A Literary Magazine in Support of the Jewish Community
Jerusalem
There are only two ways to travel in Jerusalem. Over top, or underneath. You can walk on the rooftops where laundry billows; you can trapse the Ottoman ramparts of the Old City; you can gaze across the Kidron at the blazing golden Dome; you can peek from a thousand towers. Or, you can descend a staircase to Roman paving stones from the time of Jesus; you can slither through a cistern; you can creep cautiously through a limestone quarry cave, passing your hands along the wet, cold stone; you can get lost in a maze of fabric. If you go over top, you will be seen as underinformed, ignorant. Don’t you know what lies beneath you? But if you go underneath, you will be seen as overambitious, a selfish seeker. What are you searching for? What did you expect to find? Only those who live between the two are called locals. They go in and out of grocery stores. In and out of busses. In and out of elevators. In and out of streets, crowds. The weight of history crushes them from above, supports them from beneath. They pass neither over nor under Jerusalem. Jerusalem passes through them. Time only travels one way.
Isaac James Richards
Isaac James Richards researches and writes about religious memory in the Middle East. He spent a semester abroad at the Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies and dug for a season with the Huqoq Excavation Project in Israel. He has published poetry, prose, and peer-reviewed scholarship in several venues from Oxford Magazine to The Journal of American Culture. He is also a Pushcart Prize nominee and will begin a PhD program in the fall at the Pennsylvania State University. You can learn more about him at https://www.isaacrichards.com/.
