Jerusalem Letter Introduction

My work (and my wife’s) took us to Jerusalem where we lived for three years from 2004 to 2007.  My first couple years there I wrote emails, essays really, to family and friends about life in Jerusalem.  I wrote about social and cultural events, things I saw and did, descriptions of visits to historical places.  I really tried to capture the feeling of whatever I was talking about at the time, my reactions and observations of how other people responded to and lived  in this amazing, complex place.

If you’re hoping to find my opinion about the conflict there, or gather fodder for your arguments or beliefs supporting one side or the other, you’ll be disappointed.  I tried, and think I succeeded, to keep these notes as apolitical as possible.  I might acknowledge a reality but only as the backdrop for the main point.  In my work, to be sure, but also my life outside the office I interacted evenly with members of all groups.  I cultivated friendships and participated in events in widely diverse neighborhoods and communities: Israeli, Palestinian, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, strongly religious and not so much.  I enjoyed eating, conversing and visiting, participating in weddings, funerals, graduations, bar-mitzvahs, and baptisms, all in many different settings and locations.  I still treasure the incredible diversity juxtaposed with the surprising similarity of people living in that part of the world.

I’m not going to edit my originals too heavily.  I want to maintain the voice and viewpoint I used at the time.  I had a certain attitude and approach to life and my context as I lived it that I no longer have (with some things lost in the process and other things gained).  I enjoy reminiscing on who I was at that time living in that timeless place.

One way to live literarily is to write about life round about you, not as a heart-pouring out diary or journal, but as a description and interpretation of what’s going on around you.  I’m convinced every person’s life is more exotic, more interesting than he or she might think.  One of the keys to recognizing the exotic is looking at the thing’s context.  What surrounds the event?  Writing about things you wouldn’t expect in a certain surrounding  is pretty easy when the context is an exotic place like Jerusalem.  I think it’s possible even when the context is Indianapolis or St. Louis or any of a thousand ordinary places we love and call home.

I wonder what would happen if people started writing a sentence or paragraph a day, or a week about some aspect of life in their respective necks of their respective woods?  I wonder what it might lead to?