Well after a super successful flight of sleeping for all but about 2 hours of it I am back in the USA! Currently we are on our bus heading back to Lehigh from Newark and I am really happy to be back! The trip was an amazing opportunity and I will post a final blog of compiled reflections from each of the days but right now I am just realy happy to be heading back to my personal mode of transportation, shower, BED, non-smelly EVERYTHING space and my life.
I will be more reflective and summative later-I think I am just really looking forward to a McDonald's breakfast bagel which will accompany the Starbucks I had at Newark nicely in my tummy!
Boker Tov to my American readers and Shalom to those we left in Israel!
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Qumran, Masada and the Dead Sea!!!
We finished up our last day in Israel by heading down to Qumran (there they found the Dead Sea Scrolls), taking a cable car up to the top of Masada and dipping in the Dead Sea with two amazing meals in there (no shock since I am pretty sure we ate our way through Israel!).
I think I enjoyed touring Qumran the most from the day, as I went to NYC to see teh Discovery Musuem's exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls in January. It was amazing to see actual portions of the scroll in the Israel Museum on the first day and then see where the scrolls were found on the last day. In NYC the exhibit did not have actual scrolls on display but I think the rest of the exhibit did an amazing job of setting up the history and showing movies of people that actually worked on the dig. I felt very connected to this part of the day because of the other learning I had done around this topic. I would highly suggest anyone interested in knowing more, who can't hop an El Al flight to Israel check out the NYC Discovery Museum. The thing that we learned more about in Israel than the NYC museum was the life of the people that copied the scrolls and how they lived and why they were there.
Masada was one of those miracles that you can't understand, sort of like the pyramids. How was a whole city (a small one but same scale) build ontop of a mountain plateau some 2000 years ago? I have no idea but it was amaizng to take the cable car to the top and see the detail with which a city was built. One of the coolest parts was looking at the model of how they engineered to collect the runoff water in canals that came down the mountain into gigantic cisterns to get them through an entire year. It was also crazy to think about how they didn't have soap back then so they would go through a series of bath chambers cool, warm, hot (that they created a raised floor, with furnace underneath and terra cotta pipes with holes coming up into the room)so that their pores would slowly open up and then they would scrap the dirty off with metal blades. I think it is also interesting to think about the dispute between ideologies that the Jewish people did not surrender but that they committed mass suicide rather than going into Roman slavery (the Josephus Flavius version) rather than the disputed version that suiced and killing your wives and children is so against the Jewish faith and believe system that they must have allowed the Romans to take them. The "Ripley's Believe It or Not" twist comes in with the fact that no Jewish bones or remains were found in archelogical excavation and it is believe that the store houses were full when the Romans got to the top. What does this all say? The debate rages on with certain scholars, but is seems widely accepted by many Jewish people that Masada marked a great stance taken that indicated they were never going to go back into slavery at the hands of the Romans so they took it upon themselves to control their destiny.
The Dead Sea....I was there at -422km below sea level!!!! The water was a bit slimey and the boyancy that people experienced was amazing to witness. The beach was rocky and the salt deposits were amazing and I managed to get a few salt rocks from the Dead Sea back in my suitcase! So on this trip I have had my feet in both the Mediterrean Sea and the Dead Sea...two bodies most people don't get to in a lifetime and I got to do both in the span of 10 days...this is pretty unbelievable!
We finished up with a dinner in a Muslim neighborhood of Jerusalem, Abu Gnosh-which is the oldest Mulism neighborhood in the city. The food was amazing and it was there that we gave Rueben(our driver) Barki(our guard) and Yael their formal gifts. Yael accompied us all the way to security and it was sad to leave her, many of us had tears in our eyes. She was amazing and I wish we could remain friends...Carolina and I are going to put together a weddign well wishes and thank you package later this week and send it off to her....love to Yael (Ani Ohebet Otach-that means I love you in Hebrew just for Yael! and that will be my last Hebrew word of the day!)
From there we headed to the airport and after a quick 20 minute delay (to repair a toilet on the plane) we were off and heading back to Newark!
So what was the change-I forgot to add this in the original post so here it is now as I do my overall trip reflection! Unexplainable things happen everywhere and every day (like ancient biblical writing being sold in the NY times, like a huge city being built atop a giant plateau with now modern equipment, people choose to die at their own hands rather than facing an fate that seems worse than death, and a place that is considered dead can produce valuable exports and products) who are we to make judgements on those things. They occurred for a reason and not everything needs to be explained by scientific fact or written history-sometimes things just occur as part of a grander plan for reasons unable to be understood or interpreted in the present time. I think I need to be more open to this idea and accepting that for me God is the larger force guiding this plan and that as long as I am moving in his path I am doing what I should be.
I think I enjoyed touring Qumran the most from the day, as I went to NYC to see teh Discovery Musuem's exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls in January. It was amazing to see actual portions of the scroll in the Israel Museum on the first day and then see where the scrolls were found on the last day. In NYC the exhibit did not have actual scrolls on display but I think the rest of the exhibit did an amazing job of setting up the history and showing movies of people that actually worked on the dig. I felt very connected to this part of the day because of the other learning I had done around this topic. I would highly suggest anyone interested in knowing more, who can't hop an El Al flight to Israel check out the NYC Discovery Museum. The thing that we learned more about in Israel than the NYC museum was the life of the people that copied the scrolls and how they lived and why they were there.
Masada was one of those miracles that you can't understand, sort of like the pyramids. How was a whole city (a small one but same scale) build ontop of a mountain plateau some 2000 years ago? I have no idea but it was amaizng to take the cable car to the top and see the detail with which a city was built. One of the coolest parts was looking at the model of how they engineered to collect the runoff water in canals that came down the mountain into gigantic cisterns to get them through an entire year. It was also crazy to think about how they didn't have soap back then so they would go through a series of bath chambers cool, warm, hot (that they created a raised floor, with furnace underneath and terra cotta pipes with holes coming up into the room)so that their pores would slowly open up and then they would scrap the dirty off with metal blades. I think it is also interesting to think about the dispute between ideologies that the Jewish people did not surrender but that they committed mass suicide rather than going into Roman slavery (the Josephus Flavius version) rather than the disputed version that suiced and killing your wives and children is so against the Jewish faith and believe system that they must have allowed the Romans to take them. The "Ripley's Believe It or Not" twist comes in with the fact that no Jewish bones or remains were found in archelogical excavation and it is believe that the store houses were full when the Romans got to the top. What does this all say? The debate rages on with certain scholars, but is seems widely accepted by many Jewish people that Masada marked a great stance taken that indicated they were never going to go back into slavery at the hands of the Romans so they took it upon themselves to control their destiny.
The Dead Sea....I was there at -422km below sea level!!!! The water was a bit slimey and the boyancy that people experienced was amazing to witness. The beach was rocky and the salt deposits were amazing and I managed to get a few salt rocks from the Dead Sea back in my suitcase! So on this trip I have had my feet in both the Mediterrean Sea and the Dead Sea...two bodies most people don't get to in a lifetime and I got to do both in the span of 10 days...this is pretty unbelievable!
We finished up with a dinner in a Muslim neighborhood of Jerusalem, Abu Gnosh-which is the oldest Mulism neighborhood in the city. The food was amazing and it was there that we gave Rueben(our driver) Barki(our guard) and Yael their formal gifts. Yael accompied us all the way to security and it was sad to leave her, many of us had tears in our eyes. She was amazing and I wish we could remain friends...Carolina and I are going to put together a weddign well wishes and thank you package later this week and send it off to her....love to Yael (Ani Ohebet Otach-that means I love you in Hebrew just for Yael! and that will be my last Hebrew word of the day!)
From there we headed to the airport and after a quick 20 minute delay (to repair a toilet on the plane) we were off and heading back to Newark!
So what was the change-I forgot to add this in the original post so here it is now as I do my overall trip reflection! Unexplainable things happen everywhere and every day (like ancient biblical writing being sold in the NY times, like a huge city being built atop a giant plateau with now modern equipment, people choose to die at their own hands rather than facing an fate that seems worse than death, and a place that is considered dead can produce valuable exports and products) who are we to make judgements on those things. They occurred for a reason and not everything needs to be explained by scientific fact or written history-sometimes things just occur as part of a grander plan for reasons unable to be understood or interpreted in the present time. I think I need to be more open to this idea and accepting that for me God is the larger force guiding this plan and that as long as I am moving in his path I am doing what I should be.
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