Tzfat: A City for the Living and the Dead
By Max Yacker
I keep eternity in the space between the grains of sand and my dangling, Blundstone clad feet. The chill that lingered in my bones from the steel bar my arm snaked around moved silently through me. It was of the same wind that blew through my friend, sitting, only a few feet away, dangling above the shifting grains. There is a gentle breeze that blows through the town. It floats on through the graying and beiged buildings and lingers where it will, free in its intentions. There is a violent wind that screams through the streets. It beats on the flags, on the windows in which the docile and the monstrous alike take refuge. That blows the sands through their caverns, across the cliffsides, up, just enough to almost reach our fingertips. It envelops this city of ours, threatens to overtake us. It surrounds this city of ours and becomes a resident in the push and pull of everyday.
It had been maybe two hours since we were meant to meet the rest of the tour group at the main synagogue in Tzfat, and maybe two and a half hours since we managed to separate and subsequently become entangled in the labyrinthian, stone cobbled streets of the city, past art exhibitions with the highest of spiritual ideals laid in tri-color canvas vistas and overlapping collages of formless kodachrome. We had sulked past the wooden carvings of gulls in flight, bulls at fight, the shavings mesh with the sand and dirt that cake the inner crevices between the stone that lines the pavement that envelops this city of the living for the dead. The city of artists and spiritualists, who breathe in this ancient wind, which saw the birth of the country, as a geographic location and a legal nation, which will see the heat death of the universe, come when it may. They keep it within them, only to command it outwards, onto the page, into the stone. This wind which watches and fuels. Tzfat is a city of the living.
When the colors began to mesh in our eyes, and the wind no longer howled with the artist’s fury, we let it pull us closer to our roots. In the Jewish tradition, we ended up at a graveyard. It is among the highest of holy experiences to pray at the grave of a great Jew. It was among our highest honors to stand by this crypt. To move the sounds through our throats, to have it carried out, skyward, from our lungs. The air that stayed with us, that birthed these expressions of the generations that lived with each stroke of the brush was the same as that which pulled our pleas. We sang, in our prayers, silently, we sang for each hobbled door that remained shut for Friday night, and for each curving stair that smoothed under the pressures of these lovers it supports. We sang for the Aliya (spiritual raising) of the soul of every great writer, thinker, individual we were by. We prayed for the living but we certainly prayed for the dead as well. Tzfat is a city for the dead.
And, having recently been made aware of just how much overdue we were at the shul (synagogue) through the incessant clatter of a communal clock, seeing no reason to seek it out, we settled, high above the sand, on the cliffside, our arms clinging dearly to the sole steel bar behind us. The deep black sky was peppered with bone and amber stars, which looked down on the desert road. There we sat, beneath the dichotomous sky, to discuss what the city’s shown us. There we sat, to breathe in the cool, autumn air. We let the wind caress us, we let the space beneath our feet grow in infinitude the more we chose to ignore it. We could have seen how far up we were, but Tzfat is a city for experience without measure.
