– by Erez Bleicher – 24/9/2023 

This is a short reflection from Erez Bleicher, the Communications and Membership Director of the Green Olive Collective, written in 2019 as he walked through the streets of Jerusalem on Yom Kippur. The holiday is often referred to as the Day of Atonement and is one of the most sacred days in the Jewish calendar, in which congregants are asked to reckon with their personal and collective shortcomings. Every year on this and the other High Holidays the West Bank and East Jerusalem are put fully under closure. Erez reflects here on the profound melancholy and contradiction of this fact, and references a poem by Yehuda Amichai meditating on similar themes in 1967, the year the West Bank was conquered.

After attending Yom Kippur services this morning in Jerusalem I walked past the Damascus Gate to the Old City and toward my barber so I could begin the new year fresh. As I walked past the main thoroughfares to East Jerusalem I saw each one blockaded by IDF roadblocks. To confirm, I asked a young man in broken Arabic, “Why today?” He answered nonchalantly from his car window, “The Jewish holiday.”

It carries a specific pain to bear witness to the callousness of occupation on this day. This is a day of radical accountability in which we are meant to stand in awe as we take stock and make amends for the ways we have caused harm in the year past. That half the city of Jerusalem is shuttered so the other half can collectively atone for it’s wrong-doings is a macabre irony almost fathomless. And now as I sit on a stone to write this and think about the work of repair we need to do in the days to come, I am eerily reminded of a Yehuda Amichai poem reflecting on another Yom Kippur, in which he meditates on a similar afternoon:

“On Yom Kippur in 1967, the Year of Forgetting, I put on
my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old City of Jerusalem.
For a long time I stood in front of an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall shop,
not far from the Damascus Gate, a shop with
buttons and zippers and spools of thread
in every color and snaps and buckles.
A rare light and many colors, like the open Holy Ark.

I told him in my heart that my father too
had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.
I explained to him in my heart about all the decades
and the causes and the events, why I am now here
and my father’s shop was burned there and he is buried here.

When I finished, it was time for N’eilah, the Closing of the Gates.
He too lowered the shutters and locked the gate
and I returned, with all the worshipers, home.” – from Jerusalem 1967