After spending five days in Athens, the Greek Isles and Turkey, our “Cradle of Civilization” Tour landed at Haifa last week on Israel’s Mediterranean coast.

Piling into our coach, we visited Nazareth and the Mount of Beatitudes, enjoying a sumptuous lunch - complete with excellent Israeli wine (who knew?) - on the Sea of Galilee. We then traveled past the Dead Sea, alongside the Jordan River and through the controversial West Bank settlements, finally arriving in Jerusalem.

This is an endlessly fascinating city with more history than some continents.

Home to dozens of sacred sites - and a perennial destination for millions of religious pilgrims - the walled Old City has been besieged, desecrated, burned and rebuilt many times over the past 4,000 years.

The locals, in fact, are still wailing…

Arriving on the Jewish Sabbath, we stopped to see the men and women gathered for prayer at the Western Wall, a remnant of the Second Temple complex destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D.

Just a stone’s throw away is one of the world’s most beautiful mosques, the magnificent Dome of the Rock with its 24-karat-gilded cap.

Nearby, too, is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Tradition holds that it is built over the sites where Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected.

It’s a bit surprising to see three of the holiest sites of Judaism, Christianity and Islam practically on top of each other.

But then, the world’s three great monotheisms share common roots. Judaism is based on the Old Testament, Christianity on both the Old and New Testaments, and Islam on the Old and New Testaments and the Qur’an.

Over the last thousand years, of course, the faithful have often been at daggers drawn, an unfortunate history for the Holy Land. But there have always been those who imagined things differently…

In a famous Talmudic story, the great rabbi Hillel (c. 80 BCE - 30 CE) was approached by a pagan who promised to convert to Judaism if Hillel could teach him the entire Torah standing on one leg. Hillel replied, “What is hateful to yourself, do not to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is but commentary. Go and study it.”

Hillel insisted that any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred or disdain for others - whatever their beliefs - was illegitimate.

The world could use more of his approach these days.

At its best, religion aligns us with a moral axis. It allows us to live with realities that don’t have easy explanations and problems that can’t be solved: mortality, pain, grief, despair and outrage at injustice, poverty and cruelty.

Some modernists claim that faith is incompatible with the philosophical rationalism of the ancient Greeks.

Not so. Students did not visit Socrates to learn anything - he always insisted he had nothing to teach them - but to have a change of mind.

As religion historian Karen Armstrong writes in “The Case for God,” “Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the founders of Western rationalism, saw no opposition between reason and the transcendent. They understood that we feel an imperative need to drive our reasoning powers to the point where they can go no further and segue into a state of unknowing that is not frustrating but a source of astonishment, awe and contentment.”

This is only possible when we cultivate a receptive, listening attitude. It requires us to set aside sectarian differences, put our core beliefs into practice, and develop what Confucius called “human-heartedness.”

People want to live richly and intensely. They want peace and serenity in the midst of pain and loss. They want lives filled with significance, with a sense of the divine. They want to honor the ineffable mysteries of life.

Many find this in ritual, prayer and practice. Yet true religion is always a call to change.

Our actions mirror our thoughts and beliefs. We need look no further than an individual’s outer behavior to see the degree of his inner achievement.

Jerusalem’s great Abrahamic traditions have enabled millions to find meaning in the face of pain and injustice. They allow us to overcome the thoughtlessness, greed, and self-preoccupation that threaten to undo our best efforts.

True, we will always fall short as nations and individuals.

But the quest for spiritual attainment - a sense of the transcendent - is Jerusalem’s greatest legacy, its unique gift to the West.

Carpe Diem,

Alex