I was born at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem, which I know only because I have memorized the name. 

Hadassah, Ein Kerem, Jerusalem, Israel. 

I say it to myself sometimes the way other people say prayers. As though precision, or the syllables themselves, might unlock something.

I don’t remember the hospital. I don’t remember leaving. But I have spent much of my life circling a city I technically arrived in before I could see.

On a winter evening in Jerusalem, my husband and I ate sushi in Rehavia.

Real sushi on neat plates, in a restaurant with soft lighting. The kind of restaurant that could exist anywhere. That ordinariness felt almost confrontational.

Jerusalem is not a city that usually allows you to forget where you are. And yet here we were, passing plates, discussing whether we should order one more roll, listening to Hebrew and English braid themselves together in the air, our waiter moving easily between languages. A normal night. A normal conversation.

And beneath it, something else.

“I think this is my tenth time in Israel,” I said suddenly, halfway through the meal.

The number surprised me as soon as I said it. Not because it felt excessive, but because it felt like confirmation.

Two long stays, the year in 2012 and the year from fall 2021 through summer 2022, each count as only one. The rest were shorter returns. Pilgrimages, maybe. Or evidence.

Some cities you visit. Some cities you keep returning to as though they are withholding something.

In 2012, I lived in Katamon and Baka: small stone buildings, narrow sidewalks, and laundry strung between balconies.

I walked everywhere. I didn’t know what else to do with the intensity except keep moving inside it.

Jerusalem does not let you recede into the background. It sharpens perception. It amplifies whatever you arrive with.

Loneliness felt more articulate there; Doubt felt more precise. Faith was less like comfort and more like demand.

Even the errands felt charged: the bus ride that turned into a political seminar, the grocery line that became a meditation on language and power, the constant sense that history was not behind you but brushing against you.

Sometimes I felt alive in a way I couldn’t access anywhere else. Sometimes I felt scraped raw.

There were moments I still carry physically.

The light just before Shabbat, softening the limestone. The brief hush after sundown, when the city seemed, for a moment, to forgive itself. The scent of jasmine that could interrupt despair without warning.

Jerusalem could exhaust you. It could also startle you with beauty that was sudden and out of nowhere. 

Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether what I felt was love for the city—or grief for something I could never quite retrieve.

I came back again in fall 2021 as part of my rabbinical studies, this time to the German Colony.

I thought I was returning to a place I understood. Instead it felt like meeting an old teacher who could see immediately what I still hadn’t learned.

More cafés now, more English, more polish. The light rail extended.

And underneath it, the same density. The same refusal to simplify.

The city still would not offer a single coherent story.

It still demanded attention.

What surprised me most was how quickly my body remembered. The vigilance returned. The alertness. The sense that you cannot drift here. That drifting feels like a kind of failure.

In 2012, I thought I was being shaped by Jerusalem. In 2021, I realized the shaping had begun much earlier than that, in ways I could not fully trace.

Sometimes I am not even sure what it means to claim Jerusalem as a lost birthright.

Maybe it is only a story I have told myself too many times. Maybe the haunting is partly of my own making. Maybe I have become attached to the idea of being haunted.

The difference feels smaller here than it should.

In late December 2025, I returned again. This time for a week. This time, married. This time staying in Rehavia: Tree-lined streets, stone buildings with a gentler dignity, and a quieter register of Jerusalem.

It suited the version of me who arrived.

We walked slowly. We chose restaurants. We argued mildly about directions. We made plans for the next day. A life I could not have imagined in 2012 unfolded itself casually inside the same geography.

Jerusalem, which once felt like a city that demanded everything of me, now had to accommodate the fact that I was no longer arriving alone.

On Friday afternoon we walked toward Baka to meet friends for Shabbat dinner.

The timing lived in my body before I named it: the softening light, the subtle urgency in people’s steps, the way the city began to tilt toward stillness.

We passed streets that had once held so much of my life.

This corner. This street. This stretch of pavement where something once happened that I no longer know how to name.

At some point I wondered whether I was narrating too much. Whether I was trying to make my husband witness a version of me that might not even exist anymore. Whether I was sharing my life—or quietly asking the city to validate it.

The light was doing what Jerusalem light always does on Friday evening: making even the ache look like meaning. The familiar hush settled. And I felt—not overtaken by the past, but accompanied by it.

Jerusalem is still Jerusalem.

Intense, contradictory, and impossible to consume casually.

Even on a short visit, even in winter, and even in Rehavia’s relative quiet.

It still seems to insist on a certain quality of attention: Stay awake. Do not pretend this is simple.

I no longer expect Jerusalem to resolve anything for me.

Not the birth story, not the leaving, not the returning, not the numbers I keep counting.

But I recognize now that something in me keeps answering its call.

Ten times. A city I left before memory. A city I keep reentering.

I don’t know whether that is fate, obsession, loyalty, or narrative. I only know that I am still in conversation with it.

The conversation continues—but it no longer feels haunted so much as ongoing. Open-ended in the way living things are open-ended. Not resolved, but real. Not finished, but no longer fractured.

When we left this time, I did not feel the familiar ache of unfinished business. Instead I felt something quieter and more surprising: a sense that I could return again—not out of longing, not out of searching, but simply because it is one of the places in the world where my life now exists.

And that felt, at last, like a kind of peace.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)