Exploring the Northern Coast (Caesarea and Acre)

            I know I’ve said it before, but the history in Israel is unrivaled by pretty much anywhere.  I’ve been to so many museums over the years that I’m not a huge fan anymore, but I think I still learned an important lesson I picked up from visiting a few here.  You walk through the galleries, and they spell out for you who was in charge when and depict the culture of the times.  So and so was Pagan and so they clashed with the Jews, or so and so were Jewish-Christian and they tried to worship in the same locale as the Jews until they got called out for it.  Yes, I fully understand that there aren’t many details or names or dates in those statements, so maybe it doesn’t really count as an accurate recollection of history, but the truth is, that’s not what I’m going for. 

            I have just under three months to train for a marathon, evaluate several supply chain processes and figure out what this country is all about, and I’m not a huge history buff, so I’m not striving to memorize what year the Romans were in charge or when the Iron Age began (and I read a thousand pages of Israeli history before I came here and that didn’t even start until the 19^th century), but I do want to be aware that that occurred, that here we have several layers of history piled on top of one another (literally).  Walking through the crusader fortress in Acre, also known as Akko (see above), this is most evident, since the Muslims used the foundation of the Crusader’s fortress to build their own.  There are literally areas where you can see that you can’t go any further because it hasn’t been excavated yet (See to the left).  Money doesn’t grow on trees or anything and the archaeologists seem to know what they’re doing.

Many Jews wear their kippah’s and the Muslim’s prayers sound from their mosques.  And that’s not the only thing that makes Israel so incredibly varied.  Below you see some sort of parachute plane and to the right, stand up paddle boarders just off the coast.  What I like about these pictures is not simply that they’re of a couple stand up paddle boarders and an airplane/parachute combo, but because of the juxtaposition 

between those outdoor activities and their surroundings.  These pictures were taken when I was at Caesarea, which was built by Herod the Great around 20 BCE, and was an important location for the Romans and the Byzantines. 

Theater in Caesarea
(No humans were harmed here)

As the story goes, these statues were
beheaded by Muslims who were
against idolatry.

Caesarea is the perfect mesh of history, religion and nature… It perfectly sums up the conundrum that is Israel, the centuries of being wracked with conflict, the pride of overcoming it, the acceptance of living with it, of living in it, and the efforts of a nation and of the world to excavate all of this, to come back from the rubble, to find a way home again, to find a way to blend the past and the future with the present.  One lady on our tour hadn't been in Caesarea since the 1970s.  That struck me especially because I'm young.  I didn't exist in the 1970s, but this has been here for thousands of years.  We, as individuals, have a set timespan, inconsequential compared to the length of time these statues have been standing here.  How many generations of eyes have looked at these, trying to imagine who these people once were, where it all came from, when it all began, or trying to figure out a way to deface them, to murder that past, to let that history die?  Today, we strive to honor our ancestors, and we walk through museums that were painstakingly prepared to explain to us the customs of each people, and how many of these people can we trace our own ancestry to?  Do we know there wasn't intermarriage under one reign or another, that we are not a melting pot of all this past?  And yet, don't we not still cover what they believed in?  Bury it with our own ideas and postulations?  Do we not have enemies the way the Romans did?  Has human nature caught up to us enough to understand that that's no way to live?  Or do we just hide it better?  Do we not hide it at all, as the news stations report tragedies as often as they transpire?

Arena: There were definitely some humans harmed here
        (chariot races, duals to the death, skinning people to death, etc.)

     

     View of city of Caesarea (And part of the Arena)

I don't know.  I do know we're standing here trying to find a way to understand where this all started, why Herod the Great built up this place, and how it survived hidden in the rubble for so long.  We close our eyes and try to imagine what it would look like in Herod's time.  And the Byzantines.  And the Romans.  What would it be like to be the archaeologists who discovered a city no one knew ever existed?  Years of patience and hard work to uncover a masterpiece, maybe one that's unraveling at the seams, and maybe one that's like a puzzle with a million broken pieces you're striving to put back together.  To find yourself in an arena where thousands of years ago, they skinned a rabbi alive, because he was a rebel, because he didn't believe in what they believed in.  We don't skin people alive anymore, thank goodness, but we still struggle with that reality of human nature.  

                  

                                                   Not going to lie, this pool looks a lot like one
                                              we have in Lake Erie back home.          

   We still argue over  land that has been fought over for thousands of years.  Our lifespans are longer than the Romans and the Byzantines and the ancient Jewish people, and we don't throw the names of people we don't like into a well (like the Romans did), hoping it will send them to hell, we have laptops and iPhones and 3G, we come here not to live or contest the area, but to see who they were, to see what they were.   And yet, how different are we really?  We're still human.  We're always going to be.  Will we ever be Something I've been wondering though is how do we know all of this is true?  We found a bunch of disconnected pieces, we can guess, we think we know, but at some point it comes down to faith, and to beliefs.  The evidence might be unsurmountable… until you look at it from another angle… And there's pretty much always another one.  The story is told over and over again and there will be a point where the story could have changed like a game of telephone and we'd never know.  But, maybe that's okay.  We know enough, if nothing else.  

          The reality is that tourists have been coming in flocks for years, since they first excavated it, trying to get to know this nation, trying to get to understand this part of the world.  But I forget that sometimes, if you blink, things change.  Things disappear.  Last time I was home, I was caught off guard by the pile of rubble where a local hospital used to be.  I knew it was coming down to be rebuilt into assisted living, but I also didn't expect it to look like that, to just be gone.  In Israel, it's different, because it seems like things are constantly going up or coming out of the rebel instead of vice versa.  But, that could all be perspective as well.