Climb to Mt. Sinai
The most deeply felt spiritual experience during my travels through Israel/Palestine was the climb to Mount Sinai before sunrise. I had booked a land rover trip down into the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula with a guide called Yossi who, with his curly hair and sandals, looked like one of the old Israelites himself. He showed us Wadi Paran, one of the main Bedouin routes through the mountains, and took us to Bedouin camps and old settlements on mountain tops and near water holes. We finally arrived in a Bedouin camp near St. Katherine, the monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, where we all slept next to each other on a platform with quilts. Before bedtime we sat around outside under a sky ablaze with stars, incredibly grateful for this experience.
The next morning at 3 am Yossi woke us up, offered us a cup of tea and some pita bread, and we were on our way to the top of the mountain to see the sun come up. It was apparent to me very soon, that, as the oldest person in the group, I could not keep up with the others. Yossi and I agreed that they all would go ahead and I would follow at my own pace. They disappeared around the bend and I found myself utterly alone on the mountain path on a stony outcropping in a completely silent world. There was no sound, no sound at all, utter silence reigned. Slowly it got lighter, the sky became dark grey and then light grey, and finally revealed the waves of hills in the distance. Then the sun came over the horizon, first as a little point, then bigger and bigger and blood red, until the light flooded the world in a brilliant abundance of luminosity. I sat on a boulder and drank in the indescribable wonder of life, of pulsating, radiating power that had existed from time immemorial, through the days of the earliest humans, whether viewed or not, whether appreciated or not, whether viewed by believers or humans like me who have such trouble with religion, God or faith. For the rest of my life, whenever “I don’t know”, whenever doubt arises in me, I will remember Mount Sinai as the proof of the power of nature. And know it will make death, my Death (when it comes) an ecstatic passage into the blood-red substance of the light of the sun.
After a while a camel appeared on the path, led by a camel driver who had taken a visitor up to the mountain before and was coming down empty. He was a middle-aged man, a Bedouin, very friendly. He sat down next to me to smoke a cigarette and we chatted for a while in English, two strangers with worlds separating us. Finally he offered me a ride on his camel down the mountain to the gate of St. Katherine Monastery where I joined up with my group later that morning. And so I rode from the height of ecstasy back into my daily life on the back of a swaying, lumbering, smelly camel.