Susan's Blog: Pilgrimage to Israel/Palestine. Caesarea Maritima, Nazareth, and Sephoris. Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

"Amira Hass, Israeli peace activist and journalist, a child of Holocaust survivors, who lives in Ramallah in the West Bank, sends weekly dispatches to the Israeli press to tell her fellow Jews the true story of the occupation. Hass credits her mother for showing her the way to her own course of action as a Jew and an Israeli. She tells the story of her mother on a day in 1944, herded from a cattle car into the Bergen-Belsen death camp. As she climbed down from the train, Hass's mother observed a group of German women on bicycles, slowing down to watch with indifferent curiosity on their faces. 'For me,' writes Hass, 'these women became a loathsome symbol of watching from the sidelines, and at an early age I decided that my place was not with the bystanders.'"
Fatal Embrace: Christians, Jews, and the Search for Peace in the Holy Land. Mark Braverman. 2010

Today we left Jerusalem for three days out of town.

Here, a photo of the wall/"separation fence" from the road. In many places where it meets the road, it's obscured by trees. But here you can see pretty well that it's a high wall on a high embankment, topped with razor wire.

First, westward to Caesarea Maritima, a city on the Mediterranean that was built by Herod the Great (the collaborationist king of Israel until 4 CE) to be a Roman-style city in Israel. Ampitheatre, hippodrome, cardo, palaces, baths--it's was all here, a huge and impressive Roman city. Now, in ruins. After Herod died it was taken over by the Romans, and this is where Pontius Pilate would have been living when he had to go down to Jerusalem to manage the 'situation' with the Jews piling into town for Passover.

This is what's left of Herod's palace looking out into the sea. It's a ridiculously great location. As someone pointed out today, you'd be in a bad mood too if you had to leave this to go deal with a bunch of rabble in a dirty, crowded city.

This is the same place that features in Acts 10, when Peter gets the message to share the Gospel with the Gentiles. As well as Acts 25, when Paul asserts his rights as a Roman citizen.

Now, Caesarea Maritima is a huge park, clean and with helpful signs explaining the uses of various stone structures. So it was indeed a significant contrast to drive east into Galilee and find ourselves, forty minutes later, in Nazareth.

Galilee itself is, according to our tour guide, the most beautiful and peaceful region of Israel. We passed field after field of food crops, olive trees, mango trees. It's green, whereas the regions around Jerusalem are quite literally desert. It's beautiful.

Nazareth, at the time of Jesus, was a tiny town. Perhaps as small as 300-400 people. Excavations have found stone-paved pathways and houses consistent with a small Jewish village there. Now, it is the largest Arab city in Galilee-- 100,000 people. 70% Muslim, 30% Christian. The infrastructure and amenities are visibly poorer than those of the affluent, Jewish West Jerusalem. But compared to the other Arab towns in Galilee, it is relatively rich. Just driving through the town is a study in contrasts. Whereas Caesarea had been well-groomed, clean, and full of natural beauty, Nazareth seems crowded, littered, and its obvious natural glory--positioned on top of a hill in Galilee--is obscured by the open trash dumps in the valleys. The town was quiet, on Sunday afternoon.

 

 

 

Nazareth, you remember, is the town where Mary lived when the angel Gabriel visited her--hence, the huge Basilica of the Annunciation, stewarded by Franciscans, here. All over the grounds and inside the modern concrete building, Roman Catholic faithful from all over the world have sent mosaics of the Virgin Mary to adorn the walls. They are beautiful, and the architecture of the basilica itself is very striking.

 

It was 3pm by the time we left Nazareth, which, you remember, is also the place where Jesus would have grown up.

 

 

From there, we headed to a national park a few miles away, on the top of a nearby hill--Zippora (or Sephoris). Sephoris would have been about an hour's walk from Nazareth. And where Nazareth was a small Jewish town, Sephoris was a huge and wealthy settlement (also built by Herod the Great). Scholars speculate that Joseph, being a carpenter, might have been living in Nazareth because of the access to construction jobs in Sephoris.

 

Excavations there reveal wealthy homes on the edge of the hill, with a spectacular view, that boast mikveh--Jewish ritual baths. We spent about an hour there, wandering the site and looking at the remains, wondering what it would have been like during Jesus' day and whether he might have been there, exposed to Hellenistic theatre and culture.

 

Then, back on the bus, hot and tired, we headed for our temporary home--a guest house on Mount Beatitudes. It's beautiful, and overlooks the Galilee. I am on the balcony right now using the wifi and looking at the moon. Glorious.

Here is the challenge of today: it is lovely and moving to walk among the ruins of cities, to see things that perhaps Jesus saw and walk where perhaps he walked, in clean and quiet parks, preserved for the tourist and pilgrim. It is, in some ways, all very tidy. We get to keep our vision of how things happened in the gospels. With just the foundations of ancient buildings, we are free to build dreamy versions of the story in our minds that perhaps match up with the pictures we saw in Sunday School.

But I wonder if, in fact, that is not so different from the women on the bicycles.
I wonder, if we shield ourselves from the grit and noise and messiness and poverty of Nazareth, and if we shield ourselves from the sight of a big wall by the road--if we are more similar to the women on the bicycles than we would like to be.