Sunday January 2, 2011

This day began very early, with a 7 AM departure. We found out at breakfast that the Badgers had lost a very exciting Rose Bowl game in a 21-19 defeat, but still we knew that our town was proud of the home team.

Our first stop today was the plaza in front of the Western Wall of the ancient Jerusalem Temple, and Miri described the importance of the site and where it is today with the separation of the sexes, and the prohibition of the Orthodox of women’s minyans. We took time to approach the Wall, some placing notes in the wall’s huge Herodian stones, others criticizing the rule of the Orthodox in the place.

Then we entered the tunnels that were excavated along the western face of the Temple Precinct that extend in a northerly direction from the current Western Wall plaza. Each year more and more levels of the complex of staircases and passageways are uncovered by the archaeologists, and in each successive visit, we see that the wall of the Temple now extends to the Maccabean street level.

One facet of the tunnel is that it passes a place in the Wall that is directly west from the supposed site of the Holy of Holies, and now both women and men have found places to pray within the tunnel and along its pathway. The shrines are numerous, and the religious fervor is palpable.

The tunnels extend into the Muslim quarter of the Old City, and from our exit point, we walked through the Muslim, then Jewish, then Christian quarters up to the Jaffa Gate of the Old City.

We caught our bus to the newly refurbished Israel Museum (it was closed for a three-year renovation project, and just recently re-opened). We viewed a model of the city of Jerusalem in Second Temple times, with its Temple, residences of the Priests, and palace. We also viewed as a group the Shrine of the Book, the current location of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. (Others are kept in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem.)

We then took a few hours to guide ourselves through the museum, with its emphases on modern art and artists, archaeology of the land of Israel, and its historical and anthropological exhibits.

After lunch and purchasing at the museum shop, we traveled the short distance to the Knesset building. (The government does not permit cameras to be brought into the Knesset today, so we have no photos of it.) The Knesset is the seat of the Israeli government, and as a group we toured its reception hall (with large tapestries by Marc Chagall) and floor and wall mosaics also by Chagall, and also had the chance to sit in the gallery of the Plenum Hall where the Knesset members sit and deliberate the laws and policy.

Our final stop today was at the headquarters of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, and we had a conversation with Gil’ad Kariv, that organization’s executive director. He stressed to us the need for both democracy and religious values in Israel, and in close ties between the Israeli and North American Jewish communities. After a question by a group member, he said that he believed that the word “Diaspora” had outlived its usefulness, and that there needs to be a people-wide re-evaluation of the relationship between these two great Jewish bodies in today’s world Jewish community.

We then walked the few blocks back to the hotel, taking in – on the way – the campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s Jerusalem campus, built in 1964 on no-man’s land on the Israeli-Jordanian border, and today sits on one of the most expensive and desired places in the city.

We ended our day at about 4:30, and there’s more tomorrow. Lailah tov - Hebrew for "good night!"