Let us spare nothing but our provisions, for they will be a testimonial when we are dead that we were subdued not for want of necessaries, but that according to our
original resolution we preferred death before slavery.
-- Eleazer of Massada (from Josephus)

The morning held its breath -- a kind of "nature holiness," like a hymn. The dawn was slowly breaking the darkness in the distance with a pale yellow light. The tents stood like trees on the treeless hill. The stone bare crags outlined the sky. From the White Promontory, two thousand years of silence met my ears. Wonder dinned my heart and mind:
How had they ever picked this spot?
How did they ever get up here?
Water -- where from?

And they built buildings "with corners sixty cubits high!" Who was the architect? Had they put out a public tender? Did Jonathan, the high priest, work in an office with compass and ruler and india ink with double steel pen?
And the sun-photo plans for work on the site --who made them?

Who carried ponderous boulder after ponderous boulder?
Asses, oxen, sheep and camels, how many had slipped on their unaccustomed hooves into the wadi below?

The women? The children? The men? The guts of them!

The newspaperman's tape recorder was an anachronism. I heard him interviewing Danny, our archeologist.
"Yes, we've found mosaic floors, a water heater, Roman style, monogrammed jugs, and jugs without names, a Beit Kenesset, a pool, pieces of glass, stone fixtures... the inventory went on...

My small pickaxe rang "skirk skirk, the warning tone of metal against pottery. A spot of umber peeked out in the earth." I gently coaxed the jug handle out of hiding. There under a pile of stones toppled from walls once straight, pressed day and night for one hundred forty-eight million nine hundred and twenty thousand hours it had been lying in oblivion waiting for this moment when I would come and sift it out from under the dust of time. And who was I to find the testimonials? I, the daughter of Pincus the son of Aaron, the son of Moses, the son of Eleazar, the son of Joel, the son of Jonathan, I with my long generations behind me, belonging there because of them, was squatting on the floor of their storeroom under the constant sun digging out the broken pieces of that life that had long ago started ours.

I lifted the shard up into the light. Whose were the fingers that molded, the hands that raised, the feet that trudged? Men's souls beat within the clay.
"Found a coin!" shrieked a girl behind me.
I felt a streak of possessive jealousy. I wanted to have found that bright green circle, oxidized by winds and rains and storms and suns giving testimony by its existence, and by its inscription --"Israel Third Year of the Rebellion."
And now we are "Israel, Fifteenth Year of the Revival".

There was fascination in expecting the unexpected, compulsion in the search, adventure in the discovery and intimation in the revealed.
"Here's a small bone."I called to Danny. "Probably a chicken," I said, not liking to think of a death of a child even so long ago. . .
Would we find a graveyard where those killed before the siege were buried?
Will the stones say, "Here lies Yochanon ben Arie who stood guard at the North Gate after four days and nights of ceaseless watching fell with a Roman arrow in his throat"?
Yael bat Guriel who met her death carrying water to he loved one on the night of the watch.
"Gad who died before his time at the age of eight because he forgot that children do not play in the shade of a tree in the heat of the day when catapults play havoc with the world."

We noticed a plant tendril incongruously competing for space with the inanimate bequests of long ago, pushing its way under the debris of this almost hermetically sealed vault-of-ages, a ridiculous bit of weed, insisting on growing in this lunar-like geologic stratum, putting out little feelers, grasping at the tiniest irregularities on the smooth surfaces of the worn stones to help itself to its feet in its climb towards the sky, finding every crack, every empty space to creep forward into it, it endured, survived, grew to eight thin inches in unnumbered years. Why must it grow? What for?
How long?
The little weed was like a prayer there in the grit, or better, like a blessing asking for nothing just gearing witness to an indomitableness, to a birthright, to something that is forever.

Like a poem, A gaunt and tender poem, Being its own opposites in is very essence Its nature forged Tremendously strong and immeasurably weak. Quite crazy, An idiot thing on the floor of that "mausoleum" Seeking nothing but to live. Why? Is the answer not in the broken jug In the coin marked "Judah"? In the double walled edifice? Is the answer not in the charcoal heaps? The unburnt logs? In the papyrus shreds, in the words that were written The thoughts that were believed? And is the answer not in the lines recorded out ofthe seed of memory I the answer not in the man, Eleazar? The Jew? In the man's idea Handed down, as he said from his forefathers. Their nature being forged tremendously strong andimmeasurably weak Nine hundred and sixty burned everything but The testimonial Killing themselves there Near the weed now seen Now green Seeking but to live They died.

"The soul of man continues," Alexander said, "invisible to the eyes of man, as is God ,Himself. . .
for whatsoever it be which the soul touches, that lives and flourishes, and from whatever it is removed, that withers away."

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This material is ©1998 by Grace Hollander
3 Keren Haysod St., Ramat Ilan, Givat Shmuel, Israel 51905

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