It is midnight, and the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem are aglow against the backdrop of dark rainclouds, a reminder of the spotlight that has for millennia illumined this city. As I sit to jot down a few lines of reflection, I glance out the window at these walls, and at the jumble of ancient ruins and warring passions that is Jerusalem, and am torn: should I write about the last week of my life, which has seen three continents and not a few fiascoes, or about the way this mysterious city has already gripped me, promising to challenge and redefine what I mean by words like human, me, God, life, and love? Which way should I go with this?
I suppose I'll go with the past week's recap, for a couple reasons. First, thoughts on big issues don't just happen; they take time. Maybe in two months I can write about the word "human," but not yet. And second, I board a bus in a few hours for Jericho where I'll spend the day hiking wadis and exploring monasteries, and I should get a few hours sleep before that.
7 days ago I boarded a red eye flight from Boston, Mass to London. As luck would have it, the three seats next to me were all empty, so I stretched my 5'6" frame to its full length, and slept soundly until touchdown at Heathrow. A good friend of mind from Seattle, Sam Ade, is doing a semester abroad at Oxford, so he and I met up at Big Ben first thing in the morning and blitzed London in a day. We visited Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, the London Eye, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, the Winston Churchill Museum (the underground bunker of the British war council preserved in state from 1945), Trafalgar Square, and #10 Downing. The highlight, though, was the British Museum, which is considered one of the premier history museums in the world and a place I have long wanted to visit. There we saw the Rosetta Stone (the artifact discovered by Napoleon's army that unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphics), the Cyrus Cylinder (the 5th century BC imperial edict that allowed the Jews to return from Babylonia to Palestine, considered the first human rights document in history), the Gilgamesh Epic (which, among other biblical parallels, contains the story of a Noah figure who survives a worldwide flood and saves the animal kingdom by building an ark), the Shalmanassar Obelisk (showing King Jehu of Israel paying homage to the king of Babylon, 2 Kings 9-10), along with many other artifacts too numerous to mention. Seriously, this place is like an ancient treasure chest.
It was a cold night in London with a full moon, and after Sam and I conducted our own photo shoot on Westminster Bridge (we was looking fine!), we had an Italian dinner at a little place on the east end, right across from St. Paul's Cathedral. We lingered until they closed, then headed back to our hostel on the west end, north of Hyde Park. Around 3 am we finally made it to bed.
At 5 am I woke up to snow flurries, checked out of my hostel, and went straight for the tube station. And at this point, I'd like to make a very long and emotionally exhausting story into a very short and triumphant one. In a nutshell, this is what happened between the hours of 5 am and 9 am: the London underground was having an unannounced maintenance day, all trains down. This meant that I got to the airport for my international flight a full hour later than I planned. And once I got to the airport British Airways victimized me. If you didn't know this, BA is like the McDonald's of the sky: a massive impersonal corporation that has great billboards, catchy jingles, and deplorable customer service. Without going into the details, which would just bore you and make me grit my teeth and cuss, I only made my flight to Israel due to an act of God, the pity of a random airport employee, and an olympic-qualifying sprint across the international terminal of Heathrow. You know, I may be a theology nerd, but it turns out that I'm also a pretty danged fast white guy.
I arrived in Israel on Saturday afternoon, and hit the ground like I left it: running. New school, new language, new city, new roommate, new classes, new campus, new bike, new church. But I'm used to it: in the past 12 years I have been a student at 13 different schools. Being the new guy is nothing new for me. And here's all I have to say about my newest digs: I LOVE IT! The school I am at is incredible. Probably the second oldest building outside the old city walls (not counting, of course, ancient religious shrines), Jerusalem University College is situated on the heights of Mount Zion. The only reason that the school has the property it does is that the papers for the lease were signed with the British in 1966, a year before the Six Days War, when Jerusalem was a no man's land on the Jordanian side of the border. In the 1948 War of Independence the Israelis captured JUC and made it the base of their forward position. In characteristic Jewish chutzpah, they drilled one end of a 1" steel cable into what is now the dorm room directly above mine, and the other end they drilled into a building on the other side of the Hinnom Valley. In the daytime the Jews would lower this steel cable into the valley floor and hide it in the weeds, but on dark cloudy nights they would raise it hundreds of feet above the valley floor and with steel cranks cable across soldiers, munitions, and supplies. The cable is still here: one end is in the dorm room, and the other end is housed in a National Historic Site Museum.
But enough about the history of the place (I didn't even mention that it is built on a Maccabbean tower that Herod later refurbished)....today the campus is lovely. In the back, overlooking the Hinnom and Kidron Valleys all the way to Bethlehem and beyond into the wilderness, there is a large garden area of probably two acres. Vine arbors cover gravel walking paths, and lounge chairs in shady places are good places to read or write or just listen to the birds. I have applied for a student worker position in the garden - at $4.50 an hour I will have a portion of the garden that for five hours a week is mine to tend. A fire pit has been dug out in one corner of the garden, and on my second night here me and several of the students had a big bonfire. It was one of those "slap me I'm in Israel right now" moments.
I have five classes this semester: Classical Islamic Thought and Modern Middle East, Jewish Thought and Practice, The History of the Church in the East, Physical Settings of the Bible, Theology of the Pentateuch, and I'm going to audit Historical and Social Settings of Modern Israel. I'm also looking to find a Modern Hebrew Ulpan, which would teach me the nuts and bolts of conversational Hebrew. So I definitely have my work cut out for me, but we'll get it done.
A couple days ago I bought myself a used mountain bike, and have been cruising all over Jerusalem ever since. This city is incredibly diverse: yesterday in a two hour ride I visited an ultra-orthodox neighborhood, the Knesset and government centers, the modern suburbs to the west of the city, the area surrounding the King David Hotel, and also did a lap around the old city walls. Today I rode in the rain across town to a Hebrew church service held in a local shopping center. Tomorrow night I'm going to ride up to this Jewish post-Sabbath party. There is so much to see in this city.
Okay, there is more to be said, but you're probably tired of reading, and I'm definitely tired of writing. I need to get more sleep tonight than I did in London. Tomorrow is Jericho and the Judean Wilderness.
Shalom from Jerusalem.
Nice Ryan, sounds ever so sweet. Freakin' Israel, you kidding me!
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