A GUERRA QUE MUDOU ISRAEL! A historia de MASSADA!

Shalom and welcome back to Israel with Aline! Today our adventure will be in Masada, a fantastic 2000 year old place in the middle of the desert, so if you’re ready, come with me! To travel the 900 meters from here to the top of the mountain, we can do it by cable car, as we are doing now, it’s 30 km per hour and in three minutes we get there, or if you want to be adventurous you can go up walking. There is a path below us that is called “the snake path”, but you have to be in good physical shape; besides being more than 1 km long, it is an ascent of more than 300 meters and those who also want to climb by walking, but in an easier way, can climb the ramp path that you will see later. Massada is one of the most incredible constructions of the ancient world that we will start now knowing here the constructions that King Herod made, and stay with us until the end because the end of this story is amazing! King Herod, he was completely paranoid, he thought all the time that there were people coming to take away his throne, to kill him, to make rebellions; and so he goes to build Masada, which is a castle, inside a fortress, on top of a mountain in the middle of the Judean desert. An impenetrable place! Here are the food stores, why do we need them? Because if a rebellion happened, Herod would take all this food from the storehouses and would have enough so that nobody would have to enter and leave this fortress during the whole time of the rebellion. King Herod is going to build a luxurious castle here, he liked the good life. This Castle will be three floors high with frescoed walls, mosaic floors, but the biggest madness of it we’ll see now: What could be crazier than a three-story palace? A personal pool, and not only that, an entire spa, including that part which is a heated pool! including this part which is a heated pool! Imagine how much luxury someone has to possess to have a heated pool in the middle of a desert! I have some news to tell you now: King Herod will pass away and Masada will be abandoned! About 70 years later, the great Jewish rebellion against the Romans begins, and a group of about a thousand Jews climb the mountain and begin to living here, and they build this here, this is a synagogue, one of the oldest synagogues in the world ever found! And in the synagogue there is this room, here the scrolls were kept, the sacred texts of Judaism. And do you know what it is used for today? Come and see! [Suspense music] And in here sits a scribe of Jewish sacred texts, and I want to ask him why did he choose Masada as the place to do this work? [Scribe] In Massada, at the archeological excavations, Torah books and Scrolls were found here, and this shows that this was the site of the synagogue. A synagogue must remain a synagogue. We have Torah books here, we do here Bar Mitzvah’s, and we also do weddings. And we are also here during the week from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, and I write the Torah books here. I show it to the whole world, to all the tourists, of all languages, that what people wanted to stop us from doing two thousand years ago, today we continue to do. This exclaims to the heavens: The people of Israel live! Let’s go back now to the Jewish rebellion of the year 66 after Christ against the Romans. And the Romans don’t like the idea of a Jewish revolution in Israel at all, and so they will destroy all Israel from north to south and the last free Jewish stronghold will be Masada, but Masada was built precisely to be an impenetrable stronghold, to be a place that the Romans won’t be able to get to. And so the first thing they do is around Masada down there build a wall and build the camps that we can see here, with the idea that the Jews couldn’t escape. And they settle down there and wait, wait, wait for the Jews to surrender, but of course the Jews are not going to surrender. They have what? They have everything they need up here, from heated pool, castles, Palaces, all the luxury. So the Romans understand that the Jews are not going to come down, and so they need to go up. And how do you climb up in a place like this? So they decide to build a giant ramp, yes a ramp up the mountain! And then they start building, but the Jews up here start picking up stones and throwing them down at the people who are building. And then the Romans are going to do an extremely cruel thing; they’re going to bring Jewish slaves and put them building the ramp. The Jews up here look down and see what? Jewish slaves. And they have a big dilemma: are we going to throw stones at them or not? Because if we throw stones at them, we’re hurting innocent people. But on the other hand, if we don’t, we will end up like them. What do we do? And the decision of the people of Massada will be not to throw stones. And the ramp goes up, up, up, until she arrives in Masada and they go, and now they start hitting Masada’s walls, until they open a hole and they are ready to enter Masada and conquer the place. And when they look up, they see that it’s already the end of the day, the sun is setting, so the Romans decide to go down, and wait until sunrise and come back, because they didn’t want to fight at night, so we now have all night here on top of Masada and Jews wondering what are we going to do? And that’s their dilemma; they look down, they see this ramp and they wonder what to do. And then comes Eleazar Ben Yair, the head of the rebellion here in Massada, and he will speak the following words: “Dear fellows, we resolved long ago not to become slaves to the Romans. We were the first to revolt and we are the last to fight against them. We can still die in a glorious way, together, next to our dear friends… Let our wives die before they suffer any kind of abuse, and our children before they experience slavery. But first, let us destroy our money and the fortress by fire; Let’s destroy everything except our food. For they will be witnesses that we have not been overcome by necessity, but according to our original resolution: that we preferred death to slavery.” (The War of the Jews VII – Flavius Josephus) And that’s exactly the decision they’re going to make, and each man is going to take his own life and the life of his own family. And the last ten men, they are each going to write their name on a little piece of pottery. And then they will draw lots and the name that is drawn will take and kill the other nine and fall on his own sword. And all of Masada will be destroyed, with the exception here of the food stores that we had already seen at the beginning. And so ends the story of Masada, the last free Jewish stronghold. And the Jews will not have independence in Israel until the year 1948. Masada will be forgotten in time. And then nineteen hundred years later, we will rediscover this fascinating and incredible story! And that is why Masada is a must-see place for you to visit in Israel, here, to join the past, the present. A place where you can see a two thousand-year-old synagogue, but with a scribe up to the present day writing here. Where can we come and see Israeli soldiers coming here to receive their insignia! So, everybody, I hope you enjoyed today’s video! If you liked it, share this video with whoever you think will like it too, leave that like and see you next time!