From "Tourists"

My dear friend Rabbi Jon Gross asked me to send him this poem that I shared with him some time ago. So I'm sending it to everyone. This hits home for me, on several levels (human, poetic, Jewish). (It bothers me when people use the expression "on so many levels," but don't explain what those levels mean, so I'm left to wonder if there really are levels at all or it was only words).

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."

- Yehuda Amichai

Translated by Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt