A walk in the Old City

I walked through the Old City this week, my footsteps unsteady. My body tired.

I was thinking about how the city is ancient, built from stones that look as though they could crumble in an instant, from a gust of wind or the thousands of feet that traverse its paths every day.

Yet, it's so still. So solid. An everlasting neighborhood that provided a place for us to build our Holy Temple, survived an exile of its people, and a grand return that has seen millions of visitors from all over the world each year.

It’s so ordinary in its daily patterns; bakers putting out fresh pitot, shopkeepers opening their stores early in the morning, students running back and forth to their classes, tour groups and visitors descending and ascending slippery stairs to get to the kotel. Artists running to their workshops, mothers shuffling down the alleys carrying their children over the cobblestones. The people that ask for charity are sitting, waiting for your attention.

And all of it, every layer of the everyday, rests on stone. Unmoving.

I don’t know why, but that brought me comfort.

Maybe it’s because everything else in my life right now feels like it’s shifting under my feet. The war. The passing of my friend, Laura. Grief for our people. The exhaustion.

The way one loss comes before the last one has even begun to heal.

The sirens in the night, the half-finished thoughts, the people I miss who aren’t coming back.

The way life keeps rushing forward while I’m still somewhere stuck in what’s just happened.

The thing is, Jerusalem endures.

She doesn’t try to fix anything, doesn’t offer explanations, and doesn’t pretend to make the pain disappear.

I felt like I could walk, step by step, through narrow alleys and ancient arches, while she quietly held the weight of thousands of years of heartbreak and return, exile and hope, prayer and silence.

And somehow, in the midst of everything I’ve been carrying - personal grief, collective sorrow, the exhaustion of a world that won’t slow down- being in a city that knows how to hold sorrow without crumbling felt like a kind of permission.

Permission to feel heavy.

To not move on.

To let the ache exist without rushing to transform it.

During these weeks when we mourn what was lost- when we recall the destruction of the Temple, the exile of our people, the long arc of Jewish suffering and longing, there’s something both painful and comforting about walking streets that remember it all.

Stones that witnessed it.

Walls that absorbed it.

Paths that still carry the imprint of barefoot grief and the sound of joy returning.

And maybe that’s what gave me strength.

Not because anything was fixed, not because I had answers, but because I was reminded that some things were built to last. That even in a time of loss, even in a year like this one, in a world that won’t stop changing too quickly, some things know how to remain.

It made it easier to hold for that day.

It reminded me that not all grief demands urgency. That not all healing comes quickly. That sometimes, it’s enough to stand still in a place that knows how to carry loss.

I didn’t leave feeling lighter. But I left steadier.

As if something in the stone had told me:

You are not the first to walk here with a broken heart.

And you won’t be the last.

This story isn’t over.