This radical string quietly weaves around our college-town, hidden in plain sight. It crosses the city blocks we walk on our way to class. It wraps itself around the trees hanging just above our gaze. This string is not a telephone wire- or a random hanging shoelace – or mistake. This string has a story – has a purpose – has a name: the eruv.

The eruv (made from wire, string, and wood) wraps itself around a pocket of Jewish life in Berkeley. To those who know its name, the eruv string is the informal borderline of the Jewish community, unconditional like a mother’s tight embrace. To all the others, who unknowingly meet its gaze, it is a random, serendipitously long, secular string.

Until recently, I was an “other.” I had no reason to pay attention to the thread that sewed my town together, embroidered into the fabric of modernity. I seldom looked up, for what could I see that I did not already know? And then, I was told the story of the eruv:

Its name is the eruv. And the eruv is defined, in Hebrew, as a“mixture.”

And the Berkeley eruv does just that: it mixes lands (private houses with public parks and libraries); it mixes religions (mostly Jewish, and also Buddhist, and Muslim, and atheist, too); it mixes faiths (those who know the eruv’s name, with those who look up to find a serendipitously long, secular string).

And the eruv is a vague rendering of a bygone kingdom: Berkeley’s frail string recalls an ancient Jewish kingdom’s cobblestone walls; when Sabbath meals were carried from house to house within an antiquated city’s walled domain.

But the eruv is not a kingdom’s cobblestone wall- it is a frail string, it is tattered fabric tethered between trees. And so, each week, people of faith climb ladders – to mend the string and its many frays.
Then, I raised my gaze and saw my faith, strung across tree trunks: the eruv.

I got to know the eruv. I spent time wrapped around its hugging arms, gifted with the knowledge of its name, of its story. When I got to know this eruv, I got to know myself.

I now look up to find that this eruv, in Berkeley, is a radical borderline unfurling in the air.

I found that this eruv is revolutionary: a kind, maternal thread that is unwilling to harm its visitors as castle moats did as carceral border walls do. This eruv intimately unites Berkeley’s Jewish community inside of its borders. This eruv is inclusive of all who lie within its string-framed bounds.

This eruv is a breathless solace that enchants the fringes of our college-town. This string meanders through trees, it wraps around telephone poles. This is an ancient, Kabalistic thread. This is a cobblestone wall and a radical borderline. This is everything I want the world to be.

Now that I know the eruv, I know myself.

And this string hugs me. And this eruv holds my hand.