Scott and Raegan Gilliland

By: Scott Gilliland Sorry for the delayed posting, our wifi was not working at the hotel last night so I had to wait until getting to the Shalom Hartman Institute to post.  I'll be going over the last couple of days in this post and then I'll do a write-up on today later this evening.  Let's begin. On Wednesday, we woke up, had breakfast, and headed over to the Shalom Hartman Institute for a morning study on the Jewish concept of tikkun olam .  The term is a loaded one that means many things, but essentially it refers to the restoration of creation.  This can be through environmentalism, social justice, legal changes, or personal actions that lead to the betterment of the earth and its peoples.  Our discussion and study led very naturally to a late-morning excursion for our group where we split up and went to area community organizations that engaged in a variety of tikkun olam . My group of five went to Beit Matanya, a community "inreach" organization tha...

By: Scott It's about 9:00 p.m. as I write this blog post from my bed in Jerusalem, so you know, typical New Year's Eve for me.  At least the "in bed at 9:00 p.m." part.  I know I have a lot of family and friends praying for Raegan and I as we journey throughout areas of Israel and Palestine over the next two weeks, so I thought it might be fun to keep a blog throughout (but no promises on frequency/quantity).  This one is a little long, but feel free to treat it like a children's book and skip to the pictures. Let's begin! We got to the DFW at 1:30 for our 4:20 flight, which turned out to be more than enough time, since check-in and security took approximately 3.5 minutes.  We boarded an almost-full Lufthansa flight and hunkered down for the 10-hour flight to Frankfurt, Germany.  I like Lufthansa, mainly because the German-accented staff greets you with a cheerful "Hallo!" and their movie selection was good (Man of Steel = great, Wolverine = passabl...