Crowds: it'll take a miracle...

My first real experience of serious crowds came some years ago when I was running a course for lawyers in Lagos, Nigeria, on anti-counterfeiting law and practice. Planning to cross a road, I stood poised at the street’s edge, scouring the pavement on the opposite side of the road in search of a spare inch of space on which I might set foot. I could not see one.

Jerusalem is not supposed to suffer from the effects of overcrowding. There is a Mishnah (Avot 5:7) that lists 10 miracles that were said to have been performed in the Temple. The tenth and final miracle is that “no person ever said to his fellow ‘this place is too hard for me to stay overnight in Jerusalem”.

Over the past fortnight Jerusalem has been rocking. After two sad, quiet years of Covid, the festival of Sukkot has blazed forth in all its glory. Tourists from the Jewish diaspora as well as Israelophile non-Jews from all over the world have poured into town. There has been much gaiety and partying, in keeping with the ancient tradition of the Simchat Bet HaSho’evah, the water-drawing celebration of Temple time that is so vividly depicted in the Talmud.

Sadly, while every practising Jew prays for the restoration of the Temple and its services, we have yet to merit the return of the miracle mentioned in our Mishnah.

In my local butcher’s shop, the demand for meat for festive meals was immense. Although the store had twice as many people working there as it normally did, the line of impatient big-spending customers stretched out well into the street and moved at a snail’s pace. I only had to wait an hour and a quarter to be served, but those who queued up behind me were not so fortunate. On of the regular customers exploded with rage that the store had not made special provision for the locals, who supported it every week. How dare they make their loyal and faithful customers wait while serving mere holidaymakers? Across the road, a little later, I listened to the grumblings of a pair of visitors from abroad, irritated and indeed exasperated by the remoteness of their prospects of picking up a swift coffee and bagel when there were so many people in all the eateries.

While one can sympathise with anyone who has to wait a long time to be served, there is in general little to be gained—and much to be lost—by intemperate speech and the raising of angry voices. The inconvenience of overcrowding is not an objective that is keenly sought by local businesses: it is a consequence of something that we should all be prepared to tolerate and indeed welcome and, while making constructive suggestions for its alleviation, it is something we should be prepared to bear with patience and fortitude—at least till we are treated to a return of our miracle.