“I would never call Jerusalem beautiful or comfortable or consoling,” the novelist and essayist Pico Iyer has written. “But there’s something about it that you can’t turn away from.”
I would agree with him about Jerusalem’s fascination. But I disagree about it’s being beautiful and consoling. Sometimes — though far from always — it can be extraordinarily beautiful. And the consolations that it offers are the greatest that can be conceived, even though they come, at times, with great sorrow and pain. But comfortable? I’ve never found it “comfortable.”
I don’t think Jerusalem was ever intended to be “comfortable.”
Posted from Jerusalem, Israel
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In