Days 9 and 10 and 11...am I that far behind???

Day 9 we visited Bet She'am...which has been around for a very very long time, longer before the time of Christ if I remember correctly because it was not built by King Herod.  I think the Egyptians were the ones who may have built it.  We then drove through Jericho, where most of the group had the opportunity to ride a camel and we saw a Sycamore Tree that is believed to be as old as the time of Christ, but it was not the one that Jesus called the little man out of (I have the song going through my head...but can't think of the man's name...total brain fart...it's right out of the Bible).  We continued to drive down (south) through Samaria into Judea.  After being in Nazareth/Galilee for two days and seeing how amazingly beautiful and how agriculturally rich it was, it really set up a contrast for Samaria and Judea, which are very rocky and desert landscapes.  We saw shepherds herding their small flocks of sheep and goats and I kept wondering what the heck those animals were eating because there was so little vegetation...and I mean there was no green in sight!

Day 10 was Sunday and we worshipped at the Lutheran Church close to our guesthouse here in the Old City of Jerusalem.  One of our fellow students, Jen Grangaard, who graduated this past May is spending this year with her husband on the Preaching Scholarship where they are to spend the year traveling different parts of the world (of their choice).  They spent the first five months in Africa and are now here in Israel/Palestine.  We were able to be there when Jen was preaching so that was nice.  It was a beautiful service with English speaking people from all over the world.  Most of the people there were a part of one peace organization or another or were there on behalf of their home churches doing some kind of work towards peace.  There is a larger sanctuary in the church building where the Arabic and German services are held.  After the service, Pr. Mark, who is an ELCA pastor from the U.S. on a 4 year call here in Jerusalem to the ELCJHL (ELC of Jordan and the Holy Land).  That afternoon we walked to the Western Wall, which Jewish people call the Wailing Wall.  It is the western wall of the Temple Mount, which Jews are not allowed inside (and haven't been for many years) because it is a Muslim area where the Al Aksa Mosque is located.  Men and women go to separate sections of the wall and pay homage to those who they mourn for.  They pray and read from Holy scripture and touch the wall and some even leave prayers on little pieces of paper and stick them in the cracks of the rocks that make up the wall.  The wall is part of the remains from King Solomon's time.  When I approached the wall to pray, it was really strange to think about how many generations of people before me had been right there praying for friends, loved ones, and others in need.  I guess we can say this for any church in America also, but at the Wailing Wall, which is a few thousand years old (plus) it puts it in a whole new perspective.  There was this sense of solidarity, not politically or socially, but a very human solidarity when it comes to pain and tears for people we hold close and that wall represents where many people have come together as people of God in need of love, grace, and forgiveness.

Day 11 began with an interesting visit with a man named Jeff...okay I haven't been real good about catching the names of all of the poeple we have listened to...I'm struggling a bit with the one-sidedness of much of what we are hearing...and it is not moderately one-sided, it is pretty much on the extreme end.  Jeff, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 or 2008 (whichever would have been the time before Obama got it) has an organization that stands against house demolitions.  The Israeli government has been demolishing Palestinian homes and rebuilding houses for Israelis.  Many Palestinians after the 1967 war, were relegated to refugee camps and theirs are the homes that being destroyed.  It is very difficult to see how the people in the refugee camps are living and it is difficult to hear about how difficult it is for Palestinians to move around the country because of the control that the Israeli government has on their lives in the way of checkpoints and ID cards.  It is also difficult to hear, again, that people want the US to fix the problem when they can't tell us specific ways that we can help.  I have come to the conclusion that the politics of it all have turned 'peace talk' into mere rhetoric and that politicians keep trying the same thing expecting a different result!  Real change needs to happen on a humanitarian level to empower the people who are being oppressed and to give them hope of a better future and courage to take up their own cause in peaceful ways.  It's extremely complicated here.  Jeff is a Jewish Israeli man who has taken up the cause of the Palestinians and has very little good to say about the Israeli government.

After lunch we visited Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocost Museum.  I have been to the Holocost Museum in Washington D.C., so I was fairly prepared for what this would be like.  This one did not seem as graphic to me but it made a more pronounced statement about the role that Christianity played in the rhetoric leading up to the Holocost and it gave a more profound image of the number of lives that were terminated as a result of the Holocost.  I'll share two of the images that really impacted me.  The first was a miniature sculpture of one of the gas chambers and on the left it showed the Jews in a building going down a set of stairs which went underground and then you could see them in one underground chamber taking off their clothes and in the next underground chamber they were struggling to stay alive and bodies were laying everywhere.  There were Nazi soldiers loading bodies onto a platform that was raised aboveground into a room where the bodies were put into the incinerator.  It is a horific image of how what we often see on the surface tells so very little of the whole story.  The second image is that of the Children's Memorial.  One and half million children were murdered during the Holocost.  The entryway to the Children's Memorial was very dark but when you get into the room where the names and ages are being read in Hebrew and then in English, there is just one candle burning and the image of the candle is reflected on mirrors to show many little lights burning like stars in the night sky.  As a Christian, I couldn't help but think of how that is so representative of the light of Christ that burns in all of us, but whether or not a person believes in Christ, just the image of all of those little flames being all that is left of those little lives is very moving.  I would imagine that most people who had memories of those children were also killed in the Holocost.  We can only imagine what kind of light they would have brought to the world.

Shalom,
Tara