The Jordan Rift Valley, stretching from the Red Sea to Lebanon, was
ripped open millions of years ago by vast forces within the earth. This
geological object has also been a part of human history ever since early
humans used it as a path in their journey out of Africa. And for a
quarter of a century it has been part of the biography of Israeli writer
Haim Watzman.
In the autumn of 2004, as his country was riven by a fierce debate over
its borders, Watzman took a two-week journey up the valley. Along the
way he met scientists who try to understand the rift through the
evidence lying on its surface--an archaeologist who reconstructs the
fallen altars of a long-forgotten people, a zoologist whose study of
bird societies has produced a theory of why organisms cooperate, and a
geologist who thinks that the valley will some day be an ocean. He
encountered people whose life and work on the shores of the Dead Sea and
Jordan River have led them to dream of paradise and to seem to build
Gardens of Eden on earth--a booster for a chemical factory, the director
of a tourist site, and an aging socialist farmer who curates a museum of
idols. And he discovered that the geography's instability is mirrored in
the volatility of the tales that people tell about the Sea of Galilee.
As an observant Jew who has written extensively about science and
scholarship, Watzman tries to understand the valley in all its
complexity--its physical facts, its role in human history and his own
life, and the myths it has engendered. He realizes that human beings can
never see the rift in isolation. "It is the stories that men and women
have told to explain what they see and what they do as a result that
create the rift as we see it," he writes. "As hard as we try to
comprehend the landscape itself, it is humanity that we find."
Watzman's poetic evocation of the scientific and the human is a unique
chronicle of a quest for knowledge.
