Question for you: Do you like coffee? Some people love coffee. Some people have one glass, two glasses, three glasses, four glasses, five glasses, six cups of coffee a day. I used to like coffee. Right now, I prefer a nice hot cup of tea. But when we were young, if we could convince my parents to give us a taste—a cup of coffee—wow, that was heaven. How did they give us coffee? They would take a cup. They’d put about, oh, half an inch of coffee and about four inches of milk and a little bit of sugar. You could barely taste the coffee. If you didn’t focus and concentrate on it, you’d never know it was coffee. Why is that? Because the more milk you add, the less you taste the coffee.
What does that have to do with anything? The land of Israel is surrounded by water when you really think about it. You have the Mediterranean in the northwest. You have a body of water in the northeast, which is also known as the Sea of Galilee for those other people. You have the Red Sea. You have the Suez Canal. You have the Jordan, the Jordan River. You have the Dead Sea, surrounded all around by water. We know that the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) is a source of all the water for the Jewish people, for the Jordanians. It gets its water from the tributaries, and then it flows. It goes down into the Yarden (Jordan River), which then flows into the Dead Sea.
So I have a question. Why is it that, if fresh, clean, drinkable, delicious water has been flowing into the Dead Sea for 6,000 years—or, if you come from that other side, 4 billion years—the Dead Sea has the highest concentration of salt of any sea in the world? Why doesn’t it lose its taste of salt the same way that coffee loses the taste of coffee when you add a lot of milk to it? I don’t understand. It’s been doing that for thousands of years. It should be bright and clean and wonderful. It doesn’t support life, not human life. You can’t swim in it. You can’t get the water in your eye. It’s so salty. No fauna, no fish, nothing. Totally, totally dead. Now, I’m not going to get into the idea of Sedom and what happened over there. Let’s just talk geography, regular geography, regular science, regular common sense. If fresh water is flowing into the Dead Sea for thousands of years, why does it still have the highest concentration of salt? I think the answer is simple. The Kinneret, as we said, gets water from all its tributaries. It gets the water and gives it to the Dead Sea. So it’s a very, very, very, very high concentration of salt. The Kinneret gets the water over to the Yarden. The Dead Sea doesn’t. The Dead Sea only receives. It gets the water from the Jordan, and it just stays there. When you give, you’re alive. When all you do is get and you never give, well, then maybe it’s time to wake up and smell the salt.