It was then that I noticed the faded black numbers on the bare arm sticking out of his Hawaiian shirt. And suppose He’s a She? Wouldn’t that drive all the old boys in black out of their curlered heads?” “Some Jews believe that the Messiah will come through that gate.”He started to laugh. It is as if you can still hear Him weeping for all of us, for what must happen.” He stretched out his arm and pointed to the bricked-up golden gate in the wall of the Old City opposite us. Our talk is light, fact-stocked, and airy until we find ourselves in the early afternoon on the Mount of Olives, and stand, suddenly silent, in the subby ochre olive grove where Christ wandered on the night before His crucifixion.Įven on a cloudless afternoon like this, Isaiah whispered, “this place is so sad. Today he is wearing bright red sneakers and a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt with great orange suns on it. I love his sardonic wit, his baroque flights of phrase, his kabbalistic learning, the way his eyebrows twitch asymmetrically when he gets excited, which he does often. My guide to the mysteries of the Old City was “”Isaiah,” plump, bald, late-middle-aged Israeli poet and mystic who looks, as he himself says often, “like a semi-enlightened sunburnt frog” and who has, over two days, become a friend.
I was a fierce, unhappy, intellectual twenty-eight-year-old, still uneasy with all things “mystical,” stalking in old jeans and cheap army boots around Jerusalem.
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