Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death
Trip Start
Sep 19, 2008
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5
11
Trip End
Sep 23, 2008
Masada,
Israel
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
The terrain in Israel is largely desert and therefore very arid & dusty. When driving through the country, nearly everywhere you look it is brown. I believe it only rains about 18" a year here, so that would explain it. As I rode around after a few days I began to think about those Israelites and Moses. No wonder they were angry and restless. If Moses had me wandering around in this arid environment for 40 years I would've been more than a little upset. I definitely would have been asking where all the purported "milk & honey" was located. In fact forget milk & honey, I would've been happy with mere water at that point
Judean Desert
. Yes, I can empathize with the Israelites.Remember how I said in an earlier email that the worst enemy to face was perhaps a religious zealot and I noted that this might be even more dangerous than a protective parent? Well, today I visited a site that, depending upon how you look at it, proves my point. Today we went to Masada National Park.
Masada was a strategic palace/fortress built around 20 BC on top of a mountain in the middle of the Judean desert, near the Dead Sea. Eventually after Herod's death, some Jewish freedom fighters and their families (totaling about 900) took it over and lived there for many years. It ended up being the last Jewish rebel stronghold to fall. Eventually the Romans decided to take over Masada again and brought about 8,000 troops to topple the rebel community. However, the Jews had the upper hand with their strategic position and successfully kept the Roman troops at bay for many months.
Long story short, once the Jews realized they could no longer hold off the Romans, their leader made 2 impashioned speechs and convinced the community that it would be better to commit mass suicide than live in shame & humiliation as Roman slaves
Monastery
. So all of the men went back to their families and killed their wives & children via slitting their throats. Too bad they didn't have Jim Jones and his refreshing Kool Aid around back then! They had cast lots to decide the 10 men who would then go around and kill all the men, as they hugged their slain family, and then cast lots again for the remaining man who would kill the other 9 and then kill himself. When the Romans arrived at daybreak, everyone was dead. The Jews had also burned their money and anything else of value so that it couldn't be used by the Romans. The only thing they left was their food, to prove that they hadn't died of starvation and to show that they had preferred death over Roman slavery.Now that's a great story. Sad but riveting. In fact, Hollywood even made it into a movie with a Peter O'Toole cast as the Roman leader.
Now the obvious question is how do they know the specifics of the story? Well there were 2 women and 5 kids that hid in water cisterns that lived to tell the story. Evidently they preferred slavery over bleeding to death. Also, later excavations even found the 10 pottery shards with names on them that were used as the lots, which lent authenticity to the story. Maybe that is a reason the Bible says not to cast lots
Masada Ruins
!Here are a couple of excerpts from the Jewish leader's speech convincing them to suicide:
'Since we, long ago, my generous friends, resolved never to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than God himself, who alone is the true and just Lord of mankind, the time is now come that obliges us to make that resolution true in practice.'
'Let our wives die before they are abused, and our children before they have tasted slavery; and after we have slain them, let us bestow that glorious benefit upon one another mutually and preserve ourselves in freedom as an excellent funeral monument for us.'
Today I also saw the caves At Quamran where a young Bedouin shepherd found the Dead Sea Scrolls by accident. He used some of them to make sandals- talk about expensive footwear!
Also saw a wild animal in the desert- the Ibex. It is a deer-like animal with HUGE corkscrew horns. The horns are about 1/2 the size of the body
Palace Ruins
. It gave me a headache just looking at it.Food of the day for Doug: Shwarma. It's made in the same style as gyro meat, but it's made of turkey. It is challenging to describe how they do the turkey, but imagine taking brown turkey meat in slices and stacking it vertically. Then somehow they squeeze it together as a gyro-like hunk of meat on a spit and turning it slowly as it roasts. They shave it off just like gyro and put it into either pita or a huge, thick tortilla thing. In it they stuff hummus and all sorts of salads of your choosing. Messy but certainly filling & reasonably priced. You can even convince yourself it's healthy since you are eating turkey. It and felafal-based pitas are the Mideast version of fast-food. The felafel pita sandwich- it is a carbohydrate nightmare: smear a pita with hummus, throw in fried balls of beans (felafel), add some potatoes possibly, top it off with a smidge of salad and chomp away. Dr. Atkins would turn in his grave.
It's largely a meat and bean diet here, at least for traditional dishes. They have plenty of other kinds of restaurants: Italian, Chinese, and even sushi- but the sushi is limited in variety as its Kosher a.k.a. boring bland. The main bean used is the garbanzo. The Mideasterners are gonzo for garbonzo. They use it whole, stew it, mash it and fry it. Due to the immense dietary focus on the breads and beans I think the reason they are so uptight and angry over here is that they are compacted. There you have it!
