Remember. Together. Apart.

Friends, this part of the world is not one for casual declarations or simple answers. It is world of passion, devotion, paradox, complexity, beauty, struggle, deeply held convictions, and long, long histories.

This morning we awakened at our hotel-for-one-night in Jericho, in the West Bank. Jericho, like all of our destinations today (Masada National Park, Qumran National Park, and Tiberius on the Sea of Galilee), sits in the Great Rift Valley, a geographical feature at the meeting of two tectonic plates. The tectonic plate upon which Israel rests is traveling in a southward direction, while the tectonic plate containing neighboring Jordan is traveling northward. Even as we remember being on top of Mt. Sinai just days ago at 7,700 feet above sea level, we are currently sitting at about 1,200 feet below sea level, at the lowest place on earth. From the very ground shifting beneath us, there is both movement and tension here: we remember the past, inhabit the present, and wrestle with historical and present realities of groups living together and apart.

At Masada (pronounced mat-SAH-dah in Hebrew), we explored the history of the Jewish people resisting Roman occupation and capture after the destruction of the Second Temple, around 73 C.E. This mesa fortress, originally created as a getaway fortress by a King Herod, later became an ideal escape location for the Jewish patriots, led by Eliazar ben Ya-ir, seeking to resist the Roman occupation and siege of Jerusalem. This group of people lived—and died—together in a community of Jewish believers set apart from the oppressive ways of the Roman empire.

Remember. Together. Apart.

Next, we traveled the short distance to Qumran National Park, the site of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. As a total language nerd, I was quite excited to visit the place where these 950+ scrolls in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek were uncovered. Here again, we revisit remembering, together and apart: the Qumran community, a proto-monastic community of scribes, left their families to live set apart as the “Sons of Light”. The Qumran communities is well-known for their archive that contained biblical, apocryphal, and communal texts. As the Roman army approached, the Qumran community hid their precious scrolls in jars in caves, where the scrolls remained until their discovery in 1947 purportedly by a Bedouin shepherd.

Remember. Together. Apart.

After this (hot!) day of touring sites of profound remembrance and significant discovery, we headed northward to our hotel for the next four nights in Tiberius, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. I am certain that long after this trip when we are apart at our two campuses and in our post-seminary lives, we will be remembering these impactful times together.

–Janice Kominski,
MDiv/MACE 4th Year Charlotte Student