard the muezzin all year. The midday call to prayer rings out from across the street in Bet Zafafa during my gemara class at Nishmat.

It's a crazy thing to say, but despite all but a complete lack of connection with Muslim culture, my gut reacts to the idea of muezzins talking about their lives and work with familiarity and endearment. There is something that I want to preserve.

Last week, we had a group seminar called Palestinian Movers and Shakers. We went to Haifa. We heard from Palestinian community organizers, a rap artist, the director of the Palestinian National Theater in Haifa. We asked them about their lives, and they told us about their pain, about the slow progress happening their communities, and about a political vision that precludes the viability of our own. It is so raw, so real.

That is why I feel so alive when I am in Israel. It's so raw, and so real, for everyone who lives here. There is a lot of screaming. It's not behind a screen, and it's never too elegant.

For as long as I've written poetry, I've worried about trying to make my life imitate art. Now, finally, that paradigm seems wholly artificial. For living life well is the highest art. In some circumstances, living life merely with dignity is an art.

I will be moving to Manhattan this May, somewhere I always imagined NEVER living. It always seemed overstimulating to the point of overload. How can a reflective person handle so much information, so many colors, so many moods? Somewhat ironically, it is my love of wilderness and drive to work for healing the ecology of the land that will bring me there for graduate school. But its compactness is a blessing for its carbon footprint. The ratio of bodies to its relative peace impresses me. It is an impressive place. And to confess, I have not only called it the "epicenter of capitalism" since high school, but it has also been my baseline city, wherever I have traveled. I am a Jersey girl, if only by birth.

If I can preserve, for myself, a sense of raw and real...if I can preserve for myself a life of mindful striving simply for the life well-lived, I will prove to myself that I can carry the village mentality inside myself. I will have a new answer to the 'which superpower' question: the ability to turn a megatropolis into a village, knowing her neighbors in their raw and real.

So this is my hypothesis for Cairo. It will endear itself to me, because, like Jerusalem, it is a metropolis that will feel like a village. I will be convinced that Israel is indeed a Middle Eastern country, with more in common culturally, at least on the street, with Egypt than with the US. I will love being there, for the distinctness and vitality of it, and for the novelty of being a foreigner there, but I will be ready to leave at the end of my five days, because there is only so long that I can enjoy myself, while feeling like I am a foreigner keeping her identity a secret.