Temple OF THE NOW

by Yoav Sivan

Few cities define themselves by what they are not, but Tel Aviv prides itself on being the city that is “not” Jerusalem. Indeed, the distance between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is precisely that between a living-in-the-moment present and a layers-of-history past that can sometimes be a burden to creativity.

In contrast to Jerusalem where you inhale thousands of years of history in a single breath, Tel Aviv lives today intensely. And much of that life gets lived in cafés. First-time visitors are in awe at the number of cafés a city of 400,000 people can sustain. You won’t find a block without a café and free wireless Internet. Tel Aviv’s coffee shops have become Israel’s modern temples for secular thought, where students finish their homework, businessmen conduct their meetings, couples meet for dates, friends hang out and artists hash out new ideas. These are the places to seize the moment.

While Jerusalem, ancient and mystical, was designated by God, destroyed and reconstructed repeatedly by kings and has been portrayed in ancient maps as the center of the world, Yoni-come-lately Tel Aviv, now merely 100 years old, was designed as a suburb on a dune by a Scottish urban planner.

In Tel Aviv, the practice of religion is kept at arm’s length. Synagogues, for instance, do not rise into the sky, but rather blend into the fabric of the city — the world’s first Jewish city. Sure, places of worship do have some presence. Take St. Peter’s, for example. This Franciscan church, which is said to have hosted Napoleon in 1799, is situated on a hilltop at the center of Jaffa’s Old Town, overlooking the sea and modern Tel Aviv.

Or consider the Hasan Beck mosque, on the Mediterranean seashore near the seaside promenade. Glowing at night with neon lights and closed to passersby during the day, this elegant 19th-century mosque is today encircled by modern hotels and office buildings. The Arab neighborhood it once served, Menashiya, is long gone. But the modern, imposing enclave of glass, steel and concrete buildings blocking the picturesque neighborhood of Neve Tzedek from the Mediterranean is still unofficially known by this Arabic name.

There are, in fact, grand synagogues. On Allenby Street, one of the city’s main thoroughfares from its early days, you will find the Great Synagogue. But regardless of the building’s architectural merits — and downsides — it is far from being a Jewish equivalent of Europe’s Baroque churches, familiar to the city’s first dwellers or today’s Israeli tourists who frequent foreign capitals. In Tel Aviv a tourist would likely not walk into a synagogue just to admire the art.

And a resident of Tel Aviv is even less likely to enter a synagogue, less still its unwelcoming Great one, to participate in a service.

It is on Friday afternoons when the contrast between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem comes into sharpest relief. Friday afternoons are a magical time in Jerusalem, as the city prepares for the Shabbat. Friday afternoons, just before sunset, are also magical in Tel Aviv as this easygoing city becomes even more carefree. When Jerusalem rolls up its sidewalks, Tel Aviv’s streets and beaches recharge with a massive jolt of energy, as the masses turn streets like Rothschild Avenue or the promenade into world-class thoroughfares of excitement. Though a few alternative Kabbalat Shabbat ceremonies have gained popularity in Tel Aviv, you’re still more likely to find the city’s minyans in restaurants, bars or among joggers in the park.
The difference between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, then, is the distance from the Torah to modern Hebrew. In fact, we Israelis know Tel Aviv as the first Hebrew city, not the first Jewish city, as it is known in English. So the question arises, just how Jewish is the first Hebrew city?

To be sure, the street signs are in written in the Bible’s original language, and the city parties according to the Jewish calendar. The traffic is heavy, and Jews swear in God’s own language. The bureaucracy works in Hebrew, and so do the prostitutes. Tel Aviv is the Zionist dream of Jewish normalization in all its urban grandeur. It is as central to Zionism as the kibbutz — only Tel Aviv is still on the rise while the kibbutz’s better days are behind it.

The city’s disregard for the past (and sometimes even the present — during the last war in Gaza, the city’s restaurants were jammed) gives rise to a creative energy in the arts, research and business that sets the agenda for much of the country. How Jewish is this creativity? Is Tel Aviv-made art Jewish or something new, Israeli or Hebrew? The jury is still out. But if this creativity intersects with the past at all, it is likely to do so through rebellion, through a healthy tension with tradition.

As the city born on the dunes enters its second century, perhaps the best hope for Israel’s future is for a commingling of the ideas and values that animate Tel Aviv and Jerusalem — roots and tradition on the one hand, modernity on the other.

For now, I’ll make my stand in Tel Aviv, Israel’s present-tense city.

Yoav Sivan, who lives in Tel Aviv, is a journalist who has written for Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post.

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