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A few days ago, I found what I think is my new favorite place in all of Jerusalem. The Church of St. Anne in the Old City, next to the Pools of Bethesda (close to Lion’s (or St. Stephen’s) Gate). I had heard great things over the years but never managed to make it. Within 30 minutes, I was a convert (pun only slightly intended). Why would this be my new favorite place?

Because it is, and it inspires, what I have always believed to be the essence of Jerusalem: holiness, awe, uniqueness. A place where the most mundane experience becomes extraordinary solely because it happened to you in Jerusalem.

If you’ve been to St. Anne, you may have an idea of what I mean. Built in the 12th century, it’s a church renowned for its near-perfect acoustics. As such, people and groups from around the world come there not just to visit and look around and marvel at something so old, but to sing. Like they never have before. Because it’s Jerusalem.

It’s extraordinary, really: one group walks in, sits in the front pews. Then, with hardly a word, they start singing. Ave Maria. Amazing Grace. Or whatever hymn or song moves their group the most. They sing and sing, then stop, get up, walk down to see the tomb (or at least what some believe to be the tomb) of Anne (Mary’s mother) and location of Mary’s birth. In the meantime, another group takes their place in the pews and sings their own hearts and souls out. Maybe someone has a guitar, but no one needs a microphone, and mostly there are just human voices, inspired from the depths of their beliefs, whatever those may be.

I watched four groups in a row do this the other day, while my baby boy looked up at me in amazement and joy. (The down side is all of the singing makes for quite a distraction from his bottle). And while he was looking at me so intently, I wondered why.

Why would people from around the world (two of the groups I saw were American, one was Italian, and the other from somewhere in Eastern Europe; a Japanese group was on its way in when I left) come here to sing like this?

Why? Because the church is renowned for acoustics? Maybe. But there are plenty of places in the world with good acoustics; I think more so because it’s Jerusalem. It’s a city that inspires – at least the idea of the city inspires – people to believe a little bit more than they do anywhere else. Maybe because they think God, whichever version of God, can hear them a little more clearly here. Maybe because they feel inspired by the examples set by those who have come before, feel that they’ll start to hear and heed the words of Jesus a bit more when they walk on some of the same stones that he did.

Maybe because there is a little Jerusalem syndrome in all of us – a moment where all of us feel that we can be just a bit more than we are anywhere else. That we can leave real or normal life for a moment and be, well, holy. That we can indeed save this world that needs saving so badly.

Maybe because Psalm 122 still rings true for all of us.

A Song of Ascents; of David. I rejoiced when they said unto me: ‘Let us go unto the house of HaShem.’
Our feet are standing within thy gates, O Jerusalem;
Jerusalem, that art builded as a city that is compact together;
Whither the tribes went up, even the tribes of HaShem, as a testimony unto Israel, to give thanks unto the name of HaShem.
For there were set thrones for judgment, the thrones of the house of David.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; may they prosper that love thee.
Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.
For my brethren and companions’ sakes, I will now say: ‘Peace be within thee.’
For the sake of the house of HaShem our G-d I will seek thy good.

I think we all pray – and sing — for the peace of Jerusalem, for peace within its walls because we believe that if there is peace here, then peace should reign everywhere. Conversely, the further from peace is Jerusalem, the further we are all from peace, from holiness, from ourselves. So we come here from all over to be a part of the city for a moment, to sing as loud as we can, in the hope that someone will hear.

It is all of this that is on my mind when I pull up to a traffic light in East Jerusalem, whether down the hill from the Regency near Hebrew U. or close to the A-Ram check point, and face 2-4 Palestinian kids trying to sell Chicklets or rub a cloth on my windshield for a few shekels. A few shekels I never seem to have on me, or that I sometimes admit to not wanting to give over. The kids are usually there, most hours of the day and night. Not in school. In need of new clothes, new shoes. Probably needing some nourishment.

Of course, you see kids like this, kids in need of money, of a future, in so many cities. But this is Jerusalem – it just doesn’t feel right. Kids like these shouldn’t exist here. They, too, should be singing, believing, becoming, just like those of us who stop through Jerusalem in the course of our lives. Those of who are privileged enough not to be born into their world – divided by walls, separated by their religion and ethnicity, discussed rhetorically by so many but understood practically by so few. They live here – so close, yet so far away from what Jerusalem is. And yet they are also its future.

The words of Psalm 122, the songs of St. Anne, and these ideas are also on my mind when I pull up to the light near the Malha Mall, near our new place. There, at least in the evenings, you will find Haredi men selling various items, most notably copies of Tehilim, the Book of Psalms.

(I thought I saw one of them selling bean pies and copies of the Final Call, a la members of the Nation of Islam, but then I realized I was daydreaming. Quite an image, though, if you think about it.)

Do they sell these items because, like the Palestinian kids across town, they and their families desperately need the money, need something to build hope for the future with? Maybe. I admit I haven’t asked. But they certainly look a lot less in need.

Perhaps, rather than them being in need, they stand on this corner because they believe the rest of us to be in need. They realize that too many of us have missed the words of Psalm 122, and so many others, reminding us of the glories of the city whose streets we drivers honk and crawl and gesticulate our way through all day and night. Perhaps they understand the glory of this city and want to remind those of us too busy with normal life that we are not in a normal city.

We are in Jerusalem: you don’t need gum, you need God.

A few weeks back in Haaretz, Sayed Kashua took a break from his normal weekly writing and published an interview with Hillel Cohen, author of the new book “The Market Square Is Empty: The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem, 1967-2007.” It’s a fascinating interview (especially to hear how Cohen spent years on his own roaming East Jerusalem and the Territories, learning from the streets), but this is what stuck out for me:

…official Israel can celebrate united Jerusalem’s fourth decade more comfortably than ever. What’s left of the future capital of the Palestinian state are heaps of ruins, a political phantom; a surrounded city, encircled by settlements and isolated from the rest of the West Bank, a city that had already been dying for 15 years before the separation fence came to finish it off.

Cohen speaks of how Jerusalem has become more theoretical, more spiritual for Palestinians, yet with the reality of Jerusalem existing as a capital, or even as a truly functioning and integrated part of Palestinian society, ever further away.

One need only look at the two sides of Jerusalem to see how true this is – Palestinian kids selling Chicklets and Orthodox Jews selling Psalms. The luxury to sell Psalms, to peddle food for the soul, for the heart, for Jerusalem is one that only half of this city has. That half has come much closer to realizing its own dreams, its own notions of what Jerusalem might be. Even if they are sharp divisions about the scope of religious influence, religious interpretation, or religious identification, there is no question that those are questions that do not require one to sell Chicklets to try to survive.

And while much of Palestinian Jerusalem is not at all impoverished, and indeed includes some of the wealthiest anywhere in Palestinian society, the truth is that their part of this city is “ruins.” Not just because their kids must sell Chicklets, but because the evolution of this city – its settlements, its walls, its permitting authorities - - has left them with a Jerusalem address, but not a Jerusalem reality or a Jerusalem dream.

That reality, that dream may only exist in the voices of the faithful at the Church of St. Anne. Those voices, no matter how ignorant to the realities of the people around them, still contain the essence of that dream that is so necessary for the future. And it is one that I hope everyone gets to hear some day: the dream of Jerusalem.