Brick by brick by brick.

It could only have been a wall. 

I was late once. On an organized bus tour of nearly 60 people, it's as rude as it is inevitable. But when you're dealing with mostly gingerly-stepping retirees, it's to be understood that at least one will at some point be late. As it happened each time over the course of six days, some people around me got frustrated, my mother definitely included, but for the sake of change alone, I didn't mind that I was killing time waiting for someone on the streets of Nazareth rather than the avenues of Hell's Kitchen.

I let myself be the culprit, once, for about 45 seconds. And I was a little shocked that no one else had picked this moment to do the same. That I was the one that had pushed it farthest. Or maybe I was shocked that I still let myself be shocked.

They were late for different reasons. Missed wake-up calls at the hotel, a Southern preacher haggling down the price of a 3-foot-long ram's horn to bring back for his office wall, several people getting turned around in the folding alleyways of Tsfat. My excuse is I got lost in conversation, with no one in particular.

I didn't like Jerusalem. It was everything I thought it would be and less. Bad souvenirs, clueless snail-paced tourists, nonstop pitchmen, an approach to history either apocryphal or apathetic. The ancient that has survived into the modern day is incredible to behold, as long as you can put aside the lingering doubts of its authenticity, and ignore the great deal more of history here that has been completely destroyed. The capital of three deeply-related faiths practicing an alternating cannibalism, of both followers and foundation stones for the past three thousand years. Obsessed with the fallacy that destruction of the tangible will eradicate the transcendental. Adamantly asserting the dogma of Jesus, Elijah, Muhammad, but really just underscoring the gospel according to Tyler. That on a long enough timeline, the survival rate of everything drops to zero. Solomon's temple fell, as did Herod's that replaced it. The Via Dolorosa, the path of Christ dragging the cross, isn't the actual path he took, but one that a group of 14th Century Franciscan monks particularly liked, and hence the tradition was born for unaware pilgrims to follow centuries later. Temples, truth, and theology.... all inevitably fall victim to time. Nowhere more blatantly than Jerusalem.

Aside from the Temple Mount, which is now accessible only to Muslims, the oldest public site is the Western Wall, the most holy in all of Judaism. The sixty-plus-foot high wall that surrounded the ancient temple courtyard. The afterthought of function now turned center for faith. Here believers stand with palms and foreheads against ancient stone, asserting pressure that gets them closer to God. Hoping the physics behind coal and diamonds carries over to prayers. Here they jam wadded scraps of paper into cracks of the wall, believing the words of the petition inside will then stand a greater chance of consummation. Caulking the gaps- in their lives with hope, and in Herodian limestone with notebook paper. 

I didn't write a prayer, as I had nothing to pray for nor to. Instead I closed my eyes and pressed my forehead into a contour of the wall and thought of the four-thousand years of men that had occupied that exact groove before me. Of what they might have asked for. And I thought of the walls that had come before in my life. My visit to the largest of the few remaining portions of the Warsaw Ghetto wall, tucked away in a courtyard between two more modern apartment buildings, its ten feet of height now helping to provide shade for a playground a few steps away. The only time in my travels that tears came absolutely instantly rather than a gradual buildup. 7 miles from where I stood now and a day earlier, the Israeli built security wall that carves the entire border of the West Bank, covered in painted protest by Westerners demanding its destruction and the creation of a Palestinian state. How history is as cyclical as it is ironic as it is cruel. This Palestinian barricade so reminiscent of the iconic wall in my favorite city of Berlin and its East Side Gallery. Four months earlier, my Thanksgiving day spent hiking atop the Great Wall of China at Gubeikou. My nontraditional if still entirely appropriate observation of the holiday. The John Lennon Wall in Prague, covered in Beatles lyrics birthed from cans of spray paint, that my best friend and I had added to in 2008. He tagging "Here Comes the Sun," which his mother used as a lullaby in his infancy. Among the three I contributed was "Nothing's gonna change my world," and within the year I had said unretractable goodbyes to my home, a parent, a love, a number of friends, and stability. But the absence of each only pushed me onward, propelled by a vacuum.  And still all the other walls, the Khmer-carved ones at Angkor Wat, the fragment in a Hiroshima museum stained with the blackest streaks of atomic rain, the bricks used as canvases throughout Europe, in Naples by Banksy, in Kreuzberg by Swoon, in Glasgow and Valencia and everywhere by nameless others. In Jerusalem, I was remembering these other walls and how this oldest one stood here as those others were only being built. I wasn't trying to invoke some holiness away from these bricks, but add some needed contentment back. I wasn't saying please. I was saying thank you. To whatever this is we are all a part of. If not necessarily God, then life, energy, samsara. For everything I've been indescribably fortunate enough to do already. And for everything I plan to do next.

I took my forehead away from the wall and carefully walked backwards, as is the reverent custom, to the entry gate, deposited my borrowed informal yarmulke in the pile, and found my tour group, the guide finishing another head count, one with my presence now complete. 

I was late once. And it was intentional. Because one of the central tenets that the last 3 years has taught me: you pick your spots.



Ophir raised the small logo-ed plaque on the stick and spoke into the small microphone headset. "Okay, so we're all back. Now we're going to walk through one of the oldest gates of the Old City...."