The MBTA bus runs in front of my hotel along Washington Boulevard toward Harvard and takes less than twenty minutes.

At nine in the morning, there is a particular look to its passengers: college-age, mostly white and Asian, each absorbed in the same small rectangle of light. AirPods. Phones. No one smiling. One young man is picking his nose. Their shoes have the carefully cultivated look of urban grunge, although they appear to have cost considerably more than the shoes I’m wearing. 

Nearly everyone carries the same oversized Dunkin’ iced coffee.

My son once told me, “Boston survives on Dunkin.”

He may not have been far off.

There is standing room only. We are packed in, the proverbial sardines.

And no one is talking.

It is the quietest bus ride I have ever taken.

I am on my way to the Harvard Art Museums, eleven stops to Kirkland Place. I have a few hours to fill before my flight back to Los Angeles after a three-day visit with my son. Ninety minutes in an esteemed academic museum seems just right.

The bus passes through Somerville, a lovely community north of central Boston. Rows of wooden triple-deckers and multi-family houses line the streets, interrupted occasionally by newer mid-rise buildings. Much of it looks like student housing. Amazon boxes occupy nearly every porch.

I have been to Harvard before. The last time was a couple of years ago, when the campus felt very different.

At that time, parts of the university were blocked off. Gates were closed. Access was restricted. The war in Gaza had brought protests onto campus, and encampments had become part of the landscape. Students wore keffiyehs. Signs and banners were everywhere. Harvard’s leadership was facing intense criticism over its handling of protests and concerns about the safety and treatment of Jewish students.

That is the Harvard I remember.

So I am not quite prepared for what I see when I get off Bus 109.

Calm.

Open spaces.

Students walking to class.

Restaurants around the perimeter dealing with the late-morning rush.

Here and there, students wearing kippot and tzitzit.

A beautiful New England campus at the end of summer, beginning its transition into fall.

No encampments.

No barricades.

No shouting.

Nothing that announces itself as a political statement.

Just a university.

I am surprised by how much this affects me.

Perhaps because, for the past few years, I have learned to enter certain spaces differently.

When I converted to Judaism, an older Jewish friend told me, “You’ll know you’re really Jewish the first time you experience real antisemitism.”

I remember the comment because it unsettled me. I had found a pathway in life that led me to Judaism. But I was still learning all that belonging to the Jewish people might mean.

What she never told me was that I might eventually come to expect it. Antisemitism.

As a Jewish person, I have become accustomed to looking.

Looking for the sign.

Looking for the keffiyeh.

Looking at the bulletin board.

Looking at the windows of businesses.

Looking, before I even realize I am looking, for some indication of whether I am welcome.

It is an odd way to move through the world: anticipating something before it happens.

And then, sometimes, nothing happens.

At the Harvard Art Museums, I spend the next ninety minutes looking at art. I see a remarkable and thought-provoking photography installation, a collection curated by the first woman to major in sociology at Harvard.

The morning becomes about photographs, artists, students, architecture, light.

Not Gaza.

Not Israel.

Not antisemitism.

Not me.

And perhaps that is part of what feels so remarkable.

On my way back to the hotel, Bus 109 carries me through the same streets.

This time I notice one residential property surrounded by a white fence covered in anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian graffiti.

There is also a Free Palestine sign in the window of a small lesbian bookstore, far off campus.

And that is about it.

I find myself almost relieved by these remnants.

Not because I agree with them. I don’t.

But because they remind me that what I experienced that morning was not a transformation of the world. It was simply a morning.

A Tuesday morning.

On a particular bus.

To a particular campus.

In a particular moment.

A reminder that moments still matter.

We live in a time when Jewish people can enter a room, a university, a neighborhood, a synagogue, a public gathering, and wonder what awaits us. We can find ourselves bracing before anything has actually happened.

I had done some of that bracing myself.

But on this Tuesday morning, Bus 109 carried me into a place where I expected to feel unsettled and instead found something almost startlingly ordinary.

Students going to class.

People drinking iced coffee.

Restaurants opening for lunch.

Jewish students walking across campus.

Art on the walls.

People going about their lives.

Perhaps the pendulum does not only swing from one extreme to another. Perhaps institutions and people can absorb conflict, change, adjust. Perhaps controversy can recede without disappearing entirely. Perhaps a place can become quiet again.

Perhaps my own heart can feel less fragile.

I don’t know where the overheated rhetoric surrounding Israel, Palestine, antisemitism, and Jewish identity will ultimately lead. I don’t know whether what I saw at Harvard represents anything larger than a single morning.

I only know what I saw.

And what I saw was calm.

For someone who has grown accustomed to anticipating the opposite, calm can feel like a gift.

That gift came to me on a crowded bus on a random Tuesday morning.

Bus 109.