Jerusalem Ben-Yehuda St.

Photo credit: Israel Tourism

No one will ever be able to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes Jerusalem so special. The mountains, the crystal clear air, the extraordinary light may be part of it and, clearly, the ancients were drawn to this mountaintop where closeness to spirituality comes easily.

It was on Jerusalem's Mount Moriah, that Abraham prepared to follow God's command and sacrifice his son, Isaac. A thousand years later, King David, the beloved warrior-psalmist of the Bible, made Jerusalem Israel's capital. Perhaps he saw the poetry of the place. The Gihon Spring flowed through a paradise of gardens nestled at the foot of the Kidron Valley. From there a long narrow ridge rose steeply northward, stone houses perched precariously on its sides. At the top of the ridge, seeming to hang in the heavens, was the threshing floor of Araunah, which David purchased as the site of the Temple his son, Solomon, would one day build atop the site of Abraham's covenant with God. Overlooking everything was the might of the Mount of Olives, across whose ridge, the sun rose each day. From its crest, the view opened onto the desert, stretching over barren mountains and down steep wadis eastward to the Dead Sea.

Ever since the time of King David, Jerusalem has been the physical - and spiritual - capital of the Jewish world. After Solomon's Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in the 6th century BC, Jews longed for the splendors of Jerusalem from their exile in Mesopotamia. Once they returned to Israel, a second Temple was built, and it was in 167BC, at the apex of the Maccabee revolt against the Hellenistic Seleucids of Syria, that the Temple was miraculously redeemed, giving birth to the festival of Chanukah. It was in the dazzling and legendary Temple built by King Herod that Jesus preached, and it was here that hundreds of thousands of Jews perished during the great revolt against Rome in 70AD. For close to two thousand years, Jerusalem remained the focus of Jewish prayer and longing, and it was in 1948, with the rebirth of the State of Israel, that Jerusalem once again became the country's capital.

The walls of the ancient city (built in the 16th century by Suleiman the Magnificent atop earlier walls) contain the most awesome holy places of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. During the centuries of the Crusades, Jerusalem was the ethereal vision that moved the armies of Europe and Islam, but for centuries the actual city of Jerusalem existed as a shadowy, forgotten backwater until, in the 19th century, the city again begin to come alive and reemerge from behind its walls.

Today, Jerusalem is a city of 750,000 people, Israel's capital and largest city. It is a city of countless holy places. But it is also a city of museums, galleries, art, music, science, education, Israel's governmental institutions, markets, quaint neighborhoods, elegant suburbs and sprawling parks. It is reached by expressways, highways and trains and it is the most visited city in Israel. Indeed, no visit to the country is imaginable without spending a substantial amount of time in Jerusalem.