The Dead Sea is the lowest place on earth at over 1,300 feet below sea level. Before today, I thought that people floated a little bit in the Dead Sea. I was wrong...very wrong. There is so much salt in the water (30% salt content) that you just can not sink--you just can't sink. In fact, if I wasn't careful today then I might have bobbed my way from Jordan to Palestine/Israel without realizing it.How can I describe floating in water as salty as the Dead Sea?
In trying to move through the salty water I was a marionette puppet controlled by an unknown puppeteer. Motions that normally would allow me to move forward resulted in my moving sideways or my ending up bobbing in the water. Once I gained some understanding of how to move through the salted water then I felt like a hummingbird effortlessly floating through the air this way and that. However, when I tried to swim in the Dead Sea I became a man of cork with my bottom bobbing up and down--perhaps I just had a bottom of cork as I moved as much up and down and side to side as forward. After awhile of floating an unknown and unknowable distance above the bottom of the sea I realized that this is the closest I have ever come to being an astronaut unhinged from gravity thousands of miles above the earth. In short, I floated.
Being coated in Dead Sea mud is a popular activity at the Dead Sea once the salt water has made its way into every minor and major cut on your body. Be sure that there are pictures of me with the mud--and Leon trying to avoid the mud--that I can share once I am home at the end of August.
This is a picture of the setting sun over the Dead Sea and towards the West Bank, Palestine. I now have a better appreciation for the symbolic resonance of why Moses by tradition viewed the Promised Land from Mt. Nebo. We passed Mt. Nebo today on our way from Madaba to the Dead Sea. Mt. Nebo overlooks the Dead Sea and the lush Jordan Valley. By tradition, Moses could part the Red Sea to flee slavery, but a lifeless water separated him from his ultimate paradise on earth. Many Jordanians call the Dead Sea the Sea of Lot. One of our Jordanian colleagues told us the story of Lot, Sodom, and Lot's wife as his understanding of why the lake is sterile--it is a punishment to people who choose to go a different way. But why did the Sea of Lot, the Dead Sea, a water that is almost a third salt stand in the way of the Promised Land?Are the followers of Moses meant to see that the path to the Promised Land lies in choosing between sweet and salt? Is it meant to suggest the sterility of leadership once a people have been freed? Is it meant to represent the lifeless barrier between our world and paradise? I don't know why Moses could lead his people through the Red Sea, but not around the Dead Sea to the Jordan Valley. I can appreciate the importance of the geography of Jordan in understanding our most basic sacred stories.
