with the Marcus & Michelle Bowman family
Our family plus my parents recently had the joy and privilege of taking a two week trip to the Land, with the beginning of the trip being in the middle of Sukkot and ending at the beginning of November. While we’ve been to the Land a couple of times, once right after Michelle and I were married in 2006 and once with HaYovel in 2016, this trip we elected to “do our own thing.” There were parts of the land that we have never seen (and there still are), and we felt that because of that, and because we were traveling with seven children, doing this trip on our own might give us the opportunity to slow down (ha!) and have some flexibility in terms of what we would take time for.
In reflecting on the trip, I’m choosing to divide my report into places, experiences, and connections. Of the three, connections continue to be our focus and nearest to our hearts; we’ll take about those last. I acknowledge that the three are woven together and may be difficult to separate, but we’ll try.
On places: the trip was filled with visits to new places for us (Arugot Farms, Mount Kabir, Caesarea Beach on the Mediterranean, the Ruthie Mann Horse Therapy Center east of Jerusalem, Kiryat Tivon where our second AirBNB was located, Zikhron Yaakov, Kibbutz Belt El, and Haifa) as well as many places we’d been before (Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, Ein Gedi, and the Galilee, to name a few). Each of our family members would likely share different places that were particularly impactful for them. For me, I entered the trip with a desire to get a better geographical grasp of the Land as a whole, something that I find to be challenging to do from inside a tour bus. I also wanted to experience Israel more as a resident would, and less as a tourist does. Mission accomplished, to some extent, as the locations mentioned above took us west to east and south to north throughout the land and due to our living arrangements, we were on the streets of the towns where we stayed interacting with Israelis as we procured food, pumped fuel, and completed other tasks necessary to daily living. I was amazed by the incredibly diverse geography of what we took in, from the barren Jordan Valley along the Dead Sea (hard to put yourself in Lot’s shoes to see it as he saw it the way that it exists now, but we hope to someday see the renewal that Ezekiel 47 describes) to the somewhat less barren and magnificent Judean hills to the beauty of the Mediterranean and Sea of Galilee coastlines, to the rugged forested hills of northern Israel (my personal favorite).
On experiences: the trip was also filled with new experiences – driving in Israel for the first time (which is particularly challenging when you’re directionally challenged and they scramble the GPS such that your current location shows as the airport in Amman, Jordan), participating in releasing a young rehabilitated ibex out of its crate to rejoin its Ein Gedi herd, and, as mentioned above, interacting with Israelis going about their daily lives. Buying fresh bread, pastries, and coffee in a bakery in Jerusalem and being informed later by Hanoch that those things we thought were kosher sausages in those pastries were in fact tofu, finding a bank to withdraw shekels from their ATM, observing (and hearing at 3 a.m.) the late night festivities during Sukkot, seeing the sukkot on the balconies and roofs of the old and new city of Jerusalem, taking a ramparts walk along the Ottoman-Turk era old city walls, the kids riding horses at the horse therapy center, swimming in the Mediterranean (while hearing what I’m pretty confident were explosions to the north in Lebanon), scrambling down a flight of stairs late at night to shelter in a safe room (only happened twice), ordering pizza and Thai food from local eateries in Kiryat Tivon and trying to explain to them (with a language barrier) why it was that we had chosen to be in Israel at this time, riding cable cars in Haifa, and many more things that I’m probably forgetting. Did I mention driving and pumping fuel? On the pumping fuel front, we were bailed out of our inability to make sense of the process by friendly IDF soldiers and members of the Magen David Adom service. Side note: our 16-year-old taught me to use Google Translate as I went and things got a little easier after that. 🙂 And many more experiences that we had for a second time, some of them almost 20 years after the first time, such as swimming in the Dead Sea (we got to spend time in in the Dead and Med, but not the Red, as the kids like to say), wading in the Sea of Galilee, visiting the Western Wall and Tunnels and the Temple Mount, and others too numerous to mention.
Finally, on connections, which are both most important and the hardest to describe in terms of their impact on us: in the words of Ephraim Frank, deep called to deep in our soul and spirit while we interacted with these our brothers and sisters on various levels throughout the trip, creating emotions and questions that we will probably be pondering for a long time. New and significant connections for us were Yishay Aveetal (and later his wife) who guided us through our tours of Shiloh, ancient Beit El, and Mount Kabir; Ruthi Mann and her husband Chaim at their horse therapy farm and retreat east of Jerusalem; the artist Udi Merioz of the Blue and White Art Gallery in Jerusalem; Hanoch Young (we knew Hanoch a little bit previously but got to spend significant time and have significant conversation as he toured us around Jerusalem one day); and last but certainly not least, Kibbutz Beit El elder Joachim Blind and his assistant Betty Strayle as they warmly welcomed us and gave us a virtual tour of their kibbutz and explained their long-standing service to the national and people of Israel. We were also privileged to spend time and deepen our relationships with the Hayovel team as we spent a night and part of a couple of days on their base in Samaria, and Ephraim & Rimona Frank as they toured us through Zikhron Yaakov, made the connection for us at Beit El, and spent our second Erev Shabbat in the land with us, expounding on the continued revelation of the restoration of the broken down tabernacle of David in these our days.
An observation that Michelle and I have as we’ve discussed our several trips to Israel is how we have consistently encountered circumstances on those trips that test our ability to walk in the Spirit and not in the flesh. Those circumstances have the potential to rob us of our joy and steal precious time from our visits, and have done that to us, historically. We were in specific conversation and prayer about this as we headed into this trip, and while it was not without its challenging circumstances (a last-minute stomach bug that altered some of our travel itinerary as we were attempting to leave the US and a one-year-old that simply did not travel well for most of the trip as examples), we believe that our Father answered our prayers in giving us many meaningful experiences and connections in places old and new that we trust will endure as the memories of the less-pleasant moments fade. I believe strongly that the enemy is doing everything that he can in this our day to distract us from what is important, particularly when we do spiritually significant things like visiting the land of our forefathers. We pray for our Father’s continued grace and protection as we continue to go up to the Land in an effort to do what we can to further his present and coming Kingdom. May its fullness be realized soon and in our days!
