Israel was my 70th country, so I landed with just about as much certainty as humanly possible that some good was about to happen, just brimming with optimism. Still, kindness surprises.
Jackie and a driver from the Embassy took me straight to my new apartment in Jerusalem. From there we walked through my new neighborhood as she pointed out the best falafel, the beloved cinema, and the paved-over railroad that would become my new running path. She shopped with me for my first groceries so I would have what I needed when businesses closed the next day for Shabbat, my first—some pomegranate and tahina, coffee and zucchinis—and on the way back, she mentioned offhandedly that there was a former leper colony on the corner that was now a pub I should check out.
Then she led me to the edge of a valley of cypresses for my first glimpse of the Old City. Jackie got quiet as I teared up, understanding. She said, “You’ll come have Shabbat dinner with my family, won’t you?” Sitting with her children, one who works for the Red Cross and another an art therapist, and her husband, a painter, eating my first “soup almonds” and realizing they were some of the first Israelis I had ever spent time with sealed one of the warmest welcomes of my life, the kind that made me invite everyone I knew to stay with me, the kind that spreads—what I took, above all, from Jerusalem.
Once, she set aside an old book for me that was to be discarded, on Dorothea Lange, the photojournalist, saying, “I thought of you, Joe,” and I knew I was known.
Life moves fast. Just months later when her cat passed away, we sat in her favorite wine bar half-sobbing, half-laughing. When her husband passed away, I watched her hold each of her friends tightly at the funeral, one by one, and set an almond blossom on his casket. When my program was canceled and I came home to my parents suddenly, during the first of many nightly walks with my dad, he asked, “How’s Jackie doing?” and I cried. I was struck that friendship can move fast too. And kindness astonishes and spreads. And I love life.
