There are moments when a work no longer belongs to the one who carried it. It begins to breathe on its own, to take on its own gravity, and to step into the world as witness and companion. Jerusalem Fumes has reached that moment.
For the past three years, this book has lived inside me like a chamber of fire: twelve midrashim, a chorus of witnesses, a procession of sigils, the Mirror Trilogy, and a closing invocation that refuses to let the world collapse into cynicism. It is a descent and return text, a civic prayer, and a threshold manual for an age that has forgotten how to see.
Today, the Gate opens.
Beginning this week and continuing for a full year, I will release Jerusalem Fumes here on Substack. It will not appear as an inert manuscript or as a finished artifact. It will unfold as a living cycle aligned with the Jewish calendar, moving through festivals, fast days, and seasons of return. This is not simply a publication schedule. It is a liturgical procession, a journey through exile, mercy, violence, recognition, and covenant. It is a walk through fire. It is a return to the imagination.
Over the next year, this space will become the home of the full cycle of midrashim, their corresponding witness accounts, the sigils and symbolic images that carry the mythic charge, and the integrated reflections shaped through Rene Girard, James Hillman, and Diana Fosha. The Mirror Trilogy will arrive later in the cycle as the turning point of the entire work, and the final invocation will close the year at a still point in the turning world. Each post stands on its own. Taken together, they form a coherent covenant.
I am releasing this work now because the moment demands it. We are living in a turbulent cultural and political season. The rhetoric of our age drifts toward cynicism, fear, and spectacle. Souls are exhausted. The imagination is thinning. Jerusalem Fumes was written for such a time, as a mythopoetic act of repair, as an archetypal mirror of what remains possible. I want this work to breathe in the public square, to meet readers where they are, and to invite a slower and deeper way of seeing.
Today is simply the Gate. In the coming weeks, we will enter the first movements: The Scapegoat’s Path, The Gate of Breath, The Stone the Builders Refused, and The One Who Ran Away. These will lead us into the larger arc of betrayal, violence, mercy, recognition, and covenant. Each Friday, the next flame will be lit.
Thank you for walking this path with me. Many of you have accompanied me through earlier fragments, paintings, drafts, and private readings. Your presence has shaped this book more than you know. Now the work moves outward. The city is burning. The temple is falling. The world is trembling. And still, the Gate is open.
Welcome to Jerusalem Fumes.