Nov 18- Jerusalem

Recovered with a good nights sleep. Had room service for dinner. Kathy and Bos had their pizza delivered to our room and we semi- sort of shared a meal with them sitting on our bed eating and us at the small table. Their food came on a cart so it all worked great. We were all four exhausted from the day of touring.

Today Yonatan met us at 9:00. As we waited in the hotel lobby a large extended family was gathering for what we guessed was a Bar Mitzvah. The ladies were very fancy in their dress and all had on really, really high heeled shoes. There was a photographer taking group photos of many different combinations of people. Each of the younger women also carried a small shopping bag. As the group begin to gather to leave to board the two waiting buses, the women took off their high heels and put on flat shoes. Looked like a family reunion with a great purpose. Yonatan said they were headed for the Wailing Wall in the old city for the young man to read the scripture. These happen most often on Mondays or Fridays.

We first drove to the Old City and we able to drive into the city and see up close many of the sites I thought we would miss. The streets were narrow but we covered the area. Saw the Wailing Wall, the Dome of the Rock and the El Aqsa Mosque. The President of France was visiting today so many of the roads leading outside the city were closed preventing us from heading toward Mt of Olives the way Yonatan waned to go. Finally we got out of the walls of the old city.

From the Mt of Olives we saw the classical views of the city. Saw The Garden of Gethsemane, the

Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and the wall. Was an amazing thing to see and wow were there lots of folks from so many different parts of the world.

Leaving that area we headed out of Jerusalem to visit Masada and the Dead Sea.  Both something to see.

Texas has its Alamo and Israel has its Masada. Both are places where heroic soldiers faced impossible odds but refused to back down and died in the fight for freedom.

Masada is not mentioned in the Bible, but it’s a national shrine that’s dear to the hearts of all Jewish people. Here is where almost 1000 Jewish rebels, although out-numbered by more than fifteen to one, defied the Roman army. The story of the struggle comes to us from the writings of Flavius Josephus, a Jewish writer who wrote two histories of the Jewish people. He was an eyewitness to many events that he wrote about, particularly during the reign of the Herod dynasty.

Masada was the site of a fortress-palace developed by Herod the Great. Located in an isolated area near the southern tip of the Dead Sea. It was to be a place of a final refuge for Herod and was on the flat mountaintop rising about 800 feet above the Dead Sea. Around the fortress palace Herod built a massive defensive wall. Nearby were huge storage buildings for food and weapons. He also hewed out a massive cistern in the rocks for water storage in case of a long siege.

As it turned out Herod never had to use the fortress but seventy years after his death a group of Jewish nationals did. When Jerusalem fell to the Romans in 70CE, these rebels succeeded in occupying Masada. They packed in stores of food and water, and then proceeded to make life miserable for the Roman troops camped below by conducting raid against tem and then fleeing to the safety of their Masada stronghold.

Finally the Roman army, fifteen thousand strong, moved against the entrenched Jews. A direct assault was impossible so they spend months building an assault ramp up the mountainside with rock and dirt.

When they broke through the defensive wall at the top, they were greeted with nothing but smoke and silence. The Jewish defenders had set their buildings and food stores on fire and then committed mass suicide. They preferred death to capture and enslavement by the Romans.

Because this involved so much walking Yonatan knew someone who was trying a project to see if having scooters to rent was a good idea so he quickly reserved those for the four of us.

We looked like little ducks in a row going up in the elevator and then onto the cable car for the ride to the top. After we began, unfortunately Kathy’s scooter developed a mechanical problem and there was no other one so she returned to the visitor’s center. The rest of us continued on and saw much more of the national park than we could have otherwise.

I asked Yonatan what he would have done and he cleverly didn’t answer my question but said, “The purpose of this Masada Park is to get you to thinking and asking yourself the same question.” So at dinner tonight we had a great discussion about just that. Kathy would have been the one woman who was alive because of the choice she or her husband made. The rest of us said life as a slave would have been too hard so we would take the other option.

Cable Car to Masada

We passed by the Qumran community and stopped to see one of the caves where some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

We saw the lush oasis of En-Gedi. Sure was easy to see in this land of barren landscape. Went into the En-Gedi Nature preserve and saw some cute rodent looking creatures called rock hyraxes. We

went down and down to the Dead Sea- the lowest place on earth- is actually a lake and not a sea. The water was very low as a result of the Israeli government drawing down water from the Jordan River for irrigation. Seemed to us that water and water rights are a much more pressing issue for the area than the conflicts we read and hear about.

We stopped by the shore of the Dead Sea, touched the water and skipped a few stones. The water is so dense it is impossible for anything to sink. There were several large hotels that we could see. The other side of the Dead Sea is Jordan.

Throughout the day we were through a number of checkpoints but none seemed to be a worry to us. Probably would have been different we if we had been Palestinians.

Was a good day today! This experience has been enriched greatly by traveling with Kathy and Bos and having an excellent guide, Yonatan, to bring many facts to life through his stories.