When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and stars that
You set in place, what is man that You have been mindful of him, mortal man that
You have taken note of him? -Psalms 8:4-5
On June 15th, the full moon of mid-Sivan, a full eclipse of the moon was
visible in our part of the world. I read about it in the morning paper and made
a mental note of it, but of course promptly forgot all about it. However, as it
happened, I was scheduled to spend that evening accompanying a group of HUC
students from the US on a tour of the old city of Acco with Abdu Matta, a tour
guide and story teller who lives there. It was a perfectly clear night, and as
we set off on our walk, we could already make out the shadow of the earth
beginning to fall on the face of the moon. As the moon rose higher and the
shadow darkened, we kept encountering it every few minutes, as our route through
the alleyways of the city would bring us out into plazas or even as we passed
gaps between buildings. By the time we concluded our tour the eclipse was
complete, a faint orange disk glowing in the sky. Abdu is full of local lore
and knowledge and has great comic timing, but even he had trouble keeping up
with the cosmic competition.
Interestingly, while the moon is
central to the Jewish calendar, and the rhythm of Rosh Chodesh and the holidays
keeps one aware of the phases of the moon, our tradition does not make much of
eclipses. There is no special blessing to be recited upon seeing one. Along
our tour Abdu stopped a couple of young men emerging from a mosque, who told us
that in Islam (where the moon is even more central than in Judaism), it is
customary to gather and recite special prayers on the occasion of an eclipse. (By the way, since this is a leap year in the Jewish calendar, Ramadan will be
moving up one month, and will coincide with Av from this year until the next
leap year in 2014, when it will move up to Tamuz. The Muslims live by the moon
alone; we take the sun into account as well.)
Walking around Acco at
night (by the light of the shrinking moon) arouses ambivalent feelings in me.
On the one hand, the old city (like Jaffa or Jerusalem - or any old city built
of stone in pre-modern times) is charming and romantic, filled with graceful
stone arches and domes, minarets and church towers, the sea wall and the shuk. The narrow passageways convey intimacy and mystery, the weathered stone and iron
and wood give you the feeling that you're walking through history - which you
are, as you listen to Abdu's tales of the nobility of Sheikh Dhar el Omar and
the cruelty of Jazzar Pasha, and you stop outside the synagogue of Rabbi Moshe
Haim Luzzatto. On the other hand, one person's romance is another's squalor.
The advantage of a night tour is that the dim light helps cover the poverty and
dirt, the roaches and the rats, the crumbling infrastructure and dismal quality
of life of the residents of the old city. Acco has great potential as a tourist
destination, and recent years have seen significant development - new museums
and hotels, a new youth hostel under construction, new lighting and parking,
etc. The dilemma is, how best to use that potential to improve the lives of the
residents without forcing them out and without destroying the charm of the
"oldness" that characterizes the city. We have seen graceful old neighborhoods
in other cities give way to high-end luxury developments that pretend to
"preserve" the old but actually do so taxidermically at best, kitschily at
worst. So far that hasn't started in Acco. I wonder if there is some kind of
middle way, that would allow modernization along with strengthening the social
and economic fabric of the local community, without eclipsing the historic and
esthetic values of the old city itself. I suspect we have something to learn
from Europe in this regard; I hope we figure it out before it's too late.
Multimedia: 