We visited Tsefat (alternative spellings: Safed, Safad, Tsfat, Tzfat, Tzefat) about two weeks ago. It is my favorite city in Israel: spiritual, up in the clouds (it’s on a hill), artistic, architecturally interesting, walkable, colorful. Lecha Dodi, the lovely prayer welcoming the Sabbath queen that we sing every Friday night, was composed by Rabbi Shlomo Halevy Alkabetz in the 16th century in Tsefat.
Here’s a welcoming sign to the old section on the busy main street at the top of the city’s hill.
Ari Synagogue (Ashkenazi)
Abuhav Synagogue on the right: lots of blue here. Blue is a recurring theme in Tsefat.
My husband and middle son went for a dip in the mikvah of the Ari.
Stay tuned for a post about the simple, delicious, kosher, healthy food that we ate in a little square in Tsefat. Unfortunately, Eldest son, same son who does not like garlic, didn’t care for Tsefat because he found it smelly.
Have you ever gone along with a group(family, friend, spouse) and agreed to do some activity, only to find it was a GREAT activity?
Such was my experience with visiting the City of David (see entrance in above photo, with Arab neighborhood of Silwan in the background; there is a valley between the entrance center and the neighborhood that one can’t see in the photo).
All I heard prior to our visit was:
- Our legs were going to get wet.
- We needed to take our flashlights to Israel just for this tour.
Because my daughter did not want to go through the wet part, called Hezekiah’s tunnel (nor did 3/4 of our tour group), I didn’t even experience the wet, flashlight section.
Getting back to the beginning, here’s what we saw even before we entered that harp entrance:
There is some archaeological dig going on behind that mural. The mural on the right shows up again at the end of our tour, as it represents how the ancient Siloam pool may have looked.
At the beginning of our tour our guide, Oren, pointed to the walls around the “Ir HaAtika”, as the ancient walled section of Jerusalem is called and said: “For the purposes of this tour, those walls are new.” Indeed, they were built by the Ottomans a mere 500 years ago. Oren was an articulate, knowledgeable, enthusiastic guide, as was our tour guide of the day before, who led us on a tour of Herod’s western wall of the 2nd Temple. Oren spoke English well and knew Tanakh and biblical archeology.
Here’s Oren showing us a drawing found in this area, one similar to that on the 5 shekel coin:
Underneath us in that photo is what archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar deemed to be David’s Palace. This discovery took place in 2005, a mere 3 years ago. I first learned about this discovery while working on Prof. Gary Rendsburg’s Bible and History course.
Oren told us how British archaeologists in the early twentieth century dug up a lot of this area, but they did not discover the palace Dr. Mazar found. They did, however, jumble up many of the layers of history, making the job of current archaeologists all the more difficult. Also, the city is on a hill, so many of the precious “trash” of the centuries rolled down into the valley, all mixed up instead of in nice layers as archaeologists would prefer.
A tourist building about the City of David was supposed to be built here. However, all that got built were those concrete walls, because an archaeologist was sent in to inspect before the building could receive a building permit. The permit was never issued, and more digs are going on in this area.
Here’s the plaque inside this room. I would have liked to photograph the English as well, but Oren had put his book bag on top of it. Loosely translated, the first sentence says Prof. Roni Reich in 1995 started excavating the Gihon Spring area here. (Anyone who cares to translate the rest, feel free! I’ll add it). The Gihon Spring is key; this whole area was developed over 3000 years ago because there was water here. The plaque ends with this quote from Samuel 2 5:8
וַיֹּאמֶר דָּוִד בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא, כָּל-מַכֵּה יְבֻסִי וְיִגַּע בַּצִּנּוֹר
Basically, the way King David conquered the Jebusite city situated on this hill was by attacking the water source. Tsinor may mean water source and may refer to the Gihon Spring.
Above is Warren’s Shaft, discovered in the 1860’s. I wrote about Charles Warren previously. It used to be thought that this was the ancient spring from which the city’s inhabitants got water, by dropping their buckets down this shaft to retrieve water. Now this whole theory is debunked, with archaeologists believing this is just a natural fissure in the rock.
Finally, we get to the fun part: Hezekiah’s tunnel. Why was this tunnel built? As you may recall, David conquered the city from the Jebusites by capturing the water source. So when the Assyrian king threatened the Kingdom of Judah in 700 BCE, the smart thing to do was to protect the water source by diverting the water with a tunnel, called Hezekiah’s tunnel.
My daughter and I didn’t go through the wet section, which my son said was a lot of fun. You can see from maps that the water tunnel was built in a twisty, turny way, with two sets of diggers working at two ends and then managing to meet in the middle.
Instead, we traveled through what is referred to as the Canaanite Channel. She declared it ‘squooshy’, and I asked her if she knows the meaning of the word claustrophobia.
Here’s where we came out. Notice how far down the hill we are from where we started. Click on the photo to see larger detail. Towards the top of the photo, where building meets sky, you can see the walls of the “Old” City (that you now know as new).
The tour guide then led us to what may have been the Siloam Pool, a pool that gathered water from the Gihon Spring. We also saw some steps from a little before the Roman period, that alternated wide step, short step, wide step, short step. The wide steps were so donkeys could climb up along with people.
At right is a detail from Siloam pool mural at the end of our tour.
The tour was fun for adults and kids alike, as there was a lot to see and learn and fun passageways in which to traverse. To see if any of you are still with me, I’ll leave you with Oren’s quiz:
- What did 98% of people do (for a living) in the times of David?
- What do 60% of people do today (what motion with his hands did Oren make for this question)?
City of David website
Here’s a photo of my daughter trying to walk backwards at the Kotel, the Western Wall. It is considered respectful not to put your back to the Kotel. The wall that one can see at the Kotel plaza is actually a mere fragment of the walls of the Second Temple renovated by Herod Around 19 BCE.
We took an underground tour that showed us the full extent of the wall on the west. On this tour we passed by Warren’s Gate, an ancient entrance to the Temple. I was surprised to see women davening (praying) as we tourists tramped on through them. The men had less interuption in a balcony above. This is considered the closest one can get to the Kodesh HaKedoshim, the Holy of Holies. The gate is named after the explorer Charles Warren, whom our tour guide told us to Google to find out more about this fascinating man. According to our guide, at some point in his tunnel explorations Warren seemed to have accidentally come upon the bathroom of some nuns, but I couldn’t find any evidence of this anecdote online. He was also known to have failed to find Jack the Ripper when he returned to England.
I am working on a post of Ir David, the most fascinating of the tours we took, because every few months they discover something new. And this is by far the most ancient section of Jerusalem (it is right outside the Dung Gate, outside of what is called the Old City). Charles Warren shows up again in Ir David.
Can you identify what is in this photo?
Hint from Parshat Korach (Numbers 18:30) —
Therefore thou shalt say unto them: When ye set apart the best thereof from it, then it shall be counted unto the Levites as the increase of the threshing-floor, and as the increase of the wine-press.
Ilana-Davita (5.) was the closest thus far. I’ll post the answer with more photos and explanation next week.
My breakfast at Kfar Blum (my son makes fun of how much salad I eat)
Westbank Mama hosts Kosher Cooking Carnival.
And
Phyllis at ImaBima hosts Haveil Havalim: The Packing for Camp Edition. Thank you, Phyllis, for including some Pirkei Avot links and a link to my Galil post. We need to pack for camp (Camp Stone, for Middle Son) when we are finished unpacking from our Israel trip.
Yesterday was Parshat Naso, a great parsha with laws of the suspected adulteress, laws of the nazir, the Kohen’s blessing and gifts of the tribes. Maybe next year I’ll write a post on this parsha, but some bloggers came up with some good divrei Torah (words of Torah) that I would like to present.
First, read Jack’s Haveil Havelim #168 Go Celtics Edition.
On Parshat Naso:
If you needed to decorate your house for just two days with some kind of flower theme, how would you do it? If you wanted to involve your children in the project, how could you make it fun?
Here’s some quick ideas:
- Buy some beautiful (but expensive) flowers at the florist.
- Go to the supermarket and buy some OK flowers.
- Do tissue paper flowers (do you use pipe cleaners and twist around the middle and trim the tissue paper?).
- Draw pictures of flowers and plants and hang those up.
- Go pillaging through your garden and find something or another that might possibly last for two days.
Ideas welcome.
The holiday of Shavuot is coming, and it is customary to decorate one’s house with flowers. The origin of the custom may be a tradition of vegetation sprouting up around the mountain of Sinai when the Torah was given, or it may be connected to the agricultural roots of this holiday, which is also called Hag HaKatzir, the holiday of the harvest. Whether you celebrate this holiday or not, I am sure you can come up with at least one idea of how we could floralize our house.
After a busy Sunday (see the parade) and a Monday of work, here’s a simple post.
A snapdragon from my front yard.
I had the pleasure of marching in uniform with Troop 55 of Highland Park/Edison, New Jersey in the Salute to Israel Day Parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City. The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America are some of the first marchers in the parade. We are right behind the Veterans of America. First, we had to get there:
At left, we leave from Edison, New Jersey. At right, we are in Penn Station, New York.
A lot of waiting for the parade to start:
Finally, we march:
There were a lot more schools and floats from many organizations that we missed, because we wanted to get home. In particular, it would have been nice to see RPRY(my children’s school) and TABC(the high school my son will attend next year). But they weren’t marching until much later.
This one is a reflection in the window of a New York apartment building:
So here are some of the tired scouts, sitting down this time in Penn Station:
We got to ride on these cool double-decker trains on our train ride back to New Jersey.
See also Elinka’s parade pictures.
In between working on intriguing posts for your enjoyment and taking care of my family, I do website work for a number of Central New Jersey businesses and organizations. Sometimes it takes a while before my work becomes public, but recently I edited a number of web pages that I can share with you:
- Yesterday, I put the Rutgers Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life’s
Fall 2008 Public Events. Note that in December Dara Horn, author of The World to Come, a book recommended by Mother in Israel, will be speaking at Rutgers.
- The Highland Park Public Library has a bug poster to advertise summer programming for children. The bug poster, by children’s book illustrator Harry Bliss, is part of a national program called Collaborative Summer Library Program, so you may see a similar one on another library site. I just added some text to make it unique to our library.
- New Jersey School of Dental Assisting had me add their newest schedule, information about tuition and financing, and a new field on their contact form.
- I did some edits for Wilkin & Guttenplan, an accounting firm in East Brunswick, New Jersey, including an animated gif of Best Places to Work award logos that you can see on the bottom right of the Careers page.
I will soon be working on a new online course for the Rutgers Bildner Center. The courses are free; so if you have some time to do a course, go to the Jewish Studies Online Studies page to take the Bible & History or the Israeli Political System. Also, I’ve been working a site for a local firm that is not yet public.
