My Journey in Israel part 3 - museum day cont.

So to begin where I left off, after Yad Vashem we went to lunch. Nothing too exciting about that. And then after lunch we were off to the Israel Museum. We had been told all day about a miniature there of what the "Old City" looked like at the time of Christ. Now to go back a little bit, at the airport there is also a miniature of the Old City. It's about 1 m squared and includes all the important little things. So, I was expecting something similar to that. Um, no, that is not exactly what the "miniature" was like. As you can see, this is a little bigger and more involved than that. To quote one of the men in my group, "This is one heck of a lego set!" Take a look!


The Temple Mount





The NW corner of the Old City ->















The South end of the city - mostly residential






The North Gate Christ carried the cross through
->










The Southern end of the temple mount where they are excavating now.




















Amazing, isn't it? And the real thing is simply breath-taking. We spent several minutes walking around while our guide pointed out all of the important sites, including where we think certain events took place. Some things we know exactly where they were, but some things are "tradition tells us . . ." I'll get more into that later as we go through different sites.

After we saw this amazing miniature we were taken inside to see the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yea, you read right. I've seen them! Well, I've seen some of them. I could tell you what I remember of the story of the scrolls, but I think you would be better to look it up on Wikipedia. I'm bound to have forgotten details and so would not do the story justice. But the basic story is that a group of Jews left the city and set up a type of scholarly school in the caves around the dead sea. The scrolls are their "textbooks," you might say. But, like all the other groups throughout history in that part of the world, eventually they were all taken captive and lead out of the country, leaving these scrolls, all contained in ceramic jars, in the caves where they went unnoticed for 1500 years. Then one day a shephard going after his lost sheep threw a rock into a cave and broke a jar. He couldn't read but knew the leather it was written on was valuable, so he took it to a leather worker in Bethlehem and sold it. That leather worker could see it was important and took it to someone, who in turn sold it to someone, and anyway, after being sold several more time, was put on the black market in the states. Someone read about the sale in the newspaper and started collecting and translating them. Now we have them preserved, as best we can. One of the difficulties with the keeping everything in jars, is that the jars were on wooden shelves, and they were heavy. Over the years several of the shelves broke, dropping the jars and then, of course, the jars broke. Many of the scrolls are in pieces and they are attempting to reconstruct them like a puzzle. Others have sections that have just deteriorated over time. Others were in pretty good condition and fairly easy to read. But looking at them is simply amazing. It really is a piece of history.

After those amazing sights, we boarded our bus again and headed 2 hours to Caesarea, on the coast. Now, this has nothing to do with the event, but I just want to say, Caesarea is HOT AND HUMID!!! When the sun went down I thought, oh, good, it will cool off. Nope. HOT, HOT, HOT! Ok, back to the original story.

We arrived and the bus driver took us real quick by some of the Roman ruins in the area. There is an aqueduct there as well as Herod's Palace. Neat, but we weren't able to walk around so no pictures. He then parked the bus and we were off to the event. I grabbed a pictures of some of the tour buses that were there, but as we came out, I realized what you see is only a small portion of the row of buses that ended up parked there.

And although the event did not procure all of the tour buses in Jerusalem, the estimate was about 85-90%. Amazing.

















The theatre is quite large. I think someone told me it seats about 2000 people, not including the floor. The theatre is not the original, but some of the original foundation still lies there. It is made exclusively from the same white limestone that all other buildings are made of there (and that is no exaggeration because there is a law that all buildings must be made of the white, Israeli Limestone). We were pleasantly surprised, then, when we went through the entrance and found that Glenn has purchased pads and water for all of us to use. They gave me 2 pads and I was grateful because that limestone is HARD! And I was very grateful for the water, considering how HOT it was.


The even itself was very uplifting. Of course I don't remember everything that was said, but I did want to share what stuck out to me.

One of the themes reiterated over and over again was the importance to love "the other." Who is the other? It is anyone different than us. Their religion may be different, or their culture, their skin color, or their language. Whatever sets them apart as being different from us. But in loving the other, we can not put people in a group. It is when people are grouped together that hating becomes easy. It is easy to group all Muslims together, and blame them for terrorism, for example. It is much harder to look at each person individually and judge them on their character. Instead, when we look at each person individually, we end up saying, not all Jews are __________. Not all Muslims are ________. Not all black people are ____________. Not all white people are _______________. Get the idea? God judges us, not as a whole, but as an individual, and that is how we must judge each other. And in doing so, we will love each other and be our brother's keeper. It is the responsibility for each of us to be our brother's keeper in whatever capacity we can. Here are 2 more pictures of the event.



I believe this is Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. An amazing man with an amazing message. If you have time I suggest you go to YouTube and look up his address (or rather, I believe it was a blessing, not sure, they kind of run together).













Good 'Ol Glennie!



After the event we boarded our buses and headed home again. It was after midnight before we made it to the hotel and the next morning started early. I'll write more about that later.