Jerusalem - Mostly Dance

Regina Ress is an award winning storyteller, actor, author, and educator who has performed and taught from Broadway to Brazil, in English and Spanish, in settings from grade schools to senior centers, prisons to Carnegie Hall, homeless shelters to The White House. She teaches applied storytelling at NYU and produces a long-running storytelling series at NYU’s Provincetown Playhouse. She is a founding Board member of Healing Voices-Personal Stories. www.reginaress.com

Following last week’s blog on creating Sabbath Woman, Regina sent me an email with this memory in response to its image of “congregants filling the aisles with joyful dancing,” and men going out to greet the “Sabbath Bride.” I asked her if she would share it as a guest blog. I am delighted she agreed. Regina and I have been dancing and collaborating together since we were six!

I went to Jerusalem in 1973 to visit my college friend Ian. I had no expectations, religious or otherwise, just the excitement and curiosity of seeing an old friend I hadn’t seen in seven years. I knew that when Ian had been released from the U.S. army three years before, he had walked from Germany to Jerusalem. Walking, we know, becomes sacred practice and perhaps even a form of dance when done with intension.

Ian picked me up at Lod Airport and drove me up to Jerusalem. He was living in a flat on the roof of an old apartment building near the Souk, the Market. We walked up several flights of concrete stairs, turning on the lights at each landing to find our way up the dark, winding passage. This was my first experience with electricity as a precious and expensive commodity. We came out on to the roof and there was a small structure built in the middle of it. Ian’s place! In the day time, the Middle Eastern Jewish women living in the building used the roof as a space to winnow and dry grains in large, flat baskets. I had entered a different world.

When we arrived, it was early evening. Ian said we had been invited to a party. As I had just emerged from a twelve hour, non-stop El Al flight from New York, I was exhausted. I said that he should go to the party. I needed to sleep.

Ian returned home about 1:00 AM and I awoke. My internal clock told me it was early evening and I was wide awake. In the years since college, our lives had taken many twists and turns; we had a lot of catching up to do. Around 3:00 AM, Ian asked, “Are you ready for an adventure?” Absolutely!

It was a Friday night, and the August full moon lit Jerusalem. My memory is of a shimmering, cream-colored city, quiet, with a big bright sky. I had no idea where we were going and didn’t ask. I knew nothing about Jerusalem, and had no preconceived notions, expectations, images. I asked no questions, but simply watched the play of the moonlight on the buildings.

We parked and began to walk. There was a wall and a gate and we entered. I realized we were in the Old City. I had never been in a walled city before. I felt a shift in the quality of the space, a shift, if you will, in the feeling of the stones themselves. The air, too, felt different, as if the molecules were packed, dense with emanations from the stones, filled with the history of the place.

We walked along narrow stone streets bordered by stone buildings. The moon sailed in the sky and we walked in silence. No traffic noise, no sirens, only the sound of shoe against stone. And no other people. Until, at some point in our journey through the labyrinth of the Old City, we began to be passed by men, men running along the narrow streets. They ran with expectation, not hurry, their long black coats, like capes, flapping after them as they ran. There was joy in their feet.

“Mazeh? What is this?” I asked. “Ah,” said my guide, “On Friday nights they run to be at the Wall for Shabbat. They are running to greet the Sabbath Queen.”

It was then that I understood that we were walking to the Western Wall. I hadn’t even thought about it being early Saturday morning, let alone understanding the significance of the pilgrimage we were making on that moonlit night. We were silent again. The closer we got to the Temple Mount, the closer it got to the dawn; the closer to dawn, the more men dressed in archaic black passed us, running to be at the Wall for the first moment of Sabbath light.

We arrived suddenly at an open space, a space lit by the huge, sinking, August moon. There were many people, many kinds of people, but all were there to be at the Wall as the sky changed from black and silver to pink, yellow, blue, to dawn. It was like a dream. It was not a dream come true, for I had never dreamed of Jerusalem. This was a dream I was experiencing wide awake.

I stood there as the moon slid behind the old buildings and the world of color returned. I breathed the air warmed by the old stone walls and watched the many pilgrims to this ancient, holy place. It was there and it was then that I began my personal pilgrimage to the ancient holy place hidden deep within my heart. It was the beginning of a shift in my relationship to the sacred, to the way I would move upon the planet and through my own life.

A few days later, Ian took me to meet his spiritual teacher, the resident monk in a Zen Center on the Mount of Olives. As we sipped green tea, Ian told his teacher that I didn’t understand the Zen practice of sitting meditation. And, he added, “Regina feels guilty about not wanting to sit with us. Tell her it’s OK.” The monk turned to me and, in a deep, penetrating voice said, “You don’t sit.You move.”

Not long after that trip to Jerusalem, I found my personal expression of a relationship to the sacred in ceremonial dance. Since then, in community and alone, I have danced in pine groves and cathedral crypts, on mountain slopes and Manhattan’s streets. And even my not so “sacred,”more celebratory dance is also, always, an expression of my relationship to a wider and deeper reality. And when I dance, wherever I dance, like those men running to greet the Sabbath Queen, there is joy in my feet.