Rocket Day at School, Trip to Galilee

It was an eventful week. Surely Israel stole more than its share of headlines in news media around the world. There were many kids at work on Sunday—school having been cancelled due to the barrage of rockets (>40) being hurled into Southern Israel from Gaza. School was closed for three days in some areas, in fact, until the ceasefire settled in.

Many of my co-workers who live within rocket range of Gaza slept in their bomb shelters—reinforced rooms in their homes complete with ultra-thick windows and ventilation shafts--as they listened throughout the night to nearby explosions. Supposedly out of Grad rocket range (though Hamas claims to have alternate not-yet-used weapons that can reach our area), our apartment in Tel Aviv doesn’t include a reinforced room. We did some exploring though, and came to find a large reinforced-looking door in the basement of the complex, which is presumably our community bomb-shelter. If only we knew who has the key.

My talkative cube-mate said that his kid woke up in the middle of the night, and when he was informed that he’d be staying home from school the next day due to the rocket attacks, he celebrated—just like we used to back in Iowa when school was cancelled because of a snow storm. My cube-mate looked at me and said: “Do you understand? It shouldn’t be this way”. I agreed.

He also said “maybe they were right”…referring to those who long ago had supported a proposal to provide the Jews a state in Uganda instead of Palestine. Back in the early 1900’s, I’ve learned, the British had offered to give a portion of British East Africa to the Jewish people as a homeland. After much debate, the offer was declined.

I searched the web to see what the rest of the world was hearing. I noticed a CNN article highlighting the Israeli strike against terrorist group members, but neglected to point out that the conflict started after a rocket was fired into Israel from Gaza last week. Without this critical piece of info, a reader could come to the conclusion that the rocket fire was brought on solely by Israeli aggression. I’m not making a statement against CNN—and who knows the what the circumstances were that led to this information being excluded…but I did realize that when I’m forming opinions based on what I read (especially from a blog? J), I need to realize that I may not have the whole story.

Another story I came across was this one. Apparently spawned by the recent release of Gilad Shalit in exchange for 1027 Palestinian soldiers, a Saudi royal utilized Facebook to offer a $900,000 bounty on Israeli soldiers—a ploy with which he plans to leverage the release of more Arabs detained in Israeli prisons (in one of which my cube-mate was a medic during his stint in the military, by the way).

With the rocket fire dying down, the headlines now tout a potential preemptive strike against Iran in an effort to thwart their nuclear capability. This too, is nothing new, although a conflict seems inevitable at some point. As the Iranian military leader stated, Iran has been hearing threats of a strike for 8 years. We’re hoping that the primary reason for the recent headlines is an effort to draw worldwide attention to the issue, and that Israel is attempting gauge which nations are behind its cause to ensure that Iran isn’t able to build nukes.

Shifting gears, we recently utilized the last holiday weekend until April (Passover) to take a quick day trip to Galilee. I had an extra day off of work for Simchat Torah, which marks the end of the annual reading of the Torah.

Our first stop was Tiberias, a town situated on the Western shore of the Sea of Galilee (also known as the Sea of Tiberias and the Kinneret, in Hebrew) and just over 90 minutes drive from Tel-Aviv. After soaking in some views of the lake, uh, I mean sea, we looked for a place to eat lunch. Having forgotten that Tel-Aviv is a secular outlier amongst Israeli cities, we quickly realized that most of the town was shut down for Shabbat—including McDonalds, not that we were hoping to eat there. We finally found some restaurants open for tourists along the lakeside promenade, so satisfied our hunger with a couple of falafel sandwiches.

Here is a view of Tiberias with the Sea of Galilee in the background...

And here is another view of the Sea of Galilee (aka Sea of Tiberias, Kinneret), which gives you an idea of what the surrounding landscape looks like. We thought it looked a bit Central-Oregon-ish...

And here is a sign along the lakeside Tiberias promanade that gives you an idea of the shape of the Sea of Galilee. We thought maybe it tells viewers who can read Hebrew the depth of the lake as well. You can see the places where the Jordan River flows at the north and south ends of the lake.

We then drove north along the lake towards Capernaum (also apparently spelled Capharnaum), a lakeside village which is called Kfar Nahum (“Nahum’s Village”) in Hebrew, and is the town in which Jesus lived during his ministry. Jesus also recruited several of his disciples in Capernaum, as it was the home of Peter, Andrew, James, and John, who were local fishermen (see Matthew 4:13-21).

This is a sign stating some of the Biblical references related to Capernaum.

Here is Nicki at the synagogue which stands in the place where Jesus preached. While we were standing in the synagogue, on one side of the wall we heard worship songs being sung by a group of Christian tourists. On the other side of the wall, we heard a tour guide telling his guests that this is where Jesus had “spread his propaganda”. 

Other examples of Capernaum in the Bible include but are not limited to: Jesus performing healings (Mark 1:21-34), Jesus’ astonishment at the faith of the centurion (Luke 7:1-10), Jesus’ “Bread of Life” sermon after having walked on the water (John 6:16-59), Jesus’ take on taxes (Mark 17:24-26), and Jesus healing the paralytic man lowered through the roof by his friends (Mark 2:1-12).

Here is the octagonal Byzantine church that was (strangely, in my opinion) built over the site of what is thought to have been Peter’s house. You can also see some of the ruins of Capernaum.

From Capernaum, we attempted to drive up the hill towards the Mount of the Beatitudes, where Jesus preached to the crowds as recorded in Matthew 5. Knowing which direction to go, but not seeing any signs for the road, we ended up off-roading through a banana plantation in which I’m sure was a short-cut to the Mount. Water-thirsty bananas are grown near the lake, which is Israel’s primary source of fresh-water. This is somewhat controversial in the fact that the lake is drying up. You can read more about the water issues here.

Today, a catholic church sits atop the Mount of Beatitudes, which was a bit of a disappointment for me, as I was hoping for something a bit more representative of Jesus’ time. Nonetheless, we took in some views of the lake and then explored the church and well-kept grounds.

For this shot, I had the choice of capturing the entire church, or cutting of the top in order to include Nicki & Sammy. I chose the latter.

 Here is a view of the Sea of Galilee from Mount of the Beattitudes.

We watched the sun set over the Sea of Galilee from the Mount of Beattitudes.

On the return trip to Tel Aviv, we learned an important lesson about traveling in Israel on a holiday weekend. DO NOT wait until after Shabbat to head for home! Many Israelis were traveling for the weekend, and many Jews don’t drive on Shabbat…so as soon as the sun went down on Saturday, the roads were jammed with people trying to get home. 4.5 hours later, we made it back to Tel Aviv. For two of those 4.5 hours, traffic on our 4-lane highway came to a halt, until people started driving on the shoulders and even off-road! Soon there was a huge could of dust due to all of the cars that were driving through the desert about 20 feet off of the right shoulder. Definitely another China-esque moment, from our perspective.

Here in Tel-Aviv, the last weekend in October seemed to signify the end of summer. Beautiful weather meant that everyone was outside, and all who own a boat seemed to be sailing them at once. Here is a view from our balcony.

This weekend (first in November), on one of our regular walks, we found the beaches of Tel Aviv nearly empty. Sure, it was a bit breezy, but temps were still in the 70s--certainly warm enough for us. We were surpised to see that most of the tourists had seemingly gone home.

Speaking of beaches, I also came across this story about how Tel Aviv is viewed as one of the top places in the world in the eyes of propsective US Ambassadors. This "Miami of the Middle East" is deemed a nice combination of weather, culture, and policy-related issues which seems to bode well for diplomats.

And now for Sammy. He’s now 5 months old and newly-solidified tricks include the ability to roll-over and to jump in his “jump-a-roo”. We couldn't decide which one of these poses we liked best, so decided to post both :)

Note the bib...he was hoping that the verbiage was true!