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How a deeply religious Christian artist captured the spirit of the Jewish holy land
I was briskly walking down the main drag of a swanky neighborhood in Seattle when I saw a faded, old-timey lithograph in the window of an art store. It was a landscape with a fortress built into the cascading side of a massive, dry and desolate canyon. The location was as far from green and leafy western Washington on that drippy spring day as one could imagine. In the foreground, a group of men wearing exotic clothes were standing and sitting outside the fortress.
I did a doubletake — I knew that place; it was Mar Saba, an ancient monastery in the middle of nowhere.
I went into the store and talked with the owners who told me the artist’s name was David Roberts. He was a contemporary of a couple of men named Charles: Dickens and Darwin. David Roberts started his career by painting sets for the London theater. After that, he developed an interest in landscapes and toured western Europe drawing historic churches and later found his way to southern Spain where he drew the famous sites of Moorish architecture.
Then, he did something truly extraordinary, especially for someone living in London at that time. In 1838, he sailed from England all the way to Egypt. Almost no one in Europe had traveled there since Napoleon and his army invaded in 1798. He toured Cairo and sailed up the Nile to the temples, tombs and relics of the pharaohs, detailing them in his sketches.
After returning to Cairo, Roberts embarked upon another excursion even more daring than his Egyptian adventure. A deeply religious Christian, he succumbed to the urge to see the Holy Land. The easiest way to do that would have been to sail down the Nile to the Mediterranean and follow the coast to the east. Or, he could have gone by horse or camel along the Via Maris, the ancient road that follows the coast. Both routes would have taken him only a few days to complete.
Instead, Roberts made a totally radical and potentially dangerous choice. He hired Bedouin tribal guides to take him by camel across the eastern desert of Egypt and through the length and breadth of the Sinai Desert, following the route the Hebrews took during their 40-year journey we now refer to as the Exodus. In the Torah, the book of Exodus is called BaMidbar which means “In the Wilderness,” which is exactly what the forbidding Sinai is like. Life can easily be lost if one is not careful due to lack of water or the threat of bandits.
Once Roberts finally reached Israel, he toured almost all the places mentioned in the Bible and continued on to Lebanon, drawing everything he saw. Upon his return to England, Roberts made lithographs of his drawings and collected them into three jam-packed volumes. Being a shrewd businessman, the artist sold his collection to subscribers. It was an instant hit. His first subscription was purchased by Queen Victoria.
A refuge from the outside world
Years ago, when my wife and I were visiting Israel, we took a bus from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. After visiting the popular sites in that city, we hired a taxi which took us down a one-lane, dusty, rutty, partially paved “road” atop a narrow, steep ridge to its literal end. This road led us deep into the Judean Desert where Jesus spent time and where King David hid from his rebellious son, Absalom, who almost succeeded in having his father assassinated.
Mar Saba sits precariously on the shoulder of the canyon, called a wadi by the locals, in the hills above the nearby Dead Sea. Even though it was mid-October, the air was so hot that a local shepherd and his goats were sheltering in the shade of one of the high walls of the fortress.
We approached the main gate and knocked. A low voice inside answered. It was one of the monks. We were lucky he spoke English. However, we were not so lucky with what he said. He told us my wife could not enter because she was the wrong gender and would have to wait outside. However, he let me in.
Inside the main gate, the compound was crowded with ancient sand-colored stone structures. The monk first showed me the chapel, which was cool and dark in striking contrast to the veritable furnace outside. What it lacked in size, it made up for in ornamentation. The floor had a complex pattern of symmetrical pieces of colored marble. The altar had an elaborate filigree of gold. Most impressive were the walls up to the domed ceiling which were completely covered with icons of various saints, all of which appeared to have been made a very long time ago. Even the inside of the dome was covered with painted images of saints.
I followed my guide to a nearby stone building and was dumbfounded by what I saw. This was the monastery’s sepulcher room. On display on wooden tables under glass were dozens of skulls and bones. The monk explained that when a monk dies, he is buried in the monastery’s cemetery and remains there for several years. After that, the bones and skull are removed and placed on display in this room. He said that many of the remains belonged to martyred monks who were murdered when the Persians invaded in 614 CE.
In what I supposed to be the dining hall, the monk gave me a drink and proceeded to tell me he was from Greece. He seemed to feel free enough to unload his feelings because he went on to elaborate about the corruption and iniquity of the outside world and how his community of believers cherish their refuge from all of that behind the high walls of their little world.
Once I exited the main gate, I found my wife sitting on a rock in the shade waiting for me. Her only company was an old Arab man who was likewise escaping the withering glare of the sun. Her only consolation was that I had taken so many photos of the interior of Mar Saba that I had made a visual record of everything I saw inside the walls.
An island at the end of the world
When I was in the art store in Seattle two years later, the experience of Mar Saba came flooding back and I wound up purchasing the lithograph. I can tell you it is a pretty accurate depiction of what we saw. The place has not changed at all in more than 175 years since the artist was there. I doubt the place has changed much at all since its founding in the fifth century CE.
After learning more about Roberts, where he traveled and what he did, I began collecting more of his lithographs, including a drawing of the Tower of David, which I saw regularly when I was a college student in Jerusalem.
The Tower of David, next to the Jaffa Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem, functioned in ancient times as the citadel of the city. It was originally built during the Hasmonean dynasty who descended from the Jewish Maccabees of Hanukkah fame. I should mention that the Tower had nothing to do with King David as it was constructed by the Romans after their conquest hundreds of years later. When Roberts made his drawing, the road outside the Tower was just a narrow, dusty, dirt path. Now, it is a busy, well-paved, four-lane highway leading from Jerusalem to Bethlehem and Hebron.
Roberts also drew a panorama of the Old City viewed from high atop the Mount of Olives. After my wife and I climbed the steep road up the Mount, past the old Jewish cemetery, which is where legend says the Messiah will appear and raise the dead on Judgment Day, we saw the same precise view that Roberts recorded for posterity. I believe Roberts took some artistic license with his work since he sketched a bridge over the Kidron Valley, even though there never was one.
Roberts drew the Isle of Graia where I traveled with a friend, Andy, when we were on spring break and took a trip to Eilat. At that time, Eilat was extremely remote, and it took hours to get there. The only other passengers on our bus from Jerusalem were workers headed to construction jobs building new hotels. As we got close to our destination, the other passengers pulled knives and guns out of their luggage.
Eilat, located where the Negev desert ends and the Sinai begins, was not much of a town back then. Surrounded by high hills, it is not a pretty landscape of undulating sand dunes; the terrain is rocky and almost completely devoid of any living thing. While Andy and I were there, we heard about an island further down the coast. We hitched a ride with some soldiers in a jeep who were headed down the coast. After about two dozen kilometers, they dropped us off at a place called Hof Almogim, or Coral Beach in English.
It was a beautiful beach without a soul there. It seemed as if we had reached the end of the world. The only thing on the beach was a small shack where the lone proprietor sold Cokes and rented snorkeling gear. Off in the distance was the island. On the opposite coast were the mountains of biblical Edom, in today’s kingdom of Jordan.
When Roberts was there, he was heading north with his local Bedouin guides in a caravan. I believe he included himself, dressed in Ottoman style-clothes, in the lower right corner of his picture drawing the scene; you can see him holding some kind of paper and his writing kit and an umbrella are on the ground in front of him.
When we showed up many, many years later, the weather was scorching, so we did what anyone else would do— we rented masks, pipes and fins and waded into the water. It didn’t matter that I had never gone snorkeling before. It took me a little time to get the hang of it, but I figured it out. The Red Sea’s temperature was like bath water, so we plunged right in and crossed into another world.
Not far from shore, we encountered a multi-colored coral reef that, from the shore, looks distinctly red, which is where the Red Sea gets its name. In stark contrast to the aridity of the land, the sea was alive. The reef was covered by lots of sponges that looked like colorful human brains. It was surrounded by swarms of shimmering, iridescent, palm-sized fish in different hues. As we maneuvered through them, they darted here and there, moving in unison liked flocks of birds.
The coral was razor sharp, so I was careful to keep my distance as we passed over it, at which point the sea floor dropped to 60 feet below us. Suddenly, it was devoid of life and it was hard to see the bottom.
It took almost an hour to reach the island. It has an impressive stone castle which was originally built by the invading Crusaders who wanted to protect the pilgrimage routes in the area and defend their kingdoms centered in Jerusalem. Later, during the Crusades, the Christians lost control of the fortress to Muslim forces. When we were there, Israel controlled the area, having conquered it in the Six-Day war. The Sinai now belongs to Egypt as a result of the 1979 Camp David peace agreement.
When Andy and I reached the beach, the weather was blistering. We could not explore the castle since our only footgear consisted of the fins we had on our feet. So, we did not stay long. On our return, the sun was sinking on the horizon. It was becoming noticeably colder. Sea creatures were emerging from their hiding places; a pink bubble the size of my fist floated directly toward me. It had tentacles that hung down from the body. Instinctively, I turned to avoid it. I later learned it was a Portuguese man o’ war, a type of jellyfish, which carries an evil sting.
Upon reaching the mainland, darkness smothered us, and Andy and I camped on the beach. The next morning, we checked our belongings for scorpions and caught a ride back to Eilat. Today, luxury resort hotels have sprouted on that once-lonely beach. The commercialization of that former paradise is heartbreaking.
Epilogue
Quite a few years have passed since those travels and David Roberts’ lithographs now hang in honored places in our home. Once in a while, I pause in front of one of them and marvel at the precision with which the artist captured the mood of his subject. Some of these locations, such as the ones in Jerusalem, I have been intimately familiar with. Others I merely passed through as a tourist just as Roberts did, albeit under far more primitive and dangerous circumstances. I almost wish I was able to go back in time and travel with him in that caravan.
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Israel, Hezbollah War Persists Despite Truce Extension
Smoke rises following an Israeli strike in Choukine, Lebanon, May 18, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Israel carried out airstrikes in southern Lebanon on Monday, Lebanese security sources and the state news agency said, while Hezbollah announced new attacks on Israeli forces, continuing the war in Lebanon despite the extension of a US-backed truce.
Since the war began on March 2, more than 3,000 people have been killed in Lebanon, the country’s health ministry reported in its latest casualty toll on Monday. Most of those killed have been Hezbollah terrorists, according to Israeli officials.
Reignited by the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, hostilities between Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel have rumbled on since US President Donald Trump first announced a ceasefire on April 16, with fighting mostly contained to southern Lebanon.
A 45-day ceasefire extension, announced after a third round of US-hosted talks between Lebanon and Israel on Friday, began at midnight, a Lebanese official said.
The US-led mediation has emerged in parallel to diplomacy aimed at ending the US-Iran conflict. Iran has said ending Israel‘s war in Lebanon is one of its demands for a deal over the wider conflict. Hezbollah, which opened fire at Israel on March 2, objects to Beirut taking part in the talks.
AIRSTRIKES, EXPLOSIVE DRONE
Overnight, an Israeli strike near the eastern Lebanese city of Baalbeck killed a commander of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group, a Hezbollah ally, along with his daughter, security sources in Lebanon said.
The Israeli military said it had killed the commander, Wael Mahmoud Abd al-Halim, in a strike, after taking steps to “mitigate the risk of harm to civilians.” It made no mention of Halim’s daughter.
Hezbollah said it launched an explosive drone at an Iron Dome air defense position in the Galilee area of northern Israel and carried out other attacks on Israeli forces in Lebanon.
Israel‘s military said some “launches” aimed at Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon, as well as an explosive drone, had crossed into Israeli territory.
Lebanon’s National News Agency reported Israeli airstrikes on more than half a dozen locations in south Lebanon.
The Israeli military said it could not comment on the reported airstrikes without the coordinates of each one and didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the attack claimed by Hezbollah on the Iron Dome position.
The Israeli military said earlier on Monday it had struck more than 30 Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon in the previous 24 hours and warned residents of three villages in the south to leave their homes, saying it intended to act against Hezbollah.
DEATH TOLL RISES
Israeli forces have occupied a self-declared security zone in the south, where they have been razing villages, saying they aim to shield northern Israel from attacks by Hezbollah fighters embedded in civilian areas.
Lebanon’s health ministry reported that the death toll in Lebanon had risen to 3,020 people, among them 619 women, children, and health-care workers.
Its toll doesn’t say how many combatants are among the dead. Various reports have put the figure at thousands of Hezbollah fighters.
However, sources familiar with Hezbollah‘s casualty numbers have said many Hezbollah fighters who have been killed in the war are not included in the health ministry death toll.
Reuters reported on May 4 that several thousand Hezbollah fighters had been killed in the war, citing casualty estimates from within the group. The Hezbollah media office said at the time the figure of several thousand fighters killed was false.
Israeli authorities say 18 soldiers have been killed by Hezbollah attacks or while operating in south Lebanon since March 2, in addition to a contractor working for an engineering company on behalf of Israel‘s defense ministry. Hezbollah attacks have killed two civilians in northern Israel.
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Recognizing Shabbat Is Not Establishing a Religion
Shabbat candles. Photo: Olaf.herfurth via Wikimedia Commons.
The backlash to President Trump’s “Shabbat 250” proclamation reveals something deeper than disagreement over a single president or a single ceremonial gesture. It reveals how uneasy a slice of American Jewish leadership has become with the public acknowledgment of a tradition that helped shape America’s moral vocabulary.
The timing matters. Since October 7th, antisemitism has surged on a scale unfamiliar to most American Jews living today – across college campuses, in major cities, on social media, in synagogue parking lots that now require armed guards and entrances fitted with metal detectors. Against that backdrop, a sitting president has used a White House proclamation to honor a core Jewish practice, to invoke George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, and to name Haym Salomon – the Jewish immigrant financier who helped fund the Revolution – as a model of Jewish American patriotism. One might have expected the organized Jewish community to receive that gesture with something closer to unanimity. Instead, the response has split.
As eJewishPhilanthropy recently reported, the divide ran along predictable lines. Orthodox and politically conservative organizations – Chabad communities, Agudath Israel, the Orthodox Union, the Rabbinical Council of America, Young Jewish Conservatives – embraced the proclamation immediately. Progressive institutions and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs raised church-state concerns. The fault line itself is worth noticing. It tracks, with unsettling precision, which segments of American Jewry still feel confident about Jewish practice in public and which have grown uneasy when Jewish tradition appears outside the synagogue.
The critics’ anxieties are not frivolous. Jewish history is full of governments that used religion coercively and turned on the minorities they once flattered. American Jews were right to be cautious about religious majoritarianism in the past, and a cautious American Jewish political tradition has long taken that lesson seriously. But caution becomes distortion when even symbolic recognition of Jewish practice is treated as a constitutional threat.
The most serious version of the objection comes from Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, who warned in the eJP piece that when church-state lines blur, “one day you’re in and the next day you could be out.” The worry deserves a real answer, not dismissal. But Spitalnick herself drew the right distinction in the same interview. A government celebration of Jewish identity and practice, she said, “is very different than trying to utilize the government to advance a specific approach to religion.”
A proclamation honoring rest, gratitude, and the Jewish American contribution to the national story falls squarely on the first side of her line. It establishes no theology. It privileges no denomination. It requires nothing of anyone. It is ceremonial recognition: the same category as presidential Hanukkah candle-lightings, Ramadan iftars, Easter messages, and Thanksgiving statements that have rolled out of the executive branch for generations. The American constitutional order does not require a public square emptied of faith; it requires a public square open to all of them. A president who honors Shabbat one season and hosts an iftar the next is not establishing a religion. He is doing what American presidents have done since Washington: recognizing that the country contains many traditions and that none of them needs to be hidden to be American.
A different objection comes from Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie of Lab/Shul, who wrote that we should observe Shabbat “not because a leader commanded it, but because our humanity demands it.” That is a theological worry, not a constitutional one, and it deserves a theological answer. Trump has commanded nothing. All he has done is acknowledge that Shabbat exists, that millions of Americans keep it, that the country is better for the practice.
One can hold separate concerns about this president’s habit of telling Jews how to be Jewish. Those are concerns about a man. They are not an argument against the proclamation. The principle would be right whether the proclamation came from this president or any other, and an American Jewish community that could only accept public recognition from presidents it liked would not be defending the Constitution. It would be practicing politics.
The deeper problem with the church-state framing is that it gets American Jewish history almost exactly backward. American Jews did not flourish because the public square was scrubbed of faith. They flourished because the public square was open to faith – to all faiths -and because the founding promise of religious liberty was extended to a people who had never before been treated as full citizens anywhere in Christendom. Washington’s letter to Touro Synagogue, which the proclamation invokes, did not promise the Newport congregation that religion would be banished from American life. It promised them that the new republic would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” and that the children of the stock of Abraham would sit safely under their own vine and fig tree. That is not the language of secularism. It is the language of religious confidence extended to Jews as Jews.
The Jews who arrived in America did not ask for invisibility. They asked for equality, and America’s founding promise made that claim possible in a way nearly no other country had. Haym Salomon – born in Poland, jailed by the British, dead in poverty at forty-four after pouring his fortune into the Continental cause – did not finance a revolution so that his descendants could ask the public square to please not mention Jews. The American Jewish bargain has always been the opposite: be visible, be present, be unembarrassed about being Jewish in public, and the country will be the better for it. The First Amendment was designed to prevent a national church. It was never designed to scrub religion from American public life. Covenant, human dignity, moral obligation, liberty under law, the sanctity of conscience; none of it appeared from nowhere. Recognizing that inheritance is not theocracy. It is historical literacy.
It is worth saying plainly what Shabbat is, because much of the anxious commentary proceeds as though the underlying practice were a minor ritual rather than one of the central institutions of Western civilization. Shabbat is the weekly insistence that human beings are not merely productive units. It is the structural refusal to let work, commerce, and noise consume the whole of life. It builds in, by law and by habit, a day for family, for study, for rest, for gratitude and for the things that markets cannot price and bureaucracies cannot manage. The Jewish tradition holds that Shabbat sustained the Jewish people through exile, dispersion, and persecution: more than the Jews kept Shabbat, Shabbat kept the Jews.
That a weekly cessation might be good for an entire country – and not merely for Jews – is not a controversial proposition. It is one of the most quietly radical contributions the Jewish people have made to human civilization. A country drowning in screens, in noise, in the demand to be always available, might reasonably want to pause and acknowledge the institution that taught the West how to stop.
The split inside the American Jewish community over “Shabbat 250” is, in the end, a split about confidence. The progressive instinct to guard the church-state line is the right instinct, applied to the wrong case; the Jews who worry about state-favored religion are reading from the correct historical script, only on the wrong stage. The Orthodox and conservative Jews who embraced the proclamation did so because they still feel ownership over Shabbat; because the practice is theirs, lived, and they are glad to see it honored. Some progressive leaders responded with discomfort because seeing Shabbat publicly honored by political authority now feels unfamiliar, uncomfortable, perhaps even weaponizable. That asymmetry says something painful about where parts of American Jewish life now stand in relation to their own tradition.
Recognizing Shabbat is not the establishment of religion. It is the recognition of a gift; a gift this country received from the Jewish people, and a gift it is finally, in its 250th year, pausing long enough to say thank you for. At a moment when Jews on American campuses are being told they do not belong, and Jews in major cities are being assaulted for being visibly Jewish, the proclamation says something the Jewish community badly needs to hear from the highest office in the land: you are not foreign here. You built this. The country is grateful.
The answer to that gesture is not worry. It is the lighting of candles.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Stacey Bosworth selected as the Forward’s next Vice President of Development
Forward Publisher and CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen announced today that Stacey Bosworth has been selected as the Forward’s next Vice President of Development, beginning June 1, 2026.
Bosworth comes to the Forward from documentarian Ken Burns’ Better Angels Society, where she served as Chief Development Officer, leading donor strategy and philanthropic initiatives. Prior to that, she was the Director of Development and Co-Chief Advancement Officer at the Sundance Institute. At both Sundance and Better Angels, she worked with major donors and foundations such as the Emerson Collective, the Ford Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation and others to secure funding for stories that needed to be told.
Bosworth also served as Vice President of Advancement at MacDowell Artists Residency, where she launched a journalism fellowship fund, was the president of Aaron Consulting, supporting various nonprofit organizations in fundraising strategy, and founding executive director of the Joyful Heart Foundation.
Bosworth began her career at the Workers Circle, then located in the Forward building on 33rd Street in Manhattan. She is also on the board of The Old Stone House in Brooklyn, where she lives.
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