Bright and Early Sunday morning, there was a crew of us who headed out to the Western Wall to check out the Sukkot festivities happening there. our Israel teacher, Ophir had told us it was something cultural that we might find interesting!
This is the Old City at 6am... Usually this place is LOADED with people and vendors.
Sukkot is a week long Jewish holiday, and Sunday morning at sunrise, the tradition is to wack branches on the ground in hopes that God will send rain -- the cool thing about this is that the next day, it DID rain!
These girls stopped Jaquel and asked her to take a picture of them -- on her camera... people are funny about that here. So we got to talking to them, and they were saying "this tradition is weird to us, so I can't even imagine how crazy you think we are to see this!" We told them it's a cool experience that we are honored to observe. They then explained that the people are "pulling" blessings out of heaven with their branches. And they pray for a blessing on the whole world. "Not just Israel, or themselves -- but EVERYONE. America, too!" I like that tradition. I'm going to start pulling blessings down from heaven for the whole world in my prayers from now on.
My girl Rosie took some GRADE A pictures that morning that you can check out at her blog HERE.
Right after that we met the rest of our class in David's City where we walked around the park and went through Hezekiah's tunnel for round 2! It was cooler this time cause I knew more about it (thank you field trip packet!) and also there wasn't a group ahead of us taking their sweeeeeeeeeet sweet time...
And this is the cutest little Stratford on earth with Michael. Reppin the head lamp.
Entering the tunnels
My camera was spazzing out down there and not flashing... so I only got TWO pictures in the tunnels that didn't look like this:
Luckily both of those pictures were of THIS guy..
He regretted this decision immediately when he realized this was just the beginning, and he was going to be freezing for the next 30 minutes...
A successful round TWO for Hezikiah's tunnel.
3 comments:
I was wondering if Emily even attended this study abroad! haha love you.
It looks like I am not wearing ants in one of those photos. Awkward.
And by ants, I mean pants.
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