The Bewildering Complexity of Life in the World (#1)

Last night we walked down to the Bethlehem Road, not far from our house in Jerusalem, to a street fair organized by the municipality.  A sizable section of the street was closed off, many of the local stores and restaurants were open, two bands set up at intervals along the street, just far enough away from each other that you couldn't hear both at a time, unless you were standing halfway between them.  At stands people sold handicrafts, food, a lot of bread (Bethlehem means, of course, "House of Bread'), and there were some street performances.
Hundreds of people strolled up and down the street, the usual variety: young couples with kids in strollers, teenagers, older couples, and even two Hasidim, a father and son, wearing huge fur straimls and the golden caftans of one of the Jerusalem sects. 
We brought our dog, who didn't enjoy it all that much, but we thought he would be happier with us than left alone in the house.

***

When you think about an event like that -- planning it, the arrangements that had to be made, the security issues, publicizing it, setting it up, budgeting it -- you realize how far from simple it is.  Or if you think about the street fair from the individual point of view of every person who was part of it in any way, the experience they brought to it, their situation in life at that moment, their hopes, fears, loves, hates, you realize that it wasn't a single event at all.  For every person involved, it was a different event.
I was not in a good mood for the first half hour or so, for reasons that I can't entirely explain to myself, and nothing I want to go into here.  Neither of the bands was playing when we first got there, but when we reached the second band, which had set up on the balcony of a building, they started to play.  Judith was looking at the tablecloths on a stand on the east side of the street, and I was waiting for her with the dog on the other side of the street, close to the musicians.
Judith wanted to buy a tablecloth because today we're driving down to the moshav where our son-in-law's grandparents live, and we wanted to bring them a house present.  Everyone who looked at the tablecloths or bought one had a different reason for buying one.  And everyone who ignored the tablecloths completely, or decided not to buy one, had different personal tastes and needs. 
Our need for the tablecloth had to do with our connection with that son-in-law and his family, which is very different from our connection with our other two sons-in-law and their families.

***

The band started to play a Beatles song: Get  Back!  Within half a minute, my mood changed completely.  Everyone within earshot started dancing, some just quietly, for themselves, and others openly.  The musicians were good.  They had a strong rock and roll rhythm and they sang convincingly.  They were pretty young.  Most of them probably were born after the Beatles broke up and stopped performing.  None of them could remember the excitement that people my age felt when that exuberant wave of creativity swept the world of popular music, when it was something new and energizing.

***

People once thought they could figure the world out, that they could find one key idea that would explain everything.  If none of the current ideas was adequate, intense effort would get to the right one.  Christianity was such an idea, a universal religion that explained everything.  But from the very start, Christianity split up into competing sects, each with its own doctrines, each believing that it knew the ultimate secrets.

But even a simple event like the street fair on the Bethlehem Road, an event that lasted only a few hours, demonstrates the impossibility of grasping anything fully.  The broader the context, the harder things are to grasp.  

The Bethlehem Road was more or less a dirt track in a rural area when the British conquered Palestine during WWI.  Under the British mandate, it became an affluent Arab neighborhood.  In the war of 1948, the Arabs were driven out, poor Jews were settled in the neighborhood, two or more families stuffed together in a single apartment, but in the 1970s gradual gentrification took place.  In the past five years or more, the street has become more lively commercially.  

All that history also lay behind the street fair, as well as the contested status of Jerusalem today.  And let's not forget that the fair took place during the intermediate days of the Sukkot festival, something that might have been going on for three thousand years by now.

How can we get our minds around such complexity?