Day 25: Friday, May 16, Shiloh

Today we hit Shiloh. Since Shabbat starts at sundown on Friday, this was a short day. While driving there we passed a guy riding on a donkey. I saw a lot of that over the course of the trip. They guide them by hitting them on one year or the other with a stick.

Mosaics from a long-abandoned Greek Orthodox church in Shiloh.

Shiloh is where the tabernacle stood for several hundred years before David moved it in preparation for the temple building. It was also where Eli was sitting when a runner brought the news that the Ark of the Covenant had been captured in battle by the Philistines. Jewish tradition teaches that the runner was Saul, who later became king.

The current synagogue in Shiloh is modeled after the tabernacle. It has a big altar outside attached to the synagogue on which they perform a lot of marriages. I said I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to be married outside on an altar, and a guy on the trip quipped that “when you marry, you realize the true meaning of sacrifice.”

In the course of conversations Mickey talked about a British general (Orde Wingate) who trained Jewish settlers in the guerilla warfare tactics later used against the British. Wingate, a gentile who supported Zionist Israelis, consciously created and trained Israeli units, knowing that their tactics would be used against the British. These arguably treasonous actions made him one of Mickey’s heroes. Talk also turned to fighter aircraft plans sold to China. Israel wanted to develop its own aircraft and actually got U.S. aid money to do so; a combination of factors (Israel’s inability to build enough to lower the per-unit cost, pressure from American defense industry, etc.) led Israel to cancel the project. They sold the plans – which included top-secret U.S. technology – to China, and the end result is the J-10 that China officially revealed in 2006.

We had lunch in Ariel. It is heavily populated by Russian Jews; Mickey said that about 25 orthodox families evicted from a settlement in Gaza joined the Russians because the Russian Jews were completely non-religious. The families were basically Jewish missionaries to other Jews.

A fuel-efficient means of transportation.

Many people here live in trailer homes. They are officially not permanent buildings and therefore can get around some laws preventing permanent buildings in contested areas. People frequently park the trailer and then brick over the outside, making it look permanent.

Our tour coordinator had fallen on his knee and was talking about it with Mickey at dinner. Mickey said something about checking his mezuzah (the thing that Jews put on their doorframe; see Deut 6:9). What I got was an intro to Jewish mysticism. The response was something like, “I’m not superstitious, but the mezuzah really does affect things.” Apparently he was having issues one time and found out that his mezuzah wasn’t kosher because the letters had worn down, and when he replaced it his problems went away.