Jerusalem: Windows
Where would you re-visit if you lived in Jerusalem for a year?
Four windows draw me back every time.
1. The Chagall Windows (Windows in a unique place)
It’s not just that the windows are beautiful or interesting. It’s where they’re located that ultimately draws me back. In Ein Kerem, a suburb of Jerusalem, is a large hospital called Hadassah Medical Center. Hadassah is another name for Esther in the Old Testament who risking her life saved her people. The Israeli staff there are in the business of saving lives both Jews and Arabs.
It is in the hospital that the Chagall Windows are located in a simply constructed synagogue. I like the peace and beauty of the town, the underlying message of a hospital being that life is important, and the stories on the windows themselves. This past summer I was left alone in the synagogue with the narration of the story of each blessing depicted on the stained glass windows to the 12 tribes of Israel. The woman who unlocked the door to the synagogue asked me if I’d seen them before. I have to admit my face dusted over with a little emotion. And before I could say yes, she seemed to know and quickly left. Replicas of these windows in ceramic were given to me by my grandma.
2. Neot Kedumim: The Biblical Landscape Reserve in Israel (Window to the Old and New Testament past)
Ok. So it’s not exactly in Jersualem but a few miles outside there is a huge nature reserve recreating the agricultural images of the Bible. Imagine not just reading these words but seeing and standing in an ancient vineyard in Israel (Isaiah 5:1-7).
“Now will I sing to my wellbeloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard. My wellbeloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill: And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein: and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes.”
These were words on a page but not at Neot Kedumim. You see the vineyard and the tower and the grape vines and now it’s different.
3. Church of the Sisters of Zion (Window to the Christian past)
A stone here and a cave there. Israel is full of places monumenting a significant event. To me it’s not important where something happened but the reverence you can feel anywhere. But as far as making the human element of the Christian story real, it happened for me in the Church of the Sisters of Zion. You can walk underneath the church where Roman soldiers kept base. At one place you can see the floor where soldiers etched out games and cast lots in the stone as they awaited their next duty. For some reason this little evidence of humanity, not just a worn stone, made the story vivid. You can find the accounts in the biblical gospels (Matt. 27, Mark 14, Luke 22-23, and John 19).
“[The soldiers] said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend [his garment], but let us cast lots for it, whose it shall be: that the scripture might be fulfilled which saith, They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did. (John 19:24).”
4. Islamic Library in the Al-Haram Al-Sharif (Window to the Islamic past).
Careful Arab scholars preserved both the Islamic, Roman, and Greek philosophies, medical discoveries, and histories of the past on scrolls. So while the Western world’s scholarly records were being luted and destroyed by barbarians from the north, the Arab world held our link to the past in their hands. We are lucky to have been able to retrieve them again from our Arab allies giving us a kick start into the modern world.
While on the Arabic program we gave the Islamic library located near the Dome of the Rock, a volume of the Islamic Translation series. In the library alcove old texts written on scrolls are stacked on shelves and fitted into compartments. I feel a deep respect for the glorious Islamic past and its continuing contribution to the world as I look at those scrolls. (For further reading on this topic, you can find information in many historical studies. Here is one to start you off. History of the Arabs; Revised: 10th Edition by Philip Hitti. Look at chapter 27.)
Are there places that make history come alive for you?
See other posts in the series:
Part III: “Cairo as an Arabic Student: Mosques and Trains”
Cairo Part II: “Cairo for the first time with an Argentine Flair”
aud'acious 
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