A Jaunt into Jordan

2 days, 2 border crossings, 2 incredible ancient landmarks.  After a life-changing week in Israel (post upcoming), my sister Lauren and I took the express bus for tourists to see the best of Jordan’s spectacular 2000-year-old ruins, Petra and Jerash.  Despite the brevity of the tour, we did get a sampling of Jordanian cuisine at palace-like buffet restaurants, handicraft art at roadside bazaars, and Bedouin tradition at our overnight tent camp under the desert stars: basically, a carefully-constructed cultural experience for foreign tour groups.  While my understanding of Jordanian culture is mostly secondhand (from our tour guide Abdullah and from my parents’ stories after spending a week in Jordan), the sights on our fleeting foray into the East Bank were spectacular and unforgettable.

Jerash

Jerash, a Roman city destroyed by earthquake in 748 AD but rebuilt in modern times

Our tour left Jerusalem at dawn, drove 90 minutes through the West Bank to our first border crossing, then traversed a maze of customs proceedings.  Israeli exit visas, Jordanian entrance visas, a security queue lined with cartoon messaging targeting immoral visitors (e.g. a purple blob of a character aspirating with the caption “Drugs are bad and a waste” — sorry there’s no picture, I wanted to get through customs)…it was a process.  But we made it through, crossing the muddy creek that is the Jordan River and continuing into the Transjordanian Highlands.  As we drove through the first town, several children waved at our charter bus, a few of nearly 2 million Syrian refugees who have settled in Jordan after fleeing the Syrian conflict.  I couldn’t wave back or interact in any way through the tinted windows, but that didn’t keep these children from smiling.  Likewise, it felt strange to drive right by the Roman ruins of Pella, one of the Decapolis and a vast archaeological site, without stopping.  Some detachment is a side effect of taking the express bus, as I only glimpsed much of Jordan through a thick pane of glass.

In the early afternoon, we finally arrived to Jerash.  After a delicious buffet lunch on a hill overlooking the city, we entered the ruins through a bazaar then through a Byzantine-era gate.  Inside were all the hallmarks of a Roman/Byzantine city: a racetrack for chariots, central forum linked to a cardo (literally the artery, or main street of the city), theaters with elaborate stages, and early Christian churches with intricate mosaic floors. The architecture was crumbled by the 748 AD earthquake, but the stones were well-preserved by the arid climate until archaeologists could re-stack many of the toppled columns and walls.  An interesting characteristic of Jerash, the capital of the Decapolis city-state, is that the central forum was built in an oval shape to accommodate the pre-Roman entrance to the city.  This was done as an optical illusion: an oval shape could confuse the Roman governor into believing the forum was traditionally circular and that the city’s entrance followed the North-South design requirement specified by their religion.  A weird but interesting factoid of ancient engineering.

Oval-shaped forum leading into the mile-long cardo, all lined with columns

With Lauren on stage, stealing attention from the Jordanian bagpipers

We had an hour to roam the ruins after a short guided tour, which felt like a high-paced scavenger hunt to see as many cool ancient things as possible.  A beautiful Byzantine mosaic featuring a wide variety of native animals small and large.  The majestic Temple of Artemis, standing on the highest hilltop.  Two theaters with thousands of seats apiece, multi-level facades, and Greek lettering on 2000-year-old stones.  What struck me the most was the scale, especially when hurrying along the cardo back toward the bus. The main street was completely empty as I walked along the worn stone pavement, peeking into archways and foundations, glancing at the remains of fountains and recesses for public sculptures.  There was a moment in which the ruins seemed to come to life, which was an incredible experience for me: I could imagine the cardo lined with homes and businesses, the street flooded with traders and camels and children and centurions.  And just like that, I walked out of Ancient Rome into the restored forum of the present, feeling exceedingly grateful that I had such an enlivening experience in Jerash.

One of many archways within the city

Byzantine mosaic of the animals

North theater, where no one was around to hear me sing

Collapsed commercial buildings along the cardo

So many columns! A defining feature of Jerash, for sure.

Amman, and everything else

We continued on the bus to Amman, where we stopped at a bakery for knafeh, a delicate dessert of flaky semolina dough layered with sweet, oozing cheese.  We sat at a table on the outside terrace, sandwiched between the shiny, marble-clad bakery and the dingy, crowded highway.  This contrast was emblematic of Amman, which looks beautiful from afar with its miles of white alabaster buildings but suffers from congestive traffic, air pollution, and garbage accumulation.  We passed the giant new CityMall, King Hussein hospital, royal business and technological park, and multiple universities that all appeared brand new.  The road to Petra was a series of construction zones, as the state was upgrading to a 4-lane divided highway.  I’m sure this improvement was approved in part because 2-lane roads in Jordan are somewhat harrowing: lanes are a bit of a formality here, as cars attempting to pass will create their own suicide lane along the midline by parting oncoming traffic.

Painted ostrich eggs, middle, tucked in a maze of ornate furniture and housewares

Along the 3-hour journey, we stopped at a travel stop/bazaar for tourists, pictured  in full vibrant colors above.  We also were treated to a magnificent desert sunset, an orange sky of scintillating dust and smog particles.  After dusk, we stopped in a small town (to quickly clean out an ATM) as families walked home from the mosque after evening prayers.  Soon we arrived at our Bedouin camp, a meticulously landscaped village of carpeted cabins under a sandstone monolith that was dotted with accent lights.  Dinner was a hearty goat stew with rice, then we proceeded out to the central fire pit for a tea and hookah nightcap.  Here under the stars, I had a wonderful discussion with Abdullah about the religious landscape in Jordan: he describes a climate of tolerance that you may not expect within an Arab country.  Tolerance for his Christian wife and mother to worship openly, despite a 94% Sunni majority and Hashemite support of Islam as a state religion.  Tolerance for Syrian refugees, even though the influx of 2 million migrants into a country of 7 million has to put a strain on society.  And tolerance for foreign tourism, as non-Muslim women could wear shorts everywhere we went without issue.  Abdullah attributes this peace to “No oil, no problems,” but I’m sure there is more to it.  Thanks to our great hosts, I left with a perception of Jordanians as an openly helpful, neighborly people.

Medieval fortress facade was a nice touch at our ‘Bedouin’ camp.

Petra

Glad you made it to the end, because Petra is perhaps the most awe-inspiring place I have ever been!  At this Wonder of the Ancient World, the ancient Nabatean architecture provides a window to Egyptian, Assyrian, Canaanite, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine civilizations.  The city is located inside a sandstone mountain, which we accessed through a long, deep slot canyon.  The interior wall of the mountain is lined with carved tombs and facades of other buildings, hundreds of meters across, and one can imagine the mile-wide valley full of stone structures prior to the catastrophic earthquake of 748 AD.  Besides that many of the buildings were monolithically carved into the mountainside, I was blown away by the intricate variety of sculpture: Abdullah explained that the Nabateans adopted architectural styles and customs to impress visitors from nearby empires, specifically pointing to Assyrian burial cornices and Greco-Roman column styles.  I can’t really explain how impressive these buildings are, so I’ll let a few pictures do the talking:

Approaching Petra through the city’s ancient entrance

Selfie in front of the iconic Treasury

Abdullah pointing out a 2500-year-old camel sculpture hiding in the canyon wall

The royal tombs, carved into a sheer rock cliff

The ancient city extended into the rugged mountains

The toppled remains of some massive columns

Lauren and I had 3 hours to explore this massive complex of ruins, meaning we had to hoof it to the famed Monastery.  It was a two-mile trek over sand and rock in the hot desert sun, but Lauren was particularly determined to see this secluded masterpiece (after all, this is where the Primes were buried in Transformers, basically a pilgrimage site for her!).  And we were not disappointed, as we sat and took in the otherworldly view for several minutes before any other tourists arrived.  Descending back into the mountain valley, I took a little more time to interact with some of the many vendors lining the paths, and to watch a goat yell(?) obstinately in front of his nomadic shepherd.  We had a few minutes to explore the lower city, which included a colossal theater, Roman and Byzantine temples, and countless other foundations of civic buildings erased by time.  As a city, Petra is full of history and culture spanning many eras, and its beautiful architecture was honestly beyond imagination.  It was the perfect cherry on top of a truly wonderful trip.

The monastery, in all its untouched glory

I enjoyed some of the best views in Jordan!

Yad Vashem

As I reflect on my recent visit to Israel, my thoughts keep circling back to Yad Vashem (pronounced yahd va-SHEM), the world’s center for Holocaust remembrance and education.  During the two hour visit, a thousand fleeting anecdotes painted a dark picture of the terrifying descent into the most unthinkable, unspeakable evil.  Like many visitors, I left with a feeling that my chest had been cleaved open and my heart ripped out: ill, exhausted, but most of all deeply empty.  These are the side effects of a true understanding of the Holocaust, and in light of recent anti-Semitism here in the U.S., are particularly timely to share.

First, comprehending the brutality and scope of the Holocaust underscores its importance today.  Some unknown number between 6 and 7 million people were killed, a number too high for our brains to rationally process without a visual — and I had seen the paper clips.  About 1.5 million of these were children, memorialized at Yad Vashem by a dark corridor of infinite mirrors that reflect a single candlelight into an ethereal landscape of thousands of distant floating orbs.  Each an individual with their own personality and life story, murdered deliberately.  At first, German soldiers would execute Jews by firing line, but the horrifying atrocity of these killings quickly wreaked psychological torment on the soldiers.  Thus, the beyond-evil Final Solution was introduced, an industrial system of concentration camps and gas chambers designed to  exterminate Jews in an efficient, hands-off manner.  As it became clear that the Nazis would lose the war, the desperation move was to push the system as hard as possible…to near completion, as they killed off over 2/3 of the Jewish population in Europe. There is no ‘why’ that can even attempt to justify the ‘what,’ period, hence the Holocaust remains an open wound for humanity 70 years later.

Moreover, understanding the ‘how’ adds another chilling dimension to all this, since the Germans of the early 20th century were a highly developed society with many similarities to our own.  The economic pressures after World War I (rampant inflation and unemployment) led to the rise of the Nazi party, who rode a wave of nationalist sentiment to sweeping victories in the 1932 democratic elections.  From this point, the Nazi regime spread propaganda that encouraged suspicion/hatred toward Jews, which combined with the austere conditions to sour the attitudes of many ordinary Germans toward their Jewish neighbors.  The situation snowballed in 1938 as discriminatory laws were imposed to essentially segregate Jews from mainstream German society, and sympathetic German citizens were punished for supporting or allying with the Jews.  Yad Vashem presents this bystander dilemma in a poignant, relatable way: it’s hard to either universally accept or deny the culpability of the average German citizen.  What’s clear is that the gradual slide of German societal morals was strongly influenced by insidious forces within the Reich, and before any significant moral opposition to the state-sponsored hatred could coalesce, Germany was invading Poland and provoking another World War.

The question is, have we learned from this?  I would posit that we haven’t learned as much as we should have.  While we almost universally vilify Nazis and Nazism, anti-Semitism is still alive (and perhaps growing) in the United States, demonstrated by the mass shooting in Pittsburgh and coordinated arsons at several New York synagogues in just the last two weeks.  Also, the growing animosity toward refugees here is alarming, as a caravan of Central American refugees fleeing cartel violence is being met with more vitriol than calls for granting asylum, not to mention the over 2 million Syrian refugees barred from entering countries around the world.  Come to think of it, we’ve collectively turned a blind eye toward many genocides and refugee crises worldwide, like the ongoing state-sponsored killing of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, like the civil wars in Yemen and Syria that have displaced millions of civilians who only long for peace…I could reach back further to genocides in Darfur, Kosovo, Timor, Rwanda, other places that are unfamiliar so the murder of tens of thousands doesn’t seem to hit home.  While governments may not always do the right thing, I think it’s imperative to remember that any humanitarian crisis is a crisis for humanity.

Yes, Yad Vashem is a must-see for anyone who visits Jerusalem.  Likewise, I wish I had made an earlier visit to one of the Holocaust museums closer to home, as I’ve heard the memorial museums in D.C., New York, and Los Angeles are similarly powerful.  If we make a point to learn about the darkest of tragedies and the vilest of evils, we will be stronger and wiser as a people.  And maybe, just maybe, the world will move beyond wars and genocides into a mutual understanding of the humanity that bridges cultural  and religious differences.  Only then I believe these deep, deep wounds can heal.