Dome of the Rock

Sent as we stand here

Can we move this shiny thing out of the picture?

The Wailing Wall. And the other thing.

The Dead Sea

We did the obligatory swim in the Dead Sea, and it was all it is said to be. While feathers can be adversely affected by all the minerals, we enjoyed floating effortlessly, feet, head and arms sticking out of the briny brew.

To salt things up even more, a Caribbean Christian lady (pictured) got rather excited talking to an African American couple in our group and started dancing and clapping and speaking in tongues with great gusto and volume, much to the interest of the ethnically and religiously diverse folks relaxing close by.

Then it was back to Jerusalem, an almost non-stop ascent from the lowest point on earth (1200 feet below sea level) to around 2700 feet above.

On the Boat

Undoubtedly the boat ride will always be a highlight for the kosher kiwi, pictured here basking in the warm sun and cool breeze on this most sacred of all lakes.

Seriously, I found it to be profoundly moving. It just makes the gospel accounts and Jesus so much more three-dimensional. He's not just words on a page, even a nice crispy page in a volume that has "Holy" in the title. He's not just a character in a story, even though he's an amazing character in an astonishing story. He was here. Right here. And right there. And he walked on stuff that physics tells us shouldn't be walked on. And he created stuff that didn't exist a millisecond before. And he said to the 5000, "I hope you like fish cause falaffel isn't on the menu for many years yet."

So why am I crying, except that Jesus, just up the hill from here, said "blessed are the pure in spirit for they shall see God..." Because they did. Right in front of them. Peter's great realization was that he was qualitatively different from Jesus. "Depart from me lord, for I am a sinful man. I'm not and will never be properly poor in spirit, and yet you want to befriend me?" I guess that same greatest discovery in my own life hit me again but in an entirely different way so that I'm not sure I can, or even want to, try to translate it into words. Some things are meant to be just experienced, not elucidated. I hope this isn't the onset of the Jerusalem Syndrome.

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