Trip to Israel

We returned to Cairo, from our Christmas trip to Israel. It was a trip full of insight into the interaction of religion, politics, geography, culture and the simple vagarities of life all mixed together. This picture is probably the most photographed in all of Jerusalem. It shows the Temple Mount, a mosque with a golden dome, along with the many Christian churches that dot the Jerusalem landscape.

The curent day Mosque is built on the site of an ancient Jewish Temple. This Temple was the holiest of holy places for the Jewish people because it housed the Arc of the Covenant--the tablets given to Moses containing the word of God. The Temple was destroyed by the Romans and the tablets scattered or destroyed--no one knows what became of them. They are lost. All that remains of the Temple is the foundation--the famous west wall, affectionately called the Wailing Wall. It now is the a most holy place and designated as a synagogue with its own rabbi. At all hours of day and night people come to the wall to pray.

The most famous church is probably the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the site of the Cruxification. It is at one end of the Via Dolarosa, which was the road Christ walked from his imprisionment to his cruxification. Along this street and in the church are the 14 Stations-of-the-Cross; those places where something significant occurred along the way.

More about our trip in future posts.