Israel Museum and Shabbat

One of the greatest places in Jerusalem is the Israel Museum. It is newly remodeled and absolutely gorgeous! There is so much art, history and the Dead Sea Scrolls. We spent a little bit of time walking outside in the sculpture park and I took the cliche picture of Kaitlin sitting in front of the Ahava (love) sculpture and the ones of us playing with the reflecting statue.



Then we went inside the Shrine of the Book. This is the location of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The exhibit here is really impressive. There is so much more to see and read than there was at the traveling exhibit I saw with Kaitlin at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Instead of leaving disappointed with what we saw, we were fascinated by the layout and even the facsimiles they had on display were much more impressive than what we had previously seen. I had a chance to play history lecturer for Kaitlin again, but this time we were looking artifacts. It was really cool.

In the basement of the Shrine of the Book is the Aleppo Codex, a very complete copy of the Tanakch. One of the things that I kept coming back to that I found fascinating was that inside the margins and above the text are notes and corrections. There are places where the scribe made errors and corrected them and there are places that the writers made comments. I see a theme that shows just how much you can comment on the text as your own thoughts.

We continued to wander through the rest of the museum and looked at their section on fashion and on some of the other art they had available. I'm no art connoisseur. I have never claimed to be. It was refreshing to walk through a museum with someone who kept telling me that I don't need to understand it. You just need to find something that appeals to you in paintings or the pieces. There was one in particular that I really liked. An Israeli artist had arranged a photo that resembled The Last Supper by da Vinci. Adi Nes replaced the characters with Israeli soldiers.

In the Modern Art section there were some cool pieces about motion. This is one of their new exhibits. Again, it was great to go to all of this with Kaitlin. I'm hoping I can go again with another person who is more of an art connoisseur to teach me a bit more about what to look for.

Since it was Shabbat, the museum closed early. Kaitlin and I went home to get things ready since Marina was having a dinner. We used my mom's challah recipe to make challah for dinner. The problem was that it was chilly in the apartment and the dough didn't want to rise. We ended up not making it to services because we sat around waiting to finish making the challah. But I think it turned out pretty well.