Alchemy in the City of Gold

Alchemy is the ancient pursuit of turning what is base and guttural into something noble and eternal. With roots spanning the ancient world from Greece to China — an obsession for the ages intense in its way as unlocking the secrets of AI today — alchemy most famously meant using some combination of science, magic, capital, and philosophy to transform lead into gold.

Gold is one of humankind’s most powerful fictions. There’s no natural reason why wedding rings or the value of currency should depend upon how much gold rather than lead a person or nation has gathered. But gold glitters. It’s beautiful and inspiring and light to the touch. For as long as we can remember in most places we know, people have agreed upon gold’s supreme value, and been willing to sweat, slave, fight, and die for it.

Yesterday in the City of Gold, Jerusalem, the base and guttural urges of the Jewish people were expressed amongst what is ethereal and eternal. It was Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, a celebration of the miraculous reunification of the capital of the Jewish people in 1967.

I love Jerusalem like a precious friend — for its cool nights and corner restaurants, its holy people and neighborhood characters; for the shuk and the tayelet and the Kotel as well as Mike’s Place and Kippa Man and the King David Hotel. When I travel up the steep mountain past Shoresh and Beit Zayit and the military vehicles from 1948 and 1967 repainted year after year by the side of Highway One, I always feel like I am entering a kingdom befitting a King.

By every measure, even with the recognition that we still have not fully metabolized a way to live in peace in Jerusalem with all who love it, Jerusalem Day should be a time of jubilation. Yet tragically in our day, at the nexus of brutal, systemic hostility against the Jewish people and our own fears and arrogance, Jerusalem Day falls flat and hard like a lead balloon rather than soaring to the heavens. It is a day that attracts a gathering of ultranationalist shouting, disruption, violence and harsh marches down Agron to the Old City. It’s a day of testosterone and triumphalism rather than laughter and appreciation. Yesterday was not the Jerusalem of the prophets for which we waited, but rather an incomplete Jerusalem that still needs our help.

In this time of war, where Israel and the Jewish people legitimately, tenaciously, and unequivocally must fight to protect and secure our nation, identity, and holy places, we also must humble ourselves. Great warriors like great alchemists know that whatever mastery we carry, forces beyond us judge our conduct. Submitting to a service of something greater than ourselves is often the difference between good and great.

Some say that the Semitic root of the word “alchemy” refers to reuniting something divine with something of the earth. Carl Jung considered alchemy the art of all arts, a symbolic model for how we turn our most haunted and broken parts into a pristine, higher self. The art of turning lead into gold has something to teach us about Jerusalem, which is as base as any place, with mail undelivered, garbage to collect, and taxes to pay. But it is also a capital of faith, a home for dreams and aspirations as lasting and holy and elusive as the glimmer of gold.

As a Zionist, an Israeli, a Jerusalemite, and a person who puts heart and soul into creating pathways for people around the world as well as local friends and neighbors to find meaning and community in Jerusalem, I don’t know if the word “lead” and the word “leaders” are related. I do know that it is only by powering transformation within the metaphor between these two words — to make what is base and guttural into something noble and eternal — that we will fulfill the destiny of our City of Gold.