Jerusalem Day 3: A whirlwind tour!

Mom was sick in bed all day yesterday and today, so John and I struck out on our own.  I found us some walking tours through the Old CIty of Jerusalem and to the Mount of Olives.  Having spent the last two days not knowing what I was looking at, I decided it was time to have a guide give me some context.  Our guide, Erez, certainly had a lot to say, although I'm not sure quite all of it was factual...  The first tour, featured in this post, took us through all four quarters of the Old City: the Armenian Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, the Christian Quarter, and the Muslim Quarter.  The Muslim Quarter is actually more than half of the whole area of the Old City, so "quarter" is a bit loose of a term.  Below are some photos and quotes from the trip. 

What I can't capture in photos are the sounds and smells of the place.  Part of the tour took us to the rooftops of houses and churches, and from there we could hear Muslim calls to prayer from the minerets and bells ringing on the church steeples.  We smelled incense and falafel, schwarma and honeysuckle.  Large groups of Hasidic men would part as our group of women walked through, and int he Muslim Quarter we ran into a pedestrian traffic jam as a mosque let out from prayer.  I was most suprised to see that there was really still an active life going on all around us, that people were living and working in one of the largest archeologically significant places in the world.  As Erez said, "life goes on."

We started near a bread-seller.  These loops of bread are sold everywhere, along with these sort of doughnutty-bear-claw types of bread.  And falafel, always falafel.

Our first stop was in the Armenian Quarter.  Armenians lived in what is now Turkey, and were some of the first adopters of Christianity.  They adopted it before it was popular, and thus got persecuted quite a bit.  They have continued to be persecuted over the centuries, and so have established a tight enclave here in the Old City.  One man said that the passageways were designed in a labyrinthine manner on purpose, so that the corners were too tight for horses to turn in, and so that enemies would easily get lost.  Most of this quarter was indeed dark passageways.  Occasionally we would see into a door, though, and it revealed large, bright courtyards within.  I fell in love with this century plant hanging from this window.

This is a colonnade recently excavated from under a road in the Old City.  Turns out it's the Cardo, a Roman thoroughfare, from Jesus' time.  It's quite possible that he walked on some of the stones in this picture.  This was the sidewalk area, with shops that came out to meet where you see the arches.  This would have been covered.  No one knew it was there because it kept getting buried further and further under the rubble of later conquerors of Jerusalem.  This happened so many times that the streets are now about fifteen feet higher than they were 2000 years ago.

This is a madras, or school, in the Muslim Quarter.  Our guide said that the striped stonework was very typical of Muslim architecture. He also said that the prevalence of madrases here, in this remote outpost of the Muslim world, showed the Muslim's investment in making a good life for themselves here.  They weren't just here to conquer land, but to live and teach their children.  I didn't have time to take a good photo, because just then the mosque down the street let out, and we were surrounded by people!

This was taken on the roof of the homes that straddled the Armenian and Christian Quarters.  It's possible to go from quarter to quarter entirely on rooftops.  Our guide said, "Jerusalem is a city connected by its roofs, and divided by its inhabitants."

Sabbath and Politics

Today we spent with Coretta honoring the Sabbath, which mostly means resting, with a lot of walking and eating thrown in.  I observed it a little, in that I didn't get in a car, and I celebrated Shabbat dinner/lunch with her former host family.  I did take a few pictures, though, and turned on some lights.  Oh, and wrote on my blog... :)

The family that Coretta stayed with her first semester here was very welcoming.  They were a British family that has resettled in Israel.  They have four kids, and a very fun, relaxed vibe.  We prayed over the wine, washed our hands and ate blessed bread together, then ate a bountiful meal.  The meal ended with more prayers -- lots of singing!  For John's and my sake, they sang one of them to the tune of "Amazing Grace!"

After dinner, we walked up to the top of their apartment building, where the father of the family pointed out all the sites of Jerusalem.  The view was amazing.  I couldn't take any pictures while with them in honor of the Sabbath.  He did show me the dividing line between Israel and the West Bank -- a giant gray gash through the landscape.  I didn't say anything to him, but it was very clear that the land in front of the dividing line (the Jewish area) had many trees, while the land behind it was all desert, with hardly any trees at all.  Something tells me that's not entirely by accident.  I did ask him what he thought about Obama's proposition this week, that Israel should return to pre-1967 borders, which would mean that that gray line would become a national boundary.  He got a bit upset in hearing about that, saying that he liked Obama but wished he would learn more about what he was saying before he said it.  He showed us all the Arab and Jewish enclaves in the city, and said it would be nearly impossible to separate them all.  Religion aside, he said, it would be a hopeless task just in practical, technical terms.  His apartment would end up being on the border of the country.

This was the first openly political conversation I've had here.  I could tell that he was being reserved, and that he seemed to be a man who wanted everyone to live well, but that he was also very frustrated with the situation.  We were going to get more into it, I think, but his kids began tugging at him to go inside from the blazing sun.

We left soon after, and Coretta took us on a walk through a local park with equally amazing views of the city.  She said she often sees shepherds there with their sheep, but it was the middle of the day, and Coretta said that they were likely somewhere in the shade.  We saw many lizards, all of which were too fast for my camera.  We also saw a wide variety of flora: olive trees, flowering bushes, and thistles.  The thistle seemed appropriate for this beautiful and pain-stricken land.  In the photo below, you can see the landscape behind the thistles.  Look for the grey line going through the landscape horizontally -- that's the dividing wall to the West Bank.

Shabbat Shalom!

It is midday on Saturday as I write, and I am definitely breaking the Sabbath by using the computer.  The past 36 hours have not gone very much as planned.  Mom is sick with a very bad cold or flu, and has been in bed for the last two days.  John and I spent yesterday doing walking tours of Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives, and then Coretta led us on a walking tour of her own to go to Shabbos dinner with her friends.  By the end of the night, we'd walked a solid 9 hours!  Surely that's a biblical experience...

The walking tour was full of amazing information, but I'm not sure I have time to go into it right now.  I'm feeling a bit strange about this trip.  I think I expected to have some kind of life-changing or earth-shattering emotions/thoughts/experiences, but so far I feel mostly like a tourist.  I'm learning a lot about the history here, and seeing things in a new way that I am sure will help be become a better biblical interpreter, but I feel more like a student of history than a pilgrim.  Perhaps I need to spend more time in devotional prayer, and perhaps I should also lower my expectations!  ;-)

Shabbos was lovely last night.  There was a lot of singing, and delicious food, and good theological talk.  Coretta's just gotten here to take us on a new journey, though, so more on that later.

Shabbat Shalom! 

Jerusalem Day 2

Psalm 122

A Song of Ascents. Of David.
I was glad when they said to me,
   ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’
Our feet are standing
   within your gates, O Jerusalem. 

Jerusalem—built as a city
   that is bound firmly together.
To it the tribes go up,
   the tribes of the Lord,
as was decreed for Israel,
   to give thanks to the name of the Lord.
For there the thrones for judgement were set up,
   the thrones of the house of David.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
   ‘May they prosper who love you.
Peace be within your walls,
   and security within your towers.’
For the sake of my relatives and friends
   I will say, ‘Peace be within you.’
For the sake of the house of the Lord our God,
   I will seek your good.

After leaving the school, we headed back to our apartment, changed into "modest dress" (skirt below the knees, elbows and shoulders covered, and a scarf for holy sites), and headed back to the Old City.

First stop: the Wailing Wall (also known as the Western Wall).  This is the last wall standing of the Second Temple after the Romans sacked it around 70 CE.  It's not actually one of the walls of the temple, but a retaining wall around the temple grounds.  Still, it's a wall made of stones that were actually standing where they are today at the time of Jesus, and long before him, so it's pretty impressive. 

After running the gamut of merchants offering to sell you everything but their firstborn for a very good price, you have to go though a security checkpoint to get into the wall area.  There, they have divided gates: women go to one side; men go to the other.  I noticed that the men's side was MUCH larger and less crowded.  We women all had to jostle around each other for space.  We did it peacefully, though.  As in the psalm above, we were all there praying for peace, whether in the city of Jersusalem itself, or in our own lives.  When I got my turn, I pulled out the envelope of prayers that people had given or sent me from the States.  For each of you who sent a prayer, I took the folded up paper and held it to my lips, praying, "Oh Lord, hear our prayer," and placing it into a crevice in the wall.  I had more than ten prayers, so it became a sort of ritual and chant.  Then, I placed my hand on all of them and began to pray for God to hear all of these prayers.  As I did, I felt a sort of swirly feeling in my head, and I reeled forward just a little.  Nothing dramatic, but it was special.  I ran my hands all over the wall, connecting with thousands of years' worth of prayers in this very spot.  Then, as is tradition, I backed away from the wall.  (You aren't supposed to turn your back on it, but I only managed to walk backwards for a little before I had to turn.)  You can see the prayers I put in here.  In the larger picture, you can see all the crevices with little light-colored things in them -- those are all prayers!

I've heard that a team comes through every night and collects the prayers by vacuum (not very romantic), and then burns them as a holy offering (which sort of makes up for the vacuuming).  So, all of us who put in a prayer today can be assured that, right now, they are going up to God as a burnt offering.

We weren't quite sure what to do next, and spent about an hour wandering through markets and small streets.  The Old City is almost entirely pedestrian, and there are hundreds of nooks and crannies in which to get lost and purchase many trinkets.  A man named Abraham worked really hard to convince us to let him be our tour guide tomorrow, and we almost agreed, but then, when he quoted the price, our sanity returned.  Besides, we realized we were right next to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and it was time to return to our devotional tour.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is purported to be the site of Jesus' tomb.  It goes deep into the carved-out rock of Jerusalem and has small chapels every which way within it.  The first thing you see when you go in is the Rock of Unction, where Jesus' body was laid after he died, and where the women covered his body with oils and spices to prepare it for burial.  People bring rags of oil to rub on this stone, and they will often kiss it and rub things like rosaries on it.  I felt the oily surface myself, and was surprised at how it stayed with me through the day.

We didn't have a guide, so I had to guess on what a lot of the chapels were about.  I did read in a brochure that the chapel is shared by five sects.  The Greek Orthodox, Catholics, and Armenians each have a major section, and the Syrian and Coptic Orthodox churches have smaller chapels.  I'm not totally sure which is which, except that I'm pretty positive that the gold mosaic murals with Greek lettering were the Greek Orthodox's.  So beautiful!

In the center was Jesus' tomb, a squareish box under a dome, with a smaller dome sticking out of the box.  (See picture, since my description is terrible.)  It was absolutely covered in lamps and candles, and I watched as an Orthodox (not sure which kind) priest lit several of the lamps.  After a long wait in line, I was able to enter the tomb, which was heavily decorated with gold and more lamps.  There was a stone slab in the back room that I believe was to be the stone under which (?) Jesus' body was laid.  (Not sure how that works given that the story was that he was in a cave with a big round stone in front, but maybe there's an explanation I didn't get.)  I placed my hand on it and felt a strange sense of nothing.  Then, I heard a voice in my head, "Why are you looking for the living among the dead?  He is not here; he is risen."  So, that explained the nothingness.  It felt like a lovely homage, but not especially holy.  I wore my headscarf nonetheless.

By the time all this was done, it was very late and we were quite hungry, so we met up with Coretta and had another lovely meal.  So far, I'm eating really well in Israel.  Thanks be to God!

Fun in the Yeshiva

This morning, Coretta took us to class with her.  She's learning the Hebrew language and studying the Tanakh.  We skipped the Hebrew grammar class, but joined her for her very interesting Tanakh interpretation class.

We were studying Genesis 20 and 21.  Gen. 20 tells of Abraham claiming that Sarah is his sister, and then King Abimelech takes her for his wife.  God intervenes and keeps Abimilech from violating any rules, and Sarah gets returned to Abraham, but it's a rather icky story. In class, we got to discuss the details of how exactly God kept Abimelech from consorting with Sarah; midrash suggests it might be an STD!  Who knew such things were sometimes God-given?

After class discussion, we got sent out for Beit Midrash (house of Midrash, or interpretation; also known as the biblical library).  It was not like the seminary library, where everyone was silent and you got dirty looks for sneezing too loudly.  This was a truly Jewish library, with groups of people arguing (sometimes loudly) over interpretations.  It was fun!  We all got to participate.

We were studying Gen. 21, where Sarah, who has now given birth to the long-desired Isaac, sees Ishmael "playing" and casts him and his mother, Hagar, into the wilderness, with God's approval, despite Abraham's dismay.  Some of the interesting interpretive questions that came up were how it is that Sarah (a woman) has her voice honored over that of a man; how Sarah's decisiveness seems to be honored more than Abraham's emotional indecisiveness; and how the word "playing" might actually mean a very violent type of playing, like maybe Ishmael was "playing" by shooting arrows at Isaac(!).

We went out to lunch at a great vegetarian restaurant, and then returned for Coretta's acapella group rehearsal.  They were pretty good!  Here's a clip!

The words are Hebrew (of course!), and the chorus, which you hear below, is from Isaiah 40.  The translation is:

"Comfort, comfort my people,
Comfort, comfort, says your God" 

It was so fun to be back in this kind of environment, with everyone studying and interpreting biblical texts.  It helped me remember why I love bible study!  Perhaps we'll get a good argumentative bible study going at Scarsdale... :)

Day 1 in Jerusalem

Shalom!  We have arrived safely in Jerusalem!  After a very long flight full of disgusting food (Mom said, "my food tastes like bread disguised as meat, bread disguised as cheese, and bread disguised as bread..."), we touched down in Tel Aviv around 10am Israeli time.  There was only one minor scare of a lost passport (the loser shall remain nameless), and then we made it through customs and to our rental car.  The GPS we brought along didn't work, and neither did our other electronic devices, so I got busy interpreting a map for John, who drove like the Boston cabbie he used to be.

We found our way to our AMAZINGLY gorgeous neighborhood, Yemin Moshe, just outside the walls of the Old City.  The neighborhood is like living in a garden.  You can see john and Coretta (his daughter, who is living here for a year) outside our rented apartment.  The long hanging flowers are nasturtiums, according to Mom. 

After an epic nap, which refused to let me out of its grip even after I officially woke up, Coretta led us on a walk to the outskirts of the Old City for dinner.  She told us that everything in Jerusalem is required to be built of Jerusalem stone, the tan-colored stone you see in the pictures.  It's a bit bland by day, but at sunset, when the light hits it just right, it's absolutely gorgeous. 

This is us walking through Yemin Moshe.  We believe that this is Herod's tower, now called King David's Tower, in the background.  I might be able to confirm that once we've actually visited the Old City.

The cafe that Coretta took us to was in a labyrinth of back streets.  We had to go through a small doorway and down a narrow stone passageway into a courtyard, then up some stairs. It felt like we were getting let in on a little secret!


Once inside, it turned out to be both a cafe and a bookstore, full of interesting reads tucked into old stone archways.  They even had a pride fiag hanging in there, which was a delightful surprise.  The food was delicious, and it was nice to have lots of vegetables after all that bread this morning!








As I must always do, I checked out the restroom at this cafe, and found this sign.  I recognized the feeling from the airpiane last night...

Coretta helped us plan some of our next few days, and we headed home down a street famous for its nightlife.  There we found some interesting kitsch (including a store actually named "Kitsch").  My favorite items for sale were these yarmulkes decorated with whatever cultural reference you might want to revere whilst worshiping.  Facebook, Spongebob, Mac, the GAP -- pick your pleasure!

We're about to turn in for a short night before we get up to meet Coretta at her Hebrew history class in the morning.  Goodnight!

Joys and Concerns

So, I woke up and checked my email, as I do as a postmodern smartphone addict, and I found this article:


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/world/middleeast/16mideast.html?_r=1


Yeah.  So, there's a new conflict that has arisen in Israel.  Well, a new flare-up of a very old conflict.  Selfishly, I hope it ends very quickly, so that by the time we get there tomorrow, things will be safer.  I also hope, though, that for the sake of moving things forward, it might spark another round of talks, rather than another round of violence.  It could easily go either way.  I welcome your prayers!


Freaked out by waking up to this news, I called Mom.  She said she was still ready to go, saying that if it was our time to go, then we'd just as likely be hit by a bus in the states as be hit by a bomb in Israel.  This was not very comforting for me.  But then I got the following email from a missionary we've connected with there and will meet on Monday:

Greetings!

The type of violence that you saw yesterday on TV is in specific places that we evade... Come to Israel and Palestine without concerns and with joy!

Yours,

[his name]

With joy!!  I will go with joy and hope!  And so now I must sleep so that I will be joyous and not cranky tomorrow.

Shalom, y'all.

Rachel