Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
March 2007 – “I’m in Jerusalem,” I whispered aloud in my hotel room, and the very thought of being in the Biblical city gave me chills.
I was one of six journalists from the U.S. and Canada who had been invited by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism to, well, tour Israel. As someone who gets paid to pay attention to current affairs, traveling to a country that is frequently in the news was an exciting prospect.
However, we were also all Christian journalists, and as we traveled around the country of Israel visiting cultural, historical and archeological sites, it was more than just an academic or professional exercise. What was most on my mind was the fact that Jerusalem represented the origins of my faith – the faith that forms the joy of my life, the hope of my future and the anchor of my soul.
As someone who is also a pastor, I was visiting places I had preached about countless times during more than 24 years of ministry.
I was in Jerusalem, and the sites there were awesome: the Mount of Olives, the Tower of David museum, the Western Wall, Golgotha, the Garden Tomb and countless others.
Life in the desert
Our tour didn’t start in Jerusalem, however, but ended there. We had begun four days earlier in Old Jaffa and Tel Aviv. It was in Old Jaffa that I got my first taste of the character of the people who have come to populate this amazing country.
Making our way through some of the narrow streets of Old Jaffa, artist Stanley Handelman and his wife Rose spotted us and invited us into their art gallery. They explained how, in the early 1970s, they had uprooted their family, including three teenage boys, and moved from America to Israel to begin a new life. It was their participation in the “aliyah,” they explained, the “ascension” to Israel as Jews from around the world return from exile to live in the land of their ancestors.
At the time of the Handelmans’ immigration, Israel was essentially a Third World country, lacking many of the amenities they had enjoyed as Americans. The building in which their beautiful gallery now exists had been a ruin back then, requiring extensive repairs. In 1973, two years after they began the reconstruction, Studio Handelman opened for business.
Their personal experiences, however, are like a metaphor for the nation itself. Just as the Handelmans rebuilt an old ruined house in Old Jaffa, the rest of their countrymen rebuilt a nation, one to which numerous Jews from around the world continue to stream. All throughout our tour, our Jewish guide, Ikey Korin, told us stories of Jews from Germany, Russia, the U.S. and elsewhere who had come to Israel to build new lives for themselves.
Israel is a Third World country no longer, but a robust, modern state. Smaller, I was told, than the state of New Jersey, Israel’s accomplishments over the past century – and especially the last three decades – are nothing short of astonishing.
Take something like water, for example, which most Americans take for granted. Israel and much of the Middle East exist in a very arid part of the world. “Water is life,” Ikey said, reciting an old proverb, and it is the most obvious proverb in the world for a people surrounded by desert, by brown and dust and rock.
And yet the Israeli people everywhere find ways to conserve water, directing it to waiting pools and reservoirs, or piping it for miles to a kibbutz (Israeli commune) so people can live and work and irrigate their crops.
So, driving through the desert on our way to Masada, the ancient mountaintop fortress of Herod the Great, we saw sheep and camels grazing under the watchful eyes of their herdsmen, eating vegetation that was barely visible from our vehicle. But one could also see banana, palm or olive trees in large groves, startling patches of life-giving greenness in the middle of a nearly barren wasteland.
Elsewhere I peered with amazement through the windows of our van as we drove past ponds where fish are being raised in the middle of a waterless desert!
Viewing history
As incredible as the miracle of modern Israel is, for many Christians it is the miracles of the distant past which are most meaningful.
In the Holy Land the events of Scripture are given new life through the work of archeologists and other experts. In Israel it seems as if it is impossible to turn over a spadeful of dirt without uncovering the top of some ancient artifact, house or pillar. The country is, after all, the home to most of the redemptive history of the Bible.
The names of places evoke not only Scripture, but the emotions associated with Biblical events that are etched into the hearts of believers as surely as reliefs etched into ancient stones.
Every place seems to echo with Biblical import: the ruins of Caesarea, the ancient port built by Herod the Great; the town of Nazareth, with its churches commemorating the angelic annunciation to Mary; the Jordan River and the traditional site where John the Baptist baptized Jesus; the Mount of Beatitudes; Capernaum, the fishing town which played such a central role in the ministry of Jesus; and Bethsaida, the birthplace of Peter, Andrew and Philip, and the town where Jesus healed the blind man.
An unseen hand
Interestingly, some of the places that were most meaningful on this trip were not even places directly associated with the Bible.
For example, we visited Bet Yigal Alon, a museum at which a 2,000-year-old fishing boat from the time of Jesus is on display; or the Qumran community, where the sect of the Essenes lived and diligently copied the Scriptures which would later become known as the Dead Sea Scrolls – the oldest copies we have of the Old Testament.
Both of these discoveries seem to be according to Providence, because if the scrolls or the boat had been discovered even decades earlier, the techniques used for preservation would have been unavailable. It was as if the Lord Himself, with His great, unseen hand, was uncovering the past in order to speak to us today, and doing so only when we could safeguard the existence of these incredible finds.
Sometimes God speaks to us of a history that is not so distant. Yad Vashem, Israel’s national museum commemorating the horrors of the Holocaust, is one such place. Established in 1953 by the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, Yad Vashem is dedicated to documenting the history of the Holocaust and educating visitors about the cultural and political events leading to the willful eradication of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.
It is difficult to conceive of such a horrific event until you stand in Yad Vashem and look into the faces of human beings, photographed sometimes just days before they were loaded onto trains and sent to death camps; when you read hastily-written letters scribbled by those doomed to die, as they tried to make sense of what was happening or attempted to communicate on scraps of paper a lifetime’s worth of feeling for loved ones; when you look at a pair of glasses or see a pair of shoes or a leather suitcase, and you realize that these were worn or carried by another human being who was exterminated by a hatred that viewed them as nothing more than vermin.
Promises kept
The ruins of Herod’s fortress at Masada similarly speak of the horror and heartbreak experienced by the Jewish people over the centuries. At Masada, a stronghold atop a nearly inaccessible plateau, a small band of Jewish freedom-fighters, along with their wives and children, resisted a Roman army of some 15,000 legionaries, auxiliaries and slaves.
By this time the Jewish Revolt, which began in A.D. 66 and resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in A.D. 70, had been brutally crushed. The Jews in Masada alone resisted.
It was Israel’s last stand, and it failed. In A.D. 73, after using Jewish slaves to build an immense, dirt ramp to the fortress, the Romans prepared to finally take Masada. Knowing that a cruel fate awaited them, the nearly 1,000 men, women and children agreed to take their own lives rather than fall into the hands of their conquerors.
Like so much in Israel, however, the past is not the end of the story. In 1949, after the nascent Israeli state had successfully defended itself from an attack launched by its Muslim neighbors, the Israeli flag was raised upon the summit of Masada.
Seeing that flag may have been the most meaningful moment of my trip to Israel, for it represented the faithfulness of God to His promises. Although the Romans triumphed in A.D. 73, it is they, strong and influential though they once were, who are consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history. Where now are the Roman legions? Where are their siege engines, their generals and their eagle standards?
Without that flag being raised, Masada might have simply been a towering monument to the unspeakable sufferings of the Jewish people. Instead, fluttering high above Masada’s ruins is the flag of the modern state of Israel, prospering and flowering in the arid land of the Middle East, a land to which thousands of Jews have returned as if in answer to some whispered call.
Yes, once again the Jews possess Masada. God has kept and is keeping and will keep His promises to the people of Israel. And that is proof enough that He will keep His promises to me. 
