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The one of the most exhilarating religious ritual in town, to my opinion.
A long, long time ago a noble and erudite muslim geographer returned to his hometown of Jerusalem in order to write a book depicting his many journeys throughout all countries in the Islamic world. And among all sights he has seeing the one he treasured the most was of the golden dome of the rock at dawn. In his own words he wrote:
At the dawn when the light of the sun first strikes the Dome and the drum catches the rays, then is this edifice a marvelous sight and one such that in all of Islam I have not seen the equal, neither in pagan times.
- Muhammad Al-Muqaddasi (985 A.C.)
Today, 1,029 years later I was fortunate to capture the very same sight that Al-Muqaddasi had eloquently portrayed in his writing.
This entrance to the Temple Mount is open only during the month of Ramadan and other special occasions in the Muslim calendar. However, thanks to a gentleman from the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf the guards were willing to open the door for few minutes and let a sun ray to penetrate through the half open gate into the vaulted alley of the Souq al-Qattanin.
One of the jewish rituals practiced on the eve of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) is known as Kapparot. The head of the family swings live rooster and hen (for women) above his family members heads and recites the following three times:
This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my atonement. (This rooster (hen) will go to its death ), while I will enter and proceed to a good long life and to peace
And thus, the sins of a person are symbolically transferred to the fowl. The fowl is then brought to a slaughterhouse and the butcher (shochett) is performs the Derasah (pressing) on which the knife is drawn across the throat and never hacking or pressing it. The ritual of the kapparot with live chickens is still performed in some of the ultra-orthodox communities, in spite of the fact that many prominent figures of the jewish law strongly oppose the custom and consider it as a non-Jewish ritual. I think their reasoning is true nowadays…While I were there, in the slaughterhouse, with all the chickens brought in, I could simply see the death in their eyes.
Empty-handed we enter this world, so empty-handed we leave it
Mount of Olives' lookout towards Old Jerusalem
One of, and perhaps the most, impressive sun-worship rituals from the pre-Hellenic Aegean period had been in honor of the Greek god Helios that Homer describes as, giving light to both gods and men. Part of the ritual involved a giant chariots pulled by dozen of horses to the edge of a cliff and from thereupon pushed by into the sea.
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus
- Mark Twain
The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along
Jalal al-Din Rumi
View on Black
And taking the hand of the child, he said to her, "Talitha kumi" [Mark 5:41]
View of a Christmas tree in Manger Square before the Armenian Church of Nativity, traditionally accepted as the birth place of Jesus Christ, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem.
Photo by: EPA/JIM HOLLANDER
