! ; THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS 1 : A The Gate Behind The Wall: A Pilgrimage To Jerusalem Friday, October 4, 1985 23 . Caught between the orthodoxy of his fathers and the modern world in which he had been born and raised, sociologist Samuel Heilman tells of his search for a spiritual wholeness. BY SAMUEL HEILMAN Samuel Heilman, a sociology professor at Queens College in New York, went to Jerusalem to learn about the society and culture of ,those who devoutly study the Talmud. As a sociologist, Heilman, in the jargon of his profession, would be "parti- cipant-observer." But at a less scientific and more personal level, Heilman also wanted to pursue a spiritual quest. Raised as an Orthodox Jew, he felt estranged from Judaic texts and Orthodox mandates. He was more Western than Orthodox more skeptical then observant. After attending several chavruses (Tal- mudic study groups), Heilman was still caught in that middle ground between the ancient world of the Orthodox, and the con- temporary scene. • "I knew that however much I tried to identify with the traditional world of the Jews around me," he later wrote, "I would never give up who I was, never abandon my foothold in the modern world." All the time he was in Jerusalem, Heil- man tried to resolve his ambivalence toward these very disparate, yet very com- pelling worlds. In the following adaptation from The Gate Behind the Wall, Heilman's recently published account of his spiritual quest. in Jerusalem, Heilman settles his ambivalence. — A.J.M. person can spend time with himself on the streets as easily as and ometimes more easily than in his room. For a few days, I walked the streets of Jerusalem. Not the Old City — that was too filled with sights and sounds that would take me away from myself. I went instead to the neighborhoods adjacent to Mea Shearim. Here where every other doorway seemed to lead to a synagogue or ' study room, I thought I might find a place for myself. Here was the world where peo- ple remained attached to an eternal land- scape of the past and to the tradition. And here, I believed, I might discover whether or not I still had any connection to that world. Every so often I would walk into one or another little synagogue, directing my feet toward the corner or bench where men sat at study and resolved that I, like them, would take down a volume from the shelf and begin to lern [the review and ritualized study of sacred Jewish texts] on my own in their company. But when I got inside, all I discovered was my feelings of embar- rassment and a sense otbeing out of place. And so I would act as if I had forgotten something, turn andleave. Back on the street, I caught the bus pul- ling up at the corner. It was bus number nine. Of all the lines running through the city, none offers a more remarkable route than number nine. Starting from the cen- tral bus station and its social underlife, it winds its way through the posh neighbor- hood of Rehavia, populated by govern- ment officials and wealthy Ashkenazim, past the headquarters of the Chief Rab- binate, fancy tourist hotels and the Jewish Agency building where the modern Zionist state was born. From there the bus con- tinues into the city center, where it skirts the open-air vegetable market filled with bargain hunters on one side and on the other the golden triangle of streets named A6 . , Adapted by permission of Summit Books from The Gate Behind The Wall by Samuel Heilman ©1984 by Samuel Heilman • Ben Yehuda, King George and Jaffa with their expensive specialty shops and de- partment stores. Next it turns up a hill past the old Bikur Cholim hospital, touches the fringes of Mea Shearim and then drives past the massive houses and up the wide avenues of the once grand Bukharian quarter, built in the nineteenth century by rich Jews from Bukhara, in central Asia. Afterward, number nine glides across the old border that cut the city in half before the 1967 war and passes from old salvations to new ones, alongside the sym- metrical, gleamingly modern apartment blocks and little shopping centers of Ramat Eshkol. Finally, the end of the line and the bus climbs up to Mount Scopus. A ride on number nine from beginning to erid is a trip across every kind of border, through various circles of Jewish ex- istence, back and forth from old to new. In each neighborhood the people getting on and off the bus change. And' if one allows himself to become imaginatively trans- formed with each turn — to become, as I did on occasion, a part of what he observes — the ride can be a sort of spiritual journey through Jewish life. Mount Scopus, the end of the line. To the east, where rain never falls, lies the awesome wilderness of Judea. The prophet Jeremiah, and others like him, had always found a needed solitude there when the city and its people became too much. Since April 1925, the Hebrew University had stood there. Enlarged after 1967 when the ground around it was regained, the place now hugged the mountain like a fortress. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the city, I felt at home and strangely safe. Here, like the bus, I came to rest and for repair. This was, after all, the university — and that was where I best fitted in, where I had already learned how to learn and where I knew I should at last return. I walked to the library and found the social-science section. In the past, whenever I felt overwhelmed by the people and places I observed, I had often been able to steady myself by walking amid the O Continued on next page t v+111m- • • ....