Some part of me hoped I would get Jerusalem Syndrome when I moved there. Some larger part dreaded I would. Most of me wanted to make it a clever metaphor in an essay.
For centuries travelers to the Holy City with no signs of mental illness have lost their minds and thought themselves the Messiah or fixated on some religious obsession, even (or maybe often) turning violent. The psychosis usually dissipates soon as they leave.
My third month I felt pressure. An intensity in the way people speak in Jerusalem pervaded me, as if they needed to unburden themselves, and I started to take on that need. Because I’ve chased listening so intently the past few years, it slowly dawned on me that I was dangerously open to these nervous outpourings and maybe I should step back. I wondered when I called home if I was talking faster, listening anxiously to myself.
In Mahane Yehuda market, Mordecai smiled and I asked to interview him for my podcast—and photograph him (I’d been lusting after a portrait of a well-endowed Orthodox beard but never knew how to break the ice). He said he was born in Senegal, had lived in Los Angeles, Washington, Paris, Brussels, Rabat, and Oslo, left his wife and kids there to come to Israel to understand the will of God, and that in the desert, God gave him the mission of publishing a long lost letter he found in the sand, which, with the help of the Israeli government, he had done. He smiled again and handed me a copy of a book in Hebrew. He said now most of all he wanted to get his message out that we have to bring the bones of Rabbi Nachman back to Israel, then pulled out a guitar and sang “Hey Jude” in Hebrew, changing the chorus to “Na, na, na, Nachman, Nachman, Nachman!”
My girlfriend in Jerusalem saw his eyes in the photo, looked at me, and said, “Joe, please be careful.” I bought a plane ticket to Chicago for a ten day leave soon as the Embassy gave me permission.
