When I was in kindergarten, my mother taught me to memorize
my address and phone number just in case I would get lost. That was then. Today,
although I have no problem remembering my phone number, I’m really not sure
where I live. Okay, yes, I KNOW I live in Jerusalem. And I do know where my apartment
is located, and I can even give accurate directions. But I don’t have an address,
or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I have three addresses, but,
depending on who I’m speaking to, they can all be wrong.
Until recently, our official address was 7 Shmuel Hanavi Street,
and that’s the address we usually use— at least for mail and other official
things. But the problem is that our building is squeezed between 97 Shmuel
Hanavi and 101 Shmuel Hanavi, which means that logically, 7 Shmuel Hanavi should be over a mile away. And that’s why,
when people rely on their GPS instead of on my detailed directions, they end up
completely lost and call me asking, “WHERE is your building? I see fifteen and
five, but seven seems to have disappeared.”
Just to make things a wee bit more confusing, although our
building is on Shmuel Hanavi Street, the entrance is from a small alleyway called
Etz Hadar. There are two problems with this alleyway (at least as far as this
article goes). One is that most people are not aware that it has a name. The
second is that there are three alleyways circling our complex, and all three
are called Etz Hadar. But since the Etz Hadar address works with the GPS
(although not with the Israeli Postal Authority), I usually give that address
to people coming by car. But more times than I can count, the person will say,
“I got so lost trying to find you. Why didn’t you just tell me that you live on
7 Shmuel Hanavi Street?”
Because of all the confusion surrounding our address, the
city decided to make things even more complicated and give us a NEW address.
About two years ago, we received an official letter notifying us that from now
on our address would be 32 Etz Hadar (I think. I’m not really sure). Posters
were placed in all ten of our building’s entranceways, and we were given
instructions to place a lighted number above our entranceway, with a warning
that we’d be heavily fined it we didn’t.
I think we were the only one of the seventy-five families
living in my building that took this seriously. When we realized that we were
the only ones to do so, we quickly forgot our new address (which no one uses,
including the post office and including official letters from that same office
that informed us about our change of address).
But when the city changed our address, they also invested
in new street signs. So, beneath the name of our alleyway there is now a large arrow
pointing to our building with the numbers 32-40 underneath it, since — I kid
you not — every entranceway in our building was given a different address!
Therefore, when I tell people how to find my apartment, I always have to add,
“Don’t look at the numbers of the street signs. Just follow my directions.” But
more often than not, people do follow the signs and not my directions.
To make things even more confusing, my building borders four
streets: Shmuel Hanavi, Etz Hadar, Chativat Harel and a second branch of Etz
Hadar. Although Chativat Harel is a major throughway, most people have never
heard of it. That’s because the street is only a block long! Actually, it’s one
section of a long street that for the last half century has been in the midst
of a major identity crisis, changing its name every few blocks or so. It starts
off as Yirmiyahu Street, becomes Bar Illan Street, turns into Chativat Harel and
finally changes into Sderot Eshkol. People coming to visit me by bus must get off
at the Chativat Harel bus stop, but more often than not, no one, including the
bus driver, has heard of Chativat Harel.
But once people finally get to my apartment me, their
reaction is usually something like, “What a great location! You’re right in the
middle of everything.”
And we really are. My home is the best location. I’ve
devoted a large portion of my life to creating it. It took me years of trial and error, of searching and
learning, to realize that the recipe for finding it cannot be
memorized. And as for directions, since each person understands things
according to his own experience, the journey was not always easy.
On Purim, a friend called me in the middle of our seudah.
The house was topsy-turvy and grandchildren were everywhere, while their
parents were rushing back and forth bringing food to the table. I was enjoying
every minute of it. “I don’t know how I got here,” I said to my friend.
“Neither do I,” she responded. “It’s amazing! Who would have believed it –
forty years ago we were two young kids, trying to find our way, and today, here
we are. We've succeeded in creating a true Jewish home!”
And that’s the real reason why, when you come to my home,
you’ll realize that, like every true Jewish home, it really is the best
location.
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