Ok, so hopefully Robert Frost won’t take offense. But every adventure, every visit on this trip so far turns up something so mind-boggling in the context of human/religious/cultural/Jewish history. It’s all I can do to record impressions, the smart stuff (at least what I’m capable of) will have to come later.
Off to Masada with our tour guide on Shabbat. The city’s streets are of course mostly empty as we zip through Jerusalem in his little wagon. Our guide, call him Mike, would make Boston drivers proud, navigating the curves with the alacrity and tenaciousness of a bird of prey. Soon we’re on route 1 to the east, the landscape turns to desert, the Bedouin tents alongside the road predominate for awhile, the drive through the West Bank as Israeiis and Palestinians share the road, then quickly, quickly descending almost a mile to the Dead Sea and environs.
I don’t know if you can comprehend the rapidity of the physical and cultural changes unless you’ve experienced it elsewhere. And there aren’t a lot of places to experience it. This isn’t like the gradual ascent from Eastern Kansas flatland to Western Kansas high plain to Denver plateau. This isn’t 3 hours from the Grand Canyon’s down to Zion’s up. This is 25 minutes from city hills to over a thousand feet under sea level. This is 25 minutes across Jewish, nomadic, Palestinian. This is like real world Epcot Center without a laser show.
But Masada does in fact have a light show, though we missed it. Not that it needs one. This mountain fortress of over 600 meters across hovering above the Dead Sea is still another example of complexity. Always complexity in this Place of Israel. Tough, resilient, challenging complexity about history, peoples, times.
History. There’s the Masada of legend, with the supposed mass suicide of a thousand to avoid enslavement by the Romans. At least that’s what Flavius reported in his journaling. But would such a pious group as the Jews have so violated the Laws of Moses, even indirectly by killing each other? It seems incredible.
But that’s only the Jewish story. Not the story of the Byzantian Christians who later built a place of worship within Masada. Nor the tale of the Israeli archaeologists who painstakingly deduced the histories (plural) of this strange and magnificent place after 1948.
Always multiple times, multiple stories. Like I said, too much to grasp all at one.
Environment. Will the Dead Sea, 45 percent salt, shrink out of existence? The hash marks on the stone risings, dozens and dozens of feet about the current level of the salty brine, tell the tale of where the Dead Sea rose to just some 90 years ago. Evaporating, slowly, mercilessly? Losing a historic resource and a source of (very expensive and time consuming to desalinate) water? Time will tell.
And the beauty of environment, too. After a kibbutz-prepared lunch, a hike up the lusciously lovely rocky hills of En Gedi, with its invigorating waterfalls and swimming hole, its small furry critters hanging around because…why else…fresh waters are relatively abundant.
Back to town after a day of Changes and Mysteries. A wonderful speaker over dinner and resultant discussion about how to educate and engage American Jews about how to talk and think about Israel. Far too complex to describe in a blog, but fodder for further musings and great educational and context for framing issues.
Next……Tunnel Vision…to be continued….
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