Jerusalem by Perspective

The Hitchhiker

Description

You can travel to many varied cities though out the world. After a short while you have seen the main sights, visited the nightlife,, met a few natives, and then you may feel you have experienced the city. Jerusalem is different. You strip one layer away. Another layer invites you to delve into it. Then another layer. Going ever more deeply. Never ending.
The author has the odds to know this. He has hitchhiked into many cultures on a bunch of continents, taking his time working and being with the people at hand, always with the quiet, humble demeanor and a keen eye to absorb what each culture was really about.
With that same humility and eye, the author has attempted to grasp the inside of Jerusalem. From the physical to the emotional to the spiritual, this intimate view shows itself through his concise vignettes, almost like painted pictures. Whether you have never been to Jerusalem, plan to come, or even if you have already toured or lived here, you will gain insights which just might bring about a life changing perspective or two.
If you read slowly and add on the process of meditating on what you have just read, you can gain an experiential taste and sense of the sweetness Jerusalem provides in Jerusalem by Perspective, Insights of a Hitchhiker.

Sujets

• Israel
• Travel
• Middle East

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 25 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456635145
• Langue: English

Extrait

Jerusalem by Perspective
Insights of a Hitchhiker
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
by The Hitchhiker
Copyright by the author,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-3514-5
 
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Contents
Prologue
Insights
Painting Pictures
On Being Invisible
Bamboo and Baby
Believing in Someone
The Bicycle Dilemma
Birds Hovering
Brouhaha-Uman
Business Savvy
Carless Calm in the City
City Cats, Country Cats
Compassion Revealed
A Coopenhagen Jerusalem Divide
Drop by Drop
The Exceptional Street Musician
Flavors
Floored in Israel
The Foreign Ministry
Friday Night Deep
From Belz to Birds
A Garden of Tranquility
Giving from the Heart—the Shabbos Kiddush
Giving on the Streets of Jerusalem
Glued Telling Posters
Growing Gardens
Heavenly Artist
Home Fortress
Honor
The House on the Hill and Progress
Inspiration to Rise
Intended Isolation
The Israeli Gym
It’s Personal
The Latest Tish
The Lone Bureaucrat
The Lone Rebbe
Mishna Rocks
Modest Hanging
Music
A National Treasure
The Necktie
Nobody Home……Yet
The Oblivious Tallis Switch
Ocean Grove Tranquility
Play It On The Radio
A Pregnant Friday Afternoon
Quorum of the Steadfast
Raising Pitch and Children
Rejected and On Her Own
Revelers in Two Shifts
Russia in Jerusalem
Serenity in the Big Family
Sheikh Afoot in Jerusalem
The Shoemakers’ Wives
The Shuk: Daily Pace
The Shuk: Weekly Pace
Sisters’ Shabbos Splendor
Stars of the Park
Sunshine and Laundry
The Superfluous h’s
Third Time Does It
A Tree Grows in….
The Tree Surgeon
Two Conferences
The Two-Legged Beggar
Up on the Roof
Wall Sleep
What Is
Who Wags Whom?
Wise Tree
You Never Know
A Young, Old Soul
Epilogue
Glossary
About the Author
 
Prologue
Hitchhiking fine tunes your senses. You see, hear, and smell more acutely. In addition, your sixth sense enters into another stratosphere. That sixth sense must function at its optimum in order to protect and maintain your own life. There is absolutely no one else to depend upon. There is only your sense to size up whoever is front of you within a few moments. 99 % of the time the person in front of you is fine and positive in intentions. That one percent is the killer.
On the road, reality is multiplied by ten. Each day contains ten times the meetings and experiences of what we call normal life. So each year is like ten.
As a professional hitchhiker for a few years, I lived on the edge and exponentially learned astoundingly more than what was ever offered in the classroom. The travels took me through Canada and the United States, Europe, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and a bit of North Africa.
In Stockholm, I was offered blood pudding. While still very much communist, in Moscow, I met up with taxi drivers conducting commerce with a strong capitalistic bent, and shop keepers who managed stores filled with empty shelves.
In Greece, in the north, I crossed the dangerous roads of the snow-covered Rhodope mountains, and in the low lands hitched on donkeys with milk containers banging on each side.
In Sofia, I awoke to a full-blown violent shoot-out of a revolution only to discover it was a movie when I caught on to the cessation in the action.
In Vichy, I was feted to 12 course dinners. In Kentucky, I water skied on surprisingly wide lakes. Just outside Seattle, I picked cucumbers with migrant workers. Around Santa Fe, I dug ditches shoulder to shoulder as part of a team of forest fire-fighters made up of Hispanics and men from the Apache tribe.
Throughout my travels, I chuckled at what my good friends had warned me about before I set out from New Jersey, “You’ll never make it alive out of Bayonne.”
In Yellowknife, I worked side by side with Inuit, and Eskimo men, loading beautiful white fish packed in ice into the hull of our fish-packing ship cruising on the Great Slave Lake. In the brief darkness of the summer, I took my turn steering that ship guided by the dream-like sky filled to the brim with the northern lights. I could keep going.
An old Jewish teaching says that when a person travels, he searches for a part of himself that is missing. During these jaunts throughout the world, I know I was.
After hitching from England to Greece, I hopped on a boat and docked in Haifa. My knowledge of the land of Israel was nil and like most uninformed people, my bias was negative. But a hitchhiker has to be open to what is before him.
I hitched throughout the breath of the land, a small land in comparison to just about any state in the US of A. But Israel is packed with variety in a condensed form: topography-wise, sort of a world in miniature; demographically, a full-blown gathering of people from most of the countries that make up the United Nations.
To shorten this introduction, I came to discover that Israel was something special, in a way, the heart of the world. Then it dawned on me that the heart of Israel is the city of Jerusalem. Realizing that this is a huge jump, you don’t have to believe me, at least not yet. In reading “Jerusalem by Perspective, Insights of a Hitchhiker” you can judge for yourselves. As a card-carrying member of the hitchhiker’s guild, it is my sense that the Jerusalem I see, is not the one most people do. And in switching from my external journey to what I call my internal journey, over twelve years spent here has provided a chance to explore and consider a plethora of facets.
Speaking in archeological terms, relationship wise, and surely spiritually, reality exists in layers. In richly-laden Jerusalem, these layers continue to appear and fit into each other, offering an expanded grasp of this thing we call existence. The pieces of the puzzle include culture and language unlike any other. The spoken language is the only one in the world that was unspoken for almost two thousand years and became alive and accepted throughout the land. The Quinalt Indians of the Olympic Peninsula, for example, could not restore their language.
Other pieces of the puzzle include: the past cradle of civilization revealed via the riches that lie on and under the land; the present as shown by energetic involved human endeavor, start-ups; and our future with works of literature that offer an opportunity to conceive of a slice of the perfection that the Great One has in store for the entire world.
Acknowledging that this introduction is a bit over the top, let us proceed slowly on a wonderful journey- through Jerusalem- on the inside.