There is a woman in Ra’anana who finally got her israeli tour guide license right before COVID started, when all the tourists vanished. She’s done some tours for the local kids, including our girls, who absolutely love her, and I guess there were enough parents who were jealous of their kids (like me 😀) so that she decided to go a grown up tour.
It was a one day event that left from the girls school in Ra’anana and went first to the grave of the biblical prophet Samuel. For those that don’t know, he was the prophet who anointed the first two kings of Israel, Saul and David. And to relate it to the High Holidays, the haftorah reading (reading from the books of the prophets) for the first day of Rosh Hashana tells the story of his birth – another miraculous birth to a formerly barren woman who famously went to pray to God in Shilo (where the Ark of the Covenant was for many years before King David moved it to Jerusalem), where she was mistaken for a drunk by the prophet at the time, Eli. Anyway, there’s a muslim shrine there (the muslims share a reverence for all the Jewish prophets) which has become a minor tourist site. It’s just a few minutes north of Jerusalem, between Jerusalem and Ramallah with a great view of the area.
From there we stopped off in the small town of Kfar Adumim just east of Jerusalem, at a lookout point in the Judean desert. We talked about the desert and what it represents in Judaism – how so many things happen in the desert, most obviously the Israelites wandering in the desert for 40 years, but also the fact that the Torah was given in the desert at mount sinai, how Moses ran away into the desert after he accidentally killed the Egyptian who was beating the israelite slave, where he eventually saw the burning bush, and how Elijah the prophet ran away into the desert from king Ahav and his queen Jezebel who were trying to have him killed – and this is the tie-in to the high holidays – how it was there in a cave in the desert that, “a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a still, small voice…” Which we reference during the Unetaneh Tokef mussaf amidah prayer on the high holidays: “…you open the book of remembrance and it speaks for itself, for everyone has signed it with their deeds. A great shofar is sounded and a still small voice is heard, angles rush forward, trembling, shaking, exclaiming The Day of Judgement is here!” That “still small voice” is God’s voice, and it comes from that episode with Elijah the prophet, in the desert. Now that was in the desert of Sinai, but it looks pretty similar (I’m told) to the Judean desert. Which is strikingly beautiful and dreadfully barren.
We then moved on to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem itself, which overlooks the Temple Mount and the famous golden dome of the Dome of the Rock. From there you can see the entire Temple Mount complex, how King Herod built up the platform on which he expanded the Temple. The view is from the East looking West, so that the Western Wall is on the other side, hidden from view. The Mount of Olives itself was the ancient cemetery of Jerusalem, as it was on a mountain just outside the city.
All in all it was a great tour of a few of the sites that are a bit “off the beaten path” from what I had seen before on my trips there. And I took the bus home to Ra’anana from Jerusalem with my RavKav card. And while i was waiting in the bus station for the bus to arrive, I noticed these two guys davening mincha while waiting for the bus. Why not?
