The knowledge that we’ll be getting up at 3:30 in the morning to go to the airport and we’ll be enroute home for 30 hours makes this last day especially precious.
We enter the Old City through the Muslim quarter at the Damascus gate, where there’s been a suicide attack on soldiers a few days ago, also mindful of the recent terrible incident in Manchester England.
The conference participants, who hail from Italy, Canada, England, USA and Israel, share breakfast in the hotel and then go their separate ways. With many of us it’s a poignant farewell since we bonded over the rigorousness of the schedule, our specialized expertise, the excitement of talking about the Bible in the City of Jerusalem, and the enjoyment of our generous welcome. (more…)
A cab took us across town to the Prima Park, a less posh but comfortable and well situated location for the rest of our stay. We celebrated the Sabbath by resting and reflecting upon the intense and varied experiences of the last week.
Sunday morning, feeling free and a little abandoned, we walked on our own to the nearby tram stop, struggled with the ticket machine and rode the three stops to the Mehane Jehuda Market, where we mixed with local residents wandering through the stalls and found a lively restaurant for lunch. In the afternoon we reconnoitered the path to the Hebrew University, weaving our way through a maze of construction of the new light rail line that would soon be serving it. (more…)
After reading a draft of the paper about Shakespeare’s adaptation of the Bible’s resurrection narrative in The Winter’s Tale I’ll be presenting in a few days at the Conference, my friend George has suggested I provide the opening with more punch. This morning I get up early to avoid the crowds and walk through the deserted City back to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to seek inspiration.
Our bus circumnavigates the Old City’s walls, passing the Mount of Olives, with the garden of Gethsemane at its base, and the Jewish cemetery, every inch packed with graves from 3000 years ago to the present.
We start the day at the lavish breakfast buffet on the eleventh floor of The Herbert Samuel“-named for a late 19th c. English colonial governor active in early efforts to prepare the way for making Palestine a Jewish homeland.
First stop is the Israel Museum, a huge complex near the Hebrew University where my conference will take place in a few days. Gabi leads us to a model of the City during the first century BCE centered around the Second Temple, whose massive reconstruction was sponsored by Herod the Great.
The natural fortress of Masada stands apart from the escarpment of barren mountains that rise above the Dead Sea depression.
Our bus pulls up to the elegant visitor center at its base, all pavement and walls faced with the “Jerusalem stone” that seems both to reflect and absorb light in a warm blend reminding me of the travertine marble of the Getty Center in LA.
From the highest region of the country, today we head for the lowest point in the world at the Dead Sea, 1412 feet below sea level. The continuing haze produced by unusual heat for this time of year reduces visibility of the Sea of Galilee from our first stop, the shrine of the Beatitudes where Jesus is reputed to have preached the Sermon on the Mount. The place is packed with Christian pilgrim tour buses.
First stop today is the Hula Valley Nature Preserve, a national park providing a twice-a-year stopover spot for mass avian migrations from Europe to Africa and also attracting birders from all over the world. Since its not migration time, we get a “fourth dimension” media experience, including 3D glasses, moving seats, air jets and bubbles describing the restoration of this large wetland from reclamation projects that drained it and channeled all its water for agricultural uses.
After the tour bus heads north without us, we are picked up at the hotel by Yair Caro. Before we left the States, Jan searched the internet for people we might meet in Israel and discovered that he was a second cousin of mine whose brother Gustave we had met in Grenoble in 1969 and whose grandmother, Ida Blum, was the sister of my grandfather Adolf Gruenwald. Ruggedly handsome, deep voiced and fluent in English and authoritative in manner, he drives through the Arab part of the old city, where elegant but dilapidated buildings are now being renovated, gentrified, and repurposed by the municipality. (more…)