Bone Thugs-N-Harmony

Hello everyone! Welcome to Day Five of the Israel blog. I can’t believe we are almost halfway through the trip - time has been flying and Yehuda is always keeping us moving fast so we can see all of the amazing sites Israel has to offer.

In fact, the only moment so far I have really felt time standing still was when I was looking like a fool crouching over my bathtub attempting to wring soapy water out of dri-fit t-shirts wondering how in the world would I have survived prior to the invention of the washing machine. I don’t think very well.

Anyways, enough about my lack of basic and/or foundational human being skills. I want to tell you all about what we did today and why I feel like every day seems to get better and better on this trip.

Bones

We started off the morning at Tel Dan, a site in Northern Israel (near the Golan Heights) that has been around for a LONG time (moving forward, I’m going to all caps “long” if it was like, a long, long time ago and I can’t remember the date because we have talked about so many dates ranging from 10,000 BC to yesterday.) So old that this site had a wall considered the oldest wall in the world and I am pretty sure the city was around at the time of Abraham.

This site had beautiful, lush greenery, babbling brooks (or bubbling because I don’t want to be rude. Maybe the brooks DID have something important to say and just wanted to be heard) and a cool gate. (Should I have ended on gate? I feel like that may have been anti-climatic but trust me, Yehuda was talking about this gate like it was a big deal).

Towards the end of this site, we got to see one of the two temples built in Northern Israel after Israel divided into two Kingdoms - Israel in the North and Judah and the South (around 930 BCE - think post-Dave, post-Solomon, pre-Assyrians).

Here Terry talked to us about intersection of politics, archeology and the truth found in the Bible. Politically, this temple was created to consolidate power in the North. He described to us what would go on at this temple - priests would take the animal sacrifices given by the people and offer them up in the Holy of Holies (for those of you who may not know what this means, it is exactly as it sounds - the holiest of holy parts of the temple, this is a place only the priest could go to offer sacrifices to God). This is all described in the Bible in places like Leviticus under the job description for Priest:

Must have at least 15 years of experience of being better and/or smarter than everyone else, must be able to carry up to 25 lbs (of dead animal remains) and skills include following Jewish law and properly disposing of burnt, unclean animal bones.

What was so neat about this temple at Tel Dan was old animal bones were actually found during recent archeological excavations. The temple obviously was discovered and even a couple shovels were found along the way. This means that the stories we read about in the Bible are being backed up by real archeological evidence. While as Christians, we walk in faith to believe the Bible as truth, it is always amazing to see what we believe being confirmed by real life evidence and events.

Thugs-

Later in the day, we were able to go up into the Golan Heights in Northern Israel and visit Mount Bental. This is a mountain peak with a panoramic view of where Israel crosses borders with Syria and Lebanon. Basically my blog friends, we were a stone’s throw away (was that right, I’ve never been good with idioms?) from everything crazy that is currently going on in the Middle East.

During this portion of the trip, Yehuda did an amazing job telling us about the history of Israel in recent times, including the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. To give you the short, it’s almost my bedtime so I need to hurry this blog post along description, these were both territorial wars fought as the Arabs tried to invade Israel, but Israel was able to hold its ground and keep the land. Pretty amazing feat for this nation that time and time again finds itself as the underdog, but is able to stay protected because God is on its side.

Being up there in the mountains knowing that Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and ISIS were all so close to each other, so close to Israel and so close to us - it was a surreal and kind of crazy, kind of freaky experience.

N-Harmony

We ended the day at Katzrin, which was a historical replica of a Jewish city from the time of the Roman Empire. We had this hilarious, spunky Jewish woman show us an olive press and teach us how to make pita.

LUCY CREEPING ALERT: Okay, I hope they are okay with this, but I have to tell you the sweetest thing I saw today. While we were making pita, everyone basically took the dough and made oblong circles. While Tom made a fun top hat shape and I saw a couple other outside-the-box ideas, most kept things circular. Except for Jay - he made his wife a pita in the shape of a heart. I just thought it was the cutest thing - he took a blank canvas where most followed the pita protocol and instead turned it into a demonstration of love for his wife! It’s the little things people, it’s the little things.

Later, we visited what was supposed to be an ancient Jewish house. Here we crammed all 44 of us into a small stone room and Terry spoke about the story in Mark 2 where a group of friends lowered their paralyzed friend through a roof to be healed by Jesus. Terry talked to us about these friends and their sacrificial love - and how they had to have been pretty young men to carry out such a crazy scheme. But Jesus loved their love and healed the paralyzed man. Terry asked us to think - do we have a friend like that and are we a friend like that?

What was so neat about this experience, was that so many people in our group began opening up about moments in their lives where people offered them sacrificial love and the exact care they needed. There was something about being crammed in there together, sharing stories of God working in each other’s lives through others that felt deeply personal and intimate. I am pretty sure it was one of the first times our collective group opened up together - and you know how good moments like those can be. I think the Jewish people from the Roman times and those 12 people who are in love with tiny houses today have a good idea going - sometimes when we are physically brought closer, we can spiritually be closer too.