Saturday morning - Dec 8 - A new understanding

Does morning bring a new light inside us, as well as external to us? Maybe so. Maybe that's what we mean when we say we want to sleep on it. This morning in Jerusalem, the morning of our first and only Shabat in Jerusalem, the coming of the light caught my attention. The hotel is beginning to bustle a bit as small groups gather in the lobby for coffee; and others, mostly men, leave the hotel to meet for prayer. Today should be a quieter day in the city. We expect that traffic will be lighter than yesterday. Our guide tells us that Fridays always bring people out to the streets, to the markets, the old city, as they prepare for the Sabbath.

We'll be spending much of our day today, this last day in Jerusalem, in the old city, as we finish our holy week journey during this Advent season. This afternoon, we will be free to shop. I'm hoping to find fabric that I can bring home and incorporate into a quilt. It would be a very nice memento of our trip.

The hotel lobby is on the fourth floor of the building, and the dining facilities are on the second. This picture is a view of the dining area reflecting from the windows at the rear of the lobby area. The hotel is quite sufficient for this part of our journey, and the staff has been very attentative to the needs of its patrons. We are not allowed to go out and wander, except to the two adjoining hotels - our guides (our paid guide from NAWA and the pastor of the church sponsoring our group) are afraid they will lose us. We are a small group - only 14, and we are behaving well; so I don't think they need to have many fears that we will wander far. However, without their frequent reminders, we might be tempted!


In the illumination of this early morning, I recalled our NAWA guide's explanation yesterday of orthodoxy, an explanation that I had never considered. He said that both the Muslims and the Jews believe that God is mad at them. Orthodoxy may encourage him to turn his face toward them again; and if he turns his face toward them, they will have better lives.

The lightbulbs flashed with this explanation. Of course! This makes perfectly good sense. This was the point of the Essenes, too, from my understanding. God turned his face away because the people were so disobedient, and the Essenes (those who, it is believed, were the Dead Sea Scroll writers) believed they could turn God's favor back to the by correcting their observances.

These few words may provide the greatest illumination I receive on this trip, and it's major. Orthodoxy is always something a Christian ponders, whether we're pondering it by comparing it to our own interpretation, or by pondering it to consider how we can or should be more orthodox. This simple phrase - God is mad at us - never occurred to me. I don't need to subscribe to this belief to understand it. I will now forever have a new awareness and appreciation of orthodoxy.

So, here on this Sabbath in Jerusalem, I give thanks!

Just one final note for the morning. This is a picture of my breakfast today. It's cottage cheese (but probably not low or no-fat, as I would prefer) topped with a tomato-cucumber salsa, yellow peppers (yum, yum, yum), sliced cucumbers, and what looks like a barley museli mix. I usually mix some basmati rice in with this scrumpt-dilly-icious healthy mix of food, but there was none to be found this morning. I suspect that's because it's the Sabbath here, and there was little cooking going on in the kitchen. In the bowls just above the plate, I have two boiled eggs (today, they're cold; but usually they're still warm from the boiling water) and some fresh fruit - grapefruit and pineapple today. At home, I usually have a favorite combination of Wheat Chex, All-Bran (original), and my own museli mix, topped with banana and skim milk; but the combination in this picture seems just as good and it holds me all morning, just as my at-home breakfast does. In all our travels, we have never consistently had such good food as we've had here in the Grand Court Hotel in Jerusalem!