Maybe this urge to quarrel with God proves that I, too, am in the grip of this Holy Land. The Hebrew patriarchs are famous for taking God head-on. Perhaps the covenant gave them the necessary status. Didn’t Abraham argue with God over the fate of Sodom? Didn’t Jacob wrestle a blessing from an angel? Didn’t Moses negotiate the terms of his spokesperson deal with God?
The Jews have a tradition of arguing with God, and I feel a bit envious. We Calvinists don’t do that. We elevate God so high that we dare not approach. Instead, we assert our adoptive claim as God’s elect, then scramble to prove ourselves worthy of its benefits and blessings.
Will I still be a Calvinist when this pilgrimage is over? The bus rolls along while my thoughts tumble. It’s ironic that I want to tussle with God over problems that started when people felt they had some sort of special dispensation that allowed them to tussle with God.
Most of the people in the bus are dozing or staring vaguely out the windows at the few signs of life. Occasionally we pass a primitive building, and I wonder if it shelters people or animals. I look for evidence of vehicles, cook-fires, clotheslines. I see none. The buildings seem too huddled to house people. Occasionally a lone sheep or goat drifts across the sand, untended.
Someone shouts and points out the window. In the distance an entire hillside is moving. As the bus gets closer, it seems that the sand is flowing alongside us like a river. There’s commotion as people crowd to one side of the bus. The flowing hillside isn’t sand, but a herd of sheep, their rounded, wooly backs rippling like water and parting around rocks like a current. Near the back of the herd is a lone Bedouin, his red-and-white scarf a spot of color. In a moment we’ve left the scene behind us. Just when we’ve been lulled into thinking this is nothing but a boring desert, we are surprised and thrilled. This is what a pilgrimage is, this up-ending of what you think you know to be true.
The bus continues south. The land flattens, and I doze. As we approach the Dead Sea, I wake, just in time to see a grove of date palm trees, unexpected and flamboyant. These tall trees have orange nets strapped beneath their feathery umbrellas, like girdles, to protect heavy clusters of dates.
The enormous plateau of Masada is visible from a distance. It’s a stunning formation, a geological oddity. Imagine you’re an ant in a sandbox when a toddler, or some other God-like being, drops a gigantic, flat-topped rock next to you. What could you do with such an object?
Our guide for the day, Rula, is a Christian of Bedouin ancestry. Her long hair is light brown, settling on her shoulders with a curl. She is knowledgeable and well-spoken. Now she takes the microphone to give us some background before we arrive. She tells us that the earliest record of life at Masada is from the Hasmonean kings, a hundred years before Christ, who used the plateau as a sort of royal retreat. This sounds uncreative, but also unsurprising. I suppose the mighty have always felt the need to escape the riffraff, even before Queen Victoria built Buckingham Palace or Rupert Murdoch bought a jet. Privilege is not a new concept in human history.
As the bus pulls into the parking lot, I’m happy to see that the sky has cleared and is properly blue. Tourists like a blue sky, and today I’m a tourist in hiking shorts and shoes.
“Divide into groups,” Rula says. “There’s an introductory film, and then you take a cable car to the top. Once you get up there, the tour is mandatory, and the guides are provided by the site. The tour takes about an hour and a half. After that, you’re on your own. You can stay as long as you choose. Just don’t miss the last cable car down!”
Climbing off the air-conditioned bus, we’re assaulted by the heat. It must be over 100 degrees. A steady wind blows the hot air straight into our faces.
“With this sun, it’ll only get hotter, right?” Kyle says. “So let’s go straight to the top and see the film later.”
It makes sense. A group of us climbs aboard the cable car for the six-minute trip to the top. The car swings precariously, and the mechanism creaks. We clutch the handrails. I don’t have any fear of heights, and still the ride is discombobulating. The steep walls of the plateau seem to cruise past our swinging toes. No wonder people chatter, plotting their descent even while we ascend. Someone noticed signs for ice cream in the gift shop below. I understand their urge to return to level ground, to air conditioning. It’s unnatural to be dangling like a spider on a thread in a blast furnace.
We disembark into a blinding sun. I touch my temples to make sure I’m wearing my hat and sunglasses. Even with those, I’m still squinting. After our group gathers, a guide tells us the history of this place. King Herod — the one from the Christmas narrative — decided to use Masada as a fortress, so he built reinforcements. It flourished for a while, but not long. A group of Jewish rebels, or extremists — the Zealots — took possession of Masada during the Jewish Revolt around 70 CE.
Eventually the Romans retaliated by laying siege to Masada. They built a ramp up one side of the plateau, shovel by laborious shovel. I look over the edge of the plateau and imagine the drama. Did the Zealots peer down from their fortress and watch the Romans make their daily encroachment? Did they grow hungrier and thirstier each day? The story goes that when the Romans finally breached the wall, they found that all the Zealots — some 900 people — had committed mass suicide rather than be taken.
“For this reason,” our guide emphasizes, “Masada has become a powerful symbol of determination, heroism, and freedom.”
The sun is so strong that I can believe this story. This is a place where death seems inevitable. Why not engage it head-on instead of letting it hunt you down?
We trudge from ruin to ruin while the guide explains what the various buildings were used for over the centuries. In Herod’s time there were palaces. Residences. Kitchens. Storerooms. Bathhouses. Saunas. This last is so bizarre that I laugh aloud into the dry heat. Did she say “sauna”?
Someone asks the obvious question. “Where would they get water?”
“Water came up by donkey,” the guide answers. “A caravan from the oasis below.”
“That must have been some caravan,” someone says.
“It was endless. Imagine a giant loop.”
I look over the edge and, instead of picturing Romans with shovels, picture donkeys wending their way, nose to tail. The guide is explaining how the water was heated by solar power, but I’m still picturing the donkey caravan switchbacking up the trail. I suppose some slave had to unload each beast’s precious cargo. I suppose the donkeys didn’t get to drink the water they carried — it was too valuable. Yes, the life-giving water had been hauled under duress simply so it could be heated by the desert sun and steamed away into the thirsty air for some fat king’s moment of pleasure!
When the tour is done, I mosey along and read the helpful interpretive plaques, hoping to find some bit of information, some scientific fact, some Bermuda Triangle-type hypothesis that would explain why this place is the locus of so much excess. Instead, the plaques say that the clues unearthed by archaeologists don’t support the most dramatic stories. For instance, that cache of bones from a mass suicide of 900? It’s nowhere to be found. Instead, a more modest but verifiable number might be thirty. Maybe it’s comforting to realize that truth is elusive, that history collides with legend everywhere in this Holy Land. I think about that as I plop down in the shade of a massive rock.
A desert vista spreads before me, crumbly and colorless. The silence is vast. In the far distance is a shimmer, the Dead Sea in a bowl of whitened hills. As the sun climbs, the shade grows smaller and smaller until it is gone. I think of Psalm 121, one of the Pilgrim Psalms: “The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.” Was that just a preacher or poet’s hyperbole? Or had the Psalmist never sat in this particular patch of desert where there is no reprieve? Maybe everyone needs to experience a place like this, where the sun is inescapable, the world enormous, and a human being so small. This place thins out the veil between human and divine — you can feel it. This is a sacred spot e
ven if there’s no shrine, no candles to buy and light. Perhaps the lack of human meddling makes this plateau seem even more sacred. I cup my hands around my sunglasses and peer through slitted eyes at the ruins encircling me, imagining the events these remnants once witnessed.
In the distance I hear a loud sound like public-address static. It occurs every twenty minutes or so as the cable-car deposits another load of tourists, and a microphone announces the car’s imminent return trip. My watch says that this is the last call before my bus’s departure. I get up and brush sand from the seat of my shorts. I’m a little sorry I stayed so long, even if it wasn’t long enough. Not only did I miss my chance to see the film and soak in some air conditioning; I feel off-balance from being immersed in such stretching silence.
The cable car is full. With our arms raised over our heads to grasp the swinging straps, we’re packed body to body. Body to stinky body. We cast our eyes discreetly down, the way people do on subways, waiting for the trip to end. About three-quarters of the way down the steep incline, the cable car comes to a lurching halt. Inside, a chorus of exclamations erupts in every language. We are suspended over a gorge, swinging. Camera Michael attempts to shoot some footage of shocked faces, but it’s too crowded for him to use the viewfinder. Undaunted, he lifts the video camera above his head and points down. Like him, I want to document the drama of the moment. I want to record this taste of terror before it evaporates into the desert air.
I look around at faces. Most are strangers, but I spot a couple of my documentary teammates. Michael catches my eye and winks. He’s good at finding humor in situations. Ashley’s eyes are huge. Her mouth is working as if she wants to spout words too awful to utter. She’s sweating, but we’re all sweating — we’ve been sweating all day.
What a terrible experience this must be for someone with claustrophobia. Yet I can’t help but feel elated. The feeling is irrational, of course. Something awful, something irrecoverable might happen. Yet I love this feeling of not knowing, of waiting for the deity to make up its mind about what to do with us.
Each minute stretches. The ride that was supposed to take six minutes stretches to twelve, then to eighteen. The mechanism makes creaking sounds that we can’t interpret. Occasionally there’s a jerk, followed by a sliding movement as the car slips along the cable. I realize that the cable might give way altogether, and I imagine that we will drop to our death.
Lord, my daughters! Watch over them!
My prayer is instant, going straight from my heart without pausing in my brain.
The cable car swings, and through the windows the distant desert floor appears, disappears, reappears. Everything about this experience heightens the sense that we’re suspended between heaven and earth — indeed, the sense that anything might happen. When the engine does finally make the right kind of noises, where things catch and turn, the car slides one final time before resuming its normal descent. That final crazy bout of swinging seems to be an answer to my prayer.
When we finally step off the cable car, we each have some words on our lips to describe the ordeal to the onlookers.
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” exclaims Ashley. “And I’m not taking the Lord’s name in vain — Oh, my God!” Jessica rushes to Ashley’s side, and they clutch each other.
I know it was terrible, but to me there’s something invigorating about terror, about scraping against the face of God and surviving. I feel like a child after a particularly scary roller coaster ride. Knowing that everything comes out all right, wouldn’t I do it again?
After Masada, the bus takes us to the Dead Sea, which sits in a basin of hills striped white and gray with minerals. The Dead Sea is the lowest point on the surface of the earth and one of the planet’s saltiest bodies of water, too salty to support animal life — hence its name. Even if we can’t actually swim, we’re ready to immerse ourselves in water. We go to one of the resorts on the sloping edge of the sea. The resort has a few clusters of palm trees and a central pool with a single lackluster fountain. We are each dispensed a plastic bag containing a dry roll slit open and laid with a thin piece of pink meat, a whole unpickled pickle, and an unripe piece of fruit that we cannot identify, something similar to an apricot. It doesn’t take us long to eat a few bites and pronounce ourselves done.
We women take our swimsuits into a changing room. The mirrors are shiny pieces of metal, so at least we can’t fuss too much about how we look. We come out wrapped in our towels and conscious of the cameras. We wobble down a path of rounded rocks to the water’s edge. The rocks are smooth, but they’re the size you want to palm, not step on.
The water itself is very clear, even though the shoreline is crusty white. The bigger rocks are frosted with stalagmites of salt. I pick up a wet rock and put my lips against it, tentatively, tasting the salt. The water splashing my toes is surprisingly warm. My feet are blistered, and the salt stings wherever the skin is broken. JoAnne says the salt is healing, and I want to believe her. I want to believe that pain can be healing.
We hobble further in, exclaiming, until the water is around our waists. We’ve been warned not to splash and to keep our faces away from the water.
Shane must have slipped — I didn’t see it happen — and gets submerged in the water. He comes up raking at his face.
“There’s a water spigot,” yells Brian. “See it?”
Shane can’t see it, of course, but someone on the shore helps him stumble over to it and get his face rinsed off. I wince, just watching. I don’t blame him for not getting back in the water after that.
“Remember what they said,” Jessica reminds us. “When it’s deep enough, just sit.” We sit back as if we’re on chairs, except there are no chairs; there’s only the salt of the sea, which buoys us up. We laugh. Charlie pulls his toes up in front of him.
“Is this like walking on water?” he asks. “Toes on water.”
Emboldened, the rest of us pull our feet up. We bob like weighted yellow ducks.
“Now that’s a view you don’t see every day,” says Michael. “Faces and toes but no bodies.”
On the shore, the cameras roll. We know we look silly, like every other group of tourists. Nothing about it feels real.
I feel thirsty. How odd to be suspended in water that cannot slake thirst, that cannot sustain life.
The Sea of Galilee
CHAPTER 14
Flotilla
Where do you get that living water?
JOHN 4:11
IN THE BIBLE, Jesus is forever traipsing from town to town. I imagine him walking down dusty roads wearing sandals that don’t have good arch support. It must have been very wearisome. No wonder he needed to stop and get water from a well. No wonder he asked that Samaritan woman for a drink. I always thought he asked as a lead-in to their conversation. He knew she was thirsty — not physically, but metaphorically — for living water, for salvation. Now I see that maybe Jesus wasn’t only opening a conversation. Maybe he was actually thirsty. Traveling is hot, hard work. I’m feeling travel-weary from sitting on an air-conditioned bus with a water bottle!
We’re headed north now, to “the Galilee,” where we’ll spend a few days. Stephen always adds the definite article — “the Galilee” — short, I suppose, for “the Galilee region.” JoAnne picked up on that and has been adding “the” in front of random proper nouns to make me laugh. “Shall we go listen to the Stephen?” Sometimes it’s fun to make jokes that have nothing to do with God or Jesus or the Bible.
We packed our bags for three nights, and were asked to include our swimsuits and a flashlight. On the bus JoAnne comments, “I’ve been checking the moon, and it’s been getting bigger every night. Maybe we’ll go swimming under a full moon.” It hadn’t occurred to me to even hope. Somehow I assumed that the Sea of Galilee would be polluted, or that there would be a war raging across it, or that it would be surrounded by wire. I know that the Golan Heights, which is Israeli-occupied, borders the east side of the lake, and I’m not sure exactly
how that works.
To break up the trip, the bus first takes us west to Caesarea Maritima, on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, so we can see some pristine ruins. The day is picture-perfect, with a bright blue sky and the sun sparkling on turquoise water. The first ruins we pass belong to an aqueduct, and they run for miles.
Excavation is underway everywhere. Caesarea Maritima was a harbor city built by Herod about a generation before Jesus was born. The city’s capstone was a pleasure palace built on a piece of real estate jutting out into the water. An amphitheater we tour is huge and stunning. I picture it filled with wildly cheering Roman citizens as the chariots race in long loops. What joy!
“Herod built this for races,” says the guide, “but after the Jewish revolt of 70 CE, it was used for gladiator games. Some twenty-five hundred Jews were killed here.” The gaily colored scene in my imagination ends abruptly.
The guide leads us through a maze of ruins to a particular wall. Like the other walls here, this one is constructed of cut stone. A series of partitions, or projections, extend from this wall like a rib cage.
“What do you think this area was used for?” the guide asks.
“Stalls for horses.” “A dressing room.” “Storage areas.” Our guide is bemused and encourages us to keep guessing. People call out things we’ve seen in ruins elsewhere, no matter how unlikely they are here: “An olive press.” “A bathhouse.” “An altar.”
“You’re trying too hard,” the guide tells us. “It’s something a crowd would need, especially in a venue of this size.”
“A restroom?” someone asks.
“That’s right. A toilet. Multiple toilets, actually.”
Michael and Charlie immediately climb onto the stone projections to take a seat. They make funny faces as they try to situate themselves with a cheek on each stone projection.
Chasing the Divine in the Holy Land Page 11
