There are some amazing things to see in the Holy City.

Jerusalem, in many ways, is like cities of similar size throughout the world. It has an expanding light-rail line, and its heavy train service has cut the time to get to Ben Gurion Airport from nearly an hour to 22 minutes. It has awful traffic jams, not infrequent protests by some group that is unhappy, expensive housing, and a wide range of restaurants from which to choose. But if one goes to the Old City and to the City of David, he can enter a world of the distant past.

I have always had an attachment to Jerusalem, even when growing up in Chicago. I used to scan the Chicago Tribune for articles about the city or Israel in general. For years, I had a brass JERUSALEM key chain, which went with me everywhere. If Jerusalem is a magnet, then the Western Wall is an electromagnet. It draws a person, and I have seen many a visitor talk to God there and begin to cry. There are very few places where one feels that he is leaving our modern society and transporting back to an earlier time. The Museum of Science & Industry in Chicago had a 19th-century street, and there are still places in Europe and in the Middle East where time seems to have stopped for at least a couple of hundred years. But in Jerusalem, one is transported back 3,000 years. As the Bauers did not make a big vacation this year, we at least made our way to the new City of David exhibit: the Pilgrimage Road. The first time I heard about it, I read about Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee visiting the new exhibit.

The tour took two hours and covered primarily the period of the Second Temple. Before we hit the main part, we walked by an earthen retaining wall built by the prophet Nehemiah, after the Persian king gave him permission to return to the Land of Israel and made him his........

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