What is Masada? A Window into Modern Israel
A script I wrote for BimBam, a Jewish Educational Media Company.
Masada - it’s a place that most tourists in Israel visit, and the way its story has changed over time gives a fascinating window into Jewish history and current Israeli thought.
Masada is the hilltop site where a splinter group of Jewish zealots held out against the Romans for three years, a final act of rebellion after the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE. Eventually, the Romans built a giant ramp and took the location over. Rather than submitting, these 960 people committed suicide as one last act of rebellion.
This is the classic telling of the story of Masada, taken from the pages of Josephus, a first century historian - our only ancient source, as remarkably it’s never mentioned in the Talmud.
Judaism is consumed with the destruction of the Temple, but Rome was not focused maliciously on destroying it, rather, it was a means to quash this popular rebellion. But because of the splinter group on Masada, Rome had to keep on fighting.
It might seem hard to believe but Masada was only excavated by archeologists in 1963. The ruins proved, beyond a doubt, that there was a holdout against the Romans here. Part of the reason it became such an important story for Israelis is that it presented an image of a fortress of people held together by the idea of Jewish Nationalism. The excavations showed how they were surrounded by Roman camps. And according to Josephus, they ultimately chose the dignity of loyalty to the cause over servitude. In the early 1960’s landscape, Israelis were surrounded by hostile Arab armies, and the Masada story resonated for them: A small group, boxed in.
Archeology in Israel is political, as the country is building a modern nation while literally excavating the past and trying to create a coherent line between the two. In this way Zionism is both about being really new and really old. And the Masada discoveries were at the heart of that. There were excavations with larger Biblical importance, say, but for secular Israelis, Masada was more significant: It gave them a sense of deep attachment to both the land and also to the story of Jewish sovereignty.
That’s why for decades one of the sites of the swearing in ceremonies for Israeli soldiers was the hilltop of Masada. As if to say, “We, us Israelis, will be the last people on whom the dream of Jewish sovereignty hinges. Even at the cost of our own lives.”
The story evolves alongside Israeli political consciousness. According to social scientists, post the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin in 1995 by a Jewish religious zealot, the tour guides on Masada start changing the way they tell their story about religious zealotry. The Masada story of the early 60’s had to change in the 90’s, because zealotry had come suddenly to mean something different. Israelis understood that Rabin was murdered by a religious zealot and therefore it couldn’t work for them to celebrate a story about religious zealotry. So they still visited the site, but they changed the story. And what they changed was, “Look, the result of zealotry is mass suicide.” In other words, what once was a clear-cut story of heroism, now looked like a complex story about Zionist ideals: How far is it acceptable to go for a cause? So Masada stays important in Israeli consciousness, in this new packaging.
Masada is a Rorschach test about Israeli self awareness. You can hear its story different ways, depending on your political leanings.
It’s not just Israelis, Jewish tourists associate Masada mainly with being a very cool military site and story, but it also has become a powerful window into the Jewish present. Our anxieties, our politics, are being played out by the way Israelis show up and do their ceremonies at this place. That’s why it’s a powerful story. Masada is as much a modern Jewish site as it is an ancient one.