The Time Magazine Essay That Saved Sinai

The site of the giving of the Torah was about to become a tourist-packed heap of litter and Lance Morrow would have none of it. 

The longtime Time Magazine reporter, who passed away earlier this winter, penned a short piece that put the kibosh on plans Egypt was developing in 1990. As The New York Times recounted in his obituary, Morrow’s wife, visiting Cairo at the time, heard of the development of a cable car railway that would ferry folks up to the summit of the mount. “People were desperate to stop it, so I called Lance and asked what we can do about it, and he wrote an essay in two hours that stopped it dead,” she said.

Morrow’s essay is worth revisiting as the parsha of Yitro, containing the Ten Commandments, is read in synagogue this Shabbat. It testifies to the timeless spiritual power of God’s revelation to Israel well beyond the Jewish community.

“Elvis Presley’s Graceland in Memphis has become a shrine, a sort of tackiness made sacred. Mount Sinai, where God came to earth, is about to become a sacred place made tacky,” Morrow’s piece began.

He then quoted a billboard sign spotted six miles north of Sinai’s Monastery of St. Catherine that proclaimed, “At this site will be 500 villas, a tourist village with 250 rooms, two hotels with 400 rooms, shopping center, school and hospital, supplied by all facilities.” 

Lamenting that the “‘great and terrible wilderness’ described by Deuteronomy is on its way to becoming a tourist trap,” Morrow movingly described how after the Lord said “Whosoever toucheth the mount shall surely be put to death,” in the Book of Exodus, “for over 3,000 years, the occupiers of the Sinai peninsula, from Justinian to the Prophet Muhammad to Abdel Nasser and Golda Meir, took the site under their protection. Mount Sinai is enclosed in a convective divinity that is primitive and powerful. The mountain seems to gather thousands of years into a prismatic clarity.”

Yet, he lamented, “The Egyptian Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction, however, is not awed.” It hoped for the economic windfall from what was projected to be a 1,800% increase in tourists per year.

So Morrow argued against the project on multiple grounds. 

The first was that the hustle and bustle of visitors would disturb the Greek Orthodox monastery, whose inhabitants had traditionally prayed there for 14 centuries. “The monks’ medieval tradition of hospitality to the wayfarer was never meant to accommodate tour buses,” he noted. 

Secondly, the earthly environment would not take kindly to the increased foot traffic. There are “812 species of plants in the Sinai,” Morrow wrote, “half of them found in the high mountains around St. Catherine’s. Of those, 27 are endemic, found nowhere else in the world … The contemplated tourism would arrive in that nature like a neutron bomb.”

But it was the short article’s last reason which resonates most profoundly for all those who hold dear the heavenly instruction offered in the desert three millennia ago. “Bulldozing desanctification for money must end,” Morrow starkly stated. “If the attraction of Mount Sinai is its holy wilderness, and even the physical effort required to approach it, tourist development threatens to destroy the uniqueness and transcendence of the pilgrimage. The Egyptians are often haphazard about protecting their dead treasures. Now they seem ready to sacrifice a powerful, living mountain that is in their care. Perhaps they will make the cable cars in the shape of calves and gild them. The golden calves can slide up and down Mount Sinai and show God who won.”

Thanks to Morrow’s missive scrapping the project, the Disneyfication of the site of divine revelation was avoided. Sinai would continue to stand tall as a source of awe and wonder, the call to transcendence and the commandedness of covenant. 

Thanks to Morrow’s missive scrapping the project, the Disneyfication of the site of divine revelation was avoided. Sinai would continue to stand tall as a source of awe and wonder, the call to transcendence and the commandedness of covenant. Where a people once stood, freed from tyranny and bound by faith, the gilded calves of commercialization could dare not tread.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”