HE DESERT BAKED IN THE AFTERNOON sun—a pitiless place to the stranger, but to the knowing, patient, and strong, it was a place of visions haunted by the memory of past glory.
Here, in the folds of arid hills, were caves and holes that had sheltered people. Here Abraham wandered for territory, driving his herds along the route that is now a tarmac road from Beersheba to Eilat. Here the caravans of Solomon came, hauling copper from his smelters in Etzion Geber and trade goods from the Gulf of Eilat. Here the Nabateans had lived, taxing caravans, building towns, and farming the wilderness with water stored from the winter rains. Here the Byzantines had built Abde and Subaita and then abandoned them to the lizards and scorpions. And here now live the hardiest of the cactus breed of Israel, growing oranges in the sand and the shale, probing the wind-blown waste for minerals, planting their outpost farms farther and farther eastward toward the cleft of Wadi Arabah.
I stood at the junction of the highway that ran from Beersheba to the Dead Sea. Turning east, I could see the great salt lake, locked between the rocky escarpments, shining like a silver shield in the sun. I changed course again and followed the water north until I saw the great flat-headed bulk of Masada towering out of tumbled desolation. I stared, awed by the monstrous majesty of the place, familiar yet
terrible, sacred, glorious, and full of bloody memories.
More than 2,200 years ago, Jonathan Maccabeus had fortified it. A hundred years later, Herod the Great had built himself a palace on the escarpment, a grand place, with bathrooms, granaries, storehouses for arms, huge wells storing enough water for an army, and stuccoed chambers and pleasure rooms for the monarch and his minions. When the Parthians took Jerusalem, Herod retreated into the wilderness, shutting himself in with a wall and 37 watchtowers that commanded every approach to the plateau.
Then the day came when Titus cast a trench about Jerusalem and laid siege to it, crucifying its fugitives on the lip of the ditch, starving its defenders into submission, flattening the city into a ruin, and enslaving its survivors. Only then was Masada remembered. Eliezer ben Yair gathered his Zealots about him with their wives and children—a thousand souls—and led them into the Wilderness of Zin, heading west to the deserted fortress. They climbed up the precipitous snake paths and scaled the ragged cliffs to reach their refuge. They camped on the table of barren rock, swept by the desert wind. They rebuilt Herod’s walls, opened the storehouses and the armory, and found the wherewithal to live and fight. And they waited.
Then the Romans came, outraged that so small a band should still defy their legions. Flavius Silva led 10,000 men, camping them in permanent quarters at the foot of the rock to besiege the citadel. They brought in Jewish slaves for laborers and servants, and they too waited while the great Silva surveyed the problem. They could afford to wait, because Rome was great, and her empire stretched from Parthia to the Pillars of Hercules.
Finally, Silva made his plan. Using the labor of Jewish slaves, he built a great ramp of earth and rock from the valley floor to the walls of the citadel. He hauled his rams and catapults to the top of the ramp and began to bombard the defenders with stones “of the weight of half a hundredweight,” blackened so the defenders could not see them. When the stone walls were breached, the Zealots repaired them with wooden beams, so laced and backed with earth that they rocked with the rams but would not break. Then, Flavius Silva set fire to the wooden wall, but the desert wind blew the fire back in the Romans’ faces and they retired, knowing that by morning they could enter and take the fortress without trouble.
As I stood in silence where, 2,000 years ago, the Roman fires blazed through a night of terror, I could almost hear the voice of Eliezer ben Yair exhorting his doomed army to a final heroic act (recorded by the renegade chronicler, Josephus): “Let us die then, before we become slaves under our enemies, and let us go out of the world, together with our children and our wives, in a state of freedom. This is what our laws command us to do; this is what our wives and children crave at our hands; God Himself has brought this necessity upon us.”1
“Our laws . . . and God” require such a monstrous act?
Whether or not you concur with the reasons for this mass suicide, we can agree about one thing: the greatest convictions are in the field of religion. And on that forsaken place where the old oath of the Haganah and the covenant with the new Israel is “Masada shall not fall again,” I asked myself this question: Why is it that when people firmly believe some religious truth, they often consider others who refuse to accept that same truth as either stupid or bigoted? On the other hand: Why do others who have no compass or life map and deny there
is any truth or goodness other than that which they decide for themselves—why do they take a position of cynicism and ridicule the believer?
Here we are concerned not with deciding which group is right, but with what attitude one ought to take toward their own convictions and those of others.
The best answer to the first problem was given more than 1,500 years ago by St. Augustine: “Let us seek [truth] as expecting to find, and let us find as expecting still to seek.” Those who already embrace a philosophy are not to rest in idle adherence, but should keep on studying to deepen the knowledge they have, or perhaps discover that those profound truths were merely emotional adhesions or inherited prejudices, without foundation in history, reason, or revelation.
Ellen White cautioned: “You will never reach
the truth if you study the Scriptures to vindicate your own ideas. . . . Do not read the Word in the light of former opinions. . . . Do not allow what you have believed or practiced in the past to control your understanding. . . . Never cease asking and searching for Truth.”2 To this she adds: “It is the privilege of the children of God to have a constantly enlarging comprehension of truth,”3 and “There are mines of truth yet to be discovered by the earnest seeker.”4
The second problem (mentioned above) has to do with the attitude to take toward those who differ with us. We are admonished: “Do not stoop to ridicule, do not place [your opponent] in a false light, or misconstrue his words, making sport of them; do not misinterpret his words and wrest them of their true meaning.”5 We must show charity, love, benevolence, and a recognition of the sincerity of the other person’s motives and their honesty of purpose.
Sometimes that is called tolerance, but tolerance can be bad as well as good.
Tolerance is not right when its basic principle is a denial of truth and goodness and when it asserts that it makes
no difference whether murder is a blessing or a crime, or whether a child should be taught to steal or to respect the rights of others. It is, in the words of Joshua Loth Liebman, “the positive and cordial effort to understand another’s beliefs, practices and habits, without necessarily sharing or accepting them.”
But there is another form of tolerance that is right, namely, one inspired by true charity or love of God. Even though a virtuous person may hold absolutely to their philosophy of life, they do so, not because they look down on the views of others as inferior to their own, but because their own beliefs are so real to them that they’d not have anyone else regard them with less reason, love, and devotion.
There is too often a tendency to condemn the opinion of a group or race or class, simply because it belongs to them. A spirit of charity, however, suggests a willingness to search for the truth in their position, or at least to give it as kindly an interpretation as possible. In the words of Ellen White, “No conversion is genuine which does not change both the character and the conduct of those who accept the truth. The truth works by love, and purifieth the soul.”6
There is something good in everything. Evil has no capital of its own; it lives in goodness as a parasite. But by loving the partial goodness in others, we bring them more quickly to the circle of goodness, which
is God. Jesus used this tactic when He spoke to an adulteress at the well. His divine goodness and her sinful life shared nothing in common, except a need for a drink of cold water. So He started there . . . and led her on to a declaration that He was love—and Savior of the world.
We, too, then “should show that the truth” makes us “patient, kind, forbearing, tender, affectionate, forgiving.”7 That is true tolerance.
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1Flavius Josephus, The Works of Flavius Josephus, translated by William Whiston (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1974), vol. 1, p. 507.
2Messages to Young People, p. 260.
3Counsels on Health, p. 594.
4Testimonies for the Church, vol. 5, p. 704.
5Counsels to Writers and Editors, p. 50.
6Sons and Daughters of God, p. 288.
7Testimonies for the Church, vol. 2, p. 677.
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Rex D. Edwards, now retired, was the associate vice president and dean of religious studies at Griggs University, Silver Spring, Maryland.