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After months of lockdown and partial lockdown, I had forgotten there were things such as street music. The sounds that fill my eardrums are a cacophony of cries and shouts, threats and promises that radiate from the daily news – a sea of crazed tensions that mottle and distort my diminishing humanity.

I had forgotten street music is theater with the power to shatter the artificial parameters ascribed to street life. I had forgotten what a good street musician can do when his heart is so deeply engrained in the music his surroundings fail to restrain him and the voice and the instrument, guided by some unseen inner gyroscope, extract long-forgotten memories of our once imagined selves. The summer of ’67 that I had spent in California with its brilliant splashings of roadside music is light years away from the deflated, corona-wrought Jerusalem that now blankets me.

I plod along from Jaffa Road to Ben-Yehuda Street, enmeshed in confrontations of astonishing absurdity and banality. My bones and flesh, my heart and brain are wrapped like dead fish in an old newspaper. And then I see him, somewhere on the far side of the street. Or rather, I hear an echo of another time when I had the will and the freedom to break the rhythm of my life and expose myself to any musical intention.

A few people block my view of him, and I am aware only of the sound rising with force and feeling, bringing in its wake those frozen memories of San Francisco streets. Then suddenly, I am before him. And for a split second, there is a sharp, uncanny fissure between sight and thought. My brain, ready to receive the Doors, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, focuses on a full-length beard, a black suit and a black yarmulke – a permanent resident of Mea Shearim, that haredi enclave forever closed to the ecstasies of Rock and Roll.

And yet, the sounds pour outward, pulsing in the air, now glowing within me in long-closed chambers – the musician’s voice calling to me, like some mad alchemist fusing folk-rock with the melodies of David, King of Israel, master of song.

There is something so extraordinary about the figure before me – a perfect juncture of my long-gone world of the sixties with this clambering, uncertain Jewish state. He sits as though mocking me, as though showing me how easily that juncture can be found. As though my decades of floundering and praying and stumbling were so unnecessary if I had simply used my eyes and opened my heart.

Mea Shearim, the Doors, the Beatles and the Psalms have an identical Creator. The vast differences are in my mind, in the walls I have shaped with my own hand, putting man against man, Jew against Jew.

His fingers dance across the strings; before him a Book of Psalms. He is reaching the end, the tension glowing before the final closure. I want to go to him and find out who he is under that Mea Shearim mask. Question him about his leaping across that chasm between one world and the next.

The musician puts down the guitar and reaches for a nearby water bottle. The sounds around me are now familiar street sounds. The musician takes a long drink and I have a sudden dread that it was all a trick my mind played on my senses: that Pink Floyd did not actually mesh so perfectly with the yearnings of King David; that I have been conned as I was once long ago by immature dreams. But before I can move, the guitar swings up once again, and the music again, as though testifying, presents itself to my doubts, certain of its own beauty and timelessness.

I know this moment will pass. I can see it clearly coming out of the darkness and then once again swallowed by it. But for one instant in the sunlight on Ben-Yehuda Street, with the pulse of the man moving me, with the quivering strings, with King David coming straight across the grasses of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, my senses soar freewheeling, high above me. And I know with all my being that the heart’s final circumcision will come as an event whose power is sheer beauty – and wonder at the oneness of those things that once stood in opposition.

Martin Hoffman is a freelance writer living in Jerusalem who grew up in Vermont, did post grad work at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill, crossed part of Afghanistan on horseback, ate yogurt in Teheran, studied at Yeshivat Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem, served in an antiaircraft unit in the IDF, has freelanced for various magazines like Hadassah, the Jerusalem Post, and Ami.