Days Three and (part of) Four

DAY THREE

We got up early today and drove from Jerusalem straight to Tel Dan, the archaeological site that is the basis for my work in Israel. It was about a 3.5 hr. drive, and we got there at 10 am. It wasn't too hot yet as we made our way from the gate complex up to the temple area. Here we are right in front of where the altar would have been during the later Iron Age (700's BC):

The temple precinct is almost on the summit of the site, but just a little farther up is a lookout that affords some great views across to Lebanon. Here is a picture of Em; the buildings in the background are a Lebanese town, and the land in between, though lovely, is a minefield. It is true that Emily is quite good at Minesweeper on the computer, but this was not the time to put those skills to the test.
After Dan it was on to Banias, which is the site of a famous battle between the Egyptians and Seleucids in 199 BC and later became the site of Caesarea Philippi. More exciting is the temple to Pan that was built there. (The name Banias is actually derived from "Pan.") Pan was a forest god who plays the flute, as seen in this picture of a coin found on the site:
I was so moved by the pagan spirit of the site that for a few moments I became Pan. It was rather exciting for Emily and for the group of high schoolers from England. For those fifteen seconds the forest was alive with merriment.
Such merriment brings great hunger, so our next stop was Dag al-HaDan ("Fish on the Dan"), which had been recommended to me by some of my housemates. The uniqueness of this restaurant became apparent when we pulled in to the (open) kitchen and dining area and saw a peacock sitting on the roof of the kitchen. By the time we sat at our table, we counted three peacocks, two cats, four chickens, a dog and a pond with ducks and swans. In the middle of the seating area, they had diverted part of the Dan spring to stream through the tables. Here is a short video to give you a sense of the excitement:

Needless to say, it was an awesome and elegant dining experience. Afterwards we headed back down to the Sea of Galilee stopping along the way at the Mount of the Beatitudes. This small church overlooks the Sea and is said to be where Jesus gave the sermon on the mount. It is octagonal: one side for each beatitude. It is a simple church with a beautiful view, and it is one of our favorites so far, definitely lovelier than anything we saw at the Holy Sepulchre.

After this long day we checked into the YMCA hotel in Tiberias, and since we were still full from our lunch, we didn't bother with supper.

DAY FOUR

After a night's stay at the YMCA by Peniel, we decided that we'd drive back to Jerusalem after another day of sightseeing rather than stay a second night. Before we left, we took advantage of the lovely views of the Sea of Galilee. Here's a shot of Andrew on our balcony:

After a delicious breakfast, we bid the YMCA goodbye and headed out to Capernaum, which is the city where St. Peter lived and where Jesus spent a significant amount of time. Capernaum was fantastic - a beautiful view of the sea and fascinating ruins. One of the most interesting sites was the house of St. Peter, which, prior to the first century AD, was primarily a residence but by the mid-first century showed signs of public veneration. Although it's impossible to say it definitely was the house of St. Peter, the fact that the earliest Christian communities thought so is pretty compelling. There was also a well-preserved synagogue in Capernaum that served as a community center for the town. Here's a picture of me in the synagogue:

From Capernaum it was on to Bethsaida, and then to the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes. Below is a picture of a famous mosaic in front of the altar. Underneath the altar is a slab of limestone that Christians since the 5th century have used to commemorate the miracle of the loaves and fishes:From there, we headed out to Sepphoris (Zippori). Sepphoris is not mentioned in the New Testament at all, but it was a major Jewish community in the first centuries AD. It is known for its beautiful mosaics, which graced the homes of the wealthy and also the town's synagogue. (Actually, an ancient source remembers several synagogues, but only one has been found so far; hopefully, there are more mosaics to come!). Here is a picture of Andrew on the roof of a later Crusader fortress at Sepphoris. (He'd like everyone to know that he is sporting his Krispy Kreme hat in this photo.):Our final stop at Sepphoris was the ancient reservoir that supplied water to the city. Here's a shot of me in the reservoir:

The rest of the day we spent driving to Nazareth and then to Mount Tabor, but that adventure and Day Five will have to wait for another entry!

Day Two

Well, here we are at Day Two. We were up early again this morning and back in the Old City, this time to finish walking along the Via Dolorosa and then to explore the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We made our way through the stations and got to the Holy Sepulchre around 9 am, and there were already quite a few people there. Here is the entrance into the church:

The site of the church had been in ancient times a stone quarry, but one section of the quarry was left untouched after a crack was discovered in the stone. Later some of the niches where stone had been excavated were dug further and used for tombs. When compared with the gospel accounts of Jesus's death (ie, it took place on a rocky outcropping that looked like a skull and there were tombs nearby), the Holy Sepulchre makes a pretty strong case for itself. Just inside the entrance and to the right, the church is built around the disused rock that is believed to be the site of the crucifixion; it can be seen in some places through protective glass. Also right inside the entrance is a stone slab commemorating the anointing of Jesus after his death. Here is the mosaic that is directly behind the Stone of Unction:

Here is an example of the church integrating the rock; this is the Greek Chapel, which exposes the rock beneath. Pilgrims are able to touch the rock through a small hole underneath the altar and just in front of the icon:

Here is the tomb monument. There was a huge line waiting to get in to the monument:
And just when we thought we had seen everything, what do you think emerges around the corner from the tomb monument? Did anyone guess a tractor? That's right: mere steps away from the tomb of Jesus this guy was backing his tractor into this niche. I thought it was pretty awesome and made Emily take a picture of it. There just aren't enough tractors in holy sites these days!
The afternoon we spent at the Israel Museum, most of which is unfortunately closed for renovations. Fortunately, we still got to see the permanent exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls, where they also had on display the Aleppo Codex, which is a famous manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. Another highlight of the museum was this outdoor model of the city of Jerusalem during the time of King Herod the Great. It was great to walk around with the audio tour guide explaining different parts of the ancient city. Fortunately, I resisted the urge to show off my Godzilla impression.

And last but not least, Emily could not believe I have neglected to mention the other fine establishment across the street from the Albright, The Yummy Corner:

This should not be confused with the Yummy Restaurant, which is located behind the Albright. Both are indeed yummy.

Emily: Though I have not yet sampled any cuisine from the Yummy Restaurant, I can attest to the yumminess of the goods from the Yummy Corner.

A few other quick observations about our day today and Jerusalem in general, after 2 days of being in the city:

* Walking the Via Dolorosa was such a moving experience. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was also moving, but it was not at all what I expected. The church itself is very segmented - several different orders are responsible for the operation of the church, and you definitely get the idea that there is some territoriality going on. It was also strange to see people smiling and posing for pictures in front of the Stone of Unction or the Tomb of Jesus...something about it just seemed odd to me. It was amazing to see the old quarry stones (and to actually touch them!) and to at least have a sense of what the site was like at the time of Jesus. The tractor thing was so bizarre...I don't even know what to say about it!

* I was able to meet some of Andrew's friends at the Pontifical Biblical Institute this evening at Mass, which was great. It is a wonderful community, and I'm so glad that Andrew discovered it!

* I am ruined for life by the pita bread here. It is incredible.

* The weather here is really beautiful - warm and sunny during the day, and cool in the evenings. After Mass and dinner, we took a long walk to the German Colony and back. I was struck by how strange it was that we were walking down a street eating ice cream bars, with cars and buses whizzing by blasting techno music - and just across the street are the walls enclosing an ancient holy city. It is the wildest experience to have the ancient and the modern juxtaposed like that.

Tomorrow - Galilee!

Day One

Hi everyone - Emily here! We've had a busy first day...after breakfast at the Albright, we walked into the Old City and headed straight for the Western Wall and Archaeological Park, which is located near the Temple Mount and displays the ruins from the Roman and Byzantine periods. You can see the street that ran along the Western Wall of the temple, as well as some of the staircases leading into the temple area. Very cool!

We were making great time, so we decided to begin the first two stations of the Via Dolorosa, the path that Jesus walked on his way to his crucifixion. After visiting the Chapels of the Flagellation and the Condemnation, we headed to Ecce Homo, whose name is taken from Pontius Pilate's presentation of Jesus: "Behold the Man." Andrew, having met a few Daughters of Zion sisters, had a VIP tour lined up for us. Sr. Bernadette took us to the rooftop terrace of Ecce Homo, which afforded us a breathtaking view of the Old City. In this picture, the two domes of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are to the right of Andrew's head:

Here is a picture of me on the terrace - the tower behind me is part of the Antonia Fortress, which was built by Herod the Great and named for his patron, Mark Anthony:
After a delicious lunch of falafel sandwiches and a brief tour of Andrew's office at Hebrew Union College, we picked up our rental car -- a Daihatsu Sirion. Andrew said it was not the muscle car he was hoping for, but it gets the job done:
After picking up our wheels, we drove over to the Mount of Olives. It's amazing how having a rental car instantly stamps you as a tourist - we had lots of vendors seriously pestering us to buy maps, postcards, etc. At one point, a taxi pulled up to us (while we were in our car) and offered us a ride to Bethlehem. We said, "We already have a car, thanks!" He said, "I know. You leave your car here, and I'll take you to there for a good price." No thanks, buddy! Anyway...check out the view of the Old City from the Mount of Olives. The gold dome is the Dome of the Rock, which is the first major Muslim sanctuary ever built and the site where Muhammad ascended to heaven. It is also the third holiest Muslim site (Mecca and Medina being numbers 1 and 2):The following picture is especially for our niece, Dimney, who told me before I left, "I hope you see lots of camels in Jerusalem!"Our first two stops at the Mount of Olives were the Chapel of the Ascension and a tear-shaped church named Dominus Flevit ("The Lord Wept"), which is the site where Jesus was supposed to have wept over Jerusalem. This picture of the Dominus Flevit altar (facing out to the Old City) is one of our favorites so far:
Then it was on to the Garden of Gethsemane, the Church of All Nations, and the Tomb of the Virgin Mary. Here's a shot of Gethsemane:
All in all, a very busy and fun day of sightseeing!

A Special Visitor

Well, October 25 is finally here, and with it arrived Emily in Jerusalem! Her flight from Baltimore to Newark hit a small snag, and she ended up having to take a later flight out of Newark, which arrived in Tel Aviv at around 2:30 pm. I got to the airport to meet her around 2:00, and finally around 3:30, she emerged from the flood of other Newark passengers:

Naturally, I had the camera ready because I thought it would be good blog material -- and who doesn't like to have her photo taken after a ten-hour flight?

We were so happy to see each other! We've both been looking forward to this day for so long that it's hard to believe it's here! Well, Em said she wanted to say hello, so without further delay, here's Emily:

Hello, family and friends! I'm so happy to finally be here and to be with Andrew...it was a great reunion! Travel didn't go exactly as I anticipated, but I did get to know the ins and outs of Terminal C at Newark International Airport pretty well - and I got to watch a bit of the Red Sox game (go Sox!)

The flight to Tel Aviv was very smooth, and after 20 Questions at Passport Control and a moment of panic at baggage claim, my suitcase finally came through (Whew! Almost the last one on the belt) and I went through Customs to meet Andrew. I scanned the crowd, unable to find him at first, but then I saw the guy with the camera and I knew right away that I had found him. (There's nothing like having your picture taken after 22 straight hours of travel!)

We'll look forward to posting reports of our adventures...lots of love to you all!

Lunch with the Cardinal

Hebrew Union College, where I work three days a week, is located a block away from the Pontifical Biblical Institute here in Jerusalem. I've been going there for mass on Saturday nights because there is a pretty regular group of English-speaking Catholics who attend that mass. After a few weeks, I've gotten to know the house's guardian, an Indian Jesuit named Agnello.

This morning on my walk to work, I was almost at the HUC, when I bumped into Agnello, and he invited me to come to lunch at the PBI at 1 pm. Who am I to turn down a free meal?

When I got there, Agnello met me and introduced me to the five Jesuits who were joining us for lunch. The first was an older priest; Agnello said: "This is Cardinal Martini." In my mind, I did a double-take. Martini is a well-known Jesuit cardinal; in fact, after the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, there were some who hoped His Eminence might be elected as John Paul's successor. Although no official counts were released, it was reported that Martini received some votes during the conclave's first vote.

His attire at lunch was slightly less formal.

So there I was, sitting beside the one-time papabile Cardinal Martini during lunch. He was a friendly man and pleasant to speak with, even though he had just arrived the day before from Rome and was jetlagged. When Agnello introduced me, he told the Cardinal that I had attended a Jesuit school, and when I told him I had gone to Weston, he nodded approvingly.

Later Agnello told me that the Cardinal has lived at the PBI for the last few years, ever since his mandatory retirement at the age of 80.

Ulpan Fun

An ulpan is an intensive modern Hebrew course that usually meets a few days a week, and the most intensive courses last a few hours per class. My course, which I began last night, is not of this super intensive variety; my class is more like Ulpan Lite, meaning that my it meets twice a week for about three hours per class, and there's even a 25 minutes break during which complimentary Turkish coffee available. (Turkish coffee isn't as bad as I used to think.)

The course is run through Hebrew Union College, and since I'm affiliated with the college, I got a 25% discount on the tuition. Those of you who know how cheap I am will not be surprised to learn that this discount was a decisive factor in choosing the Hebrew Union ulpan.

I liked my teacher Leila right away. She began the class by going around the room, and each student had to say in Hebrew his name and where he's from. When I mentioned that I live in Baltimore, she said she had lived in Pikesville for a few years and had taught modern Hebrew at Johns Hopkins. It turns out she taught in my department, and we knew some professors in common.

There were about twenty students in the class, and on one side I sat next to a woman from New York named Judy, whose partner is a rabbi on sabbatical in Jerusalem. She wore several Lance Armstrong knock-off bracelets, and her backpack featured at least twenty buttons, one of which read: "If you're against gay marriage, don't marry one." I couldn't read the other ones, but I took this one as representative of the corpus. When someone commented on how many buttons she had, Judy said: "I'm a trouble maker." For some reason this struck me as funny, as if two dozen buttons were an edgy and provocative new way to express political ideas. Here in Israel folks grapple with the two-state solution, corrupt politics on both sides, constant security anxiety -- and now political buttons! Oh, the troubles!

Judy and I spoke for a bit (without any troublemaking, thank goodness). She was very nice, and I was glad she would be my conversation partner whenever we're told to "turn to your neighbor and discuss...." Then this Australian kid sat between us, which may have been a blessing in disguise because later in class, when we were talking about why we all like Jerusalem, Judy said in English: "The rocks, the stones are like gold. They speak to me." When you make no sense in Hebrew, it's all right because it's a foreign language and maybe you can't find the right words, but this was in English, and I'm pretty sure no one knew what she was talking about.

The other highlight of the evening occurred just after class had started. Leila had just asked us a question in Hebrew ("Are there any museums in Jerusalem?"), when the door opened and a 30-ish man spoke in Hebrew to her, then closed the door. Leila had just repeated the question when the door flew open, and a woman stormed in. But before she actually entered the room, she roared down the hall: "I told you I don't want to be here!" I thought: this should be interesting. Our new student plopped down at a desk, and Leila looked right at her and said: "Shalom. Do you know a museum in Jerusalem?" Under the circumstances I thought it was the best thing she could have said.

So between Judy's mystical non sequiturs and the late-comer's not-so-passive aggression, this should be an interesting course! The Hebrew should be fun, too.

Basilica of St. Stephen...

Or St. Étienne, if you'll excuse my French:

This church is located only a couple of blocks from the Albright and is run by the (ahem) religieux dominicains. It is most famous for housing the relics of Stephen, the first Christian martyr (Acts 7:55-60), which were transferred here at the time of the church's dedication in AD 439. That's him on the statue with the date AD 460 written below, which is the year of a second dedication ceremony.

The church has seen its share of changes: it was first destroyed in AD 614, after which the site was rebuilt as a leprosarium until AD 1099, when the Crusaders rebuilt it as a church. Then less than a hundred years later the Crusaders themselves destroyed the church rather than let it come under the control of the Muslim general Saladin.

At last the church as it now stands was rebuilt and dedicated in 1900. At that same time a school, the École Biblique, was added to the church by Le Père Marie-Joseph Lagrange:

Le Père didn't take no mess.

Nowadays the École Biblique has one of the best libraries in Jerusalem for biblical studies and theology, which is what took me there today, but the church by itself is still worth a visit.

New Coffee Mug

As many of you know, I am a pretty regular coffee drinker (two cups in the morning, one in the afternoon), and I have a habit of choosing a favorite coffee mug and using only that coffee mug for long stretches. All through high school and college, there was the Jimmy Buffett Margaritaville mug, and when I lived in Austria I used the same green and white checkered mug every morning. In Boston there was the little white mug with a thin Carolina blue stripe at the top.

My first year in Baltimore, while Emily was still in Boston, I used a St. John's High School mug, because that is where she was teaching. Most recently, I've been using (thanks to Kelly, Nicole and Jim) a ceramic version of the "We Are Happy to Serve You" coffee cup you're always seeing on Law & Order, or else (thanks again to Kelly) a mug from Cairo.

This tiresome litany is my way of introducing the mug that has become my morning regular and will forever be linked with my stay in Jerusalem:

I couldn't have imagined a better mug: the banner telling me to enjoy my day, the brand name that has no regard for the candy bar by the same name (which is sold all over Jerusalem). The bonus is that Kit Kat Koffee Mills is on my street, Salah ed-Din, which is also listed on the mug. It may be a trivial thing, but there's just something comforting about having a favorite mug.

Galilee Revisited

I returned to the Sea of Galilee this past weekend for another adventure, this time with some other fellows from the Albright. One of them, Chad, is an avid cyclist and planned for us to rent bikes and ride around the entire sea. This prospect was at once exciting and horrifying: it's 40 miles all the way around, but Chad assured us that it would be mostly flat. So after renting bicycles from Hooha Hostel (what a great name!) in nearby Kefar Tavor, which sits at the base of Mt. Tabor (supposedly the site of the Transfiguration), we mounted up.

Here's a picture of me (representing UNC's Fetzer Gym):

I was later told that few cyclists wear dark socks and sneakers when they ride, but if I'm going to bike 40 miles, I'm gonna do it my way. As you can also see, I couldn't really gets the helmet straps to cooperate. It rested so far on the back of my head, I thought of it as a helmet/yamulka, which seemed appropriate since it was Shabbat.

Here's the rest of the crew (from left: Chad, Erin and John):

Trust me: such smiles were few and far between for the rest of the ride. Fortunately, the beautiful scenery distracted me from my huffing, puffing and wheezing. Here's a few shots:

And here is the mighty Jordan. Even though this section looks all right, I've been told that the water is pretty nasty, even this close to its source. Obviously, no one informed the guys flyfishing downriver -- you can just make them out. I think I'd eat Baltimore lake trout before I'd eat any fish out of the Jordan, holy though it may be.

This last picture was taken about 2/3 through the ride. Don't be fooled: that smile is all for show.

But we made it. Altogether I think it took about 6 hrs. with lots of breaks and a pretty long stop for lunch. I think I rode a bike farther on Saturday than I have in the last ten years combined, and this ride has likely scratched my biking itch for another ten years. But it was a great time and a fun way to take in the Galilee region.