Flower Power

Ataliah is a flower child, but she denies it. It's easy to pick her out from our group. The floppy polka dot hat and the red bell bottoms are a sure giveaway. She's too young to realize that when she talks about her dad who "gave up" his American citizenship and came to Israel from New York via Canada in the late Sixties, she's saying "draft dodger" to me. So regardless of what she claims, yeah, she's a second generation hippie.

Ataliah isn't the kind of name you expect for a hippie. In fact, regular Jews don't name their girls Ataliah 'cause the one in the Bible was a wicked queen who grabbed the throne by killing off her brothers in law after her husband the king got himself assassinated. A pretty cynical thing to do that doesn't square with stuff like peace, love and nature. Hippies have names like "Dandelion" and "Moonbeam". The only thing I can imagine is that when our Ataliah was born, her folks were trippin' on some really good weed and it sounded, like, groovy at the time.
.
.

.
Now, I've gotta come clean; I'm genetically biased. Back then when hippies were doing LSD in Central Park and demonstrating against the war in Vietnam, my people were on the other side of the barricades. They were chanting peace and free love, and we were shouting back country and patriotism. It's not like we were against equal rights or crazy about young men dying in Southeast Asia, but it was a clash of values. As far as we could see, at best flower children were naïve, at worst leading the next generation down a garden path to destruction.

Ataliah is a sweetie, but from where I'm coming from, I'm a bit skeptical about Flower Power.

I wonder what's Ataliah's take on our Negev Campus last week. We spent 4 days in the desert. We learned how its unique landscape was molded, carved and painted, and about the phenomena of Jewish settlement reclaiming the wilderness for the modern state of Israel.

Chaim "the motor mouth" was our guide mercifully for only the last day of the campus. From the moment he boarded the bus until well after dark he didn't give his vocal chords, or us, pause save to inhale air or take a slug from his canteen. The scuttlebutt is that in his day he was employed by the Mossad, interrogating enemy agents, wearing them down with endless, inconsequential trivia until they were singing like canaries. I spent the better part of the day in the hot seat across from him slipping in and out of consciousness.

The Negev has always been uninhabitable wasteland; a buffer between the land of Israel and Egypt, the highway of armies. Save for notable exceptions, such as the Nabataean civilization, it had been abandoned to nomads. At first it was even overlooked by the Zionist movements struggling to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

But by 1943 there was talk of partitioning the British mandate in Palestine between the Jews and Arabs, and word of the Holocaust making its way out of the death camps in Europe. The Jewish leadership knew that independence was fast approaching, and when it did they would have to have the means to receive and support large numbers of survivors from the camps. They needed land and lots of it. The Negev, by default more than choice, was the solution, and it had to be settled before the map dividing up the mandate was drawn.

The first settlers had to overcome two major obstacles. First of all, the British White Paper prohibited new Jewish settlement. This was solved with semantics; they called them "agriculture experimental stations". The second problem was the climate. Living at first in a "cave" (Which was actually a cistern abandoned by the Nabeteans) they build a stockade for defense, and then set about trying to grow something. The local well water is brackish, but by trapping desert flash floods they were able to dilute the salt content of the water enough for agriculture. At Kibbutz Revivim, among their first attempts as farmers was half an acre of gladiolas. Flowers in the Negev? At best, naïve.

The kibbutzniks were kinda like hippies, living off the land and sharing their stuff in a commune. Then some members of the U.N. commission partitioning Palestine showed up at Revivim. The kibbutzniks thought this was far out. They led the commissioners down the garden path and paused at the gladiola patch in full bloom.
"Really now", said one of the commissioners, "We didn't just fall of the turnip wagon! You probably stuck those in the ground yesterday."
To make his point, he grabbed one and pulled - and ended up with flower, bulb and roots in his hand. One of the kibbutzniks handed him shears.
"Dude, cut as much as you like, but it's, like, a real bummer to uproot the bulbs."
The commission returned to headquarters with a recommendation that the Negev be included in Israel. The kibbutzniks celebrated by smoking some of the stuff they were growing. (As an experiment, of course.)

So maybe there is something to Flower Power after all. Looking back, those hippies were right about Vietnam and played a big part in the movement for civil rights. Ataliah isn't at all like her namesake, but she isn't naïve either. She was a combat soldier in the army and recently helped organize "Walkabout of Love". Ataliah isn't leading anyone down the garden path; she just has more faith than most, including me. I'm glad she doesn't pay attention to me and my stereotypes.

Like, if she did, that would really be a drag.....

The Bean

Jack and the beanstalk. A boy and a bean and dream. The story is ancient, and everyone knows it thanks to Joseph Jacobs who published it about 200 years ago. Jack outwits an evil giant who in addition to being stingy, is a bad poet:

"Fee-fi-fo-fum!
I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Be he 'live, or be he dead,
I'll grind his bones to make my bread."

In the end, Jack lives happily ever after with his mother in the shadow of the dead giant, who was clumsy and fell off the beanstalk and landed in their backyard.

The Russian language edition translates the giant's ranting thus:

"Ya choi blat!
I smell the blood of the working class proletariat.
Be they alive or be they dead,
I'll grind their bones to make my matzo bread."

This caption is next to an illustration of the giant bearing a striking resemblance to Yankle, the Jewish tinker in the market in Mimansaslav, Ukraine. Jacobs was Jewish, so it's little ironic that his works provided documented evidence for what the locals had always suspected, namely that the Jews use Christian children to make matzos. Of course, this is total nonsense; everybody knows that Jews grind up Christian boys and girls to make kneidelech. Not ones to be hindered by the facts, Russian Orthodox priests brandishing crucifixes and a copy of "Jack and the Beanstalk" at the head of a mob of ignorant peasants set off on yet another pogrom leaving burning Synagogues and terrified Jews in their wake.

It was time for European Jews to move on. Russian peasants are very convincing. But to where? How? One group of Zionist activists had the answer. A bean.

Called "Lovers of Zion", they planted the bean in a plot of land purchased in Zammarin, Palestine, which was then smack in the middle of the Ottoman Empire. It wasn't a giant that troubled them at first, rather the monster was very small. A mosquito. Entire families were wiped out by malaria and many of those who survived physically put an end to their lives broken hearted. Today, only rows of silent graves in a pioneer cemetery remain to tell their story.

Of course, a bean isn't enough to make dreams come true. You need a giant. The pioneers found a friendly one in Baron Edmund James de Rothschild who took it upon himself to supply funds and advisors to jumpstart the failing experiment in Jewish settlement. In return, he asked that they name the place Zikhron Yaakov in memory of his father, James (Yaakov - or Jack) Mayer de Rothschild.

With Rothschild's help, the community took off. They built small homesteads and a synagogue and a winery. Today Zikhron Yaakov is a bedroom community between Haifa and Tel Aviv. The 19th century stone houses are galleries and tourist cafes along the cobblestoned main street. The winery is still up and running, but better know for the drinking and dancing fests held in the old wine cellars.

And like every happily ever after, they live in the shadow of a dead giant. Edmund de Rothschild purchased an enormous estate just out of town on the chalk cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean for his grave site. Today there is a center dedicated to educating the future generations of Israelis. Designed to friendly to the environment and to the visitor, it is built underground with an air conditioning system that works by circulating air through subterranean springs. The grounds around Rothschild's mausoleum are immaculate, rivaled in Israel only by the Baha'i Shrine in Haifa.

Being a gardener by trade, I couldn't resist breaking away and admiring my competitors work. And indeed, there is no limit to what you can do when money is no object. A greenhouse on site to grow perennials, and fountains and pools with a recirculation system. The paths are cleverly designed to be accessible to the handicapped and there's even a section devoted to herbs and fragrant plants for the benefit of the blind. There's literally something here for everyone.

I bumped into a couple of the staff that care for the grounds. One introduced himself as Sidney. Do I smell the blood of an Englishman? Well, yes. But more remarkable is the fact that he's in his eighties and going strong. He used to work in the office, but filled in for a woman on maternity leave and stayed on when she didn't return. That was 15 years ago. Very encouraging, me wondering if I will be able to go on landscaping until retirement.

Jack and the beanstalk is an incredible story, even for a fairy tale. Of course, 200 years ago when Jacobs first published it, who would have ventured that a wealthy suburban tourist town would be sitting on the Carmel overlooking the sea in an independent Jewish state.

.

No, that's a bean too hard to swallow.

A Journey Through Society

(I posted "A Journey Through Society" last year. It seems to me that now in the "Days of Awe" between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur that its message fits the season, fits what we have been studying and fits "Real Deep". My tenth graders below started 11th grade 2 weeks ago.)


My tenth graders set off on a journey last week. It's not the first time they've been in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, but this time they visited places and people that perhaps they had heard of, but could barely imagine. They traveled to the farthest corners of Israeli society; dark places most of us Middle Israelis never see.

And the first step was a question: If on one side is equality and on the other is 'survival of the fittest', where are we Israelis? Part of the answer is a rundown neighborhood in south Tel Aviv ironically named Shikunat Hatikvah ('Neighborhood of Hope'). Our guides did their best to to explain what it's like to live in an island of poverty in a party town like Tel Aviv, but they weren't nearly as convincing as the locals we met by chance. "It's not as bad as they say it is", they explained, but the subtitles read otherwise.
.
.
A few streets over is a slum that doesn't appear on the map, but has a name – 'Crate Town' (my translation). Not recognized by the authorities and therefore free of building codes and municipal services, people build their homes out of odds and ends. Pitch dark at night, flooded in winter and ruled by criminals, the people living here probably would have been left to their own devices except that to their misfortune they are sitting on some of the most valuable real estate in the country. Rich contractors buy up the ground from under their feet turning them into squatters on land they have lived on since the nation was founded. The rich getting richer use a combination of goons and city ordinances to force the poor getting poorer out of their homes.

Our next stop was the 'slave market' near the Central Bus Station. The street is a kaleidoscope of human beings of all colors and races, foreign laborers living on a pittance and often just one step ahead of the law. Exploitation draws exploitation – a few blocks over is the red light district (We didn't go there of course.)

A 15 minute bus ride away is Kikar Hamedina. It's Tel Aviv's Central Park, a circle of watered parks surrounded by chic boutiques that only the very wealthy can afford to shop. Again it was the passersby that underlined the message, casually mentioning how much they invest in the manicured dogs they're walking – more than what an entire family lives on in the neighborhoods we had been only minutes ago.

Walking back to the buses, I asked Odedah what she made of what we had seen that day. She's 16 years old, so learning that she was shocked didn't surprise me. She thinks that social justice has to start with people with money.

"Because people follow people with money."
"Do you have money?"
"No."
"Neither do I."

Oh well………….

We spent the night in a hostel in Jerusalem. An overnight school trip where we don't sleep in tents in the desert and have showers and teachers too tired to know or care what they're up to all night (see 'The Lowest Place on Earth'). The kids were very excited.

The next morning we invaded an ultraorthodox stronghold called Mea Shearim. I use military terminology because that is how the people living there see us creatures of modern society – the enemy. They reject modern culture, modern kids and the modern state that spawned them. They say that only the Messiah can redeem the Jewish nation in the promised land. The state of Israel is an abomination. We were asked not politely to leave.

Something odd occurred to me. Our guides were obviously not religious. That's why they wanted us to see the nasty side of religious Jews. Yet, for two days they were preaching about equality and social injustice.

There are two explanations for everything in the world. The first is called evolution. By random chance and natural selection, things are what they are. Survival of the fittest. The other, less popular, notion is creation. God created stuff for a reason.

Now if you believe in evolution, then the strong survive. There's no way around it. And if you believe in equality, then it's because we are created beings. There is a God.

So I thought it was odd a bunch of people trying to show us that God is bunk, but talk equality – and a another bunch of people that think they are better than everyone not like them, but talk God. I know there's some rational explanation, but I just thought it was odd, that's all.

Nevertheless, after two days of seeing poverty and crime and exploitation, I was wondering if those snobs in Mea Shearim aren't right. Maybe Israel is an abomination.

The plan was for my tenth graders to finish the day on Mt. Herzl, where the dreamer who wrote the blueprint for modern Israel is buried. They are 16 or almost 16 now, and the idea was to give them their identity cards in a ceremony at a place symbolic of the society they will be joining before long.

But once again, something not on the program underlined why we need Israel, warts and all. Just before loading the buses taking us to the ceremony, one ambulance siren, then a second, then dozens. In Jerusalem, that can mean only one thing. Terror. Another Palestinian that hates Jews more than he loves his own life.

Israel hasn't succeeded any more than the rest of the family of man in establishing a just society. But time and again, the world has turned on Jews, and providing a haven, not social justice, is why Israel has to exist.

On the way back home I remarked to Odedah that our journey reminded me of the Gospels. I mean, Jesus was on a journey in society. He rubbed shoulders with the poor, broke bread with the rich, was rejected by religious hypocrites.

"You know, like, not much has changed here in 2000 years."

"And it won't until He comes back", she replied.

I doubt if human beings will ever be able to create a just society. I know that Jesus didn't even try. He didn't come with a social agenda; He didn't come to change mankind. He came to save men.

So in a way, as much as I hate to admit it, they're right in Mea Shearim.
Redemption will come with Messiah.

Church Hopping

And now we finally come to the subject of Christianity. Yaki, our guide and instructor is Jewish and I suspect an atheist to boot, so his take on Jesus and the New Testament is a bit different than the one I recall. (To remind the reader, I did 19-20 years of hard time paying my debt to society in Sunday School.) Naturally, if Jesus is the subject de jour, a day in the field on the northern shores of the Sea of Galilee is mandatory. This was Jesus and his gang of disciples' stomping ground, where he spent most of his ministry and performed the majority of his miracles.

We started at an octagonal Roman Catholic church run by grumpy Italian nuns on the Mount of the Beatitudes. Yaki took us off to the side, hopefully out of the evil nuns' earshot, to explain at length about the Sermon on the Mount. Yaki thinks that even if Jesus existed, he never said or did the things 'they' say he did and in fact 'they' made it all up. He says that the Sermon on the Mount is a Christian invention meant to copy Moses giving the Torah on Mount Sinai. Yaki has a point; Jesus would have been a lot more original if he would have given the sermon in a bar. Jesus didn't really say anything new (Which is to be expected, him plagiarizing the Torah and all.); he just said that it's not enough to be good, but you have to really mean it. The nerve.

(In the meantime I'm on the lookout for angry nuns. Seeing how nasty they are to Catholic pilgrims, I can only imagine what they would do to a bunch of Jews bad mouthing Jesus.)

Despite my aversion to all things Catholic, I had to admit that the place is breathtaking. A short shower cleared the haze over the Sea of Galilee and freshened the gardens around the church. I decided to keep a safe distance from Yaki while he was Jesus-baiting and wandered in the grounds.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

It was a Sunday and groups from Brazil, Mexico, Germany and England had arrived in the meantime and finding quiet corners here and there, were celebrating mass. The Church has recently built a hostel for visitors, although this is misleading as from appearances it deserves at least four stars. As appealing as it looks, spending a night under the same roof with the cranky nuns isn't my idea of fun.

If I had the guts, I'd ask the nuns why they planted a big ol' church (with a big ol' plaque honoring the Pope that donated the funds to build it) smack on the spot where Jesus told his followers to (1) pray in private and (2) give alms in secret. As we were leaving, I wondered aloud if very many non-Catholics visit the place. I mean, the church and the bougainvilleas and the view are really swell, but they came all this way to see a hillside where Jesus spoke to the masses. You see lots of Catholicism, not much Jesus. Yaki is convinced that Evangelicals like the place, but my bet is that if they come at all, the first thing they do is cut through the garden and around the church, and head for the fence on the other side overlooking the lake.

Our next stop was at the bottom of the mount on the shore at the Church of the Primacy of Peter at Tabgha. This is where the Catholics say that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he rose from the dead. He asked Peter, who was apparently sitting on a rock at the time having lunch, to feed his sheep. The disciples, none of them being the sharpest tool in the shed and all of them being Roman Catholics, immediately set to work and built a church over the rock and made Peter the pope. In the meantime, a flock of sheep in Nazareth starved to death.

Yaki sat us down behind the church on the beach for yet more heresy, but coming in I noticed that the priest in charge of the place was being distracted by a couple of giggling (female) Filipinos that couldn't get enough of him, so I was pretty sure we were safe.

Next door to the Church of Peter's Primacy is the Church of the Multiplication. This is an odd name, as the Catholics are notoriously poor in mathematics. This is where the Church has decided that Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes, although anyone who has read the New Testament and is familiar with the local geography knows that the miracle could have taken place at any number of places around the lake except for Tabgha.

Unlike most churches which are closed all week and open only on Sundays, the Church of the Multiplication is open all week and closed on Sundays, so we didn't get to visit. Rats. Yaki says the place is worth a visit in our spare time if we get a chance. He explained that when the Church started building churches (After being legalized in 324 by Constantine the Great.), they built structures using the blueprints of pagan temples and simply translated the symbolism of idolatry to a Christian message. The Church of the Multiplication, built recently but on the guidelines of the ancient structures, is a standing example of what almost all churches looked like after Christianity came out of the closet.

Now, after Peter became the first pope they hadn't built Vatican City yet, so Peter had to live with his mother-in-law in Capernaum, which is just down the road from Tabgha. Not only was Peter the pope, but he was known for cracking great mother-in-law jokes from the pulpit. It wasn't long before they had to remodel the place to contain the ever growing congregation in Capernaum, and after Christianity was legalized they flattened the house and built an octagonal church instead. Unfortunately, in the meantime Peter had got fed up with living with his mother-in-law and had moved to Rome where he was crucified upside down.

Our visit to Capernaum was the first place in the day that smacked of authenticity and not Catholicism. A modern, round church has been built suspended over the ruins of the ancient one. Yaki fondly calls it "the flying saucer". The ruins which can be seen from under the church and from an opening inside are probably the first church built ever. They reflect the development of the Church from Jewish roots to an underground movement to an established state-recognized institution. An average home like any of the others on the site was renovated internally to allow large numbers of believers to congregate (but not externally lest it draw the attention of the authorities), and then in the fourth or fifth century was turned into a place of pilgrimage.

A fifth century synagogue a stones throw from the church, built of white limestone while the local stone is black basalt, was obviously imported. The Christian Byzantines prohibited the building of new synagogues, so it's possible that the local Jewish community purchased an existing building elsewhere, transported it here and reassembled it on its present site. Or perhaps the Church wanted a standing synagogue for pilgrims who wanted to see the synagogue where Jesus preached (John 6:59). Anyway you look at it, the white synagogue in Capernaum is a product of the Church.

While the Catholic church may have reinterpreted the pagan architecture, they didn't succeed in sterilizing the interior decorating of idolatry. It's hard to pick out Jesus among the host of images in a Catholic Church. I've been to quite a few churches over the last few months, and save for notable exceptions like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the nun's church on the Mount of the Beatitudes, all of them are dedicated to saints, not Jesus.

The little girl with the doll caught my eye in the Greek Orthodox church at Capernaum. She was fascinated by the Madonna and child, and repeated approached the icon and imitated Mary cradling her doll like baby Jesus.

.

We ended the day at the baptismal site at Yardenit. Jesus was baptized in the Jordan, but probably quite a bit downriver at Kassar el Yahud near the Dead Sea. Today the water flowing in the Jordan is for the most part treated and untreated sewage, so this spot near the Sea of Galilee where the water is still fresh is favored by Christians that want to be baptized in the waters that Jesus was. This is a site oriented to the Protestant crowd, and we came just in time to witness the baptism of a physician from California by Pastor Bob. He told his friends and family gathered around about his life since he had come to faith as a young medical student, then joined Christ symbolically under the water as Pastor Bob dunked him.

For me this underlined the difference between the Evangelical experience and Catholic pilgrimage. The Evangelical comes here seeking a closer relationship with Jesus. They want to see where he grew up, trace his footsteps and follow his ministry unobstructed by changes in the scenery, including beautiful churches, over the last 2000 years. And they want to meet his people, the Jews that live here today.
.

For Catholics, it's all about the Church. They want to see the "Church Triumphant", and are perfectly willing to accept the interpretations they are spoon-fed by their clergy regardless if it contradicts historical research or even common sense. As the Pope's last visit to Israel made clear, the Catholic attitude towards Israelis is that they are trespassers, in both definitions of the word, in the holy land.

During the day Yaki mentioned the three towns Jesus cursed – Korazim, Bethesda and Capernaum (Luke 10:13-15). The first two are deserted ruins, but before Christians get too smug with this knowledge, consider this. The same earthquake that flattened the cursed towns also destroyed Christian Hippos known for the number of churches out of all proportion to the number of inhabitants. And Jesus' prophesy hasn't been totally fulfilled. There's still a small community of Franciscans living in Capernaum.

Better watch out………

Sunday School

When I was a kid, we used to compete at Sunday School to see who could memorize the most scripture by heart. Besides John 3:16, the all time favorite was John 11:35, "Jesus wept." The shortest verse in the Bible; only two words. A freebie.

It's about how a friend of Jesus, Lazarus, gets sick. His sisters run off to fetch Jesus, but by the time Jesus can get away from the Messiah business, poor ol' Lazarus has died in the meantime. When Jesus finds out that his buddy Lazarus is dead, he's real broken up about it. "Jesus wept."

Now everybody is real impressed with the show of emotion, but his friends take Jesus aside. "You know, the sympathy is really nice, but you being the Messiah and all, we were hoping for a little more." Jesus takes the hint and then and there raises Lazarus up from the dead. Once again, Jesus saves the day and everybody's happy. (Especially Lazarus and his sisters.)

All this happened a few years before the rebellion against Rome. It didn't go well for the Jews, and Jerusalem didn't fare any better than Gamla and the rebels in Galilee. The Romans took their sweet time and then finally stormed and took the holy city, destroyed the Temple and slaughtered anyone that had managed to survive the siege. Jerusalem was leveled, and then to add insult to injury, less than a century later the Romans founded a pagan city on the ruins and called it Aelia Capitolina. They built a temple to Zeus on the temple mount to rub in their victory over the Jews, and another temple to Aphrodite on Golgotha (Where Jesus was crucified.) to stick it to the Christians, who they liked only a little more than the Jews.

The Romans built fortifications for their new city Aelia Capitolina, included 4 gates – and no wall. Not only that, only one was at the entrance to the city. Another one stood half a kilometer north out of town and two more so called "gates" were in the city center. Our guide Nachum claims that this was something the Romans did to demonstrate power, but to me it looks like a bureaucratic snafu – someone budgeted for 4 gates and forgot to allocate funds for the wall. Despite my objections, Nachum maintains that the Romans did this all over the empire, including in Rome. I counter that it only proves that they were consistently incompetent, no more. My friends duly noted Nachum's opinion and not mine because he claims to be one of the examiners for the exam to be certified. (But then, if he's inventing tales glorifying inept Romans, then it's likely that he's not above impersonating an examiner.)

Nevertheless, the city gate was very impressive. One main entrance was flanked by two smaller ones, and on the other side was a huge half circle plaza with a statue of the emperor or Zeus on a pillar. Today the Damascus Gate built by the Ottomans 500 years ago stands on the ruins of the Roman/Byzantine one, but you can still see one of the minor gates below serving as foundation for the 16th century one.

And then in one of those strange twists of history, the Romans converted to Christianity. Most people don't realize that the Byzantines were no more than the same mean ol' Romans that had simply switched from idols to icons. This brings us to the Byzantine period.

When you are studying the land of Israel in the Roman Period, Jesus doesn't figure in. He wasn't a player; working miracles and being the Messiah don't cut the mustard. But when you come to the Byzantine Period, it's a different story. A lot of things had changed since Lazarus rose from the dead.

One of the first things the Byzantines did was change the name of Aelia Capitolina back to Jerusalem. It was confusing for little Byzantine kids in Sunday School, memorizing Bible verses about Jerusalem and then the grown ups had to explain that it meant Aelia Capitolina. Changing the name back to Jerusalem made it a lot easier for everybody. Not only that, they built churches.

Now everybody knows that Constantine the Great was the first Byzantine emperor, but it's a little know fact that he never went to Sunday School. When he was a little boy he didn't have to go because he was a heathen, and even after he got saved he was just too busy running his empire business.

One Sunday morning his mom, Helena, dropped by the palace.
"Constantine the Great, Sweetie, I think you should come to church with me this morning."
Constantine saw where this was going. The last thing he needed was for the palace guard to see him tagging along behind him mommy to Sunday School. In no time they would have him memorizing Bible verses.
"Mom, I've got a better idea. I think you should go to the holy land."

So Helena went to Jerusalem. She walked through the gate, took one look up at the statue of Zeus and told the city fathers to pull the dang thing down and put up something more appropriate to the city of our Lord. In a jiffy they had the statue down, sawed off the lightning bolt, and drilled a hole in its place and then inserted a golden staff. They shaved off the helmet and a sculptor chiseled away until it looked like long hair. By the time Helena left town, a statue of the Good Shepherd was standing on the pillar as good as new, without making a dent in the city wall fund.

Helena's mission was to find the very places Jesus had been, in particular the ones connected with his crucifixion, and to build churches there. She marched down the Cardo, which is Latin for "Main Street", and stopped smack in front of the temple of Aphrodite, which is Latin for Hustler magazine.

"Isn't this Golgotha?"
"Yes, ma'am." The town fathers blushed. (Who would have thought that the old bag was so well informed on holy places.)
"What in carnation is that abomination doing on the passion of our Lord?!!"
A few town fathers snickered.

Helena demanded that they tear down the temple, get rid of those outrageous statues of naked women and build the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Someone dared suggest that if they left the statues it might be easier to get the kids to go to Sunday School. Helena wasn't amused.

Which brings us to my course in the 21st century. The subject for our day in the field was "Byzantine Jerusalem". This means for the most part going to churches, and being a Sunday, I couldn't help getting a little de je vu from my childhood years in Sunday School, but for most of my collogues church is about as familiar as the far side of the moon. (Somehow I got separated from the group at the Damascus Gate, so I headed for the Holy Sepulcher hoping to catch up with them. When I didn't find them there, I back tracked and found them in the museum that's under the gate. Miron, our course coordinator, asked me where I disappeared. I just shrugged. "I went to church.")

.

.

.

.
We took the Via Dolorosa, the same route Jesus was lead to Golgotha, to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. There are stations along the way marking every detail of Jesus' way to the cross.
.

If there is a time and place on earth that is the focus of the Christian religion, it's what happened here 2000 years ago. Its heart is an empty tomb. It has been embellished, and a dome built over it, but that's what it is. While ancient churches always were always oriented, pointing east, the Holy Sepulcher's basilica points west, towards the place that Jesus rose after 3 days in the grave.

One cannot but be impressed by the emotion, the awe, the passion, of worshipers from all over the world that make the pilgrimage. The sepulcher itself is covered with soot and wax, and the air a thick haze, from hundreds of candles lit around the base every day. It's as if an aura of holiness has been bottled and capped inside a grand Roman vestibule.

Yechiel, the other American taking this course, is an observant Jew. This was no doubt the first time he went to church. As we were leaving, he remarked that he can see why Christians that visit the Holy Sepulcher are moved.

I agree; no Christian can be apathetic, but not always in a positive way. I couldn't help but recall my brother Barry's remark after visiting the place: "This is the first time I've seen idolatry in real life." Barry's gut reaction to the religion the Romans created by dressing Jesus in the vestments of paganism is understandable. And anyone who's been to Sunday School knows that if Jesus is who he says he is, the last place you are going to find him is in a grave.

The last place we visited in Byzantine Jerusalem was in the parking lot of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City. Nachum pointed to a spot on the pavement and explained that we were standing on the northwestern corner of the Nea, a church in honor of "The virgin Mary, mother of God" built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian. It had a sanctuary bigger than a football field and towered over the Temple Mount.

The Nea would have been just another VERY big church if taken out of context. Its location and size were no accident. One of the curiosities of Byzantine Jerusalem was that one vast stretch of prime real estate, the Temple Mount, was left in ruins purposely as witness to Jesus' prophesy that the Temple would be destroyed; that not one stone would be left on another. (Luke 19:41-44) Pious women all over the empire were asked to save the soiled rags after their monthly cycle and the church sent special deliveries of these "offerings" to be thrown on the Temple Mount. The Nea had no connection whatsoever to the life and ministry of Jesus; building a monument of grandeur to dominate the Temple site, and degrading the mount with refuse was a statement of the triumph of Christianity over the Jews.

Today the Nea lays under a parking lot. Jews park there.

Yechiel remarked about the Nea Church on the way home.
"They built this huge monumental church out of hatred, to humiliate the Jews and to one up the Temple. Was this what Jesus had in mind when he said that there wouldn't be one stone left on another?"

And my Sunday School lessons served me that moment. I recalled the story of how Jesus had come into Jerusalem a week before he was crucified. He came up over the Mount of Olives on a spring day, and as he made it over the top, the city was spread out before him in all her glory. He saw the Temple and the mansions around it. No doubt he knew that there were people there already plotting to take his life, and that same blind hatred would one day take them deeper, to murder one another while the enemy stood at the gates. He saw the Romans pulling down Jerusalem's Temple, raping her women and butchering her babes. He saw the abomination the Gentiles would make of her, and how one day they would built monuments of hatred in his name. Perhaps he even realized that the same Roman Empire that crucified him would twist his words and convince his people that he had planned all this.

That Sunday School story popped into my mind when Yechiel asked about Jesus' prophesy.

Did Jesus prophesy about Jerusalem in a spirit of spite and superiority?

"No", I said, "Jesus wept."

.

Been There, Done That

They say that those who know, do it; those who don't, teach. A half year into this course, in which the accent is supposed to be practice before theory, I think I can agree with that. I did the academic thing first and only now am (supposedly) working for a license to kill, so I can tell the difference.

For one, the field is our classroom. They drag us out week after week to see for ourselves what happened, where it happened. Our instructors and guides are more often than not the last word, the ones who made the discoveries themselves, uncovered the past with their own two hands. They tell us not only what they found, but how the mysteries of the past unraveled before their eyes. The dilemmas, the doubts, the debate and the dumb luck that bore discoveries. A generation from now, future courses will only be able to read about this stuff.

Like this week. It started at a site literally next door, Gamla. It was a fortress city that fought the Romans down to the last man, woman and child – those who couldn't fight to the bitter end jumping over a cliff lest they be taken captive. It came up again a couple of days later with Dr. Moti Aviam, the archeologist that dug out the forensic evidence corroborating Josephus Flavius' testimony of the siege of Yodfat (Jotapata) which fell a few months previous to Gamla. (Moti's also a leading authority on ancient synagogues in the Galilee.) He noted that there's a pattern of behavior when the Jews faced defeat at the hands of the Romans – they preferred to die fighting, or to just die (In the case of the mass suicide at Masada.) rather than surrender to the enemy. "Jews never lose, they simply kill themselves before the enemy can win", he quipped wryly.

This led to a debate. Martyrdom, heroism, suicide, murder – ideas and ideals bounced around. And then Moti told us his story.

He was a young tank commander in October of 1973. His platoon was attached to a paratroop company holding positions on the Golan Heights. At midday on Yom Kippur their positions were overwhelmed by a massive Syrian surprise attack. Falling back to a fortified hilltop called Tel Saki, Moti was the first one wounded, taking a burst from an Uzi from one of his friends. ("On the firing range, they always had him flip it on automatic 'cause he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, and then I get three solid hits, including one to the forehead.") They realized that they were going to be overrun by Syrians. "Our commander radioed for 'fire on our forces', artillery firing on our positions while we duck for cover and hopefully wiping out the attackers. One shell fell short, and one fell long and so ended our artillery support."

Piled almost one on top of the other in one of the bunkers, they heard the Syrians take the positions above. Wary of trying to flush out the survivors, the Syrians threw in hand grenades. "At this point, we decided that this would be a good time to surrender." One of them went up with a white flag, but when they heard shots they realized that their options were limited. The paratroop commander gave an order to pass out grenades, take out the safety pins and release them if the Syrians come down. They tried to stay as quiet as possible, hoping the Syrians would take them for dead. One of the wounded, deafened by the grenade blasts, didn't get the message. He moaned and didn't hear them telling him to be quiet lest they draw attention. Finally the commander ordered his comrades to kill him, but instead one of them unrolled cigarette paper and wrote with some charcoal, "Syrians above – be quiet." The guy quieted down. "He was deaf, but he could see."

Taking us back 2000 years to the Jewish rebels facing defeat, Moti said, "From my personal experience, it's a thin line between suicide and martyrdom. All I know is that lying there wounded and holding a live grenade, I wanted very much to live."

History profs, archeological finds or even Josephus' accounts can't put you there with the Jewish rebels with their backs to the wall the way Moti Aviam does. Even the stones cans speak when translated by someone that dug them out.

So speaking as one that has done both, a hands-on course for a certificate can mean more than an academic degree. I want it from the source, from those who have been there and done that. If they haven't, let them teach.

Against The Odds

First let me say that the first part of this entry is incredibly boring geology stuff, but I'm going somewhere with this, so bear with me. If you just can't take it, skip the next paragraph.

Geologists tell us that after creation, the land of Israel was a very peaceful place. This is because it was about 500 meters under water at the bottom of the sea. Moving tectonic plates under the sea floor crashed into a fig tree on what is now the sidewalk on Bashar Blvd. in downtown Damascus, and as a result of the collision the sea bed was pushed up much in the way the front end of a '72 Corvette piles up on a telephone pole. Until this time, fish and sea horses had been defecating and dying on the bottom of the sea and the debris had hardened into limestone and a kind of soft chalk stone half a kilometer or so deep. Unfortunately, the earth's crust was damaged when all this happened. The newly formed mainland split in two forming the Syrian-African Rift, and both halves started moving in opposite directions. Molten magma forced to the planet surface started erupting all over the place, covering the chalk and limestone with hundreds of meters of lava flows, volcanic debris and silica. Personally, I don't believe a word of this, but this is what geologists say and since I wasn't there at the time, I'm in no position to challenge them.

One person that could challenge the geologists is Marvin the Canaanite. One morning 5000 years ago he woke up, emerged from his Early Bronze Age house on the Golan Heights and was walking his goat when a wave of lava washed into the village, destroying his home and drowning his goat. We know this because the goat's bones were found next to the remains of Marvin's house.

Marvin left the area never to return. His descendants eventually immigrated to the U.S., certain that they had finally found a peaceful place where their quiet lives would never be disturbed by the forces of nature. Some of them live in New Orleans and others settled in the Pacific Northwest in a tranquil hamlet at the foot of Mount St. Helens. They were last heard of in 1980.

(Photo of Mt St. Helens, May 18, 1980)

Meanwhile a new bunch of people moved to the Golan in the Chalcholithic Period. They didn't actually live there – it was where they spent their vacations. The remains of their holiday cottages can be found about 50 meters to your right when you turn off the main road to Moshav Yonaton. You won't find graves at this spot – duh. Like, they were on vacation. Besides, as one of the Chalcholithic old timers used to say, "Bad enough I wasted my vacations here: I'll be danged if I let them bury me here." Apparently there wasn't a lot to do save doodle on the basalt rocks, which is how the place – Ras el Harbush ("Strange scribbling" in Arabic.) – got its name for the strange markings Chalcholiths made when they got bored.

(Travelers note: If your guide takes you to see Ras el Harbush, you can be pretty sure you've managed to piss off somebody. I asked Nir, our guide, why he decided to take us to Ras el Harbush. He shrugged. "Miron (Our course director) just said, 'Whatever you do, make sure to take them to Ras el Harbush.'")
.

.

.

.
Now while we were on our way to the next historic site, we were wondering where the Chalcholiths buried their dead and noticed a lot of strange rock formations scattered all over. These are ancient burial sites. The Early Bronze Age people would stand up two big boulders on end and put a third one on top. They called this a "dolman". When they were in a hurry, they piled a bunch of rocks on the body (hopefully dead). This was called a "tumulus". Sometimes they just cleared away the stones to make a holiday village or something. This is called "a pile of rocks".
.

.
Over the years erosion has carved gullies and ravines into the layers of lava and the soft chalk below. When this happens,the chalk underneath is washed away and the basalt rock above breaks off, leaving cliffs that drop off sharply into the wadis below. Sometimes narrow rock outcroppings remain where two wadis meet, with cliffs forming natural fortifications on three or more sides. One of these places was chosen as the site of a fortress town, first by the Seleucids and later by the Maccabees. It's called 'Gamla' because the narrow hump like hill the town was built on resembles a camel's hump (Gamal is camel in Hebrew.)

In 66 A.D. the Jews in the Galilee and Golan revolted against their Roman rulers. The good people of Gamla fortified the northern approach into town by reinforcing the exterior walls and filling in rooms of houses on the city limits. They were pretty happy with themselves, especially when the Roman governor showed up with a posse and tried to starve them out, and when this didn't work tried to take the town by force only to get his butt soundly kicked.
.

Nir the guide was explaining this when someone pointed out that I was standing smack on top of a hornets' nest in a crack in the rocks. This gave me food for thought. My first thought was how glad I was that I wear long pants even on hot summer days, otherwise the hornets would have flown clean up my pant legs and stung me where the sun don't shine. The other thing that occurred to me was how more often than not something random happens on these field trips that symbolize the place we're visiting. Because the story of Gamla is how a small country town managed to stir up a hornets' nest.

When the Roman governor came back with mud on his face, the Romans applied that old adage that what you can't do with force, you can do with even more force. They showed up at Gamla with 3 legions, which if you count legionaries, archers, servants, cooks and camp followers amounts to about 40,000 to 50,000 men. This was about 4 Romans per each Gamlan; man, woman and child.

The Gamlans were never very bright, so they thought they could beat the odds against them. And at first it seemed rightly so. The Roman general Vespasian broke through the walls with a battering ram and the legionaries burst in, but for once typically poor Israeli city planning played to the defenders favor. The town was built on a steep slope, the city street in front of one row of houses being the roofs of the houses in the row below. Of course, the Gamlans had never built to code, so when hundreds of soldiers started racing down the street, the roofs collapsed under the weight. Vespasian barely managed to make an exit with his life.

In the end, substandard building practices were the Gamlans' undoing. One night a few legionnaires got bored with the siege and snuck up to the round tower that dominated the fortifications. They were fooling around and dislodged a few stones at the base of the tower and the whole dang thing came tumbling down! Like soldiers every where, the legionnaires' natural instinct was to not take responsibility for their tomfoolery, but just as they were making their getaway who should limp up but ol' Vespasian nursing a bum leg from the roof collapsing incident.

"What are you fools doin' wandering around in the dark? Why don't you come and help me figure out how to break into Gamla?", asked Vespasian.
"Well, as a matter of fact, we just got done pulling down the tower.", said Tumulus the legionnaire.
"Good save.", whispered Tumulus' friend Dolman.

Vespasian, never one to be taken in by his men, insisted on seein' it for himself. Sure enough, no tower! First thing the next morning Vespasian sent his son Titus into the city with some cavalry with orders: Do not ride on the roofs! Titus thought his dad was being a bit overprotective and that his order of the day was a bit odd, but nevertheless promised to not ride on the roof. In no time the Romans were kicking butt and the defenders were forced back to some rock cliffs at the top part of town. At this point the Gamlans didn't have many options. They could either try their luck with the Roman forces coming up through town, or with the force of gravity. It was about 50-50, but none of those who tried to fight off the legionnaires nor those that jumped over the cliff survived.

Today Gamla is the Golan's "lover's leap". Young star-crossed lover go there when their folks won't let them get married. Usually one glance over the edge of the cliff gives them second thoughts and they decide to just shack up together.

Our next stop was another fortress town in the southern part of the Golan called Sussita in Hebrew, or Hippos in Greek. (Both names mean "horse" in their respective languages. I noticed that they named cities after beasts of burden back then. I'm certain that if archeologists look hard enough they will find another town called "Hamor", Hebrew for "jackass".) Sussita was quite a bit better off than her poor cousin Gamla, probably due to the fertile farmland on the bluffs overlooking her and the narrow shore of the Sea of Galilee below. Remarkably, the farmland in this part of the Golan is almost free of rocks, despite the fact that it sits on a bed of basalt like the rest of the Golan. Nir the guide claims that this is due to the volcanic rock being dissolved by the elements over time. I think there might be another explanation. The farmers in the south were shrewd businessmen. They knew that further north there was always a good market for stones, what with them building dolmans and tumulus and chucking rocks at Gamla and all, so they would plow up their fields, let the Romans and Bronze Agers gather up the rocks for a modest fee a come out richer for it both ways. Just a thought……

What ever the case may be, Sussita fared better than Gamla, mainly because she didn't mess with the Romans. Having a Gentile majority probably had a lot to do with this. In fact, things were going so well for Sussita that they decided to make it the county seat and turn it into a full blown Roman city, starting by calling it Hippos and joining the 10 city league called the Decapolis. There was one little problem, namely that being on the top of a hill they didn't have a source of running water. Fortunately, the Romans were never ones to let Jews or the law of gravity get in their way. They built an aqueduct from a nearby spring, and then a watertight pipe system made up of pipes made of solid stone that transported water down the slope opposite the city gate and then up into the city with hydrostatic pressure. Hippos/Sussita was never very big, but it was an attractive city with water fountains and beautiful temples (later churches) complete with huge marble columns that some how were hauled up the mountain and then over the walls. Very impressive.

It occurred to me that the Romans were an arrogant bunch. They weren't to be stopped by anyone or anything, not even the forces of nature. A bit like Americans that a build major port city like New Orleans below sea level. I think there's a moral here. In the end, Nature won. In 749 a major earthquake leveled the city and its ostentatious building and cut its water supply. The Arabs who were masters of the land by then decided that it wasn't practical to rebuild Hippos/Sussita and it was abandoned never to be rebuilt. There's a lesson here for Americans: the Romans' technological achievements lasted only 700 years.

Food for thought....

The last chapter of Sussita's story was in 1948 when some kibbutznikim from Ein Gev took control of the hilltop, turning it into a forward outpost on the Syrian-Israeli border where both sides took potshots at each other until the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel conquered the Golan Heights.

Geologists tell us that one day the land of Israel will be once again as peaceful as it was a million or so years ago when it was under the sea. They say the Syrian-African Fault is moving and an ocean being born under the Sea of Galilee. If we are only patient, one day there will be peace between Israel and her neighbors because Israel will be on one side and the Syrians will be on the other shore and it won't make sense to fight. All we have to do is wait a million years or so.

So Mr. Obama is right after all: there is hope for peace in the Middle East.