Nearly the end of the trip, but certainly not the end of the blog.

There are so many more things I remember that I would like to share in this blog. But I won't catch up on them now. For now, I'm updating live from an internet cafe in Jerusalem.

I took a sample of a Jewish spirituality class for that last few days. I met Mottle, the guy who runs it, at a synagogue and he invited me to do it for these few days, giving me room and board and everything. He was hoping I'd decide to stay and extend my trip, but when I said I didn't want to, he didn't push it at all. He proved that he truly wasn't doing it only to get me to join. When he said I could just chill there for a few days and he only wanted to share his awesome program with me, he really meant it. Good guy.

The program was quite good. It didn't turn me around and make me feel more religious, but it did show me that, as I thought, I have a good potential to be a religious person. Or a spiritual person. Or whatever you want to say.

Some of the way the teachers talked about Judaism were as foreign to me as Christianity or Islam. They taught it as a more loving, almost Eastern religion in which YHWH is more like the infinitely faceted Hindu gods, or like the Tao that flows through everything.

And the dorm/study space is located in the most picturesque neighborhood in all of Israel: Nachlaot, Jerusalem. It resembles the Old City, with buildings made of stone with tiny yars behind walls, and blue metal shutters. But it lacks the claustrophobic and touristy feeling of the Old City. The buildings are farther apart and, well, there are no tourists. it's full of hippies and super religious folks. There are some cars, but they are few. it is full of parks and gardens, but they are all compact and personable. It all has a very compact feeling, but along with that is a sense that they wasted no space. Nothing there is big enough to make a person feel small- in fact, it's all so small that it makes you feel a bit big, but not so big that you can't fit in it (which is how the Old City makes me feel sometimes.)

And best of all, the city was built by Jews, for Jews, in land that never belonged to anyone else. Before the Jews settled it, it was nothing but forests full of coyotes. It, in fact, was the first building built by anyone outside the Old City walls, and it was bought fair and square from the Ottomans in the 1800s. I may have problems with the concept of Israel as the biblical, millenial homeland of the Jews, and in Nachlaot, the knowledge that Jews had lived here for more than a century moved me more than Massada or any other ancient monument. I felt more invested in the history of that place than the history of anywhere else I'd been in Israel. I could see my ancestors there just as much as I saw myself.

That's not to say the Western Wall doesn't still blow my mind. It still does, for sure.

Now I'm headed to Tel Aviv to track down a Jewish Brit named Joe Dale who I met at the beginning of the trip. He was a great guy, and seeing him again would be a cool way to end my journey.