Holy cities

Tzfat (Safed/Tsfat/Zefat etc....) and Jerusalem are two of the holy cities (or horry shitties as Tuong Lu Kim of South Park might say) for Judaism, and Amanda and I visited them good.

Tzfat is the home of Kabbalah study, a subject only those learned enough in the ways of the religion can begin to embark on their path to whatever it is Kabbalah leads you to. Jerusalem, you've probably heard of that one.

Neither of these traditional spiritual places really struck me. Perhaps part of the problem in Tzfat was the sheets and sheets of rain that poured down during our visit. But I don't think I have a lot of common ground with the folks who are so taken by Tzfat that they decide to stick around. We still tried our best to have fun while we took in a couple of synagogues and art galleries; the day certainly wasn't a total loss.

The old city of Jerusalem is sort of fascinating. It's part museum, part mall, part home, and mostly nuts. This time around, the thing that struck me more than anything is the fact that historical precedence suggests that the odds of Jerusalem being blown to shit again are pretty high. So for me, it is a little hard to get attached to this piece of earth that so many people find to be holy. If anything I think I had anti-Jerusalem Syndrome.

There were certainly some touching moments in Jerusalem. Visiting the Kotel for the first time in a while is still an emotional experience. While we toured the open-air archaeological park next to the Kotel, we saw a small egalitarian bar mitzvah ceremony, which I enjoyed seeing. And after that, we saw a petrified 13 year-old boy being led towards the Kotel by a singing band of Orthodox Jews and Haredim, complete with clarinet and shofar accompaniment. The procession was tailed by curious gentile tourists snapping pictures and dancing along. While I personally have not viewed the marketing material that the foundations use to convince bar mitzvah aged children to come to Israel for their first step into adulthood, I would hazard a guess that this scene is not quite what they show. Nevertheless, it was a rather awesome sight.

This is one of the most well-trodden pieces of land on the planet, and I don't really have much to add. Enjoy our pics with snippets of commentary.

As far as Temple Mount goes, I think we might be best of selling it to China and letting them handle it. If there's one group who might be able to handle the responsibility for everyone, it's an authoritarian communist government. This could also bring up the interesting prospect of performing some archaeology on the Temple Mount.

This is about all we saw in Tzfat. Rain.

After a wet day in Tzfat, we drove north to Agamon HaHula. The valley here was once a marshland that was a major landing spot for migratory and local birds. Israelis conquered the marshland in the early 1950s and converted it to farmland. After a while, the ecologists were successful in pointing out how completely ruinous this was, and part of the land went back to wetlands. Now, a bajillion cranes spend the winter there, amongst many other birds that call it home.

On the recommendation of Dorit and her family, and despite the excessive difficulty in booking one, we took a tour of the underground excavation at the Kotel. Here, we are facing a section of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount that is still underground. This was the street level at the time of the 2nd Temple, about 2000 years ago.

In the Muslim Quarter in Jerusalem, some of the doorways are marked by graffiti and posters. This apparently is a celebratory mark for their recent pilgrimage to Mecca.

Here's a mosaic wall in the Jewish Quarter that depicts some well known biblical scenes.

Next up, the newer part of Jerusalem.