The Owl of Minerva

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Birds imitate life.

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

Pride and prejudice

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

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

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

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

“Like 'gavah'?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

Playing hookie at the deepest hypersaline lake in the world

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.