![]() God had called Jonah to bring a message of reconciliation, repentance, and hope to Ninevah. Jonah caught a ship to Tarshish to try to run away from God, as if that would be possible. Two well known events in biblical history took place here. Once we retrieved the other half of our group from the airport we headed to Jaffa (biblical Joppa). Traffic was slow, but we could pass the time by watching the people. People of all ages crowded the streets dressed like historical figures, or superheros or any kind of creative costume they could think of. Anyway, apparently, the modern day version of the Purim festival is to dress up in costumes of all kinds, much like kids do for halloween in North America, only it's not just kids that participate in Purim. You'll have to read Esther for the whole story. Purim is celebrated to commemorate the story of Esther who saved the Israelites from annihilation by the King of Persia. On the way we hit a traffic jam caused by the Purim festival. Once through we met Isaac, boarded the bus and continued on our way to the airport to pick up the other half of our group from the Tel Aviv airport. We had to go through six levels of security including xraying our luggage. Security on the Israeli side is another story. I figured he must have had xray vision - or not. The Jordanian border guard must have been in a good mood, because he just looked at our luggage and told us to go through. On the Jordan side, normally all the luggage gets scanned and then you would proceed to the Israeli security. We left our hotel at the Dead Sea in Jordan this morning at 7:00 so we could arrive at the border at 7:30 to meet Isaac, our Israeli guide. Tomorrow I will find out the rest of the story. Anyway, I have yet to hear the whole story, but they were stuck in the elevator for about 15 minutes on their way to dinner. They would be on a timer so as to not break the sabbath. They won't flip light switches on either. Normally a sabbath elevator's buttons don't work and it will stop at every floor so the riders don't have to push the buttons. I'm not sure if the elevator malfunctioned, or why it didn't work. Sabbath elevators differ from normal elevators because the normal ones actually work on the sabbath. A couple of our group found that out the hard way. ![]() Sabbath is taken very serious to many Jews. Sabbath begins at sundown Friday and ends sundown on Saturday. Our group got a taste of things Jewish tonight, not only the food, but the sounds of families in the restaurant singing sabbath songs and reciting their sabbath prayers.
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