Shared fragility on Jerusalem’s streets

For a moment, I thought he might lift off and go soaring into the air. He was so tall and thin, his hands and feet resting lightly on the scooter that carried him, his tzitzit riding the winds behind him, that he seemed to be flying down Jaffa Street, which stretched out before him, an empty vast expanse, granite stones, and the light rail’s metal tracks glistening in the crisp light of early morning, before the crowds of people hurrying along with their bags and their furrowed brows, and before the trains with their warning whistles and whoosh of speed. He was like a bird, free from gravity and all human concerns.

Suddenly the man did go flying — up and up and up, then sharply downwards, and his silver metal scooter was crushing up against his soft body, and the two were tumbling one over the other, once, then twice, and maybe even a third time, until both body and scooter lay absolutely still on the ground.

Everything froze.

Then, as though a conductor with hand held high had signaled with the bare flick of a wrist, all of us early risers, who had been heading to wherever we were each headed to, pivoted, as one, towards his crumpled figure. As I neared, his stillness triggered a moment of nausea, but he suddenly staggered half-upright, looked around wildly, then dragged himself and his scooter over to a bench where he collapsed, doubled over, and, clutching at himself, began rocking forwards and backwards.

“Are you okay? Should I call for help?” asked the first person to reach him, a woman with a religious Jewish head covering. But before he could even emerge from his close-eyed swaying to acknowledge her, I heard a man’s voice describing in clear terms the accident we had all just witnessed and requesting immediate assistance. I looked around to see who among us had the wherewithal to already be calling for help and saw that it was a man, perhaps in his 50s, wearing the yellow neon vest of a city worker. From his accented Hebrew I could tell he was Arab.

What a strange offering from the early morning city streets. The worst of luck — with this flight of freedom so painfully curtailed, followed by the best of humanity — with so many people rushing to help.

And, of course, impossible to ignore in the midst of the horrors of this war, that the one who was quickest to help the injured man — a religious Jew — was Arab, probably an East Jerusalem Palestinian. This on the same city streets where, over the years, both Palestinians and Jews have all too frequently attacked and been attacked by each other, each incident causing endless ripples of harm.

And then, just a few weeks later, I witnessed a similar event, but a sort of mirror opposite.

Coming home from a late night walk, I turned onto my street to chaos — red-blue-white lights flashing against the dark night; ambulances, police, medics encircling a body stretched flat on the ground. This injured body, that of a man, I saw as I neared, with buzzed black hair and a trim beard of black which stood out against the glowing white of a large neck brace gripping his head stiffly in place while the medics, some with tzitzit swinging gently as they worked, buckled, and tucked his prone body onto a stretcher.

A group of young men stood close, faces grim. I could see they were Arab neighbors from Abu Tor, the Israeli/Palestinian neighborhood where I live. A food delivery motorcycle was propped up on the sidewalk at an odd angle — perhaps the injured man’s? The heavy silence of both medics and observers indicated that whatever had happened was serious.

Suddenly the man let out such a sharp groan of pure pain that I gasped and stopped mid-step, and the medics stiffened, checking that he was okay before continuing, moving even faster, as though every moment mattered.

The medics began loading the man onto the ambulance, releasing us onlookers from our spell. The clustered young men began to disperse, and as I started walking towards home, I passed two of them at the corner, still watching the scene with troubled faces.

“Do you know him?” I asked them.

“Yeah,” they said quietly, and confirmed that it had been a motorcycle accident. “There’s nothing to be done,” they said resignedly, shaking their heads and then repeating somberly, almost more to themselves or to the vastness of the universe than to me, “nothing to be done.”

I shared my hope that everything would be okay, and we wished each other good night.

Like downtown Jaffa Street, my neighborhood streets too have been the backdrop for inter-communal violence. The battles of 1948. The battles of 1967. And in the years that I’ve lived in this seamline neighborhood of Jerusalem, I can show you where persons of one community harmed, in various ways, persons of the other community.

But most of the time, my neighborhood, like on Jaffa Street and many others places, is a place of mundane non-events. The non-story-worthy comings and goings of people going about daily life. And there are always moments like these, of people doing what is needed to help each other or work together. Not, I must add, just because they were fulfilling professional roles (like the municipal worker in the first story or the medics in the second), because that overlooks the too-many examples of bias and ideology trumping professional requirements in a range of roles. But just because helping someone, regardless of who they are, is the right thing to do.

Weeks have passed since I witnessed these two accidents, but my mind keeps looping back to them.

We are drowning in the terrible harms between our two communities, whose impact ripples out across communities and generations. These stories are amplified by media, reaching even more people, enlarging and entrenching fear, anger, hatred. And then this is all too often manipulated by politicians and others in ways which make it almost impossible to repair relations or trust or imagine anything different.

Research about couples’ relationships shows that for any one negative incident, five positive incidents are needed to maintain a good relationship. If the ratio for couples is 5:1, it’s mindboggling to consider the ratio and type of positive interactions needed to change the tide of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship.

Yet for the all profound harms, there are also many positive interactions, experiences, and efforts. Perhaps these need more attention. Not in order to conceal problematic interactions or policies. But, rather, as an aspect of helping us correct course and work our way towards the mutual acceptance, fairness, dignity, we need to be able to live together.

So I offer you these two glimpses of mutual help, not mutual harm. Two moments of shared and sharpened cognizance of life’s fragility. Because, while we are all members of our communities, believers in certain ideas and narratives, we are also, first and foremost, just people with needs, fears, and hopes that are more similar than we often allow ourselves to see. Our soft flesh a reminder of our shared humanity.