It was the sort of early summer evening in New York when all you can think of is living…Everything was as it should be, except that it wasn’t. We were living in two worlds. The old one, which never seemed more beautiful, had not yet vanished; and the new one, about which we knew little except to fear it, had not yet arrived.
The new world lasted nineteen months.
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I scaled Masada in 1986 and I scaled it again in 2010. The crest of this dramatic chunk of rock is only a couple of hundred feet above sea level, but the ambient Judaean Desert is the most sunken area on earth, adding another 1,300 feet to the climb. So it takes at least an hour, and that afternoon the temperature was around ninety-five.
Elena and Eliza forged ahead on their powerful brown legs, while I was in the rear with Inez (b. 1999). About a tenth of the way up, as the slope became much steeper, she went all floppy and weepy and begged to go back down and take the cable car. I said,
‘Courage, Bubba. Onward. Just think. Hitch can’t climb Masada – but you can. And once you’re up there you’ll remember this day for the rest of your life.’
She rallied. The young collapse suddenly and rally suddenly. About a tenth of the way from the summit I paused in a patch of shade for a breather (and a gasper), and Inez said imperiously,
‘Come on, Daddy! We haven’t come this far to give up now!’
‘I’m not giving up.’
‘Then come on!’
Ten minutes later we were all looking down at the beautiful and painfully ancient desert and the Dead Sea. And there too, on the horizon, you could just make out in the bright air the distant mirage of Jerusalem and its vague devotional silhouettes.
The Masada movement started in January 1942. It was a time when the Jews were engaged in a spasm civil war with the Palestinians, who had recently formed an official alliance with the Third Reich (their Grand Mufti met with Hitler in Berlin in November 1941). At this point, too, Erwin Rommel was rampant in North Africa (and the Holocaust had been under way – as covertly as it could, given that the Germans were using bullets, not gas – for about six months). As the crises gathered there was a concerted campaign to mythologise and centralise, in effect to nationalise, Masada, or the spirit of Masada, or ‘the way of Masada’, in Shavit’s phrase.
Why? What happened there? This is the story.
By 73 CE, after the Roman sacking of Jerusalem, the Great Revolt of the Jews was close to its crushing end. Masada, which Herod had turned into a near-unbreachable bastion a hundred years earlier, was the locus of the last stand of the self-styled Zealots, the most extreme of the rebel forces. Up on the rock there were just under a thousand men, women, and children when Flavius Silva’s Xth legion began its final assault. With defeat inevitable, the remaining Zealots put themselves to the sword. The men killed the women and children, then drew lots to see who would start killing the men.
So: a nihilistic tale of bloody fanaticism and bloody downfall was re-engineered into the regnant symbol of the new Jewish identity. This had immediate popular appeal; but even Zionists, and David Ben-Gurion himself, found the associations of the historical event repellently grim. The men of fighting age on Masada faced execution, but the women faced not death but probable rape and certain enslavement, and the children faced enslavement only. Five of the latter group survived by hiding in a pothole and were captured. Making you wonder how many other women and children, given the choice, would have joined them.
Nevertheless, the campaign, dreamed up and spearheaded by the scholar, archaeologist, and trekker Shmaryahu Gutman (who, affectingly, was by birth a Glaswegian), shifted the emphasis: ‘Masada shall not fall again.’ And this shaping vow – the absolute refusal to yield – was very quickly emplaced as the defining Jewish truth…There are always many chains of boy scouts and girl scouts and school groups and platoons of IDF inductees streaming their way up and down Masada.
‘Only the young Hebrews willing to die will be able to ensure for themselves a secure and sovereign life,’ as Shavit summarises the meaning and the moral of Masada. ‘Only their willingness to fight to the end will prevent their end.’
We came down from the fortress on the mesa and went and immersed ourselves in another emblem of Israel and its political life.
I almost typed, We swam in the Dead Sea. But you cannot swim in the Dead Sea – swim in the sense of propelling yourself through water. Because the water of the Dead Sea (the Sea of Death) is ten times saltier than brine.
You can wallow in it – you can more or less sit in it, or even on it. When you try anything else you become aware that you have no weight, no ballast, and are soon upended by the whimsical physics of zero gravity, as in space. Then the head goes under and you savour the glutinous liquid – like the spoiled anchovies from the Sea of Azov that Stalin’s organs used to give to parched prisoners heading for the camps.
But look at what surrounds you. The festive daytrippers of Israel (some of them daubing themselves with the reputedly wholesome black sand), the cheap-and-cheerful snackbar (where Eliza and Inez devoured their burgers and fries), the scuttled waste of Judea, the dramatic eminences of Masada, and Jerusalem, twenty miles away, under its encrustation of curses.
The historian Tony Judt – late, lamented, and (for the record) Jewish – closed his monumental Postwar: A History
