Walking the Bible (45 page)

“So what do you do?” I asked.

“I say, ‘Don’t bother me. That’s what you believe; I believe something else.’ ”

“And would you consider changing it?”

“Why? If you want to learn about religion, you go to synagogue. Here you learn about science. I can’t change that, so they shouldn’t change this. I accept religion; they should accept science.”

“But how can you say religion is not connected to science?”

“I don’t say that. For me, the Bible is mostly a historical book. I believe it’s written by human beings. But I’m not ignoring it. I don’t know if there’s a God, but neither am I sure about science. But I am sure this crater is more than 5,700 years old. I’ve seen bones older than that.”

“So did God create the crater?”

“No, the water did.”

“Then it’s not a miracle.”

“For me, no. For you, maybe yes. Maybe God sent the water.”

Back in the car, I was struck that Dafna, like many people we’d met, defined herself as a person of the desert, a person who chose to be in the wilderness not necessarily because of its association with religion (as, say, the hermits), but because of its natural beauty. Ido was clearly a member of this group. On our drive toward a secluded stretch of the Egyptian border, where we were going to stay with some friends of Avner’s who were squatting near the site associated with the biblical city of Kadesh-barnea, I asked Ido if he thought it was connected to his upbringing.

“My greatest memories are from the desert,” he said. “From the years we lived with the bedouin in the Sinai.” When he left the Sinai as a boy and moved to Beer-sheba with his mother, Ido found the transition almost unbearable. “It was very hard for a seven-year-old kid, who didn’t know what television was, or telephone, or electricity, to suddenly be in the middle of things. I had no idea how to live my life in a normal place.
In the Sinai I could do whatever I wanted. I ran around by myself since I was three. No fears. My friends in Beer-sheba never left the house.”

Ido’s response was to flee, to return to the desert, to go outside and play.

“The best place to be is the desert,” Ido said. “It’s where my happiest times as a child were. It’s where I want to raise my kids. I spent three years in the army, in Lebanon. I did what I had to do for my country. Now I just want to live my life.”

“What about the future of the country?”

“I don’t really think of myself as an Israeli,” he said. “I don’t really care about my nationality. The desert is important to me as a person—not to me as an Israeli, just to me as a human being.”

“So this feeling,” I said, “is it connected to religion at all?”

“To me the connection is to the fact that I was here, that I have memories of the desert. There’s an energy. I can understand how people connect it to religion. I just don’t.”

“If you go into a room, say a wedding, and there are five hundred people there, how long does it take you to find the other desert people in the room?”

“Not too long.”

“How can you tell?”

“You can tell. You can see, the way they walk, the way they talk. Usually they try to escape and go outside.”

“Do you go talk to them?”

“Usually I do. We find each other. That’s what the desert does. It sticks to you. It stays in your mind. It goes with you wherever you go.” I chuckled. “It’s the same thing people say about the Bible.”

“Maybe that’s why they’re so similar.”

We got up to go. “By the way,” I said. “Is there a secret handshake among desert people?”

“No,” he said, “but even if there was we wouldn’t tell you.”

We continued driving along paved but increasingly empty roads toward the most isolated part of Israel. The desert may have appeal as a playground,
but few people want to live here, particularly in the highly fortified zone along the Egyptian border, which is home to secret military bases, intelligence listening posts, and sensitive archaeological ruins. Har Karkom, the mountain that archaeologist Emanuel Anati says is Mount Sinai, is located near here, as are seven stations on the legendary Nabatean Spice Route, on which traders ferried frankincense from Arabia to the Mediterranean.

The night had turned black—no road signs or car lights for miles—by the time we pulled onto a dirt causeway that led to a small campsite. The campsite was tended by Avner’s friend Ofer, who lived in the nearby village of Ezuz, population: twenty-five. Ofer was an Israeli but looked like a bedouin, with leathery skin, deep wrinkles around his eyes, and a whispering, inward manner. If there were a desert handshake he would have known it without being taught.

Sitting around a small fire underneath an acacia, Ofer explained how he came to live in this outpost. Thirteen years ago, newly married and having traveled around the world after the army, Ofer and his wife wanted to help colonize the Negev, an area that had been mostly ignored in Israel’s early rush to settle the waistline of the country. Ofer and his wife chose this spot, which at the time had two and a half families, because it had water, a well dug by the Turks. “You can live without electricity,” Ofer said. “You can live without people. But you can’t live without water.”

“And how did you intend to make money?” I asked.

“We didn’t really know. We lived almost without money.”

“Really?”

“The money was not the problem. The problem was we didn’t have a cow, so if we wanted to buy milk it was 110 kilometers,” about seventy miles.

“You came here without a car?”

“Oh, no, we had a car, but she broke after one month and we didn’t have money to fix it.”

“So how did you go shopping?”

“We walked to the nearest town by foot. We took a bus to Beer-sheba. We shopped, took the bus back, and walked home.”

“How long did that take?”

“Three hours each way.”

I looked at him. “What did your
mother
say about all this?” I asked.

He grinned. “Good luck.”

In time, Ezuz started to grow. Ofer and his wife had two kids. Eight other families moved in. The community flourished as a desert hideaway, a shining village in the sand, with a naturalist, two potters, a philosopher, a French cheesemaker, and Ofer, who started running eco-tours of the region. Didn’t his kids resent not being in the city with easy access to pizza and movies?

“We recently made a donkey trip for three days with my children and the children of my neighbors,” Ofer said. “We were sitting one night around a fire like this, and one of my boys said to his friends that we were planning to grow the community, to add another twenty families. And my boy said, ‘You know, if our parents are going to continue with this thing, bringing in too many families, I don’t want to stay.’ And his friend said, ‘Yeah, maybe we’ll speak with our parents and we’ll close the town before it becomes a city.’ ”

“You must have been happy about that,” I said.

He smiled. “We’ve tried to give them a good life,” he said. “The desert’s a special place. It’s my place.”

“So where does that come from?” I said. “From history? From your parents? From the Bible?”

Ofer suddenly got very still, as if he were waiting for the answer to come up through the ground. “The feeling doesn’t come from the Bible,” he said. “But it’s
described
in the Bible. There is a lot of mysticism around the desert, and around this place especially. The Bible talks about that. But the Bible did not invent it.

“Look,” he continued, patting the ground. “I don’t want to say that this was the place that Moses walked or slept or talked to God. But I believe Moses was here. Tomorrow you’re going to go to the border, to the place where Moses may have stood and looked over the Promised Land. I see this road seven times in the week, and every time it’s different—because the sun hits it in a different place, because I am in a different
mood. And for me it’s always new. I don’t feel this when I go to other places. I feel it only when I’m here.”

We slept around the campfire that night and when we woke the following morning, the valley was covered in a dense swell of fog. It was like waking in a meringue. Unlike northern Sinai, which is low and flat, this part of the Negev is four hundred feet above sea level and gets over two hundred days of dew a year. “That’s why even desert plants are green,” Avner said. “It’s not the rain, it’s the dew.” Nearby, you could see the symbiosis at work. Dew that collected on the leaves of the acacia would drop to the white broom bushes, then in turn drop to the ground, where little yellow flowers sprung up in a circle like a wreath.

Slowly, as the sun grew stronger, the fog began to dissipate, revealing a vast, open valley where we’d been sleeping. Six hundred thousand people could have slept here. To help determine whether they did, we were joined over breakfast by the resident naturalist of the area, Doron, the lone bachelor of Ezuz and the “half a family” Ofer had referred to the previous night. An Israeli of Yemeni descent, Doron had dark skin, hardened cheeks, and the kind of stony, impassioned eyes that could stare down an animal peering through the darkness. The symbol of native-born Israelis is the sabra, a prickly pear that’s spiny on the outside and sweet on the inside. Doron was closer to the
maktesh,
a cracked limestone exterior and a sandstone heart. He, like Ofer, was made of the land.

Plus a generous helping of rock and roll. Five minutes after arriving, Doron apologized for the quality of his speech. “I’m afraid my speaking is not very good,” he said. “I learned English from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, and Aretha Franklin.”

“So you must speak city English,” I said. “I don’t think any of those people ever set foot in the desert.”

Our plan was to drive across the valley and visit an abandoned Israeli military outpost on a mountain that may have been the one Moses used to survey the Promised Land, overlooking the oasis that
might have been the one where the Israelites lived for thirty-eight of their forty years in the wilderness. I joined Doron in the front seat of his government-issue jeep, which was equipped with two telephones, several packs of cigarettes, and a copy of the Wayfarer’s Prayer, the one I had heard on the way to Hebron.

For most of the next few hours we made our way south-southwest over a series of escalating passes, on a succession of deteriorating roads, toward the border with Egypt. Every now and then we’d stop, get out and explore a site, fill a pothole in the road with boulders, or just take a break, before continuing again. At one point Doron slowed the jeep to a stop and pointed to the horizon, where a small family of gazelles—a male, a female, and two calves—was grazing. They looked like they were made of sticks. These were Negev gazelles, Doron explained, able to survive without drinking water, getting all the moisture they needed from plants. “When you say
desert,
the usual interpretation is that it’s an empty place, with no life,” he said. “But in this desert, it’s full of life—birds, animals, bugs.”

I asked him what was the most exciting animal life he’d seen, and he told me the story of tracking the rare Negev leopard. Recently, the radio beacon Doron and his colleagues had placed around the neck of one of the leopards broadcast from the same place for forty-eight hours. They went to see her, and found her dead. In her heart was the needle of a porcupine. “Porcupines have a wise strategy for protecting themselves,” he said. “They let the predator run after them for a while, then all of a sudden they stop. The predator—in this case, the leopard—runs right into the needle. When it sticks, the porcupine releases the needle from its body.”

Doron didn’t act particularly excited when he told this story. He didn’t act excited when he told any story. He had that peace that comes from being comfortable in his own skin. But unlike other confident people I’d known, Doron had a quality I’d noticed elsewhere in the Middle East, in Father Justin, in Avner. It was the feeling of being comfortable across time—in the present, the future, the past. Ground yourself in this part of the world, and you may find yourself sprouting up at any moment from the third millennium
B.C.E.
to today. It’s as if by following
a simple rule of design—broaden the base of an object in order to increase its stability—they had strengthened their lives. Perhaps that’s why time moves more slowly here: When you use ten thousand years ago as your starting point, your life seems awfully short.

One factor in this equation, of course, is the Bible. When I first set out on this trip, I expected—or at least hoped—to find the Bible in the places that I looked. What I was unprepared for was how easily I found the Bible in the people that I met. Almost all the people I encountered—especially in Israel—carried the biblical stories in their head like some cornerstone against which they measured their lives. To be sure, not everyone took the same lessons:To some the Bible was a measuring stick of faith, to others character, to others history. But everyone seemed to find a way to relate the stories to his or her own experience. Doron was a particularly unexpected example.

At one point in the afternoon we pulled over to view an ancient bedouin burial site, similar to the
nawamis,
only these weren’t buildings but rings of stone that had been untouched in the six thousand years since they were built. A few minutes later, back in the car driving toward the Kadesh-barnea lookout, we passed a homemade stone monument to a motorcycle driver who had been killed on the road. “That’s new!” Doron said, screeching to a stop and going back to inspect it. “It’s only two or three days old. You can still see the oil stain on the road.” As the area’s naturalist, he would have to decide whether to keep the ring of stones, which had been painted fluorescent orange, or remove it. He said he would try to find a way to preserve the memorial, only make it more tasteful. I mentioned that I had never seen so many roadside memorials as I had in Israel, and asked him why.

“This is a small country,” he said. “The population is getting larger. More people are dying in accidents.”

“But that doesn’t explain why there are so many memorials.”

“Jews like memorials,” he said.