When you go to the Dead Sea you go to experience the healing waters and to visit Masada. Some people do this in two or three days but we found one day to be just fine. This included a crazy night at Le Meriden, a vast hotel that usually hosts a solid international guest list but the night we stayed the hotel was filled mostly with locals, as if a wedding party took over the place. The short of the story is that the hotel lost electricity for two hours which seemed to encourage guests to scramble with their post-Sabbath appetites to the sprawling buffet (all prepared before sunset).  With countless babies in tow, climbing temperatures, and declining oxygen particles, hundreds of people descended upon what seemed like miles of buffet tables.  Except for some flashlights, cellphones used as flashlights, and candles, people navigated the hotel, stairwells and by golly, the buffet! By the time the lights went up the throngs of guests cheered without missing a single bite! All seemed to forget about it by the next morning. I don’t think I ever will!

 

THE SEA and  MASADA

Ambitious tourists will get to the base of Masada’s precipitous plateau at 3:30 a.m. prepared to flank the side of the mountain via the harrowing Snake Path to the flattop in order to watch what is rumored to be a spectacular sunrise over Jordan, he Dead Sea and the Judean Desert. Note: don’t ever expect me to confirm this.

 

In fact, we, ever the slothful tourists, chose to spend the a.m. at the Sea. More aptly put: ON the sea, encrusting our bodies with bromide, magnesium, potassium and chloride.  TRUST ME! The therapeutic water of the Dead Sea is not a myth and here’s why:  magnesium combats water retention and is good for the hair and nails; potassium energizes the body by decreasing inflammation and bringing moisture to the skin; bromides ease muscle tension and the sodium combinations improve overall immunity as a lymphatic drainage. Even if you don’t go onto the water (caveat: never dive or dunk) just breathing all that oxygen (there’s more below sea level) and the evaporating minerals will leave you feeling blissful. My favorite photos from the morning dip are not of us floating in/on the sea, but of the women who slathered their skin with Dead Sea mud.  I so enjoyed how they unselfconsciously meandered in their bathing costumes with muddy bodies fully enjoying the morning in nature’s perfect spa!

MASADA

Masada  Metzuda in Hebrew is a kind of vernacular buzz word which means “fortress” or “to hold out”.   This term refers to the Masada incident that happened 2000 years ago  and marks one of the more courageous and vainglorious episodes in Jewish history. Steeped in true gravitas, the story naturally makes for potentially good movies that Hollywood has grappled with a few times including an overreaching effort by Peter O’Toole. The historical documentation that recounts the Masada episode is called “The Jewish War” by Yosef Ben Matiyahu  a scribe who changed his name to Titus Flavius Josephus. Some historians claim he was present at the Masada site when he changed his name to Roman so as not to be part of the self imposed demise of the Jewish Zealots. In any event, his “documentation” is integral to the records of ancient Israel.

 

Here is a thin historical synopsis as recounted by Flavius :  Around 55 AD a group of Jews called the Zealots rose up against the Romans and captured a sparsely guarded, Dead Sea-side bachelor pad built around 43 B.C. by  and for the brilliant architect/engineer Herod the Great (an on again-off again Jew) who never lived to occupy it. Once it became a Jewish stronghold, Masada housed nearly 1000 men, women and children. At the end of four years the Roman army planted 8000 soldiers around the fortified desert structure. With Jewish slave labor, the Romans built a ramp strong enough to enable its army’s siege engines to climb. And while the people inside the fortress had enough food and water to last them for months thanks to the brilliantly engineered storage systems designed by Herod they still had to reinvent ways to keep the Romans out.  But as the Roman “human machine” began to kick into operation, the Zealots resigned to reality. As they set fire to their “digs” to delay the Romans, they made a pact to kill themselves rather than to be raped, tortured and murdered. Eleven men were chosen to kill the others; ten of the eleven were then executed by their fellow Zealot before he killed himself. They left their names behind on small tiles for their accountability. A few women and children managed to hide from the mass suicide and lived to tell the horrid truth.

 

It was high noon when we took the cable car to the Masada promontory which to the East provided a spectacular view of the Judean and Jordanian Desert with the  Dead Sea running like a zipper between.  From this vantage point one can comprehend how the Dead Sea, the Syrian-African fault line formed 3 million years ago, was caused by a massive earthquake. To the North one sees the vast Ein Gedi and various wadis (swaths of desert).   On the Western side, looking out over Masada’s Roman Ramp, one can sort of see Aradin the distance, a town some 45 miles away where people who earn their livelihoods at the Dead Sea, live.The wonderful archeological finds of the Masada dig are absolutely fascinating.  And while the rare antiquities like the bathhouse black and red tile floor and the stunning example of Byzantine tile work in the church (5^th Century) are captivating for their rarity and beauty, it is the engineering of Masada’s infrastructure, including the sheer size of the water cisterns, store houses and protected shelters that impressed me the most. While these utility spaces were originally planned for a bachelor’s “villa” life, its usefulness truly proved itself when the hundreds of Zealots, and later others, took advantage of said facilities in order to survive an environment fraught with enemy, not the least of which was the desert itself.

 

Next Installment:

Petra, Jordan: A Classic

  

Fall's Kitchen Muse: The Blue Pumpkin