Nearly three thousand years ago, a man walked down to the harbor at Jaffa with a bag of gold and one goal: to get as far away from God as a ship could take him.
His name was Jonah. God had just told him to go east, to Nineveh, the capital of the brutal Assyrian empire, whose ruins lie across the Tigris River from today’s Mosul in Iraq. Jonah turned around and went west. He walked to the coast, found a ship bound for Tarshish, which many scholars place in southern Spain, about as far as a sailor could go, and he paid.
Can you imagine the scene on that dock? The Hebrew says Jonah paid s’kharah, “its fare,” meaning the fare of the ship itself. So the sages teach that he did not buy a seat. He bought the entire ship, for four thousand gold dinars. The sailors must have thought it was the luckiest day of their lives. A stranger walks up, pays for everything, and asks for just one thing: leave now.
Then he climbs below deck and falls asleep. A storm tears at the ship, the sailors scream to their gods and throw the cargo overboard, and the prophet of Israel is fast asleep in the hold.
Read the story in Hebrew and a pattern jumps out. The word yarad, “went down,” keeps coming back. Jonah goes down to Jaffa. He goes down into the ship. He goes down into the hold. He sinks into a deep sleep, vayeradam, a word that echoes the same sound. Jonah never makes one big decision to abandon God. He just keeps stepping down, one comfortable step at a time. I think most of us know that staircase.
The same beach, the other direction
What makes Jonah’s escape so striking is where it happened. Jaffa was not just any port. It was Jerusalem’s harbor. When King Solomon built the first Temple, King Hiram of Tyre promised to send cedars from Lebanon “as rafts by sea to Jaffa; you will transport them to Yerushalayim” (2 Chronicles 2:15). The Hebrew word for “transport” there is ta’aleh, which literally means “bring up.” The wood for God’s house went up from Jaffa, about 35 miles into the hills. Jonah went down to it.
And three thousand years later, the Jewish people came home through this same harbor, going the other way.
In the early 1900s, a young man from the small Polish town of Płońsk named David Gruen was lifted off his ship by dockworkers and carried ashore onto this beach. On his first postcard home, he wrote: “Today at the ninth hour I alighted on the shore of Jaffa.” He assured his family he had not been seasick once and that he felt healthy, confident, and hopeful. Spoken like a son who knew exactly what his mother was worried about. Four decades later, under the name David Ben-Gurion, he stood two miles up the coast and declared the State of Israel.
Jews have a special word for what he did. We do not say he moved to Israel, or immigrated. We say he made aliyah, “going up.” It is the exact opposite of Jonah’s yarad. Jonah went down to Jaffa to run from God. Ben-Gurion and tens of thousands of pioneers like him landed at Jaffa and went up to rebuild the land God promised.
Christians remember one more story from this shore. Centuries after Jonah fled a mission to a foreign city, Peter stood on a rooftop in Jaffa, by the sea, and received the vision that sent him to the nations (Acts 10). Same harbor. Jonah said no. Peter said yes.
What you cannot do at your kitchen table
You can read every one of these stories at home. Plenty of people do, faithfully, for a lifetime.
But you cannot smell the salt coming off the water where Jonah counted out his gold. You cannot climb the steep stone alleys from the harbor into the old city, the first steps of the climb the cedars made, and feel your own legs teach you what “going up” means. You cannot stand on the beach where a hopeful young man from Poland was carried ashore and realize, all at once, that the Bible’s story never stopped. It came through this harbor a hundred years ago. It is still unfolding in this land today. And it has room in it for you.
That is what God told Abraham, then still called Avram, when He first promised him this land. He did not hand him a map. He told him to walk.
The sages taught that whoever walks even four cubits in the Land of Israel, about six feet, is promised a place in the World to Come Six feet!
Come up with us in May
That is why our tour begins in Jaffa. Rabbi Elie Mischel and Rabbi Tuly Weisz are leading a group through Israel from May 5 to 13, 2027. On day one, they will walk the alleys of the old port, look out over the harbor where the cedars came ashore and Jonah bought his ticket, then you will drive up the coast to Herod’s harbor at Caesarea and on to Tiberias for the night.
Don’t worry, you will not be carried ashore like David Gruen. You will land at Ben Gurion Airport like a civilized person! But from there, we go up: to the Sea of Galilee, to Jerusalem, to the Western Wall.
God told Avram, “Up, walk about the land.” This May, that invitation is yours. For jusst $140 a month on a three-year payment plan, you can stand where the cedars came ashore, sail the Sea of Galilee, and press your own prayer into the Western Wall, with Rabbi Elie and me leading the way. Space is limited, so please, reserve your seat today.
Reserve your place on the May tour
