Frohe Weihnachten

It didn’t rain until I had already been here for over two months. Since the first storm came through in mid-October, the sandy ground has become overgrown with beautiful green grass and the dry canals in the mango and olive plantations turned into rushing streams. Before heading out to the desert for a leisurely mid-December camping trip, I was warned multiple times to watch out for flash floods, to which I politely nodded and inwardly scoffed. However, the rain has gotten more heavy and consistent since then. Now we get around 4 or 5 days a week with rain, which the Israeli people see as a reason to celebrate rather than sulk. Rain brings life to a country where the level of the Sea of Galilee has lowered so much in recent years that ancient ruins from around the time of Jesus have been revealed to the glee of hungry archaeologists.

Nonetheless, sometimes enough is enough. An especially rainy evening on Wednesday, January 8, quickly turned the wadis (streambeds that are dry for most of the year) from newly flowing streams into raging rivers.

I have always marveled at the snowdrifts and fallen trees that follow the extreme weather in Minnesota, so this first encounter with a flood was a special sort of introduction to the strangeness of a snowless winter, as well as a welcome distraction from the news about the rising tensions between the U.S. and nearby Iran.

Despite the changing world around us, life goes on here in Tabgha, with the majority of recent change coming from within. The biggest development since my last blog post is that ongoing renovations in the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem has required several of the monks to move into the Tabgha monastery, bringing our monk population from 3 to 8. This has allowed us to connect a little more with the typically withdrawn monks. The majority of our interactions come either in passing or on Wednesdays and Sundays, when we have scheduled social time during or after dinner. Luckily, the Christmas season has given us more opportunities to get to know the newly arrived monks as well as some of the German Christmas traditions. A few highlights were the cookies, songs, and playing games and watching Joyeux Noel with the monks.

We took part in a unique annual Christmas fundraiser and pilgrimage run by the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem. More than 100,000 names were submitted to be written on a scroll, which was carried in prayer on an overnight walk from Jerusalem, past the checkpoint into the West Bank, and finally Bethlehem. Before the pilgrimage, many Israeli Jews attended the late night services, which were a mix of German, Hebrew, and English. Our cluster of about 170 people arrived at the Church of the Nativity around 4:30 on Christmas morning. After a prayer service that I may have slept through and a half hour of waiting in the cold for the bus, we made it back to Jerusalem as the sun came up.

It’s hard to explain how I felt during the pilgrimage. I walked much of the way with a friend from Boston that I had met only a few days before, and our conversation about his past, the current world, and my future sticks in my memory more than the trademark powerful parts of such an experience. Maybe I will appreciate the value of this trip in the future, but for now I am happy to have done it.

Another big part of the German Christmas that my German friends constantly hyped up was the Christmas markets, so naturally we took a short trip to visit the Arab variation in Fassuta, per recommendation by a friend in our monastery’s souvenir shop. Unfortunately, we could only stay there for an hour due to the bus schedule, but we did have enough time to get some Glühwein (mulled wine) and to speculate as to why some of the stands were playing hip hop music at a Christmas market.

We also celebrated Christmas with our lovely neighbors down the way. The five Filipino sisters know how to bring a party to our nonchalant community with amazing food, games, and music.

A few days after Christmas, we travelled back to Bethlehem to visit some of the recipients of the Christmas donation. Several of these organizations support people with disabilities in the Bethlehem area, and so they are regular visitors of ours. It’s been a few months since we’ve had a group stay with us, so seeing them again was a great reminder of the main purpose of our work in Tabgha.

Besides all the time spent celebrating Christmas, we did find some time to work, too. The Beit Noah meeting space that we operate has been closed for the season since November, so we have been able to take things a little more schwei schwei than usual. On the days when I wasn’t scrubbing down every square inch of the guest rooms and kitchens, I got the opportunity to see into the life of a monk when our brilliant fix-it-all/build-it-all man Nizar conscripted me to help renovate the monastery cells in preparation of the incoming monks. I found the interior to be elegant yet simple, chilly yet still comfortable enough to live a life of contemplation. It is difficult to understand the life of a monk only from stories, so it was fascinating to see for myself.

On Tuesday, the six of us volunteers will take a 9-day trip to Jordan to spend a few days in the ancient city of Petra. The prospect of seeing Petra was a big draw for me to come to Israel, and I am still very excited, but I’m finding that some of my excitement has been redistributed to the incoming visit of my family and the remaining 6-7 months of my time here. It’s good here, so I’m not going to play favorites to any moment until they’re all memories.

Thanks for reading, to those of you who made it this far! Happy holidays and God bless.