A Few of My Favorite Things (Set to Israeli Wedding Music)

The world-weary traveler (more like world cuisine-stuffed traveler) has returned home and is ready to offer up thoughts on Israel and New Jersey packed in brown paper packages tied up with string.*

I cried thrice in Israel.

My first tears occurred at the museum that houses the Dead Sea Scrolls (The Israel Museum in Jerusalem). Men belonging to a Jewish sect called the Essenes lived with their families in the first century B.C. around caves, which we call Qumran. The men would leave their families to enter into these caves and copy what we refer to as the Old Testament. These scrolls were discovered accidentally in 1947 by a shepherd and contain sections from every book of the Bible except Esther and Nehemiah, including the oldest copy of Isaiah (known as the Isaiah scroll), a scroll that is complete of the whole book.

Why would this excite me, you may ask.

Beside the fact that Israel brought out my inner nerd (yes, I know), seeing the different handwritings, some tall, others small and neat, still others slanted, reminded me that everyday men sat down and wrote out these stories, both these copies and the originals. They sat with ink and parchment to attest to God's work in their lives. These particular copies have been preserved over centuries, a testimony to God's preservation work of the Scriptures, not just in hard copy (such as these), but through the work of the Holy Spirit in the universal Church. Scriptures are alive and active. This work does not negate personality but draws on it, employs it, gives it meaning. God works primarily through humans, unique, beautiful, and weird.

The Caves at Qumran: where shepherds accidentally found the Dead Sea Scrolls

The second time I cried, our tour guide, Karl, had been telling us two stories of Holocaust survivors, one from Romania, one from Hungary. They were the stories of his parents. He told us these stories at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial center, in the Garden of the Righteous, a garden that remembers the goyim, or Gentiles, who put their careers, lives, and families at risk to save Jews. 

Yad Vashem is Hebrew for hand and name, which are two ways of remembering--the body and the name. The architecture of the place symbolizes the deterioration of the Jews as a people group before the Holocaust, the darkness of the Holocaust, the open light at the end, and the strength of the Jews now. My favorite story shows the hope and healing Yad Vashem offers. Yad Vashem keeps archives of the names and stories of those who suffered in concentration camps. One woman put her name into the system to find that it had already been entered. By her sister. From whom the woman had been separated since the Holocaust. Each had assumed the other had died. Turned out the sisters lived close to one another in Israel. They were reunited after fifty years.

Whether you visit Israel for its archaeology, as a pilgrim, or for its food, you must visit Yad Vashem. It is a center not for hate but for healing, to which its architecture attests. I'd recommend going without a tour guide and allowing yourself to take your own pace. (One of the journalist with whom I traveled wrote a piece about Yad Vashem, which I recommend. You can read it here.)

My third set of tears came at our goodbyes.

Nineteen writers traveled together for a week, spending almost every waking second together (except when we parted ways to update Facebook, where we often ran into each other), communing together at meals, dancing together, and sharing an experience that took us all by surprise. I did not expect to find friends in Israel. What can happen in a week? Even now, I can't articulate what happened, but somewhere between the laughter, the awe, and yes, the sarcasm, on 4000-year-old remains, friendships emerged. I must have known them for decades, I think. If I believed in reincarnation, I would've argued we came from the same family a few centuries ago. I'll offer the only explanation I have: God.

It hurts to be separate from them. In the new earth, I'll search them out, and we'll dance together again (perhaps on the Sea of Galilee sans boat).

Dancing on the Sea of Galilee: photo by Peter Fleck

*Fine print: You'll find a more detailed article about the setting of Israel in the story of the Bible upcoming at Biblical Studies Foundation, aka bible.org.