Kibbutz, Hezekiah's Tunnel

May 23, 2007
Today 5 of the service couples left the Center early to see the Festival of the Harvest in a Kibbutz about 1 hour away from Jerusalem. Again, the drive there thru the country was one of very pretty farm fields. Once there, we sat on the hillside to await the little program. There was a band playing music, girls dancing typical Israeli dances - each with a basket representing the harvest, little children dressed as animals or ducks, groups of people carrying young animals – turkey, goat, etc., older people singing folk songs, and then towards the end the 7 families with brand new babies born since last year’s festival all came on stage with their children. As the last folk song finished, the children let go of their brightly colored balloons which traveled quickly up into the sky – it was almost like fireworks.

We noticed how family-oriented the people were, and friendly. There was no smoking or drinking there – it felt almost like one of our ward parties.

May 27, 2007
Today we went with the students on a half-day field trip to the City of David, where the main attraction is walking thru Hezekiah’s tunnel. He built this tunnel to carry their water supply away from the main source into the Pool of Shiloam in case they were attacked by enemies who would cut off their water supply. It is a very long, narrow path thru solid bedrock, dark, sometimes quite low to the ground, and still today has water from the underground spring running thru it. The water then ends up in the Pool of Shiloam (spelling?), which was just discovered in 2004. The students had a great time walking thru in the dark with only a few flashlights, and all came out wet. I didn’t want to get wet so Bob and I went thru the dry tunnel – an almost parallel tunnel that has no water, is narrow, but slightly lit.

The students went back to school at Noon, but we and another service couple went to the Archeological Park just on the edge of the Western Wall and the Temple Mount. It was fascinating. We watched a virtual tour of what the Temple looked like (very interesting and helpful), then we walked all thru and around the ruins. There are still some steps remaining that people would take to get up to the temple. Instead of being regular distances from each other, there is a short step, followed by a deeper step (so you have to take 2 steps on this landing before you can reach the next step up). The reason for this was so that people would walk slower, could gather their robes and/or children, causing them to look down with bowed heads on their way up to the Temple. We saw where the markets stalls were right out the Temple wall, etc. It was a place we could go back to again.

That night we had a marvelous concert at the Center, a piano trio – 2 from Israel and 1 from Russia (all between 22-25 years of age). They were out of this world – very wonderful musicians. When the pianist played a Chopin piece, he made the piano “talk”. It was one of the best concerts so far.