I have been doing and seeing so many things on this journey that it is truly impossible to encompass all of them. I have tried several times to write posts capturing highlights as they happened, but problems logging in, posting, and other technical bugaboos kept me from this. As I speak, there are one or two draft posts in here somewhere that I need to complete, but I don't know how to find them. So I will just proceed and hope I can finish this post and. put it up.
Yesterday I finally made the promised trip to Jerusalem, Yerushalayem, Zion, city of a hundred names. And in my admittedly limited experience, there is truly nothing like it.
We didn't get to explore the place by foot, which is the way one probably should, walking the ancient streets and letting all the senses absorb the ambiance, but at least I had an eyeful, both eyes filled to running over with the sheer density of all these sites in one tiny place, a microcosm of this nation.
We rode a tourist bus of the sort one can board and exit at will, but we didn't exit. We had come in the afternoon by public transport, a trip that took a couple of hours, so we had time for very little that day.
Naturally our plans to go to the marketplace, the museum, and then to make it finally to the Kotel, the Wailing Wall, at sunset were much too ambitious.
The crowds of people and cars all squeezed impossibly into the narrow streets made assured that we'd have to scale back on our plans. Finally, we managed only the Wall, but that was an emotional experience.
The sight of that portion of history, the ancient stones that contain within them all the anguish and hopes of thousands of years, combined with the weeping and ecstasy of the women around me (the sexes are segregated in this place, according to the rules of Orthodox Judaism), reaching out to touch the weathered stone, worked on me as I backed slowly away, cognizant of the prohibition against turning one's back on the wall.
Add to the experience the fact that this day marked the observation of Purim, a holiday from which we get our Halloween, and the strangeness and intensity were multiplied many times.
If the fur hats of the Satmar Chasidim, the ultra orthodox who occupy the religious quarter of the city, seemed exotic to me, how much more so when they and the others ranging the cobbled streets, an amazing amalgam of ancient and modern, were garbed in the clothing of cowboys and aliens, princesses and dragons.
It seemed somehow natural to me that these creatures of fancy should walk among the all too human. In this city, if anywhere, it did not feel surprising.
And yet this was a real place, not a trip through history's looking glass, a gallery of our conquests and efforts to exceed time.
I headed home hoping I could return again soon to see and experience at closer range all the other places of the city I was able to take in only in a cursory glance.
Certainly this is an extraordinary place, worthy or a lifetime of exploration.