Sometimes it seems this country has scoliosis. A concrete wall twists like a bad spine through the center of the nation, segregating or protecting people from each other, depending on how you look at it. And the ailment in my Jerusalem backyard is symptomatic of the broader region. If I were a doctor, how would I classify it? What is the root flaw? Theology. 

Walking down Jaffa Road in Jerusalem for the first time on a Christmas morning was quite a cross-cultural experience for me. The most anticipated and unique day of the year in my home country was just another humdrum business day in Israel!

Our community will not accept as members any who champion Jews over and against Muslims, or Muslims over and against Jews. Holding such an attitude calls into question whether we have yet understood the grace of God, which bought as at such a dear price that we no longer have the right to withhold grace from our neighbors.

While some in the West are emphasizing Israel's right to defend itself from rocket fire from Gaza, our neighbors here in the Middle East seem united this week in condemning Israel's response, using words such as massacre and criminal. How can people see the same events so differently?

Three times this week I've seen the bodies of dead children held up for television cameras outside the hospital in Gaza.

The native soil of Christianity was the farmland and orchards of Jewish peasants. Its central ethos was the Sermon on the Mount, a startling morality in the accessible language of metaphor and parable. But in those first centuries, as the Christian movement penetrated the influential circles of Mediterranean culture, an esoteric language emerged, the language of philosophy and metaphysics.

We had an unexpected visit to the emergency room of Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus Thursday night, after our Palestinian coworker Yousef was startled by unfamiliar chest pain. 

Death is the great equalizer, and I certainly saw a cross-section of the people of Jordan as I sat waiting in the Amman morgue for a few hours on Shabbat morning.

A Palestinian-Jordanian sheikh with a silver beard and a white robe, when he learned we were helping children go to Israel for heart surgeries, told me with a smile that the Jews would only survive another seven or ten years.

"If we love Abraham, we will love all of his children," I replied.

It stands on Mount Zion, an unprepossessing two-story building: the most bizarre site in religion. The supposed tomb of King David is on the first floor, the traditional site of the Last Supper is on the second floor, and on the roof, asserting itself rigidly into the hazy sky, a Muslim minaret. Take a quick tour with me: