Living with joy

Here's a taste of what it's like to be in a hospital in Jerusalem:

Yesterday I went to Hadassah Ein Kerem to visit a friend. I came early and had an hour to spare before the visiting hours reopened in the maternity ward. So I sat in the very large atrium at the hospital entrance and got to observe.

This is what I saw:

There are patients, doctors, nurses, staff, and visitors of every denomination, color, and religion.

There was a chassidish man in a wheelchair deep in conversation with his son, both had long, beautiful bottle curls of payis, one white and the other greying.

On the other side was an Arab couple, the woman in a wheelchair, clearly just having given birth, light purple hijab elegantly wrapped around her head and neck, next to a mizrachi family with oodles of aunts and uncles and balloons and stuffed animals.

Further down, there was an older Arab man walking in a hospital robe and an IV pole, with his Jewish nurse in a tichel.

There are people wearing scrubs running back and forth to the different departments. Women with skirts over their scrubs, women with scarves of different denominations. Men with kippot, men with nothing at all. I heard Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Ukrainian, French, Amharic, and some languages I didn't even recognize.

I saw an Ethiopian woman wearing a dress and head wrap of turquoise blue. She smiled as a troop of performers swept into the lobby area with costumes and bongos and guitars and began to dance and play.

The entertainers were dressed as watermelons and bananas, a hot dog. A foot? And maybe some sort of animal with ears. With sunglasses and jingle bells and flower necklaces and energy.

The vibe was weird and joyous, and all of us sitting began to clap along and even sing. They gave out handshakes and an infusion of silliness to the seriousness of the hospital.

I saw the Arab man with the IV pole smile.

I saw the charedi couple who just had a baby smile.

I saw the nurses giggle, and the doctors clap along; the workers at the cafe pause their coffee-making to laugh, and I sat bopping to the music and wondering at the generosity of people who spend their time making other people happy.

To me, it captured the spirit of Israel.

The best of what Israel can be.

There is so much heaviness here. So much that is complicated and painful and frightening.

And yet there is this stubborn insistence on bringing more life into every corner of it.

Babies are being born. Sick people are being healed. Families are gathering. People are caring for strangers.

Someone decided that what a hospital lobby desperately needed on a Tuesday afternoon was a dancing watermelon.

And somehow, they were right.

This place can be so impossibly heavy.

And yet, those moments of living with joy?

Precious.