It smelled of urine and dilapidated cars and vans were parked at weird angles on the sidewalks. Posters were pealing from the walls, mostly advertising gigs. Weeds grew between paving stones. Washing hangs from grubby balconies. Was it Hackney? Or Leeds? Bristol? No, it's Jerusalem.
Just a street away from the tram line - but a street away that tourists would not generally take - here is city life in the Jewish part of Jerusalem for some of its inner city residents. Few would be surprised to find this kind of scene in the Arab or Palestinian part of the city - but here, in the Promised Land?? How easily we romanticise a name - Jerusalem, all godliness and gold. I venture that few of the home-owning Christians of England would readily swap their situation for these streets, even those who get dewey eyed singing about Jerusalem.
Referencing Blake's poem Jerusalem, standing on this street in the modern, Jewish Jerusalem a dark satanic mill on the next corner would not have seemed so much of an incongruity as the poem supposes. Never did the importance of a Jerusalem that descends from heaven (Revelation 21) strike me as so important as it did here.
Just a street away from the tram line - but a street away that tourists would not generally take - here is city life in the Jewish part of Jerusalem for some of its inner city residents. Few would be surprised to find this kind of scene in the Arab or Palestinian part of the city - but here, in the Promised Land?? How easily we romanticise a name - Jerusalem, all godliness and gold. I venture that few of the home-owning Christians of England would readily swap their situation for these streets, even those who get dewey eyed singing about Jerusalem.
Referencing Blake's poem Jerusalem, standing on this street in the modern, Jewish Jerusalem a dark satanic mill on the next corner would not have seemed so much of an incongruity as the poem supposes. Never did the importance of a Jerusalem that descends from heaven (Revelation 21) strike me as so important as it did here.
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