Light and Darkness

On our last day in Israel, we finally made it to the one site that tied together so many loose ends on our trip: the Israel Museum.  At practically every historical site that we visited, we were told that the original stones, pottery, artifacts - basically all the cool stuff - has been moved to the Israel Museum.  Given that we saw replica artifacts stolen in several places, we completely understood.  But we still wanted to see the originals.

Upon arriving, we headed immediately to see the Dead Sea Scrolls.  

As mentioned in a previous post, these scrolls were found at Qumran in 1947 by Bedouin goat herders who threw a stone into a cave and heard pottery breaking.  Inside the cave were a series of scrolls, stored in clay pots, covered with ancient Hebrew writing.  The scrolls were sold several times before ending up in the museum.  They are about 2,000 years old (they vary in age by several hundred years) and are the oldest documents containing the stories of the Hebrew Bible.  All but about two books are represented among the many scrolls found in the original and surrounding caves, and they agree to a surprising degree with accounts written down hundreds of years later.  The scrolls were written by the Essenes, a peaceful sect that waited for the End of Days and lived communally.  Despite the terrible audioguide, it was fun to wander the room and see the various scrolls.  The longest ones found were over eight meters in length - that's quite a lot of writing.  And animal hides.

In the same exhibit was the Aleppo Codex, the second most ancient text.  

It is so-called because its last resting place before the museum was in Aleppo, Syria.  Sadly, when the state of Israel was declared, the synagogue where it was housed was burnt down.  Most of the codex was saved, buts one of the holiest bits were lost and the document remains incomplete.   They are still hoping that the other pieces will surface; one page fragment was carried around in a New Yorker's wallet for years after he picked it up in Aleppo in 1948, and was given to the museum after his death.  We all left the exhibit a bit mesmerized and hoping that someday we would stumble upon something ancient and important.

The other exhibit that we had hoped to see was one on Herod the Great.  We had visited so many of his constructions: Masada, Caesaria, Bet She'an, Jerusalem.  And the exhibit was great.  Herod the Great was really something: he imported the most expensive eyes to color his frescos, like the red cinnabar dye quarried in Spain.  He had wines, fish sauces, and other consumables sent from around the Mediterranean and distributed among his palace so that he and his guests would dine in style.  He schmoozed with Caesars and was seduced by Cleopatra.  He was cruel, paranoid, shrewd, exacting, and imaginative.  Much of what we know about him, including his bad reputation, is from "The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities" by Joseohus Flavius, a Jew who worked for Rome.  The copies of his works in the exhibit include a 1470 printing... That's only 15 years after the Gutenberg Bible, and Tia in immaculate condition.  Anyway, he was really something.  They say he was obsessed with building because he wanted to immortalized himself, and I think that he was quite successful.

From a video on Masada that was part of the exhibit.

Saturday evening, we were initiated into another Jewish ritual: Havdalah.  This short, beautiful service welcomes the new week and often includes music and dancing.  It is a celebration of opposites: man and woman, light and dark, etc.  For our Havdalah service, we snuck into a beautiful garden just a block or two from our hotel.  For the service, a braided candle with two intertwined wicks is burned and, after the prayers are said, is extinguished in the last liquid of a glass of wine (mostly consumed by the person leading the prayers).  The candle is then removed and people dab wine on their forehead for wisdom, the back of the head/neck for health, and the pockets for money.  According to Dana, a man once asked Shimon (her husband) why people only dabbed a little bit of wine on the pockets for money and Simon replied that you could use as much as you wanted.  The man poured the entire glass in his pocket and, as luck would have it, won the lottery the very next week.  Happy Havdalah!

Spotted: toilet paper.  Or, rather, a lack of toilet paper.  Be careful when using public restrooms on Shabbat!  There's nobody to restock or clean the bathrooms and things get quite messy.

A Memorial and a Name

Note: no pictures were allowed at the two places that I went today, so there are only two photos in this post.

On Friday morning, we set out for Yad Vashem, or the Holocaust Museum of Israel.  

While I have been to others, such as those in Washington, D.C. and Berlin, this exhibit was quite different.  For example, the beginning of the exhibit is a history of anti-Semitism dating back thousands of years.  It features medieval paintings of Jews sacrificing Christian children and using their blood to make matzoh.  There has been some pretty sick stuff said about the Jewish people.  But perhaps the most surprising was this quote and its origins: "The Jews are our misfortune."  While this quote is attributed to Von Treitschke, one of Hitler's "favorite anti-Semites" (in the words of our guide, a cynical former prosecutor from New Jersey), it is actually a quote from Martin Luther, albeit out of context.  Luther was perplexed by the Catholic obsession with punishing Jews for killing Jesus, though later in his life he became quite anti-Semitic and advocated burning down all the synagogues in Europe.

Anyway, it would be impossible for me to do Yad Vashem justice through my description, especially without taking hours to do so, so I will simply share some facts and anecdotes that jumped out to me during the visit. Note: a lot of the information below is disturbing and depressing.

The building was designed in 2005 and is built in stark, bare concrete to look like a scar on the mountainside, since the Holocaust is a scar on the history of mankind.  A skylight runs the length of the building to remind people that these events happened in broad daylight.

A group of Polish Jews were taken by the Nazis and killed just before the Soviets could liberate them. The bodies were burned, but in a hurry, such that many of the documents in the victims' pockets survived.  One of the victims was Jakub Noach-Lewis, a young man who has been admitted to medical school in Switzerland for the fall of 1940 but who was sent away by the Nazis before he could matriculated.  Sadly, he would have been safe in Switzerland, if be had only reached it in time.

German Jews has one of the lowest mortality rates of any of the Nazi-controlled countries, because at first the government tried to force them to emigrate.  It was only later that more drastic measures were taken, and these measures were extended to other countries that were conquered.

Very few Italian Jews died, relatively, because the Italian population was not notably anti-Semitic.  Mussolini's first mistress was actually Jewish, and he protected her even after he abandoned her for a second, non-Jewish mistress.

One of the concentration camps, Sobibor, used carbon dioxide in the gas chambers.  This was fairly inefficient; it took 30-60 minutes for people to die and, since it rose, often left the young children alive.  They had to be killed afterward by the guards.

The name Yad Vashem comes from Isaac, 56:5, which reads: "I shall give them in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name."

We ended our tour with a visit to the Children's Museum, which was one of the first parts of the museum to be completed.  In a darkened room, give candles sit in a case in the middle and hundreds of mirrors on the walls reflect the light millions of times, creating stars above and beneath that sparkle. It is beautiful, and so simple.  I highly recommend visiting.

Since Friday evening marked the beginning of Shabbat, we joined a merry throng walking to the Western Wall to observe the Friday night rituals.  

Frustratingly, women have to stand to the sides or behind the main area, where men gather, socialize, dance, and generally work themselves into a holy ecstasy.  Women wait dutifully for their husbands, pray in silence, and peek over the divide.  As my mother irreverently put it, "I feel like I'm in a harem or some thing, peering from behind this screen."  Verdict: Not recommended for feminists.

We soon departed for a beautiful Shabbat dinner of song and, as usual, thousands of courses of food. The locals and a few brave guests partied long into the night, while the rest of us trudged off to bed, full of food and desirous of sleep.

Spotted: Jesse Owens in the Holocaust Museum.  In the 1936 Olympics when he won his record 4 golds in track and field at a single Olympics, he was entered in a race in which he was originally not slated to participate.  A pro-Nazi member of the American Olympic Committee convinced the rest of the Committee that having Jewish competitors win would be too much of an affront to Hitler, so Owens was out in to replace one of the Jewish members of the relay team.  The snubbed runner never got over it, despite a successful career.  But he and Owens were lifelong friends.

Spotted 2: Giant furry donut hats.  These are worn by the super ultra Orthodox and look terribly uncomfortable for a hot summer evening.

Walled Out

After a disappointing group tour of the New City, we were hopeful for our private tour of the Old City on Thursday.  Ronan, a friend of the groom's and a tour guide for 15 years (albeit an engineer by education) was wonderful. He began with a brief history of the land of Israel and, in particular, of Jerusalem, helping us to contextual ice all that we had heard about the various incarnations of the Temple Mount and why it even existed in the first place.  His history lesson also tied in other things that we had learned during the course of our trip.  For example, one of the main gates to Jerusalem is Jaffa Gate, which is so named because the road from Jaffa Port led straight up to it.  We had been to Jaffa and learned about its historic role as a port in this region; it was the longest-running active port until it was finally replaced in 1967 by the adjacent port in Tel Aviv.

And now a word about these gates.  This city was a fortress: the gates were thick and high, with a double gate, slits for archers, and special holes through while boiling oil could be poured down on attackers.  Today, the city gates stand open but it is internally divided into four quarters, listed from biggest to smallest: the Muslim Quarter, the Christian Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, and the Jewish Quarter.  Yep, the Jewish Quarter is the smallest.  And the Armenian Quarter is Christian but because they got here before all the other Christians (basically before Rome converted to Christianity), they get their own sector.

While Jerusalem is very much a living city, it has also been excavated to reveal the history beneath.  The two Cardos (main streets in a Roman city) can be seen, excavated below main arteries of modern commerce.  Archaeological sites such as the Herodian Quarter (within the Jewish Quarter) reveal the giant chambers of a high priest and indicate the social strife of millennia past.  Mosaic floors, stucco walls, mikvahs (ritual baths), pottery shards, carvings of a menorah (the oldest known menorah representation in existence), Roman spearheads, and other finding help to educate us about the past buried beneath our feet.  One can't help but wonder what other mysteries lie beneath the modern city.

Since Ronan, like Danny, seems to know everyone, we got to enter a yeshiva that had just finished hosting a bar mitzvah and... Beheld a spectacular view of the Western Wall and the mosque with the golden Dome.  

When the Muslims conquered Jerusalem, they built a mosque over the ruins of the previous temples, in the spot where Abraham was ready to offer his son Isaac as sacrifice to God.  As an Abrahamian religion, the Muslims also consider this site holy.  Sadly, due to political divides between religions, Jewish pilgrims are not allowed even on the plaza around the mosque, and Christians are allowed on the plaza but not within the mosque, so neither of the other Abrahamian religions can worship at this holy site.  For this reason, the Western Wall - the closest accessible point to the site of (attempted) sacrifice - has become the new holy site for the Jewish people.  It is unknown why, in 1967 when the Jewish fighters recaptured Jerusalem, they did not tear down the mosque and begin the construction of a new temple.  But that decision has meant that they do not have access to the temple and most content themselves with the wall.

The wall is one of four retaining walls built by Herod to create a flat plaza around the religious site and is a marvel of engineering.  Only a small portion of the wall is visible above ground today, but underground tunnels beneath the Muslim Quarter show the length of the wall and the giant rocks quarried to build it.  The longest one weighs over 250 tons and they are not sure exactly how it was moved there.

In comparison, the Christian sites are rather bland.  The Church of the Holy Sepulcre is at the end of the Via Dolorosa, the path that Christ supposedly took while hauling his own cross to the site where he was crucified. Three of the stages of the cross took place inside the church: the crucifixion, the washing of the body, and the burial in a cave.  Since these are about 50 steps from each other and all of these events are thought to have occurred outside of the city, the sites hold no real significance for those who prefer rationality to blind belief.  

See the walled city in the background behind Jesus?  Even the mural IN the church suggests that these events didn't happen here!

The stone upon which they say Christ's body was buried is apparently from the 1930s.  Most of the pilgrims inside are of Eastern European origin and rub scarves and other belongings on the stone in the belief that holiness can be transported inside material things; they bring ashes from candles burned within the church home to their parishes.  

The site is also part of a divisive power struggle between twelve sects, who block each other whenever possible.  The rivalry is so bad that a trusted Muslim family holds the keys because the Christians can't trust each other.  It's just sad.  The interesting part about the Church of the Holy Sepulcre is that it was originally built by Helena, mother of Constantine, after he converted the Roman Empire to Christianity.  It was one of the four churches she first built on holy sites.  The original, sadly, was mostly destroyed.  The current version is about half the size and was built by the Crusaders on the same site.

As we retraced our steps through the city, we wandered through the Muslim Quarter bazaar, which was like any other market: kitschy merchandise alongside fresh produce and gleaming sweets.  There were quite a few pro-Palestinian shirts, often right next to an I <3 Israel display.  It was quite strange, and also quite telling.

Two days in, Jerusalem continues to surprise, delight, and befuddle.

Yes, that is an antique rifle sticking out of a window hanging of flowers.

So many Spottings:

1. Cohen.  This is derived for the name of the families of high priests/rabbis.  Those who have this last name are descendants of those families.

2. Garbage tractors.  Small ramps have been built into the ancient steps of the city for the purpose of garbage collection.  Small tractors navigate the narrow streets, three times as tall as they are wide as they accumulate the city's waste.  They often skim the tops of archways, but always miraculously pass through.

3. Fireworks in the Muslim Quarter.  In the evening, these are set off by Muslims celebrating the end of fasting on the days of Ramadan.  But this morning they were being set off to celebrate the end of school exams.

4.  Hats.  It's very strange to go into a building, take my hat off out of respect, and be scolded for not respectfully keeping it on.  Covering your head is in here.

Love and War

Our day started with a rather mediocre tour of the New City, from which I gleaned only this:

When there was a large demilitarized zone (1948-1967) between the Jordanian-controlled Old City and the Israeli-controlled suburbs, a nun lost her dentures in the DMZ and had to be escorted by a Jordanian, an Israeli, and a UN representative waving a white flag to get them back.

After over a week in Israel, we finally made it to the event that started it all: the wedding of our family friend Dana.  While I had been to a few Jewish weddings in the United States, they were completely different from the Orthodox Israeli marriage festival that unfolded before my eyes on Wednesday night. We boarded giant buses at the hotel and were whisked away to kibbutz just outside the city.  In case you haven't caught this from previous posts, gone are the days of shotguns and backbreaking farming on most of these kibbutzim.  This one specialized in event planning, providing both the space, staff, and catering services to make your event run smoothly.

As we disembarked, we added ourselves to the throng of happy wedding guests mingling on a wooden patio, frequenting the (kosher) appetizer stations serving small sausages, soft tacos, sushi, fruit smoothies, and a variety of other finger foods.  The drink was available for those who wanted something (much) stronger; drinks were poured strong and people loosened up quickly - especially the orthodox guests who self-segregated by gender on opposite sides of the patio.

We walked further back to a clearing where Dana sat on a small bench and blessed her guests.  Sitting in a flowing white lace dress among greenery and flowers, she looks like an Israeli Titania, tended by family members and supplicants.  But mostly she was just our beautiful friend, a giant, irrepressible smile stretching from ear to ear.  Meanwhile, back at the patio, her groom-to-be shared her grin and was enthusiastically greeting guests.

After about an hour, a group of Orthodox men gathered around the groom and danced in a circle, singing louder and louder, accompanied by an unlikely trio of saxophone, flute, and acoustic guitar.  The men escorted the groom in a parade of song down to where the bride sat, flanked by her mother and future mother-in-law.  The women crowded around Dana, and again it was a curious face-off of men and women.  In days past, this ritual is to allow the groom to confirm that he's got the right bride. Or perhaps it has present relevance, too - a large number of Orthodox weddings are still arranged, which perhaps isn't so surprising in a culture where men and women do not touch affectionately outside of the family.

Bride confirmed and grins still firmly in place, the couple was swept up on a tidal wave of guests, the milling crowd pressing onward to the chupah.  While the American guests meekly took their seats, the Israelis crowded right up their with the couple; their laughter could be heard in the background on the microphone as the evening's narrator/MC called people up to read or give blessings.

If nothing else, an orthodox wedding in Israel is a celebration.  People serenaded the couple with traditional songs, joining the chorus with gusto.  There were cheers; more people crowed the chupah. Then the couple was coming back down the aisle with people singing and dancing and again a tidal wave of celebration brought us back to the entrance.  

Here, the couple was ceremoniously dropped as the thirsty, hungry guests (it was now 9 or 10 pm) filed into the reception and the couple was left alone. Traditionally, this is where the couple "touches" for the first time and they were greeted with lusty cheers when they rejoined us in the reception hall.

The rest of the evening was spent alternating between numerous courses of (kosher) food and dancing in gender-separated areas.  The women were given pom poms, whipped into frenzied circles, thrown in tongue center to dance with Dana, and otherwise egged on by a single woman who I never managed to identify as anything other than "Stripes" (so called because of her dress pattern).  The men's side (which I snuck over to observe, having no reservations about seeing the other gender dance) needed no such invitation.  They were mad men - grinding, swiveling, flailing, jumping, squatting, springing, twirling, do-si-doing, clapping, waving napkins.  Several of their moves looked like poorly-executed amateur break-dancing, but they gave it their all.  And then the strangest part happened.  Dana and her groom were lifted on chairs, each on their respective side, as if teasing each other from opposite sides of the wall.  Stripes gave Dana a giant parasol with ribbons hanging down, but nobody had any idea what to do with it (least of all Dana).  

It was odd, it was hilarious, it was festive.  Nobody knew what was going on but they enjoyed the chaos.  And while my grandma-bedtime self left on the first bus (at around 1 am), the party raged for hours.  This didn't surprise me in the least, since one of the last things I saw was a very drunk young man throwing a bottle of Belvedere high into the air in complicated flipping patterns and attempting to catch it.

Israelis definitely know how to party.

Quarries on Tatooine

On Tuesday, our last day with Danny, we drove from the Dead Sea to Jerusalem, stopping at a few last historical sites on the way.  Much of our drive was through the Negev desert, a particularly dry region with large changes in altitude that Josh thought looked like Tatooine.

Our first stop was at a Tel Maresha's Caves.  In this area, there is a thick upper crust of rocky soil called the "nari", with chalky, crumbly soft stone beneath.  This made it easy to carve cisterns, using the natural structural integrity of the nari as a roof and the easily carved chalky rock as a quarry.  These rocky passageways and manmade caves have a great acoustic and provided a welcome respite from the blazing sun.  The temperature drop was incredible; this is definitely where I would have hung out back in the day.  My mom agreed, going so far as to say she was probably a quarry manager in another life.  We also got to see the giant underground dovecotes of the Columbarium Cave; doves were used for food, as messengers, for cult purposes, and for their manure (a useful fertilizer in a desert).

In the area of the caves was also a karob tree; its dense and fibrous pod tasted wonderfully sweet when chewed.  It turns out that the karob "chocolate" treats that I used to steal from my dog (sad as that is to admit) are made from the sugar of this plant's husk.  As another fun piece of trivia, the karob seed is thought to be the original measure for karats of diamonds - one seed weighed one karat.

Our cave exploration continued at several other sites, including at the Bell Caves of Bet Gurin-Maresha Park.  These caves were quite large and hosted both a large family of bats and some ancient carvings of both crosses (from the Crusaders) and the name of Allah in Arabic.  Our other stop during the drive was Ephesus Dammim, between Socoh and Azekah - for those who are Biblically illiterate, like me, that's where David killed Goliath.  I never realized before that Goliath was supposed to be nine feet tall.  My childhood imagination had always made him about 50 feet tall.  The story also includes a lot of bad mouthing of David by his brothers and other fluff.  The things you learn from dramatic Bible readings, right?

At long last, we arrived in Jerusalem.  Due to the ever-present traffic, we had plenty of time to admire the various public buildings, from the Knesset (the Israeli parliament building) to the elaborate YMCA (designed by the same guy that did the Empire State Building) to the tiered graves on the Mount of Olives.  Jerusalem is a gleaming city, with every building built of or faced with Jerusalem stone (locally quarried limestone).  This was the style of building in ages past, and it is now law, so the architecture of past and present meld almost seamlessly.  That said, the current city has far outgrown its old boundaries (a tall wall). While the old, walled city is about a square mile, the current area of Jerusalem is at least nice times that size (a rough estimate from looking at a map) and boasts a population of one million people.

Given the amount of history beneath our feet, we counted ourselves lucky to have five days to immerse ourselves in all that is, and was, Jerusalem.

Spotted: Bedouin settlements.  Some are legal, some are illegal (and unrecognized).  Those that are illegal often use windmills and solar energy to generate electricity independently and stay off the Israeli grid.  Who knew rebels were so green?

Sinkholes and Salt

We started the day by diving straight into history, stopping at the Roman ruins at Bet She'an.  This city has only been partially excavated, since there is a modern community built over it.  This city was one of the decapolis cities, the ten cities built in full Roman grandeur to attract people to their way of life.  Each of these cities was built on exactly the same design, so that a Roman soldier entering any of them would already know his way around (including to the brothel).  At Bet She-an, only the public buildings were excavated, while the community housing has remained underground.

First, we wandered the gladiator theater.  The various entrances were different sizes, we can only assume because of the various entrants: the smaller shorter ones appeared to be for wild animals while the tall and skinny ones were for their human opponents.

A short drive away, we wandered the other excavated part of the city.  There, the various layers of city built atop city were revealed.  The majority of the revealed architecture was Roman: the grand colonnade, the dry and steam saunas, the theaters, and various other buildings.  The grand columns reached skyward, though a few were left toppled to show the way that they were found.  

Roman columns may be strong, but they were no match for the earthquakes that routinely shake this region.  At one place, the three layers of mosaic floors were revealed: Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim art tiered by century.  For an aerial view, Josh and I also hiked to the top of the hill, surveying the city layout.  Atop the hill were also a recreated Egyptian structure and others - further evidence of the recycling of cities and locations.

Next we stopped at Qumran, the site where the original Dead Sea Scrolls were found.  They were discovered in 1947 by members of a Bedouin tribe who threw a rock down into a cave while herding goats and heard the smash of pottery breaking.  They climbed down inside and found carefully wound leather scrolls with ancient Hebrew writing, stored in clay pots.  It wasn't until the scrolls had changed hands several times that their true value was realized: they were decoded and revealed as ancient Hebrew texts outlining the lives and rules of the Essenes.  This peaceful sect spent their days waiting for the End of Days and shared everything communally.  Every routine act had an associated ritual.  And all of this was written down on the Dead Sea Scrolls that have been found in the last half century.

Nearby where these scrolls were found (they have since been moved to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem), an excavation uncovered a building complex with rooms for the scribes, for communal eating, and for the other daily activities.  

Many artifacts were found here, from communal bowls to inkwells.  We wandered the site, appreciating the harsh beauty of the desert and the courage of populations that make their home here.  It was here that we also got our first glimpse of the Dead Sea, the water a gorgeous green-blue.  The sea was edged in white where salt crystals had grown along the shore.  I couldn't wait to swim in it.

We finished the afternoon with a hike at Ein Gedi, a park with several pools and waterfalls where locals go for a dip to cool off in the hot summer heat.  

Due to falling rocks, swimming is not prohibited in certain areas.  Danny told us that the ibex have learned to kick rocks at people, too.

Driving certain places is also off-limits, due to sinkholes that form.  But we made it safely to Ein Bokek on the Dead Sea, in time to watch the sun set over the chalky yellow mountains and the aquamarine waters.

Spotted: Hitchhikers.  Hitchhiking used to be popular among members of the Israeli army, young students trying to travel or get home.  Since several soldiers were kidnapped by terrorists this way, the army has forbidden hitchhiking by its members and the practice has generally declined.  But the other interesting tweak?  Hitchhikers don't ask for a ride by sticking out a thumb.  Instead they stick out a pointer finger, horizontally, as if pointing at the car they're hoping will give them a ride.

Float On

In the morning, my parents drove to Masada and took a cable car up the mountain to the ancient fortress.  Built by Herod the Great, this fortress overlooks the Negev desert and the Dead Sea and is one of a series of fortresses that Herod built a day's journey from each other (I believe there were seven in total).  Masada's real claim to fame, however, has nothing to do with Herod.  About a hundred years after Herod built the place, the abandoned fortress was taken by a group of Jewish fighters, the Zealots, who opposed the Roman forces swarming the region.  The Romans had already taken Jerusalem, and those who had fled had set up refugee villages in caves, fortresses, or wherever they could.  After all other rebel groups had fallen, wiped out by the ceaseless onslaught of thousands of Roman soldiers, Masada alone held strong.  The Roman army could not scale either of the thin, steep, winding paths up to the fortress in large numbers; spreading their forces into thin lines would eliminate the advantage of their large numbers.  As a result, the Romans literally moved mountains (of dirt) and built a giant ramp up to the fortress, with a tower at the very end.  This allowed them to use a battering ram and catapult, and fire flaming arrows down on the stronghold.  When at last they breached the wall, late one evening, the Romans withdrew to gather their forces.  That night, the Zealots decided that they would rather die at their own hands than surrender to the brutal Roman forces who would kill them anyway. The Romans would tell their enemies to surrender so that they might live, but they invariably killed them and made them slaves.  The Zealots also burned all of their belongings, so that the Romans could not plunder they village for their own gain.

How do we know this?  A few of the Zealots managed to survive.  We do not know how, but they told their story to Josephus Flavius and it has lived on until today.  This story has represented the courage of the Jewish people, their defiance, and (in an odd way) their ability to survive.  It was a story that gave the Palmach courage when they sought to fight their first opponents; Palmach troops would hike cross country to Masada to climb to the fortress and realize that they were the first Jewish fighters in that place in nearly two thousand years.

The afternoon was spent relaxing and enjoying the Dead Sea.  I was particularly excited, because this would be the first time I had ever floated in water.  After years of swim lessons, swim teams, and my own pool experimentation, I had never been able to float.  But with such a high salt content, the water of the Dead Sea was so dense that I would have to float this time.  And I did!  The water was like a bath because it was so shallow and the sun was so bright.  The ground was like a gravel of salt crystals.  The metal ramp leading into the water was crusted with salt.  Any small cuts burned in the salty water.  But once you get a bit further out, the water a few feet beneath the surface is cooler and you can float in a standing position with your feet not touching the bottom.  Or on your back.  Or any which way.  We had a blast, though we were diligent about not getting our faces in the water.

When we returned to shore, we enjoyed the other half of the Dead Sea experience: Dead Sea mud.  We had purchased a few kilograms of it and lathered ourselves up with the nearly-black mud.  Due to the high mineral content of the water and mud, it's supposed to be very good for your skin.  You smooth it on, bake yourself dry, and then go and wash it off.  

Sure enough, our skin came out baby smooth.  But the fun part was standing there like a human art project as we lathered each other up.

Spotted: Israeli hotel gyms.  They are small, if they exist at all, even in the larger hotels.  And they have limited hours, because they are always staffed.  In the US, you often just swipe in to the gyms and there is no attendant, but here they are required to have a staffer for liability reasons.  At the Isrotel, where we were staying, this attendant was a personal trainer who would come and correct your form if you were doing a move incorrectly.

Off-Roading

We spent Saturday in the Golan.  This disputed territory sticks up like a small northern lump off the main body of Israel, ooching its way between Lebanon and Syria.  Upon reaching the Golan, we exchanged our comfy car for an open-air Jeep and sped off.  

We wove our way through a kibbutz, admiring the blooming plants heavy with plums, pomegranates, dates, and various citrus fruits.  Smaller greenery was identified as cotton or peanut plants.  Our guide had grown up on the kibbutz but had moved off of it years ago to a nearby development.  He was still good friends with the kibbutz owners, though, so he felt comfortable stopping and feeding us fresh fruit from the trees.  The black diamond plums that we tried have probably ruined us for all other plums, forever.

After turning off the kibbutz, we drove along a highway that has formed the 1948 border of Israel, back when Syria glared down from the neighboring hill.  We then turned and drove up this hill, now a national park.  Beside the reclaimed farm areas (Israel has done a pretty incredible job of reclaiming land), the area was very dry.  We rumbled up the rocky path, the car rocking up and down and the nearby shrubbery and trees rubbing up against the sides of the Jeep.  

Ibex stood proudly and silently on the hill, melting into the colors of the hill.  We stopped to pick fresh figs, biting into the sweet fruit.  The fresh fruit is so different from the dried versions that you find in the U.S.  We continued our bumpy journey through the national park, eyeing the rubble of former Syrian army bases, the signs that warned of landlines off the path, the cows that are used to graze away the grass to create barren areas so that forest fires cannot spread.  Near the ridge line, we stopped to spread out a blanket, share a watermelon, and hear the history of the area and see the maps. 

 We learned about the struggle over water that had shaped these borders; water security is a recurring issue in this part of the world, with a greater urgency than in a place like the United States.

In that vein, we ended our Jeep excursion with a dip in the Stream of the Fig, wandering a watery path that cooled our feet.  The cold was jarring after the sun's heat, but felt so good.  Locals scampered through the water, similarly reveling in the cool relief.  It was nice to see the place where locals went to relax on the weekend.

Drawn to water as we were, our next stop was kayaking down one of the streams that feeds the Jordan River.  It moved quite quickly, making it easy to float down with minimal effort. The only paddling truly required was to turn your boat or thread your way through the other groups that splashed each other and generally blocked the way.  The river was full of inflatable rafts and kayaks and laughter.  The water swished in and out of the holes along the bottom of the kayaks, keeping us cool.  The promised "rapids" were about four feet long and had the similar bump-bump feel of riding an elephant just above its shoulders.

In the afternoon, we stopped at Kursi, where Jesus cast out the demons from a man and sent them into the pigs, which ran into the Sea of Galilee and drowned.  

We also stopped at a commercial baptismal site, which isn't actually where John the Baptist baptized Jesus, but the owners want you to think that it's close enough.  

The actual site is further upstream, in a less friendly area.  It was interesting to wander around, seeing the giant plaques where preachers from different nations and languages offered their version of the relevant scripture verse describing baptism.  

Definitely my favorite.

There were photos of Christian "celebrities" (many American, like Mike Huckabee), who had been baptized here.  You buy a flowing white robe with a rather cheesy image screen-printed on the chest, submerge yourself, and - voila - a fresh new Christian is (re)born.

Spotted: Thai labor.  Due to the extreme heat and heavy farm labor, many Thai workers are imported to work on the farms.  Due to the obsession with pale skin in that part of the world, they cover themselves completely while working in the sun.  Danny said that they are the only people willing to work in the greenhouses when it is 110 degrees in there.

Sewer Rat

We started our day in Akko, at the Hospitaller Compound.  There, we saw Crusader buildings that were later covered with dirt by the Ottomans and they built a palace.  This palace was then used as a prison by the British during the mandate.  Finally, it became a museum.  When one of the floors caved in during the night to reveal the courtyard of the Crusader complex below, archaeological excavations began in earnest.  

The building beneath is quite elaborate, with a large mess hall, courtyards and walkways, and flour de lis carvings to indicate that these were French Crusaders.  My favorite part was, interestingly enough, walking through the sewer.  It's now empty, of course.  The Crusaders emptied it when they felt threatened by the approaching Muslim army and they used it as a series of secret passageways through which they could escape to the port.  The site also has Mamluk architecture, a series of alternating red and cram bands and fluted arches.  

The Mamluk were Mongols who were kidnapped as children and brought to Egypt as a mercenary army.  Eventually, they became more powerful than their masters.

As we walked out, we saw a series of shops where the site had attempted to create a traditional bazaar.  Since it was Friday and most of the merchants are Muslim, nearly all the shops were closed.  In the two open ones we saw wonderful local crafts: in the first, a man with a hammer and chisel working intricate designs into a copper platter, 

while in the second a woman showed us jewelry made of old Roman glass and a series of funny t-shirts.

After so many manmade structures, we stopped at the Rosh Hanikra Grotto (or Ladder of Tyre) to appreciate the natural beauty of our surroundings.  

Carved out of limestone and flint, these caves form a beautiful underground pathway.  

It also gave us a chance to see the the border with Lebanon across a bit of the Mediterranean.  The division is marked with innocently bobbing buoys, and a battle ship stands ready to defend it.

As we continued on our way to Tiberias and the Sea of Galilee, we stopped at Tzfat to see the synagogues before they closed for Shabbat preparations.  Among those that we visited were those of Joseph Caro and Rabbi Isaac Luria.  

These are some of the original places where (Lurian) Kaballah teachings originated.  Despite the hype about Kaballah due to Hollywood celebrities, many of the teachings of Kaballah have been incorporated into mainstream Judaism for a very long time.

Down below are the grave sites of one famous rabbis.  They are considered holier dead than alive because now they are with God and can more readily whisper in his ear.

Next, we made our way toward the Sea of Galilee.  On the way, we stopped at the Mount of the Beatitudes, where Jesus gave the sermon of the mount and fed the 5,000. 

From there, we got our first glimpse of the Sea of Galilee, the site of so many stories.  Heck, that's where Jesus walked on water!  You would think he'd have picked the Dead Sea given the buoyancy, but Jesus never really made things easy for himself.

The Sea of Galilee is not what I expected at all.  First of all, it's not a sea.  It's freshwater and you can see all of the edges at once.  It's not nearly as big as the large lakes of the U.S.  On the longest side, the length is only about 18 kilometers.  In the words of Josh: "18K? That's an average crew workout!"

Spotted: kosher cellphones.  You get half-price minutes and it automatically shuts off during the Sabbath.  Only in Israel, folks.

Oh Danny Boy

Starting on Thursday, we traveled with our rugged guide, Danny.  His father's family came to this land in the 1870s, while his mother's family arrived in the 1930s.  He has lived in Israel his whole life (beside his travels) and has been a guide for the last 42 years.  He can talk on any subject that you bring up, from foods full of antioxidants to the transition of land between Israeli and neighboring governments.  He's the type of guy who can honestly recommend places and say "tell them Danny sent you", and they know who we are talking about.

As we pulled out of our hotel parking lot and left Tel Aviv behind, Israeli history swallowed us up through Danny's lessons and stories.  First stop: Caesaria, one of Herod the Great's many palaces.  

We found out that Israeli rock stars know they have made it when they play a concert in the ancient, reconstructed theater of Caesaria.  This amazing city, unearthed under the watchful eye of Israeli benefactor Baron Rothschild, is a tourist attraction and something of a resort town.  If it was good enough for the kings of ancient times, it's good enough for modern day vacationers.  The city must have been magnificent.  A giant pool house overlooking the water, a temple on the highest point dedicated to Caesar, a horse-racing stadium that could seat 10,000 butting up against the palace.  Other civilizations took over the city, including the Crusaders. Yet each time the city fell, leaving layer upon layer of ruins.  

It was here that I learned there were quite a few Herods back in the day.  And that Herod the Great, the one that I had always learned about, was a pretty shrewd guy even if he was also cruel.  Though it doesn't justify his actions, his cruelty was par for the course as kings went in that era. Killing your wife, sons, and mother-in-law wasn't as rare as you might hope.

Fun fact: to build the water break offshore, giant, hollow wooden structures were built, then filled with volcanic ash.  When these structures were placed in the sea water, the ash and water mixed to form a natural cement.  Brilliant.

Fun fact 2: Many words came from the roman theaters.  The word "scene" comes from the painted backdrops of these theaters, the scaena.

Fun fact 3: The outer room of the theater was called the vomitorium.  I had always heard this word in reference to the rooms where Romans went to vomit up food so that they could eat still more, but here it refers to the way that the building seemed to vomit people as the crowds exited.

Fun fact 4: The Roman aqueduct that brought water to Caesaria from the Carmel mountains (using only gravity) was built with a decline of less than one degree along its entire length of nine miles.

Next, we stopped at Atlit, a town best known for the Atlit Detainee Camp.  

The camp was built by the British Mandate for Palestine in the 1930s as a place for Jewish immigrants who attempt to enter illegally.  This was a particular issue during and immediately after the Second World War, when thousands and thousands of former concentration camp prisoners had no home to which they could return.  The Palmach (see yesterday's post) refitted old boats to carry these people, crammed in, on the 3-10 day voyage to what is now Israel.  Over 140 boats attempted to enter, but a British blockade enforced the immigration limits, and the people were sent to Atlit or later to Cyprus.  The Palmach was furious and broke into this camp, freeing over 200 prisoners in a single night.  Sadly, they also bombed ships meant to deport immigrants and once killed over 200 of them as they miscalculated their explosives and the Patria sank too quickly.  Other times, the immigrants died before reaching the British Mandate either in the skirmishes with the blockade or because the boats were simply too old, and sank.  The saddest part of this whole incident is the trauma to the prisoners, who had been torn from their homeland, put into concentration camps, then into refugee camps, then into a cramped boat, and then into a detainee camp with the same barbed wire and guards (albeit without forced labor, starvation, or gas chambers) as before.  

The creepy part?  They host a kids summer camp there.

That afternoon, we drove past the kibbutz of Ben Oren (where the Palmach-freed detainees fled) and through a Druze village, where women passed us in the traditional black robe and white head scarf.  An offshoot of Shi'ite Islam, the Druze are quite separate.  Interestingly, they believe that there is a fixed number of Druze souls.  I guess they will never be missionaries.

For our late lunch, we stopped for falafel.  Since Danny knew the owners and the day's rush was over, we got a huge spread and got to learn how to make falafel!  

As soon as I scooped the chickpeas up to mold them, I realized how much I have missed cooking these last few months.  It was fun to lend a hand.  As we molded the balls, Danny told us that falafel was actually an Egyptian invention, but they made them with Fava beans.  Since many Iraqis had trouble digesting the Fava beans, though, people eventually switched to chickpeas.

Continuing on our way, we stopped at a monastery on Mt. Carmel, thought to be the place where Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal.  As would become a trend, we forced Josh to do a dramatic reading of the appropriate Bible verse. 

From the peak - the highest in the region - we could see Nazareth, Armageddon, Mt. Tabor, Mt. Moret, Mt. Gilboa, and numerous other Biblical locales.

We ended the day in Haifa, stopping on our way into the city to admire the incredible Baha'i gardens.  The gardens are gorgeous, sloping down from practically the peak to Ben Gurion Avenue that leads through the German Quarter to the water.

Then, exhausted from the heat, we enjoyed dinner in the warmth of the evening at Fattoush, a restaurant that preaches Baha'i ideals of unity and equality.

Spotted: You can get kosher McDonalds in Israel!  Especially in Jerusalem.  Also in Jerusalem, most hotels (even the really nice ones!) charge for wifi, so get your kosher food fix along with your free wifi.