Pomegranate shade and totalitarian beauty
My Jerusalem Succah next to a pomegranate tree. Can you beat that?
So I was thinking about the definitions of the beautiful cities by Rabbi Steinsaltz. Let assume that Jerusalem, Paris and even Boston (I am reversing and contradicting myself here including Boston in the beautiful category as will be explained later). Conversely NYC, Moscow, Tel Aviv are not beautiful despite having superiorly beautiful individual buildings.
I propose that the beautiful cities have one thing in common, namely totalitarian, regulated, controlled construction and urban planning. In case of Jerusalem it is the uniformity of the stone finish going back to the dictatorial British mandate. In case Paris it is Baron Haussman urban design as we already described (see Eastern Parkway: Shades of Paris in the County of Kings.) In case of Boston it is the tightest development approval process in the world with highly regimented dictatorial regulations.
There is cemetery on Baker St. in Boston. On one plot you see old graves uniformly carved out of grey New Hampshire granite. On the other side are Jewish Russian graves in pink and black elaborately carved custom granites. Not to diminish the individual beauty of the some of the Russian Jewish stones, but you can guess what plot is more beautiful.
Is the totalitarian control a prerequisite to the urban beauty in its totality? I thought about this for many years and I don�t have an answer. But I am convinced that individual beauty is not a contradiction to beauty in its sum of parts (Steinsaltz example of face and mouth). G-d is not a dictator, he hasn�t created two similar things yet. In nature all aspects of G-d creations animate and inanimate are individually beautiful, from pomegranate fruit to bulldogs, they all from a supernal beauty together.
Besides naturally beautiful hills, is the Jerusalem beauty flows out of textural uniformity? Is it totalitarian in its source?
That Rimon is getting eaten off the tree on Hoshano Raba!




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