Morning on Masada

On my visit to Israel I made a pilgrimage to Masada. Not quite Chaucer-like, it was on a bus through the desert but with no less a diverse group of folks from round the world. We were led intelligently by a wonderful little sage, our guide, Uri, who tirelessly kept our curiosity at the ready with his wonderful explanations of practically every crevice in every mountainside as the bus roared through the Judean Desert. And there is plenty of desert. It may seem trite to say also plenty of history. It stretches as long as the rocky, arid landscape. How lucky are we that sages of days of yore hid their papaya manuscripts within the cavities of the very mountains we spied from our bus window? I think, plenty. Thank goodness for all these scribes. I thought of this whilst on the journey toward our ultimate destination, a place alive thanks to the remembrance of history: Masada. For those possibly familiar with the name—and may be even the film of the same name---but not so much a geographical grasp, Masada is a large, mountain plateau in the eastern part of the country standing at the lip of the Judean Desert. It is the very desert we traveled. It is also along the Dead Sea, just a stones throw away. And stones do abound. If you’ve ever wondered why, in that ‘good’ book, stones are often a prescriptive tool for sponsored assassination, go to the desert. Stones are aplenty.

Our destination, our large “stone,” Masada, reaches skyward about 1300 feet above the Dead Sea where the peak of the mountain does in fact plateau flat like a mesa. It’s a very large, stony tabletop. Mercifully, tourists like us could be lifted to the top mechanically thereby saving the body from an excruciating hike up the side of the mountain on foot which, too, can be done. One can hike either side of the mountain. On my visit one of my fellow pilgrims, the young strapping lad of the group, forewent the cable car and bravely hiked the side. When eventually reunited with the rest of us at the top his face bore such a deep, anguished red as to look to my eyes like a soft black.  His own eyes were like slightly lit pieces of coal. I don’t know if I ever saw in those embers such exhaustion. At least, I think so.  This, too, is hazy as the sun altered my vision and brain.  Everything seemed a hot, white electric buzz. Yes. There is no hiding from it. Make this pilgrimage in the summer in any form and you are doing it under a hot white sun that is equally blistering and unforgiving. Masada, it has been pointed out as a prescriptive more than once, should only really feasibly be done in the morning. Any later would be excruciating. This point will make the history all the more incomprehensible.

Historically, and put rather too simply, Masada was to be the final destination for contumacious Israelites on the run. Rather than fleeing this same seeming unceasing sun they moved closer to it in order to escape the equally sweltering oppression of Roman persecution and rule. And it was this large, flat, dusty expanse which became both settlement and fortification for rebellious Israelites demanding emancipation from on high. The Romans of course, having none of this, lay siege spending their time at the foot of the mountain devising ways to penetrate the mountain, or at least hoping to wait them out. I recall Uri explaining how a bridge was built by the Romans through the use of those Israelite slaves with nary the luck to have escaped. This bit of engineering was implemented in hopes of, as it were, bridging the gap between them, the Romans, and their target. That target, of course, being the new inhabitants of the top of that plateau. It is a story that emanates and still rings loudly. If you are there walking the terrain it rings louder still.

Anyone at the top of this plateau today worries about nothing less than staying hydrated or keeping dust from a camera lens. He also does not have Centurions waiting to shackle at the bottom of the rock.  We are free to roam what was once the existence of a small society. As you do mingle in and out of each room or crevice, you get the feeling of a kind of ‘tough comfort’ domesticity. The place, naturally, is only a pale, wind driven ghost of itself, but with enough imagination one can still place hewn brick and mortar, and colour in to it. It may be much like knowing the Parthenon only as we can know it today, as a skeletal but beautiful ruin. However, when a clever graphics expert ably recreates it in all its former glory, we then see the vivid impact of the original and so different than the ruin we know and love.

There are, for example, the baths, now bereft of any water, with the small columns still rigidly rising out of the dusty bottom. These columns presumably would hold tiles where the bathers could sit above the steam coming from the water below. With the tiles since gone, the columns are exposed. They still hold their rounded features with a flat top though time has reduced these tops to unequal sizes resembling often used erasers at the end of pencils. There are the small dusty rooms, proof of domesticity, some of which still carry proof of breathtaking design. In a few you will find the beautiful and complicated remnants of a mosaic pattern in the floor and walls. It is enough to make one smile to think that among all the practicality that comes with desperation, these inhabitants still found the need to decorate for the sake of aesthetics. One must constantly pass through small arch top passage ways to get to these enclosed rooms which, in my own emotional appeal, added an almost ‘sacred’ element to every entrance and exit.

Outside in the open air, one finds walls and mazes that lead to steps and brings one to all different aspects and levels of the plateau.  It was out here that Uri, beads of sweat dotting his sweet bald pate, explained in proud, almost nationalistic explanations, how the Israeli’s bravely and single-mindedly defied the Romans. They not only demanded freedom, we now know they would rather have not lived than to be bound by others than themselves. Uri described all this in is more than charming Israeli accent as we all stood just over a slightly vaster than usual smooth decline that led to a lower level of the mountain.  It was this scene that turned Uri’s description of the bravery and single-mindedness of defying the Romans to the more practical need of collecting water. He described how they would make the small trek down this particular decline of the mountain in order to collect the so very necessary rain water caught within one of the very ingenious aqueducts. Upon describing this, I could not help but notice that the trek down the mountain toward the all-important water system brought one dangerously close to where a portion of the Roman army purported to have staked them out. This captured my curiosity. I asked in the simplest way possible of Uri, who exactly owned the arduous task of fetching and bringing this water to the rest of the community? With not a hint of irony Uri turned to me and in that same accent that transfixed me to every syllable, and said so very matter of factly, “Their slaves.”

Is 73 A.D. just too far in the distant past to create a causal argument they did good with their sacrifice? Can we say it made a palpable difference today? Because of this distance, I believe, it is too hard to tell. I hope this does not make me sound nihilistic in my approach toward doing anything in hopes of affecting the future. Could what I do today affect circumstances fifty years from now? I think it’s safe to say it is a possibility. But, what of 5,000 years from now? The prospects become as vague and hazy as the heated Judean dessert. But, they did make history. Of course they did as we still talk about them today. And this is an extension of learning. We are learning through history.  We’re still visiting their chalky and arenose ghost town at the top of a mountain. What is left is a weather worn former community and ghosts of history.

Uri’s explanation about slaves fetching the water reminded me that even a King resided on that mountain. It also reminded me of philosopher Walter Benjamin’s notion that what drives revolt and the need for progress is not “dreams of liberated grandchildren” but rather “memories of enslaved ancestors.” It might be important to remember even this enslavement was by degrees. The great equalizer is that Israeli king and Israeli servant alike, their Roman oppressors, and the leader of that army, are now mere spectres. They do not walk the rocky grounds and earthy rooms of Masada. No. They just flitter in our imagination as we attempt to cover them in bones and sinew, and imagine the workings of iron age brains, as we try to place them in that setting of rocky ground and earthy rooms, the same ones that, no matter how weathered with time and wind, outlasted them. But, not in our minds.