Street Names and Stone Steps

Rabbi Michael Feshbach
Temple Shalom
Chevy Chase, Maryland

Paraphrasing a comment I heard: a rabbi I know who has lived in Jerusalem told me that attending “guide school” – training to be a tour guide in Israel – taught almost as much about Judaism as did rabbinical school.

I can believe that.  If it sounds strange, well, just take a walk around, in any Israeli city.

It’s not only the ancient sites and religious rites.  It’s simpler than that.  Decoding the street names is a major, profound history lesson all in itself.

In Jerusalem, I live this summer in a neighborhood called Rechavia.   My apartment is on Abrabanel… a  brilliant medieval Spanish Biblical commentator.  What are some of the other street names I can think of here?  Let’s see.  Ramban.  Ibn Ezra.  Ben Maimon (Maimonides).  Or: in the neighborhood of Baka, all the tribes of Israel.  Last summer I lived on Gideon.  It was near Asher and Shimshon and so on.  Closer in to town we have Ben Yehuda (who restored Hebrew as a spoken language) and Usshiskin, and Palmach (the fighting force at the beginning of the state) is not far away.  The Machon (the Hartman Institute) is near Kaf Tet B’November, the 29^th of November (the day of the UN vote on partition, if anyone needs the reference).

The highways outside of town?  The other day I took the Begin to get to the Golda Meir interchange.  You take those roads to get to Ben Gurion (the airport).  In Tel Aviv names from early Zionist history come to mind: Allenby and, again, Ben Yehuda; medieval poet Ibn G’virol,

Walking around is simply a delight.  You look at a map, but you look back in time, and to know who the streets are named after is a lesson in history, ancient and modern, and Jewish life all unto itself.

Of course, in Jerusalem… in all of Israel, perhaps, when walking around one should watch one’s step.

This summer, just as last summer, the last step on the way out of the apartment, for some reason, is totally uneven.  It is, in other words, not at all the same depth as the other steps.

Why anyone would build this way is beyond me.  I am wondering, however, if it is something of a metaphor.

Because just as everything here, it throws you off your usual stride.  It requires extra concentration, a slight bit of extra thought.   Not everything is packaged and branded into conformity.  And not everything around us is what we think it will be.

If there is an added awareness, an extra intensity, a sense of concentration on important things that is needed just to get around here, well, you know… I think I like it.  The fact that the step is a different size…I don’t know if it was an accident, or a mistake, or part of some pattern I simply don’t see yet.

But it fits.  And here, in Israel, even an extra half step teaches us about how we stand, and who we are.