January 6th, 2011
A Wedding in Jerusalem – A University in the Desert
I went to a wedding in Jerusalem with my girlfriend this past month. It was a totally amazing experience and we had the good fortune to be on tours to such fantastic places as Masada and the Dead Sea, and the underground tunnels of Jerusalem.
There was tension in the air, as there is wont to be, and it was certainly made worse by an American tourist being killed while we were there. It was a tension that I recognized from a previous visit I had made to a tense region – that of Zimbabwe before Mugabe had destroyed the entire country. At that time the nation was still 90% owned by the 10% minority of whites but every conversation, every interaction had behind it the sense that the violence that was bubbling beneath the surface was about to erupt. The center could not hold as it were. And, a short 18 months after I visited Zimbabwe the whole nation did indeed begin to fall apart, perhaps irrevocably so.
I’m not saying that this is what is doomed to happen in Israel, but just that the tension in Jerusalem and in journeying to the Dead Sea and Masada was palpable. What was uplifting, in addition to my friends’ marriage with a view of the Western Wall, was the visit that we made to the Ben Gurion University in the Negev. It is one of Israel’s largest universities and the incredibly positive energy of the place, the staff, the students, the idea of terra-forming intelligently a swath of desert – it was all incredibly exciting.
And being an optimist by trade or by default, seeing such wonderful energy being poured into CREATING something NEW as opposed to rehashing arguments about something old – that was the way forward for me. That is the path of excitement. That is the path of rebirth.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 6th, 2011 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.