It's March 21st as I leave the house.
The streets look the same as ever. Manor House tube station looks the
same. I'm carrying an unwieldy bag containing an oversized laptop full of
dull market research questions. I'm on my way to another colourless day of
market research interviewing. That's the same.

Faces are the same dour Manor House faces.
It never exactly thrills me to be going to work. But today I feel
especially reflective, melancholy and depressive. You see. Today's
Purim.

11 years ago I was in Jerusalem for Purim. I had never heard of Purim
before 1989. It was worth (albeit unknowingly) waiting those first 26
years of my life to experience it. The careless, history filled streets of
the Jewish quarter of the old city sung with hundreds of children and
adults dancing, drinking, and blowing streamers.

I've been down on Israel a great deal since my last 'adventure' there in
1992. I stayed on Kibbutz Ulpan near Haifa and experienced some utterly
dreadful karma. Some really horrendous things. But realistically as the joy of
Purim fills me (even on this Piccadilly line tube to Hammersmith where I'm
interviewing this Purim) I have to acknowledge that these things could have
happened anywhere. Perhaps it's just a part of my constant wrestling with my
Jewish identity which makes me blame the Holy Land. Today I'd like to think so.

Israel in 1989 was traumatic for me for widely different reasons. I had
some problems on the Yeshiva (Religious college) I stayed at there. (One of
my friends in Israel once said I was a 'nudnik' and I won't flinch from that description. -
It's Purim after all. I do have problems and arguments everywhere).
But it wasn't on the same level as Kibbutz/Ulpan. I cried the night
I left Yeshiva. It's the only time I've ever been truly sorry to leave
anywhere.

When I left (high) School I threw my jacket in the nearby Manor Pond. As I
left University - head still buzzing from the caffeine tablets which had sustained me through my last exam I
joyfully (with no irony) sang 'ON THE DOLE,ON THE DOLE, ON THE DOLE' to
myself -and anyone else in listening distance on the bus home.
I left Kibbutz, broken, suicidal and needing spiritual regeneration. Needing
68 thousand psychiatrists on hand.
Three years earlier I cried the day I left Yeshiva.


As a couple of close friends (most of my only real friendships have been
made in Israel) helped me to the taxi it actually felt like a pivotal
moment. It felt like I was leaving somewhere. I'd never felt that before.

Jerusalem attracts people looking for answers. Looking for a country to
change their lives. Of course it can't. A country can't change your
displacement.
We look to Israel for the wrong things us displaced Jews of the Diaspora.
Israelis find us hard to cope with, our neurosis, our searching for the
essence of Jewishness, as hard as we find their cultural differences to us
to deal with.
But Jerusalem's beacon lights to the displaced does make for meeting
interesting people. I don't miss my Haifa Kibbutz at all, but I do miss
Jerusalem. I miss that feeling in Jerusalem, that vibe where every other
person you meet is an artist, a writer, a musician a Rabbi or a Christian
missionary.
(Despite this the continual striving to be a massive success that prevails in the West
isn't there. There are people in Jerusalem who see a bit of
davening (prayer),6 good conversations, and a couple of hours selling jewellery on Ben Yehuda St
as a wonderfully fulfilling day).

Leil the Irish busker for me symbolized this Jerusalem. Leil was a lapsed
Catholic Dubliner( but in true Jerusalem spirit had recently become a born
again Christian when I met him)with a
talent for nifty guitar work, A lover of drugs,a lover of women,a real
working class troubador. A free free spirit.
Leil came to Jerusalem because he fell in love with an Orthodox Jewish girl
from Mea Sharim.(very possibly the most fervently Orthodox Jewish area in
the world.) Leil had somehow met this woman in Dublin. I'll never forget
him telling me and my pal this story in her tiny apartment in Jerusalem.
Her cat ( one of about 2000 in Jerusalem) scurried around the room heavily
pregnant. I remember I was falling asleep and the story was appropriately
dream like.
It's one of those that a thieving writer could not but recyle.
" I was in Dublin. Then I woke up in Mea Sharim. It had been nightime
when I arrived. In the morning I decided to nip out for fags before
anyone woke up." He said wielding the colloquial as if still talking about
being in Dublin.
"And everybody was wearing black, I was the only one not wearing black.....
everybody was Orthodox. It was like a different century. I couldn't
believe it."Naturally the relationship floundered.
Leil actually tried to become a Hasidic Jew but it never quite worked out.
But Leil stayed in Israel.
The very fact that Leil came to Jerusalem and attempted to become Hasidic
is,to me,Jerusalem.
Leil thinking that as a Catholic boy from Dublin he might somehow enjoy a
successful relationship with an Orthodox woman from Meah Sharim is this
city. (It's a little like Beavis and Butthead trying to marry into the Royal
Family) He was ( and still is I trust) an incurable romantic.You believe
the impossible.
Want the impossible from it. Jerusalem makes you think the impossible
might be there. It thus attracts a certain type of character.

In Tarantino's Pulp Fiction Samuel L. Jackson's character (much to John
Travolta's character's chagrin),finishes the movie by saying he is going to
discard his wordly essentials,and roam the world doing
good. As a Holy Man. Just walking. "Going where G-d wants me to be".Many
may have thought this far fetched. but one
night in the Jewish Quarter my friend Alan Tevine and I encountered a black
american guy sitting on some steps overlooking the Kotel (Western Wall) in
the Jewish quarter.
He had no shoes.

We began to talk to this man. He was gently spoken,completely rational and
very kind. He told us that he had been a successful 'Yuppie' businessman
in the USA (the use of this word Yuppie will tell you that this was around
1987) with a nice apartment and a promising career. One day he heard what he
swears was "G-d's voice".
The way that he described this conversation could have come straight from
Tarantino's pen. Though it would of course be at least five years before
anyone would hear of Quentin Tarantino.
He was instructed to
"DROP EVERYTHING. GIVE UP YOUR JOB,YOUR APARTMENT,YOUR POSSESSIONS"
"Everything Lord?"
"YES AND ALL YOUR CLOTHES EXCEPT THOSE YOU ARE WEARING"
"ALL my clothes Lord?"
"YES ALL."
"Not shoes Lord!!.!"
"AND YOUR SHOES"
"Com on Lord not SHOES"
"You heard me my son"
He had given up his apartment,started to wander the streets and
eventually,inevitably perhaps found his way to the Old City of Jerusalem.
His brother had paid for his plane ticket. He arrived in Israel with no
money.
He is perhaps the only person ever to get through the strictest security
system in the world - El Al airlines - in 30 seconds. He had no luggage. He
described a hilarious encounter with security.

" 'you have no
luggage sir???' ..... The guy couldn't believe it, and then my jeans lifted off my feet as I walked away
and he said 'YOU HAVE NO SHOES EITHER'."

He'd wandered around Israel in biblical spirit washing his clothes in the
sea and in streams and meeting many different people.

I want to stress that he was perfectly rational and sane(at least on the
surface).
Genuinely giving. He even offered Alan his jacket because he felt he
looked cold in the late night Jerusalem breeze. He offered Alan his
jacket, yet he had no shoes.
I don't believe he was crazy to this day.

It turned out to be a gorgeously sunny day on Purim. The old
British Jewish cliche is that it is always sunny on Jewish holidays. For
March 21 it was indeed a cracker of a day. Trees shined and shimmied and
the wind barely blew.
And I was doing inane Market Research Surveys not getting drunk. Not
getting belted with my people in this Indian (Jewish?) summer.

We are (as far as I know) the only religion with a Holiday like Purim where you are
advised to get drunk. Jews supposedly can't drink yet I once met an
incredibly posh, hearty and likeable ex alcoholic Baal tshuva, (returner to the
Faith) who informed me in his Etonian accent that Purim was 'a tea party' to
him after his drinking years.
I certainly haven't been averse to alcohol in my life but I still found the
24 hour, non stop, unselfconscious knocking back that was Purim a bit of a
struggle. Though I had a fabulous time.

On March 21 it all came back to me and I even began to plot what had been
the unthinkable since my time there in 92 - a trip to Eretz Israel. I feel
like I'm in Gullas (exile),cut off from myself,my people. I just knew I
should be getting drunk on Purim.(How often does a person have a guilt trip
where they think they SHOULD be getting drunk?)
Not pissed you understand. That's England.
Drunk on Purim. That's Jerusalem. That's Jewish.


So what of me? It takes days like March 21st to help me realise I
miss Israel.
Part of me (the greater part?) feels eternally connected to it. (At least
to Yerushalayim)

Purim? Next year in Jerusalem?

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