On Top of Mount Sinai

Sinai is holy.  It is where haven and earth met.  In the arid heat of the blank desert, Sinai is a barren mountain.  Except for a few monks at the Santa Katarina Monastery, it is a place of tremendous quiet.  Little stirs.  The monks sit and meditate day and night.  Little in this environment is disturbed the soft padding through the monastery on the hillside.

We were afraid that that would all be changed when the Egyptian tourist authority took over the Sinai desert. It could have been a potential gold-mine. We envisioned them thinking  “If we can offer all those camera toting, American Express carrying, overweight guys in Bermuda shorts and create a spiritual resort and the hopeless desert…”

Problem. The burning heat will fry anything that moves. To get up to Jabal Musa (Arabic for the Mountain of Moses) you have to get up before dawn.    As the sun lights the Byzantine path, the power of the great orb beats down mercilessly.  The three and one-half hour trek is not for the weak.

So.  My imagination runs toward the inevitable; cable cars, tour guides, concession stands (“I said Coke not ice cream!  When are you going to learn to speak English?”).  I envision natural habitats destroyed.  College students coming with their blankets and mantras.  OOOOOH! The possibilities are endless.

Then there are flora and scrub brush, which will fall prey to dusty Adidas’.  As I understand there are twenty-five species that are found only there.  Desert animals depend on them to survive.  If the plants die, so dies indigenous life.

Holiness is not to be dismissed or trivialized.  It is.  That is the lesson gleaned from our holy and no-so-holy days.  That is also why Moshe Rabbenu’s burial place was never revealed.  Can you imagine the concession stands there selling miniature Moses’? 

The world exists and we are a part of it, not vice versa.  The earth pulses with life even when the trees in wintertime stand barren.  Sit.  Rejoice.  Let holiness be wherever you are.