Israel is a magical place. A place
where the words of those thin parchment pages come to life.
Despite warnings of Israeli airport
security, we got through customs without a hitch. We met Jim, our
contact (name changed), in the lobby. Jim led us to a 3D
representation of Jerusalem during the 2nd Temple period,
around Jesus’ time. It was made of balsa wood. He was so excited to
show us. His eyes lit up and he had a big smile on his face.
Sometimes when someone would whisper,
“Wow, that’s awesome,” Jim would growl happily, “Yeah! This is
really neat stuff!” He paced around the model, jumping in between
the 30 of us crowded around to point out interesting things like
Herod’s Palace, Golgotha, Wilson’s arch, and the Hinnom valley, which
is where the residents of Jerusalem would throw their trash and so
became a widely used metaphor for hell.
As he talked, I wondered when Jim had
time to breathe or swallow. At one point he stood next to me to
point out David’s city, which David conquered from the Jebusites in
the seventh or eighth year of his reign, and was really quite small,
only about 400 yards long and housing just 1500 people. I noticed a
tiny bit of foam collecting around his top incisors. Jim was
literally foaming at the mouth in his excitement for Jerusalem.
The next day we took a bus from Arad,
in the south, to Jerusalem, so that he could tour us around the Holy
City. Our bus drove through streets lined with bagel shops and
cafes, synagogues and churches, all built in white Jerusalem stone.
We walked through the old city streets with its tall, tan walls of
soft, rough stone. We went through the Zion gate, still marked with
bullet holes from 1948 when Israel seized the old city, only to lose
it again a few days later.
Through the Zion gate we walked to the
Temple Mount. There was the golden plated dome of the Dome of the
Rock, the mosque built in 691 to mark the place where Muslims believe
Abraham went to sacrifice Ishmael. There was the Temple Mount that
Solomon built because his father’s hands were too bloody; there the
Temple Mount where Jesus threw out the money changers who were
profiting from God.
The stones of the Temple Mount were
different, as Jim pointed out, with large, perfectly hewn stones on
bottom and smaller stones with more mortar holding them together on
the top. He said the better, bottom stones good Herodian stone,
stones that were there during Jesus’ day. The smaller stones were
put in much later by the Ottomans who were renovating the Dome of the
Rock.
There is no mention in the Qu’ran of
Jerusalem, Jim said. There is only a vague reference to “the near
mosque and the far mosque,” which was interpreted later to mean the
Dome of the Rock by people who were trying to raise money for its
renovation after it had fallen into disrepair.
After that Jim showed us the Mount of
Olives. The Mount of Olives was first mentioned in the Bible when
David fled Jerusalem from his son Absalom, who was taking his
father’s throne in a coup. The Mount of Olives is also where Jesus
fled to weep and pray in the Garden of Gethsemane the night he was
betrayed.
For our last and biggest adventure, we
went through Hezekiah’s Tunnel. Hezekiah’s tunnel is ¾ of a mile
long and usually either 6 ½ to 5 feet tall. It took about 45
minutes to get all the way through, much of it crouched low so as to
avoid hitting our heads. It was made to get water from the Gihon
Spring to the pool of Siloam, so there was a constant presence of
cool water around our ankles, sometimes even up to our thighs. King
Hezekiah built the tunnel in the 8th c. BCE to get water
from the from outside the city walls to the pool which was inside the
city walls in order to prepare for the seige of Jerusalem by the
Assyrians. It was awesome!
Finally, we walked atop the rebuilt 1st
wall to get back to the bus, looking out to see the white city turned
pink, reflecting the brilliant sunset. We were tired. It had been a
long day of walking and learning and traveling.
And yet as I looked over at that
beautiful city I felt like I could stare at it forever (provided I
had a comfortable chair and a cup of coffee at all times). I felt
like I wanted to convert to Judaism (the Messianic variety) and live
in Israel and walk that city forever. I’ve seen a lot of beautiful
cities during the Race, Dublin, Pula, Budapest, among many others,
and I’ve kind of wanted to live in most of them.
But Israel was and has been different.
Seeing it, I felt a bigger urgency to live here than anywhere else.
It captures my imagination, my love of history, religion, and even my
love for God like no other place I’ve been. I don’t think I will
easily forget this place. It’s magic has gotten under my skin.
