God is in the field — but I live in the city

We are elbows-deep into Elul, and they tell us that God is in the fields.

This is an old teaching: During the month before the High Holy Days, the King leaves the palace and comes out to meet us where we are.

Usually I imagine wheat.

Something golden and pastoral. A soft breeze. Perhaps a pomegranate tree nearby, because this is a Jewish metaphor and apparently we require seasonal fruit.

But I live in Jerusalem.

And tonight, there are jackals outside my house.

This isn’t a metaphor. Like, there are literal jackals outside my house.

Someone spotted them moving through the neighborhood after dark, slipping between the buildings, those lean golden creatures that live in the hills around us and occasionally wander across the invisible line between wilderness and city.

The WhatsApp group was notified: the jackals have crossed the line.

I cannot stop thinking about that line.

Because we are very fond of lines here.

We draw them on maps.

We build them out of concrete.

We argue about where they should go and who should live on which side of them.

We have Green Lines and municipal boundaries and checkpoints and neighborhoods where one population ends and another begins, except of course it never quite does.

We have Jewish Jerusalem and Palestinian Jerusalem, East and West, religious and secular, left and right.

We have people who are certain this entire land belongs to us because God promised it.

We have people who are certain none of it does.

We have people who can tell you exactly who is indigenous and who is foreign, who is victim and who is oppressor, whose fear is reasonable and whose grief is propaganda.

Everyone has a map.

The jackals /- meanwhile — do not care.

They come down from the hills at night and trot across our carefully constructed streets and boundaries.

I have no idea how they crossed Tsomit Oranim without stopping at the mall.

A field has no walls.

That is precisely what makes it a field.

And I live in a country obsessed with walls.

Some of them exist for good reason.

I know this.

I understand why people who have buried their children want walls. I understand why people who have watched terrorists cross a border want fences and soldiers and gates. I understand why Jews, after two thousand years of being told to leave one country after another, might become fiercely attached to the idea of a place where someone else cannot simply order us out.

I also understand what a wall looks like from the other side.

This is the unbearable thing about living here long enough:

Eventually, if you are paying attention, everybody’s story ruins the simplicity of yours.

And still we keep reaching for simplicity.

We sort ourselves into camps.

We decide which dead children we are allowed to mourn without qualification.

We decide which frightened mothers count.

We decide whose extremists represent an entire people and whose extremists are unfortunate exceptions.

We decide that empathy is betrayal.

We decide that listening is weakness.

We build walls around our compassion and then congratulate ourselves on having principles.

But Elul arrives anyway.

The shofar sounds.

Wake up.

Wake up.

Wake up.

The King is in the field.

And this is where the metaphor becomes inconvenient.

Because if God has truly left the palace, I do not get to control whom God meets out there.

God is in the field with the Israeli mother whose son is serving in Gaza.

God is in the field with the Palestinian mother trying to keep her children alive.

God is with the family waiting for the knock on the door.

God is with the people who are afraid of rockets.

God is with the people who are afraid of soldiers.

And if tge jackals have left the field, I don’t get to decide who THEY meet, either.
I do not mean that all choices are morally equivalent.

They are not.

I do not mean there is no such thing as justice, responsibility, terrorism, self-defense, cruelty or consequence.

There is.

The field is not a place without morality.

It is a place without the comforting fiction that morality belongs exclusively to us.

Maybe that is why the King leaves the palace before Rosh Hashanah.

Palaces are built for hierarchy.

There is a throne.

There are gates.

There are guards.

There are people allowed inside and people kept outside.

But in the field, everyone stands on the same earth.

Maybe that’s so what sent the jackals into the streets.

Tonight they are somewhere near my house, moving through Jerusalem while we sleep.

They know how to find their way through the places where our boundaries fail.

Perhaps that is why I find their presence strangely meaningful tonight.

Not because I want the boundaries to disappear.

Some boundaries protect us.

Some walls keep people alive.

But because I need to remember that the maps we draw are not the whole world.

And neither are the maps I carry inside myself.

Elul asks us to examine those too.

The border between the person I believe I am and the person I have actually been.

The wall between the people whose suffering breaks my heart and the people whose suffering I have learned not to see.

The checkpoints I have erected around my own compassion.

The gates I keep locked because opening them might require me to change.

Somewhere nearby, jackals are moving through the streets. And again, not a metaphor.

Their howls puncture the night.

Soon the shofar will sound again.

And I am beginning to wonder whether God was ever waiting for me somewhere far away, in some imaginary golden field.

Maybe the field has been here all along.

Under the asphalt.

Beyond the walls.

Between the lines on the map.

Underneath all our arguments about who belongs where.

God is in the fields.

And the fields have come to the city.