Experience Jerusalem

The word "unique" is easy to throw around, but Jerusalem has a real claim on it. A mountainous walled city with a 5,000-year history, Jerusalem is sacred to more than one-third of the world's population.

For Jews, Jerusalem has always been the focal point of devotion and spiritual yearnings, and for many, the psychic center of their nationhood. "The world is like a human eye," wrote a Jewish sage in the 1st century AD: "the white is the ocean that girds the earth, the iris is the earth upon which we dwell, the pupil is Jerusalem, and the image therein is the Temple of the Lord."

For 2,000 years Christians have also venerated Jerusalem as the place where their faith was shaped -- the site of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. A famous Renaissance map shows the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe as the leaves of a clover meeting in the holy city, a reality at once spiritual, historical, and (almost) geographically accurate.

Islamic tradition identifies Jerusalem as the masjad el aqsa, the "farthermost place," from which Muhammad ascended to Heaven for his portentous meeting with God. It is the third-holiest city for Muslims, after Mecca and Medina. A Muslim tradition claims that the great rock of Jerusalem's Mt. Moriah, site of the onetime Jewish Temple and present Dome of the Rock, is made of stones from the Garden of Eden.

The focal point of any visit to Jerusalem is the one-square-kilometer walled Old City, with its four residential quarters (Christian, Jewish, Armenian, and Muslim) and the enormous Temple Mount, or Noble Sanctuary. It is a sensual mix of exotic sights, sounds, and smells.

Step outside the Old City and you'll see a modern metropolis of 700,000 -- not as cosmopolitan as Tel Aviv, but with many good restaurants, concert halls, markets, and high-quality stores, as well as quaint neighborhoods that embody an earlier simplicity. The city prides itself on its historical continuity; a municipal bylaw makes it mandatory to face even high-rise commercial buildings with the golden "Jerusalem stone," the local limestone that has served Jerusalem's builders from time immemorial. Indeed, to see these limestone buildings glow golden in the sunset is to understand the mystical hold Jerusalem has had on so many minds and hearts for so many thousands of years.