Love of Jerusalem
Love of Jerusalem - meaning Summary
Fragmented, Contradictory City
The poem presents Jerusalem as a city of sharp contrasts: separate streets, vivid human suffering, construction and destruction, hatred and love. These concrete, lived contradictions resist tidy or idealized portrayals. The closing comparison argues that loving Jerusalem from a tourist guide or prayer book is a reductive, schematic affection—like loving a woman from a manual—suggesting that authentic love must confront the city's messy, heterogeneous reality rather than abstractions.
Read Complete AnalysesThere is a street where they sell only red meat And there is a street where they sell only clothes and perfumes. And there is a day when I see only cripples and the blind And those covered with leprosy, and spastics and those with twisted lips. Here they build a house and there they destroy Here they dig into the earth And there they dig into the sky, Here they sit and there they walk Here they hate and there they love. But he who loves Jerusalem By the tourist book or the prayer book is like one who loves a women By a manual of sex positions.
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