If you want a true, undiluted Israel experience, you need only to cross the street from the Pavilion and enter the Mahane Yehuda market. There your senses will be accosted with the brilliant colors of the fruit and vegetables, gifts and haberdashery. The mixture of aromas of spice stores, fish markets, bakeries and coffee shops will enhance that exotic sensation, and the sounds of merchants shouting their bargains, and buyers haggling about prices, freshness and flavor is almost musical.

Looking around, you notice that in spite of all the busyness, people are in almost a leisurely mood as they casually chat, sip coffee, and greet the passersby they recognize. The fish flop in their bin and a new shipment of fresh flowers arrives and sets up suddenly in the middle of the street. Watch out for the banana peels, broken eggs, and fruit pits underfoot.

Something about the market makes me think of it as a microcosm of Am Yisrael. It’s a mix of people from many nations, gathered and joined together. It’s a blend of old and young, rich and poor, well educated and simple, religious and secular. It’s a place where one glance shows you the bounty, the God-given harvest of every imaginable flavor, aroma, color and texture. Walking through, you will want to sing, “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!”

The biggest impression you will get from the “Shuk” is that it is thriving and bustling. On every street you will see renovations and upgrading. It is a picture of restoration and blessing. It is a picture of Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones coming together with that great rattling sound, with sinews and flesh covering the bones, and the body becoming whole. The natural picture of life and vitality at the “Shuk” is a precursor of the spiritual life that is to come, when the four winds which have been commanded to come, begin to breathe life into the body.

Go to the Shuk and pray as I do for this prophecy to be fulfilled in our day. Or pray from the Prayer Tower overlooking the Shuk for “He will arise and have mercy upon Zion…the set time to favor her has come!” (Psalm 102)