I wrote the piece after I got back from Israel in December. Masada stayed with me after I left the country. Its beauty enchanted me and its story made me wonder about the other side, the side I was so not willing to explore.
An edited version was published in Sunday Eye (Indian Express) on May 2, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
Masada
It’s in Masada that Israel begins to make sense. Because in this region where there are only two extreme identities – of the oppressed and the oppressor – in Masada the roles are reversed. And you must let Masada tell you its story. You must listen, and not ask questions. That will break the spell.
As we drove in the desert towards the fortress, Zivit Sari, our guide, stuck her neck outside and shouted she could see Masada. All we could see looming in the distance was a cluster of sandstone-colored mountains. Somewhere in the middle was a flat-topped mountain, Dead Sea in front, the desert in between them.
Then it began to slowly emerge - the three terraces of King Herod's grandiose palace on the north tip precariously balancing themselves down the rock like the gardens of Babylon. It came out of the rock, blended in, and yet carved out of it. Here’s where nature helped man forge a getaway fortress from its belly - beautiful, delicate, and yet so formidable. Masada sat in the mountain like an embryo – protected and enigmatic.
Masada is where stands the refuge palace of Roman King Herod, who was himself Jewish, built by him in 38-4 BCE, and this was where a thousand Jewish refugees died centuries ago defending the "last stand" of Israel. During the First Jewish War, the Jewish rebels captured the mountain as they fled from the Romans after Jerusalem was captured and the Temple was burnt. It is not like Caesarea where there are shopping arcades, and restaurants amid the ruins.
Only Masada remained because it was built to intimidate, and it was inaccessible. But in 73 AD, Roman General Flavius Silva besieged the fortress after camping there for months. The Jewish refugees, as the myth goes, killed themselves preferring death at their own hands rather then be enslaved by the enemy they so loathed that they wouldn’t even use the Roman bathhouse built by King Herod. While they stayed there, they built their Jewish baths around the ancient bathhouse and the ruins are a testimony to this.
The Roman armies destroyed the wall around the fortress, and then they burnt the new wall the refugees had built of wood. That’s when the Jewish refugees understood they could not hold out any longer. But embracing death was a calculated move, too. Zivit told us how they left the storage area intact to show to the enemy and to the world if they came to document the incident that they had enough food to last them for years, that they didn’t commit suicide because of the threat of the enemy but because they chose freedom and pride and rejected enslavement as narrated by Josephus in the The Jewish War .
As we waited for the cable car that would take us up the mountain and into the refuge fortress complete with a Roman bath and a palace overlooking the Dead Sea, I found the narrative getting to me, and I started believing in the myth, too. It was Masada enchanting me, charming me with its sadness, its magnificence and its fate. It was staring at me, it was in my face convincing me with all that was left of it, and when I looked down from the top, I knew why it was so beautiful in its remoteness. The Dead Sea, its blue water, the Jordanian mountains reflecting in its waters, changing colours, stretched across from the fortress. The desert was beneath it. The hills closed in on it, the rains had carved the limestone mountains when they gushed forth in the rainy season, pulled down by the earth’s force. This place had everything and maybe that’s why Herod came here, lured by its promise of everything.
Masada ’s appeal has only increased over the years. Conde’ Nast Traveler magazine rated it as the world’s most popular tourist side recently.
Of course Zivit had internalised its tragic story, passed it on to her children and didn’t once mention the controversy about the Masada myth of Jews sacrificing their lives to dodge enslavement by the Romans that diluted the story of heroism because then it would mean negating their own struggles, their beliefs and their place under the sun, her own time serving in the Israeli Army always trying that Masada didn’t fall yet again.
The battle of Masada was lost. But the settlers saw that the idea could help in recruiting a force, and Masada resurfaced, and remains as important as it ever was.
It is in Masada, perched on a flat-topped limestone mountain, that the Israeli Defence Force recruits held swearing-in ceremonies shouting “Masada shall not fall again” from the 1927 poem by the Ukrainian poet Yitzhak Lamdan for many years until doubts about the accuracy of the Masada story itself was challenged by a scholar.
The idea of Masada trained soldiers to do anything; it became a symbol of Israel surviving among enemies, and occupied a place in the collective memory.
The fact that Israel has mandatory army service, it is a nation constantly on alert, trying to defend its borders and expand them, too. They are surrounded with countries that have denied its very existence.
It is here in Masada that I began to understand why Israel can fight the way it does, aggressively, ruthlessly, to defend the piece of land that’s their home and refuge and a place where Jews from all over the world can return to.
On most holidays, Zivit would pack her children in the car and drive over two hours to Masada in the Judean Desert, and the children would climb up the Snake Path and listen to the narrative of the Jewish refugees. They needed to be inspired, to look forward to the army time, and they needed to believe in the cause, feel sorry for the victims, she told us.
Because this is the age of doubt and doubt corrodes faith, she added.
The story that was relevant almost 2,000 years ago still holds ground. Surrounded by countries that have not recognized its existence , it is the perennial source of inspiration and dozens of children still climb up to the fortress, their mothers prodding them on, their teachers exhorting them to climb faster.
Zivit’s children too had soaked in the story, walk through the ruins, and listened to their mother saying how they should always be brave and never fear death.
That’s a ritual that Jewish mothers believe in. It’s part of the Jewish upbringing, a way of preparing their sons and daughters for the army, a service that is mandatory for the youth in Israel, she said.
“Because then they will never show their backs on the army and fight,” she said. “That’s how we raise our children.”
When Zivit, who now works as a tourist guide out of Haifa, was a young girl, she had trekked the narrow and steep path, too. The story of Masada is an important part of Israel’s national narrative, a myth that sustains its ideology, its wars, and its space.
I had been to Jerusalem, walked in Jesus’ footsteps, the Via Dolorosa, the path that Jesus took when he walked to his crucifixion, stood outside the Al Aqsa Mosque and wrote my wishes on a piece of paper and stuck it in the Western Wall so they could be answered, and watched in silence the hundreds of Jewish women reading the Torah facing the Wailing Wall, the last remnant of the second Jewish Temple. But in the old city I found identities, its clashes. Religion hung heavy on us, but even in the tears of the Jewish women I saw praying at the Western Wall, I couldn’t find the idea of Israel convincing enough.
Until I saw Masada, I was still trying to understand the Jewish mind. There were memorials scattered throughout the country, there was the Holocaust Museum, but it needed more, at least for me. Because in Jerusalem, past the security checkpoints, past the heavily-armed gunmen, it didn’t take much to see why Palestine needed its own place. This was their space denied to them.
In Masada, I knew why Israel needed to exist, too. Because here I saw how the Jewish refugees struggled to defend Israel after everything else had been taken over and how they died in the hopes that Messiah will gift Israel back to them. According to the account by Josephus, they killed each other until the last man killed himself while the walls burnt around them believing that God was punishing them for not being able to defend Israel. When they reclaimed Israel, they knew they were only trying to get what had been theirs. It’s another story that in the intervening 2,000 years, others had come to inhabit the region – the Palestinians.
In Israel, the first immigrants after the Nazi Germany hounded them and persecuted them, established communes called Kibbutz, pushing the boundaries of their country into the deserts, into hostile neighbor’s territories, incurring the wrath of those who were uprooted, and the world that often criticized them. They needed to sustain the zeal, and wanted their children to grow up believing in the struggle, and their victimization.
And this is why they needed Masada, and its heroic narrative.
For years, the schools have been bringing students to the fortress, narrating to them the story they have heard at home, that they will grow up with, and which will kill their doubts on war.
Masada is key to understanding the country’s insecurities, its youth and its transformation as its old generation gives way to new, the ones who are growing up in an age of aspiration.
Masada was rediscovered in 1838 by two American travelers, Edward Robinson and E. Smith, in 1838.
And from the 1930 onwards, after the Jewish National Fund bought it, it was a destination for Zionist youth. It wasn’t excavated until 1960s and at once became the centre of national interest, a site of pride for settlers who derived their sense of clan and community living from those Jewish refugees who came here. It injected Israelis with heroism needed to survive in a hostile environment, Zivit told us.
But Israeli new historians like Nachman Ben Yehuda have debunked the Masada story saying only a few skeletons were found in excavations later and Romans could not have waited out the whole night to get into the fortress whose walls they had burnt already.
But anyone visiting Israel, who needs to understand the Jewish people, needs to walk in the ruins of Masada and let it enchant you, and let it explain to you why it should not fall again and why they won’t let it fall again and why its beauty is so tragic and so convincing.
Facts about Masada
The Israel Nature and Parks Protection Authority has restored Masada’s ruins and adding to the historical site a museum consisting of nine rooms that house statues and other finds to help tourists reconstruct history was opened in 2007.
Masada was incorporated in the UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list in 2001. While Masada presents spectacular scenery in the night when the moon is strong and the ruins glow with its light, the sunrise viewed from the top of the flat mountain is equally famous. An audio-visual light show chronicling Masada's history is presented at the night time during summers. The dramatic show takes place during March and October and documents the last days of the rebel’s in the cliff-top fortress.
While a cable car has been built, a winding snake path built in those days to ferry people and supplies is still used by the people. The Snake Path opens about one hour before sunrise but is closed during extreme weather conditions. The treacherous path was built by Herod to get food and raw materials up on the 450 meters fortress. It is very narrow and steep and many still wonder how the palace was constructed and how slabs of stones were carried to that height. But there is what seems like a mining quarry that suggests the stones used to build the palaces were from the quarry.
Masada, with its myth and its conflict, will also host Verdi’s opera “Nabucco” in June. It will be produced by the Israeli Opera.
The fortress that sits in the mountain like an embryo was voted as the most popular tourist site in Israel in 2008 by Dun and Bradstreet.
Also known as Metzada, the fortress is on the western shore of the Dead Sea and is in the Judean Desert. Its east and west edge’s measure between 400 meters and 90 meters in height. This is where the Sicarii, the Jewish rebels, fled to after being hounded by the Romans centuries ago.
It was largely undiscovered until a Hebrew poet’s poem called Masada in 1920s generated interest in the site. Then, in 1960s Yigael Yadin started to excavate the region and the site became one of symbols of Israel.
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