Looking forward to Yafo

The itinerary that we follow on our tours to Israel invariably takes us to Tel Aviv on the first night.  We stay in the Dan Panorama Hotel — great name, no? — which is right across the street from the park and the beach that you can see (in the distance, across the water) in the photo above.  (Please click on the image to enlarge it.  The Dan Panorama Hotel is in that first cluster of high-rises toward the right of the photograph.)

My wife and I prefer, when possible, to arrive a day early.  That way, we get a bit of extra sleep — I like to be less jet-lagged than my tour group, if I can — and have the next day to walk in the sun, which is a good thing to do in order to overcome jet-lag.  We always do an easy stroll, and invite others who may have arrived a bit early to join us, along the beach to Yafo, which is also known as Jaffa or, in the New Testament, as Joppa.

Joppa is one of the oldest cities in the Near East, while Tel Aviv , which is far larger, was only established in the twentieth century.  Joppa is also very pretty, situated on a slightly elevated promontory that juts out into the Mediterranean.  It’s something of an arts center today, shared by both Jews and Arabs.

It was from Joppa, according to the Old Testament, that the prophet Jonah set out, seeking to escape the Lord’s call for him to preach in Nineveh.  And it was in Joppa, in the house of Simon the Tanner, that the apostle Peter received his vision of the clean and unclean beasts, which paved the way for taking the Gospel to the gentiles.  According to Greek mythology, it was also at Joppa that Andromeda was chained to a rock as an offering to the sea monster Cetus, from which she was saved by the hero Perseus — one of the earliest surviving “princess and the dragon” stories.