Tour Leader’s Blog

A day of juxtapositions! We began by going to the Holocaust Museum—stories and images of a tragedy too big to take in.

We ended our day with communion by the Garden Tomb—a place to remember the death of Jesus and a place to recommit our lives to the Lord who brings hope in the midst of the greatest suffering.

Between these two somber experiences we toured more of Old City Jerusalem—watching Bar Mitzveh street processions with exuberant music and dancing. What a way to pass faith and identity on to the next generation! We went underground to an archeological site (the Burnt House) that has remains of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. We also visited the Pool of Bethesda where Jesus healed the man who had been lame 38 years. Then we followed the ancient Via Dolorosa, the traditional street route that Jesus took on his way to Golgotha, for our final worship time together at the Garden Tomb.

In a few hours we board our flight at Tel Aviv to return to North America—grateful for safety, meaningful worship and learning every day, new friends, and most of all for Immanuel God-with-us who changed the course of human history two thousand years ago.

~ Nelson Kraybill

Today we passed through the “separation wall” that divides the Holy Land in order to see the birthplace of the Prince of Peace.

We found the ancient Church of the Nativity filled with enough pilgrims that we did not wait in line the three hours required to get down into the crypt. So after getting an overview of fourth-century structure built by Constantine, we made our way to the Herodion-King Herod’s mighty mountain-top fortress that overlooks Bethlehem. Did the soldiers stationed there 2000 years ago hear the angels sing?

On our return through the wall we took a detour to see Rachel’s tomb-now almost embedded in the wall and tightly guarded for Jewish people and Israelis to visit.

The Separation Wall makes an extra extension to include the tomb in the Israeli side (and exclude Palestinians).

That window into current conflict set the agenda for us to visit MCC workers Rochelle Friesen and Bassam Thabet at their offices on the Mount of Olives. We learned something of the struggle Palestinians face simply to earn a living in a land where they face so many restrictions.

At our evening prayer time one of the tour group’s members said “I used to think that ‘pray for the peace of Jerusalem’ meant ‘pray for the Jews.’ Now I know it means pray for the peace of Jews, Palestinians, Christians, Armenians, Muslims . . .”

~ Nelson Kraybill

The Mount of Olives is the perfect place to get an overview of Jerusalem, and we began our day by visiting the traditional site of the ascension there. It’s a tiny medieval mosque today, complete with an indentation in the rock where Jesus’ foot pushed off! That was a stretch for us to believe. But reading the Acts 1 account of the ascension from the open spaces of the mountain was a moving experience.

Nelson sounded a shofar (biblical “trumpet”) there, and read an apocalyptic passage (from Zechariah 14) about the Lord coming to mete out justice on the nations and splitting the Mount of Olives in two!

Walking down the Mount of Olives to the Kidron Valley with many other pilgrims gave us a sense of accompanying Jesus on the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Along the way we stopped at the traditional spot where Jesus wept over the city (“would that you knew the things that make for peace”) and prayed in the gloomy church by the Garden of Gethsemane.

The afternoon saw us in “Mount Zion,” the modern name for the hill outside of the present city walls where the Upper Room likely was located. While the building you enter as the “Upper Room” actually is medieval, it perhaps is on the spot where the disciples had the Last Supper and where they gathered after the resurrection. Pentecost happened somewhere nearby as well, and when we entered the spacious room there was a cacophony of worshipping groups—Catholic, Jewish, Pentecostal Christian. . .One group was praying loudly in tongues! It all seemed reminiscent of the Acts 2 Pentecost.

We let the day down with a visit to the Western Wall (which Jews don’t like to call the “Wailing Wall” anymore). Hundreds of devout Jewish men wore phylacteries and kippas and prayer shawls, and bobbed heads as they prayed and read Torah at the Wall (the remains of the foundation of the temple of Jesus’ day). Women had their own crowded section of the Wall.

We had much to process at our evening worship/teaching/prayer time!

~ Nelson Kraybill

We were delighted to start Monday with a visit to the (probable) site where John baptized Jesus—just north of the Dead Sea along the Jordan River.

This place has been known for years, but was inaccessible because of political conflicts between Israel and Jordan. In the last year it’s been opening to tourists, and we were blessed to watch pilgrim groups from various parts of the world enter into the waters where the dove came down on Jesus!

Cable car took us to the top of Masada—an astonishing piece of mountainous landscape, location of horrendous violence in the Jewish Revolt of AD 66-70.

On the way back from Masada we stopped at Qumran for lunch, and learned why the Dead Sea Scolls found there have transformed biblical studies.

We took the obligatory and delightful swim/float in the Dead Sea, smeared on rejuvenating Dead Sea mud, then made several brief stops in Jericho to shop, ride a camel (!), get a quick look at the tel of ancient Jericho, and see Mount of Temptation.

At dusk we came over the top of the Mount of Olives and saw Jerusalem for the first time.

Someone started singing “We’re marching to Zion.” At dinner one of our group had arranged for the hotel staff to bring out a birthday cake for David Kindy. The entire dining hall of guests sang Happy Birthday when the cooks brought out a cake with a sparkler-streaming candle on top!

It’s hard to imagine how our day could have been more spiritually rich and rewarding! We started the morning by going just south of the Sea of Galilee to a place on the Jordan River where a Kibbutz runs a baptismal site (yes, Jews providing baptismal facilities for Christians).

Among large shade trees tens of thousands of Christians arrive every year to sing, pray, praise and be baptized. With all in our group having been baptized already, we simply waded into the water and sang and prayed.

From there we went to the north end of the Sea of Galilee to a mountaintop overlooking Capernaum that is celebrated as the site of the Sermon on the Mount. In an outdoor worship space on the hillside we considered ways in which Jesus saw God’s tender care even for nature and assured his followers that God will care for them even if they love their enemies and put down their weapons.

At noon we feasted on “St. Peter’s fish”—tilapia taken from the Sea of Galilee, probably the fish from which Jesus told Peter to pull a coin to pay the temple tax—a tax that Jesus implies the “children of the king” should not even have to pay. First-century tax protest! After lunch we toured the ruins of Capernaum. They are impressive, and include the foundation of the synagogue that is likely the place where Jesus preached. A nearby boat took us out on the Sea of Galilee for 40 minutes, right next to Capernaum and the Mount of Beatitudes.

In the evening our speakers were Anna Dintaman Landis and David Landis, key planners and implementers of the Jesus Trail footpath from Nazareth to Capernaum (forty miles).This young couple have written and published a splendid guidebook to that footpath, and already thousands of people are walking it every year! We were impressed with their vision for presenting Jesus and his message in this winsome way, and for doing so with grace-filled interaction with Muslims and Jews throughout the region.

~ Nelson Kraybill

A small tour group can take occasional detours! Today on the way from Nazareth to ruins of ancient Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast we got talking about the presence of the Roman army in Palestine in the New Testament era. Our guide—a wonderful Armenian Christian man with the paradoxical name of Lazarus Kevorkien—said he had an inscription to show us. Still two miles from Caesarea we went down side roads to the ancient aqueduct built by Herod the Great to carry water from Mt. Carmel to Caesarea. There on the side of the aqueduct was an inscription in Latin naming the Tenth Legion—the band of soldiers who were in Palestine during the first century (the inscription, however, was from the second century).

Pleased to have seen something few tourists see (because we still were miles from the spot most visitors see), we went on to ruins of ancient Caesarea—the city where Paul “almost persuaded” Agrippa II to become a Christian, city where the centurion Cornelius became a believer, city where the great church historian Eusebius lived.

After falafel and salad at a Druze restaurant, we went to the top of Mt. Carmel. Somewhere along that 13-mile ridge Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal. We considered ways we are tempted to give allegiance to gods other than the living Lord.

In an unscheduled extra stop, we saw astonishing ruins at the ancient tel (mound) of Megiddo. The city guarded a key entrance to the Jezreel Valley, and probably is Armageddon (“Har Megiddo” or “Mt. Megiddo) of John’s Apocalypse. We left the tel through a deep, deep underground shaft that allowed residents of Megiddo to a deep well even during siege. In the attached photo Pastor Steve Landis and wife Rosemary walk across Megiddo tel, past stone mangers used to feed horses—probably from the time when King Solomon used Megiddo as a military base in the 10th century B.C.

Now we’re resting comfortably at a Kibbutz on the southeast shore of the Sea of Galilee. Having learned so much about soldiers and war today, and being increasingly informed of political conflicts in this troubled land, we look forward to visiting places tomorrow where the Prince of Peace walked among mortals. Our evening debriefing and worship session tonight was rich and heart-felt, with good input from various persons in our pilgrim band.

~ Nelson Kraybill

Today’s itinerary began in Nazareth with a 7:15 a.m. walk to the nearby Church of St Mary’s Well, a Greek Orthodox structure built above an ancient well that dates back to the biblical era. Since water was so essential to any village, the well is almost certainly a place frequented by Jesus and his family. At least one ancient extra-biblical document states that the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary while she was at the well.

From Mary’s well we went three miles by our bus to the ruins of Sepphoris, a city of Galilee that was destroyed in 4 B.C. and then rebuilt when Jesus was a lad. Historians speculate that Jesus’ father-whose trade mentioned in the New Testament is more “builder” than “carpenter,”-probably found work at Sepphoris. We were amazed at the sophisticated mosaic floors found in the ruins, including a grand one in a third- or fourth-century synagogue.

A highlight of the day was our visit to Nazareth Village, a living museum portraying life in the first century when Jesus was in Nazareth. The Village is smack in the middle of the urban sprawl of Nazareth, but they keep donkeys and sheep there. Museum people (Christians who do this as a ministry) have found an ancient winepress carved into the bedrock, and have wonderfully reconstructed a complete first-century style synagogue (see Luke 4:1ff). We enjoyed a fabulous Palestinian lunch (lentil soup, flatbread, hummus, salads, olives . . .) served by staff in first-century attire. (See picture, with group members while a first-century server stands at the far end of the olive wood table.)

A visit to nearby Cana filled out the rest of our afternoon-it’s the traditional site of Jesus turning water to wine at a wedding (John 2). Some of us carried water bottles into the church on the grounds, but still had just water when we got back on the bus.

Tonight we spent our usual hour together after dinner-debriefing on all we saw and learned today, and studying Bible passages relevant to our day tomorrow. We chanted Psalm 84-a pilgrims’ prayer on the way to Jerusalem-before retiring for the night. The whole group seems to be in good spirits and good health, and we already feel the kinship of sharing meaningful spiritual experience together.

~ Nelson Kraybill

God is good! Thirteen TourMagination pilgrims from Canada and the United States came through the long flight from Newark, NJ to Tel Aviv in good form last night, and launched into learning about Israel/Palestine as the sun rose.

Starting where the Christian story begins, we came first to Nazareth. This was an inconsequential hamlet two thousand years ago; today it’s a bustling urban area (though considerably slowed down on this particular day because it’s Israeli Independence Day, marking the launch of the state of Israel in 1948).

We went to the top of Precipice Mountain (where people remember the story of Jesus escaping from those who wanted to throw him off a cliff), then visited staff at the Fauzi Azar Inn where the Jesus Trail to Capernaum begins. In the attached picture four of our troupe are in front of the massive Basilica of the Annunciation (Iris and Al Driver in the background, father and son Ed and Ray Yoder in foreground). Weather is excellent, the salads/fruits are delicious, and the group already feels like a community. We’re all eager for a good night’s rest tonight!

~ Nelson Kraybill