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By Root 869 0

dug in the yard of a kibbutz kindergarten near the Syrian border, with two benches against earth walls and a concrete door always open; in the fantastic machinery and belching smokestacks of phosphate works in the Negev; in the weed-grown dirt streets and emergency shacks of a new village where a bearded Jew from Morocco stares out of dull eyes at a strange land, and a Hungarian Jew with more hope has hung out a sign: SALON BUDAPEST—HAIRDRESSING; in the compulsive talk of plant manager, government official, or school principal as they explain to a visitor what conditions were like five years ago and what they will be five years hence; in the energy of marching youth groups on a mass hike, singing and swinging as they walk, with a purposefulness almost too arrogant; in plant nurseries with millions of pine and cypress seedlings for reforestation of the barren hills; in two figures on the wharf at Haifa after a ship has come in—an immigrant father locked in the arms of a waiting son as if all the deaths and griefs of the lost six million were enclosed in their wordless long embrace.

The landscape too is dramatic, both in Israel and Jordan, which together make up the country of the Bible. Seeing it at first hand, one realizes it was no accident that God was invented and two religions originated here. In the desert with its endless horizon by day and brilliance of stars at night, the vastness of the world would make a man lonely without God. The grotesque pillars of basalt and eroded sandstone on the shores of the Dead Sea, the red mountains of Edom, the weird gulfs and crags and craters of the Negev could not have failed to make him wonder what immortal hand or eye had shaped them. If he saw God in a burning bush, one recognizes the bush today in the blaze of yellow blossoms on the broom, as well as the origin of another story in the extraordinary brightness of the star hanging over Jerusalem (and over Bethlehem five miles away in Jordan). To Abraham and his progeny the supernatural would have seemed close at hand in the sudden ferocity of cloudbursts that can wipe out a village, or in rainbows of startling vividness with all the colors and both ends visible. Even the sun does not set reasonably here, as it does in the Western hemisphere, but drops all at once in what seems less than a minute from the time its lower rim first touches the Mediterranean horizon. Visions like miracles occur in the constant play of moving clouds across the sun, as when a hilltop village or ruined crusaders’ castle will suddenly be picked out in a spotlight of sunshine and then, when a passing cloud blots out the light, as suddenly fade into the shadowed hills and vanish. A suffused pale light, sometimes luminous gray, sometimes almost white, constantly changing, shines always on Jerusalem, and when the sun’s rays shoot skyward from behind a cloud, one sees instantly the origin of the halo.

The past lies around every corner. Herod’s tomb is next door to one’s hotel in Jerusalem. And at Megiddo, the site of Armageddon that dominates old pathways from Egypt to Mesopotamia, archeologists have uncovered the strata of twenty cities, including Solomon’s with its stalls for four thousand horses and chariots. The past is seen from one’s car on the way to Tiberias, where workmen cutting into the road bank have laid bare a row of Roman sarcophagi. It lies on the beach at Caesarea, where one’s shoe crunches on a broken shard of ancient pottery. One is sitting on it when picnicking on a grass-covered tel, or mound, thought to be the site of Gath, where Goliath came from. One walks on it along the crusaders’ ramparts of Acre, where Richard the Lion-Heart fought Saladin, or on the hill of Jaffa overlooking the harbor besieged by Napoleon. It is present, if somewhat obscured by cheap souvenirs, at Nazareth.

Archeology is a national occupation, hobby, and, in a sense, the national conscience. The government maintains a department for the exploration and study, preservation and display of ancient sites and monuments. Students in summertime volunteer for “digs.