A more relaxed touring day (Israel, Day 11)

[rhu]

Today we headed back into Jerusalem for one last day of sightseeing.

First of all, I promised you all a better shot of this pizza joint's sign:



We parked by Jaffa Gate and headed through the Old City to our first stop, which was the Wohl Archaeological Museum of the Herodian Mansions. On the way, one person we passed called out to me, "There's no need to rush, sir, the Messiah is already here!"

I didn't tarry to find out if he meant Shabbatai Tzvi or someone else.

The Herodian Mansions are (here's that word again) amazing. Basically, when the building for Yeshivat ha-Kotel was built, they started off by excavating what was there. What they found was an extensive neighborhood of large houses with lots of indications that they were lived in by wealthy members of the priestly clan. So they built the yeshivah on large pillars, and retained the dig as a permanent exhibit in the basement.

There are beautiful mosaic floors, lots of miqva'ot (ritual immersion pools), Greco-Roman architectural specimens, and the ashes and remnants of beams that were burnt when the Romans torched the place in 70 CE. There is also an extensive set of cisterns, fed by aqueducts and collection drains which apparently still work, because when we were there they were busy pumping them out from last week's rains.

We then went to the Burnt House, a sister museum which has a single house that was burnt by the Romans. The Burnt House is also known in Hebrew as Beit Katros, because some of the belongings found there had the name of the Katros family, who are mentioned in the Talmud as a priestly family that met a woeful fate. In addition to the relics, they had a moving and powerful multimedia presentation that explained how the Zealots caused baseless hatred and brought about the destruction of Jerusalem.

(Photography was prohibited at both of those sites.)

After that, we had a lunch break. H was amused by the automated toilet-seat covers in the ladies room of the Quarter Cafe:

 

She can explain it in the comments to this entry.

Obligatory happy-child picture. The necklace is a souvenir we bought at this point in our day:



After lunch we went through security to the Kotel plaza, where we picked up our tickets for the Kotel Tunnel tour. For those of you still reading these entries who are not familiar with the Kotel ha-Ma'aravi, here's the basic summary:

When Herod expanded the Temple Mount, he built a large level area that encompassed the original Temple and several acres surrounding it. This was supported by four retaining walls. The hebrew word for wall is kotel. The western wall, for various historical reasons, and because the Holy of Holies was closest to the western side of the Temple Mount, has been a favorite place for Jews to gather to pray since the destruction of the Temple. (We are no longer allowed to ascend to the top of the Temple Mount itself, so this is as close as we can get to the holy place.)

The Kotel ha-Maaravi, or just "the Kotel" for short, has no intrinsic holiness. And about 2/3 of it remains underground, since the Byzantines and Mamalukes wanted to build their houses at the same level as the Temple Mount, and built up arches and vaults and landfill to the west of the Temple Mount, burying it. Today, only the southernmost portion is exposed; about half of that is approached via the Kotel plaza, and the southernmost part is part of the Archaeological Gardens that I wrote about last Sunday.

However, the archaeologists have now excavated northward from the Kotel plaza all the way to the northern end of the Kotel, and that's the tour we took today.

While we waited for the tour to start, we paid one last visit (for this trip) to the Kotel plaza itself:

 

 

 

 

Alissa wrote a note for the Kotel:

 

Tani and I went into the rooms adjacent to the Kotel plaza, where there are various synagogues:

 

Then we started our tour of the tunnels:

 

The rock in the center of this picture is the largest stone in the wall, weighing over 5,000 tons:

 

The holes in it were so that a second wall could be supported by it; the second wall was part of a Byzantine drainage system:



Each level of stones in the kotel is offset about 1cm back from the previous one. When it was constructed, the wall was about as tall as a 14-story building today; the Temple atop it added another 2 stories' worth of height. This was an amazing skyscraper for those days, quite possibly the tallest structure in the world. And the architects knew of the optical illusion that a sheer wall would appear to be falling over, but a wall with a gradual backstep would appear to be sheer.

The blocks are perfectly carved; the kotel is drywall construction. There is no mortar, no cement, no plaster, no joints.

We got to the small chapel in the middle of the kotel, which is the point closest to the Holy of Holies. I recited the Psalm "Esah enai el he-harim" (I raise my eyes to the mountains, from where my help shall come.) It seemed the only appropriate choice at this time.

You can look down the side of the walkway to the bottom of the kotel. The current ground level is still most of the way up the wall:



As you go further north, though, the natural topography rises to meet you. Eventually, we reached the ancient Roman street level --- again, if you refer back to last Sunday, you'll see pictures and a description of the ancient road that ended here, went adjacent to the kotel under Robinson's Arch through the Archaelogical Gardens, down through the City of David and ended at the place of Simchat bet Ha-shoeva.

At the point where the natural bedrock becomes the support for the kotel, Herod's stonemasons dressed the bedrock with the same "frames" that the blocks had used, to preserve the illusion that the wall was continuous.

At the end of the tunnel, we ascended to the Via Dolorosa in the Moslem Quarter. Normally, the guide offers people an escort back to the Jewish Quarter, but encourages them to explore on their own; today he strongly urged us to accompany the two armed escorts back to the Jewish Quarter --- and we were glad of it.

  

We paid one last l'hitraot to the Kotel, and headed up the hill back to the Cardo for some souvenir shopping.

 

We returned to our car, and drove to Mea She'arim so I could buy some books. I was only partly successful, and we were all grumpy, hungry, and frustrated. So we drove to --- gridlock! Jerusalem traffic in rush hour!

By some miracle, we ended up getting spat out, like Jonah, in the right direction, and headed down to Emek Refaim street in the German Colony. We had never been there before. What a charming neighborhood, and what fancy restaurants! We window-ate up and down the street before coming across a place called Selina. It was a little pricy, but it looked really good and we decided to splurge.

I'm glad we did.

We had the "meats you can't find kosher in the States" menu, I think. :-)

I started off trying, for the one and only time in my life, fois gras. Since it was a kosher restaurant, I knew that at least the goose would have had to be schechted, and not literally fed to death, and although I was a bit uncomfortable with the idea, I realized that this was my one chance to find out why fois gras is supposed to be so incredible.

It was good; I understand why many people find it appealing. I don't think it was as amazing as all that, though. (Of course, this was just one sample, and who knows how the kosher fois gras compares to the real thing, but at least now I have some sort of frame of reference for it.)

H and I both ordered the seared sirloin as our main course. It was excellent. Tani had the sirloin strips in a mustard-onion sauce which he let us taste, it was even better. Alissa had the breaded chicken cutlet, which was also excellent (although it violated the principle of getting things was can't get in the States. :-)

For dessert, H had the chocolate Marquis, I had the chocolate souffle and a short espresso, and the kids shared a plate of chocolate truffles. Each dessert was intense and wonderful.

We spent almost two hours at that dinner, and hardly seemed aware of the time passing. It was a meal every bite of which was to be savored, and we did. That was the kind of luxurious dining experience I was hoping to have on this vacation, and I'm glad we finally discovered the German Colony.

Oh, and the bathroom sink was just right for the restaurant. The men's and women's room shared the sink, which was the partition between the entrances. The faucet was a light shower-style spray, and it came out over a small pool of polished stones. The washing cup was coordinated with the decor of the sink, which felt almost Japanese in its beauty and simplicity. (We should have thought to take a picture. Oops.)

We're now back in Efrat; we're mostly packed and I just finished entering all our souvenir receipts into a spreadsheet for use at customs. Tomorrow morning, we are taking the kids to join their friends for the start of the school day, and then we'll do a little more sightseeing and shopping. After dinner, we'll head back to the airport; our flight to New York departs a little after midnight. I don't know if I'll get to post anything tomorrow evening; don't count on it (although I'll certainly type up the day, for posting when we get back to Boston).

Comments

what have the Romans ever done for us?

[sethg]

the architects knew of the optical illusion that a sheer wall would appear to be falling over, but a wall with a gradual backstep would appear to be sheer.

Also, the Kotel is a retaining wall, and if it were sheer, it would have fallen over soon after its construction.

Re: what have the Romans ever done for us?

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

There's that, too, although the blocks could have simply been made deeper and deeper as they went up to accommodate that. Also, in many parts, it appears that the kotel is not, contrary to what I had been taught, a retaining wall; it's a wall surrounding vaulted rooms on the inside.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Have a safe trip home!