I was reminded this afternoon, as I often am, how incredibly spoiled I am, being a New Yorker. I was killing a few minutes in Washington Square Park late this afternoon before attending an event nearby, when I looked up from my book and saw the man above--a rabbi, I presume--roving around the benches, looking for Jews with whom to spend a few minutes praying. He approached the family a few seats down, suggested prayer to the young father, and proceeded to wrap his arms and head with traditional phylacteries, or tefillin, in an encounter that lasted last than three minutes before he moved on.
While I'm not a historian, nor a philosopher, I know there were ancient cities that were as or more open and multi-cultural than New York through the ages. But short of Paris, or perhaps London, I'd be hard pressed to want to be living anywhere else but a city in which the prayerful and the playful get to exist, side-by-side, in relative peace.
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