Riviera Maya - Day 1 - Arriving

[Composed 11/27/2024]

¡Hola! Greetings from the beautiful Riviera Maya, Mexico! It may be 6:30pm, but after heading to Dulles Airport at 4am (as it's the day before Thanksgiving), we're wiped and ready to call it a day. As travel days go, however, this one couldn't have been smoother.

Not only was our trip to the airport and check-in easy, but we even managed to enjoy a real breakfast at Chef Geoff's. We shared an avocado toast with vegan sausage; I can't recall eating such a nice meal in an airport terminal.

Our flight to the Cancun Airport was equally effortless. We're so used to the short runways and steep climbs out of DCA, that the gentle takeoff at Dulles felt comically tame.

Customs in the Cancun airport was a nearly automated affair, taking little more than a scan of our passports, a photo and 30 seconds of waiting. Baggage claim, too, was laid back. It wasn't until we walked through a set of doors into the airport's lobby that we got our first taste of what tourist crazed chaos can feel like.

All around us folks were hawking their services; from taxi rides to tours. Fortunately, directly opposite the doors was the Hertz rental counter, so finding where to go next was easy. Neighboring Hertz was Budget or Dollar or some other rental company. As we stood in line, I couldn't help but notice the rep next door actively trying to sell travelers on renting a car: "rent a car, it'll be cheaper than a taxi!" Since when did a car rental become an impulse buy? I had to admire the man's sales chutzpah in the face of such long odds.

Once at the front of the line, we got our instructions: go out and find the gal with the pink hat and clipboard, she would transport us to the real Hertz counter. As we walked through the airport, we turned down offer after offer. At one point, I noted an especially persistent sales person urgently trying to get our attention. Turns out, he was a Hertz employee trying to escort us to the correct spot.

Within a few minutes, all the noise was behind us. Shira filled out a mountain of rental car paper work, and before we knew it we were on our way to lunch at Puerto Morelos.

Puerto Morelos was .... nice. Nothing magical, but I suppose just what we needed: a chance to acclimate a bit to Mexico, and have a solid meal. The guac, quasadilla and fish tacos were good. Because tap water is off limits, I relished getting a coke. Ahhh, coke with cane sugar and not corn syrup, that's the good stuff right there. It didn't help our impression of Puerto Morelos that as we looked around for a restaurant, it started to downpour.

After lunch and the rain, we made our way to the town's only sight: El Faro Inclinado, the Leaning Lighthouse. In 1967, Hurricane Beulah tore through the area and damaged the lighthouse's foundation. The result is the tilt that we see today. You could be excused for not being impressed by Faro Inclinado, as there's not a whole lot to it. Personally, I have an affinity for lighthouses and all things Atlas Obscura, so it gets a gold star from me.

From Puerto Morelos we made our way to our resort, The Fairmont Mayakoba. The driving was easy enough, until Google Maps informed us that we needed to make a U-turn on route 307, the main road running along the coast. Shira waited patiently for a chance to go, but the cars just endlessly streamed towards us. How exactly was one supposed to do this? Eventually a small gap opened and she went for it.

The Fairmont, as we one would expect, is gorgeous. Our room overlooks the 8th hole of the property's golf course. The view is great, but even more impressive is the wildlife spotting I've been able to do in just the short time we've been here. A green heron perched on a nearby tree, giving me a chance to take some great close up shots. Across the way, a limpkin has been doing some hunting, giving me a chance to capture this guy as well.

We talked about exploring the resort or going to dinner. But ultimately, we decided to call it a night. There's something luxurious about just crawling into bed and saying the rest of the world can wait. Besides, we're meeting a guide at 7:00am in the lobby tomorrow. That means our first real day of vacation will be starting before we know it. Let the adventure begin!

Neabsco Creek Boardwalk

Last Monday, Veteran's Day, the temps got up to nearly 80° F. Fortunately, we were able to spend the afternoon outside, enjoying the perfect weather.

We hit up Neabsco Creek Boardwalk with our friend's 2-year-old. It turned out to be the perfect mini-hike.

We saw tadpoles and turtles, and two screaming bald eagles in the distance. We took in amazing scenery and soaked up the sun.

Much of the boardwalk is enclosed by railings. That meant L could explore to her heart's content, and we didn't fear we were going to have to fish her out of the water.

The hike was an out-and-back, but even that worked for us. L (mostly) toddled her way to the southern point of the trail, and then we strolled her back to the car. All told, we did a little over 2 miles of hiking. Our nearly 1-mile-an-hour pace was proof of just how fun the trail was.

Near the car, there was a playground where L could use her last bit of energy. By the time we dropped her off, she and I were fully spent. What an amazing day!

Review: The Scrolls From The Dead Sea

When I picked up the thin volume, The Scrolls from the Dead Sea by Edmund Wilson, I was certain I knew what I was getting into. While I was hazy about the details of the Dead Sea Scrolls, I thought surely they were a treasured discovery met with universal acclaim.

I imagined that finding the Dead Sea Scrolls would be like finding a cache of letters from your grandparents. At first the discovery would be met with disbelief: Surely these aren't what I think these are?! Once confirmed, you would pore over the letters, savoring even the most minor detail.

Wilson, however, paints a far more nuanced picture than this naive scene.

The book starts off light enough: the author describes the discovery of the scrolls.

At some point rather early in the spring of 1947, a Bedouin boy called Muhammed the Wolf was minding some goats near a cliff on the western shore of the Dead Sea. Climbing up after one that had strayed, he noticed a cave that he had not seen before, and he idly threw a stone into it. There was an unfamiliar sound of breakage. The boy was frightened and ran away. But he later came back with another boy, and together they explored the cave.

I love that this once-in-a-lifetime discovery came down to kids being kids. I can still picture my nieces and nephews standing on the shore of Deer Island joyfully chucking rocks into the water, as though this was the world's greatest pastime. Let's hear it for the magic of play.

From the discovery, however, the book only gets more complex. Take the Essenes. The text explains that the cache of scrolls was most likely the library of this ancient sect of Jews. Great, I thought, I'll get to learn about my people. One classic description of the Essenes comes from Flavius Josephus in his book The Wars of the Jews, written around 75 AD. Here's what he says:

[119] For there are three philosophical sects among the Jews. The followers of the first of which are the Pharisees; of the second, the Sadducees; and the third sect, which pretends to a severer discipline, are called Essens. These last are Jews by birth, and seem to have a greater affection for one another than the other sects have. These Essens reject pleasures as an evil, but esteem continence, and the conquest over our passions, to be virtue. They neglect wedlock, but choose out other persons children, while they are pliable, and fit for learning, and esteem them to be of their kindred, and form them according to their own manners. They do not absolutely deny the fitness of marriage, and the succession of mankind thereby continued; but they guard against the lascivious behavior of women, and are persuaded that none of them preserve their fidelity to one man.

So the Essenes were basically a cult. Great. So much for finding my people.

Wilson then delves into the details of a handful of discoveries, working his way to a number of conclusions. This is trickier to do than one might imagine, as at the time the book was published, much of the text of the scrolls had yet to be analyzed. Heck, the complete set of fragments hadn't even been collected.

Wilson ultimately arrives at two conclusions: one that resonated and one that fell flat.

His first conclusion was that the discovery, while invaluable to historians, was slow to be appreciated by the faithful. Jews, he suggests, feared "impairing the authority of the Masoretic text." In hindsight, I can appreciate his point. As Jews, we've ascribed meaning to every word, letter, and whitespace in our source text; I could see how adding new source text could be a disruption.

The same could be said of that hypothetical cache of letters: reading them may reveal some truth best left in the past. What if Grandma was a jerk? What if Grandpa had an affair? What if the stories you built your life around simply aren't true?

It's Wilson's second conclusion, however, where he lost me. He suggests that the scrolls could demonstrate that Christianity grew organically out of Judaism:

[the scrolls show] that the morality and mysticism of the Gospels may perfectly well be explained as the creation of several generations of Jews working by and for themselves, in their own religious tradition, and that one need not assume the miracle of a special magnanimous act of God to allow the salvation of the human race.

That certainly seems plausible. However, he takes this a step further by suggesting that reasoning out these Christian beliefs is a sort of universal humanistic accomplishment. In that light, because Jews don't accept Christianity they are "left with a discipline of difficult observances, an anxious devotion to the letter of Scripture, which in time did perhaps as much as the malignity of Christian prejudice to keep [them] locked in [their] special compartment." In other words, because Jews haven't accepted Christianity, they are stuck in a smothering past.

He doesn't let Christians off the hook, either. He wishes they would embrace the scrolls' evidence that Christianity was a human development and not a supernatural phenomenon.

Wilson's view that Jews are somehow stunted isn't just insulting or a gross misreading of Judaism, it fails to acknowledge his own insight. The slow crawl of ideas that the Essenes used to get from one tradition to another is very much alive today. It's what allows me to attend a shul that sees no contradiction in mining the same texts that my Essene ancestors scrutinized for inspiration, all while under the guidance of a gay, female Rabbi.

One advantage I have over Wilson is time. It's now been over 75 years since the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Everyone from NASA to DNA experts has analyzed the find. So we can reasonably ask, has the discovery revealed any great flaws in our source text?

Consider the Great Isaiah Scroll:

The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa) is one of the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in Qumran in 1947. It is the largest (734 cm) and best preserved of all the biblical scrolls, and the only one that is almost complete. The 54 columns contain all 66 chapters of the Hebrew version of the biblical Book of Isaiah. Dating from ca. 125 BCE, it is also one of the oldest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some one thousand years older than the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible known to us before the scrolls' discovery.

According to the Israel Museum Dead Sea Scrolls Project, the Great Isaiah Scroll contains nearly 2,600 differences from the Masoretic text that Jews use today. Aha! you might be thinking, this proves how unreliable the Masoretic text. Not so fast. The project explains:

The version of the text is generally in agreement with the Masoretic or traditional version codified in medieval codices, such as the Aleppo Codex, but it contains many variant readings, alternative spellings, scribal errors, and corrections.

Ultimately, all 66 chapters of Isaiah are accounted for. Rather than the Dead Sea Scrolls version showing our modern version as a fraud, it overwhelmingly supports it. This is especially remarkable when you consider that the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text were composed 1,000 years apart. The fact that there was a game of telephone going on for 1,000 years and the textual differences are so small only underscores the miraculous nature of this text. How did humans manage to accomplish this incredible feat of textual fidelity? But don't take my word for this, go read the side-by-side translations and see for yourself.

Perhaps Jews don't live in fear of what the Dead Sea Scrolls may reveal because many of our source texts already contain contradictions. We've been wrestling with and learning from messy sources for millennia. From verses in the Masoretic text that appear to contradict each other (I'm looking at you: Deuteronomy 15:4, 15:7 and 15:11) to verses written one way but read aloud another, to dissenting opinions captured in the Talmud. Judaism has never been about textual purity. So bring on the Dead Sea Scrolls; that just gives us new material to study and learn from.

Puerto Rico Adventure - Day 9

[Composed August 6th, 2024]

Our adventure, which started a little over two weeks ago with C's arrival in DC, is officially over. All children are safely back at their permanent addresses, and Shira and I can finally exhale.

Today, our final travel day, was delightfully uneventful. We checked off a number of standard end-of-trip traditions, including: enjoying breakfast with J that involves copious amounts of peanut butter and taking back-to-back photos to show J's height compared to ours. I fear that this may be one of my last trips where I'm still taller than J. That boy is gaining on me fast!

There was rain in the area due to Hurricane Debby, but once we climbed above the cloud deck, it was clear and sunny all the way to DC.

Shira and I are exhausted. But we're we did it! exhausted. We watched C rise to the challenge of being a camp counselor, G fearlessly take on ziplining, T creatively bring her coconut family to life, D savor his parrot photo shoot and J lead an epic game of pickup basketball. We ate breadfruit, drank Skittles flavored water and dodged a hurricane. What an adventure!

I can't imagine how we're going to top this next year, but we're going to try!