Stephen Rustad Petaluma Argus-Courier Aug 23, 2008 |
This should have been done a long time ago....
ANTIGONOS' BRAIN
| Your Brain is Green |
 |
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Notice: Important Change Pending
This should have been done a long time ago....
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Only About Two Weeks More Until The Season Begins....
Ed Hall Artizans Syndicate Aug 19, 2008 |
This year the Redskins take the Superbowl! Yeah! [Well, stranger things HAVE happened...]
Thursday, August 07, 2008
The Destruction of A City
Sunday is Tisha b'Av, the day when Jews mourn a lot of things. The destruction of the First and Second Temples, the Expulsion from Spain, Hitler's Final Solution was promulgated--it is an all-round National Catastrophe Day. There are those of us who feel that Holocaust Day is redundant, and should be remembered, in its historical context, along with all the other disasters Jews have suffered throughout the ages.
This year is especially poignant if you live in Jerusalem. In the name of "urban renewal" and "improved mass transit" our Gracious City Fathers seem bent on finishing what the Romans started in AD 70. (A note for the finicky: the actual destruction of the city of Jerusalem by the Romans actually began on the 17th of Tamuz, in the Hebrew calendar, three weeks before Tisha b'Av, when the first breach in the walls of what is now the Old City occurred. But I'm allowed some literary license)
Well over a decade ago a decision was taken to create a network of above-ground light rail lines that would connect some of Jerusalem's more distant neighborhoods with the city center. Jerusalem is a rather odd city. The population is about 700,000, but it is spread over a very large area. Further, as it sits on top of a bunch of mountains, neighborhoods are often defined and separated by deep valleys. There was never any attempt at city planning, indeed, the topography dictates where streets will run, and in the older parts of the city, the streets are narrow and often not straight. Here is a rough city map from 1993; and here is a better one, but you will have to zoom in for the detail. The commercial center is largely defined by the triangle formed by King George Street, Ben Yehuda Street, and Jaffa (Yafo) Road. But it is Jaffa Road that is the real lifeline of the city, running from the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway at the city entrance (where the Central Bus Station is) to the Old City.
Jaffa Road isn't a particularly splendid piece of "high street". In fact, considerable bits of it look pretty much as they did in the years of the British Mandate, and even the Ottoman period, tarted up with neon signs and sporting shop windows selling everything from sports shoes to tourist twat and religious articles. Most of the shops are "key money", a kind of protected tenancy whereby the owner sells a leasehold to the purchaser for a one-time price. The purchaser cannot be evicted, but any improvements he puts into the property are at his own expense but are owned by the owner. So there's little incentive to make any real improvement to the property. Consequently a lot of the shops are quite delapidated.
Ben Yehuda Street is a pedestrian mall, and many of the small streets off Jaffa Road have been so converted also, but both Jaffa Road and King George Street are extremely busy thoroughfares, with about 20 bus lines traversing the city's two axes -- from entrance to Old City, from the neighborhood of Gilo to Mt. Scopus. (It was at the intersection of King George and Jaffa that the suicide bomber struck the Sbarro Pizza outlet with such devastating effect). A little farther from the city center is the Machaneh Yehuda open-air market, which has also seen its share of terror attacks, as it is usually crowded with shoppers, especially in the run-up to Shabbat. It is a much-beloved Jerusalem institution.
The light railway was supposed to have its first line open in 2006. To no one's surprise, the date is now some time in 2010, and the cost has escalated exponentially. Not only did all the streets using it have to be dug up in order to put down the necessary infrastructure for the electrical cables, etc., they now have to be dug up a second time to lay the tracks. Further, the railway lane will be slightly raised, except at intersections, so that cars cannot drive on the tracks and impede the progress of the trains. The construction has been inching forward at a pace that would put a snail to shame, largely because the track-laying machines, which were supposed to do everything at once, have turned out to be an untested technology (from France) which is a great disappointment.
This week the City closed the entire length of Jaffa Road from near the Central Bus Station to almost the Old City, except for one lane barely wide enough for a bus, traveling in one direction only, instead of doing it in bits. All the bus lines have had to be rerouted, at least partially, onto narrow streets that were already jam-packed with vehicular traffic. All parking on these streets has had to be prohibited. People have to walk long distances from the nearest bus stop to where they want to go; and since a great many of the usual patrons of the downtown shops are the elderly who don't drive (and thus don't go to the shopping malls on the city periphery), this is quite a hardship. They can't do their shopping, and hail a taxi because taxis can't use the now-restricted bus lanes--they have to retrace their steps, shlepping all their packages, to a bus stop on a street on which traffic backs up for blocks every time a bus comes to a halt. And the current "timetable" for the work allows two years for its completion. More like six, the way things have been going so far.
Forget terrorists: if someone has a heart attack in downtown Jerusalem now, no ambulance, rescue vehicle, or paramedic on a motorcycle can get around the blockages caused by back-to-back buses. The buses themselves cannot keep to any schedule. It normally takes me between 20 minutes and half an hour to get to work; since Jaffa Road has been closed it takes me an hour and a half. Each way. And my son-in-law the policeman has noted that, should a grave, or even a bone, or anything of archeological interest be turned up during the street's excavation, all construction comes to an indefinite halt. By law, all archeological finds must be thoroughly excavated, and the ultra-Orthodox go on a rampage every time they decide some rock or geological formation is a "grave" (because the assumption is it is the grave of a Jew). The opening of the Begin highway was held up for three years because the ultra-Orthodox decided a boulder was a grave (in spite of all evidence to the contrary), and the road had to be rerouted, a section torn up and resited so the "grave" is now in a median strip)
My SIL has told me the police have met with City officials and told them frankly that they cannot guarantee the safety of the city center with the entire length of Jaffa Road affected the way it is currently. The merchants have met with City officials and told them that nearly all of them will be bankrupt within 6 months; I've noticed some "For Sale" signs appearing already on some of the smaller shops. Eventually we'll have rapid transit to the downtown area but the downtown area will be a ghost town.
The cynic in me says that is exactly what the City is hoping for. As tenants abandon their "key money" premises, the owners can be tempted to sell to developers who will knock down every vestige of old "modern" Jerusalem and put up tower blocks for commercial and residential purposes. Currently Jerusalem is enjoying something of a luxury apartment building boom (there are those who say it has not only peaked but the newest construction sites will never even be completed) for the "two months a year residents", a great many of whom are French, and wealthy. When life is good in France, they'll stay there, but they want a foothold in Israel should the Moslems in France go on a rampage (many were pied noirs in North Africa; came to Israel penniless in the Fifties, decamped to France only a few years later because of the austerity conditions here then, leaving some relatives here, so they are not entirely strangers to the country)
I fear an essential part of the city is being undermined. Jerusalem already, because of its uniqueness, suffers from high housing costs, and has been losing residents to the satellite towns halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (it's a half hour/45 minute commute to Tel Aviv from Modi'in, for example, and maybe half an hour into Jerusalem). The downtown triangle, while it certainly could use a bit of fixing-up, has a very special atmosphere that has managed to survive nearly a century. It would be a tragedy if it went, and the Jerusalem city center looked like a hundred other places.
The whole light railway is a fiasco. Washington DC put in a trolley system that barely 5 years after its inception took out of service, when I was a child, and Washington is a town with broad boulevards, not two-lane streets that suddenly have kinks and curves. If a car that travels on rails breaks down, nothing can go around it. This weakness has had my SIL's unit, an elite one like a SWAT team, practicing various scenarios for several years already, but nothing is simpler than a terrorist suddenly driving onto the rail lane (in spite of it being slightly elevated, a car could drive onto it easily), blocking trains in both directions, and either he or a couple of confederates simply hurling a few grenades into the train compartments. This week the dangers of the raised lane were highlighted when it was shown that a bus lane in Haifa, 7 cm above the street level, but hardly noticeable in dim light, had caused several fatal accidents already, as motorcyclists fell off the edge into oncoming traffic. Since the Jaffa Road construction is now going 24 hours a day, there has been a need for a lot many more construction workers--it's not by accident that the two "bulldozer terrorist" incidents have happened right now. And the traffic rerouting, etc. demands a huge police presence (at a time of year when families schedule vacations). SIL gloomily predicts that once it rains in October or thereabouts, everything will go into abeyance until the spring: roadwork can't be done in wet conditions, and the City has lost about three months of dry weather this year.
We've got the Calatrava "string" bridge now, and it is very inspiring, there at the entrance to the city. So inspiring, in fact, that all the buildings around it look really dull and uninspired. I guess they'll have to be demolished at some point, and rebuilt in a grander style. Despite the removal of the scaffolding, etc. traffic at the entrance of the city still hasn't gone back to normal. It appears that the construction company that won the tender for track-laying has finally figured out how to lay the tracks. Apparently a couple of the cars have arrived from France and more are on the way.
All that the citizens of the city ask is that the work on the main street of the city be done in chunks so the rest of the length of Jaffa Road can function, or there's going to be a really nice rail system going into a deserted city center. I really don't know if the Jerusalem I know can survive this "urban renewal".
This year is especially poignant if you live in Jerusalem. In the name of "urban renewal" and "improved mass transit" our Gracious City Fathers seem bent on finishing what the Romans started in AD 70. (A note for the finicky: the actual destruction of the city of Jerusalem by the Romans actually began on the 17th of Tamuz, in the Hebrew calendar, three weeks before Tisha b'Av, when the first breach in the walls of what is now the Old City occurred. But I'm allowed some literary license)
Well over a decade ago a decision was taken to create a network of above-ground light rail lines that would connect some of Jerusalem's more distant neighborhoods with the city center. Jerusalem is a rather odd city. The population is about 700,000, but it is spread over a very large area. Further, as it sits on top of a bunch of mountains, neighborhoods are often defined and separated by deep valleys. There was never any attempt at city planning, indeed, the topography dictates where streets will run, and in the older parts of the city, the streets are narrow and often not straight. Here is a rough city map from 1993; and here is a better one, but you will have to zoom in for the detail. The commercial center is largely defined by the triangle formed by King George Street, Ben Yehuda Street, and Jaffa (Yafo) Road. But it is Jaffa Road that is the real lifeline of the city, running from the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway at the city entrance (where the Central Bus Station is) to the Old City.
Jaffa Road isn't a particularly splendid piece of "high street". In fact, considerable bits of it look pretty much as they did in the years of the British Mandate, and even the Ottoman period, tarted up with neon signs and sporting shop windows selling everything from sports shoes to tourist twat and religious articles. Most of the shops are "key money", a kind of protected tenancy whereby the owner sells a leasehold to the purchaser for a one-time price. The purchaser cannot be evicted, but any improvements he puts into the property are at his own expense but are owned by the owner. So there's little incentive to make any real improvement to the property. Consequently a lot of the shops are quite delapidated.
Ben Yehuda Street is a pedestrian mall, and many of the small streets off Jaffa Road have been so converted also, but both Jaffa Road and King George Street are extremely busy thoroughfares, with about 20 bus lines traversing the city's two axes -- from entrance to Old City, from the neighborhood of Gilo to Mt. Scopus. (It was at the intersection of King George and Jaffa that the suicide bomber struck the Sbarro Pizza outlet with such devastating effect). A little farther from the city center is the Machaneh Yehuda open-air market, which has also seen its share of terror attacks, as it is usually crowded with shoppers, especially in the run-up to Shabbat. It is a much-beloved Jerusalem institution.
The light railway was supposed to have its first line open in 2006. To no one's surprise, the date is now some time in 2010, and the cost has escalated exponentially. Not only did all the streets using it have to be dug up in order to put down the necessary infrastructure for the electrical cables, etc., they now have to be dug up a second time to lay the tracks. Further, the railway lane will be slightly raised, except at intersections, so that cars cannot drive on the tracks and impede the progress of the trains. The construction has been inching forward at a pace that would put a snail to shame, largely because the track-laying machines, which were supposed to do everything at once, have turned out to be an untested technology (from France) which is a great disappointment.
This week the City closed the entire length of Jaffa Road from near the Central Bus Station to almost the Old City, except for one lane barely wide enough for a bus, traveling in one direction only, instead of doing it in bits. All the bus lines have had to be rerouted, at least partially, onto narrow streets that were already jam-packed with vehicular traffic. All parking on these streets has had to be prohibited. People have to walk long distances from the nearest bus stop to where they want to go; and since a great many of the usual patrons of the downtown shops are the elderly who don't drive (and thus don't go to the shopping malls on the city periphery), this is quite a hardship. They can't do their shopping, and hail a taxi because taxis can't use the now-restricted bus lanes--they have to retrace their steps, shlepping all their packages, to a bus stop on a street on which traffic backs up for blocks every time a bus comes to a halt. And the current "timetable" for the work allows two years for its completion. More like six, the way things have been going so far.
Forget terrorists: if someone has a heart attack in downtown Jerusalem now, no ambulance, rescue vehicle, or paramedic on a motorcycle can get around the blockages caused by back-to-back buses. The buses themselves cannot keep to any schedule. It normally takes me between 20 minutes and half an hour to get to work; since Jaffa Road has been closed it takes me an hour and a half. Each way. And my son-in-law the policeman has noted that, should a grave, or even a bone, or anything of archeological interest be turned up during the street's excavation, all construction comes to an indefinite halt. By law, all archeological finds must be thoroughly excavated, and the ultra-Orthodox go on a rampage every time they decide some rock or geological formation is a "grave" (because the assumption is it is the grave of a Jew). The opening of the Begin highway was held up for three years because the ultra-Orthodox decided a boulder was a grave (in spite of all evidence to the contrary), and the road had to be rerouted, a section torn up and resited so the "grave" is now in a median strip)
My SIL has told me the police have met with City officials and told them frankly that they cannot guarantee the safety of the city center with the entire length of Jaffa Road affected the way it is currently. The merchants have met with City officials and told them that nearly all of them will be bankrupt within 6 months; I've noticed some "For Sale" signs appearing already on some of the smaller shops. Eventually we'll have rapid transit to the downtown area but the downtown area will be a ghost town.
The cynic in me says that is exactly what the City is hoping for. As tenants abandon their "key money" premises, the owners can be tempted to sell to developers who will knock down every vestige of old "modern" Jerusalem and put up tower blocks for commercial and residential purposes. Currently Jerusalem is enjoying something of a luxury apartment building boom (there are those who say it has not only peaked but the newest construction sites will never even be completed) for the "two months a year residents", a great many of whom are French, and wealthy. When life is good in France, they'll stay there, but they want a foothold in Israel should the Moslems in France go on a rampage (many were pied noirs in North Africa; came to Israel penniless in the Fifties, decamped to France only a few years later because of the austerity conditions here then, leaving some relatives here, so they are not entirely strangers to the country)
I fear an essential part of the city is being undermined. Jerusalem already, because of its uniqueness, suffers from high housing costs, and has been losing residents to the satellite towns halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (it's a half hour/45 minute commute to Tel Aviv from Modi'in, for example, and maybe half an hour into Jerusalem). The downtown triangle, while it certainly could use a bit of fixing-up, has a very special atmosphere that has managed to survive nearly a century. It would be a tragedy if it went, and the Jerusalem city center looked like a hundred other places.
The whole light railway is a fiasco. Washington DC put in a trolley system that barely 5 years after its inception took out of service, when I was a child, and Washington is a town with broad boulevards, not two-lane streets that suddenly have kinks and curves. If a car that travels on rails breaks down, nothing can go around it. This weakness has had my SIL's unit, an elite one like a SWAT team, practicing various scenarios for several years already, but nothing is simpler than a terrorist suddenly driving onto the rail lane (in spite of it being slightly elevated, a car could drive onto it easily), blocking trains in both directions, and either he or a couple of confederates simply hurling a few grenades into the train compartments. This week the dangers of the raised lane were highlighted when it was shown that a bus lane in Haifa, 7 cm above the street level, but hardly noticeable in dim light, had caused several fatal accidents already, as motorcyclists fell off the edge into oncoming traffic. Since the Jaffa Road construction is now going 24 hours a day, there has been a need for a lot many more construction workers--it's not by accident that the two "bulldozer terrorist" incidents have happened right now. And the traffic rerouting, etc. demands a huge police presence (at a time of year when families schedule vacations). SIL gloomily predicts that once it rains in October or thereabouts, everything will go into abeyance until the spring: roadwork can't be done in wet conditions, and the City has lost about three months of dry weather this year.
We've got the Calatrava "string" bridge now, and it is very inspiring, there at the entrance to the city. So inspiring, in fact, that all the buildings around it look really dull and uninspired. I guess they'll have to be demolished at some point, and rebuilt in a grander style. Despite the removal of the scaffolding, etc. traffic at the entrance of the city still hasn't gone back to normal. It appears that the construction company that won the tender for track-laying has finally figured out how to lay the tracks. Apparently a couple of the cars have arrived from France and more are on the way.
All that the citizens of the city ask is that the work on the main street of the city be done in chunks so the rest of the length of Jaffa Road can function, or there's going to be a really nice rail system going into a deserted city center. I really don't know if the Jerusalem I know can survive this "urban renewal".
Friday, August 01, 2008
Very Dispiriting, but Not Surprising
The writer is an Israeli Arab who often writes for the JPost. He discusses the current infighting between Hamas and Fatah here. Anyone who thinks that Israel is the reason there's no peace in the Middle East doesn't understand the Arab mentality.
"Myself and my brother against the world; myself against my brother". (Arab proverb, quoted by Rafael Patai in "The Arab Mind")
"Myself and my brother against the world; myself against my brother". (Arab proverb, quoted by Rafael Patai in "The Arab Mind")
Snorkle! #4
Dick Locher Chicago Tribune Aug 1, 2008 |
The NFL is definitely more interesting than the Presidential election.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Books, Part I
My cousins asked me for some reading material on Israel and Judaism. Here's a short list.
A History of the Jews by Paul M. Johnson
This is an absolute "must". Mr. Johnson is a conservative Catholic, the former editor of The Spectator newspaper. I believe that histories of religion must be written by someone of another religion if they are to have any validity and objectivity. Mr. Johnson's grasp of the subject is stupendous, and, being a journalist, his writing is lucid, succinct, and very approachable, without jargon. It is the best history of the Jews and Judaism available today.
From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine by Joan Peters
Ms. Peters set out to write a book about the Palestinian refugees of 1948, but what she found changed her viewpoint entirely. One of the book's strengths, and its main weakness, is the degree of documentation she provides. The actor John Barrymore is reputed to have said that "footnotes are like running downstairs to answer the doorbell on one's wedding night". Every single assertion Ms. Peters makes is so fully annotated that it becomes annoying after a while--but since she so fully documents her sources, you easily see that she is not simply giving her personal views.
The Closed Circle by David Pryce-Jones
Mr. Pryce-Jones is also a newspaperman, but he is also an Arabic speaker, and spent a lot of his childhood in Arab countries since his father was a British diplomat, and has made the Arab world his specialty. This book is an explanation of the psychology of the Arabs, which I think is essential to understanding their world view and their aspirations, and also why they seem to cling to a pre-modern ethic. Rafael Patai's The Arab Mind is also an exploration of the Arab mentality, and very good, but Pryce-Jones' book is better, in my opinion.
Two books about living as a Jew, written by two observant Jews but designed to be read by anybody, are To Be A Jew: A Guide To Jewish Observance In Contemporary Life by Hayim H. Donin, and How To Run A Traditional Jewish Household by Blu Greenberg. Rabbi Donin gives a very concise run-through of the major tenets of Judaism, with explanations, while Ms. Greenberg describes living in a Jewish household, from the standpoint of the woman of the house. There are a lot of anecdotes about day to day situations [such as suggesting that a woman put in her curriculum vitae how many times she's "made Pesach", it's such a major task].
For a world tour of Jewish cuisine (which some would say the Jews haven't got, but they're wrong) coupled with extensive commentary on the various communities from which the recipes are culled, nothing beats The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York by Claudia Roden. Ms. Roden, who is Sephardi, is a bit of a food snob, especially when describing Ashkenazi food, which she feels is inferior (a "folk cuisine") compared with Sephardi cooking, but she's still very comprehensive.
One of my cousins asked for books to help him learn Hebrew, which seems very daunting [it isn't, really, but that's another topic]. I recommend How the Hebrew Language Grew by Edward Horowitz, and 501 Hebrew Verbs : Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses in a New Easy-To-Follow Format alphabetically Arranged by Root by Shmuel Bolozky. Hebrew is based on an entirely different system than Indo-European languages, and so seems sometimes very difficult for those who've never "thought outside the box". But Hebrew is actually quite easy, IF you understand the logical underpinnings, which are that words have roots from which one can, if one follows certain rules, derive almost all the necessary forms and parts of speech.
Part II will be about what I'm currently reading, and some of my "desert island books"--the books I can't be without.
A History of the Jews by Paul M. Johnson
This is an absolute "must". Mr. Johnson is a conservative Catholic, the former editor of The Spectator newspaper. I believe that histories of religion must be written by someone of another religion if they are to have any validity and objectivity. Mr. Johnson's grasp of the subject is stupendous, and, being a journalist, his writing is lucid, succinct, and very approachable, without jargon. It is the best history of the Jews and Judaism available today.
From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine by Joan Peters
Ms. Peters set out to write a book about the Palestinian refugees of 1948, but what she found changed her viewpoint entirely. One of the book's strengths, and its main weakness, is the degree of documentation she provides. The actor John Barrymore is reputed to have said that "footnotes are like running downstairs to answer the doorbell on one's wedding night". Every single assertion Ms. Peters makes is so fully annotated that it becomes annoying after a while--but since she so fully documents her sources, you easily see that she is not simply giving her personal views.
The Closed Circle by David Pryce-Jones
Mr. Pryce-Jones is also a newspaperman, but he is also an Arabic speaker, and spent a lot of his childhood in Arab countries since his father was a British diplomat, and has made the Arab world his specialty. This book is an explanation of the psychology of the Arabs, which I think is essential to understanding their world view and their aspirations, and also why they seem to cling to a pre-modern ethic. Rafael Patai's The Arab Mind is also an exploration of the Arab mentality, and very good, but Pryce-Jones' book is better, in my opinion.
Two books about living as a Jew, written by two observant Jews but designed to be read by anybody, are To Be A Jew: A Guide To Jewish Observance In Contemporary Life by Hayim H. Donin, and How To Run A Traditional Jewish Household by Blu Greenberg. Rabbi Donin gives a very concise run-through of the major tenets of Judaism, with explanations, while Ms. Greenberg describes living in a Jewish household, from the standpoint of the woman of the house. There are a lot of anecdotes about day to day situations [such as suggesting that a woman put in her curriculum vitae how many times she's "made Pesach", it's such a major task].
For a world tour of Jewish cuisine (which some would say the Jews haven't got, but they're wrong) coupled with extensive commentary on the various communities from which the recipes are culled, nothing beats The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York by Claudia Roden. Ms. Roden, who is Sephardi, is a bit of a food snob, especially when describing Ashkenazi food, which she feels is inferior (a "folk cuisine") compared with Sephardi cooking, but she's still very comprehensive.
One of my cousins asked for books to help him learn Hebrew, which seems very daunting [it isn't, really, but that's another topic]. I recommend How the Hebrew Language Grew by Edward Horowitz, and 501 Hebrew Verbs : Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses in a New Easy-To-Follow Format alphabetically Arranged by Root by Shmuel Bolozky. Hebrew is based on an entirely different system than Indo-European languages, and so seems sometimes very difficult for those who've never "thought outside the box". But Hebrew is actually quite easy, IF you understand the logical underpinnings, which are that words have roots from which one can, if one follows certain rules, derive almost all the necessary forms and parts of speech.
Part II will be about what I'm currently reading, and some of my "desert island books"--the books I can't be without.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Iraq's Archeological Treasures and My IPod
Two articles, one in the NY Review of Books, and the other in the The Wall Street Journal, seem to take different views on the subject. It would be nice to know which is actually correct. And then one begins to wonder how much of what we "really" know about this entire part of the Middle East, Iran included, is correct. The Clown of Tehran now claims to have 6000 centrifuges working.
I sat at home for two months with a broken left wrist, unable to do anything (because I'm left-handed) more complicated than push buttons on the TV remote control. After the first week, I stopped pushing. Thank God for my iPod, which doesn't reduce everything to a 30 second sound bite or repeat itself every hour. I listened to the entire Ring Cycle. I listened to a number of audiobooks, and watched the lemon tree that stands next to the path from the front gate while listening to baroque and early music concerts...
Now I'm back to "normal", whatever that is, and I'm taking my ulcer medication again...
I sat at home for two months with a broken left wrist, unable to do anything (because I'm left-handed) more complicated than push buttons on the TV remote control. After the first week, I stopped pushing. Thank God for my iPod, which doesn't reduce everything to a 30 second sound bite or repeat itself every hour. I listened to the entire Ring Cycle. I listened to a number of audiobooks, and watched the lemon tree that stands next to the path from the front gate while listening to baroque and early music concerts...
Now I'm back to "normal", whatever that is, and I'm taking my ulcer medication again...
Friday, July 25, 2008
Mr. Nice Guy
I suppose he had a difficult childhood, or something, and we should treat him gently.
See this article in the Jerusalem Post.
See this article in the Jerusalem Post.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Dial Soap, Anyone?
This started out as a comment to someone on the Tachlis list ( tachlis@shamash.org )about the availability of Dial soap in Israel [it isn't]. I have been in Israel so long I had to ask what was special about Dial [I was told because it has deodorant]
For as long as I've been in Israel, which will be 33 years this coming January, there has been The Great Washing Machine Debate, between proponents of large American machines which need a specially-sized niche and a hot water hookup [but are supposed to do a load in less time] and the smaller, European ones which heat their own water, fit into the niches in older apartments, etc.
Now there's a new debate: Can I survive aliyah with Israel substitutes for American products? Or maybe it's not so new. When I made aliyah, there were lots of items--food, cosmetics, cleaning items--that Israelis simply didn't know existed [like string mops and Brillo pads, beef frankfurters and real cheddar cheese] and didn't miss. Immigrants had their eyes opened to the gumi and sponja even while they eulogized the sponge mop and the Brillo pad. There was ONE brand of locally produced abrasive cleaner, maybe two or three brands of laundry detergent--essentially all the same. And lo and behold! we all ultimately stopped salivating after those Brillo pads and somehow--amazingly! managed to clean without them! Ditto American deodorant. There's always been soap, water, and talcum powder for those whose skin was too sensitive for Israeli deodorants [like me]
You know what's really eye-opening? Take a trip to NY [or anywhere else in the US] when you've only got an Israeli income, and you find yourself muttering "do I REALLY need this?" when you go shopping because you've got half the budget you had five or ten years ago. You'll be amazed at how different your priorities become. You'll live with the Israeli product rather than the American equivalent and keep your money for the odd gadget that DOESN'T exist in Israel. When I was in NYC about 18 months ago, I bought cunning reusable little bottle corks that really keep air out of wine bottles and the carbonation in soda bottles [I was sick of throwing out half- and quarter- filled bottles of Coke gone flat], and 10" plastic knitting needles [because I only find the longer ones here]. So I've got to use a bit more elbow grease with Sano-X cleanser than Comet! I'd rather spend my limited cash on something for which there's no Israeli equivalent! [I thought I'd buy medicinals like 1000 tablet bottles of ibuprofen, but at $15-24 per bottle, I eventually settled on getting Israeli prescriptions for smaller, but very much cheaper, amounts via the kupah]
It takes time. Some people take more time to adjust, some take less. I personally think food nostalgia takes the longest to overcome, and as others have written, while at first Israeli items seem to taste odd, invariably and eventually it is the American item that tastes too rich. Brillo pads are nice, but Israeli steel wool, dipped in Israel soap paste or cleanser really works quite well, but as long as you mutter "how will I manage once this box runs out?" or "which family member in the States can I hit on for the next Care package?" you only make life harder for yourself.
For as long as I've been in Israel, which will be 33 years this coming January, there has been The Great Washing Machine Debate, between proponents of large American machines which need a specially-sized niche and a hot water hookup [but are supposed to do a load in less time] and the smaller, European ones which heat their own water, fit into the niches in older apartments, etc.
Now there's a new debate: Can I survive aliyah with Israel substitutes for American products? Or maybe it's not so new. When I made aliyah, there were lots of items--food, cosmetics, cleaning items--that Israelis simply didn't know existed [like string mops and Brillo pads, beef frankfurters and real cheddar cheese] and didn't miss. Immigrants had their eyes opened to the gumi and sponja even while they eulogized the sponge mop and the Brillo pad. There was ONE brand of locally produced abrasive cleaner, maybe two or three brands of laundry detergent--essentially all the same. And lo and behold! we all ultimately stopped salivating after those Brillo pads and somehow--amazingly! managed to clean without them! Ditto American deodorant. There's always been soap, water, and talcum powder for those whose skin was too sensitive for Israeli deodorants [like me]
You know what's really eye-opening? Take a trip to NY [or anywhere else in the US] when you've only got an Israeli income, and you find yourself muttering "do I REALLY need this?" when you go shopping because you've got half the budget you had five or ten years ago. You'll be amazed at how different your priorities become. You'll live with the Israeli product rather than the American equivalent and keep your money for the odd gadget that DOESN'T exist in Israel. When I was in NYC about 18 months ago, I bought cunning reusable little bottle corks that really keep air out of wine bottles and the carbonation in soda bottles [I was sick of throwing out half- and quarter- filled bottles of Coke gone flat], and 10" plastic knitting needles [because I only find the longer ones here]. So I've got to use a bit more elbow grease with Sano-X cleanser than Comet! I'd rather spend my limited cash on something for which there's no Israeli equivalent! [I thought I'd buy medicinals like 1000 tablet bottles of ibuprofen, but at $15-24 per bottle, I eventually settled on getting Israeli prescriptions for smaller, but very much cheaper, amounts via the kupah]
It takes time. Some people take more time to adjust, some take less. I personally think food nostalgia takes the longest to overcome, and as others have written, while at first Israeli items seem to taste odd, invariably and eventually it is the American item that tastes too rich. Brillo pads are nice, but Israeli steel wool, dipped in Israel soap paste or cleanser really works quite well, but as long as you mutter "how will I manage once this box runs out?" or "which family member in the States can I hit on for the next Care package?" you only make life harder for yourself.
Some of this undoubtedly goes back to what I've called in a previous post "the homesteading instinct". Some of it is related to the perceived superiority of American products. Some is due to simple familiarity with American items, but some, I suspect, is due to a fear of losing one's American identity, in spite of a committment to Israel. That's a real tough one. Why were our grandfathers so very anxious to leave all remnants of their Eastern European identities behind and become as Americanized as possible as quickly as possible, but we want to remain as American as possible while clutching our Israeli passports? Can it be that we still have doubts about our choice to make aliyah? American Jews are almost unique among Jews because the choice is being made without oppression or persecution, or indeed coercion of any kind. In fact, most of us have had to surmount objections from our American families, who begged us, overtly or covertly, not to leave America.
I think that is one of the biggest things that has changed with aliyah in the three decades I've been here. Once it was "we've come to Israel to build (it) and be built (by it)". Now, it almost seems that we've come to Israel to build it as much as possible like where we came from, and only to be built by it so long as it doesn't threaten our American identities. This doesn't make me very optimistic about long-term aliyah success.
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