You have already been once. You came home with a list of the places you never reached. This trip is that list.
March 2027 · April 2027
Put your name downAlmost everyone who comes to this land the first time comes on somebody else's schedule. The bus is full, the days are long, and the itinerary was built to give forty people a fair share of everything. It works. People go home changed.
And then, a year later, the same sentence arrives in my inbox from people who do not know each other. We never got to Bethlehem. We never walked the tunnel. We were at the Pool of Siloam for eleven minutes. They are not complaining. They are hungry.
So this is a trip built backwards. Not from a brochure, but from that list.
Twelve to eighteen people, one guide, one bus. No waiting for forty. When a place takes hold of the group, we stay in it. The day people remember is almost always the day we did not move on.
Before anything is booked I ask every person one question: what did you not see, and what would you go back to. The route is assembled out of the answers. This is not a fixed product.
Four nights in the Galilee and Golan without packing a suitcase once, at or beside my own farm in Natur, twenty minutes above the Sea. Then south, and hotels only where we genuinely need them.
Water to the knees, in the dark, cut by two teams from opposite ends in the eighth century before Christ who met in the middle. Most first trips walk past the entrance.
Newly uncovered, and the reason it matters is simple. That is the actual pavement the pilgrims climbed to the Temple, and the blind man in John 9 was sent down to that water. You put your feet where theirs went.
Left off more itineraries than any other name in the book, usually for logistics. We go, and we go early, before the coaches.
Not only the churches. The cliff edge of Luke 4, where the town he grew up in tried to throw him off, which changes how you read every friendly verse before it.
Qumran and the wilderness above the Dead Sea, where a boy hunting a goat found the oldest Bible on earth in a jar. The emptiness out there does something to people that no building does.
The digs here change every single year. I will bring you to whatever has just opened, which is a thing only somebody who lives here can promise.
Picking, planting, or packing food for people who need it. Not a photo opportunity. Half a day with your hands in this country, which for most people turns out to be the hour they talk about at home.
Capernaum, the Mount of Beatitudes, the Garden Tomb, Gethsemane. You have seen them. You have not sat down in them. There is a difference, and it is the whole point of a second journey.
This is the list as it stands. It moves when you write to me, which is the idea.
That fourth line is the entire reason for doing this together. The guiding cost is the same whether I walk with two people or twelve. Shared, it stops being the thing that decides whether you can come.
I will not give you an estimate and then a bigger number later. When there are enough names to make it real, you get the actual figures for the actual dates, and nobody sends a shekel before that. The day I have ten names on this list, I write to every one of them with the final figures and the dates. That is the whole mechanism, and it is already running.
When. Two windows, and I would rather name them than leave it vague, because a trip with no dates never happens:
March is green, quiet, and the cheapest of the two. April is the most beautiful fortnight of the year here, wildflowers out on the black basalt, and it closes before Passover begins on 21 April, which is deliberate: Passover is the most alive week in this country and the hardest and most expensive one to build a trip inside.
Tell me which window works for you, or tell me neither and give me your own. The group forms around the people who answer, not the other way round.
Nothing to pay, nothing to sign. Just tell me you are interested and what you would go back for.
Write to me directly at amitai.elon@gmail.com and answer three things. It takes two minutes:
I will keep the list myself and I will not pass your name or your address to anybody, ever, including to the other people on it. When there are enough of us, I will write to everyone at once with real dates and real numbers, and you decide then.