Mass Suicide
Leaving the desert city of Arad, early in the morning, we passed a sign on the road: “Artist’s Quarter.” Who is this lone artist? I wondered. One possibility – the novelist and peace activist Amos Oz lives in Arad, in exile from his childhood home of Jerusalem where the “dazzling light preyed on itself from morn to evening,” as Oz writes in Panther in the Basement. Perhaps he’s the guy, gifted a quarter all to himself filled with beneficent light. Another sign from yesterday’s trip to the Dead Sea: “Nightly Swimming Prohibited.” Now and then, sure, but not every damn night! Moderation in all things, and let me add that no mockery is intended; language translation is hard and English is particularly prickly.
Translation of human motivations across millennia is also demanding. Before giving that a shot, however, let’s climb Masada and risk sunstroke.
On the road there, camels intruded – six 1,600 pound dromedaries loafing about the roadside. We stopped the car and I jumped out with my camera held aloft like a torch. They couldn’t have cared less. Their faces were scratched, as if from battle, and scruffs of brown, fuzzy hair sprouted on their humps, shoulders and upper necks. Elahna smiled, but wouldn’t budge from the wheel. One camel scraped against the padlocked, metal fence wrapped around a water spigot. The land here was rubble and dust with patches of barely-green grass over which the camels, domesticated now for 3,500 years, dipped their long necks and nibbled. What a bunch of lunkheads. Every movement seemed a shrug, sad and insolent at the same time. Up ahead, a Bedouin shepherd ushered a couple dozen goats across the road.
The population of camels in Israel has dwindled from about 20,000 in the 1990s to 3,000 today. Prized in Bedouin culture for transportation and milk, camels suffer from a lack of grazing land in a rapidly developing country. They often fail to reproduce when cooped up in the government-built housing complexes where many Bedouins now live. At night, especially in fog and rain, camels are often struck by vehicles as they wander across the roads and highways of Israel. As with moose in Maine, these crashes usually result in the death of both the camel and the human hurtling its way.
A couple of camels stopped dead on the pavement, surveying their domain. One made a rough, desultory squawk. In the distance, a plume of black smoke rose from the outskirts of Arad. Perfect – I got the shot, a hackneyed tableau of primitive and modern, one of 17.7 million digital photos of the anachronistic camel taken by tourists in 2012. My wife called for me to get in the car already. She was worried about going up Masada before the day boiled over. It was 80 degrees at 8 a.m. The camels moseyed away.
For an hour, passing only a few cars, we drove through a desert of sand-mounded hills and moonscape wastes. The temperature hit 90 as we arrived in a parking lot on the western side of Masada. Basically it’s a high plateau surrounded by ravines and invested with epic, national significance. In 73 CE, several years after the burning of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple, 960 Jewish zealots committed mass suicide on Masada. They did that instead of surrendering to Roman troops that were about to breach the fortress via an enormous earthen ramp constructed using Jewish slaves. An account of the suicides, as well as the exact wording of the valedictory speech by Zealot leader Eleazar Ben Yair, was given to the Romans by two Jewish women who survived by hiding in a cistern. That’s the story, as told by the historian Josephus in his book The Wars of the Jews. As the only source, his version is under dispute and only partially supported by modern excavations.
This suicide saga was pretty much forgotten for 1,850 years, until the Israeli writer Isaac Lamdan wrote the poem Masada. Published in 1927, it became hugely popular among Zionists for its message of ultimate defiance in the face of defeat; it’s even been credited with inspiring the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. The poem’s concluding phrase, “Masada shall not fall again,” elevates an obscure historical tragedy into the realm of myth and allegory. After boot camp, IDF soldiers stand on the plateau at dawn and repeat those words as a sacred oath. A neighboring line in the poem, “Open your gates Masada, and I, the refugee, shall enter” equates the turmoil of ancient Masada with the making of aliyah in modern Israel. As hallowed ground, and as burning archetype, Masada has come to represent something essential about Israel, or at least about popular conceptions of the nation and its destiny. Masada also hosts an annual road race, nightly light shows (yes, every night), and an opera festival. During the week before our arrival, 45,000 people sat by the western cliffs of Masada and watched Aida, which ends in glorious suicide for the sake of love.
In the lone palm tree near the snack shack congregated a squad of Tristram’s grackles, black birds with yellow stripes at their hips; the males’ heads were jet black, the females’ gray and dowdy. Toting four liters of water, Elahna and I headed up the trail beside the Roman Ramp. I had insisted that we include Masada on our travel itinerary and, to boot, walk ourselves up rather than take the cable car on the plateau’s eastern side, as I’d done 30 years ago as a college student roaming The Land; it seemed like another correction, as with our foray to the Monks’ Mill at Harduf, a chance to get it right. Ten minutes along, we ran into a Birthright group from Brooklyn. The trailing kids were noisy and one young woman wore a profane, alliterative t-shirt about fur. I spoke with a group leader who complained, half-heartedly, that the kids weren’t listening to the Israeli tour guide.
Soon, we made it up top. (The ramp route isn’t really that hard; the Snake Trail, for next time, is a more challenging test.) The temperature had broken 100 degrees and we joined a Birthright group from Los Angeles within the shaded ruins of a storehouse. These kids listened respectfully as their guide stressed the evolving meaning of Masada and explained the modern critique that the Zealots of 73 CE were fools to put themselves in a spot where suicide or slavery were the only options. He asked for questions or comments. I raised my hand and remarked that General George Washington prevailed in the American Revolution by never getting surrounded, by always having a means of retreat. The guide nodded politely – retreat is a pipe dream if you’re born encircled, he may have thought – and then he called on someone a bit younger. Elahna rolled her eyes.
The ruins of King Herod’s palace on the northern tip of the plateau overlooked the vastness of the Dead Sea. We toured bathhouses, the Tanner’s Tower and a public pool. We looked through the gap in the perimeter wall where the Romans finally burst through, and beyond that you could see the excavated outlines of the Roman camp at the base of Masada. An American senior citizen, sweated through his shirt in the 110-degree air, asked his guide why the Romans, the masters of the world, took such pains to defeat a ragtag gang of Jews hiding in the desert. The answer: crushing the Jews sent a message to other dissident groups in the Empire. This seemed a response more fitting for the age of mass communication, but I kept quiet this time and didn’t suggest that reducing Masada was a simple case of bureaucratic momentum, of cleaning up loose ends. Oh, plus institutional brutality and its pleasures.
Beside a retaining wall, in a dark square of shade, a rabbi handed out awards to his youth group. One for Jonathan, for his optimism and good cheer. One for Jessica, for her beautiful singing voice. Not far away, in the ruins of a stable converted to a synagogue during the Revolt, a dozen young men and women gathered about their leader. He was a skinny fellow in his twenties, in t-shirt, jeans and hemp sandals. A pair of Hasidic side locks, or payot, twirled down to his jawline and quivered as he held a paperback close to his face and zealously read aloud from Eleazar Ben Yair’s famous speech… Let our wives die unabused, our children without knowledge of slavery: after that, let us do each other an ungrudging kindness, preserving our freedom as a glorious winding-sheet…and his charges looked not at him but at the dusty, packed ground. Were they listening modestly or had they tuned him out? Life, not death, exhorted the hippie-Hasid, is man’s misfortune for death liberates the soul from its imprisonment in a mortal body…
He put down the paperback and told his group that the hard choice faced by the Zealots – suicide or slavery – mirrors the choices they will make as Jews. Understanding the questions posed by Masada, understanding the mystery of the place, will guide them in deciding how to use their Birthright experience. That’s what he said to them, to me, and I just didn’t get it, not at all. Suicide or slavery – was that really the choice faced by the Jewish rebels on Masada? I’m not so sure. They were Zealots who were motivated to act fanatically. They lived that way. They didn’t fight and risk capture. They didn’t try to break out. They didn’t negotiate. They killed themselves. They killed their children. They did the most extreme thing, as zealots do. Any other course of action would have been a mystery. Their choice was made, I think, the moment the Romans made camp.
Suicide or slavery? I can’t imagine that message resonated with the young Birthright Jews on Masada that day. Could the choices they’ll face as Jews – that I may face – possibly be so stark? Freedom as a glorious winding sheet…no, there has to be a third way, a middle ground. A choice located somewhere between suicide and slavery, between the immovable poles of surrender and oppression. Or is that mushy-minded idealism? Moderation – easy to say from the USA. Hard to find out here.
After looking over the southern edge of the plateau – more desolate hills, shimmering in heat waves – we photographed the mosaic floors of a Byzantine church from a later, post-suicide era on Masada. Then we were passed by a Haredi man in black suit and black hat. Black shoes, polished. He pulled a luggage rack on tiny wheels, and strapped to the rack were a microwave oven and a cardboard box. What in the world? This fellow looked cucumber cool – he must have ridden the cable car – and by name he greeted a worker who gently scraped a metal brush on a rock. The worker nodded. We followed behind the Haredi. Elahna suggested that he was an archeologist. With a craving for Hot Pockets, I joked. The man came to an open, rectangular tent stretched between four poles. He entered and set the microwave on a folding table and began to pull food out of the box. A couple of other tourists stopped and watched briefly, then walked away.
“Torah Study Hall” read a hand-made sign on the tent. The rules of life, debated in a blast-furnace in the sky. Two fighter jets screamed above. The high-noon patrol over Masada.
At 115 degrees, Elahna faded. We drank the last of our water and crept down the path beside the Roman Ramp; I held her elbow and told her that everything would be fine. (My stupid fault, I told myself. We started late because I had to play with the camels.) On flat ground we ducked under a shelter near the parking-lot palm tree and its tribe of grackles. To “rebalance my chemistry,” in her words, I bought Elahna potato chips, ice cream and two torpedoes of ice-cold water. Remembering my Boy Scout Handbook, I pressed a bottle on the back of her neck, in her armpits and behind her knees. I may have even rapid-recited the Scout pledge to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. (Clean, I’d thought as a boy, why does that matter?) If nothing else, my folkloric efforts amused Elahna. She churned through the sugar and salt, gulped water.
Fifty feet away, the tour bus for the Brooklyn Birthrighters idled. Its driver, an Arab, ate lunch at a picnic table with three other men; the one with the gun was an Israeli Jew pulling guard duty for the sons and daughters of America. Politely, they inquired about my wife’s health. I gave them a thumbs-up, toda, toda.
When Elahna felt strong enough, we got in the car and drove back to Arad where we ate our lunch in an air-conditioned mall.
@ @ @
Translation of human motivations across millennia is also demanding. Before giving that a shot, however, let’s climb Masada and risk sunstroke.
On the road there, camels intruded – six 1,600 pound dromedaries loafing about the roadside. We stopped the car and I jumped out with my camera held aloft like a torch. They couldn’t have cared less. Their faces were scratched, as if from battle, and scruffs of brown, fuzzy hair sprouted on their humps, shoulders and upper necks. Elahna smiled, but wouldn’t budge from the wheel. One camel scraped against the padlocked, metal fence wrapped around a water spigot. The land here was rubble and dust with patches of barely-green grass over which the camels, domesticated now for 3,500 years, dipped their long necks and nibbled. What a bunch of lunkheads. Every movement seemed a shrug, sad and insolent at the same time. Up ahead, a Bedouin shepherd ushered a couple dozen goats across the road.
The population of camels in Israel has dwindled from about 20,000 in the 1990s to 3,000 today. Prized in Bedouin culture for transportation and milk, camels suffer from a lack of grazing land in a rapidly developing country. They often fail to reproduce when cooped up in the government-built housing complexes where many Bedouins now live. At night, especially in fog and rain, camels are often struck by vehicles as they wander across the roads and highways of Israel. As with moose in Maine, these crashes usually result in the death of both the camel and the human hurtling its way.
A couple of camels stopped dead on the pavement, surveying their domain. One made a rough, desultory squawk. In the distance, a plume of black smoke rose from the outskirts of Arad. Perfect – I got the shot, a hackneyed tableau of primitive and modern, one of 17.7 million digital photos of the anachronistic camel taken by tourists in 2012. My wife called for me to get in the car already. She was worried about going up Masada before the day boiled over. It was 80 degrees at 8 a.m. The camels moseyed away.
For an hour, passing only a few cars, we drove through a desert of sand-mounded hills and moonscape wastes. The temperature hit 90 as we arrived in a parking lot on the western side of Masada. Basically it’s a high plateau surrounded by ravines and invested with epic, national significance. In 73 CE, several years after the burning of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple, 960 Jewish zealots committed mass suicide on Masada. They did that instead of surrendering to Roman troops that were about to breach the fortress via an enormous earthen ramp constructed using Jewish slaves. An account of the suicides, as well as the exact wording of the valedictory speech by Zealot leader Eleazar Ben Yair, was given to the Romans by two Jewish women who survived by hiding in a cistern. That’s the story, as told by the historian Josephus in his book The Wars of the Jews. As the only source, his version is under dispute and only partially supported by modern excavations.
This suicide saga was pretty much forgotten for 1,850 years, until the Israeli writer Isaac Lamdan wrote the poem Masada. Published in 1927, it became hugely popular among Zionists for its message of ultimate defiance in the face of defeat; it’s even been credited with inspiring the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. The poem’s concluding phrase, “Masada shall not fall again,” elevates an obscure historical tragedy into the realm of myth and allegory. After boot camp, IDF soldiers stand on the plateau at dawn and repeat those words as a sacred oath. A neighboring line in the poem, “Open your gates Masada, and I, the refugee, shall enter” equates the turmoil of ancient Masada with the making of aliyah in modern Israel. As hallowed ground, and as burning archetype, Masada has come to represent something essential about Israel, or at least about popular conceptions of the nation and its destiny. Masada also hosts an annual road race, nightly light shows (yes, every night), and an opera festival. During the week before our arrival, 45,000 people sat by the western cliffs of Masada and watched Aida, which ends in glorious suicide for the sake of love.
In the lone palm tree near the snack shack congregated a squad of Tristram’s grackles, black birds with yellow stripes at their hips; the males’ heads were jet black, the females’ gray and dowdy. Toting four liters of water, Elahna and I headed up the trail beside the Roman Ramp. I had insisted that we include Masada on our travel itinerary and, to boot, walk ourselves up rather than take the cable car on the plateau’s eastern side, as I’d done 30 years ago as a college student roaming The Land; it seemed like another correction, as with our foray to the Monks’ Mill at Harduf, a chance to get it right. Ten minutes along, we ran into a Birthright group from Brooklyn. The trailing kids were noisy and one young woman wore a profane, alliterative t-shirt about fur. I spoke with a group leader who complained, half-heartedly, that the kids weren’t listening to the Israeli tour guide.
Soon, we made it up top. (The ramp route isn’t really that hard; the Snake Trail, for next time, is a more challenging test.) The temperature had broken 100 degrees and we joined a Birthright group from Los Angeles within the shaded ruins of a storehouse. These kids listened respectfully as their guide stressed the evolving meaning of Masada and explained the modern critique that the Zealots of 73 CE were fools to put themselves in a spot where suicide or slavery were the only options. He asked for questions or comments. I raised my hand and remarked that General George Washington prevailed in the American Revolution by never getting surrounded, by always having a means of retreat. The guide nodded politely – retreat is a pipe dream if you’re born encircled, he may have thought – and then he called on someone a bit younger. Elahna rolled her eyes.
The ruins of King Herod’s palace on the northern tip of the plateau overlooked the vastness of the Dead Sea. We toured bathhouses, the Tanner’s Tower and a public pool. We looked through the gap in the perimeter wall where the Romans finally burst through, and beyond that you could see the excavated outlines of the Roman camp at the base of Masada. An American senior citizen, sweated through his shirt in the 110-degree air, asked his guide why the Romans, the masters of the world, took such pains to defeat a ragtag gang of Jews hiding in the desert. The answer: crushing the Jews sent a message to other dissident groups in the Empire. This seemed a response more fitting for the age of mass communication, but I kept quiet this time and didn’t suggest that reducing Masada was a simple case of bureaucratic momentum, of cleaning up loose ends. Oh, plus institutional brutality and its pleasures.
Beside a retaining wall, in a dark square of shade, a rabbi handed out awards to his youth group. One for Jonathan, for his optimism and good cheer. One for Jessica, for her beautiful singing voice. Not far away, in the ruins of a stable converted to a synagogue during the Revolt, a dozen young men and women gathered about their leader. He was a skinny fellow in his twenties, in t-shirt, jeans and hemp sandals. A pair of Hasidic side locks, or payot, twirled down to his jawline and quivered as he held a paperback close to his face and zealously read aloud from Eleazar Ben Yair’s famous speech… Let our wives die unabused, our children without knowledge of slavery: after that, let us do each other an ungrudging kindness, preserving our freedom as a glorious winding-sheet…and his charges looked not at him but at the dusty, packed ground. Were they listening modestly or had they tuned him out? Life, not death, exhorted the hippie-Hasid, is man’s misfortune for death liberates the soul from its imprisonment in a mortal body…
He put down the paperback and told his group that the hard choice faced by the Zealots – suicide or slavery – mirrors the choices they will make as Jews. Understanding the questions posed by Masada, understanding the mystery of the place, will guide them in deciding how to use their Birthright experience. That’s what he said to them, to me, and I just didn’t get it, not at all. Suicide or slavery – was that really the choice faced by the Jewish rebels on Masada? I’m not so sure. They were Zealots who were motivated to act fanatically. They lived that way. They didn’t fight and risk capture. They didn’t try to break out. They didn’t negotiate. They killed themselves. They killed their children. They did the most extreme thing, as zealots do. Any other course of action would have been a mystery. Their choice was made, I think, the moment the Romans made camp.
Suicide or slavery? I can’t imagine that message resonated with the young Birthright Jews on Masada that day. Could the choices they’ll face as Jews – that I may face – possibly be so stark? Freedom as a glorious winding sheet…no, there has to be a third way, a middle ground. A choice located somewhere between suicide and slavery, between the immovable poles of surrender and oppression. Or is that mushy-minded idealism? Moderation – easy to say from the USA. Hard to find out here.
After looking over the southern edge of the plateau – more desolate hills, shimmering in heat waves – we photographed the mosaic floors of a Byzantine church from a later, post-suicide era on Masada. Then we were passed by a Haredi man in black suit and black hat. Black shoes, polished. He pulled a luggage rack on tiny wheels, and strapped to the rack were a microwave oven and a cardboard box. What in the world? This fellow looked cucumber cool – he must have ridden the cable car – and by name he greeted a worker who gently scraped a metal brush on a rock. The worker nodded. We followed behind the Haredi. Elahna suggested that he was an archeologist. With a craving for Hot Pockets, I joked. The man came to an open, rectangular tent stretched between four poles. He entered and set the microwave on a folding table and began to pull food out of the box. A couple of other tourists stopped and watched briefly, then walked away.
“Torah Study Hall” read a hand-made sign on the tent. The rules of life, debated in a blast-furnace in the sky. Two fighter jets screamed above. The high-noon patrol over Masada.
At 115 degrees, Elahna faded. We drank the last of our water and crept down the path beside the Roman Ramp; I held her elbow and told her that everything would be fine. (My stupid fault, I told myself. We started late because I had to play with the camels.) On flat ground we ducked under a shelter near the parking-lot palm tree and its tribe of grackles. To “rebalance my chemistry,” in her words, I bought Elahna potato chips, ice cream and two torpedoes of ice-cold water. Remembering my Boy Scout Handbook, I pressed a bottle on the back of her neck, in her armpits and behind her knees. I may have even rapid-recited the Scout pledge to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. (Clean, I’d thought as a boy, why does that matter?) If nothing else, my folkloric efforts amused Elahna. She churned through the sugar and salt, gulped water.
Fifty feet away, the tour bus for the Brooklyn Birthrighters idled. Its driver, an Arab, ate lunch at a picnic table with three other men; the one with the gun was an Israeli Jew pulling guard duty for the sons and daughters of America. Politely, they inquired about my wife’s health. I gave them a thumbs-up, toda, toda.
When Elahna felt strong enough, we got in the car and drove back to Arad where we ate our lunch in an air-conditioned mall.
@ @ @