Israel on My Mind...Again
October 24, 2008
Israel
(2 comments)
By JanetheWriter
 In my current read, In the Land of Invisible Women, Qanta Ahmed, a young Muslim medical doctor from the west, tells of her adventures living and working in the Saudi Kingdom. In one chapter in which Ahmed details her preparations to go on Hajj, a spiritual pilgrimage to Mecca, I was struck by several parallels between her journey and my own first trip to Israel.
After confiding in a colleague about her worries that she won't know the proper thing to do or say, he tells her, "Nearly everyone who attends Hajj is going there for the first time. No pilgrim ever knows what to do. Everyone takes small books with them, books of prayers and instructions."
In fact, tucked into the paperwork, luggage tags and other miscellany I received from ARZA Travel prior to my own departure was a small book entitled Israel: A Spiritual Travel Guide, A Companion for the Modern Jewish Pilgrim. Part travel guide, part journal and part siddur, it seamlessly combines before and after readings together with blessings and space for personal reflections for various regions, sites and events in Israel: the Galil, the Negev, Jerusalem, the Knesset, the Kotel, Yad Vashem, Tel Aviv and more. Indeed, this guide, my constant companion throughout the journey, appears with me in many photos and in several journal entries:
After lunch it was off to the Kotel, where I deposited everyone's prayers, distributed tzedakah and left my own note for peace. I also spied through the mechitzah over to the men's side and held my camera overhead to capture a shot. Before our approach to the wall, Ezra (our guide) asked me to share the reading from Larry Hoffman's book, which I did. We also took a group picture.
* * *
Later in the same chapter, Ahmed describes the scene at the airport as she prepared to depart for Mecca: "The terminal was submerged in a biblical scene; no movie set could have been more authentic. Millions were locked in the same force field. We were being magnetically drawn to Mecca. I could feel the gravitational pull of God."
Recalling what I'd heard and written in my journal at the time our group ascended to Jerusalem, I was astounded:
Leaving Karmiel, we raced to Jerusalem, traveling down Route 6 (once again passing the security wall) and approaching Jerusalem from the west. As we ascended the highway toward the city, Elliott started to speak about a friend who went to the North Pole to photograph an expedition there. In relaying the adventure to a group of friends afterward, the photographer described how the magnetic fields there do weird things to your body. Everyone in the group of friends who was Jewish and had been to Jerusalem nodded in understanding and reported having similar experiences in Jerusalem.
This cosmic alignment that seems to transcend all boundaries has left me wondering a few things: Is it only Muslims who feel the magnetic pull to Mecca? Only Jews whose magnetic centers align in Jerusalem? If so, how does the universe know exactly who's who? Where is it that Catholics experience this cosmic force, the magnetic intersection of body and soul? The Vatican? Bethlehem? What about other Christians and those of other faiths?
Regardless of the specific, "right" answers, if, in fact, there are any, the forces of the universe are powerful and inextricably linked to each of us. Therefore, let us harness these forces for good--for peace, for justice, and for making our world a better place for all.
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Jane, you are crediting external forces for transcendent experiences that I think come from within. My emotional reaction to Mt. Rushmore, while it included a frisson of patriotism, came mostly from taking my ten-year old to a place where 35 years earlier my parents had taken ten-year-old me.
I have remarked here previously that we are called (somewhat different from being pulled) to visit Jerusalem and Auschwitz. But our American selves should feel pulled to see the Jefferson Memorial and the Statue of Liberty.
Yes, there are awesome places to visit -- the Great Wall, the Colosseum -- that don't generate your magnetic intersection of body and soul. But that's because we don't bring the right DNA to create the Jerusalem magic.
In the old Goodman Theater in Chicago, there was an inscription above the stage: You yourselves must set fire to the fagots you have brought. What we take from our travels is dependent on what we bring.