Stubborn hope

Part memoir, part manifesto, part ‘moral reckoning’, Ittay Flescher’s The Holy and the Broken opens with a tribute to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. Flescher names Cohen’s timeless ballad Jerusalem’s unofficial anthem, infused as it is with Biblical allegory and, at times, a kind of despair-filled nihilism. Whereas Cohen imagined the Hebrew liturgical expression as either holy or broken, depending on the inclinations of those who heard it, for Flescher, his own newly adopted home of Jerusalem is both holy and broken at the same time. It is Flescher’s fervent wish, and the mission of his book, that the city’s diverse inhabitants come together to ‘mend what is broken and build a future that honours the holy aspirations of all of us who call this land home’.