Yom Kippur and beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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