the deep bath

starry night

2010-01-20T17:51:00.000-08:00

It has been unseasonably warm. I came to Montreal because I wanted cold and sunny and this has been the grayest winter in history so far, and everyone is walking around talking about how nice it is that its warm. Tonight though the clouds broke and the stars are out. Usually that means it's colder than an assdiggers grave. The wind of skating blows right through your clothes so that you look down at your legs asking, "Did I forget to put on pants?" But tonight it was minus two or three, and those pretty stars watching the hockey a million miles below, approvingly. The ice is the shits but what can you expect when we've been having warm days? I watched some of the guys, how they handled the puck. A couple could do this thing where they would turn their wrists so that the blade of the stick momentarily looked ductile, as if it had gone from being a 10 degree curve to a 180 degree curve, a perfect puck-shaped hook, and then had sprung back all in a second. I watched how the guys who know how to play take an all encompassing look around the ice just before they get to the puck so that they know where they want to pass to and swore to0 myself that I would do that the next time I was going into the boards to retrieve the puck and then failed to do so. A dozen times. It is a lot easier to do, if, like the good players you are working in Matrix time. I feel like the poor bullets which Keanu Reeves can just dodge like they're moving through water.
The other day, back when the cold was hard, I saw someone out skating at 7:15 one morning all alone. If you're reading this; way to go.

A worthy topic

2009-12-31T12:48:00.000-08:00

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

2009-06-15T04:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-10T23:58:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-08T23:20:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-23T23:29:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-19T09:27:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-18T06:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-12T02:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-07T07:18:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-23T22:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-21T00:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-14T00:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-07T04:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-04T10:45:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-28T23:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-23T11:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-22T23:57:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-03-18T00:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-10T07:16:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-10T02:30:00.000-07:00

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.

The Bats of Zion

2009-02-26T00:59:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-23T00:41:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-19T02:20:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-13T04:55:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-05T08:20:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-03T03:49:00.000-08:00

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.

War is ... like ... so stoopid

2009-01-09T00:56:00.000-08:00

War is stupid. That is, it is a bad way to solve human problems. It also makes you stupid, the closer you are to it, physically, emotionally. When you are near to a war you start saying things to yourself like "War is stupid" which is, itself, a stupid thing to think. Of course war is stupid! you say in response to yourself as you walk down the street muttering, shlepping seven bags of groceries from the SuperDealSolde as you carry on all sides of a stupid, inchoate argument about stupid, stupid war, in your head. Ariela says that she gets to the point of saying "Rrrrr" a lot these days.
The impossibility of writing something not-stupid about War (when written with a capital letter please imagine the word pronounced in all its stupid significance) has prevented me from writing at all since the outbreak of The War. I have felt too stupid to say anything useful about this War, what The War means, or War-In-General and of course it seems vulgar to write about other things when there is a War going on, so I have put all my effort into writing fiction. War is the context we give to the times when we go ahead and do what we know we shouldn't do -- try to kill other people. "Please don't kill me," you say, "I just bought all these groceries at Supersoldedeal. And besides it is wrong to kill somebody, everyone knows that." "Oh, but it's war..." "Oh, well okay then. Maybe you'll rape and pillage as well?" "Well, it is War, maybe I cheat on my taxes too, hee hee."
There are so many examples of how War en-stupid-itates people. Here is one example that got me. I read in an email that the tenor of the Anti-War rally in Montreal was really anti-semitic. I was curious so I went on Youtube to see video clips. I didn't see anything particularly anti-semitic but I did hear some pretty explicit anti-intelligence, to wit people chanting, "No Justice, No Peace." That floored me. I wondered who exactly these people thought they were representing, or supporting, or whatever. No Justice, No Peace?! Is that supposed to be a pro-Gaza chant?! Do these people want more war for Gaza?! More one ton bombs?! That'll teach those Zionist running dogs a thing or two about justice. Do these demonstrators want more cluster bombs and artillery shells dropped on the Gazans they are purportedly supporting?! Maybe they want more mortars and katushas shot at Israel? I don't think so, but even if they hate Israel and Israelis enough to want that, they can't like what it brings. At the very least they ought to come and launch the mortars themselves so the brave freedom-fighters of Gaza can have a smoke break between shelling Israeli civilian targets. "No Justice, No Peace" could be the marketing catch-phrase for War itself. Of course, you can't really blame the yahoos who were chanting this; It's War and War is when people's brains stop working. When stupidity reins.
"Open the gates of cluelessness, and unleash the dogs of dumb." That's Shakespeare, Stupid, in case you didn't know!

I miss mullets

2008-12-17T03:23:00.000-08:00

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

Absalom, Absalom Hairstylists

2008-12-13T21:27:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playing hookie at the deepest hypersaline lake in the world

2008-12-03T08:14:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

$24 Billion for Wexler Freedman and more Bethlehem

2008-11-28T04:28:00.000-08:00

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

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

Bird Notes and Bethlehem

2008-11-23T01:40:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quick bird notes.

2008-11-09T06:26:00.001-08:00

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

The Cleavage of Jerusalem, Praying for Jasham

2008-11-04T22:46:00.000-08:00

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

Charlie and the Great Glass Election Campaign

2008-10-28T11:56:00.000-07:00

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

Grand Canyon in Tel Aviv

2008-10-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

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

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

Neil Young performs at the Begin Centre

2008-10-15T23:11:00.001-07:00

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

Yom Kippur and beyond

2008-10-13T00:46:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hummingbirds Roasted in Olive Oil

2008-10-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

2008-10-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

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

Quill, Bee Eater and Acorn Art

2008-09-29T02:48:00.000-07:00

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

The Burning Bush: Final Chapter

2008-09-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-09-18T06:05:00.000-07:00

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

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

Sounds like your kind of thing!!!"

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

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

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

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

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

What Dafuk?!

2008-09-16T06:30:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

Plants attack the Holy City and Tolerant Cemetery

2008-09-14T08:32:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

The Art of Shakshukah

2008-09-09T04:07:00.000-07:00

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

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

Jerusalem: City of Peace

2008-09-08T01:00:00.000-07:00

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

Fauna and a Flower Question

2008-09-07T07:46:00.000-07:00

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

Kosher Bra and books.

2008-09-06T12:29:00.001-07:00

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

school crossing and raucous meditation

2008-09-02T11:34:00.000-07:00

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

Bougvanalia?!

2008-09-01T03:13:00.000-07:00

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

Reading

2008-08-29T06:40:00.000-07:00

It is so hot that I have had a hard time writing. My fingers keep slipping off the keys. I am greasy. I can't see the keyboard because of the thick cloud of sweaty steam coming off my chest. How hot has it been exactly? I'm guessing something in the thirties, 33 or 34. Benjy, Lev and I couldn't get a cab today and when I asked the cabbie who finally stopped what was going on he said it was the heat, everybody was taking cabs.
I am reading The Family by Iris Leal. I had never heard of her or the book. I bought it because I wanted to read an Israeli novel and it was the smallest one I could find. I looked at a bunch of different things by Amos Oz most of whose books I read at one point or another in English, but there were a LOT of words in most of them -- hundreds, maybe thousands -- and so instead I settled on this which I read by the paragraph with a dictionary at my side. I have been writing down the words that I have looked up in the front cover. Here's a partial list.
"lie/deceive
lacking ?
absorb
nostalgia/longings
prefer
compete
grip
stock
storm"
The third from last in my list (she uses it on page 12) is the verb "hitmogeg" which means melt. (She uses it in a metaphoric sense. The narrator says that the family of the title is melting over her sister in law and brother in law, but I am not sure what it means? Are they sick of them or are they sort of fawning over them?) Anyway ani mitgogeg. I am melting in a non-metaphoric sense. I wish I could say whether I recommend the book, but I would have to understand it first.
Another literary note: my "gis" (brother in law, word number one in my front cover list), Menachem, left a copy of "Skeleton Crew" a short story collection by Stephen King in the appartment. It has a picture of a demonic little monkey on the front cover which really bugged Ariela, to the point that she would turn the book over if she came across it lying around. Let me just say that Skeleton Crew sucks. Sorry Menachem, (sorry Stephen King too). There are a few scary bits but mostly not. They are however ridiculously readable and I finished the whole book in a sort of dutiful way, including the notes at the end which provided the most genuinely horrifying bit of the whole book; he mentions in passing that his short story "The Raft" (originally titled "the Float", which conjures up images of a man-eating glass of rootbeer with ice-cream) earned him TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS back in 1970 from the skin mag that he sold it to. Now, anybody who has sweated out a short story and pedalled it around to three dozen magazines and then finally counts him/herself lucky to get it published in The Cocquitlam Community College Literary E-Journal for the big reward of TWO FREE COPIES will shake with real horror at that.

Explaining the Deep Bath metaphor a little and the bigness of Rhinos

2008-08-25T23:10:00.000-07:00

Pamela emailed to say she doesn't get the Deep Bath. She is concerned that this may be because of her pregnancy but I think it is probably more because I just left it all very opaque, hoping it would seem, well, deep. Let me try to explain with a story. Years ago, I came to Jerusalem with my brother who had stopped in and surprised me on kibbutz while he was on a round the world jaunt. We stayed at a hostel and in the morning when we were leaving the guy at the desk stopped us. He was a young American guy, blond mid-western, not Jewish, former Marine I think he said and he was doing rip curls while he was sitting at the desk, pumping his already considerably pumped biceps. "Goin' to the Wall?" he asked. We said we were. (That's the Western Wall, the last surviving element of the Second Temple; actually a retaining wall and not a wall of the Temple itself so whether it qualifies as a piece of the Temple is up to you). It is considered by most to be the holiest sight in the world for Jews. "Your feet are gonna burn. Your gonna know you're standing on holy ground," said the guy behind the desk without interrupting his curls. He had a little bit of baptist preacher in his voice. I had been before and didn't feel my feet burn. I guess I was curious to see if it would happen this time, or if indeed I would feel any deep religious stirring though it is an impressive wall and it is impressive that Jews can now pray there freely (which they couldn't do before the war in 1967 when the Old City of Jerusalem was under Jordanian control). It is amazing to see so many people praying so intensely but I always felt left out of that intensity of feeling. And sure enough my feet did not burn when we got from the hostel to the Kotel. I had that same feeling that I should be feeling something more. A non-Jewish semper fi hayseed could feel it and I couldn't. But maybe that was just because I was looking for it, or not looking or too far gone down the road of worldliness... who knows? Then you wonder if all these people are just crazy. Anyway, I often have the feeling that everything in Jerusalem is kind of overdetermined, religiously, politically, historically. Like I am thinking about what my experience is supposed to be rather than what it is. You think the bath is deep but maybe its just a bath, even a little shorter. The heat helps with this. So do the kids.
We went to the Zoo yesterday though we did not see Aravah. The place is enormous and we got a membership since it is obvious that we will have to go back. I will say that rhinoceroses are very big and that is about all that can be said on that subject because if you try to get across in words or pictures the bigness of rhinoceroses you will just fail. I also have a story to tell about the Jerusalem central Bus station making up for the generally civilized and well-behaved travel experience we had arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport, and that story will resolve the not-very-mysterious mystery of Bag number eight (see previous post) but it will have to wait. The boys start school next week everyone keep your fingers crossed. Thanks, Gala for taking care of Lev's blanket. We miss everyone at Over the Rainbow, in Montreal and Vancouver. Ariela has gret photos from the zoo, definitely check it out. Here is one that I took while we were waiting to go in.
Love J

Cyborg Tortoise Takes Over Zoo as Prelude to Wolrd Domination

2008-08-23T23:20:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my mom who told us about Arava, the African Spurred Tortoise at the Jerusalem Zoo. Arava's back legs are paralyzed and so the zoo has built her this wheel-chair contraption. We hope to go visit the zoo this week.

The link for the photo and story is here

2008-08-22T06:43:00.000-07:00

HOLY UNDERWEAR, BATMAN!
Lev's underoos hanging on the line outside the storage room, from whence you can see the sky if you are in the umbatia amoka.

2008-08-22T06:07:00.000-07:00

Hey all; So congrats to Laurie from Hackensack who was the first to correctly identify our goofy message in the Zurich Airport Terminal A Kids play room guestbook. So the boys slept through the night last night, so did ariela which left me with the responsibility of lying awake and processing the day (actually ariela tells me that after I finally dozed off she woke up and did forty five minutes of yoga, probably a better use of insomnia time than going over the events of the day). So here's what I had to process of our first day. The big thing for me was speaking Hebrew again. I hadn't realized how much I missed speaking Hebrew. The fact of people speaking Hebrew in parks and on the streets is always amazing to me and I love getting to do it too. I don't know why I get such a kick out of learning odd Hebrew words but I do. We took Lev and Benjy to a little park not far from our house. There we met a little boy and girl with their caretaker. We told Benjy how to introduce himself in Hebrew and he found a likely set of candidates and went over though he was stumped once he had done that, so we came over to provide some back up and ended up chatting. The little boy told us that his family was going to Eilat for a few days. I asked if he was going to swim in the sea. He told me that he didn't know how to swim but that he could 'litzlol,' which it turns out mean dive. Now I know the word for dive is. Today, I told everybody that we were going to dive into life in Jerusalem, so as to cement litzlol in my mind. I mistook the little boy and girl for the children of the woman who was looking after them. She said they weren't her kids she was just looking after them for their "imahot" mothers. I would have gotten this in english no problem but for some reason in a second language you always make things more complicated so I tried to ask if they were cousins. The little boy straightened me out, though saying, no she's my sister and we have two mothers and a father.
Another story about language in the park. We were getting ready to leave. Ariela suggested that we go get popsicles (the heat here is pretty intense, it's over 30 every day). I said to the boys "yalla, bo nelechu liknot glida." Let's go get some ice cream, then I corrected myself and said to Benjy, "I don't know how you say popsicle in Hebrew." A man who was doing sudoku while his daughters played, smiled and asked me what word I didn't know. I told him and he filled in the gap. Kerach (literally ice) we started chatting, where are you from etc. We mentioned we'd been through switzerland on the way to Israel and he told me he had family there. "They have big problems, so may arabs are coming there. There, everywhere. They want to throw us in the sea. Since the time of Abraham. " A nice guy, three sweet girls, happy to provide a newcomer with the word for popsicle.
"They're all the same," he told me.
I said that I didn't think so, but it was clear I wasn't going to change his mind.
We said goodbye and went off to get our "kerach"
To complete the Hebrew lesson for today and to return to my theme of the other day, haumbatiah haamoka, that's The Deep Bath.

we are here

2008-08-20T09:08:00.000-07:00

we made it. a gizzilion bajilion miles and seven hundred hours in airports -- I recommend that you read what we wrote in the guestbook of the Zurich Airport Terminal A kids playroom, just if you are passing through, under a pseudonym of course, just to make it challenging -- and now we are here in Jerusalem (Tel-Aviv airport was disappointingly orderly and the people unforgivably well-behaved. Coming from Zurich where everything runs like a swiss watch dipped in chocolate I was hoping for the full-on middle eastern garbanzo when we got out of the plane). My first act in the new digs was to take a bath... My back was killing me from lugging 7 out of 8 bags, each packed to a maximum capacity of 40 lbs. ("Why 7 out of 8?" you may ask. That is a good question that missing eighth bag. where is it, what happened to it... but more about that in future posts). Did I mention that my mother-in-laws (beautiful) appartment where we are staying is up two flights of stairs. My mild cold had also turned into plague somewhere over the Atlantic, so a bath seemed right in order for muscle relaxation and sinus draining. And guess what... When I looked at it THE BATH WAS DEEP. When I got in it, I felt it to be deep. I could also open up the door to the storage/laundry room and see a little sliver of sky. What can I say about the sky over Jerusalem? It's blue, its a little grey, a little pink. Very sky-y. And I was feeling like this was very satisfactory and possibly transplendant when I realized that being able to see the sky out of your bath is not such an unusual thing. And then it occurred to me that maybe the bath wasn't so deep. Maybe it was an optical illusion because it was so short (which was no optical illusion, it was for sure short). My knees were bent, maybe the bath just seemed deeper. Which is what happens when you go away, especially to a place like Jerusalem with an august and historic name. The bath seems deeper than a regular bath and you just can't tell if it is you, or the bath.
The boys did fabulously well on the trip and have been playing happily with a bionacle that their grandmother got them for the last 2 hours so as far as they are concerned the whole thing was worth it.
Ariela has unpacked and ordered everything while I have done nothing but groan since I dropped the seventh (of eight) bags on the stone floor.
That and take a bath. I have reached no firm conclusion about its depth. Maybe its just the neo-citran talking. Love J