Live from the Holy Land

I stayed in Tel Aviv. This is a view of the city from my hotel room. It is a fairly modern commercial city with a population of around 750,000.

Tel Aviv sits right on the Mediterranean Sea, and it is amazing. The temperature was remarkably cool, the water was clean and didn’t smell like New Jersey.

The two things I noticed the most about the beach were that people let their dogs run without leashes and their children run without clothes. Bizarre in both cases. This pooch was picky. He would only eat the meat from my meal, no fries, no ketchup, just beef. The sand all over my leg was from his constant pawing at me begging for food.

Jaffa is a historic port city directly south of Tel Aviv. It has been destroyed and rebuilt 22 times in its history. It looked like what I thought an ancient middle eastern city would look like; tight winding stone streets with stairs that seem to expose endless new levels.

This is a view of Old Jerusalem. The spires on the hill in the background are on Mount of Olives.

This is a closer view of Mount of Olives taken next to the weeping wall. All of the tiny boxes are grave stones. For reasons that I won’t butcher here, it is a sacred burial place for Jews a plot currently goes for $30,000.

Jews worshiping at the weeping wall. This is the men’s area. The women are segregated; their area is to the right.

This is the Fifth “Station of the Cross”. A church has been erected at 14 locations (stations) related to the crucifixion. At the Fifth station, Jesus stumbled and braced himself against this rock. Simon was then ordered to help carry the cross. There is a deep imprint in the stone where Jesus is said to have laid his palm from the millions of people that have touched the rock.

This is a typical street in Jerusalem. It is also the street that Jesus is said to have walked while carrying the cross.

This is the Twelfth Station of the Cross — where Christ was crucified. It is tough to see in this photo, but this alter is built over bedrock (which is covered in Plexiglas). Under the alter (where you can see the guy kneeling) is a hole in the floor that goes to the bedrock. This is supposed to be where the cross was placed. Pretty much every major religious location in Israel has a church built on top of it with this sort of a setup to give people access to the actual “site”. I’ve got mixed feelings on this approach.

This is said to be the last remaining piece of the rock rolled in front of Jesus’ tomb.

I was also able to visit Bethlehem (pictured above). It is a 10 minute drive from Jerusalem, but it is under Palestinian control. People with an Israeli passport are not allowed into Bethlehem so we had to get picked up by a Christian-Arab tour guide so that we could get into the city. To get there we had to go through Israeli and Palestinian check points and cross the security wall. This year at NYU I had a student who did a speech on protest graffiti on the security wall and I was able to photograph some of the actual pieces we talked about in her speech. That was pretty cool.

Keeping with the trend, this church was built on top of the cave where Mary gave birth to Jesus. You can see by the variety of stone sizes that the structure has been build and rebuilt multiple times.

This is down underneath the church alter and the circle on the floor is supposed to be the spot where Mary gave birth.

This is about 5 feet away from the previous picture and is the location of the manger.