Bourbon on the roof and balance on the ledge

So it’s  twilight in Jerusalem, and I’m sitting at a table at my favorite bar with Four Roses bourbon in hand, letting Fiddler on the Roof wreck me in Yiddish.  Yeah, you read that right: Yiddish.   (Because apparently I’m a masochist and the English isn’t going to destroy me enough)

It’s almost Pavlovian, really — I hear the first bars of the intro  — you know, just before Tevye begins: “a fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But here in our little village of Anatevka…” and my throat closes and my eyes get hot and my heart swells, too. And I am wrecked.

To be abundantly clear, I don’t mean  “misty-eyed” wrecked—no, I’m talking about tears-running, chest-heaving, “why-did-I-wear-eye-makeup” wrecked.

And it’s not just the shtetl, and Tevye and TRADITION!. It’s everything. The pogroms. The dispersion. The endless cycle of shit our people have been through. The war. Our hostages.

I feel the weight of every exile, every burning synagogue, every shattered glass—it’s all there, playing in my head on a loop. We are living it now.

And then it happens. Through my AirPods—the noise-canceling ones, mind you—I hear it.

Loud, brash, modern Israeli music.

I take out one AirPod out and glance over. Two tables down, a group of these  guys are  blasting some obnoxious party anthem. They’re shouting and laughing like the world hasn’t been falling apart since forever —

At first, I’m pissed. Like, really? I’m sitting here mourning literally thousands of years of persecution, and these guys are throwing an impromptu rave? But then I stop. I look at them. I really look at them.

Two in uniform, one with a black yarmulke, another covered tattoos.

They’re alive. They’re laughing. They’re here.

And suddenly, it’s not annoying anymore. It’s everything. Because that’s the story, isn’t it? That’s what survival looks like. The tears and the laughter. The mourning and the music. We are standing on a roodtop  between past and future – ok hometeam had his fiddle, I have my bourbon, but always always trying for  that balance on the ledge. 

So I sit there, in this holy, messy, complicated city, listening to the ghost of a violin in one ear and bass-heavy techno as steady as my beating heart  in the other. And for the first time all night, I don’t feel like I’m drowning.

I take a sip of bourbon and let it burn all the way down.

Here’s to our past.

Here’s to our future.

And here’s to our spectacularly wild and insistently thriving  present.