Masada

A moment in Jewish History - The story of Masada - Imagine looking into the face of this woman. Her history- fleeing Jerusalem, the Second Temple in ruins behind her. She hears about a fortress Jews are setting up to battle the Romans for the land of her ancestors. She climbs with her husband and two children a 1300 ft rock tower over the Dead Sea. There, she and 1,000 other Jews create a life for themselves- complete with two mikvahs, one shul. Every morning she awakens in this settler town, for three years keeping Roman soldiers away. Teaching her children, living in a desert island 1300 ft in the air. This is her. She lives with the complexity of the world around her and finds beauty in it because it was what she must do. She lives glory. In the 1920s, the Hebrew writer Isaac Lamdan wrote "Masada," a poetic history of the anguished Jewish fight against a world full of enemies. According to Professor David Roskies, Lamdan's poem, "more than any other text, later inspired the uprising in the Warsaw Uprising." This painting is about the complexity of life, the heroism of a person's decision to continue on, the Jewish thrist for survival. The end of this woman and her comrades, if you do not know it, can be looked up on the internet. I do not condone their decisions. I do not condemn them. I do not know what I would do. But this is not about the end. It's about the middle. Of the glory and beauty of the fight.