In these days of the Sukkot holiday, my Jerusalem neighborhood changes its face and becomes a neighborhood of Flatbush in Brooklyn and a neighborhood of Sercel in Paris.
Masses of established ultra-orthodox families from the USA, France and other countries rent apartments and hotel rooms in the area, and raid the streets like swarms of locusts. We locals are pressured and enveloped in silence. Not that we have nothing to say, but for the simple reason that if you are caught speaking Hebrew on a KKL street in Jerusalem these days , it is likely that a well-heeled American lady will give you a box for transportation and a $50 tip in advance.
My friend, a lawyer who has an office in the neighborhood, forgot for a moment and spoke Hebrew in the street.
A few minutes later a nice tourist asked him if they would build him a sukkah and how much it would cost.
The store shelves are completely empty.
The guests from abroad know how to live. They stick to the goods as if they had fasted for six months. Ran the hair stylist works 24 hours a day and Hachiti the nail builder employs women in shifts around the clock, like an MRI institute. This year it is much more serious, because the custom has just been renewed, after During the Corona years, it was canceled, and the tourists had to stop their habit of coming to the Holy Land in Tishrei and remained in the diaspora.
In short, it's a nightmare.
And this week, right on Hol HaMoed, I stood in a long and winding line for a bagel sandwich, I watched in horror as a tourist ordered 70 (!) empty bagels (in my heart I thought she could have reduced two, then it was Lulav's gematria) and suddenly I realized something: how fun it is that they come .
How beautiful that Jerusalem is flooded with Jews from all over the world who come here to celebrate Sukkot.
After all, besides being our capital city and an ancient and beautiful city like no other, it has another function: it is also the capital of the Jewish people.
And this crazy line for bagels expresses this idea no less than any "discovery" group.
This is the modern pilgrimage.
The closest expression to what this holiday was and will be, with God's help, is one of the three pilgrimages to Jerusalem.
Everyone.
All the people of Israel.
A few years ago the mayor of Jerusalem Moshe Leon decided that parking in Jerusalem on the holidays would be free for everyone.
Including for tourists and visitors.
I wrote to him then that it was a beautiful idea, which also had an internal logic.
After all, for us, for the residents of Jerusalem, parking is free because we live there.
Because this is our home.
We got a parking area and it is ours.
On Sukkot, I wrote to him, Jerusalem is the home of all Jews.
All the Jewish people live in Jerusalem.
This is, if you will, a national parking area.
And therefore Mr. Simpson and Mrs. Krautenberg, Doctor Moldavsky and Rev. Rabbi Yom Tov Sheini, the annoying ones - I forgive and forgive you.
For everything.
About the bagels and traffic jams and hustle and bustle and arrogance.
The main thing is to come.
Come one and all.
"And we gathered together from the four wings of the land to our land."
were we wrong
We will fix it!
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