Jerusalem - May 7

May 7, Our 19th Wedding Anniversary - Father Bob talked about "accepting not fixing" at our Mass held on the Mount of Olives across a narrow street from the Garden of Gethsemane.   The honking taxis that clogged the street could not be heard in the peaceful grove walled off from the outside world.


Father Bob asked Joanne & I to say a few words about "How We Met"  and "What Makes our Marriage Work." After Joanne gave a complete accounting of our meeting day and other reflections , I just said, "I was lucky!" 

Joanne really enjoyed visiting the Church of All Nations, which was a gorgeous holy place.  All the windows were created in different hues of purple to reflect the ranges of Christ's suffering.    Then, we walked down the Kidron Valley that lies between the Mount of Olives and the Temple Mount.  Jesus walked this very way after his arrest in Gethsemane. 

The hillside was once covered by thousands of Jewish graves dating back thousands of years but many of them are now destroyed. Marian described the Jewish burial practice of the time of the crucifixion of Jesus.

At the end of our walk, we entered an archaelogical site where excavation well below street level has uncovered the ancient Pool of Siloam.  An aquaduct that brought water to the City of David and a stepped path that led up to the Temple Mount have also been discovered.

After lunch at the lovely Kibbutz Ramon Rachel
hotel, we went to the Israeli Museum where we viewed a large model of 1st century Jerusalem and the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Just fascinating!

We began and ended our day at the Hotel Dan that features a very attractive multi tiered lobby.

Jerusalem     Jerusalem 3 D       Jerusalem History

Abraham's Tent



Father Jerry in the Judean Wilderness

Riding camels back three thousand six hundred years, we arrive at Abraham's Tent. His overwhelming hospitality satisfies us.

Below us, the wilderness tumbles eastward down to the Jericho oasis and on to the Jordan River where John baptized Jesus. Throughout the centuries, travelers crossed the Jordan here to trek upward thirty-four hundred feet and forty-five miles through the Judean wilderness to Jerusalem.

On the near barren hillsides, scattered bands of goats graze.  As the sun sets behind us, a soft and warm desert wind dissolves time and space; the hills disappear in darkness. Far below us, the lights of Abraham, of Joshua, of John and Jesus glisten. There too are our lights.

In Hebrew, the word ruach means wind, breath and spirit.

Tomorrow in Jerusalem. 



Judean Desert  Genesis Land (Abraham's Tent)

Qumran, Masada & Dead Sea

Masada stands as a symbol of Jewish resistance to foreign rule.  Herod the Great, hated by the Jewish population, built a fortress atop an isolated mesa overlooking the Dead Sea. The fortress even included two palaces for Herod. The fortress was essentially a back-up plan if he were forced to flee Jerusalem.  Masada was also strategically located to block an invasion route crossing a shallow bank in the Dead Sea. Herod never had need of the fortress.  

 

During the revolt against Roman rule in 66 AD, about one thousand Jewish extremists held out in Masada for three years. The Romans used slave labor to build a ramp upon which they could move a siege engine against the walls.  When the Romans arrived at the top, they found the inhabitants had committed suicide rather than be carried away into slavery.

 

In modern times, Israeli soldiers are sworn into the army at Masada. They climb the snake path to reach the top. We took a cable car!

 

We carried our water with us, toured the ruins on top and breathed in the fabulous views of the Dead Sea. Upon our return to below sea level, we applied mineral rich Dead Sea mud to our bodies and floated effortlessly in the briny water!

 

Qumran was a pottery manufacturing site in the first century.  When the revolt failed, the temple priests carried their scrolls here, placed them in clay jars and hid them in caves in the cliffs above.  The scrolls are the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.  

 

 

 

 

Masada    Masada  Qumran  Qumran  Dead Sea
Dead Sea

Bethlehem

Indians pressed in behind us as we pressed on the

Birthplace of Jesus from atlastours.net

Romanians ahead of us. Hundreds of Pilgrims packed like sardines in the airless corridor inched forward taking small steps toward the birthplace of Jesus.  As we converged on a circular set of steps leading to the grotto below, forward motion stopped; the Romanians had prostrated themselves in front of the birthplace.  One couple opened a music sheet and started singing.  Despite the heat and the sweat of so many bodies packed together, this was a holy moment. Their music filled the grotto.  We were in the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem. 

Like Jericho, Bethlehem lies within a Palestinian Autonomous Zone.  As our bus passed through a security check point and a walled barrier, Marian again moved to the middle of the bus and pocketed her Israeli ID. After rolling by a Kentucky Fried Chicken sign with a peace message, we stopped to pick up a Christian guide who was born in Bethlehem.  The city once eighty-five percent Christian is now about eighty percent Muslim.

After lunch at a cafeteria style restaurant, we assembled for Mass in St Jerome's Grotto hidden below St Catherine's Church. St Jerome, Father Jerry's patron saint, translated the Bible here from Greek and Hebrew into Latin in the fourth century.   

Listen as he expresses mixed sentiments about the visiting pilgrims in his time: 

 They come here from all over the world, the city regurgitates every type of human being; and there is an awful crush of persons of both sexes who in other places you should avoid at least in part but here you have to stomach them to the full. 

Maybe he was hot, tired, crushed and sweaty when he penned the words above. He also wrote:

 The very best of the Christian community comes to the Holy Land; they speak different tongues,  but the devotion is one and the same. There is no sign of conflict or arrogance, no differentiation whatsoever, except in the mode of dress. No one censures another, no one criticises or judges his neighbour.”  (Copied from See The Holy Land website.)

He could say the same today.

After our visit to the churches, we stopped at a Christian souvenir store. I thought the prices on the olive wood carvings must have been a mistake. They weren't - the lowest price, $350 negotiable, but there's only so much one can negotiate! We bought some less expensive stuff as did most everyone else.

As we were leaving, the shop owner thanked us for coming and recited the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke.
 
Eastward toward the Judean wilderness, the earth appeared to drop away at the edge of Bethlehem. The blue sky disappeared into a dusty tan haze.

As we exited Bethlehem, Israeli security guards armed with automatic rifles bordered the bus requesting us to hold up our passports and then blew us off and waved us through. We had dinner and slept in Jerusalem's elegant Dan Hotel.  

Jericho

In Biblical times, travelers seeking Jerusalem from Galilee, crossed the Jordan River to the pagan East Bank where the going was easier and then crossed back again a few miles from the oasis of Jericho.  Crossing the Jordan was considered a ritual bath to cleanse oneself upon entering the promised land. Joshua crossed here. Elijah parted the waters here. John baptised Jesus here. 

A narrow road through no man's land bordered by barbed wire and a security gate brought us to the crossing - and what appears to be an isolated Orthodox church, lies in the country of Jordan on the other side of the river.   The river appears to be very narrow but in flood much wider. A sign on a wall of the baptism site records the water level in flood stage, January 13, 2013.  See photos.

After crossing the Jordan, travelers make their way across truly barren land to the Oasis of Jericho.  Today, Jericho lies within a Palestinian autonomous area so our Israeli guide pretended she was an American tourist even though the Palestinians knew she wasn't.

Here, we bordered cable cars to ascend the Mount of Temptation. A Greek Orthodox Monastery hugs the side of the mountain. Within the monastery lies the stone that the devil tempted Jesus to turn into bread. 

The monastery can be reached by an arduous climb in stifling heat or by cable car. We took the cable car.  Ethiopians came by foot. Humanity converged on the steps to the monastery.  Think hot and think crowded. No queueing here!

Upon reaching the stone,  the Ethiopians prostrated themselves, reached out to touch the stone and prayed. What made this place holy to me was not the monastery, the icons or the stone, but the Ethiopians who struggled up the mountain.  One should know that they are persecuted in their own land by Muslims who burned over fifty of their churches in 2011.







Christians in Ethiopia

Jordan Valley

Judean Mountain

Nazareth

On our way to Nazareth, we stopped at Kfar Kedem, located at Hoshaya, a moshavim type community of  about five hundred orthodox families.  After a few missed turns as our bus rolled through the community that looked like an American gated subdivision, we arrived at our gateway to Biblical times.

We learned, among other things, that farmers must a leave a corner of the field unharvested for the poor and that a donkey and an ox must not be yoked together. This reminded me somehow of Molly and Warbonnet harnessed to the hay wagon back in West Texas. Molly would slack off and Warbonnet would pull for her. Without a Git Up, Molly, Warbonnet would have worked himself to death .  I don't think an ox would do that for a donkey!

Joanne ground wheat into flour the old fashioned way before we all made pita bread for a snack before lunch.  Many of us got a kick out of riding the little donkeys before we continued to Nazareth.

Nazareth was a very small and very poor community of about two hundred in the boyhood time of Jesus.  People lived in interconnected caves .  Nazareth is now a city of eighty thousand, the Arab capital of Israel.  Eighty percent Christian twenty years ago;  it is now eighty percent Muslim.

We visited the Basilica of the Annunciation built in 1969 on the site of earlier Byzantine and Crusader churches that mark the site of the Annunciation.  The basilica has no arches; shapes of "A" and "M" remind us of Ava Maria.  I snapped a few photos of the many mosaics of the Virgin donated by communities from around the world.  Below this upper church lies the the Grotto or Cave of the Annunciation, where the angelic announcement to Mary occurred. 

Just down the street from the basilica, Muslim billboards proclaim Christians to be losers.  Perhaps the signs express anger and resentment - Muslims tried to build a Mosque here to overshadow the basilica but Israel intervened at the request of the Vatican.     





Nazareth - Catholic Encyclopedia Nazareth - Wikpedia
Nazareth - Bible Places

Kfar Kedem, Galilee Kfar Kedem, Galilee  Moshavim

Who Do You Say I Am?

Caesarea Philippi  - Pan is a prefix of Greek origin meaning

all or everything from which we get words like panic, pandemonium and pan grilled fillet!  Pan was also a Greek god with the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat.  Worshiped here on the southwestern slopes of Mount Herman at the source of the Banias River, a tributary of the Jordan,  Herod the Great's son, Philippi, built a temple to honor Caesar.  Jesus led his disciples here to affix them with "training wheels" before he sent them out own their own. 

Father Jerry twisted and turned on a makeshift pedestal as he portrayed a hell and brimstone preacher here before the gates of hell in this pagan place. Standing before the temple and the pagan gods, Jesus asked his disciples, "Who do men say that I am?" And they answered, "John the Baptist; but some say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets."  He then said to them, "But who do you say that I am? "And Peter answered "You are the Christ."

Following this devotional interlude by the cool and flowing water, we boarded our bus to ride through the Hula Valley and on to Mount Tabor, the traditional site of the Transfiguration.  However, the actual site was probably somewhere near Caesarea Philippi  on Mount Herman.  

What did happen here was a victory of the Israelites over the Canaanites in the time of Deborah as described in the book of Judges.  Deborah wisely withheld attack until she saw clouds approaching from the Mediterranean.  The clouds meant rain. Rain it did, miring the Canaanites chariots in mud and thus giving the advantage to the chariotless Israelites.

Tour buses cannot navigate the steep and switch-backing road that leads to the top of mountain so we boarded small vans for the ride to the top along with a dozen or so other tour groups.  One would think, we would queue up for a ride back down. But tempers flared as tour groups and their guides tried to push ahead of us for the ride down. Apparently the concept of the queue doesn't exist in the Middle East.

On the top of the mountain, Antonio Barluzzi built the Church of the Transfiguration. Outside the church in a little courtyard, Father Jerry held another devotional. 

Once we were all down from the mountain and back on the bus we headed to a kibbutz near our hotel for dinner as the sun set over the Sea of Galilee. Along the way, I snapped a few pictures of the sea from sea level.  See below...