by David Melton
I ’m still trying to reclaim a North American sleep pattern after our return from the Boston Study Trip 2016. Eleven days in Israel with 40 students and another forty friends of our college made for weeks full of memories. But there was that one night at the Kotel, the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, that says so much about what a Boston Baptist College study trip is.
The Kotel offers a limited number of private tours to excavations deep below the retaining wall of Herod the Great’s Temple Mount. Our experience at the Kotel was truly Israeli … and Boston! In Israel, almost nothing quite works like you expect it to. I showed up to “check in” our group, only to learn that a digital confirmation on an iPad wasn’t good enough. They wanted a hard copy … or a fax! Eventually, I ended up in the ticket booth, typing on a Hebrew keypad, opening a Boston Baptist email account! But we did what Boston does — we kept at it, polite but persistent, doing what we needed to do.
“A tour of the remains of the retaining wall of Herod’s Temple” might sound like old rocks and tourist spiels, but you would be wrong. Visualize reservation times changed at the last minute, leaving Keith McAllister running across the Old City of Jerusalem “faster than I’ve run since high school.” You have to see my son, David, filling in for me (while I negotiated) “leading” a line of students on a sprint though who-knows-what-part of that ancient city! You have to see a bunch of Baptist guys trying to keep yarmulkes on in the wind. Then, see students just 90 feet from the Holy of Holies, and walking on the very streets that knew the feet of the Lord Jesus! Just one night on one study trip in the course of a Boston degree. But it was a Boston night — in Israel — and no biblical text about the Temple will ever look the same to us again.