A Time Outside of Time

I sometimes dream I'm in Jerusalem, our home for 36 years. I walk the same streets, see the same cityscape, without any sense of homecoming, for Jerusalem is, in my dream, the grounds of everyday life, taken for granted. Only when I awaken do I realize where the dream had taken place.

Brooklyn is now our primary residence, indeed our only residence, for two years ago we sold our home in Jerusalem, with its high ceilings, light-filled rooms, and balcony flowers. We loved living there and we'd be there still had our children not done to us what we had done to our own parents and moved to another continent.

We changed in many ways during our stay in Jerusalem, although it's sometimes hard to know whether the change is a function of aging or of residence in the city. Is my heightened appreciation of friendship, for example, a function of the extraordinary closeness among friends that Jerusalem fosters? There, it sometimes seemed, almost all our friends knew one another. Because most of us had arrived in Jerusalem with no family other than our children, we served as each other's surrogate family - as the aunts, uncles, and grandparents who had been left behind. Or would my friendships have deepened even if I had never left America?

One fundamental change with which Jerusalem is indisputably responsible is that it was there we began to observe Shabbat. The city itself and our circle of friends were conducive to its observance. On Friday afternoons, from our apartment in the city center, we could hear the traffic noise gradually diminishing. Stores, offices, restaurants, and places of amusement closed, bosses stopped running, and by the time the municipal siren announced candle-lighting time, the city was quiet.

Our friends often invited us to share their Sabbath meals, where they introduced us to the Sabbath home rituals, the kiddushim and other ceremonies that set the Sabbath apart from the rest of the week. With the help of a tape that my boss kindly made for me, I learned these rituals, and it gave me much pleasure to enact them in the presence of friends, for it was the rare Sabbath meal without guests at our home or at those of our friends.

Neither my wife nor I is religiously observant, but we found in Shabbat a weekly oasis of sanctity and serenity, a time outside of time, a time amazingly restorative. Now that we're back in New York, we continue to observe Shabbat. Our daughter, her husband, and their son come to us every Friday evening for dinner, when our grandson, who is being raised as an observant Catholic, has an opportunity to absorb the songs, the ceremonies, and the atmosphere of the Jewish Sabbath. The tradition will continue, I hope, if not with him, then with the children of our son, who recites kiddush with my grandfather's kiddush cup.

Recently I dreamed that my wife and I were in Jerusalem, somewhere in the Maalot Dafna neighborhood, where we hailed a taxi. We asked the driver to take us home. He drove all over the city but no matter where he went he was unable to find it. That part of our lives is over. But Shabbat remains with us still.