Friday afternoon at the corner grocery store in Jerusalem

So it’s Friday afternoon at the corner grocery store in Jerusalem.

The whole place is about the size of my shower, and it’s got all the people.

Mostly fathers with their kids. The imas are home, preparing for Shabbat. The smells of soon-to-be-devoured dinners spill into the street: chicken soup, kibbe, vanilla and cinnamon from cakes and babka, roast chicken, all of it mingling in the air as tightly as we’re crowding the aisles.

We Jews are only a small tribe — maybe 15 million on a good day — and it feels like a third of us are crammed into this store.

The aisles are about as thin as a pencil.

You know the old joke about “mixed dancing”?

Well, there’s a lot of that going on as we maneuver our carts and our children and our emotional baggage around each other.

Most of the fathers are Haredi, and everyone is doing their best to give each other space — which is about as likely as Moshiach showing up in the next five minutes.

Finally, I get to the line. I’m next.

There are two guys at the checkout — one with a yarmulke, one without.

Moshiach doesn’t show up, but a yeshiva bocher does.

He swoops in, holding tefillin, and asks the checkout clerks if they’ve laid tefillin today.

The guy with the yarmulke says yes, of course.

The other guy continues to ring up groceries.

The bocher approaches him: the perfect mitzvah target except it’s about five minutes before the store closes, and all the folks we saw at Sinai are getting restless in line.

And they are angry.

I’ve seen a lot in life, but I’ve never seen so many religious Jews become instantly anti-religious — or
united in a single, fiery cause:

Thou shalt not cut the line.

They start shouting at the bocher that there’s a line, and he dare not cut it.

“But it’s a mitzvah!” The bocher argues back.

“By my wife needs salt!”

“And my kids want Bamba!”

“But it’s a MITZVAH!”

Then the checkout clerk raises his hands and says, “Don’t worry my cousins. Don’t wotth. Ana Arabi. I’m Arab.”

And yes – I swear – not everyone, but several of us – clapped.

And that’s Jerusalem. A whole universe in a store the size of a shower, where a theological skirmish breaks out over tefillin — and all roads meet.