Today was awesome. One of my favourite things is seeing new sights, and especially in 2006 our visits to some of the significant sites around the Kinneret (the Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee) were really formative. Today we toured two more places, very different from each other. Boy did I ever enjoy them both!
Getting to them was a bit of an adventure, though. I'd been working on this for a couple of days already, through our local "fixer" Efrat, who also helped me in many ways when I lost my passport on the earlier trip (a long story). The arrangements were tricky because the number of people we wanted to take on the trip was constantly going up: we started with the eight of us Canadians, then added five spaces because it was cheaper to hire a 13-seater bus than to rent two small cars. but then 15 people signed up, so we had to come up more space, so negotiated a 20-person bus instead. Then 22 people wanted to go!-- but it was too late and tricky to change it again, so stuck with the 20.
The further issue was that the driver, I was told, spoke no English. Hmm. As it turned out, things worked out just fine; sign language and very simple English did enable us to communicate what we needed to. As the day progressed, he eveb gained confidence and tried to tell me some "tour-guide" things along the way, which was neat even though I didn't quite catch it all. Right toward the end of the trip, too, he ventured to write something down for me in Hebrew, asking me to get somebody to translate it back at the kibbutz. I assumed it would be something about our group ("What nice people you are," etc.) but as it turned out the message was something along the lines of "Don't get angry with yourself, or you will punish yourself for the stupidity of others." I still have no clue what that has to do with anything; we got along well, I thought, and nobody from our group had become angry to my knowledge. Maybe he was moonlighting as a philosopher?
First stop today was Gamla, one of the fortified towns that rebelled against the Romans in 67 AD and was fairly promptly destroyed. Lots of places suffered that fate, of course, but none in so spectacular a manner as Gamla, which is perched on the side of a cliff much like Hippos' only more so. What a place to build a town! It housed about 9000 people, apparently (according to Josephus), all of whom but two women were killed in the battle, either by the Romans or by throwing themselves over the cliff.
Anyway, Gamla's attraction was much more than just the military history, as interesting as that was. The hill on which it perched is framed to the north and the south by two deep wadis (ravines), each of which has a fairly good-sized waterfall a little ways upstream as the river pours over the edge of the Golan Heights. These ravines, and the ruins themselves, now form a major nature preserve that's home to almost all of Israel's remaining population of vultures. They're huge, and absolutely beautiful-- not at all like the buzzards I picture in my head when I think of vultures. Four of them flew down to Hippos a couple of mornings ago and cruised around "our" wadi for a while, floating on the updraft and soaring-- at one point-- right over the edge of the cliff where we were digging, maybe ten metres from our square! Anyway, Gamla is a terribly beautiful place in its own right. What a treat to see it.
Its ruins were the biggest highlight for me though. I saw several miqvaoth, the plastered ritual baths that observant Jews used daily around the time of Christ. A couple of them were in houses, and sized for one person at a time, but outside the synagogue was a really big one that could have accommodated quite a few people at once. And the synagogue itself was tremendous! It's the earliest one in Israel, and is quite unusual in that it is oriented toward Jerusalem rather than strictly east-west. The reason, Doc Schuler told me, is because synagogues began to be built just before the big revolt not just for religious reasons but as a way of claiming a town's loyalty to Jerusalem rather than Rome. I took a whole bunch of pictures of all of this, of course, for personal keepsakes but also for teaching purposes. Hope I get a chance to use them.
From there we drove along the Golan all the way north to Tel Dan, which is right at the border with Lebanon. The roads became narrow and very twisty as we wound down the Golan into the valley on the south side of Mt. Hermon, which is the highest point in Israel and actually supports quite a skiing industry in the winter. Then, at Tel Dan, we got to see some really neat stuff too. This site too is in a nature park surrounding the springs that channel the melt-water from Mt. Hermon into the Jordan; the Dan River that results from those springs is one of the four sources of the Jordan River. Anyway, this cold melt-water just sort of boils up from a number of springs, and supports quite a tangle of brush and forest. Compared to the lushness of the West Coast, or other places like that, it really wasn't much of a garden, but compared to the rest of Israel, it really is! Taking off our shoes and wading around a bit in the deliciously cool waters was super.
Again though the ruins were the best part for me. The oldest structures at Tel Dan are close to 4000 years old-- a triple-arched gate that was built in Canaanite times and is the oldest such structure in the Middle East. Some of the more adventurous ones among us ventured to walk right up and touch the mud-bricks, discovering in the process that they too included straw in the mud (just like the Egyptian bricks made by the Hebrews). This gate doesn't really lead to anything anymore, but not far away is another triple gate built by the Israelites in the 9th century BC when Jeroboam split the northern part of Israel off from the southern part. As part of that split, he set up two golden calves to worship, one of them at the "high place" here in Dan that we saw today. Crazy! I'd probably heard about all of this before, but had forgotten most of it-- yet again, as with so many sites, now that I can picture the place, I think the story too will spring to mind pretty easily. I hope so, anyway.
It occurred to me several times today that connection-making of many kinds is one of the greatest blessings on this trip. Linking myself to particular sites is really exciting, and I suppose the most obvious kind of connecting that's going on. Anchoring my faith more closely to the places and the "realia" of Jesus' life and ministry is deeper and a lot more profound, sort of like the connection that we make when we get to see and touch things that once belonged to relatives who have died. It's not that the thing we see or touch "is" them, but it calls them to mind and somehow, on the emotional level, forges a bond between us and them. And then, on another level again, as we undergo all these experiences together I find myself drawing closer to the other people in our group, too. I've mentioned before the fun we have while we're digging, and the special little moments that take place in the midst of the dirt and rocks. But sharing together our faith in Christ helps us to "become" the body of Christ in a powerful way. It happens in our congregations too, back home, but there we always seem too busy to talk and listen. But here, without any distractions apart from the common things we share-- from the earliest hours of the morning until sunset and bedtime-- the links develop more quickly and strongly by far. Social scientists know that this happens in any group, not just Christian ones, but especially for us who share a common faith this is an immensely powerful and moving experience. I'm so thankful to be able to enjoy it.
At home it's so easy to be a loner, to feel rootless, to be disconnected from the environment, to just drift. Here, for these short weeks anyway, it's different.
The challenge will be maintaining this openess to listen and care, this readiness to slow down, this focus on the Lord and his call, when the pace picks up and work piles up and the schedule gets crowded and.... Lord, have mercy!
Leave a comment