The orange haze of the lights mixes with the fog two hours before dawn. I'm not sure where I am — it smells like the Tenderloin, or Skid Row in L.A., one of the many downtown streets I've wandered at night. I'm actually South of Market, 11th and Howard. It's gotten cold. I stop in the 24-hour doughnut shop on Market to buy some black tea and a doughnut.

I started walking in places I “wasn't supposed to” on the New Year's Eve after my bar mitzvah. I was at a friend's party, and as midnight rolled around I couldn't sit still. I had to be out walking. I headed under a bridge, a "bad" place. It was dark and scary, but I felt like I needed to be on the edge of something. Drugs didn't appeal to me, but the so-called limits of my L.A. suburban experience were more of a tease than a barrier.

Now here I am, at 32. The only customer in the doughnut shop besides me is asleep, his head in his arms, his cup of coffee long cold. He has a book next to him. Curious, I crane my neck over to see that he's reading the Bible.

No one's looking — I borrow his text and look through it. I skip the Christian stuff and head for the parts that belong to me. The part about the wilderness.

My bar mitzvah coincided with my first real thoughts about the world around me. I found myself preparing to climb the bimah while also waking up to the fact that skepticism was
my natural mode of being.

So I gave a bar mitzvah speech on Sartre and doubt. The rabbi seemed nervous.

The Hebrews wandered through unknown lands and found a home, eventually. A Temple was smashed, and Jews spread across the world as lost tribes.

I identify more with the wandering and the wilderness than with the Land of Milk and Honey.

When I wander through urban landscapes of my city, South of Market, I see the unsettled disputes, the unsolved problems, the things that make me uncomfortable. I am forced to see the consequences of the way we live as people who are just part of a whole. Not only do our actions have consequences, but our inaction and lack of awareness can be equally powerful.

When I wander, I see things that are conventionally hidden and convenient to ignore.

I also sense the sadness and richness of history— whether it's the former synagogue near my house in the Mission that’s now an apartment building or parts of the Western Addition that used to be a Jewish district in San Francisco — and I feel the past almost as if it were in the air.

Hanging like a halo in the streets is a sense that the present will also pass away into vaguely remembered bits.

Between the residue of the past and the vanishing present, I watch people shuffle by on the otherwise empty street.

Sipping tea in the doughnut shop, flipping through Numbers and Deuteronomy, I think about The Pianist, when Adrien Brody's character is holed up in an apartment for what seems like months and all he can do is hear history unfold beneath him. I think of the immeasurable loss of the last century for the Jewish people, and it's like trying to picture a million of something. You can't do it. How can you imagine the Holocaust horrors, even alone in the middle of the night?

It's when you wander that you can wrestle with these things.

The man whose Bible I borrowed stirs. I carefully put it back and walk out. The street is unusually quiet. I look up Market Street toward the Ferry Building in the distance.

For some reason my head is filled with images of Jews around the world — Jews in Ethiopia, Peru, Iraq. What do they all have in common?

Besides their prayers, they all wandered to those far-flung corners. And I am restless in the sadness and richness of their journey.

Jay Schwartz plays trap drums in San Francisco, where he lives with his wife and canine. He writes for the Jewish News of Northern California