Tour Tzipori with Rabbi Ephraim Schwartz - Mishpacha

[Music] welcome to the city of tsipori actually we're not in the city we're on the outskirts of the city of tsipori behind me we have this incredible view of the mountains all over the place tsipori was a city that was the capital of the galil it sits right here in the lower galilee right above the amec israel the jezreel valley which was the main thoroughfare that went for people that were bringing from egypt and all the way up north down to jordan down to syria to iraq to bavel this is the roads that they would pass and therefore a large city opened up over here but this is not just a city that was a business city it was a city where mishnah was where there were nasi where tanoyam we talk about lake and you talk about barapak we talk about vilna we talk about radhan we talk about the old communities in europe and we get moved by them well these are the cities that are mentioned in the gemara that tell us where all of the different tanoyim and amaryam lived we're told that after the khurban baysamik dash the sanhedrin moved up here to the north of harit israel it went from yavneh to a city called usha svaram bajarim sipori and then to the city of tavaria where the sanhedrin rested for 500 years over there the sanhedrin was there in the city of tavaria longer than it was ever in yerushalayim and this is where the majority of the jewish life and jewish population took place here in the north of eretz israel the kumara tells us lamandi crest sipuri why is it called sipori it's called sipori because it's perched on a mountaintop like a bird rashlakish who lived here in the city a brother-in-law of rabbi yochanan who we're going to speak about that was here tells us a land flowing in milk and honey you hear those words about eritreal the zeb tsipori it's the 10 mil that around this area this is the land that's flowing with milk and honey that akades barcode told us about this city has so many different stories that we can open up the gemara and we hear and we read the stories and here today we will admit hashem experience those stories we are looking out over there on this view and from this view on the top of the mountain we see this big tower this big citadel from the citadel i want you it was built by the turks and it but but it was built on the ruins of a crusader fortress that was here but before the crusaders there was a byzantine and before that a roman fortress that was here so picture this big tower that was overlooking all of the farms here in the local valley and down below there you see that little hill with a flag on top of it that's tel hanatone but in the times of the gemara it was known as a city called tells us one shot this afternoon a fire broke out in the field of somebody named yossi ben simoy and in his field they saw the fire from the top here in the tower of sipori they sent the firefighters down the mountain you can picture them driving down the mountain on their wagons with buckles of water to put out the fire they come to the city of chicken and the people there tell them you're not allowed to put out a fire on shabbos the romans don't know what to do they go back home the fire is burning and hashem makes a nace and rain starts pouring down and it puts out the fire that's there in the city the next day the jews send money over to at least pay the roman all soldiers and the roman firefighters for their efforts to come to the city but were very upset about that that the shabbos is that if a guy comes to put out a fire we don't tell them to put it out but if they put it out we don't tell them not to put it out the halacha that we know today of the shabbos guy it's right here from this view from the top of this hill here in the city of tsipari down to the valley over there in chichen it's one of the many many stories that come to life when we visit here in the city of tsipori okay we are here in the shul of glory it is amazing to think that we're sitting in the shul where yehudah nasi possibly was used to speak he lived in this city as we mentioned this is a shul that was rebuilt after the times of nazi the current what we see here is from the fifth century the period of the and we have an incredible mosaic for over here on this side we have over here different memorials of the people that donated the show they really got their money's was which we remembered for a while you done by israel and his daughter but when we see a few different um memorials over here and then we have this elaborate mosaic that we're looking at on the top over there we have lions it looks like with their hands on top of bulls next to that on the next planet on the next frame we see menorah we see a chauffeur we see lulav and s-rogues interestingly enough these are all things that remind us of the mesa amigdas as well we have the two pillars over there the reminders of the boas there was a family of the kohanim ishmael that lived over here after the corbin bay san mignon and possibly this is reminding them of the base i'm ignorant and then we have some writing over here it says but notice the words are spelled wrong with a sama instead of a shin we have a picture of the kior over here with the cows the mixture tells us had the cows with the water pouring out of their mouths after that the next family says kevin says look this one they got it spelling right on this one there's katsotros they're soulless trumpets and the flower we have the left hand pumin in the middle there 12 loaves of bread on the shoha and then we have a basket with all different types of fruits we have birds but the birds are hanging upside down it's fascinating that the mishnah told us that these that when they would bring the bikurim the first fruits to yerushalayim they would have birds on them but what's the problem with having birds on your be kuren they do their deeds on them shall we say and so what did we do it says they would hang them upside down this is a mishna imagine the mishna that was written about right over here perhaps and then we have a very very strange non-jewish seeming motif over here we have the gal gal masala all the different mazzolo's these astrological signs we have the game but it's spelled with two guilds and one of them is backwards fish we see over here across the scorpion in the middle we have this chariot with a big sun other synagogues that we found we actually found a goddess there helios again it seems like something that you would find in a from shul right certainly not from the periods of the mishnah on the four corners we have the two four different seasons we have a woman and she's dressed according to the season in the summer she's wearing short sleeve the sparkle magazine i don't know if it would publish that but it seems that it made it out to the floors of the schools of tsipori right we have over there the uh the winter the tufas and the wheat and very interesting motif i want to talk why this is finally we have three more frames here in the front of the show two pictures one of them we see somebody hanging a donkey to somebody else um what's that about is there a tana story that that reminds us of next to that we have a picture can't really make it out because most of it was destroyed in an earthquake that took place here in the 8th century right we see that there's a goat or a ram and he's got his horns wrapped into a bush next to that we see two pairs of shoes well we certainly know where ram is with its horns caught into a bush this is that cave that's hitchcock but why are there shoes over there well took place you're not a lot of weird that's make our eyes you don't wear your shoes in fact that was probably the most visible thing for the people that lived in the periods of the mix of english everybody's barefoot it could be freezing snow outside and you have to walk barefoot so when they come to draw a picture of the al-qaeda they automatically assume they took off their shoes finally we have one last picture over here of a woman standing in a doorway in other places we see a larger in rome in a church they found a similar motif where there was three angels that were actually coming and this is the besura what some of the archaeologists suggested is the story of claudius rome we have the besura the tidings of the birth of yitzhak of that there will be a jewish generation and then we have the division on one hand we have ishmael avram tells him you stay here with the donkey and me and the boy we're going to go all the way up and this bring that kid then we have the gal masala the zodiac the zodiac is a sign that the entire world is run by the astrological signs by them as always but you know what there's something above that and that's the reason that's the abode that's the corporals that's even above the the astrological signs that are running the world so that's a little bit of an idea of what we're looking for if you notice at the front over there there's no mosaics the reason is because mosaics is very expensive to make and therefore over there would be very difficult to go ahead and why you wouldn't put mosaics in a place that was going to be covered and that in fact is where they are encoded at now this shoe is not fasting yerushalayim but we're told in the gemara that there was some time that held that it should always be facing west perhaps it was because of the structure of the city that they built this way but the shrine is always on the side of the west and they would go ahead and build the articles facing west over here so this is our show here in sibori it's so meaningful to be in a place where the tanoyim and the people from that school for david [Music] okay we are here in the house of the governor at the top of the city here of tivaria tomorrow tells us that there was an upper city and a lower city rebellion pandas used to come from the upper city where he would live in the rava hayhudi which is behind us out here and he would go down to the lower city to learn torah he left his cloak here one day somebody tried to steal it and a snake came out and took it out this is the house of the governor though and we see this incredible mosaic floor that is amongst us we have over a million stones that were made in the intricate artwork that was done over here and right in the middle we have the mona lisa of the galil now this monalisa was way before leonardo da vinci was here the beauty of it is that you could stand at any single angle inside of this room and you'll feel that she's looking at you what makes this even more interesting is this incredible gemara rabbi yochanan says and remember we talked from you and lived here in the city of tsipori and rabbi yochanan face to face and he asks the question is it possible that one person could look at a thousand people how does that feel so he says it's like the face of that ukainen of that icon that a thousand people look at her and she is and each person feels that she is looking at them was this the icon that rabbi yokono was talking about i don't know but we know that he lived here in the city and we find this incredible incredible artwork over here now on the opposite side of us over here we have something very interesting there's a hole in the wool floor with a little channel coming out of it for water and then there's this floor mat it seems in mosaics that says la brielle translated from the original latin you know what this hole is it's a bathroom wow a bathroom from the times of the period of the mishna in the governor's house but you know what makes this bathroom unique what makes this bathroom unique is that it's also mentioned inside of the gemara see the gamer tells us that rabiyoshi says a famous mimer he says who is the wealthy man now i know that you're going to answer hasselmerch he was happy with his lot but not rebiosi rubiosi said usher zeslo somebody that has a bathroom a toilet right next to their table where they eat see back then people didn't have modern day plumbing they would have to go out to the fields a rich person doesn't want to do that it could be dangerous for him so a wealthy person is someone that could just eat and then go afterwards to relieve himself in the bathroom now is this the bathroom of rabiose i'm not sure but you know what we do know we're told the famous story in the gemara that we mentioned in niron that there were three tangoes and reviewed by eloy and speaking of the greatness of the romans and they make these beautiful cities and they created marketplaces and they did incredible things for us what are you talking about everything they did was for their own benefit they didn't have anything in mind for us they're going to bring in terrible things into artists we're all for taxes and who knows what rabiose was quiet somebody snitched on them you'd have been gayrim and the romans came and they put out a warrant for his arrest for shimbari and he was had to run and flee with his son for 13 years they hid in the cave in pekin because he spoke well they made him the governor of the jews and rabiosi what did they do with him it says they brought him to the city of tsipori where they kept him under administrative wash so yes ribosi lived here in this city right it's also the only place where we've ever found such a such a such a phenomena of a base like he said that was somehow so this very well could be that possibly that same bathroom that rubiosi and that the gemara was telling us about how incredible to be sitting in the city where the titanic lived and to see the things that they taught us about and the places that we learned from them we've left the mansion and as we move towards the south of it we look down to this valley and we're amazed to see the remains of an ancient theater here the governor he's got box row seats of all of the latest roman shows that would be shown down here in this theater this theater would seat about 4 500 people in it it had four different entrances much of it has been reconstructed but we can still see the original benches where the people sat where the people would watch and be entertained theater was essential for the roman empire what was theater form if you have an empire that's 50 60 million people in the roman empire all across the world most of them psychopaths murderers barbarians right how do you keep control how do you make sure that these people are not going to revolt rebel cause chaos the way that they do it is pretty much the same way that we do it today see today we have people for example in good times that would come to architectural on a plane they'd fly for 12 hours how do you keep a group of people in a little box of metal 10 000 30 000 40 000 feet up in the ear quiet sane not rebelling not making you meshuggah the answer you put a little screen in front of them with movies and shows and all of a sudden you don't hear a peep once in a while in between shows people get up and use the bathroom but that's about it and that was the key to the theater now we're very against the theater as you see as we mentioned we're here in the jewish quarter where this governor's house is and jews would go to the theater we know this because we have all types of testimonies from don't go to theaters don't go i'll teach are terrible things just like we'll see all types of things don't have the internet don't have smartphones don't have right if they're telling you not to go and we would find that in a hundred year we'd find these pashka villain that tells us that people were going and perhaps that's even the reason why rabbi uda nazi decided to break in the torah see the rebuda nasi who lived here in the city writes down the terrorist now there's not a lot of the territory is not allowed to be transmitted orally when a sophomore writes a terror he writes one letter and then another letter and then he goes ahead from a terrorist scroll similarly itaesha pixaf is only allowed to be given over pixar was not allowed to be written out of the book terrorist should never be a book that you just hand somebody read the book a person needs a rebbe a talmud to give it over rebbe says the time has come for us to write it it's a time to break the law in order to say the law why because everybody's assimilating they're going to feeders they're losing the yiddish crack they're looting the chuuka as we see people can't read people don't dove and we don't have the same siddhurum the printing press to keep together and he says we need to give people something to read today we have mish bakha magazine they didn't even have that over there back then right something to read turret to learn and rebuked on nasi perhaps because of the tiatronium that were here writes down the mishnah that yeah he writes the mission in a way to keep the terror it still needs rebain it still needs to be learned but that could be a result of that now one other aspect is that some people suggest and as we mentioned this was a city where the sanhedrin sat perhaps according to some opinions the sanhedrin actually sat here in that theater isn't it amazing today they have concerts here in that theater jewish singers you can be here in the theater and all of a sudden you hear a concert singing where are you romans today claudius roll is here see prairie is back in our hands the ira torah has returned to claudius has returned to khali israel and here's hashem let's enter the city and taste a little bit the beauty of the city from the time of the mishnah we're down here in the lower city that we had talked about this was the cardo the main street the thoroughfare of the entire city in fact for those of you that have been to mammilla mall in yerushalayim it's built like to represent the cargo little shops along a main street a main track and one after another an open ear on the top and all the types of stores here's where people would come and do their shopping there was an administrative center over here over here we have in this large complex an incredible mosaics floor over here and i'm going to talk about that we have on the other side here a little bath house i'm going to talk about that as well but this is you have to picture here tens of thousands of people living here teaming this is the fifth avenue of tsipori this is the rehov yaffo of tsipori of the ancient world the capital of the galil now on this mosaic floor that we have behind us over here we see a lot of different images on the top we have these two super sized faces a man a woman with what seems like angels next to them and a big tower with some person standing on top of the other one chiseling something in a huge river in the middle teeming with fish and overflowing and then we see another person on a little pillar over there horses running to a castle and then on the bottom here we have it all full of animals wild animals lions tigers eating up weaker animals what's going on over here again archaeologists have a very interesting way of figuring it out see the castle over here on our right it has some writing and it says alexandria which is egypt in fact there is a castle over there that looks like that if this is egypt then the river of course we know is the nile river if this is the nile river then what's that tower what are they chiseling well that see they're chilling a number there it looks like 17. well this is called a nylometer and it's telling me the size of the water at the level of the water in the nile 17 is a big number and in fact that little guy standing there on the tower he also has a 17 on top of him he's telling them the news and then the soldiers are coming there i see that little 17 over there he's telling the alexandria they're bringing the basuro stovos the nile is overflowing the gods so to speak have blessed the nile river but outside of egypt the highest riots are ripping each other apart this tells us that the city of sipori which was connected to rome was also connected to egypt that was here at the time now i'm going to look at the mosaic floor that's over there not far over there and as you can see there's a strange mosaic floor there's all different types of designs in fact if you look carefully no two of them are the same every single one is different this one's a triangle this is a square this one's a rectangle this is a pentagon well we never saw a floor like this with so many different shapes and sizes what is this well again the archaeologists have a very good guess what this is you know what this is this is a showroom for mosaic floors you want to go ahead and get mosaics in your house you come into this door well i want a little bit of that and i want a little bit of that and put this frame on the side and you pick out the different sizes you want isn't that ingenious pretty incredible and then we have one last thing that i want to point out to you over here on this side we have a bath house right now this bath house that we're looking at is called a colidarium or caldarium the way that romans had bath houses they had three rooms a tepidarium a frigidaire and a colidarium the frigidarium as you can guess just like the refrigerator was the cold room the tepadam lukewarm and the calderdarium was a room that had hot water now how you gonna make the water hot you have to have a bath house this is a place where they're gonna come they're gonna relax how do you get hot water there's no running water over here so the romans had a very interesting way of doing it what they did is they created a false floor a fake floor and it was held up by these small little pillars you see the pillars that the kids are standing on over there well those pillars would raise the floor up and then they would light little fires under there and it would heat the water and then the water would flow down into the tapidarium and then into the khalid area the gemara tells us an incredible story about rabia beau that lived over here earlier beau in fact was a student of rabiohan that we had mentioned and rayabo is here in the city and he goes to the beta americas he goes to relax and what happens all of a sudden the floor collapses and he grabs on to one of the pillars and he jumps on the pillar and he grabs two of his friends that are with him according to one gemara the other gemara says he grabbed the 101 people that were standing there i don't know if this one was big enough for 101 people and he held out to them and he saved them all from burning in the scalding water below in the beta americas but here you see a classic base america again archaeology the mishnah the gemara it all comes together in this holy city of tsipori we've left the park and right at the entrance gate we've come over here to the water system of the city of tsipori now you have to realize this is a city of tens of thousands the capital of the galil how are you going to provide water for them realizing that in this country in israel bark hashem we have rainy seasons and then we don't have rainy seasons right the rainy season over here in israel if we're lucky it starts after sukis but then a general year we'll talk about november december january february on a good year we'll get some in march april showers don't bring main flowers in israel it's too late already it's after pesach and we won't see rain for the entire summer eight months a year we don't have rain in this country and yet the rain is necessary for water and particularly for a city this size a city as we saw that has bath houses a city that's going to have fountains that's going to make the city the cardo and every place glorious water to feed the animals how do we provide for something like that well originally when it was in its smaller days they had every house had a little bormayam in it had a water cistern where they would go ahead and get the water that would bring in the water from the rain and that would be fine but as the city became more roman it grew larger and larger there was became the need to bring the city now normally what we would do is a city that's in a valley you can create larger boros mime that would bring water in but sea puri is a problem as we said the reason why it's called sipori is because it's perched on the top of a mountain like a bird we are about 250 meters above 750 feet above the valley below us water doesn't travel uphill so how are we going to bring the water from below here into the city so what the roman engineers came up with is an aqueduct system the city of nazareth as you see in the mountains above us in in the north here are the mountains of the hare nazareth the mountains of nazareth and those are higher than us there are springs that are there in those mountains and along the way there are springs so they built an aqueduct system different channels of water that would come along the mountain range and bring it all the way down 14 and a half kilometers and it would bring the water here to the city of tsipori when the water would be brought in it would come down here into this huge shaft we're looking at a shaft right now that is about 250 meters long that's about 30 feet high that can carry that can hold over a million gallons of water that's enough water to provide for 15 000 people for two weeks straight and the water keeps coming and coming the water would flow because these are coming from springs it's not just rain water and the way that they would bring the water they would preserve it in these man-made huge water cisterns that were here if you can see over here on the wall next to me we have plaster on the walls that was put all over here we can see the ancient two thousand year old plaster that was put here to hold the water in now what happens is when the water is running down here eventually over time it's going to get dirtier and dirtier there's going to be dirt there's going to be rocks things that will fall into it so they developed the system where they created two different channels different areas that open and close that are wider and thinner and then they would close them up as you see at the end over there we have an area that small little door they close it up they seal it up and then they clean out that area then they would seal up this part let the water flow out and clean out this area this was the water this was the source of life for the city of tsipori this is how they would bring in and provide the water that everybody had anything and once you have water then more and more people will feel comfortable moving here and the city grew and grew the city of tsipori ultimately was taken over after the roman empire was taken over by the muslims it was destroyed in an earthquake later on the crusaders came and they built the city over here and then after the crusader period the muslims came back again and once again they built it over here and ultimately in the later area arab periods and the times of the turks once the cities around here started to grow and they got modern conveniences this became less important we don't need to have the water cisterns and we could move out into the fields down blowing places more comfortable what an incredible tour we've had what an incredible city i invite you to come with us here to eric disrael to experience this firsthand thank you so much for watching