Your travel tip for the day: If you go the Holy Land, scratch "Swimming in the Jordan" off of your To-Do List:
"The Jordan River, where Christians believe Jesus was baptized, is heavily polluted with sewage and is in danger of drying up after decades of conflict and intense agricultural use, environmentalists said on Friday.
[…]
"’The Jordan River will disappear if nothing is done soon. More than half of it is raw sewage and runoff water from agriculture. What keeps the river flowing today is sewage,’ Munqeth Mehyar, chairman of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME), an Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian group, told Reuters."
Glad I didn’t know any of this when I went to the Holy Land on pilgrimage in the Jubilee Year 2000. It would have sucked some of the magic out of being sprinkled with Jordan River water while we renewed our baptismal promises.
If it’s any consolation, it’s always been that way, though maybe not as bad as today. Remember the story of the cleansing of Namaan the leper in the OT? He complains about how Elijah picked such a filthy river for him to wash clean in.
It was fine in 1999 when I was there. However, we were at the northern end of the Jordon, just south of where the Sea of Galilee empties into the Jordon River.
Which, btw, everything in Israel is over-named. The Sea of Galilee isn’t a sea, it’s a lake. The River Jordon isn’t a river, it’s a creek, or at best, a stream. And the Jezreel Valley isn’t a valley, it’s…..well as one woman from Montana said, “back home, we call that a rut in the road”.