Shabbat Shalom

You can distinctly feel the difference when Sabbath arrives in Jerusalem. A hush falls over the city; on the streets families are walking together; all the businesses--and busyness--close their shutters.

I walked over to the Old City to visit the Western Wall.

Even in February, some early blossoms were braving the brisk air.



For centuries the Jewish Faith was centered around the Temple. It really was the center of the universe, because it was the place where heaven touched earth, where God was present among his people.

Journeying through the wilderness after leaving Egypt, the Israelite tents were always pitched around the Tabernacle, the large tent of worship housing the Ark of the Covenant. The Tabernacle identified the presence of God guiding them through the desert. After King David made Jerusalem the capital of Israel, his son King Solomon fulfilled his father's dream, and replaced the tent of worship with a magnificent structure of stone, silver and gold.

Its annihilation by the Babylonians awakened a resurgence among the Jews to rebuild the house of God in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. By the time of Jesus, yet another renovation had been elaborately provided by King Herod.

For centuries the Jewish Faith was centered around the Temple. But those centuries were many centuries ago, because one generation after Jesus, the 10th Roman Legion brought heaven and earth crashing down when they burned Jerusalem and razed the Temple to the ground, leaving no stone unturned.

Jerusalem is a city on mountaintops, and the Temple had been built on Mount Moriah. Herod had created an enormous piazza to expand the area around the summit. This the Romans left behind, so those stones represent the only remnants of the Jewish Temple.

And after all these centuries, the site of God's presence is not forgotten.

Jews from all over the world still come on pilgrimage to pray at the Western Wall, the portion of Herod's Temple structure still accessible today.



No Jew would go on top of the Temple Mount, because they might inadvertently tread on the place where the Holy of Holies had been. And the highly visible Dome of the Rock--built by the Muslims to commemorate Muhammad's ascension into heaven--now dominates the ground.

But before the Western Wall, remembrance of what once was still lingers. Here a community scattered around the globe finds its center. Here the same Psalms of worship are sung before the ancient stones, in the same language of centuries ago.



And this Sabbath, the day of remembering when God rested with his people, is no different.