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Mercury, Mar/Apr 2002 Table of Contents

Courtesy of National Parks Masada.

by David H. Levy

With nowhere to turn but the heavens, a thousand people face tragedy under an ancient sky.

From the time I became passionate about astronomy in 1960 as a 12-year-old growing up in Montréal, Quebec, my interest has had a strong spiritual component. It hit one evening while walking home from the synagogue on Kol Nidre, the eve of the Jewish Day of Atonement. I looked up at the gibbous Moon, and started tossing about names of the maria that I could see on Earth’s sole natural satellite. I wondered how many other people had bothered to gaze at the Moon on such a special night. Then I realized that because the Jewish calendar is based on the orbit of the Moon, people have seen the Moon in the gibbous phase for every Kol Nidre evening for thousands of years. A small revelation, indeed, but for me it was a powerful hint that my interest in astronomy could have a spiritual dimension.

As the years passed, there were other such moments, one each during all the 58 eclipses of the Sun and Moon I have witnessed, one for each of my 21 comet discoveries, and one that happened on the night of November 5, 2000, when my wife Wendee and I joined fellow amateur astronomer Ilan Manulis on the summit of a mesa called Masada. Masada, Hebrew for "foundation" or "fortress," soars 440 meters above the lowest inhabited land on Earth, on the western shore of the Dead Sea. Eitan Campbell, deputy director of Masada National Park, accompanied us. On our night at this magical place, the Moon was in its gibbous phase, and Jupiter and Saturn were close to each other, a few months past the latest of their 20-year great conjunctions.

We walked toward the ruins of an almost 2,000-year-old synagogue, set up my telescope, and looked at Jupiter and Saturn. I knew that on an April night in the year 73 AD, 960 terrified people also looked at Jupiter and Saturn not far apart in the sky and a year ahead of one of their great conjunctions. They were not in the constellation of Taurus as we saw them in 2000; Jupiter was in Libra and Saturn was in Sagittarius. Back then, the precession of Earth would have allowed Masada’s inhabitants to see Alpha and Beta Centauri, the Southern Cross, and Eta Carinae, possibly the most stunning sight in the entire sky, but a sight unavailable to us on our night. Finally, on that particular April night, the Masada observers would have seen a full Moon over their heads, while on our night the gibbous Moon looked much as it did on any Day of Atonement.

What was so special about those people who faced the sky from this mesa so long ago? The historical events on Masada took place between 66 AD, when a small group of Jewish extremists called Sicarii took over the mountaintop at the start of the Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire, and ended on the 15th of Nissan in the year 73 – the night of Passover – when 10,000 Roman soldiers led by Flavius Silva ended a long siege by storming the site.

Wendee and I wanted to visit Masada at night because only then could we feel its majesty. As a scientist, I was interested in seeing the site, the buildings, and the artifacts for myself. But in science it is also important to get a first feel for what you are about to experience, including what the night sky looked like as the Jewish inhabitants faced a terrible choice between slavery under the Romans camped below, or freedom in the sky above. They chose freedom that night, and died by their own hands.