The morning is bright and beautiful as I walk down Fifth Avenue through midtown. I’m lost in thought. Taking in the people, the sunlight, the storefronts. Accompanied by the mind’s ceaseless chatter: did my daughter get to school on time, did she remember the folder on the counter, did she study enough for the test? The friend waiting for the diagnosis, I wonder if she’s heard back, I should call her. I never did call this other person back, and shoot, the laundry is still wet in the washing machine. My feet hurt, I wore the wrong shoes for this walk. The flotsam and jetsam of the churning mind, as I walk past crowds of people. Astounding, I think, that each of us is an entire world inside.
I pass the New York Public Library. Crowded with people on its steps, tourists taking pictures of one another, of the tulips blooming in the garden, of the iconic lion statues. And then I see him: a man, sitting on the curb. He’s holding a sign, black marker on cardboard. It reads: “I might as well be invisible.”
I’m stopped in my tracks. Actually, that’s not true. The truth is: I kept walking. It took me a full two blocks for my conscience to kick in. I confess to checking my watch first. I do run late, it frustrates people. I turned around and went back.
His name is Kenneth, he tells me. He has blue eyes and is clean-shaven. He lives in a shelter for seniors. He likes it better there than other shelters, where the young people are rowdy. This is calmer, he says, even if there are a lot of mentally ill people there with him. He’s studying for his commercial driver’s license, hopes to take the test for the learner’s permit soon. “Is the sign working?” I ask. “I’m not a drug addict,” he responds. “But people walk right by me as if I don’t matter.”
A pigeon – one of the many grazing in the small garden behind him – hops up onto his shoulder. It’s white, like a dove. “I know this guy,” he tells me with a smile. He seems proud. “I’ve known him since he was a baby. I named him. I call him Peace.”
I asked if I could take his picture. All these tourists around, snapping pictures of the lions, the building, the park in bloom. Do they post his picture, or just the selfies? Peace hopped off his shoulder before I could capture the moment. Fitting, I think. Peace being elusive, and intimacy, and friendship, and being seen in our fullness, too.
As I write this, Israel and Iran are attacking one another. The Marines and National Guard are in L.A., protests are spreading, the No Kings marches are set for tomorrow. The suffering of the Palestinians is in the headlines, even if the suffering of the hostages and their families is not, nor is the famine in Sudan. The world seems very confused about what to do with the Jews, and that takes up a lot of our thoughts. To say nothing of the real stuff that makes up a life, each of us being, as the Talmud says, an entire world. Each of us holding a world’s worth of thoughts, of people to care for, suffering and joy and stress, worry and gratitude and the to-do list. Can we be still enough, present, and kind and gentle enough to let a bird hop up on our shoulder? To name it Peace?
Yehudah Amichai (1924-2000) wrote “Tourists” in the 1970s, in the city of Jerusalem where he lived most of his life after emigrating from Germany as a boy in the 1930s. An excerpt:
Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David’s Tower,
I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists
was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. “You see
that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there’s an arch
from the Roman period. Just right of his head.” “But he’s moving, he’s
moving!”
I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them,
“You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but next to it,
left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his
family.”
Rabbi Treu’s essays may also be found on Medium.