Wilderness of Zin
For 700 years, it was stage 62 in the great journey, three legs short of Gaza and then the last greedy palm grabbed its bribe and the loads of incense and spices disappeared into ships sailing for the incredulous West. Finally, the dust-scoured camels might get a decent rest. For 700 years – let’s remember, Israel has not yet turned 70 – the nomadic, enterprising Nabateans and their caravans stayed the night at stage 62, the Negev Desert outpost of Avdat, on the 1,500-mile trek from the hills of Yemen to the coast of Palestine. This long, long shvil was hot and arid, its sands and spaces unrelenting. For 700 years, the Incense Route thrived until the Romans muscled in and ruined everything.
Among the goods the camels carted: frankincense and myrrh, as in gifts brought to a certain manger by three kings chasing a star – a less precise form of navigation than GPS or Waze. The most lackadaisical Christians know about “gold, frankincense and myrrh.” (A friend in catechism class had called it “gold, Frankenstein and myrrh” and no wonder my adolescent mind conjured a tender meeting of baby Jesus and Frankenstein’s monster, pop-culture icons and martyrs to the folly of man.) So what the heck, exactly, is frankincense and myrrh? At the Avdat souvenir shop, all was revealed on a placard: myrrh is a gum resin bled from a thorny tree in Somalia and Ethiopia, and it’s made into oils and incenses used for pain relief and embalming. Today, find it in toothpaste! Frankincense, gotten by slashing the bark of another thorny tree, is said to stop hemorrhaging and mend fractured skulls. A good harvest depends on extracting maximum product without hacking the tree to death.
As a gift for my mother, I bought a teeny-tiny basket of frankincense and myrrh which, upon presentation, she pretended to adore. Next time, I won’t forget the gold.
A dark-skinned, frazzle-haired man ran the shop. In the course of chatting, he volunteered that the site had been vandalized a few years ago. There was no reason for the attack, he said, sounding troubled still. No reason at all. I found this hard to believe – there are always reasons, aren’t there? Simple reasons, now those we lack.
The facts of the case: a couple of young Bedouins – distant descendants of the Nabateans who made the Incense Route famous – snuck into Advat at night and knocked down columns, defaced altars, smashed artifacts and splattered paint across the treading floor of a Byzantine-era wine press. When arrested, they admitted their crimes and professed anger over the recent destruction of their home, a corrugated-tin shack, by Israeli authorities. Twenty-four makeshift Bedouin homes in the vicinity of Avdat had been knocked down in the court-ordered action, part of the government’s drive to settle the exploding population of Bedouins in apartment blocks.
Modernity wins. We know that. Progress is King Meme. Progress Marches On, with its inevitable disruptions tutted over – but what’s to be done? Nomadic ways of life may be quaint but they’re not practical, and property rights should be conveyed on paper, in courts, not through stories and ancestral claims. People can’t slap up dwellings wherever they like, not without permits, zoning variances and inspections. On the other hand, yes, it’s tragic to lose one’s home, to fight a system beyond comprehension – but on the third hand, so many hands, why must these minority-status “stakeholders” expend their anger on a precious World Heritage Site, as per United Nations designation? Why take it out on the past, on this three-layer dirt cake of Nabatean, Roman and Byzantine history?
Once more, it was ungodly hot. We drove up a steep hill to Avdat’s ruins and parked next to square outlines of stone – ancient camel pens. We imagined ancient camels, penned. Next Elahna and I walked through the remains of a Nabatean temple, stopping to examine a libation altar with engravings that resembled Hebrew letters. We stood beside the delicate, stone arches of the Roman Tower – kept aloft out of sheer vanity, as if posed for a million photos – and stared across the barren desert. Two, maybe three other tourists kicked up dust. On the wine treading floor, I stomped my feet like an idiot. All traces of its defilement had been erased, thanks to restoration specialists aided by teenagers from local Jewish and Bedouin schools – a heartening display of solidarity and hope, or a cynical exploitation of kids by PR hacks (you choose).
Why take it out on the past? Maybe because Bedouins of the Negev feel as if they’re the fourth layer of that grand history and they’re being scraped away. Stop, they declare, staring at the damn rocks! Stop selling souvenirs and look at us, right here and right now. Care about our cultural heritage and how we live it today. Because there’s only one thing to learn on top of that hard-packed, ancient hill: everything passes away.
The historian George Santayana is famous for stating, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” He’s less celebrated, however, for snarling, “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.” Guess which line he saved for speeches and which one he growled in the dead of night. So I say there were reasons for the vandalism, reflecting complicated social and economic trends, and the gift shop clerk says not. He lives there, I don’t. Who am I to pontificate on Israel and the Bedouins? We Americans massacred our native populations and harassed the survivors into reservations. We had the luxury of putting the primitives out of sight and mind.
During our visit to Avdat, of course, I wasn’t entertaining such lofty thoughts. I was having a good time traveling in time. This Shvil walker imagined himself an ancient Nabatean on a desert-cruising camel laden with frankincense and myrrh, riding high just as his father and grandfather had done, as his sons and grandsons would do, and I followed the trail as ever I would, my body cool beneath swirling white robes, my eyes peeled for windstorms out of the north and hawks floating on thermals. I watched for the oasis on the horizon.
@ @ @
Halfway down the winding path that led to David Ben-Gurion’s gravesite, a peaceful stroll past rock ledges and mature sycamore and cedar trees, we saw our first ibex. An ibex! The camera, the camera, urged Elahna, and we galloped cross-country in pursuit. What luck, I thought, to get close to the reclusive ibex, a wild goat with a hippie goatee and ridged horns curving back like scimitars. This ibex moved in bursts from rock ledge to path to tree cluster, and then it stopped for a nibble of grass. Behind him stood another ibex. A third tiptoed into view. They zipped away and we followed them into an open field where a dozen or so ibex grazed. A few glanced up, shrugged. At the kevar of David Ben-Gurion – the Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln of Israel all rolled into one – the ibex aren’t so shy.
Ben-Gurion’s grave overlooks the Wilderness of Zin, a desert of grey and chalk-white hills and ridges devoid of greenery. Here the ancient Israelites wandered in pain. I sat and stared: nothing but desolation, nothing to slake your eyes upon. And yet Ben-Gurion chose this resting place as if to say, remember what we’ve endured, okay? Or: go ahead, make that desert bloom. His gravestone is fairly small and simple, just the name and dates. His wife Paula lies next to him beneath an identical stone. An ibex skittered by. A few tourists arrived and left quickly. Check, another item off the list.
When Ben-Gurion was growing up in Poland at the turn of the 20th century, explains former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, one group of Zionists believed that the world needed to be cured of its anti-Semitism. Another group, to which Ben-Gurion aligned, argued that Jews had to change themselves and, by extension, that would alter how the world perceived them. He was not a man to wait for change or sit on principle. He was all action, all about achieving a nation for the Jewish people where they could slough off the cringing ills of Diaspora living and embrace a future based on hard work, self-determination and basic biblical values. Not for him the serpentine arguments of the Talmud. Not for him to hold out for all of Judea and Samaria instead of the precious sliver of land that Israel gained in 1948. David Ben-Gurion understood that Jews needed permanent shelter after the Holocaust. To hell with the ensnaring dictates of history – build your own tomorrow! He was Moses, bringing his people home.
We went up the road to Kibbutz Sde Boker, where Ben-Gurion moved in 1953 after his first stint as prime minister. He was 67 years old and ready for a new adventure in the Negev, in the vast land where he believed Israelis could keep their pioneer spirits alive. Inside a hut, Elahna and I joined a couple dozen teens from London watching a film about Ben-Gurion. (He lived in London during the Battle of Britain and came away inspired by the country’s indomitable will in the face of annihilation. Then he returned to Israel and schemed to kick the Limeys out of Palestine after the war.) I enjoyed the grainy, black-and-white footage of Ben-Gurion doing chores around the kibbutz, tufts of white hair flying off his head like ibex horns as he wrangled with barnyard goats and sheep. His fellow kibbutznikim asked him finally to stop, please, don’t hurt yourself.
We visited the ragtag David Ben-Gurion museum, set up in a building used by his bodyguards. There you’ll find a drawing of DBG executing a headstand on the beach in Tel Aviv, not far from where the Altalena was destroyed by his order, perhaps averting a Jewish civil war. There, his Hagana I.D. card – #0001. There, blown-up DBG quotations extolling the beauty of the desert and the value of living in peace with Arab neighbors. There, a photo of him touring the Sinai with General Ariel Sharon, who also became prime minister and retired to a Negev hideaway. Who fought the Arabs like an enraged lion, then gave away Gaza for peace. As big a man as Ben-Gurion, almost. Courtesy of a stroke, Sharon moldered for years in endless coma. Some believed that his awakening would herald the End Times, but nothing much has changed since his death in 2014.
Ben-Gurion’s modest ranch house is preserved as it was on the day he died in 1973. It’s no Monticello. Paula’s kitchen looked a lot like Auntie Miriam’s – in other words, you couldn’t swing a backyard cat in there. I scanned for a sifter, but didn’t find one. A things-to-do list hung next to a table lined with contact paper, and the oven and blender weren’t fancy even for 1973. In the living room the furniture was remarkably drab, the tables covered with tchotchkes. His study held thousands of books – the very walls were made of books – and a white bust of Plato had been raised high behind his writing desk. Plato knew! He knew what was real and what was illusion glimpsed from a cave. By the window, a bulky radio. In retirement the Old Man listened to news on that contraption, squinting his ears through the static and lies as Eshkol, Dayan, Golda, Begin, Peres, Sharon and Rabin steered his beloved nation from crisis to crisis, through rough defeat and live-another-day victory.
We peeked in his bedroom. On the floor next to his bed waited a pair of thin slippers and a box of Band-Aids.
@ @ @
Among the goods the camels carted: frankincense and myrrh, as in gifts brought to a certain manger by three kings chasing a star – a less precise form of navigation than GPS or Waze. The most lackadaisical Christians know about “gold, frankincense and myrrh.” (A friend in catechism class had called it “gold, Frankenstein and myrrh” and no wonder my adolescent mind conjured a tender meeting of baby Jesus and Frankenstein’s monster, pop-culture icons and martyrs to the folly of man.) So what the heck, exactly, is frankincense and myrrh? At the Avdat souvenir shop, all was revealed on a placard: myrrh is a gum resin bled from a thorny tree in Somalia and Ethiopia, and it’s made into oils and incenses used for pain relief and embalming. Today, find it in toothpaste! Frankincense, gotten by slashing the bark of another thorny tree, is said to stop hemorrhaging and mend fractured skulls. A good harvest depends on extracting maximum product without hacking the tree to death.
As a gift for my mother, I bought a teeny-tiny basket of frankincense and myrrh which, upon presentation, she pretended to adore. Next time, I won’t forget the gold.
A dark-skinned, frazzle-haired man ran the shop. In the course of chatting, he volunteered that the site had been vandalized a few years ago. There was no reason for the attack, he said, sounding troubled still. No reason at all. I found this hard to believe – there are always reasons, aren’t there? Simple reasons, now those we lack.
The facts of the case: a couple of young Bedouins – distant descendants of the Nabateans who made the Incense Route famous – snuck into Advat at night and knocked down columns, defaced altars, smashed artifacts and splattered paint across the treading floor of a Byzantine-era wine press. When arrested, they admitted their crimes and professed anger over the recent destruction of their home, a corrugated-tin shack, by Israeli authorities. Twenty-four makeshift Bedouin homes in the vicinity of Avdat had been knocked down in the court-ordered action, part of the government’s drive to settle the exploding population of Bedouins in apartment blocks.
Modernity wins. We know that. Progress is King Meme. Progress Marches On, with its inevitable disruptions tutted over – but what’s to be done? Nomadic ways of life may be quaint but they’re not practical, and property rights should be conveyed on paper, in courts, not through stories and ancestral claims. People can’t slap up dwellings wherever they like, not without permits, zoning variances and inspections. On the other hand, yes, it’s tragic to lose one’s home, to fight a system beyond comprehension – but on the third hand, so many hands, why must these minority-status “stakeholders” expend their anger on a precious World Heritage Site, as per United Nations designation? Why take it out on the past, on this three-layer dirt cake of Nabatean, Roman and Byzantine history?
Once more, it was ungodly hot. We drove up a steep hill to Avdat’s ruins and parked next to square outlines of stone – ancient camel pens. We imagined ancient camels, penned. Next Elahna and I walked through the remains of a Nabatean temple, stopping to examine a libation altar with engravings that resembled Hebrew letters. We stood beside the delicate, stone arches of the Roman Tower – kept aloft out of sheer vanity, as if posed for a million photos – and stared across the barren desert. Two, maybe three other tourists kicked up dust. On the wine treading floor, I stomped my feet like an idiot. All traces of its defilement had been erased, thanks to restoration specialists aided by teenagers from local Jewish and Bedouin schools – a heartening display of solidarity and hope, or a cynical exploitation of kids by PR hacks (you choose).
Why take it out on the past? Maybe because Bedouins of the Negev feel as if they’re the fourth layer of that grand history and they’re being scraped away. Stop, they declare, staring at the damn rocks! Stop selling souvenirs and look at us, right here and right now. Care about our cultural heritage and how we live it today. Because there’s only one thing to learn on top of that hard-packed, ancient hill: everything passes away.
The historian George Santayana is famous for stating, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” He’s less celebrated, however, for snarling, “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.” Guess which line he saved for speeches and which one he growled in the dead of night. So I say there were reasons for the vandalism, reflecting complicated social and economic trends, and the gift shop clerk says not. He lives there, I don’t. Who am I to pontificate on Israel and the Bedouins? We Americans massacred our native populations and harassed the survivors into reservations. We had the luxury of putting the primitives out of sight and mind.
During our visit to Avdat, of course, I wasn’t entertaining such lofty thoughts. I was having a good time traveling in time. This Shvil walker imagined himself an ancient Nabatean on a desert-cruising camel laden with frankincense and myrrh, riding high just as his father and grandfather had done, as his sons and grandsons would do, and I followed the trail as ever I would, my body cool beneath swirling white robes, my eyes peeled for windstorms out of the north and hawks floating on thermals. I watched for the oasis on the horizon.
@ @ @
Halfway down the winding path that led to David Ben-Gurion’s gravesite, a peaceful stroll past rock ledges and mature sycamore and cedar trees, we saw our first ibex. An ibex! The camera, the camera, urged Elahna, and we galloped cross-country in pursuit. What luck, I thought, to get close to the reclusive ibex, a wild goat with a hippie goatee and ridged horns curving back like scimitars. This ibex moved in bursts from rock ledge to path to tree cluster, and then it stopped for a nibble of grass. Behind him stood another ibex. A third tiptoed into view. They zipped away and we followed them into an open field where a dozen or so ibex grazed. A few glanced up, shrugged. At the kevar of David Ben-Gurion – the Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln of Israel all rolled into one – the ibex aren’t so shy.
Ben-Gurion’s grave overlooks the Wilderness of Zin, a desert of grey and chalk-white hills and ridges devoid of greenery. Here the ancient Israelites wandered in pain. I sat and stared: nothing but desolation, nothing to slake your eyes upon. And yet Ben-Gurion chose this resting place as if to say, remember what we’ve endured, okay? Or: go ahead, make that desert bloom. His gravestone is fairly small and simple, just the name and dates. His wife Paula lies next to him beneath an identical stone. An ibex skittered by. A few tourists arrived and left quickly. Check, another item off the list.
When Ben-Gurion was growing up in Poland at the turn of the 20th century, explains former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, one group of Zionists believed that the world needed to be cured of its anti-Semitism. Another group, to which Ben-Gurion aligned, argued that Jews had to change themselves and, by extension, that would alter how the world perceived them. He was not a man to wait for change or sit on principle. He was all action, all about achieving a nation for the Jewish people where they could slough off the cringing ills of Diaspora living and embrace a future based on hard work, self-determination and basic biblical values. Not for him the serpentine arguments of the Talmud. Not for him to hold out for all of Judea and Samaria instead of the precious sliver of land that Israel gained in 1948. David Ben-Gurion understood that Jews needed permanent shelter after the Holocaust. To hell with the ensnaring dictates of history – build your own tomorrow! He was Moses, bringing his people home.
We went up the road to Kibbutz Sde Boker, where Ben-Gurion moved in 1953 after his first stint as prime minister. He was 67 years old and ready for a new adventure in the Negev, in the vast land where he believed Israelis could keep their pioneer spirits alive. Inside a hut, Elahna and I joined a couple dozen teens from London watching a film about Ben-Gurion. (He lived in London during the Battle of Britain and came away inspired by the country’s indomitable will in the face of annihilation. Then he returned to Israel and schemed to kick the Limeys out of Palestine after the war.) I enjoyed the grainy, black-and-white footage of Ben-Gurion doing chores around the kibbutz, tufts of white hair flying off his head like ibex horns as he wrangled with barnyard goats and sheep. His fellow kibbutznikim asked him finally to stop, please, don’t hurt yourself.
We visited the ragtag David Ben-Gurion museum, set up in a building used by his bodyguards. There you’ll find a drawing of DBG executing a headstand on the beach in Tel Aviv, not far from where the Altalena was destroyed by his order, perhaps averting a Jewish civil war. There, his Hagana I.D. card – #0001. There, blown-up DBG quotations extolling the beauty of the desert and the value of living in peace with Arab neighbors. There, a photo of him touring the Sinai with General Ariel Sharon, who also became prime minister and retired to a Negev hideaway. Who fought the Arabs like an enraged lion, then gave away Gaza for peace. As big a man as Ben-Gurion, almost. Courtesy of a stroke, Sharon moldered for years in endless coma. Some believed that his awakening would herald the End Times, but nothing much has changed since his death in 2014.
Ben-Gurion’s modest ranch house is preserved as it was on the day he died in 1973. It’s no Monticello. Paula’s kitchen looked a lot like Auntie Miriam’s – in other words, you couldn’t swing a backyard cat in there. I scanned for a sifter, but didn’t find one. A things-to-do list hung next to a table lined with contact paper, and the oven and blender weren’t fancy even for 1973. In the living room the furniture was remarkably drab, the tables covered with tchotchkes. His study held thousands of books – the very walls were made of books – and a white bust of Plato had been raised high behind his writing desk. Plato knew! He knew what was real and what was illusion glimpsed from a cave. By the window, a bulky radio. In retirement the Old Man listened to news on that contraption, squinting his ears through the static and lies as Eshkol, Dayan, Golda, Begin, Peres, Sharon and Rabin steered his beloved nation from crisis to crisis, through rough defeat and live-another-day victory.
We peeked in his bedroom. On the floor next to his bed waited a pair of thin slippers and a box of Band-Aids.
@ @ @