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.