We left the Dead Sea yesterday, Friday, to go back up to Jerusalem.

Here, when you travel to Jerusalem, it’s common to say that you’re going up to Jerusalem. First, because Jerusalem lies atop hills, and second, because of its religious/spiritual primacy for Jews. This time we were traveling by bus, and the long, green vehicle crossed to the right lane and lumbered up the mountains slowly and methodically.

I was reminded of Shitou’s words in his Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage: “Turn around the light to shine within, then just return.”

The Dead Sea is down low, as low as it gets on this earth. One night I couldn’t sleep, so I sat out on the terrace of our room and looked out to the Sea and Jordan on the other side. I feel the pulse of the world when I’m there, and it’s nowhere near as crazed and harried as it feels higher up. Its heart beats silently, and while few things survive in that heat of desert and saline water (air-conditioning is everywhere indoors), something continues to pulse without stop.

The Sea is dying, folks remind me. It’s dead, and continues to die. Hence the white mounds of salt, because the water evaporates. The Dead Sea gets almost no rain. Its source of water is the Sea of Galilee up north, whose excess waters feed the Jordan River and then filter further down, but what with the world heating up, the Sea of Galilee doesn’t have much water to share, so the Jordan River becomes a trickle, and the Dead Sea continues to dry up and die year after year.

For two days we shone the light within, two sisters and a brother who didn’t always get along, who had big personal, religious, and political differences. But down there, in the Dead Sea, we find a home for all these contrasts. If anything, by now we appreciate the challenge we each pose to one another: let go, and watch the horizon get broader and broader.

Going back up to Jerusalem is our return: to a land of conflict, trauma, bloodshed, and sirens warning of incoming rockets. At 10:00 last night, sirens sounded throughout the city warning of incoming rockets from Yemen and my sister and I made our way to the stairwell of her building in pajamas to wait things out).

The bus driver had his radio on loud to an interview program where people argued about whether or not the latest firing of the head of Israel’s intelligence services was an invitation to civil war, where the much-respected former chief justice of the supreme court is quoted as saying that a red line has been crossed, heralding the end of democracy as we know it.

Much like in the US, I reflected, looking out the window at Bedouin encampments on the sides of hills whose tops are dotted by Israeli towns and villages. I thought of the indigenous wisdom that urges you to build your homes on the sides of hills or in the valleys, not on top where you are at the mercy of the blazing sun or cold rain. Let the hillsides protect you from excesses, one of which is thinking that you’re on top, that you can see everything from that tall vantage point because it’s all below while you’re up high.

So, with the loud, argumentative voices from the radio echoing in my ears—who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s doing great things and who’s destroying the country—we came into a cold, rainy Jerusalem, I in green flipflops, red capris and a short-sleeve T-shirt under a black tunic my sister lent me to protect me from the winds. She put on heaters at home as soon as we arrived.

What are the lessons learned from a night on a small hotel terrace looking out at a continually dying Dead Sea, waiting for the sun to rise up above the mountains in Jordan on the other side? That we must all learn to live together, otherwise we’re doomed? I thought I knew that already.

I thought I went to the Dead Sea to fully relax, stop thinking and maneuvering, stop reaching for teachings and solutions. I rested and relaxed, submerging myself in those healing warm waters and a facial treatment with Dead Sea creams to make me “25 years younger,” as the Russian masseuse promised me.

But something stirs even in the middle of the night. What stirs is stillness, and stillness is fully alive. Here and there security vehicles make their way up and down the beach road, big yellow lamps blazing out front to reveal suspicious activity. They don’t disturb anything. This Saturday morning, Shabbat morning, in a gray and chilly city, warmed by the loving care of my sister, Ruth, stillness is still here, vibrant in a very different way from the radio in the next room telling and retelling the day’s events.