Jerusalem: Where Nine-Tenths of the World’s Sorrow Resides

💗 Crossroads of Civilizations ✅ Perched between Asia, Africa, and Europe—wedged between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea—Jerusalem is the holy city for Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. ✅ Towering above are the Jewish Western Wall and Temple Mount, Islam’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, and Christianity’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre along the Via Dolorosa. For five millennia the “City of Peace” (from the Hebrew Yeru-shalem) has watched blood feuds and battles unfold. It is hard to imagine another city that has endured comparable agony; holiness here seems born only after passing through purgatory. 💗18 Destructions, 37 Conquests Arrival and departure, fusion and fission, tolerance and bigotry, conflict and reconciliation, ruin and rebirth—the cycle repeats itself. Moses leading his people to this “land of milk and honey” in Exodus was merely one of many arrivals. 💗 Beneath the Western Wall Twenty meters high, fifty meters long, built of more than 600 massive stones, the Western Wall is the only remnant of the Second Temple. ✅ Jews stand before it in silent lament for their historic suffering and centuries of exile. They slip small pieces of paper—bearing grief, courage, and wishes—into its crevices, believing the wall touches heaven and these notes are private letters to God. 🥮Prayers and tears are their reply to life; to outsiders they look like children in a mother’s arms, recounting bitter sorrows. The wall has witnessed every change of history, carrying both hope and faith. 🥮 The Magnificent Al-Aqsa Mosque If the Western Wall is the Jewish gateway to the divine, just above it—on Temple Mount—rises the resplendent Al-Aqsa Mosque (the “Farthest Mosque”). 💥 Built more than 1,200 years after the Second Temple, it cannot match the scale or pilgrim numbers of Mecca’s Grand Mosque or Medina’s Prophet’s Mosque, yet it is hailed as “the most luxurious and exquisite building and historical legacy on earth.” 💥 In religious terms, it is where Muhammad made his Night Journey and Ascension, receiving Allah’s revelations and blessings. #CulturalHeritage #Travel #Jerusalem #Israel