A worthy topic

Since we came back from Israel, I have been feeling stuck, blogwise. Life seems less comment-worthy, less remarkable when you are in your regular groove. But today, New Year's Eve, it so happens, I went out to play my first game of shinny in the park across the street, one of the things I most missed when I was away in Israel and I realized that I had found my new topic. Girouard Park is a great neighbourhood park and every year around Nov. 1st hockey boards appear in the middle of the baseball diamond. From that day on I wait for snow and -10 degrees like sane people anticipate a trip to Cuba. Two weeks ago some guys from the city were out in their fluorescent orange rubber gloves with the fire hose under the giant halogen lights in the middle of a bitterly cold night putting down the first layers of ice. I went over the next day. They had been back, and the ice shimmered with another coat. I could hear it creaking and groaning as it froze. I saw skate tracks in the snow. Somebody even more eager than me had come over hoping for a skate, but the ice still wasn't ready. But a few more coats, a few passes with the zamboni and now the ice is good to go. I have been out a few times with the boys but today was the first day I went over myself and played.
I grew up in Vancouver and -- except for a few rare occasions -- didn't get to skate outdoors. Like the Montreal Canadiens, skating in the fresh air was part of a Canada that I knew about but couldn't get at. We played street hockey all year round but never shinny. Now I get to rectify that.
Anyway more about the wonders of the game as the blog progresses, with ample doses of children updates, identity, literature and other brain-sweepings. Suffice it to say that after a year away -- and I was never so hot to start with -- I was pretty rusty. I had one pretty nice assist. The highlight was when I was going for the puck iat centre ice. A young buck in his twenties a little taller than me and a better skater by far was after it too. Too late to get out of the way we both put our shoulders down. Guess who was left standing? Young buck says, "that was interference." I figured he needed to save face and anyway, I was too happy at not having been knocked ass over teakettle to protest so I let him have the puck. After all, shinny is about fun.

Cute story about Lev, and Chicken Manure news for those who persist to the end

I mentioned that I am reading Harry Potter in Hebrew. It is going well and Harry is now at Hogwarts, now, but my feeling that I could be reading this in any language generally continues. It is as if the story were being sent directly into my head without the pesky medium of language. Occasionally though the fact of Hebrew intrudes on me. This is probably largely a personal matter that has to do with knowing the original pretty well and the idiosyncrasies of learning a language as an adult. When you learn a language as an adult you actually often can remember the first time you came across a word and this sets up a whole associative network which is hidden from view or buried when the language in question is one you have spoken since childhood. For example, I was curious about the origin of the word shakshuka which is a tasty egg-in-tomato-sauce breakfast which I first enjoyed at Tmol Shilshom here in Jerusalem. I assumed shakshuka was a loan word from Arabic but came across variations on the root shakshek in several places meaning something like "shake" or "mix-up". For example, when Harry and Hagrid visit Gringots and they first get out of the cart at Harry's vault, the narrator says "He [Hagrid] indeed looked a little green and when the cart finally stopped next to a little door in the wall of the tunnel, Hagrid got out and leaned against the wall until his knees stopped "leshakshek."
Still, I recently read a letter that Gershom Scholem, the renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism sent to his friend, the philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig and which is published in the collection On the Possibility of a Jewish Mysticism in Our Time, in which Scholem says (in an uncharacteriscally overheated sort of way) that "This Hebrew language is pregnant with catastrophe; it cannot remain in its present state -- nor will it remain there. Our children will no longer have any other language... One day this language will turn against its speakers -- and there are moments when it does so even now; moments which it is difficult to forget, leaving wounds in which all the presumtuousness of our goal is revealed. Will we then have a youth who will be able to hold fast against the rebellion of a holy tongue?" What Scholem was exactly worried about, he leaves tantalizingly unspecified, but it seems that it has to do with an inextricable bent towards messianism and eschatology somehow inherent in the Hebrew language itself. Given that you would think that Harry Potter would have a more pronounced messianic or apocalyptic flavour to it in Hebrew than in English but I have to say that in general that is not the case. The translation like the orginal is sort of eerily pelucid. However I found a few oddities. One is the translation of Halloween as "layal hakadoshim" or literaly "the night of the holies." Kadosh, of course has a strong redolence of the biblical and makes the non-religious, magical holiday of Hogworts seem very close to its Christian/Pagan roots. I'm not sure how Halloween general gets translated but I think a transliteration might have been more apposite. Another spot where the language's theology sort of jumped into the driver's seat unexpectedly was when Snape puts Harry on the spot on his first day of Potions class by asking him, among other things the difference between "choneq hazaev" and "bardas hanazir." Now, I have already packed up my dictionary so it is a little hard for me to confirm this but I think the translator -- Gili Bar-Hillel -- has come up with two Hebrew neologisms having translated wolfsbane and monkshood more or less literally. Neither variety of aconitum grows wild in Israel as far as I can tell from various plant websites (plant sellers just call them aconitum) so it is not so odd that the translator would simply use a direct translation from the very evocative English common names. But I would imagine that with a little work one could find a Hebrew name in a medieval Hebrew herbology. What is funny about the translation of monkshood to "bardas nazir" is that it relies on imagining the "nazir" as a Medieaval christian monk -- in which case the hood follows naturally and the flower really does look like its namesake. But if your referent for a nazir is the biblical nazir, such as Samson, the "bardas", the hood seems like a bit of a non sequitor.

The other day I told Lev that curiosity killed the cat. He said, "Really? How?"

Finally since I have touched on the agricultural and this is really mor or less just for my mom, there was an article in this morning's Haartez about flies, chicken manure and compost, topics all dear to her heart. It also highlights the benefits for people from all over the region to co-operation in this case on ecological issues. I can personally attest that 18 years ago when I was on kibbutz not far from the Jordanian border the flies were Biblical and plague like, though I never thought to blame chicken manure or the Jordanians and I remain skeptical on this point.

Jordan bans chicken manure as fertilizer over fly infestation

By Zafrir Rinat, Haaretz Correspondent

Tags: fertilizer, Jordan

Jordan has banned the use of chicken manure as fertlizer, as it has been responsible for widespread infestations by flies for many years on both the Jordanian and Israeli sides of the Dead Sea. In future, Jordanian farmers in the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea area will be required to use only compost. Chicken manure both attracts and nourishes flies, and the profusion of the insect has been a blight to life on both sides of the border for years. Recently, authorities in both countries teamed up, with the mediation of the environmental organization Friends of the Earth Middle East, to deal with the problem.

Post Script to my last

1. This AMs conversation with Lev
ME: I really liked getting to spend time together, just the two of us.
LEV: What?
ME: I really liked spending time together, you and me, together.
LEV: (Suspicious now) What?!
ME: Benjy and Imma are away and that is a little sad. But I am also happy that we are together just the two of us.
LEV: I want a toilet paper roll for my wrist.
ME: Of course.
LEV: I need weapons (walks away muttering 'weapons' under his breath).

2. I am reading Harry Potter in Hebrew. I am on chapter 3. Reading the book in translation makes me realize something about it and its allure and failings. The book seems to be all story without (or beyond or behind) language. I swear you could take 72 Hebrew speakers and put them in different rooms each with a copy of Harry Potter in Hebrew and have them translate it back into English and get the same book (and one that would be practically identical to the original). It is uncanny. Martin Amis has a hysterical bit in one of his books, I think it is London Fields, where his novelist character complains about how hard it is to get your characters from one place to another. There is a certain dreariness for writers with aspirations to being literary in writing things like "James got on the subway." "Felicia walked across the park to Alice's house." If Faulkner ever wrote a sentence like that I can't remember it. In J.K. Rowling every sentence seems to be like that. And yet they add up to a really good story. Language versus story.

3. I just finished reading "The Swimming-Pool Library" by Alan Hollinghurst. Ariela gave it to me when she'd finished it. It is a great book very beautiful and elegaic and at the same time quite cutting (and takes a tremendous delight in language). It is all about the gay cruising scene in London in the 80's right before the awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Given the subject matter it is no suprise that Ariela gave it to me with the warning (recommendation?) that it is really dirty. And it is. Why I am telling you this is because I took it on the bus the other day when I went to pick up Lev. I was nearly finished and couldn't leave it unfinished in the appartment, so I grabbed it and read it on the 74. I didn't get cruised or gay-bashed by a very well-read homophobe or anything like that. But at one point I looked up and realised that -- and this will be familiar to those of you who have taken the bus in Jerusalem before -- while lots of other people had books on the bus, almost all of them were reciting Psalms.
Which leads me to a reflection I had been meaning to share but hadn't gotten around to; one of the things that Jerusalem does, for good or bad, is it puts "Sin" as a category in your mind. In Montreal or Vancouver or New York you might think about Good and Bad but unless you are a very religiously inclined person, you won't (at least I don't) think about SIN much, which was after all a category that dominated people's thinking for hundreds of years not so long ago. Yesterday, I saw a cute teenage couple necking in the park. No surprise, nothing you don't see a dozen times on a nice day in Montreal, even in Jerusalem. But she was wearing a hijab! I was scandalized by that. SIN! Before my very eyes. How weird is that?! It's not even my religion and I was shouting SIN at them (internally, you understand). While I don't think I would ever want to get to the point where SIN became an unrecognized category of my thinking, which I suppose could happen if you lived here long enough, I do enjoy having it in my face and it makes reading a book like The Swimming-Pool Library, on the bus, amidst all the bus-y passions, political, national, religious and sinful, all the richer.

O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me.
Thou knowest my sitting down and my rising up, thou understandest my thought afar off.
Thou hast measured my going and my lying down, and thou art acquainted with all my ways.
For no word is on my tongue yet, and lo, thou knowest it all.
Thou hast beset me behind and before and laid thy hand on me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high and I cannot attain it.
(from Psalm 139)

Lev and Jeremy unplugged

Ariela and Benjy are off in Egypt with Menachem, so Lev and I are holding down the fort here. Lev is a person of strange proclivities and I am not entirely sure it was wise to leave me under his supervision. Sometimes I question his judgement. His speech can be disjointed (I was relived when some friends showed us their son's hearing test -- perfectly normal -- which they had undertaken because he, too, is constantly saying "What?" What?"). "Do birds really know everything?" he asked me the other day, as if in reference to some previous conversation. Sometimes, his speech is whatever the opposite of disjointed is -- but weirdly so.
Two days ago he said, "Maybe you'll never die." I said I would die but I hoped it would be a long way off. Yesterday he told me he did not think I would die before Ariela and Benjy got back from Egypt. A child's loyalty is a little mercenary. He hopes I won't die, and if I have to would I at least stave it off until his mother, who knows how to buy things he likes to eat at the grocery store, comes back.
He mutters a lot.
Lev has clothing rules. Shirts cannot cover his pockets or his bum. Pants must be "softie" pants ie. sweats or fleece, preferably with pockets for putting all the weird treasures he finds with friends at school. I scored a huge parenting victory the other day by cutting the legs off an old pair of sweat pants which had too many holes in them to be acceptable anymore and presenting them as a new pair of shorts. "Softie pants with pockets!" he said with reverence and delight. You can see them in the picture. I don't think Benjy ever had such a strong tastes in clothes but maybe I have blocked it out. After all it makes the mornings more challenging.
I have been trying to find adventurous things for us to do so Lev won't be too sad about missing out on Egypt. We went to Hezekiah's Tunnel two days ago. Lev started complaining about getting car sick after thirty seconds (which explains why he was not invited on the twelve hour bus ride to Cairo.) "Ir David," is the name of the metastysizing archeological park where Hezekiah's tunnel is located. It is in Arab East Jerusalem, in Silwan three or four blocks from the walls of the Old City. It is run putatively by the Israeli National Parks Authority, but the work of digging in the site and managing it is subcontracted to a right-wing, religious private foundation (see one organization that is trying to draw attention to this). In some cases the excavations have been carried out under the homes of Palestinians, literally undermining their houses and often without permits. It has excited some controversy and in addition to seeing Hezekiah's Tunnel I wanted to see what the fuss was about. We went in and I bought tickets for Hezekiah's Tunnel and they had a 3D movie, so I figured we'd check that out too. In the meantime, Lev had a slushie. He asked me what flavor it was and I told him "red". Then we got our 3D glasses and watched the video which is called "Where it All Began" but should be called "Arabs? What Arabs?" since it is at some pains to ignore the fact that David's City is underneath a busy Arab neighbourhood. One sequence seemed particularly odd from an ideological perspective. At the end of the film, the narrator talks about how there are so many buildings from so many different historic periods in Jerusalem today and a fancy computer generated video shows a bunch of architectural landmarks. Given the bent of the movie, I didn't expect to see the Dome of the Rock or the American Colony hotel or anything like that but I was suprised by two things they did show. One was the King David Hotel. The King David is definitely a Jerusalem landmark. It is a beautiful building from the late twenties located right across from Lev's daycare. But what's weird is that the King David is perhaps most famous for is getting partially blown up by Jewish terrorists in 1946 when it was the headquarters of the British administration and military in Palestine, an attack which killed 91 people (the Irgun always claimed that they called to warn that an attack was imminent and that the building should be evacuated and that the call was ignored) not exactly an association you would want to make, I'd think. The other thing that jumped out was the way the Western Wall was presented. The Western Wall is the big kahuna of Jewish religious and nationalist iconography. Of course, it was notably shorn of its Golden Yarmulke, the Dome of the Rock, which is creepy, for sure, but no surpirse. But it was also presented as sort of second fiddle to Ir David, WHERE IT ALL BEGAN. It is pretty cheeky to put your Jewish monument standing higher (of course, it is actually quite a bit lower geographically) and glowing (?!) brighter that the Western Wall. I am curious if this reflects some subtle ideological rivalry that I am missing. Anyway, with both our slushy and our indoctrination finished we went down to Hezekiah's tunnel.
It is a hand-carved 500 something meter tunnel which brought water from the Gihon spring inside the city walls of Jerusalem during the time of the first temple built by King Hezekiah to ensure water supply in case of seige particualrly by the Assyrians. Water still runs along it from the spring and it is pitch black; a perfect place to take a four year-old. When we first went in the water was belly high on Lev and I had to pick him up and I thought there is no way I can shlepp him for forty minutes. But soon enough the water levelled off at about ankle depths. We trudged through the low narrow passage in the dim light of our flashlights and sang "Dark as the Dungeon" with great accoustics. It was fun although about ten minutes in Lev said "I want to go home." I pointed forward and said "Home is that way." He did great in the tunnel though he did tend to loose focus (amazing since all there is to do is walk and that only in one direction, but such is the power of a four year old).
When we got out of the tunnel we hiked up the steps back to the entrance which was longer than I had bargained for in the full heat of the day (the tunnel was great for a hot day, the walk back up the hill, not so much). The one good thing (or not depending on your take) is that as you walk back up the hill (shlepping a screaming 4 year-old) you get to see the amount of Jewish-Israeli settlement that has gone on as part of "Ir David," often on land/houses expropriated by the government from Palestinians. The film had boasted in a weirdly National-Geographic-sort-of-way about how Jews were now living once again where they had so long ago. Aside from the political piece of this settlement activity, which is meant to "Judaize" the eastern part of Jerusalem both as a nationalistic and religious enterprise and, practically, to ensure that the city will never be home to a Palestinian capital, it sounded from the video almost as if the settlers were caracals or ibex which had been reintroduced to their natural habitat. It seems to me indicitive of the way in which, when you view people strategically, as ideological assets rather than as individuals, you end up de-humanizing even "your own."
Finally, ruffled feathers smoothed, mine and Lev's, we got in a cab and headed home. Not quite Egypt, but plenty to think about.

In other news

Not sure what to do with this except post it. Yesterday I was talking with Yair about kids' books and I learned the Hebrew word for Vampire, Arpad. I was immediately curious, since it is a good Hebrew-sounding word and not a loan word from a European language. The word arpad, it turns out, is a hepax legomenon (sole usage) of the Babylonia Talmud, maybe an aramaic word. ("Arpada" is used as an Aramaic translation for the Hebrew "atalef" or "bat" in the Aramaic translation of the Bible called Targum Yonatan. But the Targum Yonatan on the five books of Moses, according to Wikipedia, should more properly be called "pseudo-Yonatan" or the "Yerushalmi Targum" and, probably, does not date any earlier than the 8th Century of the Common Era, therefore the Targum may be using the Talmud's word and not the other way around. Got it?)
The very cryptic and wonderful use of the word arpad in the Talmud comes as the rabbis are trying to figure out what another animal is, a bardalis, and are running through various possibilities. Could it be a hyena (tsabua)? Could the word bardalis mean the female hyena? (BK 16a)
"The male tsabua after seven years turns into a bat, the bat after seven years turns into an arpad, the arpad after seven years turns into a kimmosh (species of thorn?), the kimmosh after seven years turns into a thorn, the thorn after seven years turns into a demon. The spine of a man after seven years turns into a snake, so shouldn't he (the man?) bow while saying the blessing 'We bow to You.'"
I just love the idea of these hard desert creatures transmuting until finally they are refined down into a thorn which has one job alone and does it very well, and then into pure, incorporeal malevolence, a demon. And that the redactor tacked on to this associative serpent the hallucinatory vision of our spines becoming snakes (!!) makes it all the more twisted.
It reminds me of the Kimya Dawson song "treehugger" that my kids love. "In the sea there is a fish, a fish that has a secret wish, a wish to be a big cactus with a pink flower on it."
Who knows what the Talmud meant by an "arpad" but the fact that it ends up after all its shapeshifting as a desert demon is suggestive. In my quick search of the relevant dictionaries I couldn't find arpad used to mean anything other than a species of bat until the twentieth century when some Gothic-minded Hebraist with a really heavy duty Talmudic education wanted a word for "vampire" and pulled "arpad" nearly out of thin air. It would be interesting to know if there were Hebrew vampire stories prior to the twentieth century and if so what word was used.
Now, I should go write some fiction though I can't imagine writing anything better than
"The male tsabua after seven years turns into a bat, the bat after seven years turns into an arpad, the arpad after seven years turns into a kimmosh..."

Belz Hanging Out

I estimate that I walked about 13 kilometers today. We couldn't sleep last night because they are rehearsing Oklahoma in Beit Beuer which faces right towards us. Till about ten thirty they are whoopin' and hollerin' and singing "oh what a beautiful morning" with all the windows open wide open which keeps us all up past our usual bedtime. All the Rogers and Hammerstein meant that I didn't have my usual presence of mind when I got up this morning. There was a lot of Ariela and me walking around this AM saying "Rassafrassin' Oklahoma." Since I knew that I was too tired to do any brain work, I decided to give myself some foot work instead. I walked Lev down to daycare and then set off to visit Belz World Headquarters. Belz is the name of a large Hasidic community, named after the town in Ukraine where it started out. I had a Belz student in a social work class that I taught and he was a very sweet guy. He suggested I go and check out the place. I decided I might not get another chance especially on a day where it wasn't a thousand degrees so I set off with a water bottle and a map. I lucked out and managed to get the cook's tour of Belz, but I didn't know that when I crossed the Jaffa street. Jerusalem is really three cities, Arab east Jerusalem, Jewish modern south Jerusalem and Jewish ultra-orthodox north Jerusalem. As soon as I crossed over Jaffa street the demographic shifted and in a few blocks I was one of just a few people not dressed like 18th century Polish nobility. It was probably a forty five minute walk out through Meah Sha'arim, up Strauss boulevard to Kiryat Belz. I asked a few men for directions partly to make sure I was headed the right way and partly to see how they would respond. The guys I asked were all polite and gave me directions in good Hebrew. Though I heard a lot of people speaking Yiddish I also heard a lot of Hebrew which is a big change, the ultra-orthodox and in particular the Hasidim opposed the use of Hebrew as a secular language for a long time. I finally got to the building. It is very impressive from the outside and I was standing tehre looking when a fellow came up and asked me if I needed any help. I told him that I had come to see the building and was hoping to see the main synagogue which is the second largest synagogue in the world, seating between six and eight thousand people at a time. Yitshak smiled and said he would be happy to show me around. He led me in through a side door and in and around the labyrinth of corridors, chatting occasionally with various men as we walked, none of whom expressed any interest in me, nor any resentment. Eventually he managed to bring us to the main sanctuary. We chatted on the way. It turns out that he is not a Hasid but is a Syrian Jew who works nearby and spends a lot of time learning at the various study halls that are located throughout the complex. We came up into the main sanctuary. It is pretty spectacular -- giant chadaliers, huge wood aron kodesh for the torah scrolls, marble floors -- and we were the only people in there. He showed me where the Admor -- being the Belzer Rebbe -- sits. He showed me the old chair brought from Ukraine where the former Admor sat. Then he showed me around the rest of the complex, the Admor's 'villa' which is connected by a causeway to the Mikdash so that he doesn't have to go outside, and a balcony where he can stand and address his hasidim in the big open square out front. He even took me into the Admor's new sukkah. A Sukkah is a temporary hut built for the holiday of sukkot each year, but the Belz sukkah has a retractable roof with lights in it and sensors to detect rain so that it can open and close automatically in the event of rain as well as lights green and red to tell you when the roof is open or closed and a HDTV (I'm not sure what they watch) and must seat at least 600 people. Then Yitshak insisted on taking me to see the mikvah, the pools for ritual immersion. It took us a while to get in because his electronic mikvah pass-card (I kid you not) wasn't working. In addition to seeing more naked, hasidic men than I have seen before I got to see the cleanest, biggest and most well-maintained mikvah complex I have ever laid eyes on (not that I have seen that many). It has seperate hot, cold and luke-warm pools for dipping depending on your mood.
Finally, Yitshak and I parted ways and I geared up to walk back into downtown Jerusalem. I took a different route through neighbourhoods with four, five or six little synagogues per block. I got myself a really tasty hot bagel, and wandered in what I hoped was the right direction, but it was difficult to tell because there are very few vistas in nroth Jerusalem. New and old neighbourhoods alike have a way of feeling closed in, in part because of all the hills which prevent making long straight roads, in part because of the tremendous housing demands so that teh buildings are tall and close together and perhaps in part because people want to be enclosed, protect from the eyes of the outside world and from looking out too far.
When I finally got my bearings I realised that I had ended up a little further east than I had anticipated. The Jewish half of the city ends abruptly where the 1948 cease-fire line was and there, across the main drag of Bar Lev street begins Arab East Jerusalem. I looked at my watch and saw that I had about an hour and a half left before I had to get Lev at daycare and my map had something marked near to where I was that was called "Jeremiah's grotto" which was not far from where I stood.
I have a soft spot for the prophet Jeremiah. He and I share a name. When I tell Israeli Jews that my Hebrew name is Yermiahu I get a few reactions. Religious people don't bat an eye but most secular people laugh. Being named Yermiahu is a little like being named Jeremiah in North America. It is the sort of name that religious people give to their twelfth son when they have run out of other things to call them. One kibbutznik though nodded when I told him my name and said that Jeremiah was a prophet of social justice which indeed he was. I had no idea what his grotto was but I figured I should check it out. I saw a sign that said Garden Tomb which looked close on my map and so I followed that and soon came to a little gate in a high wall right across from St. George's Church, not a stone's throw from the busy Sultan Sulamein street. I went in and got a little brochure and map from the lady at the entrance. I asked her if Jeremiah's grotto was in here and she said no, she was sorry but it wasn't, but I figured I was here so I would head in. The I looked at the brochure and realized where I was. This was none other than the place that ol' General Charles "Whoops I lost the Empire but I Saved My Soul" Gordon had looked at and decided was undoubtedly the site of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus.
I went to General Gordon Elementary school in Vancouver for grades 6 & 7 but I don't think it ever really ocurred to me that there was a person named General Gordon until I read Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians years later and then I was apalled that somebody had thought to name a school after such a head-case. Gordon's career was full of amazing military and political adventures on behalf of Empire punctuated by inner religious upheaval.
Strachey starts his description of Gordon during his time in Jerusalem.

"DURING the year 1883 a solitary English gentleman was to be seen,

wandering, with a thick book under his arm, in the neighbourhood
of Jerusalem. His unassuming figure, short and slight, with its
half-gliding, half-tripping motion, gave him a boyish aspect,
which contrasted, oddly, but not unpleasantly, with the touch of
grey on his hair and whiskers. There was the same contrast--
enigmatic and attractive--between the sunburnt brick-red
complexion--the hue of the seasoned traveller--and the large blue

eyes, with their look of almost childish sincerity. To the
friendly inquirer, he would explain, in a row, soft, and very
distinct voice, that he was engaged in elucidating four
questions--the site of the Crucifixion, the line of division
between the tribes of Benjamin and Judah, the identification of
Gideon, and the position of the Garden of Eden. He was also, he
would add, most anxious to discover the spot where the Ark first
touched ground, after the subsidence of the Flood: he believed,
indeed, that he had solved that problem, as a reference to some
passages in the book which he was carrying would show.

This singular person was General Gordon, and his book was the
Holy Bible." Eminent Victorians @ Project Gutenberg

According to legend, Gordon, saw a cliff face that looked remarkably like a skull and said that's the sight of Golgatha, ignoring the longstanding tradition which put the site of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection at the place where Church of the Holy Sepulcher stood as well as any modern considerations of archeology. The cliff really does look kind of like a skull accept that now the Jerusalem Arab Bus Station stands in front of it. And they did find a tomb there.
After filling my water bottle and listening to the earnest bearded, sandal-wearing Christians reading Scripture, I left and walked around the corner to Sultan Sulamein and into the Arab Bus Station. It made me nostalgic for the old Israeli bus stations and seems to have been designed along the same principles of chaos and clutter. I wondered around and looked at Gordon's Golgotha which looked more like a big white rock from that angle and no sign of a grotto. Of course, I stood out like a sore thumb but I just hoped it wasn't like a Gush Emmunim Settler sore thumb. People were pretty oblivious to me until I started asking (in English) if they had any idea where Jeremiah's Grotto was. People were polite, eager to help but totally baffled. A young guy who was buying some boiled kidney in pita asked everybody around but none of them could figure it out. I was about to give up when I saw a young woman who looked Western and on a flier I said, "Do You speak English?" she did and though she didn't have any better idea where Jeremiah's Grotto might be than anybody else, she did explain to a passer-by that a grotto was some kind of cave, I guess because he immediately understood what I was looking for and walked me back to the Arab Bus station where he showed me a funny little alleyway which I had taken to be just a row of shops selling electronics and Djalabeeas. I walked down the street, past a mosque, down down down into the cliff face of Golgotha. A rooster crowed and I thought of Peter denying christ three times before the cock crows or that perhaps I had triggered some kind of alarm system. And then I entered Jeremiah's Grotto. It was like walking into a warehouse. The ground was paved. There were long fluorescent lights, a funny little booth like a taxi dispatcher's and crates and crates piled up against the walls. A man looked at me curiously and I said, "Is this Jeremiah's Grotto?"
"Yes," he said and turned on the lights.
"Wow," I said.
He showed me around a little. The place was quite big hollowed out of the rock and looks very old, but what do I know. Which raises the question what is Jeremiah's Grotto. So here's what I can tell you. Arthur P. Stanley in his book "Hostory of the Jewish Church" of the 1860's said that it was a "local belief" in Jerusalem that a cave opposite Damascus gate was the site where Jeremiah composed the book of Lamentations. I haven't been able to figure out whose local belief that was. The man from the taxi dispatch stand did not offer any answers -- our ability to communicate was limited -- though he was very nice.
"Are those bananas in all those crates?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. It's a good use for a huge, cool cave in the middle of a busy city; Chiquita Banana says 'Never put them in the refrigerator.'
"Here," he said. "Please, have one."
So I did. A perfect end to a perfectly bizarre adventure.

We're not in Kansas, anymore

It is hot... Hot heat with extra doses of warmth thrown in for a greater degree of hot. It was supposed to get up to a thousand degrees today but I think we topped that. The trick is to pretend you are a reptile. Move very slowly. For example it has taken me four and a half hours to write this post so far. My brain has also begun to slow down in the heat because the liquid that carries the thoughts around from one ventricle to another has begun to evaporate and thicken. My fingers feel like chubby, over-stuffed sausages. My eyes have begun to move independently from one another.
All the Israelis are like "So how are you doing? Hot?" all ready to mock me for being Canadian and diasporic. I tell them, "No. I find it really kind of disappointing this Zionist heat of yours. I am wearing cashmere underwear so that my private parts don't get chilly. Please, make it hotter." They smile and move away.
I finally finished Amos Oz's memoir "A Tale of Love and Darkness." Holy smokes that was some dark stuff. But really good. It took a while for me to finish it so I counsel patience for those with short, little spans of attention like my own. A friend told me that in Hebrew he gives more of his father's slightly pedantic lectures about language which sounds kind of fun, so I may have to go back and read it in Hebrew. His father for example said that the Hebrew word for a big mess, probably derives not from Russian as is comonly thought but from Persian where something like the hebrew "balagan" was the word for a small porch where you put rags to dry and may also have gone into the making of the English word "balcony".
He also tells a pretty funny story about how he was lost to the Revisionist movement in the early fifties when he went to a lecture by Menachem Begin who, in the climax of his speech, use an outmoded word for "arm" which in the Hebrew of the day -- and today -- meant "to screw". Begin, the fiery orator went on about how the nations of Europe were arming the Egyptians and England was arming the Egyptians, "But if I were Prime Minister, everyone would be arming Israel." Young Amos burst in fits of laughter and had to be taken out of the presence of his idol.
Now I have to get back to reading in Hebrew. I have been out buying books, for the kids and the grown-ups for when we leave the molten surface of the sun.

Shimon Bar Yochai versus Pope Benedict

It is Lag B'Omer, 34 days since Passover and last night was bonfire night in Jerusalem. All our clothes which were drying on the line smell like smoke. It was the kind of event that -- if I had just arrived -- would have horrified me. Everyone starts bonfires pretty much anywhere they please... there was a real four alarm-er going in a dusty lot that I could see from our window built underneath some POWER LINES. A friend told me she was so alarmed by the dimensions of the mound of stockpiled wood that she thought about calling the police but she didn't because she didn't know how to say "shantytown" in Hebrew (as in "they are planning on burning an entire shantytown"). Bands of boys have been out picking through construction sites and looting deserted fields for anything that might burn for weeks. They have been wandering the streets with grocery carts full of old lumber and waging raids on one another's hoardes with increasing intensity. The possibilities for injury are myriad. In addition to the obvious -- getting roasted alive -- there are the more arcane as suggested by the power cords, the rusty nails, the toxic fumes, eating flaming marshmallows off the pointy end of a wooden skewer.
After ten months or so in Israel squatting in a dusty empty lot in a tinder dry city roasting potatoes over old furniture and discarded doors seemed like a nice way to spend an evening. Need I say that our boys enjoyed every smokey, filthy, danger-filled minute?
All this is in commemoration of the revolt against the Romans and the yartzeit of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, mystic, reputed author of the Zohar, rebel against Rome, hermit and famous grump. As luck/karma/the tripartite and/or ten-emanation Deity would have it we are under siege by Rome at this very moment, though under slightly friendlier circumstances. Pope Benedict is visiting us (not us specifically, though we did offer).
Vatican flags are flying along the Jerusalem- Bethlehem road which the "Afifior" will take tomorrow causing no end of traffic snarls and a late start to school. His visit seems to be running into a lot of trouble so far... he didn't say the right things at Yad Veshem yesterday and a Muslim cleric began talking about massacres of Palestinians in what was supposed to be a non-political interfaith meeting. There are even some Jewish extremists suing to get the gear from the second temple back from the Pope's basement. I am reminded of something Gregorey Levey said in his book "Shut Up, I'm Taking, and other diplomacy lessons I learned from the Israeli government" to the effect that Jews and non-Jews living outside of Israel all believe that Israel is run by this ultra-smart braintrust -- sometimes that's a point of Jewish pride and sometimes its kind of anti-Semitic -- but either way we have this image of a cabal of mandarins who pull the levers of state in Israel. But the sad fact according to Levey is that nobody really seems to be driving the bus at all. I think the Vatican may be sort of the same thing. There's no super-secret DaVinci Code conspiracy or secret order running the show... if there was they'd be able to stage manage these things a little better.
Since I mentioned Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai I will say that we were up north in Rabbi Shimon's old stomping ground last week. We stayed at a beautiful 'zimmer' in Amirim which is in the Meiron mountains, not a five minute drive from R. Shimon's (reputed) grave site. We also went to Pek'in on the other side of the mountains to see his cave and eat some of the carob from what is supposed to be the miraculous carob tree which fed him and his son. The trip was fantastic, Bet Sha'an, Sachneh, the ski resort at Har Hermon (don't ask), the Hashashian (they smoked hashish and then went out and killed people for money hence the english word "assassin") fortress now called "Nimrod" and a walk along the Banias. Then Gamla where I got to see Nesher (aka the gryphon vulture, Israel's largest meat eating bird) on the wing, Jordan river kyaking. Some hiking around Har Meiron itself, the aformentioned Shimon Bar Yochai visit, then Rosh Hanikra and off to David and Ronny's for a well deserved rest. The boys were incredible travelling companions up for almost anything. We are the Wexler-Freedmans, "adventure" is our call.
Today the boys are home and we spent some time this a.m. making animations. I hope Blogger will allow them to move. Remember these are works in progress. As I told Benjy, sound will be added in post-production. Eat your heart out "Soul Mama"

Un-speculative

Dear All; We are in the midst of a lovely trip in the north of Israel which will be the subject of at least one long post... Ariela has taken many beautiful pixs which will be available soon.  But in the meantime -- until I can sort of mentally collate my experiences -- I wanted to share a totally un-Israel related thing that happened to me simply because I thought it was a funny reflection on the writer's life (in so far as mine can be called a writer's life).  

I wrote a short story four years ago or so which I like but I have never been able to publish.  The core of the story -- which is called "Beautiful Pea-Green Boat" is that a woman marries a man and shortly before embarking on a long sailing trip/honeymoon together she learns that he has a rare speech condition -- which he has cleverly managed to hide -- that causes him to speak in rhyming couplets.  It's not "The Dubliners", it's not even O. Henry but I think it is pretty funny and well-done but no editor has agreed with my assessment so far.  I have become thick skinned when it comes to rejection-letters (though there are a few that still get my goat -- "please note that our decisions are based purely on artistic merit and have nothing to do with considerations of marketability" ie. 'don't console yourself with thinking that we just didn't think we could sell your book.  No.  It is just bad!')   But this rejection seemed not just momentarily demoralizing but also funny.  

I won't name the publication but it is a leading online venue for speculative fiction.  I figured maybe -- since the premise of my story is a little fantastical -- I would have better luck at a place where weird is the norm.   This week for example they they have a story set in the near future about a person in a bionic exoskeletons doing some kind of virtual reality stimulation of these hyper-intelligent super children.   Of course, my story was pretty tame by these standards but what the hell. 

Anyway, I got a polite note back from the editor of this publication saying "thanks but no thanks."  He included his reason.  This comment from an editor who publishes stories about alien life forms and impossible technologies is the part I found funny.   "We found it a little hard to believe that the protagonist wouldn't have noticed earlier that the husband speaks in rhyme."  

Toothless in Gaza

Benjamin lost a tooth. This is the first one. We have had a lot of firsts this year; it certainly changes your perspective on a place being there with kids. The thing of it is, the tooth just popped out, or he swallowed it without realizing. This will make things more complicated for the Tooth Dwarf, so Benjy is planning on writing a note explaining the situation and authorizing the Tooth Dwarf to use shrinking potion and go on a gastro-intestinal spelunking expedition.
I did say Dwarf. The Tooth Dwarf isn't an Israeli invention. It is a purely Wexler-Freedman creation.
Benjy showed his extremely loose tooth to our friends Annabelle and Sarah a few days ago. I wanted to ask if there was a Tooth Fairy in Israel but I had no idea how one says Fairy in Hebrew, so I asked if there was a "g'mad shinayim." Now putting Tolkein and his Hebrew translators aside for a moment, I felt that I was on solid ground. I had always seen g'mad as a catch-all word for "little, supernatural people." The root G.M.D. means shortened or constricted. It seems to be used in the Bible in only one place. It is actually a good story, about Ehud, one of the Judges of Israel, with a sort of a dwavish flavour to it and could easily be a bit out of the Hobbit, so allow me to digress.
The Israelites were being ruled by Moav. Ehud, despite being from the tribe of Benjamin (son of my right hand), was a lefty. He was supposed to pay tribute to Eglon the king of Moav, who the Bible says was very fat. Ehud made himself a special sword that was two-sided (literally, two mouthed) and shrunken in its length (gomed arka) and girded it on his right side presumably where nobody would expect a sword to be ("I frisked hundreds of young punks in my day," says Captain McKluskey right before Michael goes to get the gun out of the toilet tank).... Well, I think you can see where this is going. Ehud gives Eglon the present or tribute and then says he has a secret message for him and suggests they retire to the "upper chamber." That short sword goes right up to the hilt in the fat king's belly. Then Ehud walks out cool as a cucumber.
But all this is really neither here nor there except to say that any small and supernatural being can be a g'mad as far as I was concerned. But my friend Anabelle burst out laughing when I said a g'mad shinayim since her image of a g'mad is of a true, Tolkeinian dwarf, which she pointed out might have a very hard time climbing up to a bed to retrieve a tooth, as opposed to Tinkerbell who can just flit over. She informed me that in Israel they have a "Faya Shinayim." Now "faya" is a very recent coinage in Hebrew and derived from the Latin fata probably via French fey. I find that very disappointing for a culture with a rich tradition of bizarre supernatural speculation. Another friend told me that they had done a "malach shinayim" a tooth angel which at first I took to be a little -- well, saccharine -- but then I considered that malachim in Hebrew -- along with shaydim, demons -- really have cornered the market on Jewish folkloric magical beings. Plenty of malachim have strange and seemingly inconsequential jobs (standing over a blade of grass and encouraging it to grow), and others are hardly the benevolent-but-dull angels of a New Yorker cartoon, so why not have a malach in charge of collecting old teeth from under sleeping kids?
As for us we are happy with the idea of tooth dwarf. He may be less glamorous than a fairy or an angel but he is sturdier and probably better at navigating the dark and twisting intestinal tracks of a six year-old.

Yom Hashoah

I was just sitting and working away when the siren went for Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). It has been many years since I was here for Yom Hashoah and I must have forgotten how intense the sound of the siren is or else I am closer to a siren station than I have ever been. It was a deeply powerful experience since the vibrations from the siren penetrate right into your body, shaking your bones as it were. Then it stops, but gradually with a sort of an exhausted and oddly organic moan which echoes for a few minutes as various sirens around the city die away, since something so penetrating cannot be cut off instantly. The sirens went off at 10:00 in the morning which has its own power because it gives you just enough time to get involved in your day-to-day activities and then get 'woken up' from them. I am at home and there is not much to see out the window here, no big roads with traffic coming to a standstill or crowds of people standing silently in a busy pedestrian walkway. What is extraordinary though is to look out at the little patch of the Jewish part of Jerusalem and consider that there are roughly the same number of Jews living in Israel today than died in the Shoah. A demographer recently published a report that said that there would be approximately 31 million Jews alive today if the Shoah hadn't happened in contrast with the 13 million today (That second number seems low to me and I am guessing it is using some slightly more restricted definition of 'Jew' than other demographers might use, but the point remains). It is hard not to imagine what differences there would be in Jewish life. How would our attitude to history be different? Our ideas about non-Jews? And Israel? What would the view look like out this window? All the good and also the bad that has been built here, would there be more apartment buildings, here, full of Jewish people living their domestic lives, hanging out their laundry on the line and sending their kids to daycare? Would there be fewer? Would there be a security fence encircling the city, snaking over the hills?
It is a beautiful time of the year in Jerusalem which adds to the power of the day. The city is in full bloom. Fields that were parched when we got here and only brown and grey are now bright green with lots of beautiful wildflowers, gigantic purple thistles and poppies, orange wild sweet peas. It is the season of smells here since the sun is bringing out every odor both good and bad. All the rosemary hedges are slowly baking and the lavender is flowering. When you walk by them, the bees look fat and happy and you think of the purple honey the must be making. The citrus trees are blossoming again and jasmine too which are very heady smells, so that you walk along the street and suddenly feel like you stepped into a pasha's pleasure garden in the thirteenth century and you look around and spot the culprit -- some orange or lemon tree or a bush with small white flowers -- looking very coy. As I said there are terrible smells emerging, too. I was pusing Lev in his stroller down Bethlehem Street past -- well, I won't mention the name of the restaurant -- which had had some kind of horrible bathroom malfunction and a giant vacuum truck was pumping out their septic tank or something.
It is public time in Jerusalem. With the warm weather everybody is out in the parks. Yesterday we celebrated Lev's birthday (a little late so that we could have a cake made from flour instead of Matzah meal). We did it in Gan HaPaamon (Liberty Bell Park) and it was packed. Mostly it was Palestinian/Arab-Israeli families who have a great culture of public barbeque picnics but there were a lot of Jewish teens out, too playing basketball and flirting and enjoying the warm (hot for Canadians) weather. There were sixteen-year-old girls on roller-blades looking very 'seventies, a pair of very put-together moms in hijabs, smoking a hukkah and blowing thick dragon-y plumes of smoke out their noses (I've never seen women smoking hukkah before). I saw the first Yiddish speaking Hasidic family I have come across in Jerusalem. We saw Japanese pilgrims. The park was just a great welter of people having a good time. Kids everywhere. We nearly lost a few but then the pizza came -- delivered to the park by our buddy from our local pizza store on a tus-tus -- and the kids all reconvened and we managed to hold on to them after that until everybody went home stuffed, filthy and high on sugar and fun.
Now, I have to go gear myself up for Benjy's questions about the Holocaust. We haven't ever talked to him about it because we always wanted his Jewish identity to be rooted in a sense of delight at being Jewish, not fear. It sort of crept up on us through school and he has been talking about it. He asked about relatives who were killed in the Holocaust and we told him that both of his grandmother's parents had been 'in the Holocaust' (How do you talk to a six year old about concentration camps. Or that his great grandparents wore tattoos for the rest of their lives? About how some people survived when others died and at what a terrible cost? How they didn't talk about what happened, ever?) I feel perfectly comfortable answering the questions about where do babies come from or about goldfish dying, but the question I am dreading is about the Shoah and it is "Why?"

Passover Reading

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been reading the Hobbit in Hebrew. Thanks to David M. and Noa for lending us their copy. It is great reading. I probably haven't read it since I was twelve and am thoroughly enjoying it. I am reading it once to myself and more slowly Benjy and I are reading it together translating into English. There are occasional passages which I don't get and certainly words in most sentences which are hard but can be gleaned from context. It works well in Hebrew since it gives so much of the story that ancient once-upon-a-time feel that Tolkein worked so hard to give the book, when they get to the Dark Wood they are plunged into a choshech-Mitsrayim, "Egyptian darkness". I am using the translation by Moshe haNami which is vocalized which makes the reading so much easier. Vowels in Hebrew are written as dots and lines under the letters (though I recently learned that there were other systems which had voewels over the letters). Like Arabic, Hebrew is often written without the vowel marks -whch cn mk rdng prtt hrd. But kids books are often vocalized. If it wasn't for that I might have gotten the translation which was done by a group of Israeli POWs in an Egyptian prison. They worked on their English and one of the projects they did to keep themselves from going stir crazy (they were in from, I think, '67 until 1973; they said they were the only Israelis who were happy to see that war had broken out in 73 because it meant they had a chance of getting exchanged). They got a copy of the Hobbit in a Red Cross package and worked in teams to translate it and apparently produced a really good translation (though un-vocalized).
I had forgotten a lot of the book and occasionally I wonder if the translator just dropped in his own random bits and pieces. The whole thing with Beorn the bear-man, don't remember that at all. At this time of year The Hobbit has special resonance beyond the plague of darkness, since the dwarves are on a sort of journey of historical recuperation, to undo their exile as it were. Tolkien, in his letters, wrote about his dwarves being similar to Jews "I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue.....". Of course the little, tribalistic, bearded dwarves are on that long journey back to their home-land because they want their gold back and some people accused him of being anti-Semitic. But he wrote a pretty sharp letter to a German company who wanted to make sure he wasn't Jewish before they published their translation of the Hobbit.
Bilbo strikes me this time around as a sort of Bertie Wooster figure, very proper and British, with a loathing of anything too out of the ordinary, very attached to his material comforts, nearly paralyzed at having left the house without his hat. The amount of time spent describing food in the book is certainly reminiscent of Wodehouse. Gandolf is Bilbo's Jeeves, pulling him out of tight spots at the last moment, never setting a foot wrong. It's sort of like Wooster and Jeeves accidentally ending up on trip to Israel with a dozen Belzer Hasidim where everything goes wrong, the wheels fall off the bus and the luggage all gets eaten by Orcs.
Maybe when I finish reading it, I will work on a translation into English so that non-Hebrew readers can finally enjoy this wonderful piece of literature.

Beautiful Benjy Art

Usually Ariela does the beautiful photography and I do the witty apercus about life in Israel, but she has broken that unwritten agreement with her extensive and very witty comments on her latest uploads, so I decided to upload some photos in retaliation. This is also convenient since we have been cleaning for passover and I haven't had any time to come up with any apercus. So here is an art work by Benjy; himself as capoeira-man. He had his belt ceremony the other day and tells anyone at the drop of a hat that he has a belt (yellow). I am also posting the picture that Ariela took of Lev all beat up and covered in ice-cream and pizza when we were on our way home from Mitzpe Ramon which Ariela refused to upload because she thought it might be evidence of child-abuse but which I think is evidence of a boy who had a good time.

Mitzpe Ramon

Schools here close down for a good week and a half before Passover so that the kids can help clean the house. With the kids home from school, we have done no cleaning but lots of entertaining our kids. We drove down to Mitzpe Ramon which overlooks the Ramon crater (where we saw the double rainbow when we drove through with Deb and Adriana last time). The boys had a good time. Both of them came home with various abrasions and contusions but Lev's were on his face so they were more visible. He fell once off the bunk-bed at the youth hostel and once in the wine storage cave in the ancient Nabatean city of Avdat. They ate nothing but pizza and ice cream for two days. Mitzpe Ramon is a strange place. It's pretty run down. The ibex wonder into town. Benjy loved that, seeing them as we walked back from the busted-up kids' park at the edge of town. Then they hop up on the wall at the canyon edge and over into space. Once, we came over a hill walking along the crater rim and saw this big mountain sheep not twenty feet away from us. He looked nonplussed. We were plussed.
For me one of the highlights of the trip was something that happened in the crater. We drove down and were going to hike but the boys were too tired, so I went off on a little explore by myself. I walked for ten or fifteen minutes seeing nothing but more of the same, wide open expanses of sand, rock and occasional scrubby bushes. Then I saw a big raptor flying ahead of me. There was one other way up and I assumed they were a mating pair. Then, he saw me and came over to take a look at me. He flew closer and closer until he was nearly overhead. I had stopped walking at this point and the absolute silence of the desert rushed in on me... it is startling this quiet, no bird calls, no bugs, no human sounds, just mile after mile of quiet, and I look up directly above and this lone hawk has flown into a cloud of enormous birds circling directly over me in the clear blue sky in these lazy overlapping helixes, maybe seventy five of them. The quiet and the blue and the dizzying quality of craning my neck made me feel like I was underwater and I was looking down at a school of sharks swimming beneath me. They were absolutely silent. There were two types, my raptor who had spotted me and got my attention and his kind which may have been a red hawks (Daih Aduma. The picture here is from the Israeli birding sight Moadon Tsiprut). They were big birds but the others were even larger. For a heartstopping moment I thought might be vultures because of their enormous wings and long necks. I knew that vultures wouldn't attack me but there was something about the idea of a swarm of fifty vultures thinking of me as carrion-to-be that really gave me pause. But vultures don't fly in big packs, they circle far apart and watch each other and only congregate on the ground. These were most likely some kind of migratory stork or crane. I have found no mention of them co-migrating with hawks. I remembered something that I read about the Gulag, about how when men escaped they would take a 'cow,' a fellow prisoner to eat on the way. I wondered if the hawks figure that traveling with a group of storks is a good way to get an easy meal if one of the storks founders. They circled for a while and then moved on and were replaced by another tower of birds and another. All completely quiet.
Benjy and I are reading The Hobbit in Hebrew. It is very fun. It took me a long time to figure out that the Shaydim -- which might roughly be translated as "demons" -- are the Orcs.

Magic Haggadah

My hair has been restored to something approaching normalcy. Eitan Avshalom did his thing and I am now shorn. Which leaves me with nothing to write about except birds and Hebrew. (Of the seven people who read this blog three of them are ardent Jewish bird fans -- the rest hope to get actual information about my life and family. This one is more for the Hebreo-Ornithologists in the crowd.)
I would be remiss if I did not take the period approaching Passover to address the best known Jewish birds since the dove and the raven of Noah. I am talking about those grotesque, playful half-bird, half-Jew illustrations in what is known as the Bird's Head Haggadah. I went to a talk on Shabbat by David Golinkin about illustrated Haggadahs. (The haggadah is the book which lays out all the rituals and stories of Passover and has been the focus of a lot of Jewish artistic energy over hundreds of years.) He spoke about, among others, the Bird's Head Haggadah which is visually fascinating both because it is so lively and also because it is so weird. It is the only Haggadah which depicts human beings with non-human, specifically, bird heads. Balanced on top of their little bearded bird heads are Jew's hats. (In Medieval times, principally in Europe, Jews were often required by law to wear distinctive clothing, the Jewish star being only one example). They caper, they play, they get bake matzah. They generally look pretty happy about being redeemed from bondage. The Bird's Head Haggadah is dated to 13th century Germany. It is -- as far as I understand -- the only illuminated Haggadah from that place and period -- so it is a little hard to know how typical the whole bird thing was of those Haggadahs. It is however the only surviving Medieval haggadah which uses the bird's head device.
So why'd they do it?
The standard explanation was that some zealot had the idea that it was not okay to draw the human face, especially in a religious context, because of the second commandment. There are a number of problems with this theory. For one, there ARE human faces in the Bird's Head Haggadah. The Egyptians, it seems were drawn with human faces, just not the Jews. Second, Jews had a long-established tradition of drawing human faces by the 13th C. and nobody ever seemed to mind before, so why all of a sudden get picky? Third, is it so much better to draw a bird than a human? If the concern is idolatry, certainly idolatry to a bird-headed idol is about as bad as idolatry to a human-headed idol?
Theory two. "They will soar on wings of eagles..." says the prophet Isaiah (40:31). The illustrator is making a visual quotation appropriate to the idea of God redeeming the Jewish people. This is possible, but -- and this I did not know before -- there were other illustrated Jewish books from the period of German Jewry which also have humans depicted with animal and bird faces in a variety of contexts; apparently there was a little boom in animal headed humans in German Jewish art of the 13th Century! These have no apparent correlation to the animal's Biblical iconography. What is known as the Ambrosian Bible has a picture of a variety of were-humans enjoying the Feast of the Righteous at the End of Days where God serves up the Leviathan and other mythical menu items. (The picture reminds me of those creepy cartoon advertisements of pigs happily eating hot-dogs). And something called the Tripartite Machzor has all the WOMEN depicted as animals (The illustration is of Catwoman Ruth talking to human headed Boaz). Curiouser and curiouser.
Theory three. It was magic. A fellow named Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger (and David Golinkin agreed with him) argued that the half-human half-animal motif is evidence of some kind of magic. It is unclear to me from reading the article whether the magic is being depicted in the illustrations (ie. at the time the Jews were taken out of Egypt the world was transformed and the Jew's odd appearance as birds at the time is a manifestation of that. An obvious problem with this theory is that the Jews in the Bird's Head Haggadah, like most haggadahs, are not all depicted at the time of leaving Egypt, but, as the illustration above shows, are also doing contemporary Passover stuff; baking Matzah). Or the illustrations themselves are supposed to have some magical property to them (ie. having a Haggadah with these half-Jew half-bird creatures in them will protect you against the evil eye or some other force subject to supernatural control). Or both.
Another explanation, which makes about as much sense as these three that I haven't seen anyone else put forward, is that there were a lot of bird- and animal-headed people walking around Germany in the 13th Century, so the illustrators were just drawing what they saw. Then it got better.
Whatever the Why of it, the birds heads show a healthy Medieval delight in the grotesque and bizarre. More than that, I always get a kick out of those images of the bird-Jew with his Jew hat which suggest to me a kuntz, a playful messing with the Medieval non-Jewish depiction of Jews as supernatural, uncanny, humans-but-not-quite, like he could have a thought bubble over his head saying, "If that's the state of humanity, I think I'd rather stay a bird, thanks."

The Goods

In response to my previous post (the Year of Men with Hair, see below) my friend Rob said that I needed to show what the situation really was... that I couldn't bitch and moan about my hair and not come through with the goods. Well here it is. 45 lbs of hair standing perpendicular to the surface of my head. Fraggle, n'est pas?

The Year of Men with Hair

(The author has planted a cute story about Benjy in here somewhere in order to entice you to read his ramblings about life. Ed.)
I am currently walking around with a big mop of hair that is weighing me down physically and psychically. I keep saying I am going to get a cut and then not following through. Now that it is so big, my hair will require weeks in the barber's chair once I get there and the thought of all that time spent wearing the funny plastic apron and making inane chit-chat (in Hebrew) with a person who is touching my head (!) makes me defer and it just gets bigger.
This is the story of my life. Towit -- my neuroses (aversion to chit-chat, fear of being judged for having let my hair get too long, hating to make appointments, not liking having my head touched by people outside my family) makes a bad situation worse till I am left with Tina Turner hair.
Then I saw a picture of Bernie Madoff being marched into court the other day and I thought "Look at that hair. Look at those sable curls. I wish I had ten million dollars so I could give it to him to invest for me." The other issue with getting my hair cut is that after all that time wearing the plastic apron of shame, I end up with a standard short-on-the-sides-little-longer-on-top haircut because that's the only haircut a short, Jewish guy can get away with... unless you're Bernie Madoff (I don't know how tall he is but I'm guessing from the pictures he's not more than 5'8"). That guy has money hair, hair that both cost a lot to coif and hair that makes you think it's a good idea to give him your retirement fund. "If I give him my last penny, one day I will have hair like that." And the magic is even more powerful for the tribe of Hebrew elves of which I am a charter member who generally have such a hard time pulling off any 'do longer than two inches without looking like fraggles. They should indict his stylist as a co-conspirator because he would never have gotten away with any of it if he'd gone to Eitan Avshalom for the 65 shekel off the rack Jewish short guy haircut. Even with a blow dry.
By contrast, consider Rod Blagojevich, former governor of Illinois soon to be guest of the state in a whole different capacity. That guy has hair that screams guilty. Federal wiretaps? Save your money! Look at his hair. That is guilty man's hair. Guilty of what? I don't care, he did it.

I am feeling less regretful than in my previous post, butbut still want to share a piece of poetry that I found in a book called 'Company C' by Haim Watzman (who is a neighbour of ours here in Talpiyot, though I haven't met him).
He quotes a poem called "Regret" by Sharon Dolin
"Owl-necked looking back
to where you might have been
or what you should have done."
Don't know how, when thinking about regret and owls, I could have failed to make the connection to those amazing necks. Sorry. I regret the oversight.

Finally, since I have been told I don't include enough family news, we went over to friends for apple pie and Benjy told our friend Michael that he had read a whole Curious George book himself. Michael said, "Wait. Is it the one where George is curious and his curiosity gets him in trouble but eventually it all turns out okay?" To which Benjy replied, "They're all like that."

The Owl of Minerva

Hi everybody; I am having a hard time blogging. I have been working on my fiction since we came back and for some reason I cannot contend with an imaginary world and this one at the same time (I can hardly contend with this one at the best of times, part of why I enjoy escaping into made up worlds so much). It is a weird time right now because we still have 3 months to go. It isn't time to pack our bags yet but it feels like things are winding down. Passover is soon, with a big break from school for the boys and then we will be both feet on the slippery slope to return. My feelings are mixed. I miss Montreal tremendously these days but I also feel like I have squandered my year here. I feel regret. Regret is the cruel cousin of wisdom.
I thought I would give you a bird related update that fits with my mood. I saw what I think was an owl the other night on our street, at the other end, near the Scout's building over by the open field behind the gas-station. I was walking in the dark and a big grey bird swooped past. Could have been a crow (the crows here in Jerusalem are grey crows, with grey wings) This looked bigger than a crow and was flying in the dark. What most made me think it was an owl was how quiet its flight was. That could have been an illusion of eye and ear, but like I said this was big bird and it flew past me about twenty five feet ahead, pretty fast without a whisper of sound. Owls have specialized feathers that make them silent fliers and of course they are night birds -- hence one of their Hebrew names, "Lilith." Lilith of course is also the name the Rabbis gave to Adam's first wife, the one the Bible doesn't tell us about, a sort of succubus figure, a woman demon. (Among the creatures produced from this liaison was a sort of proto-Michigan J Frog -- the cartoon frog who sings and dances but never when anyone is around. In brief, R. Haninah goes to the market and buys a dish, in the dish is a cute frog which does tricks. He is very kind to the frog, but the frog grows and grows to enormous proportions and eventually eats him out of house and home. Finally the the frog talks and says, "I'll reward you what do you want." R. Haninah says teach me all of Torah and the seventy languages of the world beside. The frog complies. The frog says to Mrs. Rabbi Haninah, "You were nice to me too, I'll reward you, too." He takes the Haninahs out to the woods and commands all the animals to bring precious gems. Then he reveals himself as the son of Adam and Lilith.)
The rabbis got the idea of the demonic Lilith from the ambiguous use of the word (I believe it is what is technically called a hepax legomenon, the lone surviving use of a word) in the ornithological cornucopia of the prophet Isaiah 34:11-15 (for those not into the the wrathful deity you may want to skip this bit)
Isaiah is generally foreseeing bad stuff for the kingdom of Edom, than he goes all avian...

34:11 Wild birds of night shall possess it (It is generally agreed that Kaat and Kipod here refer to some birds, perhaps -- and this seems really speculative-- the marabout and the bittern respectively. A kipod is a hedgehog in modern Israeli Hebrew... flying hedgehogs, go know) the owl (yanshuf) and the raven will settle in it. HE will stretch out over her the measuring line of chaos and the plumb line of emptiness.

34:12 Her nobles will have nothing left to call a kingdom and all her officials will disappear.

34:13 Her fortresses will be overgrown with thorns; thickets and weeds will grow in her fortified cities. Jackals will settle there; ostriches (banot yanah) will live there.

34:14 Wild animals and wild dogs/jackals will congregate there; wild goats (se'ir: for some reason the Koren Tanach wants se'ir to be a Scops owl, but they also want the banot yanah/ostriches above to be owls so I can only conclude that somebody was a little owl-crazy) will call to one another. Yes, lilith will rest there and make for itself/herself a nest. (The Koren Tanach goes so far as to call the lilith a Tawny Owl)

34:15 Owls (kipoz, I have no idea why they think a kipoz is an owl, the Koren Bible even has Great Owl) will make nests and lay eggs there; they will hatch them and protect them. Yes, hawks will gather there, each with its mate.

So that is a possible five different words for owl if you include the ostriches; yanshuf, bat yonah, se'ir, lilith, and kipoz. (That doesn't include kos from Leviticus which is generally translated as "Little Owl"). The point seems to be that having owls nesting in the ruins of your kingdom is a bad thing. Owls were a symbol of desolation.

Of course, the Greeks, on the other hand, liked owls. Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, is symbolized by an owl. The college which Ariela and I attended and where she teaches has Athena's Owl as its emblem. I remember we were pointed there to Nietzche's saying "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk," meaning -- I suppose -- that wisdom always comes too late, hence, regret as the cruel cousin of wisdom, wisdom and ruin together.

Nevertheless, I feel better for having written this (and using hepax legomenon and Michigan J Frog in the same post). Now back to the fiction.

Egret Tree

Just a quick PS regarding birds on our trip. We saw some kingfishers on the Red Sea fluttering over the water waiting for fish. We also saw something that looked very much like a loon in the ocean at Caesaria. That surprised me because I think of them as being northern birds. I can't find anything even remotely close to a loon in my Israel bird guide. By far the most impressive birds we saw were on our way to Pardes Hanah to visit David and Ronni. There were Vs of migrating birds, big birds that looked like herons or egrets. It was hard to get a good look at them when they were flying but when we were driving around Pardes Hana we saw trees full of dozens and dozens of huge, white birds as if they had grown there. They would all perch on one tree and leave another totally birdless. I think they were egrets. The Little Egret -- Livnit Ketana -- has a plume which I didn't see on any of the birds I spotted. The other egret that is identified in my Israeli bird guide is the Great Egret -- Livnit Gedolah -- not sure if that's what we were seeing.
Not sure what it means but it seems clear that this is some kind of omen about the coalition negotiations here in Israel where Tsipi (her full name is Tsipora which = Bird) Livni is busy laying out terms for her party's participation in the government.

The Big Adventure

After enduring a dust storm -- less dramatic than a sand storm, makes you sneeze a lot -- and pouring rain, we decided that it was time to get out of Jerusalem for a little. Friends from Montreal were visiting so we rented a van and drove South. The rain was so bad we were scared to go by the Jericho--Dead Sea route, so instead we drove West for an hour or so and stopped at Beit Guvrin in the south western end of the Judean mountains, during a break in the rain. It was great, very green and lots of things were flowering. There are giant limestone caves, scary dark tunnels and -- because of the rain -- lots of sticky mud, so the boys had a blast and got filthy. It was just the first in a series of dirt-stompings that Avis's car got from us, by the time we finished, it was filthy (I did sweep it out a little, out of shame, before taking it back). We drove south into the desert through driving rain. The wadis were jumping their banks and washing out the roads, but we drove through with the kids screaming happily/terrified in the back as the water splashed the windows. One of these wash outs in particular had a lot of steam to it. I watched as a big tour bus went through, pulling towards the edge of the road as the water pressed against it. But they made it and I figured we could too. We reached Machtesh Ramon as the storm was abating and saw a rainbow that stretched from one end of the crater to the other. Everyone had to get out and see it from horizon to horizon. The red earth of machtesh ramon got brought back into the van in giant wads, so we had a sort of red/white colour scheme on the upholstery. From about there it was a straight shot down to Eilat. There it was warm and lovely and we spent two and half days camel-riding, snorkeling with dolphins, and under-water-observatorying. We went to Timna, about an hour out of Eilat which was dry by then, though there was a lot of collecting of rocks so the back seat became sprinkled with beautiful pebbles as well. Timna is like being on Mars , red and black and white sand, and then in the middle of it you find little bright green-blue stones which are malachite (I think). It is a mineral with copper in it. There are ancient copper mines at Timna (more crazy tunnels for crawling through). We had a long discussion about copper mining. Our friend Adriana asked how did first person look at this blue rock and say let's make metal out of it? You can't get copper out of malachite or the other common ores it is found in with a camp fire, it isn't hot enough. If I read right, copper was the first metal to be smelted, or extracted by heat from ore. While people probably used gold and iron before copper they just used what they found or mined. So why even try putting rocks in a hot fire to extract metal? The possible answer according to Wikipedia is pretty interesting. Colourful minerals were often used for painting pottery, the blue green colour probably appealed to some potter who painted a clay pot with it and put it in a kiln. When he opened up the kiln the pot would have smashed but the heat would have burned off all the other stuff in the malachite and left behind a few drops of pure copper. Copper goes into bronze, which was a huge technological advance. The Philistines had a monopoly on the working of bronze and made a point of not sharpening or repairing bronze implements of the Israelites when they were at war, a detail recorded in the story of Samson.
We swung back up by the Dead Sea and everyone went for a dip under the moon since it was nearly night by the time we got there. Lev got Dead Sea water in his eyes and I raced to rinse him off. There was a coke bottle sitting by the shore with water in it and I ran over to splash it in Lev's face. At the last minute I decided to take a swig just to make sure it was fresh water and got a big mouth full of Dead Sea water. In case you ever wondered it is really blechy. So I ran spluttering and choking over to the shower and dipped Lev's eyes and my mouth.
Now we are back and enjoying Purim which is weird in Jerusalem since it is two days, unlike most other places and you don't really do anything special on the first day except bake hamentaschen.