No Praying Allowed

Petra, at the gate to the ascent, is memorable in its own right, built by the Nabateans, a technologically advanced Bedouin tribe in the Second Temple period. Its intricate palace, whose support pillars soar up to the sky, is actually carved into the red rocks of the mountain, called the “Sela Ha’adom” in Hebrew. During the 1950s and 1960s, crossing into Jordan illegally and literally risking one’s life to get to the Sela Ha’adom became a national psychosis and even inspired a popular ballad about a soldier who loses his life trying to get to the mystical red rocks of Petra (the song became so popular that the government banned it for many years).

Mayor Rubinstein recalls what happened after they left Petra and civilization behind. “We were surrounded by desert, the kind you only read about. We started out on horseback, cutting through the red desert mountains on either side of us. The sun was beating down mercilessly at a hundred ten degrees and there wasn’t a drop of shade. While I couldn’t imagine surviving here more than a few hours, I thought about how Bnei Yisrael followed Hashem through this wilderness for forty years.”

At some point, the horses would go no further, but the group was rescued by a group of business-savvy youngsters, urchins of the desert, whose bare feet were hardened and crusted like sandals. The enterprising children, who spent most of their days smoking their father’s home-rolled hashish (and once the Jewish tourists started arriving, providing donkey transportation), offered them donkeys for a five-dinar tip (about $7.50). Along the way, however, the kids upped the price and threatened to leave their charges stranded in the desert if they refused to pay up.

Still, the donkeys could only climb partway up the mountain. The rest had to be done on foot. Another two hours of near-vertical climbing, hands and feet clawing through the desert dust to reach the final destination: the shimmering white structure atop the mountain, touching the sky.

“By the time we got to the top,” Rubinstein remembers, “people just collapsed on the ground and fell asleep.”

Still, Rubinstein was so inspired by the excursion that he decided to petition for a plan to make Jabal Haroun accessible by helicopter. The Jordanians have so far never let such a plan get off the ground; it would surely ruin the donkey-desert motif of the Petra region. (Yet in a one-time gesture a few years later, Shas Knesset members were permitted to reach the site by helicopter). The following summer Rubinstein went again, even without a helicopter, this time taking along the elderly Spinka-Zidichover Rebbe, Rav Alter Kahane a”h, himself a Kohein and thrilled to have the privilege of visiting his holy ancestor’s burial site.

That summer, each climber, including the Rebbe, was given his own donkey at the start, which came with a barefoot youngster as a guide. Eventually the boys had to push the donkeys from behind in a valiant attempt to keep the animals moving, but the last stretch was too much even for these desert beasts of burden, and they buckled. The Rebbe wasn’t deterred, though. Later, he said it was the best Mussaf he ever experienced.

Rubinstein’s group was lucky: Although other buses set out for the journey that year, theirs was the only group that made it to the site for the yahrtzeit. One group couldn’t get donkeys. Another didn’t pass the tough security check. Other buses got stuck at the border after closing time (the Jordanian border is only open from nine to five), leaving the travelers to sleep in their buses at the border until the next morning.

Over the years, Jordanian policy has been fickle with regard to letting Jewish pilgrims up the mountain. For several summers a few years back, the Jordanians closed the border to anyone looking Jewish or carrying Jewish items such as tefillin, due, they claimed, to terror warnings.

Beginning in 2019, after an event in which Jewish worshippers filmed themselves singing Hallel at the site, the Jordanian tourism ministry and the Ministry of Sacred Properties forbade any kind of Jewish prayer, even in travelers’ hotel rooms. In addition, they stripped down subsequent groups of the Jewish tourists, removing their yarmulkes and even their shirts to see if there were tzitzis underneath, and confiscated any religious symbols. After that, there was a period when the site was closed to Jews.

Today, Jabal Haroun is generally open to foreign tourists, including many Israelis, through regulated tourism arrangements with Jordan, although Jewish prayer or overt religious rituals at the site are explicitly prohibited.

Mountain Range

Anyone making such an effort to reach Aharon HaKohein’s burial site would surely want to make sure they’re actually in the right place. In fact, the tradition identifying Jabal Haroun is one of the oldest in Jewish history, mentioned at the end of the Second Temple period in the writings of Josephus Flavius in Antiquities of the Jews. Indeed, Jews have ascended to the site throughout all of recorded Jewish history, and it is marked as Aharon’s grave in many writings throughout the centuries, including on a map of the Vilna Gaon.

Despite it being a classic Jewish site, the mountaintop was eventually appropriated as a site sacred to Islam as well; the white-domed structure was erected at the time of the Muslim conquests in the seventh century by Sultan Sama’ani bin-Muhammad.

Yet notwithstanding ancient sources about camels carrying holy men to the tomb and reports of both sweet fragrances and terrifying sounds emanating from the site, not everyone agrees that Jabal Haroun is Hor Hahar.

One of the strongest arguments against the credibility of Hor Hahar being located in Transjordan is, in fact, the very detailed Biblical description of its location and the events surrounding it, according to Rabbi Uri Holtzman, a maggid shiur in Beitar’s Dorshei Tzion kollel; author of the Lehalech series on Torah and Yamim Tovim; and well-known lecturer in Tanach, whose thousands of talmidim from around the world — maps in hand — regularly tune into his globally broadcast shiurim on Kol Halashon and other platforms.

Members of Rabbi Holtzman’s chaburah are always eager to connect their learning to the reality they live in: You might find them hunting for the chilazon on the beaches of Caesarea, shearing sheep, or planting ancient varieties of wheat, depending on what they’re learning at the time.

While Rabbi Holtzman admits that Jabal Haroun is the prevailing view, he believes that Hor Hahar is actually a lot closer than we think: He contends that it is one and the same as Har Tzin in the southern Negev, about two and a half hours from Bnei Brak, and not across the Jordanian border.

And so, last year on Rosh Chodesh Av, while dozens of Jews who sought to ascend Jabal Haroun were being harassed by the Jordanian authorities, Rabbi Holtzman was davening Shacharis and reciting Bircas Kohanim at the foot of Har Tzin in the Negev together with his kollel avreichim and others who’d heard about an alternative excursion to where he believes Aharon HaKohein is really buried.

Apple and Honey

One of the major difficulties regarding the tomb of Aharon across the Jordan is that anyone who visits the site knows that the mountain is extremely hard to ascend, even with a donkey. Yet Aharon, at the age of 123, ascended together with his son Elazar, on foot.

While Jabal Haroun stands at close to 1,300 meters, Har Tzin is a relatively small and low mountain, only 200 meters tall in the middle of Midbar Tzin, where Bnei Yisrael were stationed around the time of his death.

Rabbi Holtzman explains that to accurately identify the Biblical Hor Hahar, we need to review the events that preceded Aharon’s death, as described in parshas Chukas. Bnei Yisrael arrived at Kadesh in Midbar Tzin in the month of Nissan, at the beginning of the 40th year in the Midbar. This area is right outside the southern border of Eretz Yisrael, drawing a line from Nachal Mitzrayim in the northern Sinai (where Yamit and Atzmona were located before the Camp David retreat in 1981) to the bottom of the Dead Sea. At that point, they were about to enter the Land; it was there, however, that the incident of the sin of the waters of Merivah occurred with Moshe hitting the rock and the decree that neither Moshe nor Aharon would enter the Land.

Immediately after this event, the Torah recounts, Moshe sent messengers from Kadesh to the king of Edom, saying, “ ‘ We are at Kadesh, a city on the edge of your border. Please let us pass through your land…’ But Edom refused to let Israel pass through its border, and Israel turned away.”

Where did they go? The Torah says, “And Bnei Yisrael traveled from Kadesh and came to Hor Hahar.”

And the Torah continues, “And Hashem said to Moshe and Aharon, ‘At Hor Hahar, on the border of the land of Edom, say to Aharon: You shall be gathered to your people.’”

Hor Hahar, it is clear, was on the border of the land of Edom, but, explains Rabbi Holtzman, Jabal Haroun is not located on the border at all, but smack in the middle of the land of Edom, much further east, while Bnei Yisrael distanced themselves in the other direction (and would eventually take a roundabout route, heading south, then east, and then north, circumventing the Edomite kingdom to reach the Plains of Moav on the east side of the Jordan River and cross into Eretz Yisrael from there).

Right afterward, the Torah relates that “the Canaanite king of Arad, who dwelled in the Negev, heard that Israel was coming along the way of the spies” — referring to the path the spies had taken 39 years before, entering the Land through the Negev in a mountainous opening called Maaleh Akravim, which continues toward Har Tzin. Jabal Haroun is much further southeast than the path the spies took.

And the cherry (or apple) on top is, according to Rabbi Holtzman, found in Rashi’s explanation of the very term “Hor Hahar”: “A mountain upon a mountain, like a small apple on a larger apple.”

What exactly did Rashi mean by the word “apple?” Rabbi Holtzman explains that this means a mound or heap, as a similar reference corresponds to the heap of ashes that accumulated on the Mizbeiach.

So what, then, is the “small apple atop a larger apple”? Rabbi Holtzman explains that it’s the way the mountain looks, from a particular vantage point.

Har Tzin has two sections, one narrower than the other, and from a certain angle, it looks as if one small mountain sits atop a bigger mountain. And from where does one have that view? You guessed it: from Kadesh, where Bnei Yisrael camped for about four months, from Nissan to Av, where Miriam died and where the incident of Mei Merivah occurred.

“For this entire period,” Reb Uri explains, “they saw Har Tzin on the horizon, appearing as a small mountain upon a larger mountain.”

Rock of Ages

In this desert landscape of Kadesh Barnea, with its rocky gorges and channels carved out by seasonal streams, spectacular hills and sand formations, there is a sudden shift in the sandy terrain: Suddenly, jutting up the dunes, is a huge rock formation.

If we say that Hor Hahar is Jabel Haroun and Wadi Musa is the rock Moshe hit at Mei Merivah, then where is Moshe’s rock if Hor Hahar is actually Har Tzin in the Negev? Well, according to Reb Uri’s on-site research, that’s an easy one.

“Bnei Yisrael reached the valley below on the first of Nissan, and anyone standing there can still see that the only way out of the valley going north into Eretz Yisrael is through the mountainous path of Maaleh Akravim,” Reb Uri says, admitting it’s a bit of a bold theory. “But the passage is blocked by a huge rock, and I believe this is the rock of Mei Merivah.”

So close? Just a short drive from Beer Sheva or the hotel strip at the south end of the Dead Sea?

“Well, when you’re there, you’ll notice that most of the area is sandy desert, and suddenly there’s a big rock jutting upward. It’s a huge stone at the entry point to the Biblical border of Eretz Yisrael, at the narrow passageway of Maaleh Akravim,” he says. “The rock is like a wall that’s closed to access, but when you’re standing in front of it, you see that the right side of the rock is broken, and so is the left side. We know that Moshe hit the rock twice, so it’s possible that these two breaks are the two places where Moshe hit the rock.”

Whether Moshe’s sela is Wadi Musa — the huge rock outside Petra that’s still pouring water, or the boulder blocking the passageway of Maaleh Akravim; whether Aharon HaKohein was buried atop Jabal Haroun or on the plateau of Har Tzin, we’ll never know for sure. But one thing we do know: Just as Moshe Rabbeinu’s burial spot was hidden, so was Aharon’s. And while his tomb is yet concealed, his legacy of peace and love and pursuit of shalom is something we can all connect to on his yahrtzeit, and beyond.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1071)