The priceless heritage we share

Two weeks ago, my colleague, Andy Cook, shared his insight that trips to Israel and visits to its many biblical sites have revealed and connected him and his tour groups to Christianity’s roots in Judaism.

In a similar vein, I, as a Jew, confess that my own foundation for understanding Christianity was laid in visits there, as well.

My very first trip to Israel occurred in 1971. I was a 20-year-old college student participating in a six-week study program sponsored by the Department of Religion at George Washington University, where I was an undergraduate at the time.

Our tour group that summer was made up of 35 or so university students, faculty and clergy from the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area. Our goal was to learn about each others’ faiths by visiting each others’ sacred sites in the Holy Land.

At that time, I must confess, I knew relatively little about the Gospel accounts and Christian faith beyond those directly tied to the celebrations and observances of Christmas and Easter.

It’s one thing to recount biblical stories about King David; it’s another thing altogether to actually stand at his grave. By that I mean that when any of us visit sacred places in the land of Israel, biblical lives and events suddenly take on whole new significations that inexplicably and inextricably become a more deeply meaningful part of our beings.

So as a Jew, it was personally meaningful to me to visit the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus.

In Nazareth where Jesus came of age, our group visited the Church of the Annunciation, the place where the archangel Gabriel announced the future birth of Jesus to Mary.

Traveling through the Galilee, we stopped to visit the rather exquisite Church of the Beatitudes, which is built on the site where Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount.

Then coming down from those heights, our tour bus stopped in Capernaum, Peter’s home, where we walked around the preserved ruins of the ancient synagogues that Andy Cook mentioned in his column two weeks ago. We then set sail across the Sea of Galilee and bathed in a source of the River Jordan.

In Jerusalem, the original stone steps upon which Jesus actually tread as he ascended up to the ancient Temple have since been uncovered and excavated. We did visit the Upper Room, the traditional site of the Last Supper, very close by. The Garden of Gethsemane at the foot of the Mount of Olives where Jesus prayed and his disciples slept the night before his crucifixion was only a short walk away just outside of the Old City walls.

I still regard my own trek along the Via Dolorosa, Jesus’ path to crucifixion, past its 14 Stations of the Cross as one of the most powerful experiences of my entire life. That “Way of the Cross” ends at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the very sites of Calvary, and Jesus’ empty tomb and resurrection.

That was my introduction, as a Jew, to the Gospel accounts and the beginnings of Christian faith and tradition. And it was then and there in the land of Israel that I, too, came to the realization that we Jews and Christians share that “priceless heritage” of which my good friend and colleague, Andy Cook, recently wrote.

This story was originally published April 25, 2017 at 3:27 PM with the headline "The priceless heritage we share."