"Since we, long ago, my generous friends, resolved never to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than to God himself... the time is now come that obliges us to make that resolution true in practice..." -(small excerpt from Eleazar Ben-Yahir's Speech at Masada, as reported by Josephus Flavius in The Jewish Wars, Book VII)
Usually my Memorial Days are pretty chill affairs- get up late, drive to my dad's, grab the dogs, walk over to the parade, listen to the marching bands, chase the terrified dogs around the city, eat parade candy, go home. I spend my time waiting for the cool rocket car while my dad preemptively fills out his voting ballot based on which politicians show up in the parade. There are usually hot dogs and hamburgers somewhere in the mix, but that's pretty much it.
This year, my Memorial Day was spent in the ruins of Masada and Qumran (with a detour to the Dead Sea along the way). There were no parades or hamburgers or cool rocket cars, but in a way it was a more genuine time of remembrance than any Memorial Day I've had before.
It all started with the beautiful sound of the adhān, as the local muezzin sounded the Muslim call to prayer.
At 4am.
(Heeeey early morning Bethlehem)
After the muezzin riled up the 279-odd birds that live in the tree right outside my window, I resigned myself to the inevitable and slouched down to the breakfast room to consume as much coffee as my system could absorb in the hour and forty-five minutes til we left for Masada. Having achieved my goal of temporarily replacing my entire circulatory system with Turkish coffee, I brandished my futzy little fake camera and boarded the bus for the east.
(I took somewhere in the range of 30 to 40 pictures of the same desert scene on our morning drive. The Judean desert is gorgeous, but to a .5 megapixel camera, a rock is a rock.)
The bus ride to Masada was breath-taking, and there's no way my camera (heretoforth known as Futzy) can possibly do justice to the desert east of Jerusalem, or to the canyons that ridge the Dead Sea, or to the unbelievable turquoise of the Dead Sea itself. Maybe someday I'll steal someone else's pictures and post them here. For now, take me at my word when I say that the area between Qumran and Masada is awesomely, starkly beautiful.
(Canyons surrounding Masada, including a camel in the bottom-right corner.)
Without going into exhaustive detail about archaeology and history, Masada is the name of a desert fortress dating to 100-75ish BCE. While it was inhabited at various times by the Jewish Harodians, the Romans, the Jewish rebels, and the Romans again, it's mostly lauded as a symbol of Jewish resistance to Roman rule during the Great Revolt of the Jews in 66CE. Masada was the last bastion of the Jewish fighters against the Romans, with some hundreds of Jewish refugees and rebels (under the leadership of Eleazar Ben-Yair) holding out against 8000 Romans until 73 or 74CE. The historian Josephus reports (and it's widely agreed to be true-ish) that when the rebels realized that the Romans would soon capture the fortress, they followed Eleazar's command to take their own lives and the lives of their families rather than become Roman slaves.
And wow is that simplification. But that's the gist of why Masada is so incredibly important to the modern Israeli mindset- overwhelming odds, besieged on all sides, give me freedom or give me death... Anyway, it was an incredible archaelogical sight with one of Israel's oldest synagogues, two Roman palaces with baths and mosaics, guard towers, plastered warehouses, and an insanely advanced system of aqueducts and cisterns. Very cool.
(It was also very high.)
(Very very high.)
After about a billion hours wandering around the scorching desert mountain plateau, scratching ourselves on rocks and getting insanely sunburnt, we decided to celebrate our successful learning experience by taking a dip in the Dead Sea.
(Beautiful place, but a bit ouch on all the cuts and burns.)
(Possibly due to the 40% salinity- so salty that the minerals crust on the rocks in thick, slippery layers.)
At this point I'm getting update-lag, so I'm going to wrap this up with some pictures from Qumran, the cave complex that housed the Dead Sea Scrolls. We didn't spend a whole lot of time there, since many of us were nursing stinging cuts and sunburns, and coffee-detox had long since set in. So we pretty much came in, saw the Qumran complex, and jetted back to Tantur for dinner, blog updates, and bed. Well- dinner, coffee, blog updates, a bajillion pages of reading, a three hour shower, and bed. Interrupted, of course, at various times by the trumpeting call to prayer and subsequent burst of enthusastic bird nattering. All in all, it's been a Memorial Day unlike any that's gone before.
Tomorrow we have class in the morning, followed by a trip to Jerusalem's Old City in the afternoon.
(The caves the early biblical scholars were looking in while ignoring the Bedoin guides who wound up finding all the good stuff.)
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