The Bats of Zion

We all went out for pizza last night. Benjy had his capoeira class, we went to the library and then headed over to Bethlehem street loaded down with Asterix (in Hebrew and French -- apparently the English library volunteers don't believe in Asterix or Tintin). This was sort of a celebration of a return to normalcy after the boys being so sick. It was a lovely evening sort of late spring early summer type weather back in Montreal (we are supposed to be getting more rain and cold weather over the weekend). The sky was just turning pink and dark blue when I saw what I thought ate first were alpine swifts flittering high in the sky, and chirupping madly. Then it occurred to me that they might very well be bats. Now I am pretty sure that that's what they were. I am generally well inclined towards bats. Atalef, the word for bat, is one of the first Hebrew words we learned on this trip as a family from a kindly volunteer at the Jerusalem zoo. It is listed in the Torah as one of the flying creatures that you are not allowed to eat, so has the honour, unique as far as I know of, of being doubly prohibited, since it is also a mammal which doesn't have a cloven hoof and doesn't ruminate.
I'm not sure if I mentioned it but when we went to Caesaria on the Mediteranean coast, we saw a series of old Roman/Herodian vaults, once cellars for a long-vanished building that stood atop them. In the third of these vaults, the one closest to the ruins of the Crusader castle, there is a bat colony. I took each of the boys inside to take a closer look. They are definitely otherworldy creatures and while I was fascinated -- a feeling I tried to share with the boys -- I also was a little freaked out -- a feeling I did my best to hide. The bats last night weren't at all scary since they were so small and fragile looking though their flight looks kind of clumsy and hurried.
An addendum to my previous post about Amos Oz and the various ways that one might express pride in Hebrew. In Yiddish, naches is a word often used for something like pride. Naches comes from the Hebrew nachat, which means something like satisfaction. In the very first essay of the book (Here and There in the Land of Israel, Fall 1982) Oz goes to the neighbourhood where he grew up, near Meah Shaarim, which is now called Geula. It is now an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood. He chats with a representative of one of the local schools, about, among other things, Zionism. The man tells him the state of Israel is "goyische naches." There is a real irony to this phrase in the context of nationalism. The speaker means Gentile pride or satisfaction, or less kindly, the stupid things that non-Jews value which Jews are, supposedly, too sensible to race after. The irony rests in the fact that goyishe literally means 'of the nations.'
I found it funny to discover that Oz, who is so disdainful of the ultra-Orthodox, uses the same phrase (almost exactly) later in the book when he is addressing a group of West Bank settlers. He says that while he is a Zionist, he sees the state of Israel as an instrument, not an end in itself and as far as he is concerned feelings of patriotism stirred by the flag, the passport or the army are "goyim naches" (I am not sure about the difference between goysiche naches and goyim naches). Of course the irony is that Oz's vision is a pretty humanistic one (for an ardent nationalist...)

(My Translation)
"Here is the place for my first little confession.... I think that the nation-state is a vessel or a tool, that it is necessary for the 'settlement of Zion'. But I don't love this tool. The idea of the nation state is in my eyes 'goyim naches' (Gentile pride). I would have been happy to live in the world in which there are several tens of civilizations developing according to their own rhythms. With mutual respect but with no nation-states: no flag, no symbol, no passport, no anthem, nothing, just spiritual civilizations, each one connected with its land, without the 'instrument of state' and without the 'instrument of weapons'.
"But the Jewish people already did a solo performance like that, a very long one. The viewing public, the world, gave us a big hand, sometimes threw rocks and even tried to kill the actor. Nobody was interested in the model that Jews tried to set up for two thousand years, the model of a civilization without the 'instrument of state'. For me, that drama ended with the murder of European Jewry by Hitler. I am willing to play the 'game of the nations' with all the instruments of a state even if that means that I will end up feeling -- in George Steiner's phrase -- like an old man in a play-ground. Playing with a symbol and a flag and a passport and an army and even war, are allowed in the case of existential necessity. I accept these as "rules of the game" since going on without the 'instrument of the state' put us in danger of our lives. For sure. But to admire the instruments of state? To revere these toys? To go crazy over them? Not me. And if we wield the instruments of the state including its deadly power, we need to act not just with loyalty but with wisdom. I would say without loyalty. Only with wisdom. And with caution. Since nationalism itself is, in my eyes, the great curse of humanity."
This last forms a nice corrective to Israel Beitenu's demands of loyalty to the state, and the ideology that underpin them, in the recent elections.

Sick kids and Kalaniyot

We are on day six thousand four hundred and twenty seven of home with the kids sick. First it was Benjy, for while it was Benjy and Lev, now it is just Lev. It is starting to lose its charm. Lev is up all night every night coughing. I don't think I have ever seen him so sick and it is breaking my heart. Fever, bad cough, listless... I really thought we might have to take him to the emergency room last night. This AM Ariela took him to the doctor who said I've seen fifty kids like this today. Take him home and give him an expectorant, bring him back in a few days if he's not feeling better, which made me glad we didn't shlepp to the hospital and wait four or five hours to be told the same thing. He is asleep now and so I am writing in the little break since my brain isn't up to much more.
I went out for a walk yesterday to try to regain my sanity (I know, it would have taken more than a walk even before the last week and a half) and made it about half way to Bethlehem. I went to the outer reaches of Kibbutz Ramat Rachel. Ramat Rachel changed hands three times in the war of Independence, between the Jordanians and the Israelis. There are still trenches and bunkers cut in the rocks out there. Now it is like a funny little suburb of Jerusalem at the southernmost tip of the city and from the south eastern tip you can see Bethlehem in the West Bank. It is funny how close everything is here. I walked in the woods there. It si a beautiful pine forest. I was hoping to find old coins. My friend David told me that after a big rain is a good time to find antique coins, but I didn't see any. There is a lot of garbage out there. It seems to be a favorite dumping ground, which is kind of a shame. I saw a spot where somebody had taken maybe forty old cell-phones and smashed them, and left the cases. I guess there is some sort of cell phone chop shop type business where you take out components and resell them. At any rate I also saw a few red kalaniyot coming into flower. Kalaniyot have a sort of mythic place in Israeli history. Natan Alterman one of the most popular poets of pre-state Israel wrote a poem called Kalaniyot which became a popular song...

Night comes, the sunset burns
I dream, the visions of my eyes
A small, young girl comes
And Kalaniyot, in flame, consume the valley...
My (probably pretty poor) translation of the first few lines.

כלניות / נתן אלתרמן

הערב בא, שקיעה בהר יוקדת
אני חולמת ורואות עיני:
הגיאה נערה קטנה יורדת
ובאש כלניות לוהט הגיא.

Though the flowers come in many shades, the classic is red and the berrets of the British soldiers during the period of the British mandate were red so the soldiers became known as kalaniyot. I don't know if Alterman meant that when he wrote the poem but there is a story that members of the underground Jewish resistance/terror (take your pick) organizations the lechi and the etzel would sing the song when British soldiers came near to alert one another.
A kalanit is an anemone, anemone coronaria, which I always thought was a poppy. It looks like a poppy to me, while an anemone I think of as something much bigger and floppier, though true poppies go by the latin name papaver, so don't try cooking up opium from kalaniot, it won't do you any good.
I wonder whether the Alterman poem or the use of the name Kalaniyot generally was connected at all to the famous English poppy poem which linked soldiers and the flowers "In Flanders Fields" (written by Canadian John McCrae. Incidentally, the last verse which I either never knew or had fogotten, changes the meaning of the poem from anti war to pretty blood-thirsty
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields. A sentiment worthy of this part of the world in 2009.)

Kalaniot are native to this part of the world but I can't find them in Marcus Jastrow's dictionary of Rabbinic Hebrew nor in a search for the word in the bible so I am guessing it is a modern hebrew coinage, perhaps courtesy of Amos Oz's great uncle Joseph. People make a day of going to see the kalaniot in Israel in places where they bloom, like fire in a valley.

Birds imitate life.

There are a lot of blackbirds around these days or maybe I am just noticing them more. They are unremarkable looking but they have a beautiful song and the last few mornings as I walk with one or the other of the boys, I hear them whistling happy away. Benjy and I heard them this morning. I told him that the Hebrew name is Shacharur and we talked about whether the word comes from Shachor - black or from Shachar, morning. Probably both. It isn't a Biblical name nor is it Rabbinic as far as I can tell. Another possible origin is shachrur: freedom or independence. (As in Gan haShachrur, Independence Park where I saw the Hoopoe in my last posting). Some bright light of the Hebrew renaissance probably put all those things together and came up with the name for the blackbird (which is certainly nicer than Turdus merula, the latin name). Or maybe shacharur is from Arabic and has nothing to do with morning or black or freedom.
Anyway blackbirds are big news, here. HaAretz had a piece today about how urban birds are adapting to city life.
"There is a blackbird in Jerusalem's Sacher Park that imitates the whistle sounds men make at girls, and has simply incorporated those sounds into his regular songs," says Amir Balaban, of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, noting that girls even turn their heads at the blackbirds' whistle. (That's Amir from the bird observatory of a previous post, by the way).
So I went down to Sacher park -- which is right next door to the Kenesset -- to see if I could find the sexual-harrassing Shacharur. I didn't, but I did hear a blackbird chirping "I won't join your coalition unless you make me minister of the interior, and I don't care how many indictments there are against me." I even turned around and looked.
Finally, as I have mentioned, I am reading Amos Oz's "A Tale of Love and Darkness." He talks a lot about his great uncle Joseph Klausner who lived a few blocks away from here (In a funny passage Oz talks about how S.Y. Agnon and Uncle Joseph were life-long enemies living on the same street. Klausner died before Agnon won the Nobel prize for Literature, thereby sticking it to Agnon twice, once because Agnon couldn't flaunt his success, and the second time because the city named the street -- where Agnon continued to live for the rest of his life -- Klausner street). Anyway, Oz tells of his admiration for Klausner's having minted several new Hebrew words, including 'shirt' and 'pencil', how as a writer you can write books and they will get read until some better book comes along but making a new word is a whole other order of impact. One of the Hebrew words in the list that great Uncle Joseph was responsible for is "crane." That jumped out at me because I had noticed that -- just like in English -- the word for crane comes from the bird; they are both 'agur.
I'll see if I can spot any cranes of either variety the next time I am up on Klausner street and promise to listen attentively and report back any thoughts they share on language or politics or picking up girls.

Election day was a day off for the boys so we went out to the Tayelet and looked at the Old City wrapped in mist. We walked all the way around the Hill of Evil Counsel where the British Governor's residence was during the mandate period and where the UN observers post has been ever since, crossing over from West Jerusalem to East and back again, something we may not be able to do the next time we come. A lot of Amos Oz's book "the Hill of Evil Counsel" takes place in the governor's residence. The mother of the young boy, wife to the veterinarian, gets swept off her feet by a handsome British general. That's what I though about most when I was out there, among the big pine trees(that and the story of Saul and David which we ended up telling collectively as we walked, with many silly interpolations by all concerned especially when we told the story of Goliath and with added details about his halitosis, his taunting of the Israelites by mooning them etc.). In "The Hill of Evil Counsel" the young boy's beautiful, ethereal mother wanders off with the general into the gardens that we walked past. I read that book in the easy Hebrew version right before we came and it gave me the hankering to read modern Israeli literature which has driven my Hebrew reading kick this year... I am reading Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness, (in English) a memoir which I am actually finding pretty dry, though it gives a lot of interesting stories about his life as a boy in Jerusalem. I didn't know that his own mother committed suicide.
By the time we headed back into West Jerusalem it was getting windy and looked like rain. We went to Waffle Bar on Derech Bethlehem street. The boys ordered waffles which were as big as them and came with ice cream and whip cream and we all thoroughly enjoyed stuffing ourselves. There was barely any indication that it was election day as we walked around the city. It was so different from the municipal elections where our street corner was a battleground between different candidates's teams.
Benjy has a cold. He stayed home Friday and couldn't go to shul on Shabbat so I had to take his place in the Parsha players (about once a month they stage a little sketch about the weekly reading from the bible, kids and adults participate... it is cute, but a lot cuter to watch than to participate in). Anyway I was Israelite #3. I had one line. "Hishtagata!?" Have you (masculine, singular) gone crazy?!
This is a good Hebrew phrase to know, since it is appropriate to so many circumstances here. Use it in conversation today.

Pride and prejudice

I learned a funny Hebrew factlet from reading Amos Oz's “Here and there in the land of Israel, Autumn 1982”. I came across a word I didn't know, which happens about five times a minute but this a word I couldn't quite get from the context and I was curious about it. In the book, Amos Oz is going around the country asking people what they think about the future of the country and the occupied territories. It is right at the end of the Lebanon war (the first Lebanon war). Menachem Begin is still Prime Minister. Huge demonstrations have taken place calling for his resignation. I guess it is as the revelations about Sabra and Shatilla are coming out. Anyway, Amos Oz goes to Bet Shemesh, which is today a bedroom community of Jerusalem. In 1982 it was divided, as he describes it, between the new city, which was suburban and Ashkenazi and old Bet Shemesh which is Sephardi, largely Moroccan, and, until recently, quite poor. This is hardcore Begin country. Apparently, a little while before he visited, Shimon Peres had been shouted down at a town-hall meeting there and ended up calling the hecklers “birionim” “thugs” which confirmed all of Bet Shemesh's suspicions that Peres was a prejudiced, effete, Ashkenazi, elitist. Anyway, not long after that along comes Amos Oz, this Ashkenazi, (former) kibbutznik, lefty (at the time) activist writer. And he plunks himself down at a cafe. Somebody recognizes him and pretty soon he's got thirty guys around him telling him “Write this down...” “Tell your friends in the media this....” “Your problem is...” “You should thank God for Begin, get down on your knees and kiss his feet...” “When my parents came from Morocco, you people made them clean toilets...” “Yossi, get the man another soda, and some bourekas...” Anyway, at one point one of the guys says to him, “If you want to fix what you did to us, you need to come and ask for forgiveness, but without 'shachatsanut', forget the 'shachatsanut'.”

It seemed odd to me because the sense seemed to mean 'pride', but Hebrew has a very good word for pride: “gavah”. I remember once at this very religious school I used the term gavah, in its yiddish pronunciation “gayvah” and asked the kids what that meant and one boy, a round little kid with glasses, did a funny stretch of his neck, stuck his nose in the air and said in his snootiest voice, “haughtiness.”

Anyway, I was sitting reading Amos Oz at the Matnas in Baka, the community centre while Benjy was at his Caipoera class. I turned to a lady sitting near me and I said, “What is shachatzanut?”

She said “It's to say that you're better than someone or that you think you're so great.”

“Like 'gavah'?” I asked.

She said, “Well it comes from 'gavah.' But it's negative.”

Then I realized what the issue was. I had even seen it without realizing it in Oz's book, which is in some sense about pride. Gavah, pride in any pre-modern Jewish context is, (I think. Feel free to correct me) always negative. Its opposite is humility which is viewed as a tremendously positive attribute most embodied by no less a figure than Moses. There is no such thing in Jewish religious thought as -- and so no semantic expression for – pride as a positive or even neutral quality. But when Hebrew became a language of daily use again in the context of national revival and Jews wanted to express feelings of positive pride, which they most certainly did, they used gavah, stripping it of its negative connotation (maybe even as a finger in the eye of a religious world-view that saw all pride as a negative). So when people want to say to Amos Oz that they felt proud when Israel won the Six-Day War, or that leftists lack pride in the country, or that Begin restored the pride of the Sephardim, they say “gavah” or something derived from it. But that shift leaves Israeli Hebrew speakers with the problem of how to express negative pride, haughtiness.

Shachatz, the most stripped down form of shachatzanut, seems to have been used mostly in the Jerusalem Talmud and it meant something like a character flaw. Since pridefulness was such a central fault in Jewish religious thinking, the two became identified. “That person has a character flaw,” was understood to mean, “that person is proud.”

There's a joke about a rabbi and a cantor on Yom Kippur in the synagogue. First the Cantor goes before the congregation and turns to the ark where the Torah is kept and cries out in a loud voice, “Oh Lord, forgive me for I am as nothing in your sight” The rabbi, then gets up stands before the ark and says, “Oh Lord forgive me for I am as nothing in your sight.” Yankle Yossef, the butcher is genuinely moved. He runs up to the ark and cries out, “Lord, forgive me for I am as nothing in your sight.” The rabbi turns to the cantor and says, “Oh, ho! Look who thinks he's nothing!”

It is warm here, unseasonably so according to people who live here. Daffodils are flowering. The cyclamens – which I still can't believe actually flower wild anywhere are almost done and as per the song the almond trees are flowering. Pretty much like Montreal.

The Arab-Israeli conflict as seen by Chuck Jones, Birds and What I'm Reading

My mother called me up the other day and said “What happened to your blog?” I was amazed that anyone noticed that I hadn't updated it. Then she told me that “all her friends” were reading it, too and were very worried about me. For a writer there is no better prod to writing than having a reader or (ptu, ptu, ptu, ken ein haorah) several, so with my vanity stoked I am back.

I will tell you – Mother and mother's friends, and anyone else who happens along – that the reason I wasn't writing is because I just couldn't write about politics because of the ahhhhhh!!! $%@^#*!!!! -factor and I couldn't not write about politics.

I was sitting with the boys watching Road Runner the other day. As the coyote prepared to drop an Acme mail-order anvil on the roadrunner's head which everyone in the world except him knows is going to squash him not the roadrunner, I found myself asking “Are the Palestinians the roadrunner or the coyote? Who are the Israelis?”

This explains why or maybe how it is that people here end up ignoring politics when it is so important; If you think about it at all you have to think about it all the time and if you do that you are on the slippery slope to becoming a politician. Before the ink is dry on your nomination papers you are taking greasy shopping bags full of cash from a shadowy Miami billionaire... and Klong!!!! That anvil you dropped before just whacked you on the head.

Bird update: I have recently seen a Syrian woodpecker, a noisy family of jays and my first hoopoe. The hoopoe was over in Mamilla, where there are these weird old houses just west of Gan Haatzmaut. They are really run-down and it is funny to come upon what looks like the left-overs of a little Arab village across the street from the Sochnut building, the Jerusalem Sheraton and the Great Synagogue. Anyway, I heard him before I saw him and followed the sound to a dead tree where he was sitting sounding very much like an owl in the day time... whoo whoo, whoo whoo. He is called a duchifat in Hebrew which is a biblical name from the list of birds considered unclean for eating in Leviticus 11. He is the national bird as recently chosen by popular vote. Like all politicians he looks just the same in person as he does in pictures. A friend pointed out to me that all the candidate birds are non-migratory, so sojourners like us are out of the running. She works at the Arab-Jewish school in Pat and she said that when the contest was running all her Palestinian students were voting for the Palestine Sunbird because it had Palestine in its name – (in English and Arabic, not in Hebrew where it is called – I think -- the tsufit).

I am now very close to having seen all the birds on the list of candidates. I still have to see an Egyptian vulture who I mentioned in previous posts, I think. There are no roadrunners in Israel at least outside of cartoons and politics so they did not make the list.

PS. A shout out to Sam Fraser in Nova Scotia if he is reading... I took a break from Israeli writers and read “The Tombs of Atuan” and some of “The Wizard of Earthsea” in Hebrew. You see that I am susceptible to commanding booksellers.

I am now making my way – slowly -- through a book of essays by Amos Oz, the Hebrew title of which is “Here and there in the land of Israel in fall of 1982” but which I think is the same as “Amos Oz In the Land of Israel” in English. On the Hebrew difficulty scale, I would give it a 7. The reportorial style makes it easier than a novel. I also read Canadian Edeet Revel's “The Ten Thousand Lovers” which was pretty good and is set largely in Jerusalem which made it extra fun, though it is certainly not a book to give your brain a rest from the idiocy-loop of Israel/Palestine.