I miss mullets

Continuing my hair theme: The other day I saw a really strong mullet. This was a young Arab guy. It was classic, a sort of jerry-curled billy-ray cyrus thing. The guy sporting it looked pretty tough and even if I had had a camera there was no way I was going to snap his picture. I have only seen two mullets here in Israel. The other one was a few months ago and on a Russian-looking guy. What's Russia- looking? Well it was old-style Russian, like the guys I knew twenty years ago when I was on kibbutz. He was wearing a lot of acid-washed denim for one thing. He was blond and pale and he had a whispy blond moustache which completes the mullet well.
Israel is a society of short hair and long hair. Israel likes dualisms, clear dichotomies. Arab/Jew Secular/Religious, Sabra/Immigrant short hair/long hair. Short hair says neat, organized, tough and military. Long hair says hippy, rebel, soft, hiding. Those are the choices and guys go with them. Arab guys, too, while sporting lots of styles are not really adventurous; they adhere to the two basic styles rule, long or short. Mullets blow up dichotomies like that. They are anti-hippie, small-town, conservative but rebellion. Business up front, party at the back. At least that's what I always see when I see a mullet (at least on a guy). Debbie's friend Matt Bissonnette's book Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock has a classic mullet scene when some anglo kids go on an exchange trip up in Point-au-pique and meet a French Canadian guy who is like the coolest thing in his small town and the narrator calls him "the lord, high King Pepper". It is a pretty funny scene in a funny book. The narrator ends up getting worked over by the lord, high King Pepper for messing with his girlfriend.
It is noteworthy that both the mullets I have seen were solitary. I think of the mullet as needing at least one mullet-follower, somebody sporting a less committed mullet, a mullet fellow-traveller. It must be lonely wearing a mullet here.
The guy I saw this week had seriously luxurious looking curls in back, and some wet-look product on. In addition to making me think of Absalom, who I had on the brain anyway, it reminded me of a theme in the Illiad -- the ultimate West versus East book --- about the Trojans and their curled and scented hair, how the Greeks disdain them for it. But, of course, Paris woos away Helen with that hair. I'll have to ask David -- a classicist -- about it when I see him this weekend if he remembers what I'm talking about. My guess is the Trojans had the pretty-boy long hair, the Greeks had the short hair. Not a lot of room for in-between or stylistic equivocation when you are on the battlefront of the clash of civilizations.

Absalom, Absalom Hairstylists

I got my hair cut by a guy named Eitan Avshalom (the Hebrew of Absalom). I commented on the irony of someone named Avshalom cutting hair. He said, “Why? Because he and his father fought?” It is one of my favourite stories from the bible and one of the saddest. This Avshalom didn't know the end of it. I'm doing this from memory so excuse me if I get the details wrong (as I pointed out in a previous post my memory is such that I could be making this whole thing up so better go check your bibles). King David loves Avshalom who is very handsome and has beautiful long hair. Avshalom ends up rebelling against the rule of his father (he has good reasons; David is ignoring a lot of awful stuff going on in his family). Things are touch and go for David for a while but eventually Avshalom and his forces are on the run, about to be defeated. There is a final battle and David tells his men, don't kill my son because I still love him. But Yoav– the King's trusted military man -- finds Avshalom. Avshalom's chariot ran under a thorn tree and his beautiful long hair has tangled in the tree, lifting him out of his chariot leaving him suspended in the air and helpless. Yoav doesn't hesitate. He stabs Avshalom “under the fifth rib” (Yoav is David's heavy, a wetwork specialist, and he does a couple of people “under the fifth rib,” as I recall). David finds out and cries, “But I told you to leave him alive.” Yoav tells him, in effect, you aren't just a dad fighting with a son, you are king and when someone rebels against the king, even the king can't forgive that. Raison d'etat. The haircut – to give Eitan Avshalom his due -- is pretty good.

In related news, the Israeli Labour Party, in a panic at polls predicting that they are going to be reduced to a sliver of their former power, have decided to go negative with their election advertising. In Israel this isn't big news. Kadima has giant ads saying “Bibi (Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of Likud and the acknowledged front runner) I don't trust him.”

The amazing thing about Labour's campaign is that they've gone negative against THEMSELVES. The ad on the bus I saw yesterday had a big picture of Labour Party leader Ehud Barak and the text said “Lo simpati. Manhig” which might roughly be translated as “Not likeable. A Leader.” Obviously some bright light decided that Labour couldn't hide its considerable liabilities – principally the fact that Israelis don't like Barak – so they might as well put them front and centre. There's going to be a whole series of ads saying thing like "He's not nice. A leader." "He's got cooties. He's a leader. "

It seems that there is nobody left in the back rooms of these parties who can say goodbye to these guys. In Canada, if you loose an election your party's backroom boys tell you thanks very much and go away now. Everyone was appalled that Stephane Dion didn't know this, until eventually someone pricked him gently under his fifth rib and indicated the door.

In Israel, the backroom guys, the ones who in Canada would be considered too soaked in blood for party leadership aren't in the backrooms (That's both figurative and literal blood, Barak and Netanyahu were in the Israeli equivalent of the green berets and Barak, at least, spent a fair amount of his military career parachuting into Lebanon and other resort locations at night and killing enemies, eventually becoming Israel's most decorated soldier). Somehow they end up leaders of their parties and no one is left in the smoky closed-door meetings who can say, “Step aside or we're going to dump your body in the Yarkon River”. There's no line-up of talented, charismatic, bright up-and-comers who want to take the poisoned chalice of Labour leadership, whoever gives the party its money is asleep at the switch and I guess what is left of the party base is scared that if Barak goes, they'll end up back with Amir Peretz (famous for watching military manoeuvres through binoculars with the lens-caps still on, a definite no-no for Israel's Praetorian political class) or someone worse as leader, so Barak will continue to steer the Labour Party over cliff after cliff.

What do you do when you need an Yoav for your Yoav?

Playing hookie at the deepest hypersaline lake in the world

Took the kids out of school and went to the Dead Sea today. Here's what I learned from wikipedia about the Dead Sea. There are no macroscopic organisms living there; It's dead. And its a lake. Hence the name.
We went to the national park at Einot Tsukim. I saw two beautiful birds there, neither I can identify with confidence but one was a little green guy travelling with a buddy who was shy to let me get near. I think it was a little green bee eater (none other than the shrakrak gamadi) and a white-throated kingfisher (again I wouldn't put money on it). I'm pretty sure it was some kind of kingfisher but it was big, bigger than the 25 cm my guidebook gives the Shaldag Hazeh Lavan. I read in an etymological dictionary that the great hebrew poet Haim Nachman Bialik gave the shaldag its name, just made it up from two hebrew words but it didn't give a reference. In another piece of funny hebrew trivia, the car rental guy today asked me for my "hozeh." Hozeh means prophecy in Biblical Hebrew. Sure, I said and I told him that Israel was going to be lead by a generation of corrupt fools and would continue to be at war with its neighbours until the Jewish people resolved to treat one another and the stranger in their midst with greater kindness. He just held out his hand and said "Okay but give me your hozeh," and that's when I remembered that hozeh in modern hebrew means contract. I actually learned that from Dudu Busi. In his book he tells a story about one South Tel Aviv bad guy taking out a hozeh on another one. Bialik -- who named the shaldag -- said he hoped that in Israel one day there would be Jewish prostitutes and Jewish gangsters, all the normal features of a nation. He has his wish.

I mentioned the Mamilla Cemetery in a previous post. I have started an online petition asking the Simon Wiesenthal Center to stop digging at Mamilla Cemetery. If you are interested in reading it you can check it out at A True Monument to Tolerance Petition.

Finally, I have to say I never thought I'd see the day when Canada's turbulent and arcane politics made Israel's look tame and easy to understand, but its happened. A party leader who resigned but refuses to leave, who may end up being prime minister in a jurryrigged coalition, it could be ripped from HaAretz. Stephane Dion should consider coming here if he ever actually does leave the liberals. He'd be right at home. I know one thing that the looming constitutional crisis has given me; I am going to start proroguing random stuff left and right just to celebrate my Canadian-ness.
This blog post is formally prorogued, by order of his excellency, the right honourable Ornotholgist Plenipotentiary.

$24 Billion for Wexler Freedman and more Bethlehem

Hi sorry, i got sick so I took a few days off.
First thing, I want to let everyone know that Ariela and I will be going before a special joint session of Congress to request a $24 billion dollar bailout package. I want to reassure you that we have heard the messages of the American taxpayer loud and clear and if we are indeed granted this small amount we will immediately impose salary caps of $10.3 million dollars per year on our top executives (me, Ariel, Lev and Benjy). No more fatcatting around for us. Also we promise that there will be no layoffs for at least 6 months -- although we cannot promise that restructuring will not occur (Lev will no longer be getting thirds of yogurt).
Some of you may be asking yourselves why the taxpayer should spend $24 billion dollars on a family of four and the answer is America cannot afford not to bail us out. Think of all the secondary and tertiary industries associated with Wexler/Freedman Holdings. With this one-time -- at least for now -- infusion of cash, it will be possible to ensure that we can continue to buy stuff, like pizza, for example which otherwise we could not, (or it would be harder without that $24 billion, anyway). Think of all the pizza shops that will go out of business if we don't have the money. We are also committing ourselves to greater and more rigorous financial oversight; Lev -- who prioneered our leveraged use of assest-backed corporate paper, which turned out not to be such a hot idea -- has been moved out of his post to other responsibilities, chiefly in daycare. Benjy, who has six years of experience, will now be responsible for long term strategic planning. Benjy brings to the job a firm understanding of addition and subtraction in numbers under ten and vague notions of how to multiply. Tell your congresmman and senator, America cannot afford NOT to give the wexler-freedmans $24 billion dollars.

Now on to other business. I promised to finish telling you all about Bethlehem. I will tell you briefly that there were a few other things I thought were worth noting. One of the activities we did was one in which participants step into the circle if a sentence applies to them. One of the sentences was "I am sometimes scared when I hear Hebrew." To see people step in for that one, was pretty hard for me. I guess I knew that Palestinians might very well be afraid of Hebrew but knowing and seeing are two different things. In the small group where we talked afterwards I mentioned how sad it was for me to think of Hebrew -- the revival of which I think is perhaps the great miracles of Zionism -- being frightening for people, nice, decent, good people, made me cry. Another related thing was to see the degree to which Palestinians of good will did not seem to 'get' Israeli and Jewish concerns for physical safety (with the notable exception of Sami Awad, who I mentioned previously). Saman Khoury, who was an author of the Geneva Inititaive, a sort of blue-print for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict said that (and I hope I am not misrepresenting his views) that the Oslo process, started by Rabin/Peres and Yassir Arafat collapsed because Shimon Peres failed to win the election after Prime Minister Rabin was killed. Saman Khoury's account of why Peres wasn't elected, and why Oslo ultimately fell apart, left out one thing that to me was very important -- the Hamas suicide bombings in Israel. While Shimon Peres may be the perenial loser of Israel, he had some help with that one. I am not blaming Saman Khoury who I think is smart and courageous for pursuing a two state solution, but I did think that he did not see how fragile Israelis (and Jews generally) feel our safety to be -- rightly or wrongly -- which seems to me a major factor in moving forward. Finally, and on a hopeful note, we visited a place called Wadi Fukin which is just the other side of the green line from Tsur Hadassah in Jerusalem. It is a small farming village. It has an intersting history since the inhabitants were evacuated by the Jordanians in 1948 to a Bethlehem refugee camp since the village sat basically on the border. They would come in the day time and farm their fields and go back to the refugee camp at night. In 1967 when Israel took over the west bank the residents petitioned to return and eventually were allowed to. An organization called friends of the earth middle east, a joint palestinian, israeli, jordanian venture is working on water use issues with the residents of Wadi Fukin and Tsur Hadassah trying to encourage good neighbourliness. The village is beautiful though squeezed between Tsur Haddasah on the one hand and Betar Illit (a settlement next door) on the other. Teh village is working with friends of the earth ME to market and seel their produce in israel labeled as palestinian produce in the hopes that Israelis will understand that palestinian prosperity can benefit both communities.
Have a great Shabbat/Weekened. J

Bird Notes and Bethlehem

Ariela says my previous blog entry about the birds I was seeing out my window was too complicated. Just to add to any confusion, the bird that I thought was a shrakrak/bee-eater is in fact a Palestine Sunbird/Tsufit. What is today called a shrakrak, the bee-eater (merops in Latin for those who want another language thrown in to the mix) is slightly larger than the sunbird though my point about the weirdness of these small birds (about 26 centimeters according to my guide) being called shrakrak -- the translation into aramaic of the word for vulture -- seems to still apply. I also saw what I think was a nachalieli (pied wagtail) the other day. Nice because I have a nephew with a close name (when I say 'close' I mean my nephew's name is Nachliel, not, for example, Pied Wagtile) .

On subjects non-ornithological, I spent two days in Bethlehem in the West Bank last week. I went on a trip organized by "Encounter" which has as its mission bringing Jews of various flavors from outside of Israeli to the West Bank so they can meet with and hear from Palestinians. (I actually think they say that their mission is to bring Jewish leaders to the West Bank. Of course in the Jewish community just about everybody considers themselves a Jewish leader. I looked for the trip for Jewish whatever-the-opposite-of-leaders is but couldn't find it, so I settled for this).

Bethlehem is about half an hour from Jerusalem, which was my first shock, ie just how close everything is. I could walk and certainly bike from my home to the main Bethlehem checkpoint. It is remarkable to stand in Beit Jala, a neighbourhood in Bethlehem, where you can see the 'back' of Gilo, a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem (built outside the Green Line, the cease fire line which was Israel's border until 1967 when it captured the West Bank, the Gaza strip and the Golan Heights). We visited a private school called Hope Flowers which is run basically by a single family which is committed to educating Palestinian children about non-violence and trying to foster some sense of mutual respect between Israelis and Palestinians.

Met a guy named Sami Awad. He is the nephew of Mubarak Awad who was deported from Israel for his non-violent leadership of opposition to the Israeli occupation in the first Intifada. It was interesting because Sami Awad said that seeing his uncle deported actually solidified his own commitment to non-violence rather than driving him away from it because he saw how intimidating nonviolence was to the occupation. Sami Awad showed us around a little, including the security barrier. Two other things he said that stood out to me were that he thought the Oslo peace accords were doomed to fail because they had been so top down, negotiated by politicians without really reading the feeling of people who were living with the reality. He also said that he had spent a week meditating at Auschwitz-Birkenhau. He said that contemplating the intensity of the evil there had lead him feel that the Palestinians -- instead of trying to understand Israel's security "addiction" -- had spent too much energy on placing themselves in the position of the "victims of the victims." I thought that was really insightful. Throughout the visit this was the only time I heard a Palestinian articulate an understanding of Israelis' and/or Jews' concerns for individual and communal physical, existential safety. As I remarked to one of the participants as we were walking through the lobby of the Bethlehem hotel, one of the big differences between that and, say, the Dan Panorama in Jerusalem or any other hotel in Israel, is that there is no guard at the entrance to the Bethlehem hotel.

We got to see the security barrier which cuts through Bethlehem. (See the map from b'tselem at the right: Green Line is pre-67 border. Red line = existing separation barrier. Red dotted =projected seperation barrier. The Blue ares are Jewish settlements and the brown are Palestinian areas) If I ever had any doubt that the thing was being done stupidly that visit eliminated it. Interestingly, a number of the Palestinian's we talked to said that they didn't have a problem with a security barrier... along the green line. In Bethlehem, you can see how dramatically the barrier encroaches on daily life and how far beyond the pre-67 border it reaches.

One of the weirdest things right near Rachel's tomb which is completely surrounded by the barrier was a spot where one lone house stands surrounded by the security barrier on three sides. Sami Awad said that the family was Catholic and had been able to get the church involved so the Israelis didn't want to the black eye of expropriating the house, so instead they just built the barrier around it on three sides. He said that the shutters on the top floor must remain closed at all times and the family has to get permission from the military commander in order to go out on their roof, lest they should fire on the wall, or the guard towers.

The barrier is also just a disaster from a purely political standpoint as it gives everybody a 9 meter high billboard on which to scrawl their discontent. Spray-painting on the wall has actually become a sort of pro-Palestine tourist attraction and most of the graffiti we saw near Rachel's tomb was in European languages, not Arabic. Surprisingly, while it was pretty strongly anti-occupation, none of what I saw was really anti-Israel. There was one spot where there was a giant "Ich bin ein berliner" and in smaller letters nearby somebody had written, "tear down this wall." Which in that context could only be an allusion to.... Ronald Reagan: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down..." I thought that was pretty funny, given that most of the people who were writing on the wall, if they were old enough to remember Reagan, were about as far from him politically as could possibly be.

Several prominent artists have done work on the wall. I got to be about as close to a Bansky as I am likely to get this year.

I stayed with a very nice middle class Palestinian Christian family who both desperately wanted to move out of the country (it reminded me of a host family I had on Kibbutz once upon a time -- "What's Canada like? Is it hard to get a visa?") and at the same time badly wanted to stay. They have a small apartment-building that was built together by four brothers, not far from Shepherd's field. It is funny how things can be so so old fashioned and so up-to-the-minute in Arab communities. Bethlehem is a pretty big city but you still see people riding donkeys, hear roosters crowing in people's houses. The whole living with your family thing too seems -- if not old fashioned -- at least very different from the way we do things in Canada or in Israel for that matter. The other guy who was staying with them asked, "How do you get along with your brothers?" I expected an answer like, "Sometimes its hard" or "Mostly okay but we fight about things from time to time," but our host just said "We get along well." It makes you realize how much of what you get out of something is determined by what you expect going in.
I'll write more tomorrow about the rest of the visit including Wadi Fukin but now I have to go to bed.

quick bird notes.

It is a beautiful evening and I am looking out the window as the boys toil on their art. What first drew my attention was what first I took to be a pair of alpine swifts (snunit har) . It turned out that they were these big parakeets or small parrots whose English name I forget but which are called drara. These birds are bright green but from below and at evening the colour is hard to see, but you can tell them apart from the swifts by their long trailing tails. You would think that being so conspicuous you would want to keep your voice down but the drara has a loud high short cry and I think that they were the birds that I heard gatherered in their hundreds on Yom Kippur evening. ...Not to be confused with the simpilarly named dror or sparrow. The word dror literaly means free and the dror got its name because of a discussion in the talumd about discussions over free birds, that is to say birds that are not domesticated. The most common I suppose and easily pointed to, was the dror bayit or house sparrow, which are everywhere here. What I once thought were magpies are crows. They aren't black crows but gray crows (orev afor) which I have never seen in Canada, and they are out in abundance. They fly in pairs and are actually very graceful and are sort of like a poor man's hawk. They like to play chasing games in their twos, games which seem kind and friendly and not nearly as agressive as the flirtation of say pigeons (if indeed it is flirtation). They seem to really like this time of day as do a lot of birds. I also saw a shrakrek (bee eater), the previously mentioned Middle eastern non-humming hummingbird. I learned an interesting shrakrek related fact. The word shrakrek is one of the few Talmudic names which modern hebrew has used for birds. What is strange about the usage is that Shrakrek is the word used by the talmud to translate and explain the biblical hebrew racham which is generally thought to be the egyptian vulture (nothing nearly so dramatic out this evening). Shrakrek means 'whistle' in Aramaic and part of the reason the talmud likes to call racham shrakrek is because there was a prophecy about the vulture perching on the ground and whistling as a harbinger of the coming of the messiah. But this makes for an interesting juxtaposition of the egyptian vulture which certainly must be one of the largest old-world birds with the bee-eater which is one of the smallest. The bee eater does indeed make a high pitched sort of whistling sound, as I can now attest. It is almost dark out so bird watching and blogging are done for the night and now it is time to go make dinner for the boys. Over and out. J

The Cleavage of Jerusalem, Praying for Jasham

Sorry it has been a while. Many of you have been asking for more chomping at the bit.
First of all I hope you all saw the fantastic piece in the Globe and Mail about how, since the election, a lot of American conservatives are considering seeking asylum in Canada. Soldiers who want to serve another tour of duty in Iraq, economists who still believe that de-regulating the financial sector is the best way to ensure long-term economic growth and executives from health insurance companies are snapping up property in Toronto and Calgary. Someone has even set up an apartment swap business so FSCL (formerly smug Canadian liberals) can go live in Chicago and unrepentant ex-Bear Sterns employees can move to Toronto.
Now for Jerusalem political coverage. There is a sign that has gone up around Jerusalem. It shows the Western Wall broken down the middle and urges people not to vote for front-runner Nir Barkat because he will divide Jerusalem. This is a funny claim since Barkat has probably the most right-wing bona fides of anyone in the race, while people who are putting up these signs, presumably the ultra orthodox, don't usually serve in the army. Certainly his chief rival on the right, Meir Porush, wasn't in the paratroopers. But what really struck me about this ad is that Tsipi Livni, the former prime minister designate (how's that for a provisional sounding title) who is with Barkat on the poster, presumably for extra scariness, has had her exposed clavicle photoshopped. Up close you can see that the FPMD -- who the Syrian press lauded for her good looks and style -- has had a tee-shirt airbrushed in under her open neck blouse. Unpacked: the holy people who made this poster accusing Livni of planning to destroy Judaism's most treasured religious and historic site, are carefully safeguarding her modesty (and not to expose the people of Jerusalem to the provocative top three inches of her chest). Hashem yishmor (God protect us) when the general elections roll around.
We went to the Kinneret last weekend. We drove derech yericho, ie. up the Jordan valley, ie. through the west bank, ie occupied Palestine ie. Judea ie whatever. I wasn't thrilled about this when we were planning it not because I was worried about safety so much since there are very few big Palestinian towns there and the road is well travelled. I just don't like the idea of gong somewhere where most of the people who live there don't want you there. The drive was unbelievably beautiful though first down through the Judean desert side of Jerusalem. The wadis have small bedouin (my friend David says they are displaced bedouin and I defer to his knowledge) encampments. You drive past the sea level mark down to the dead sea, the lowest point above-ground on earth and switch off highway 1 to highway 90. There Lev puked for the first time, right at the interchange, at the lowest point on earth (or close to it anyway) all over the back seat of the rental car. It turned out he had a stomach bug and he threw up a number of times on the trip -- often in some very picturesque spots -- but otherwise seemed perfectly content (as you can see). We cleaned up and drove on. The whole Jordan valley was very beautiful. The extent of the settlement there is pretty amazing and you wonder how on earth they are going to get all those people out of there when they finally do give that land to Palestinians. There are graffitis in Hebrew on old buildings saying "bring the sinners of Oslo to justice." I read somewhere once that the landscape of Israel was what inspired people to think of God and you can sort of understand that when you drive on those two roads. Giant, forbidding mountains soaring clouds, oases, powerful stuff. Then out the checkpoint through Bet Shaan and off to the kinneret. We stayed at the kibbutz haon guest village in a little shack right on what was once the beach though now because of low rainfall and poor water management you have to walk out several hundred feet to get to the water. I was molested by a startled fish who flapped between my legs, saw turtles and a "parpur" kingfisher (the black and white one, not a "shaldag," interesting that in English there are three native birds all called kingfisher but in latin and Hebrew the names are different) diving for his lunch and what I think was a baz adom (one of the runners up for Israel's national bird) a lesser kestrel. Also storks and herons (hasida). The boys swam and played with Noa. Friday night, a Russian family gave me a l'chaim of high octane slivovitz so I went to prayer services (in the bomb shelter) half in the bag. I got to hear a Yemenite style torah reading of the story of Noah. It was really interesting. Where we would say 'geshem' for rain, the yemenites read 'jasham'. Aside from the first week of Heshvan, the month of floods, when we nearly got swept away, Jerusalem has been dry. Its hard to pray for rain when the weather is nice but after seeing the kinneret, Israel's main fresh water source, so low, I will re-dedicate myself as well as using the "little flush".

Charlie and the Great Glass Election Campaign

Sorry I have been absent for a bit. The weather has changed. Perhaps, lizard-like, the cool is slowing me down. I understand it snowed in Montreal a week or so ago. I have to wear long pants now. (When I told Rob that he threatened to ship me a container load of snow come January.) Today it was downright chilly with on again off again rain.
I was also held up because I was trying to make something silly about the Jerusalem municipal elections (sillier than the elections themselves), but it turns out that Jerusalemite.net has done most of the work for me. They have a good piece on it including a lot of the jokes I had intended to make about the various campaign signs to which all I can add is that Benjamin Netanyahu wins the award for sourest punim in the campaign. Despite the fact that he is not running for anything, since Likud is running a slate of candidates for municipal council (with the slogan "likud will protect jerusalem") his face is up everywhere including at the intersection of derech hevron and ein gedi where I have to cross each morning and he looks down at me as if he had caught me personally planning a terrorist act or at least doing something that smells bad. If indeed there are general elections here I may have to go into hiding.
I finished Iris Leal a few weeks ago for those who are keeping track. I can't say I recommend it though it did retain its principal appeal from start to finish which was that it was short. I am now reading Dudu Busi as recommened by my friend at Jaffa Books and quite liking it. I occasionally read a whole story without the aid of a dictionary. In the first one actually, the only vocabulary I had trouble with was tsingle ("joint") and something that I thought said muntsies ("munchies") which gives you some idea of what the general tone of the book is.
Benjamin, Ariela and I are reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in Hebrew also which is good fun. Roald Dahl's books are all available in Hebrew and English at the local kids library which strikes me as a little weird since the guy was a raving anti-Semite. Maybe it is some sort of reparations thing. You have to hand it to him though he could sure write and it translates well. I was saddened though to see though that Veruca Salt -- one of the great literary names of all times -- is called "Rika Paprika" in the Hebrew translation. I am assuming it was changed so as not to give the Umpalumpahs too much trouble making up a rhyme about her as the squirrels drop her down the hole for bad nuts.

Grand Canyon in Tel Aviv

I've been on a bit of a blogging break during Sukkot, but now the Jewish holiday bonanza is over for a while and I am getting back on the horse. We went to Tel Aviv over the break. It was fun, very different from Jerusalem. We had to scramble to find kosher restaurants. We went to the beach and then the next day we went to nachalat binyamin where there is a big arts and crafts fair which was packed with people. Based on my observations, I think there are probably modesty patrols at work in Tel Aviv: they run around and if they catch women dressed too modestly they make them take off some clothes. (I notice expansive cleavage solely in my function as blogger and recorder of Israeli cultural norms). It was particularly striking because a day or two before in Jerusalem it had rained and the temperature had dropped to like 15 degrees or something horrifiyingly cold like that. I saw one person, an ethopian guy wearing a big sweater and a scarf. Anyway, we rode the bus back from TA with the boys sitting in the aisle, Israeli style. Hoshanah rabba, the last day of sukkot I walked to the kotel. I walked outside the old city to the dung gate which takes you past silwan which is an arab part of east jerusalem . The road gives you a great view. There is a lot of talk in the Jerusalem mayoral election (nov 11 More to follow about crazy Jerusalem politics) about dividing the city. It is funny because the left generally supports the idea of dividing the city while the right opposes it. Generally I am pretty far to the left, and if dividing Jerusalem helps people get to a peaceful solution I am all for it I guess, but I find the idea weirdly counter-intuitive, ie. that the way to help people live together better is to put a wall or barrier between them. It is hard to imagine wanting to further de-integrate the city, but what do I know. When you look at Silwan and Abu Tor from the Old City it is pretty hard to imagine how dividing the city would work practically, since the city is a patchwork. I wished the Arab people I saw "subach al hir", good morning, one of my few arabic phrases and one lady who was taking out the garbage right next to the old city said subach al hir and chag sameach (hebrew for "happy holiday".)
The praying was crazy, hot and chaotic with the constant threat of getting poked in the eye with a palm branch. I got down there around 9:15 am. Started out at a Sephardi service which looked like it might well take until 3 in the afternoon, bailed. Tried to pray on my own but after getting madly jostled for a while joined in with some chasidim. couldn't follow what they were up to. There was an ethiopian guy wearing the traditional turban and a sipowitz short sleeved shirt and tie combo (impossible in the blazing heat but not as impossible as the long black kapotes and FUR shreimels the haredi guys were wearing). He was looking for a lulav and etrog to shake so I shared mine (lulav and etrog = the bunch of four plant species that is waved around on the holiday... and if you are asking yourself Why? or Wa-hun? then you are at about the same point I was). It was gonzo but kind of fun in retrospect.

I'd like to give a big shout out to my gis and devoted reader Avidan who, a propos of my recent postings about birds, drew my attention to an article about the Nesher/Eagle/Griffon Vulture on a weird but intriguing site called Zoo Torah by Rabbi Nosson Slifkin. There is a long and interesting discussion there about the exact identity of the biblical Nesher which includes the truly alarming detail from the Talmud; the Nesher's gizzards cannot be peeled. And here I had been trying to peel Nesher gizzards all this time and just thinking I was doing it wrong, using the wrong fork or failing to chill them first... But no you can't do it, so forget it. Whip that little datum out at your next cocktail party!
KEEP THE COMMENTS COMING.

Neil Young performs at the Begin Centre

I HAVE CHAGED THE SETTINGS SO IT SHOULD BE EASIER TO LEAVE A COMMENT NOW.
We went to a Bat Mitzvah at the Begin Centre last night. I was worried that Habonim (the socialist zionist youth movement I grew up in and die-hard opponents of of the right-wing Begin) would call up asking for my membership back. Whatever you think of Begin though, the guy had some generous friends. The centre is beautiful and built on an amazing piece of property looking across Derech Hevron at the old city. The Bat Mitzvah was out on the terrace in the sukkah. There had been a march to the old city earlier in the day and there were tons of people walking and driving along derech hevron. I saw one haredi guy roller-blading graceful curves down the sidewalk southwards. The moon rose at around 5:00 (we're already on daylight savings here) and it was a huge, orange harvest moon. It rose just to the north of the old city off to the right of the tower of the Dormition abbey. Very beautiful.
I once read or heard that harvest moons are really caused by the harvest, that is, the particulate matter in the air from all the agricultural activity -- rural smog -- causes the distortion. That's why the effect is only noticeable when the moon is down by the horizon. I don't know if that's true but sure enough as the moon rose it went back to being a normal-sized moon-coloured moon.
Earlier in the day we went to the museum of Islamic art with the boys. They had cool art workshops for kids (the boys both chose to make swords, go figger). The place is a little weird though. None of the staff are arab, and the little play they had for kids -- I was expecting some piece of arab folklore -- was all about King David and how he founded Jerusalem.
On a similar note, a little piece of conversation I overheard in one sukkah I went to: There were pretty canvas panels with pictures of Jerusalem in the time of the Second Temple. A non-religious Israeli who was joining the group came in and looked at the panels and said "Oh how nice; Jerusalem but with all the mosques taken out. It looks beautiful." The guy mistook the past (no mosques in the time of the second temple, which pre-dates islam) for a creepy fantasy -- and liked it. What exactly happens to the thirty thousand muslims who live in the old city today when you erase the mosques? I wondered. There is probably a great doctoral dissertation to be written on Jewish representations of Jerusalem that incorporate and at the same time obscure the Muslim or Christian visual elements of the city.
We are off to Tel Aviv today.

Yom Kippur and beyond

We brought Lev to synagogue on the night of Yom Kippur. He looked around and then he said "Where's God?" Obviously we had overhyped it a little. It was fine though, he got to play with his buddies, basically as good.

Yom Kippur is a blast for kids here. There parents are too wiped out to discipline them and we certainly plied ours with candy to keep them happy. Hardly anybody drives, there are no buses, no taxis, so kids go out on their bikes and scooters and ride around in the middle of what are normally the craziest streets. It feels great. The air is cleaner and by morning Iwas wondering why any civilized place allows cars in the first place. You can hear birds and praying and singing and chatting and of course you can walk without worrying about getting mowed down, mostly. I saw an Arab kid, out biking with his dad and brothers yelling in Hebrew at somebody who was driving down Derech Hevron street.

The calm almost entirely car free streets come at a cost. I saw a lot of police and border patrol cars out and I wasn't sure why. They never seem to enforce traffic rules, and anyway you are allowed to drive even if few people do but I think it was probably because of the politics of driving. Traffic is always a flash point in Israel/Palestine though. The first intifada was sparked by a traffic accident. Jewish Israelis living in the West Bank and Gaza regularly had their cars stoned and now settlers have begun to do the same thing to Palestinians. License plates were different for the different communities and even though that is no longer the case, the makes of cars are different, with israelis driving subarus and palestinians driving peugots. Non-religious Jews driving in ultra-orthodox neighbourhoods on the sabbath have had their cars stoned as well by holy rollers who think that Judaism commands them to try to kill their fellow Jew rather than see him/her transgress. Of course a few weeks ago an Arab from East Jerusalem plowed his car into a crowd of soldiers right downtown.
It can be hard to distinguish between bad driving and politics. I saw a car whip through the intersection near our house on Yom Kippur nearly running down a bunch of people on their way back from synagogue. Maybe the guy was just a jerk (drivers in this part of the world, regardless of race religion and nationality are joined in a rainbow coalition of bad driving). Maybe he was trying to scare the people walking or maybe he was scared to slow down for fear of getting screamed at, stoned or worse.
Aside from these little frictions, Jerusalem didn't have any political car wrecks. But in Acco, a generally tolerant city with a large Arab-Israeli population, and not particulalry well known for the religious fervour of its Jewish inhabitants an Arab guy, drunk according to the newspapers, went driving around a Jewish neighbourhood blaring music the evening of Yom Kippur. People threw rocks and bottles at his car. He was admitted to hospital along with a passenger. By the time the story reached the city's arab population, they believed that Jews had been out hunting down arabs who were driving and had killed some people. Arab marchers went through the streets yelling "death to the Jews" and smashing shop windows, Jews counter marched, counter yelled death to arabs and counter smashed. Cops tear gassed and water cannoned (and got bottles and rocks thrown at THEM, for good measure). Members of Kenesset, arab and Jewish called the (other side's) riots "pogroms".
The story is remarkable for the number of places where some common sense and goodwill could have made things better.
Next week's co-exisitence celebrations in Acco have been called off (sadly that's no joke.)

In other, happier news I was pleased to find that an old friend had a similar interest to me. I have been learning about birds in Israel (as I mentioned in a previous post) and in particular I am curious about the Hebrew names of birds. The bible names 36 birds and later rabbinic writing names another 15. The real trick has always been to take a name like

נֶּשֶׁר (nesher. Often mentioned in the bible, sometimes translated as eagle or eagle-vulture or great vulture) and then point to a real bird and say, that's a nesher. The way we group birds is different today than it was two thousand years ago, what we look at when we look at a bird is different than what the authors of Jewish legal documents from 6th or 7th century CE or religious poets from the 9th century BCE. Of course, this isn't just a problem of birds but with birds you have a limited number of variables. Anyway, I find it intriguing how people who were interested in modern science and the revivial of ancient hebrew worked these things out. So I was trying to find out where the modern names of birds come from, who was the modern Adam who said that "duchifat" will be Upupa epops aka the Eurasian hoopoe (Israel's recently elected national bird that is until kenneset coalition negotiations or financial scandal force him out)?

It turns out that the first person to write a modern Hebrew bird lexicon was Mendele Mocher Seforim (the pen name of the 19th century writer Jacob Abromovitch, author of Fishke the Lame and the travels of Benjamin III etc.). I think of him fondly because I studied some of his writing in college. I particularly liked the fact that he went back and forth between Hebrew and Yiddish translating and re-translating his own writing which causes all sorts of trouble for scholars trying to disentangle the earliest editions of his works. He was both a Hebraist and yiddishist, a maskil (an enlightened Jew) who made fun of maskilim and a traditionalist who saw the misdeeds done in the name of piety. I often walk past the street named after him when I take Lev to the Y. Now I will have another pleasant association to add to the list.
Now I have to get my hands on a copy of his Toledot HaTevah.

Hummingbirds Roasted in Olive Oil

On friday Lev and I walked back from the Y after daycare. It was the last day of Eid al-fitr (apologies for the spelling). There were Arab families out having pic-nics in Gan haPamon by the lion fountain. One guy was up a ladder picking olives. Lev and I stopped and watched for a bit. After a while I asked him if he would mind if Lev helped pick up olives and put them in the bucket. He and his family live in Bet Safafa , he said (Bet Safafa is an Arab town adjacent to Jerusalem or I guess better to say an Arab neighbourhood) and every year he comes and picks at that spot. I saw he had a huge bag already and I asked him how long it had taken to pick. He said an hour. I was amazed. He said he pickeles a bunch and grinds the rest for oil and is set for the year, then he sells whatever he has left over. Anyway, we hung out with him and his kids. They gave me coffee and Lev some water and cookies and bamba and would happily have served us lunch but we were off to meet Ariela and Benjy.
Someone told me that he thought that often the olive trees on public land were either on land originally belonging to a particular Arab family who retained the right to harvest those trees or else were given the right in exchange for trees on land which was expropriated, so this might have been a family holding in the middle of Jerusalem. I don't know if this is true. If anybody can enlighten me please do. It makes sense, though. Olive trees take many, many years to bear fruit and are very long lived so you can see places all around Jerusalem where roads and houses have been built around old trees. It is kind of neat to see people involved in an urban harvest and nice to see that the olives don't go to waste.

Did you know that hummingbirds are a New World species of bird? I learned this and other bird facts at the Jerusalem Bird Observatory today. If that is the case, then I am not sure but I think we kosher folk could chow down on hummingbird. How many would you have to eat in order to get a good meal? I am a vegetarian, what do I know? The fact is though that (and again check with your local rabbi before going crazy on the hummingbirds) birds which weren't known in the time of the Bible and hence weren't forbidden along with the non-kosher birds (storks, cranes, eagles, ospreys etc.) are generally regarded as kosher (ie. the beloved turkey). Still, kosher slaughtering of a hummingbird could prove difficult.
But the hummingbirds are there in the new world and I am here in the old world. I can however enjoy he JBO. It is a blast. It is very weird because it is directly adjacent to the Kenesset, Israel's parliament. I mean right next door. You have the huge and intimidating fence with the guys schlepping m-16s and the manicured lawns and you go around the corner and all of a sudden you are in the middle of a little patch of terraced wilderness which is four dunams (whatever a dunam is). Then past the observatory is the Givat Ram cemetary. The sounds of the city and its epic building boom are there in the background but muted by the fir trees. You can poke around at the observatory until Amir or Ellen, the two professional staff people or one of the volunteers, spot you and say hi. Then they take you around and talk about their passion, the birds of Israel.
If you are with Amir he will have his dog with him. If it seems weird to have a dog in a bird-watching station consider that Jerusalem is a city with a serious cat issue. People leave food out for strays which is weird because the cats seem to be doing fine eating from the garbage cans which are usually open. Anyway hundreds of cats on every block. If they knew there was a spot where people were luring birds with sweetened water and suet, they would probably set out plates and silverware. I enjoyed watching his dog -- who preferred not to give his name -- chasing a cat up a tree. Amir was going around taking down the "mist" netting they use to catch birds for ringing when I was visiting but I only got to see one little bird which he said was a nightingale and was already ringed get released.
I didn't get to see the hoopoe or duchifat which is Israel's recently elected national bird. Maybe I'll have better luck next time.

The New Year is Here! A Year Soft and Hairy.

Rosh Hashanah is now over and the New Year begins in earnest. We went to Yedidyah in Jerusalem for services. It is a very warm place and the services were lovely. I heard the longest tekiah gedolah (the biggest of the horn blasts) I have ever heard at the end of davening this morning. But even more moving was the walk to synagogue the first night. The sky was lovely without a single cloud and that deep blue of evening when it is getting toward night, with rose and peach closer to the horizon. The streets were full of people walking to synagogue or to family or friends. There were little traffic jams of people driving to dinner with family, too. Everyone had one of the two looks, either the look of being ready, having scrubbed and cleaned and cooked and dressed and being done and now ready to just begin time at synagogue praying or with family eating or first synagogue then off somewhere to eat. Or else they had the "we're almost there" look, of being on that last important errand, bringing home the drycleaning, picking up flowers for the table, or just getting to where ever they were going, knowing that soon they would be safely immersed in holiday time where the demands are less, and the company is good and you can breathe and reflect and drink a glass of wine. And of course nobody is fed up with the holiday yet, its new and fresh like the shirts and dresses. I wanted to hug everyone I saw. I had a giant silly smile on my face and wished many people shanah tova, a good year, and was greeted in return. This is a little odd in Jerusalem where people are very warm -- once they know you for five minutes they will lend you teh keys to their car, but they don;t generally smile at strangers on the street, I find, but the eveningw as so nice with the warm breeze and the kids all dressed in their nice outfits or maybe it was just because I looked so foolishly wrapped up in it all, that even the hardest nuts wished me a shanah tova in return, and I have the feeling that even if I had hugged them, I wouldn't have gotten punched. Even the birds were mobbing together, screeching at one another in a good natured way and then flitting off to another bush or tree where they would regroup and screech again. It reminded me of the piece of the prayers for rosh hashanah which after all is not just the new year but the birthday of all of creration that says that all the creatures will come together as one group to pray together.
In a similar vein, while we were walking home with the boys we saw an old man being pushed in a wheelchair by a young Asian man. The man in the wheelchair was looking at us so I wished him Shanah tovah. He didn't say anything, the young guy pushing him along smiled and said "Shanah Tova" to us. Everybody seemed to be in a nice and generous mood.
We walked this afternoon to a funny little pedestrian through way in our neighbourhood. It is a set of stairways that run for three or four blocks and have small green spaces on either side of the stairs. The boys played for a bit and I walked a little higher up to explore and came running back down almost immediately to tell the boys to come with me. I didn't tell them what I had found but just that there was something they would like but they had to find it themselves. They looked and then said with unbelief and delight, "A Tree House!" There at the top of the hill in this little pocket park, some industrious group of kids had banged together a tree house out of shipping pallettes and broken shelves in an olive tree which might have been grown just for that purpose. As the sun began to move towards the horizon, the boys happily clambered around, rolling accumulated olives out through holes in the floor thump, thumpitty, thump from a dwelling made for the cost of a few nails but with a million dollar view.
Finally, and on a slightly different track, tonight when I was putting Lev to bed he told me that he would only touch things that he liked, things that were soft or maybe hairy, but that he would not touch plants that were "pricky like cactuses. Or," he added after thinking for but a second, "I won't touch fire or lightning." I don't think it was explicitly part of the New Year's thing but maybe he was tuning in to the season on some level. Goals for the new year etc. Anyway, May you all be blessed with a year of touching only soft or perhaps hairy things and no pricky cactuses or fire or lightning. Amen.

Quill, Bee Eater and Acorn Art

We went to the Jerusalem Botanical Garden today. It is a little bit of the poor cousin to the Zoo. It has a similar layout, being stretched out in the bed of a wadi but it seems to have had a harder time attracting donors. Rhinos are a sexier sell than succulents. Apparently, everybody wants their name on an elephant (or will settle for a tapir) but you didn't see a lot of signs saying "the Peter and Florence Rosenblatt Walnut Tree." The place looked frizzled and neglected. There were a lot of birds and apparently nearby is the Jerusalem Bird Observatory station. I saw a pair of bee-eaters which are very pretty little birds (the males, the females are pretty plain Jane). They look like hummingbirds. I even saw one grab a bug. We also saw jays of some description and maybe a hoopoe, Israel's recently elected national bird (didn't get a good look). Benjamin found a porcupine quill which is pretty cool. Ariela drew faces on acorns. I was on the lookout for a cinnamon tree. There is a cinnamon tree in a garden in Jerusalem in this book we read to Benjy and I am longing to see one, but if the JBG has one I didn't find it. I did see a walnut and pistachio (neither are bearing fruit right now).
And I know I promised I was done, but I saw it. The BAD PLANT, the Colossal Scotch Hogbroom.
Here is a picture of me with the final thing ready to spray evil poison and the horribly phallic shoot at the left. I forgot my protective eyewear at home so I couldn't pull it up. It turns out it is the flower of an agave (those big aloe-y looking things). I don't know if it shoots toxic acid but I did get a nasty poke from the agaves themselves.
Benjy has been singing Tree Hugger by Antsy Pants from the Juno soundtrack ("In the sea there was a fish, a fish that had a secret wish..."). I think we may have to record it. I have visions of translating it into Hebrew, maybe getting somebody to do it into Arabic and then singing it with lots of kids. Doves will fly over head. Peace will break out all over.
Tonight is Rosh Hashanah. I feel like I should be cooking and cleaning like a crazy person but we are invited out for every meal! Booyakasha! Have a happy 5769 everybody (to paraphraze Prince we're gonna party like it's Tishsat!!!).

The Burning Bush: Final Chapter

From my mother re: the very bad plant and I promise this will be the last of my meanderings about the evil plant.

"Your imagination/memory mixed two stories of botanical menace. Now
that I think about it, you were exposed to a lot of herbicidal
depravity in your youth Here in the Pacific Northwest we struggle
with controlling both hogweed and scotch broom. See
http://www.efn.org/~ipmpa/Noxbroom.html for the scotch broom
shooting it's seed . I did spend a quiet August afternoon by the
Fraser in the middle of an exploding the broom seed patch.
Impressive."

So clearly what we are dealing with here in the Holy Land is Titanic Hogbroom, the evil step-sister or primal ancestor or the mother of all exploding, poisonous plants.

In other news, I survived my first experience driving in Israel. More Israelis have been killed in traffic accidents than in war or terrorist attacks. We rented a car and drove to Netanya. It was great and the boys had to be surgically removed from the water at the end of each day. It was bath water temperature, and really clear, not like Canadian beaches where you hear the yelps of flash frozen bathers like seagulls. Benjy's Hebrew will soon outstrip mine. Lev is evenhandedly resistant to Arabic and Hebrew, though he knows the word for apple in Hebrew.

Finally, as Rosh Hashanah is approaching and for those of you who enjoy Magic: the Gathering a guy named Alex has put together some mock cards on a biblical theme. They are very good. Over and out.

Evil Plant Identified. We Ask "Is Phil Collins Responsible?!"

From Amy re: the evil plants "I am trying to figure out how to post on the blog but haven't got
there yet. Meanwhile ...it's hogweed
also known as heracleum mantegazzianum.

From wikipedia
In 1971, the rock band Genesis included a song entitled "The Return
of the Giant Hogweed" on their album Nursery Cryme, a tale of
botanical menace and herbicidal depravity.

Sounds like your kind of thing!!!"

Thanks so much and no problem about the posting. The Deep Bath is full service operation.

Here's a picture that accompanies this warning from the Massachusetts Poisonous Plants Media Outreach & Education Page

"Hogweed is a public health hazard. Its clear, watery sap has toxins that cause photo-dermatitis. Skin contact followed by exposure to sunlight produces painful, burning blisters that may develop into purplish or blackened scars. Contact with the eyes can cause temporary or permanent blindness." (my emphasis)

Holy smokes! Did I say it was an evil plant?! Somebody tell that man to get away from that thing! It doesn't say anything on the Mass. Evil Plants Department page about it exploding which, while not technically about poison, you would think "it explodes" is important information for people going out to pull this stuff up. But, Mother, I seem to remember you telling me about them exploding. Am I imagining that?

Anyway I am not sure that the plants I saw pointing menacingly at the Old City are heracleum mantegazzianum. They sure look similar but the ones in Jerusalem are way gianter. The ones I saw are like Monster Ultra Giant Hogweed (recorded by Yes, on their album Menacing Sprouts). But the Mass. Poison Plant People do say that its origins are in CENTRAL ASIA (cue the scary music).

What Dafuk?!

Sorry I haven't posted as much as I might have the last little while. I have been playing Battalion: Nemesis a little obsessively in the evenings when I usually blog. The boys are doing well in school. Benjy is taking a lot of extra pull-out Hebrew classes which makes his days less boring and his Hebrew is flying ahead by leaps and bounds.

I had a sort of weird experience the other day which I think is indicative of a frightening condition of my brain. I have lived with this oddity most of life but got such a stark example of it that it came into focus as never before. To wit, I think my imagination overpowers my other brain functions sometimes to the point that it actually makes me dumber. I hear people talk about the pliability of memory, like in witnesses to crime for example and I always think “Yeah its true. Other people do have such terrible memories.”

Ariela and I have been watching an Israeli TV show – Ad Hahatunah (Until the Wedding) -- on the computer. The excuse is that we are practising our Hebrew, though any non-Hebrew speakers out there, I'm sure you can tune in and get about 75% from context and the good looking Israeli people in their ridiculously nice homes will carry the other 25% for you. Anyway, we came across a good piece of Israeli slang the other night when the traitorous, ethereal Ayah, says to loyal and dogged Ran “ha-im atah dafuk?!” Dafuk basically means stupid so the previous example might mean “What are you? Stupid?” (It comes from the root meaning 'knock' or 'bang' so it might be translated, “Were you banged on the head as a child?!” It is especially fun for English speakers because it sounds like something Joe Pesci might say. “Da-fuk? What d'ya t'ink? You t'ink I'm da-fuk?! Fugettaboutit.”)

I felt good that I recognized the word. I decided later to look it up because I wanted to know where it came from. I was surprised to see that it was not dafuk as I had always thought but it was actually dafuch. Not a big difference but enough that it surprised me. Shortly afterwards, I mentioned this to a Hebrew speaker who said categorically that it was dafuk. But I politely stuck to my guns. After all, I had just looked it up not two days before. I had even been surprised because it was contrary to what I expected to find in the dictionary. I was convinced – I mean 100% certain, like “Yeah-That's-The-Guy-I-Saw-Him-Pull-The-Trigger” certain -- and that this Hebrew speaker was wrong. Later I went to the dictionary to check and somebody had changed the letters in the dictionary back so that now it said DAFUK!!! The point is that either there are malicious gnomes that screw around with my Hebrew-English dictionary just to make learning the language harder (a possibility I haven't ruled out) or my imagination renders the rest of my brain – the parts that control memory, good judgment, probably fine motor control as well -- it renders them, well, dafuk.

Plants attack the Holy City and Tolerant Cemetery

This is a little assignment for my mother, a further consideration of the flora of Jerusalem in addition to being a standard blog entry. (She has been a good resource, having sent me the sending me the link for the Jerusalem Botanical Garden) As I was walking through the park on the way to Lev's daycare today, we saw what Lev calls the alien plants which is a very good description of them since they look like something you'd see on Mars. These are two giant (probably 5 – 6 meters or fifteen to twenty feet?) high things that look sort of like giant caraway pants, the central stalk probably six or eight inches in diameter, with a thin upreaching crown. They are in the amidst of aloes that are themselves as tall as my head. Now – and this is where you come in, AMY -- these giant alien plants remind me of the brief glimpse I had of some weeds I saw at your co-op, which if I am not mistaken you told me are highly invasive, EXPLODE when you try to cut them and spew some kind of CORROSIVE ACID? Am I crazy? Do I remember aright? I am deeply concerned. Of course in Israel/Palestine one is always worried that the end of the world will come at the end of a warhead. People are probably not sufficiently attuned to the possibility that plants may be working to destroy us. I am not kidding when I say that these things -- which dwarf the ones I saw in Vancouver -- are aimed right at the heart of the Old City. I will try to get a picture, but mother I would be grateful if you would corroborate about those weird plants you guys had out by the rail-road tracks.

And in other strange Jerusalem news I walked through the Mamilla cemetery yesterday. Of course, I didn't know it was the Mamilla cemetery because there is no way to figure that out from anything so pedestrian as a sign. It's not really indicated on our maps of the city either. And you sort of can't figure out that its a cemetery either unless you really poke around. It is part garbage can, with trash swirling everywhere and part archaeological ruin. If you really take a look and stroll between the high weeds then you start to see that the old stones vaguely look like grave markers. Almost none have inscriptions that I could spot. There is one pretty mausoleum that has stood up to time.

Mamilla was a mixed Arab and Jewish neighbourhood until independence and the war when it was largely abandoned by both groups and shelled heavily, standing as it did on the border between the two halves of the city. The whole area lay largely underdeveloped, poor and run down after that. Now it is one of the hottest sights for development in the real estate hungry city. I think I read that an apprtment in Mamilla sold for 9 million dollars recently.

One of the last undeveloped spots is the old Muslim cemetery which I had stumbled on. Part of it was excavated in 1964 to build Independence Park and at that time there was some kind of permission given by Muslim religious authorities for development and even back in the Mandate period it seems that the Mufti of Jerusalem had said the cemetery had lost its sanctity although all of this is of course in dispute now. Why in dispute? Because the Simon Weisenthal foundation was given the green light by the city to develop on part of the remaining un-excavated land to build a Frank Gehry-designed Museum of Tolerance there. The museum plan is on hold while everybody has a kick at the can about the cemetery's status as Muslim holy site and/or area of archaeological significance. While the museum has stuck to its guns, mustering all sorts of arguments why it is okay for them to build there, I am guessing that somebody at Tolerance HQ was taken out back and given a good spanking, if not for the bad PR, at least for the millions and millions of dollars they have lost waiting for the whole thing to go through.

Meanwhile the cemetery is a weed-farm in the middle of the city. It is, according to one web site, a big spot for gay men to cruise. The waaqf which is responsible for Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem says that it is not allowed to operate in Western Jerusalem so they can't do anything to care for it. I have to say I kind of like it the way it is, a complete derelict surprise in the middle of the busy high-rising city, though I suppose leaving it as it is would satisfy nobody, not land hungry developers, not curious archeologists, not angry Palestinian protesters. No one except me.

The Art of Shakshukah

I went to Tmol Shilshom today, a Jerusalem cafe and literary hangout. They have a picture on the wall of Yehudah Amichai reading, books along the walls, beautiful old tables. I hadn't eaten anything so I ordered shakshukah, pached eggs in tomato sauce, with eggplant and goatcheese, spicy, for breakfast. The waitress put a paper placemat down on the table and I looked at it and laughed. It had a short story on it by Etgar Keret. It said that it was written specially for Tmol Shilshom. I love Etgar Keret, having read a collection in English called the Nimrod Flipout, a gift from my gis, Menachem. It was the quest for Etgar Keret that had lead to my conversation with opinionated owner of Jordan Books (another post). Anyway, Keret's stories are especially suited for placemats mostly because they are so short, microfiction they are sometimes called. My shakshouka came when I was about a third of the way through the story (a story about, it turns out, a man named Etgar and his mother who owns a restaurant). I told the waitress that I was sorry to put shakshukah on literature, and she promised me that I could have another placemat when I was done. The shakshoukah was fantastic but of course it is messy and it got all over Etgar Keret's story.
I took the opportunity to tell the waitress, in my broken Hebrew, the story that I heard Etgar Keret tell about the experience of writing his first story. He wrote it during his army service in a bunker under the ground when he was all alone for forty eight hours with nothing to do but sit at a computer. When he emerged he had leave so he took the story and went to his brother's appartment. It was six in the morning so his brother was just waking up and maybe wasn;t too thrilled to see Etgar, but he agreed to come down and meet him, because he needed to walk his dog. Etgar showed his brother the story. His brother read it and said. "Hey, Etgar, this is really quite good. Do you have another copy."
"Yeah" said Etgar.
"Great," said his brother who leaned over and picked up a smoking dog turd with the story and threw it in the garbage.
"So you see," I told the waitress, "I feel bad about messing up his art."
"But he knew exactly what it was for when he wrote it," she said.
Good point.

Here's the author pic from the menu.
Can't find an artist credit.

Jerusalem: City of Peace

I like working in the apartment. Its cheaper than buying a coffee out and right now with the heat still up there its nice not to have to schlep a laptop around. The apartment is cool and peaceful. Until 10:00. Then, everyday, the daycare across the alley has, as a regular programmed activity, Screaming in the Yard for about an hour or an hour and a half. This is what I hear. Mind you I am sure the daycare teachers need to get outside or they would go crazy. The teachers sound very patient. I know after just an hour of it my nerves are shredded.

Fauna and a Flower Question

A week or so ago I mentioned the various flowers that were blooming around our part of Jerusalem. I really like this one (photo courtesy of Ariela) but don't know it's name. PLEASE HELP.
Now for the wild fauna rundown; ferule cats which look very hard and thoughtful, doves and magpies (I think, big crow-like critters with white and grey and black) lizards -- big and small -- a fat spider on a stone wall that looked like a diminutive tarantula which freaked out Ariela (and me if we are being honest). The Eisenberg girls found a dead snake in the park which they showed me on a stick and then returned to its natural habitat. They promised to keep me updated on its progress. There are many little dogs and a few big shaggy ones that are suffering in the heat, as am I. And so off to the deep bath. J

Kosher Bra and books.

Ariela went shopping for a bra on Yafo street. She said she found little bra shop where "all the ladies were four x four and 70 years old." The store had a teudat kashrut (kosher certification) posted on the wall. Anyway. She bought a bra, which she says does everything you want a bra to do, though it is, as you would expect workman-like. But it is kosher which is the important thing.
In other news, I found a nice bookstore while wandering the other day. What I liked about it is that the owner tells customers what they should buy. I came in and asked for Etgar Keret. He said he didn't have any, but what I really should be reading was A.B. Yehoshua's short stories. I told him what I liked about Etgar Keret was that his stories were so short. He got that. I said I also liked that they were funny. That lead to a discussion about how in Israel what's funny is actually sad and how Noel Coward doesn't work in Israel, because nobody wants bedroom farce, here, they want sad, uncomfortable comedy. At that point, a young Israeli guy came in and asked for the "Curious incident of the dog at midnight". The owner got it for him, he looked it over and said he didn't think it was for him. "Recommend me something," said the guy, which, as somebody who once worked in a bookstore, I can tell you is a pretty tricky proposition. "What did you read and like?" asked the owner which is not a bad way to get some information but when the guy told him what he had read and liked the bookstore owner told him "You should stop reading that stuff. Here try this," and handed him Yesh Yaladim Zigzag (Sideways Kids? sorry not sure the English title) by David Grossman. "Nah," said the young guy. The bookstore owner tried a few more, but nothing doing. "Funny," I said. "I'm from abroad and I want Israeli writers. He's from Israel, he wants foreign writers."
"That's because he doesn't think an Israeli can write about life," said the store keeper. "That's right," said the young Israel guy. I think he might have ended up with something by ג'ון גרישם (that's the author of the Pelican Brief et. al.). In the end, I bought "In the Alleys" by Dudu Busi on the recommendation of my friend, the store owner, with the strong literary tastes. An added bonus; they are short. I'll give a full review in three or four months when I've read one or two (I'm still working Iris Leal).
Finally, I have been enjoying the animations of Ruth Selwyn a.k.a. Lizzie the Lezzie, who is -- in addition to being a very funny character -- an Israeli. This video is Lizzie's rave review of being gay/lesbian in the Holy Land, sort of homosexual hasbarah (that's propogranda). It is definitely PG-13 and since this is a family blog I'm not posting the video but follow the link and enjoy.

school crossing and raucous meditation

The boys are both having a bit of a tough time in school right now, which makes me sad so I have been on the lookout for things to lighten my mood. Here are two things that have struck me as vaguely hysterical.
There are signs all up over Benjy's school about school crossing safety (including one that says "Don't let your kids cross alone before they are 9 years old." I am 38 and I am scared to cross by myself here.) I can see why they have all the signs. Drivers are pretty crazy here, though they definitely respect the crosswalks more than back in Montreal. Anyway, there are kid crossing guards just like when I was in school. They wear bright yellow pinnies and because there are traffic islands, so two kids do each lane of traffic there seem to be twenty-five crossing guards at a crosswalk. I don't know if this just an Efrata-school thing or if it is being replicated all over the country. The kids who were crossing guards when I was a boy just had these little hand-held stop signs but the Israeli kids' stop signs are on broom handles that are longer than them like they are going to joust with them. The most striking thing, though, is that as part of their traffic control system they have obviously been taught before putting down their giant, long stop signs to give drivers the Israeli "wait a second" gesture which is made by putting the thumb, forefinger and middle finger together, facing up and waving the hand thus poised at the wrist. North Americans make fun of how infuriating that sign is (especially when when accompanied as is often the case by a a tooth sucking sound) but I believe that nobody can possibly like to be on the receiving end of this gesture of unsurpassed rudeness, and my guess is that it is probably responsible for nine out of ten homicides committed in Israel. Anyway the kids look very cute and silly doing it with such stagy earnestness. By the end of the year I am sure they will be doing it with the offhand, contemptuous flair that has driven so many people stark raving crazy.
Funny thing number two. I went to a Jewish meditation class tonight. I was early and was standing outside the building on Karen HaYesod street. The building next door is the national labour court building. There was a group of guys gathering around and it gradually swelled to a large throng of what I learned were dock workers from Haifa and Ashdod. While many of the guys looked like your average Israeli, there were enough hard nuts that it could have been mistaken for an open casting call for the Israeli version of the Sopranos. The port workers were angry about something that the Labour Minister had done or not done and were staging a very raucous demo. (When I say angry, I mean only officially. They were mostly smiling, chatting on cell-phones and happily milling about with occasional time-outs to scream angry slogans. I watched as a few guys very kindly made sure to help an old lady in a walker get through the packed crowd on the side-walk).
Anyway, the meditation was punctuated by the savage throated mob howling for the blood of the labour minister and the wailing of air horns. The person leading the meditation tried valliantly to incorporate the experience into his guiding - "sometimes we experience noise, or anger or aggression in our lives and we have to just be with the experience" or some anodyne therapy-speak to the point where I had to really bear down to avoid laughing and further contributing to the downhill slide.

Bougvanalia?!

How do you spell that word? Bougavanallia? Bouvanalia? Bougavanalia? According to some spell-check it is "bougainvillea". Anyway that stuff is in bloom all over Jerusalem. I have to say that I have always found boug.... a little on the tacky side myself, kind of ungepatchked (a word my spell-check has no problem with) but there is this tree on Beit Lechem street that has bougainvillea climbing all the way up it maybe twenty five feet and it is a mass of purple flowers which is really impressive. There is also something in flower that looks like blue phlox which is very pretty. I don't think it is phlox because it is a bush. The pomegranates are getting ripe which is cool because they look so unlikely and there is carob looking very turd-like under a lot of trees (also a lot of turds under trees. My boys enjoy yelling "watch out for the poop" as we walk along the streets). I see rhododendrons around but they must have flowered quite a bit earlier in the year and a lot of laurel bushes which are quite pretty in the white to pink range. I see lantana occasionally with its pretty and very delicate, tiny flowers and think of that crazy Australian movie which took its title from the name of the plant. And there are a lot of geraniums (gerania?). Again, not a plant I love back in Montreal but it can be quite pretty here and grows to ridiculous profusion. Ariela is of course taking lots of great pix so be sure to check them out.
Benjy is doing okay in school. Today he had to go early because the President (and former Prime Minister) of Israel Shimon Perez decided to come visit his school. Every year he goes to a school and visits at the start of the year and this year it was Efrata (while most people are not aware this was a s a direct result of Benjamin being in the school. The president has been hoping for an audience for a long time). Benjamin said he seemed "nice and old." he also remarked that "Peres seems willing to change his stripes and bend on points of grave importance if it will extend his political career." Oh wait, that was me. The sad thing is thatin today's political landscape Peres seems like a giant of integrity. I also took lev to the Y for his first day. The building dates back to the period of the British Mandate (1931) and is beautiful though it goes pretty heavy on the towers, arches and domes, like they got them by the job lot. The inside is filled with furniture made for people with gout, giant heavy wood and upholstered chairs that would take four men to move. It is funny how antiquated it seems for something less than a hundred years old. Anyway, I took Lev past the Henry VIII size dining tables and to a back stair case and up a floor to the daycare, then went and sat in the cafe and had coffee (no breakfast. Not only is the Three Arches cafe not kosher, but a friend who works at the Y told me they serve bacon at breakfast, which raised in my mind the interesting question of how and where exactly you get bacon in Jerusalem? Do they have a Christian butcher in Nazareth drive it in each morning or from some militantly secular kibbutz in Emeq Izrael? Is there a small farm somewhere in the Armenian quarter of the Old City?)
Lev definitely misses being at Over the Rainbow though everyone at the Y seems very sweet. He said that he talks to people but they don't listen which we tried to explain is because they don't speak English, but I think he may also have to do with being ill prepared for the rigours of life in the real world by two over-attentive parents. We played at the Lion Fountain near the Yamin Moshe windmill and then home. The city is less hot now and the walk is lovely, past that towering bouganvillea. We also passed the spot where a suicide bus bombing killed eight Israelis back in 2004. There is little stone grave marker there.
A friend told us the other day that when they came to Israel, whenever they saw an Arab man get on the bus, they always wondered if he was going to be the one who blew it up. It is interesting because this friend went on to say something along the lines of "All Arabs want to kill Jews. It is part of their nature." What I found so interesting is how the subjective feeling of mistrust (reasonable and legitimate mistrust) became projected out as a fact about the world. It was as if this friend had said "Because any Arab may want to kill me, therefore every Arab does want to kill me."
I should say that I report my conversations with people whose politics, whose view of people, I disagree with because I find it such an interesting and tangled part of being here but those ideas are certainly not universal and I meet sabras and new Israelis who hold views more akin to my own.
Finally, and mostly to end on something less dour, I just had my first falafel since being in Israel. The boys prefer pizza. As I think I mentioned in my email to some of you, Benjy likes that there is so much kosher food here, though he remains as picky as ever, and pizza is about the only thing we can reilably get him to eat out. Falafel is far too brown and crusty to make its way past his pristine lips, hence I have not had a chance to eat falafel (I should say that the Eisenbergs did feed me falafel a few days ago, but it was fresh falafel balls from the stand across the street, in their pitas, their humus. Very tasty but not the greasy, street eating experience that I was going for). Lev fell asleep in the stroller and I ate a very nice half pita at Ovadia's (I think. On Bet Lechem). French fries on top +. Limited selection of toppings - . Ambiance +++ (it was a tiny green shack, just what you want when you eat falafel). Overall Good. The felafel gestalt was definitely there.
Love to all. J