A Crack in the Earth: A Journey up Israel's Rift Valley - Hardcover

Watzman, Haim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374130582 ISBN 13: 9780374130589

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

Synopsis

The Jordan Rift Valley, stretching from the Red Sea to Lebanon, was ripped open millions of years ago by vast forces within the earth. This geological object has also been a part of human history ever since early humans used it as a path in their journey out of Africa. And for a quarter of a century it has been part of the biography of Haim Watzman, an Israeli journalist.
            In the autumn of 2004, as his country was riven by a fierce debate over its borders, Watzman took a two-week journey up the valley. Along the way he met scientists who try to understand the rift through the evidence lying on its surface—an archaeologist who reconstructs the fallen altars of a long-forgotten people, a zoologist whose study of bird societies has produced a theory of why organisms cooperate, and a geologist who thinks that the valley will some day be an ocean. He encountered people whose life and work on the shores of the Dead Sea and Jordan River have led them to dream of paradise and to seek to build Gardens of Eden on earth—a booster for a chemical factory, the director of a tourist site, and an aging socialist farmer who curates a museum of idols. And he discovered that the geography’s instability is mirrored in the volatility of the tales that people tell about the Sea of Galilee.
            As an observant Jew who has written extensively about science and scholarship, Watzman strives to understand the valley in all its complexity—its physical facts, its role in human history and in his own life, and the myths it has engendered. He realizes that human beings can never see the rift in isolation. “It is the stories that men and women have told to explain what they see and what they do as a result that create the rift as we see it   .   .   .   As hard as we try to comprehend the landscape itself, it is humanity that we find.”
            Watzman’s poetic evocation of the scientific and the human is a unique chronicle of a quest for knowledge.

About this title

About the Author:

Haim Watzman is a translator and journalist who lives in Jerusalem with his wife and four children. He is the author of Company C: An American’s Life as a Citizen-Soldier in Israel (FSG, 2005).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One At the end of the promenade, past Herod’s, over a rainbow bridge, the swanky stores of Eilat’s hotel strip abruptly vanish. All along the beachfront, high-rise heavens with angled windows and palm-ringed swimming pools gaze down an arm of ocean that reaches out to them from the Arabian Sea. Only the plebeian strip of the promenade’s fast-food stands and street vendors remind four- and five-star vacationers that the luxury they enjoy is tenuous and temporary. The gaudiest tower of them all is the faux palace that bears the name of the ancient East’s greatest manipulator, madman, and master builder. Its rococo extravagance, all arches framed by columns and crowned by moon-bright domes, would have deeply offended the easily offended king’s classical sensibilities. Herod’s (“Where the Legend Comes Alive”) is a temple of earthly delights that offers all-inclusive vacations of endless meals, celebrity shows, and classy boutiques. It would have enraged the great king so much that he’d probably have murdered yet another of his sons. It’s not my kind of place. I’m staying at the youth hostel way down past the other end of the promenade, across the street from where the shoreline turns south toward Egypt and Africa. But the epicurean paradise ends at Herod’s eastern wall. Beyond it is a placid, silent canal spanned by an unlit convex bridge. On it, a few middle-aged fishermen cast their lines out, observed by their wives and by a silent, hungry cat. I step off the bridge into the planet’s natural terrain. The elements rule the October night. Sand, sea, stone, and sky—the loneliness in which God resides. Thousands of stars suppressed by the brash promenade streetlamps reappear; the Dolphin and the Water Carrier hover to my right, over the sea; Polaris, low on my left, marks Route 90, the northward path of the two-week trip that I began four days ago. The beach is sandy and largely deserted, except for a couple of cars and a clapboard shack, which emits some light and the lilt of songs with Hebrew lyrics and Arab melodies. I stand at the landfall of a great rift valley, a crack in the earth’s crust that begins where the Indian Ocean’s waters mix with those of the Gulf of Aden. It heads west by northwest, turns more sharply to the northwest, and at the Strait of Tiran, where the Sinai Peninsula comes to a point, it takes another turn and heads nearly due north before ending in the mountains of Anatolia. This rift is one of the globe’s largest features, clearly visible from space, and I live on its edge. It forms an intricate landscape that makes the human soul turn end over end in wonder—even in people who are sure they have no organ by that name. One would have to be an automaton not to stand in awe of the God who designed it. Or so I felt when I first viewed the rift three decades ago. In fact, we needn’t call upon God to explain either the lay of the landscape or its origin. The rift is a geological fact, the product of enormous forces operating inside the globe, and it would exist even if there were no humans to observe it. Yet humans have been a part of it nearly since there were humans; the section I will travel, from the Red Sea north to the mountains of Syria, served as a corridor through which prehistoric humankind passed on its way out of Africa to colonize Asia and Europe. From that time on, they have left their mark on the valley, and it has marked their minds. Now, even in satellite photographs, the rift cannot be seen pristinely. The light and heat emitted by Eilat and its Jordanian sister city, Aqaba, by Jerusalem, and by Tiberias on the shore of Lake Kinneret— the Sea of Galilee—stain the landscape as seen from outer space. Tiny Qaroun Lake in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley has a rulerstraight southern bank that nature could not have fashioned. It marks a dam and shows that the lake, which I rode past time and again when I served as an occupying soldier in Lebanon in the early 1980s, is man-made. Here on earth, with my own eyes, I can see the valley only from its edge or within. Like a worker ant who climbs a blade of grass to get a better view of the hollow in which she will spend her brief life, I must use my mind as a ladder, in an attempt to grasp this great geological object. But even this is no simple matter, for humankind has overlaid the geology not just with cities, dams, fields, and roads but also with history and biography and meanings. I have lived, traveled, and soldiered up and down the Israeli side of the rift valley in the twenty-seven years since this country became my home. For many of my fellow citizens, the greater part of the valley is a border that seems natural. But the location and nature of that border have been challenged by peace efforts and the winds of war alike. Israel’s government is, at the time of my trip, seeking to redraw the country’s boundaries in the Gaza Strip. Israelis who live in the Jordan Valley fear that a revision of the border along which they live is not long to follow. October of the year 2004 is thus an opportune time for me to travel my part of the rift and to see it as it is, but also as it signifies. Along my way I will meet geologists, biologists, and archaeologists who study the physical facts of the rift valley. I will speak to people who live and work in the valley and for whom it represents the fulfillment, or disappointment, of an ideal. And I will encounter others who see the rift through the fun-house mirror of myth, in which stories skip over the landscape and where human beings themselves are mysteries.  I walk across the sand and around the shack, where a brown picnic table, a green picnic table, and a table topped with yellow Formica stand on a concrete platform. Behind them is a countertop with a big sign next to it: “Fishermen’s Snack Bar, Presenting: fishing line, sinkers, bait, and fishing lessons. Ice cream, hot and cold drinks.” Around the brown table, the one on the Red Sea side, sit five fishermen drinking beer and Coke. A woman with a weathered face and a soft smile sits with them; they glance at me but offer no greetings. The potent smell of raw fish pervades the patio, which is roofed with reeds and canes. A hundred yards past the snack bar is the frontier: a fence, a line of sandbags, a guard post, and a Jordanian flag on a high pole with a blinking red light on top. Beyond that are the lights of Aqaba, Eilat’s sister city in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Avraham, the dark-haired, bushy-eyed proprietor, eyes me. I’m a stranger intruding into his territory, and he doesn’t believe that all I want is a glass of tea with nana, the Middle Eastern variety of mint. He looks beyond me to the yellow table, where I’ve already set up my PalmPilot and unfolded my keyboard, which admittedly look out of place. My second request seems to convince him, however. He makes me the tea and stirs in the spoonful of sugar I ask for. He clearly believes it’s not enough. He asks if I’m here on vacation, and I say no, for work. I could come to the Moroccan synagogue tomorrow night for Sabbath services, he suggests, but I tell him that tomorrow I’m heading back to Jerusalem to spend the weekend with my family. I take the glass and saucer from him; the mint leaves circle slowly in the amber liquid. When I turn toward my table, he calls me back, places three gratis homemade cookies on the saucer, and offers some advice: “Watch your pockets.” I sip my tea and gaze south, down the narrow finger of the Gulf of Eilat, called the Gulf of Aqaba if you live on the other side. The city across the way distracts my eye. It’s practically a mirror image of Eilat, but an image enlarged by a magnifying mirror—it extends farther south along the shoreline, into the mountains, and north into the Arava plain. In fact, it’s really Eilat that is the image in the mirror: historically, Aqaba is the site of human habitation at the north end of the gulf. The east side of the littoral gets more rain and has more sources of fresh water than modern Eilat, which was a tiny fishing village called Um Rash Rash before Israeli forces reached it during the War of Independence and made it the country’s outlet to the Red Sea. Aqaba, known as Aylah to the Byzantine Christians and early Muslims, was the Levantine seaport for commerce with Arabia, Yemen, and India beyond. Sometime during the period of Muslim rule, perhaps in the early 700s but more likely in the mid-800s, a man named Rabi, son of Qays, son of Yazid al-Ghassani, passed through the port town on his way north. A former highway robber, he was now superior of the Santa Katarina monastery at Mount Sinai. The Muslim rulers of Sinai had raised the monastery’s taxes. Al-Ghassani, known to his acolytes as ‘Abd al-Masih, the slave of the Messiah, was on his way to Ramla, the Muslim capital in the coastal plain below the Judean highlands, to plead for consideration. The Aramaic-speaking desert ascetics had probably made him their leader with this eventuality in mind, for ‘Abd al-Masih was a native speaker of Arabic, the rulers’ own language. The mission was an act of considerable altruism on al-Ghassani’s part, for he was a former Muslim, and Muslim rulers punished apostasy with death. The young Santa Katarina monk who set the story down in broken Arabic a generation later tells us that ‘Abd al-Masih had once before deliberately sought out martyrdom. Amotz Zahavi, a biologist and evolutionary theorist whom I met the previous Sunday at the Hatzeva Field School, just off Route 90 a bit south of the Dead Sea, thinks he can explain wh...

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0374130582
• ISBN 13: 9780374130589
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208