In the shuk

“Then you will look and be radiant, and your heart will tremble and swell with joy, because the riches of the sea will be brought to you, and the wealth of the nations will come to you.” - Isaiah 60:5

Friday in Jerusalem, the day of preparation for the Sabbath, and all is astir, brimming and overflowing with life. Israel, a tiny nation not fifty miles wide, has just come out of two anguished years of a multi-front war with barbaric enemies seething with hatred and sending myriads of missiles at our towns and cities and brutally violating our people, in which the knights of David have gone forth and amazingly defanged the genocidal foes all around us, and finally brought back our hostages in peace. We all feel somehow our sons and daughters back home.

The shuk - the outdoor covered market in the center of Jerusalem - is joyfully crowded with shoppers preparing for the Sabbath. A wonderful feeling of comradery flows through the very crowded shuk, which is stocked full of every kind of fruit and vegetable, grapes and dates and figs and bread and cakes and sweets and wines and whiskies from Scotland, and meat and poultry and fish, with fresh salmon from Norway and trout raised in the cold waters of the upper Jordan in the Galilee and St. Peter’s fish and mullet and many varieties of fish from the Mediterranean Sea.

In the bustling crowd is every shade and color of humanity - Black Ethiopians, Arabs in their traditional garb, Christian priests and nuns, Jews of every persuasion - with beards and sidelocks, uniformed brave and shapely teenage girl soldiers with rifles strapped across their backs, the Moroccan and the Russian, the American and the Yemenite, the young and the very old, mothers with babies, Jews gathered from every corner of the planet and returned to the Holy Land after two millennia, as promised in the scrolls of the Torah.

Then at sundown everything stops. Jerusalem now restored waxes silent as the ancient covenant and sign of the Shabbat comes in, and the city from which the prophets sent forth the word of God to the nations of the world turns golden in the setting sun, its ancient limestone walls glowing with hope, our prayers rising to the Heavens.