Airport Tel Aviv

I’ve been to Israel in person.  My wife and I landed at the Tel Aviv Airport, the second largest city in Israel, even though you wouldn’t know Jerusalem was largest.  Tel Aviv has skyscrapers and to an American it looks like a major city.  Jerusalem doesn’t.  It looks like nothing you’ve ever seen except for Jerusalem, one of a kind.  Tel Aviv is in the middle of the country and on the coast.  It is near Jaffa, which is Joppa, which you might remember from Jonah.  A little further North is Caesarea, built by Herod as the first full fledged port for Romans to arrive in Israel.

Even though it wasn’t as busy when my wife and I went, we stood in a very, very long line to get through customs.  Even expecting it some, this necessary extra layer of security to guarantee the safety of Israel and tourists, surprised in its lengthiness.  When I turned and looked at the line behind and in front of me, people came from all over the world.  An American might think, I did, that Americans hold a vast majority of the interest for God’s promised land.

Before tourists started flying into Israel on Holy Land trips, for centuries convoys of Europeans took pilgrimages there.  When Moslems hindered them, they fought crusades for the freedom to continue.  The United States media doesn’t cover the interest.  The rest of the world claims Israel too, even the Chinese, which made up a large portion of the line in which we waited.

Ben-Gurion

At the front of the line down a long wide welcome corridor in the Ben Gurion airport is an oversized replica of a Torah scroll.  Jewish travelers returning to their home country would reach and touch this symbol like Jews might do on the mezuzah as they arrived at the doorway of their own homes.  The name Ben Gurion itself hearkens to biblical names in the Old Testament.

“Ben” is a masculine Hebrew noun in the Old Testament meaning “son,” which occurs thousands of times.  It shows how important family is in the Bible.  It also reminds us of the importance of God as our Father and we as His sons.  The term “Son of Man” is ben Adam in the Hebrew, just as an example of the commonality of Ben, as in Benjamin and David Ben-Gurion, the primary national founder of the State of Israel and its first Prime Minister.  The Hebrew “Gurion” means “young lion” in English.

Train to Jerusalem

From customs, my wife Bridget and I boarded a train that travels with several stops from the airport to Jerusalem.  Wilhelm II, the German Kaiser, landed in the Jaffa port by ship on October 28, 1898 and himself took the train to Jerusalem with his wife, Augusta Victoria, the daughter of England’s Queen Victoria.  The Kaiser entered the city on horse back through two specially made ceremonial arches, one a gift of the Ottoman Empire.  He came to dedicate the German Lutheran church building, the Church of the Redeemer, on Reformation Day, 1898. At the dedication, Wilhelm said:

From Jerusalem came the light in splendor from which the German nation became great and glorious; and what the Germanic peoples have become, they became under the banner of the cross, the emblem of self-sacrificing charity.

It might seem strange, considering Hitler and World War 2, but during his visit to the Ottoman Empire in 1898, Wilhelm met with Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism. This meeting was significant as it was the first public acknowledgment of Herzl as the leader of the Zionist movement by a major European power.  Even though Wilhelm II did not offer substantial support for Herzl’s project, the meeting lent some political legitimacy to Herzl and Zionism.

Hotel

Bridget and I disembarked in Jerusalem at the closest station to Apartique, a self serve airbnb style lodging, which was in walking distance to both the Jaffa Gate and the King David Hotel.  Instead of walking to Apartique, we caught a taxi, driven by an Arab.  This is very common in Jerusalem.  When we shortly arrived, I handed him a credit card and he only took cash.  I had none.  It was close to midnight.  My wife got out at the hotel and he drove me to three different ATMs to pay my fare, failing at getting any cash at any of them.  I took his business card with hopes of paying him later and never saw him again.

King David Hotel

The plan for my wife and I as we collapsed in bed was to arise in about two and half hours to catch a bus very early the next morning at the King David Hotel to Masada for a sunrise hike up the snake path to the top.  We walked from our hotel to the King David and few other people already had arrived in the darkness of Jerusalem.  My wife and I struck a conversation with a couple from New Jersey.

The thirty-something couple wasn’t married and she was an American Jew with interest in religion.  They had been in Israel for a week and she wanted to talk mainly about the Mehane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem, where they visited three times.  We didn’t know yet what she was talking about, but we later would.  A large bus already sat on the street David Hamelekh in front of the hotel and another smaller one arrived.  A young female guide, named Yael, stepped out and we approached to see if this was our bus.  It was.

Maybe Yael sounds familiar, but with a different spelling, Jael, the heroine of the Battle of Mount Tabor in Judges chapter four and five.  Yael nailed Sisera with a tent peg through his skull (Judges 4:17-21).  It is today one of the most common names for an Israeli female.

Bus to Masada

Upon embarking the bus, the driver went South down from Jerusalem through Hebron.  It was quite a desolate route through the darkness and my wife and I drifted off until we stopped after an hour for gas in a very remote location.  The station was a destitute place with a rough old gas pump and a hardscrabble convenience store.  The items were regional, nothing you would see in the United States.  The tour and station owners seemed in cahoots as if they operated with  their own quid pro quo.  This underlies commerce all over Israel, a form of bartering.

All of the riders and us boarded the bus again and continued our journey through the darkness until we finally arrived at Masada still in the darkness.  We drove into the Masada National Park in front of that impressive geological formation.  Very few other busses also arrived and we all began our walk upward.

More to Come