Planet Israel

Visiting the LubavitcherORebbe: The Ohel

2011-12-06T01:29:00.000-08:00

After visiting 770, I took a trip to visit the Ohel, "The Tent," where the Lubavitcher Rebbe is buried next to the previous Lubavitcher Rebbe, his father in law.

A Chabad-run bus stops in front of 770 and delivers Hassidim to the Ohel, with a screen playing videos of the Rebbe giving his sermons on the way over.

The bus from 770 to the Ohel

Visiting the Ohel

Chabad purchased a house abutting the cemetery.

Lubavitchers milling about at the entrance to the Ohel

When the Rebbe was alive, it was customary to write him for advice or guidance on personal matters. Upon his passing, the custom continued. Letters are written in the house and then brought out his grave site.

Writing Letters to the Rebbe

One of the ways I studied Hebrew was by reading middle school-level books about the Rebbe. From these books, I got to know the names of many of the people surrounding the Rebbe, so it's fascinating to walk through the cemetary and see many of the graves of those about whom I read.

Rabbi Chodakov, the Rebbe's Secretary

The Grave of Chayya Mushke, the Rebbe's Wife

When I entered the Ohel, many people were deep in prayer, and I decided that it would be inappropriate to start snapping photographs and possibly disrupt their concentration. After all, a cemetery isn't a tourist site.

The Ohel is the stone structure up ahead

770: A Visit to Chabad's Headquarters

2011-11-30T01:20:00.000-08:00

In August of 2008, I took a trip to New York on my way to the west coast, and stopped over at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, a sort of headquarters of Chabad Lubavitch. I was taken on a tour by Rabbi Dov Ber Berkowitz, a Chabadnik friend of mine from my pre-aliyah days, and now the rabbi at Chabad of the Delta (back in California.)

770 Eastern Parkway, Chabad's Nerve Center

770 started out life as just another building. Purchased by the Lubavitch (Chabad) Hassidim, it became the residence of the Rebbe, a synagogue, and eventually, the geographical center of Lubavitch's outreach movement. Who would have thought that this insignificant-looking building would be the center for thousands of outreach centers worldwide.

At the time of my visit, it was the three weeks (a period of mourning for the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem) when we don't shave. By the time I landed in New York, I was sporting a full beard.

Donning tefillin in 770

The basement of 770 has been completely excavated. Later, Chabad purchased the adjascent buildings and merged all of their basements into one giant underground synagogue.

The Beit Midrash at 770

Later, when the Rebbe passed on, the Mishichists (those who believe that the Rebbe is still alive and is the Moshiach) took over the Beit Midrash and decorated it to taste, while the above-ground portions remained under non-Mishichist auspices.

Mishichist Decorations and Declarations in 770

Immediately after the Shoah (Holocaust,) as the survivors of Europe's brutality straggled into the United States, Lubavitcher Hassidim began to regroup. Originally, all of them could daven in this small Beit Midrash, not to be confused with the enormous Beit Midrash in the basement.

The Original Beit Midrash

It's hard to believe that the Chabad of today, with its tens of thousands of followers, could have started from such modest beginnings.

Outside of the Beit Midrash is a small plaza where weddings are held.

A Plaza at 770 where Lubavitch weddings are held

And across the street is the newly opened Chabad Children's Museum.

The Chabad Children's Museum

Entrance to the Chabad Children's Museum

This being Chabad, you can always find hard liquor, even at 9 o'clock in the morning.

Birkat HaChama

2011-11-24T16:14:00.000-08:00

Here are some photos of Birkat HaChama (the blessing of the sun) which I took back in April of 2009. The next one isn't for a couple of decades.

In Judaism, there are some mitzvot you do three times a day, like tefillah (prayer.) Some come once a week, like shabbat (sabbath,) some once a month, like Birkat Levanah (the blessing of the new moon) some once a year, like the fast on Yom Kippur (the day of atonement.) Some come once in a lifetime, like a wedding (well, hopefully only once.) And some come once in history, like Hashem's directive to the Jewish slaves in Egypt that they slaughter a lamb on the eve of Pesach.

At Chabad of Baka, getting ready for Birkat HaChama

One of the rarer mitzvot is Birkat HaChama (The blessing of the sun.) Once every twenty eight years, the planets and sun are aligned exactly as they were at the instant of the creation of the sun, at least according to the biblical narrative. At the sight of this unusual and wondrous occurrence, one is to recite Birkat Chama. Birkat HaChama happened to fall on Erev Pesach (Passover Eve) this year, so in addition to all the other holiday preparations, tens of thousands flocked to the Old City of Jerusalem to perform the mitzvah.

Yours truly, dragged out of bed for Birkat Chama

Reading the bracha sheet.

The sun is in position. It's go time!

Back at Blogging

2011-11-22T16:25:00.001-08:00

I don't know if any of my old readers still come to this website, as it's been quite some time since I posted regularly, but I'm thinking it's time to dust off the 'ol website and add some material. Since I've been living outside of Israel, there is really nothing spectacular to write about. But this blog, which I built with my own ten fingers over the last decade, seems to have become something of an internet resource for those interested in Land of Israel related information. Often, friends who are searching for information about The Battle of Givon or the Temple Mount end up on this blog after a google search and are surprised to find a picture of me right there looking back at them. In fact, it gets something like 60 hits a day right now.

Well, I still have huge backlogs of photographs from tiyulim I went on which I never had the time to publish. My memory is probalby a little rusty from a couple of years ago, but I can still throw together some additional posts with my backlog of material.

I will also be visiting Israel in a month, so I'm looking forward to perhaps even adding some new material.

I also have an ulterior motive. Those who read my posts may remember that I had started learning to paint. Back then, I only made a few paintings but it stuck in my head as something I would like to work on more some day. A few months ago, I decided that "some day," would never come on its own, so if I wanted to start painting, I had better get going, so I did! And what better subject could there be for painting than the Land of Israel and its people. I started a separate website for my Paintings of Israel. Right now, it is still in "testing" phase. I plan to begin uploading actual posts of my artwork in January. But I would like to update this blog with as many posts as possible, and use these posts as references for the places I paint for those who want more information. So off we go! Stay tuned.

Response to Comment

2010-07-15T08:29:00.001-07:00

One of the joys of having put together the body of work "Planet Israel" is that, even though I am not posting very frequently, I still get about 30-60 hits a day. That's more than I got even when I was regularly posting! People searching for information on this settlement or that biblical site, are directed by Google to the blog. I'm glad to know I've been able to make some positive effect, however small.

And then there's people like Khalid:

KHALID AWRTA has left a new comment on your post "Shomron Trip IV: Itamar":

On the past and for the futuer this land will be for us
sons of AWARTA
WE NEVER FORGET OUR HOME
YOU CAME TO OUR LAND YOU DESTROY OR HOME YOU KILLS OURE SONS YOU MAKE US refugee
BUT WE WILL BUCK TO OUR COUNTRY PALESTINE
FREE DOMME FO PALESTNE

Hmmmm. Interesting. You speak a language (Arabic) which is native not to the Levant. Your ancestors colonized this land after invading from the Arabian Peninsula. Assuming that you are not one of the few remaining Christians not driven into exile by the Palestinian Authority, you face Mecca, a city hundreds of miles from here, when you pray. Even in the very post you commented on, there are photographs of rock-solid archaeological proof of a Jewish presence on this land thousands of years before your ancestors arrived. Do you really think you are going to convince anyone by shouting? The past and the future of this land is Jewish. Deal with it or go home.

Full Speed Ahead

2010-05-13T15:16:00.000-07:00

It’s not that I have nothing to say, merely that I haven’t the time to say it. In the last two years, I’ve been laid off, tried to start a company, got hired, met my wife, proposed to my wife, planned a wedding, got laid off again, got married, moved countries, and drove 3,000 miles to a new city. I’ve held four different jobs in the last two years, and my wife and I explored fourteen cities in fifteen states and once Canadian province over a period of two months.

After rolling into Houston, a city of friendly Jews, a low cost of living, and even a few jobs, we decided to weigh anchor. We rented an apartment on a month-to-month basis, furnished down to the beds and linens, which was perfect since all we had was the clothing, laptops, and cup o’ noodles we could fit into our car. After dropping $170 at the dollar store on bowls, an ironing board, paper towels, and all the other necessities of apartment living, it was time to hit the job market.

Economists tell us we’re in the worst recession since the sixth day of creation, so it’s no longer good enough to just post a resume here and there and expect a job to magically come and find you. I started pounding the ground, shaking every hand and meeting everyone who would sit down with me for a conversation. I probably spent eight or nine hours a day visiting job fairs, making cold calls to potential contacts, meeting in networking groups, visiting professional organization gatherings, and practicing my elevator pitch. Eventually, it paid off, and I managed to get the job I was looking for. I’m now working for an environmental-oriented ESCO (energy services company.) We work on energy generation and conservation, as well as green technology projects. We show large municipalities and companies how to retrofit their existing facilities to save power, or generate power locally and sell it back to the grid, or any other number of engineering projects that come through the door. On the down side, the salary is low and I'm working 10-hour days, and a few hours on Sundays too. On the plus side, it’s a small firm with only four engineers, but it has great potential, and I’m gaining experience in all sorts of new fields of engineering that are expecting rapid growth over the coming years. The company is very growth-oriented (the CEO is an Enron survivor and has managed multimillion dollar projects in the past) and if the growth curve for energy conservation and renewable technology continues as it has over the last five years, it's a good thing to be getting in on the ground floor.

Meanwhile, my wife continued searching, and found her dream job working in Kiruv, Jewish outreach, a couple of weeks ago. She's still learning the ropes there, but we hope to be able to take everything we learned in Jerusalem and spread the knowledge here where it's most needed.

If I could sum up my feelings about life in Israel toward the last few months I was there, I'd say I felt like I had reached a personal dead end. Not that the spiritual magnetism or the feeling of living with purpose had gone away, but I had a sense I personally wasn't having an effect. The settlements and hilltops are turning people away, the army didn’t want anyone over twenty five, and all of Israel’s green technology firms, despairing of working with the Israeli government, found themselves building projects abroad. I had the feeling of having, through great effort and sacrifice, transformed myself into a cog in a machine that had already been retired. The lack of ability to get out of my one-bedroom closet-sized apartment, or even pay the rent without digging into savings, was the clincher.

I still have that flame in me though. I miss learning Tanach while standing on the spot where it happened, I miss seeing that same soul in a million faces of every color, and most of all I miss my friends and family. My aliyah engine may be on idle but the pilot light is still lit, and I’ve got enough fuel to make the long haul back one more time. I have big plans and great ambition, and I’m looking forward to what the future has to bring, and what I can bring to the future.

At the seashore in Kemah, Texas

Planet Israel Sells Out to Cash In

2009-11-23T20:15:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I blogged, and probably almost a year since I was writing my daily posts. And yet I've posted such a body of work that I still get 60 or 70 hits a day, more than I used to get even when I was writing daily. People scouring Google for information on El Jib, or the Jordan Valley, or any of the other myriad of places I've been, still find themselves wandering in to Planet Israel due to the vast amount of writing and pictures I've posted. I've been unemployed long enough that I've started to search for new sources of income, so I've decided to sell out to google and start posting google ads on my site. Maybe my labors will get me enough cash for another tank of gas.

In my personal life, I've descended from the holy land for the time being, but I'm still having adventures and I still want to write about them. Since I'm no longer in Israel, I think that posting to a blog called "Planet Israel" would probably be a bit of a misnomer. So I'm starting a new blog called "Adventures in Exile." It's still in the preliminary stages, but we plan on driving cross-country and posting from our pit-stops and layovers while we travel from place to place and seek adventure and employment. And I still have gigabytes worth of photographs from my Israeli travels, tours which I just never had the time to post. Maybe if someday I find a cushy government job with loads of free time, or if we can find a kosher soup kitchen with wi-fi, I'll finally have the time to post the Planet Israel archives. Until then, tune in to Adventures in Exile, and keep an eye on Planet Israel!

Climbing El Cap'

2009-10-26T04:58:00.000-07:00

The day after our wedding, the phonecalls stopped. No more hectic caterers, confused florists, irate wedding planners, sobbing relatives, or lost guests. Just the two of us in marital bliss. After weeks of sleeping past noon, we got on a normal schedule and began sorting through the heaps of wedding presents, plus all her stuff, plus all my stuff. Trying to cram it all into our tiny rental apartment has forced me to purge my wardrobe of all articles of clothing over seven years of age, begin selling some of my five computer systems, and haul out bag after bag of miscellaneous junk to the trash. It’s hard to believe I landed in this country three years ago with just two suitcases.

Leaving America with all my belongings.

Purging my possessions has caused me to try to organize myself mentally as well. What are my new life goals now that the big one, marriage, is squared away? Rambam (the 11^th century Jewish sage Maimonades) lists the proper order of one’s life goals as: Parnassah (income,) Bayit (home,) Ishah (wife.) In plainer talk, get yourself a job and a roof over your head before you think about getting married. In my 31 years on this planet, I have never actually owned my Bayit, always rented. In Israel, I have been homeless several times, living off the hide-a-beds and eating out of the fridges of friends and relatives for a month or more until I could find a new apartment. While vagrancy is tolerable for a rough-and-ready single, it would be a nightmare to drag my family through that. I need to own an apartment.

A compensating factor for the diminished personal wealth of life here is the feeling of total ownership. In Israel, even the sky is Jewish. I don’t need a castle with a five acre lawn because all the hills, streets, and trees around me are already mine. Still, I would like to have four walls and a roof of my own, to have my life beyond the whims of my landlord.

Personal finance in Israel, at least for most people, involves finding some way to scrape by. It is possible to pay the rent and bills, but it’s unusual to be able to get ahead. The cost of living for basic items (milk, eggs, busfare, etc.) is approximately the same as in the United States. Any luxury items, such as quality shoes, deodorant, a computer, or my car (which I have now sold,) are typically double to triple their cost in the United States. Meanwhile, my salary here is half to a third of what it was in the United States. A low-cost apartment in the settlements goes for at least $200,000, and a place in the outskirts of Jerusalem goes for a minimum of $300,000, and since down payments are typically 30%-40%, my down payment would be from $66,000 to $100,000. Based on a simple calculation of our earning potential versus expenses, it would take us anywhere from twelve to sixteen years to save up this amount, ignoring the effects of inflation. And that doesn’t include times like now, when I’m unemployed watching my savings bleed away. Also, while as a new couple it is possible to save up money, as time goes on and there are, God willing, more and more mouths to feed, saving anything in this country becomes impossible.

Our original plan was to give it a year and try to find something that paid better than my job at the solar power startup company. Then, five months ago, I was laid off. I’ve been to a couple of job interviews that looked really hopeful, to the point that one manager told me, “You are the ideal candidate. I’m flying to Austin next week to sign a contract, and when I come back, I’ll have an offer for you.” Having not heard from him in some time, I asked around. Turned out the company didn’t get the contract and was in a nose dive, shedding employees. I’ve reaped similar sour grapes from my other job interviews. It seems that, at least as far as I’m seeing, Israel is just too small a market for large, stable engineering firms. If they exist, they sure aren’t hiring. I’m sure that if I continue to apply myself, I can eventually land another six-month gig at another green-tech startup till it flops or is sold.

The question of leaving Israel temporarily to work and save is an option I’ve considered for some time and my feelings are mixed. Nobody comes to Israel to get rich, they come to satisfy a spiritual and ideological impulse, and to live with family. On religious terms, there is simply no comparison to the potential for spiritual growth in an environment with endless options for Torah study, the highest levels of kashrut, and a culture rooted in Jewish life. While I could sacrifice a few years of this growth on a personal level, there is a national aspect to living here as well. Living in Israel isn’t just another lifestyle choice, like dropping into Paris or London for a few years. I still haven’t lost the inspiration of participating in the restoration of the Jewish homeland and repatriation of its exiled natives after thousands of years of wandering. If every Jew were to base his or her decision to stay or leave on financial grounds alone, this country would be abandoned and revert to the deserted ruins it was under Muslim rule. Then again, if working abroad for a while helps me anchor myself here more permanently, then it could be a worthy sacrifice.

There is a reasonable case to be made for either sticking it out or going back into the diaspora for a while, and so I asked Hashem to affect my ratzon, my will, to push me in the right direction. In the end, my ratzon is pushing me to jump through this window of opportunity.

In Yosemite, I remember once speaking with a mountain climber who had scaled El Capitan, at over 3,500 feet, the tallest shear cliff in the world. At certain points on his ascent, he could anchor his equipment into the granite face and lower himself down by pulley, and then hoist himself back up to the same spot the next day. Walking into a bar in the evenings, his friends asking him what he was up to, he would answer, to their bemusement, "Right now, I'm climbin' El Cap'."

El Capitan

And so am I. Aliyah, literally "Ascent" is a process. When I landed here three years ago, I never thought I would have to leave again, but I'm not giving up on my Aliyah by a long shot. I have my family, friends, and connections, and I have some idea of how life works in this country. It may be a few months or a few years before I'm back permanently, but I can pick up life where I left off, I view this as part of the process.

So, on November 2^nd, wifey and I are going on a voyage. We will land on the East Coast, spend some time with my wife's family and purchase a used car. After visiting cities in the east, we will begin driving cross-country. We will stop in various communities across the United States and Canada getting to know one another’s family, seeing the sights, visiting those who could not attend our wedding, and hunting down job leads, until we reach my family in the Pacific Northwest. I’m confident we can find something, but even if we don’t, at least we’ll know we didn't let the opportunity pass by. And I won’t forget to write.

More on Student Loans and Defaults

2009-10-02T03:03:00.000-07:00

I've been having a conversation with Zapporah over my previous post on the Student Loan Scam.

I think it deserves its own post here, since this is an important issue which affects people for their entire lives.

Zapporah said...
Please answer me this... I just graduated college and I am moving to Israel in just a few months. Can I escape these high loan amounts in Israel? What will happen to my credit rating in Israel? Is it the same as in Canada with the new social number? What will the repercussions be for me in Israel?Thank you so much for this article.
8:49 PM

Evan said...
Hi Zapporah,There is no such thing as a credit history in Israel. At this time, lenders do not persue delinquent debtors outside of the United States. Also, there is no debtors' prison or anything like that, so you can fly back and visit as desired. Please note, however, that as of the writing of this comment, there is still no bankruptcy or statute of limitations on student loans. Therefore, if you default, and then you return to the U.S. after 20 years, your debt collectors will be waiting for you. Also, over the next 20 years, there could be a change in finance laws which makes it easier to persue debtors abroad. Nobody really knows which direction this will go. But for now, you will be safe from the loan collectors.

Zapporah said...
Evan, thanks. I signed up for as many classes as possible to get out of school in 18 months so I didn't have to pay more money. I knew my end date would be in June, but it kept coming up for Sept and no one could answer me why. I ended up being charged $3,000 more for the 3 months they added on because they didn't put me in more classes to get out of school by June which I signed up for. I was fully prepared to pay the $15,000+ amount but after reading this and getting $3k+ tacked onto my bill, no way am I going to start repayment. I will try for one more month to get the school to wipe the $3k off and if they don't, I'm out. Thanks a lot.

And Evan Says:

So basically, your college ripped you off. This is actually somewhat unsurprizing. Many colleges are now run more like businesses than educational institutions, and with a profit motive involved, inevitably there will be crooks and thieves in the mix.

However, please bear in mind one thing. If the college goes forward with charging you $3,000, then they will probably just take the money straight from the lender, unless you can find some way to convince the lender not to send the money to the university. Basically, if you default, the odds are that the university will get the money regardless.

If you do default, keep in mind that this debt will balloon with late fees and astronomical interest rates. They will not be able to come after your income as long as you are here in Israel. However, they will be able to sieze your tax returns (you still have to file tax returns from Israel to the United States every year, even if you are abroad.) That means that things like the stimulus checks or any other sort of money you would ordinarily receive on your tax returns would be lost.

More importantly, if say in ten or twenty years, should you decide to return to the United States, even if just to work for a few years, the creditors will come after you and attempt to garnish your earnings.

My own opinion is that people who are trapped in this hellish mess of massive and unrepayable debt should flee the United States as a last resort. However, this has dire personal consequences and probably shouldn't be undertaken unless the debt is so crushing that it is impossible to repay.

It's just a good idea to think about the ramifications of a decision which will affect the rest of one's life.

Our Wedding

2009-08-16T08:17:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a few days, and wifey and I are now recovering from the holy ceremony / wild party that was our wedding. I've posted some preliminary pictures taken by friends. We still don't have the official photos from the photographer or the video guy, but this should give you some idea as to how it went down!

City of Light, Part II

2009-07-01T08:05:00.000-07:00

Continued from Yesterday...

Multi-colored buckets hanging from the retaining wall of the Temple Mount.
Lights on trees. It looked sort of wintry to me.
Back in the downtown area, spinning "movies" projected onto the Iriyah (City Hall.)
In the central plaza of the Iriyah, a 3-dimensional projection of an image. The symbols of all of the 12 tribes, in this case Reuvein, were projected holographically.Meanwhile, back in the Christian quarter of the old city. A fountain in the main plaza was covered with a giant plastic bubble. Fans spun feathers and bubbles around inside the giant plastic bubble, to make it look like it had its own weather system.

Making juice next to the giant plastic bubble fountain.

City of Light, Part I

2009-06-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, the Jerusalem municipality put on the "city of light" display, where artists displayed their light-based sculptures, also projecting colors and images on the ancient walls and buildings of the old city.

Click on the images below for larger versions.

Walking toward the Jaffa Gate, the streets are lined with hanging colored lanterns. some sort of glowing translucent plastic tanks which constantly change color.

Welcome sign projected on Jaffa Gate.

People dressed in light.
Outside the walls of the citadel, some sort of whale-shaped figurine with a kinetic flying bicycle attached.

The kinetic flying bicycle.

In the Cardo, vendors selling lamps.
Multi-colored, ever-changing lights projected onto strings.
One of the benefits of the City of Light display was that all of the archaeological gardens, parks, etc., were open to the public free of charge. We went into the archaeological gardens to view some of the sculptures on display there.
Images projected on giant 20-foot tall spinning vases.

Light tubes, with a little Magen David (Star of David) in the middle.
Looking at the light tubes from the bottom.

To be continued...

The Vort / Lechayim / Engagement Party

2009-06-09T01:54:00.000-07:00

Wife2B and I had our Vort (Yiddish) / Lechayim (Hebrew) / Engagement Party (English) (choose appropriate language) last week. I've posted some photos here:

Yours truly spinning in the circle with Tel Aviv Moshe. That's Adam playing guitar in the background.

Peeking through the Mechitzah.

More guys dancing.

Rabbi Shurin from Wife2B's seminary came to give a speech.

Wife2B with friends and roomies.

Wife2B

Women dancing.

And, of course, more dancing on the men's side:

Yours truly with Wife2B!

Mighty Moish of Modi'in (soon Tzfat)

Yours truly, living it up

Fwd: Obama Vs. Israel

2009-06-03T02:48:00.001-07:00

After years of blissful uneventfullness since the end of the Second Intifada, punctuated by a few weeks of intense warfare here and there, I've suddenly started paying attention to the news again. It started with a call from one of my rabbis, who is now living in a small community on a windswept hilltop in Samaria (the northern West Bank.) These communities are often called "Settler Outposts," but the term is a bit misleading, as it implies some sort of military fortress bristling with antennae, thermal imaging cameras, and all the toys from a spy thriller. In reality, these Outposts are composed of small ramshackle temporary shelters and leaky trailers built, like their wealthier Arab neighbors, without the benefit of legal permits.

"I know you like to keep up with the news, so you're aware of what's going on?" he asked me.

"Yeah"

The new, nominally conservative Netanyahu administration, had slated twenty six such outposts for demolition.

"We need lots of tefillah (prayers) and help."
"Let me know what I can do, just say where and when."

These demolitions, which are now in progress, are the first such since 2005. They apparently did nothing to ingratiate Netanyahu with the new Obama administration. It was expected that the new administration would be markedly cooler toward Israel, but a sudden series of edicts emanating from the White House caught everyone off-guard for their naked hostility, including:

1. Israel must sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which would require Israel to disarm.

2. Israel is to take no military action to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

3. The U.S. understands Iran's, "energy concerns" (i.e. nuclear ambitions.) The United States will not make efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction until Israel makes sufficient progress on destroying settlements. Meaning, America will do nothing about Iran.

4. In violation of previous commitments and signed treaties, Obama is now demanding Israel freeze all settlement activity everywhere, including in large cities abutting the 1949 armistice line which everyone agrees will become part of Israel.

5. In his meeting with Palestinian Authority President (and financier of the 1976 Munich Olympics Massacre) Mahmoud Abbas, President Obama indicated that the U.S. will no longer hold the Palestinian Authority responsible for upholding their commitments in previous signed agreements. These commitments include turning over known terrorists to Israel for trial, prevention terrorist attacks, and cessation of funding for acts of violence against Israeli civilians. The White House is only demanding a vague, unverifiable, "Commitment to end incitement."

6. The U.S. is beginning to enact restrictions on which weapons Israel will be allowed to purchase, holding up sales of weapons which might be used to thwart Iran's nuclear program.

While no consequences for non-compliance with American demands have yet been issued, the unspoken threats for refusal include:

1. Removal of American loan guarantees. Israel would have to borrow money for its national budget at a much higher rate of interest during a time of economic crisis.

2. Removal of American support in the United Nations. One in three United Nations resolutions is a condemnation of Israel for all sorts of outlandish accusations. These condemnations are typically authored by Arab states, embraced by the third world, sheepishly ratified by Europe, and finally vetoed by the United States. Removal of the American veto could result in a gradual erosion of Israel's diplomatic position and, in a worst-case scenario, the eventual imposition of sanctions.

3. Elimination of military aid.

Since all of these measures were enacted without discussion, or even a warning through diplomatic channels, it seems pretty clear that the Obama administration, for its own purposes, is actively trying to pick a fight with the Israeli government. Taken in context of his visible cooling of relations with other American allies like Britain and India, and his warming of relations with traditional adversaries like Syria, this seems to be part of a general American trend in the world of turning away from free democratic states and toward third-world dictatorships and Islamic Apartheid regimes.

This isn't the first time Israel has come into conflict with an American administration. In fact, Netanyahu's previous term in office in 1996 was marked by conflict with the Clinton administration. Clinton, perceived by Israelis as a great friend, partnered with the Israeli left and managed to have Netanyahu replaced with the more pliant Ehud Barak.

Obama has made similar overtures to the same Ehud Barak, today Defense Minister, bypassing protocol and just "popping in" to a meeting between Barak and white house officials yesterday. It was a clear signal to Israelis that there are more pliant leaders with whom he was willing to work after Netanyahu is overthrown. But Obama is not Clinton. Clinton took four years to prove his pro-Israel credentials before involving himself in the intricacies and intrigue of Israeli domestic politics. Barack Obama jumped right in and began issuing demands, and already has a reputation on the street as an Israel-hater.

Also, the Israel of 2009 is not the Israel of 1996. At that time, Israel still held Gaza, the "West Bank," and Southern Lebanon. The Palestinian Authority still claimed, at least in English, to have no ambitions beyond a state of its own. But after withdrawing from Lebanon and Gaza, both became launching grounds for kidnapping raids, terrorist atrocities, and rocket bombardments of Israeli civilians. As distasteful as Ehud Barak may find the settlers, it's blindingly obvious that, should Israel withdraw from the "West Bank," his own supporters' homes in Tel Aviv, just four or five kilometers to the east, will come under rocket attack. Israeli leaders may still mouth the words "West Bank Withdrawal," but most seem to understand on some level the lethal threat a State of Palestine would cause for Israel.

The real threat is one of Arab perception. Since the Arab conquest and colonization of the holy land in the year 639 CE (AD), the Jews were always a docile minority accepting of second-class status. The Arab street of today views Jewish haughtiness at demanding freedom from their rule as a direct result of American military and diplomatic support. If they view this sudden rift in the American-Israeli relationship as serious, they may smell a moment of weakness and be tempted to attack.

In the long run, Obama will probably be forced to reduce his expectations. Every American administration takes office with a surge of energy, convinced that the previous guy had it all wrong. Reagan came in with a similar list of demands, although not nearly as threatening. Within a few years, after gaining real-life experience seeing American diplomats tortured and servicemen killed by Arafat and the like, he realized with whom he was dealing and scaled back his expectations.

A temporary reduction in Israel-American ties is no need for fear. It may, in fact, be beneficial to break Israel's psychological dependence on American support in an increasingly multi-polar world. India and China, both rising powers, have higher public approval ratings of Israel than the United States. Most of Israel's great accomplishments, from the building of a state, to Independence, to repulsion of repeated Arab invasions, to the immigration of millions of refugees, all happened before the American-Israeli alliance was cemented under Nixon, and often with vehement American opposition. Still, it's a shame to see the world's greatest democracy, and Israel's greatest friend for the last thirty years and more, turn a cold shoulder to its former friends.

At least the news is now more interesting than the sitcoms.

Is Obama Good for Israel?

2009-05-20T05:58:00.001-07:00

In a previous post (Three Elections,) I mentioned that, since Obama was dangerously inexperienced and had dubious associations, I was going to be voting for McCain. However, I also added a sort of disclaimer:

Of course, I remember, eight years ago, writing that G.W. Bush would be, like his father, a Country Club Republican, sneering and hostile to Israel. Boy did I have him pegged wrong! Maybe I've got Obama all wrong too, and he will completely break with the views of his friends and advisers to become a truly noble person.

In the 2000 presidential election, I voted Democrat, for fear of George W. Bush being as hostile to Israel as his father had been. But during the Second Intifada, when the Europe and much of the American left betrayed Israel and sided with terrorism, Bush's stalwart support stood out like a lone voice in the wilderness. After two years of mass murder in the streets of Jerusalem at the hands of Islamic predators, in 2002 his diplomatic support provided Israel the latitude to finally send in the tanks and crush the terror war. As terrorism continued to drop, despite almost unbearable European and Arab pressure to throw Israel to the wolves, he supported Israel's defensive measures, including the targeted assassinations of the terror gangsters, the construction of the security barrier, and the erection of life-saving checkpoints. I felt that despite Bush's having botched Iraq and reduced America's strength domestically and abroad, I could give him a bit of leeway.

I was gravely concerned when Obama won the election and took office, given the animosity of many of his associates to Israel and fear they would be moved into positions of influence. His recent overtures to Syria and the State Department's calling for Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (disarm) while simultaneously allowing Iran to build a bomb are causes for concern. Also disconcerting is his apparent support for the "Arab Peace Initiative," which calls for a complete withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice line, the destruction of the Jewish villages over the armistice line and the dispossession and destitution of their half-million inhabitants, and the unlimited immigration of hostile Arabs from neighboring countries into what would be left of Israel to vote this country into the grave.

But really, none of these threats, except Iran, have any teeth to them. Israel will never surrender its nuclear weapons, ever. Syria will not realign itself with the United States. Israel will not sign an Arab Peace Initiative which legalizes its own destruction, and will only accept a modified version in which Israel would somehow continue to exist. For a Muslim state to sign such a modified Arab Peace Initiative with a Jewish state guaranteeing its continued existence would imply some sort of shared humanity between Jews and Muslims. The Islamic political program enacted in neighboring Arab states legalizes an Apartheid system with Muslims on top and non-Muslims (Dhimmi) completely disenfranchised, so any Arab leader who signed a treaty would be branded a heretic.

As for Iran, well, both Clinton and Bush II also sat idly by and did nothing while they pursued their nuclear ambitions, so Obama is no better or worse. It's like watching the diabolical villain in a James Bond movie, except with no James Bond to stop him. On the other hand, I remember reading headlines back in 1998 that Iran was six months away from having the bomb.

As for Obama's anti-Israel advisors, it's important to remember back to the administration of Bush I. James Baker influenced George H. W. Bush to threaten to withhold foreign aid if Israel's conservative Shamir administration were to continue building in Judea, Samaria and Gaza (the "Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip") Shamir realized Bush I was so implacably hostile he had nothing to lose, and so he founded dozens of new settlements and authorized massive expansions in the others. It was the greatest flowering of the rebirth of Jewish life in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza in the last forty years. Even today, two decades later, homes are still being built based on permits he issued. As for Bush I's threats, congress stepped in and stopped him, so there were no negative consequences.

Is Obama good for Israel? No, but neither is he bad, merely indifferent. While Obama and Netanyahu may not share the lock-step relationship that Bush II and Sharon did, I don't sense much overt hostility from the Obama administration. The administration is staffed with savvy politicians and business people who have to fix their own country first, so why would they risk a fight with congress over an issue no president has ever been able to solve anyway? If Obama can somehow repair the economic disaster he inherited, it would be better for Israel to have a lukewarm but strong ally under Obama than an enthusastic but pitifully weak one as under Bush II.

The peace processors are returning to the region with their lingo about, "windows of opportunity," "peace partners," and "bolstering moderates." In the end it will prove impossible to reconcile the Arab objective to deprive the Middle East's non-Muslims of their freedom with Israel's objective to continue existing. The world will keep turning, the diplomats will keep yacking, the Arabs will stew in belligerent self-pity, and Israel will keep growing.

Next week... is Obama good for America?

"Messianic" Aliyah?

2009-05-07T00:44:00.001-07:00

I've noticed the "Who is a Jew" question popping up in relation to "Messianic" Jews lately, and it seems to be morphing into more of a "What is Judaism" question. As a people dispersed across the world for the last two millennia, constantly either assimilating into or being expelled from host cultures and nations, so much mixing of blood and ideas has occurred that it's very hard for the secular state of Israel to determine who is truly Jewish. It should be mentioned here that according to traditional Judaism, a Jew is anyone either born of a Jewish mother or who underwent conversion under which he or she accepted the 613 commandments, underwent circumcision (if he is a "he"), and immersed in a mikvah.

The secular state of Israel's definition is rooted in its mission as a haven for persecuted Jews. For Israel, a Jew is a person with one Jewish grandparent who has not opted to follow another religion.

Recent years have seen the invention of "Messianic Judaism," primarily in the United States. In the previous generation, these would have been "Jews for Jesus," i.e., Christians of Jewish descent, most of whom believe that Jesus was the Jewish Moshiach as prophesized in the writings of the Prophets. In recent years, a new brand of Jews for Jesus, "Messianic Judaism," has sprung up. In this religion, adherents set up "Synagogues," observe their Sabbath on Saturdays, and acknowledge Jewish holidays, although concepts like "Halachah," (Jewish law) are unknown. Some of the adherents are of Jewish descent and some are not.

The traditional Jewish perspective is that the Moshiach must complete three tasks to be considered authentic:

1. Ingather all the exiled Jews from around the world.

2. Rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.

3. Bring peace.

Because Jesus, as well as dozens of others throughout history claiming to be Moshiach, failed to do so, he obviously does not qualify and Jewish texts do not spend much ink refuting Christianity. It's assumed that anyone who was raised with even a rudimentary Jewish education would never go for such a thing. Indeed I have never met a "Messianic" Jew who could quote a single Gemarah.

Most Israelis, and many traditional or "Orthodox" Jews to whom I mention "Messianic Judaism," are genuinely confused. After all, don't all Jews believe in the imminent arrival of Moshiach? It's one of the thirteen basic principles of the Jewish faith. It is only when they begin to understand that, "Messianic Judaism," is just Christianity by subterfuge that they begin to feel offended. It would be as if one were to rebuild the holy temple in Jerusalem to exactly the dimensions and layout as defined in the Torah, and then place an idol to the Roman god Pan in the Holy of Holies.

The question then arises, what about a Messianic Jew who wants to make aliyah?

The Jerusalem Post's aliyah expert answered:

Q: We are Messianic Jews and would like to make Aliyah. How difficult would this be?

A: From the inquiries that I have received, I have come to the conclusion that there seems to be 2 different interpretations of the meaning of "Messianic Jews." One seems to be people born Jewish who have embraced Jesus as the Messiah and follow the New and Old testament. The other appears to be people, not of Jewish birth who support the Jewish religion and who believe in both testaments. If the questioner is the former then it would appear that s/he is entitled to make Aliyah in accordance with the Law of Return. If the latter is the case then the questioner does not qualify for Aliyah.

So by his interpretation, Messianic Judaism still passes the bar. But then this morning I read a story in Yediot Achronot:

Three Messianic Jews residing in Britain filed a petition with the High Court of Justice Wednesday in an effort to convince Interior Minister Eli Yishai to grant them citizenship…

..They claim they have appealed to the Interior Ministry a number of times but were rejected because they are Messianic Jews. They say the ministry sees members of their faith as missionaries and has denied their appeals for this reason.

The courts, which determine who is a Jew, are controlled by the liberal-secular ruling class, but the Interior Ministry is controlled by the Hareidi ("Ultra-Orthox") Shas party and the nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party. Of course I too would oppose allowing them to make aliyah. I have respect for Christians who want to practice as they choose if they leave me alone, but to allow these people to spread their beliefs through deceit and subterfuge is too great a risk to the spiritual health of the state. Such are the conflicts in a state which defines itself as both secular and Jewish, but not all-the-way Jewish.

The Student Loan Scam

2009-05-04T02:10:00.001-07:00

In the last month, I have been introduced to an issue which I think I should call to the attention of anyone who reads this blog: the Student Loan Scam. I have spent the last several weeks reading online message boards and chatrooms with people suffering through various stages of this scam. This is probably one of the greatest frauds perpetrated in American history by a special interest group against American, and I would strongly urge anyone who is considering taking out a private student loan to think long and hard about the ramifications.

Back when I entered college in 1996, I used federal Direct Loans as a way of bridging the gap between how much college cost and how much my "wealthy" parents would be expected to contribute to my education. Of course, there were some who declared bankruptcy to avoid paying back their loans, so in 1997 congress and the Clinton administration made student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy and retroactively eliminated the statute of limitations. While my own payments were rather high, the federal government, with its main motive being to get its money back to loan to the next student, was willing to work with me to refinance at a lower rate and help me find a payment plan I could afford. After five years of hard work in America, I was out of debt and could continue with my life.

But as college costs have continued to rise at double the rate of inflation, a new type of loan, the federally-backed private loan, became more popular as the Direct Loans were no longer able to cover the costs of tuition. In this loan scheme, private lenders, such as Sallie Mae, are encouraged to extend credit to student borrowers by a guarantee that, should the borrower default, the federal government would reimburse the lender for the loss. It seemed like a reasonable system, except for one critical flaw: the lender now no longer had any profit incentive to keep loans out of default since they would get their money back either from the student or the federal government.

But that was only the beginning. Over the past decade, Sallie Mae, Citibank, and other private lenders have begun taking over all aspects of the student loan business, from kickbacks to universities, to lubricating Congress and the Bush administration into passing the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005 removing all consumer protections from student lending, to purchasing all the debt collection companies tasked with pursuing delinquent student loans.

The business model of Sallie Mae and other private lenders now works as follows:

1. A prospective college student speaks with a financial aid officer who directs them to accept a loan from Sallie Mae. The then 18 year old student is told that payments on the loan will be $350 per year when he or she graduates from college. Unbeknownst to the student, the financial aid officer and the university receive kickbacks from Sallie Mae for each loan issued, and thus often steer students away from loans which would have a lower interest rate or longer term. This also benefits the university in that the availability of easy credit drives up the price of tuition, much as happened in the housing market.

2. The student graduates from college and is shocked to receive his or her first bill, not for $350 but for $800. The student aid officials and loan officers are not accountable because the bankruptcy reform act of 2005 exempts them from all honesty in lending laws.

3. The student goes into forebearance until he or she can find a job which will pay for this loan. At this stage, sometimes Sallie Mae pretends not to have received the students' paperwork and throws the loan immediately into default. Sometimes the student pays for a while until Sallie Mae can tack on enough "late fees" and interest to finally make the total bill unpayable. Sallie Mae does not offer flexible repayment plans like the federal government, since their profit motive is to push the lender into default. The 2005 Bankrupcy Reform Act makes refinancing or consolidating private student loans impossible. Either way, many students end up in default and Sallie Mae is reimbursed for the entire value of the loan by the federal government.

4. A credit collection agency purchases the delinquent debt back from the federal government for pennies on the dollar. After a few calls or letters, often to previous addresses from which the credit agency knows the lender has moved, a $20,000 legal fee is slapped onto the total amount. This is permitted by the Bankruptcy Reform act of 2005.

5. The credit collection agency sells the debt to another credit collection agency which slaps another $20,000 onto the debt. This process continues several times, until the total amount on a $40,000 loan can reach $200,000 or $300,000, or any number which is clearly beyond the student's ability to pay. Astronomical interest rates apply. Of course, all of these collection agencies are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Sallie Mae Corporation.

6. The credit agencies then sue the defaulted borrower. The borrower is of course unable to pay, or pay for a legal defense, due to the shortage of money that caused the default in the first place. The court passes judgment and the credit agencies garnish 25% of the student's salary and intercept all tax returns. The garnishment often results in the new employee being fired. The 2005 Bankrutpcy Reform Act also allows the collection agency to sue and revoke any professional licenses (medical, legal, engineering etc). Because there is no longer a statute of limitations on the debt, and the amount is far beyond the borrower's ability to repay, and this continues for the borrower's entire working career. When the borrower retires, Social Security is also garnished.

7. For borrowers who are sick or disabled, the debts can also not be discharged because the standards for disabled discharge of debts were set so high in the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Act as to be impossible. Disability payments are also garnished.

Garnishment is actually a worst case scenario. Usually debt collection agencies will accept a payment plan from the student. The payment plan continues over five or six years, when suddenly the credit agency goes out of business and the debt is resold to another credit agency and the lawsuit-garnishment-settlement process begins again. The new credit agency often claims none of the debt has been paid, and the borrower will have a very hard time getting payment reports from a shady credit agency which has gone out of business.

So who benefits from this, besides, of course, Sallie Mae investors who's stock increased 1600% in a decade, Sallie Mae Executives, and the financial accounts of politicians who sign onto legislation like the Bankruptcy Reform Act?

Canada!

In all the message boards I've read through, the only people who have successfully broken out of "Student Loan Hell," as they call it, are those who have left the country. While I have seen a few posts calling people who pay back their loans "suckers," most of the defaulted borrowers are burdened with an enormous sense of guilt and fear. It's only after having suffered through broken marriages, lost jobs, and having usually paid back several times the original loan value, before they give up and decide to pack their bags and escape the dominion of Sallie Mae. As one message puts it:

Posted By Jennifer Peoria, IL: October 25, 2008 2:04 pm

I work in a small, Canadian technical recruiting agency in their immigration profile division. Almost every applicant we get now is from the US and all running from student loan debacles. We gladly here them and assist in immigration if they meet the qualifications which include high skill sets, particularly in software development and engineering. It is definitely a brain drain towards Canada. When they do arrive they love our health care and social services and our retention rate is over 90% measured for a 5 year span. As Canada has a lower birth rate than the US, our program will double in the next year due to the overwhelming number of applicants. Furthermore, the cost of pursuing a student debtor here would cost about $40k CAN. It's simply not worth the return as a Canadian court would be far more lenient, blaming the lender as much for the predicament. Since a Canadian Social insurance Number will allow a new credit profile, many of our applicants are able to start over up North. We have terrific feedback from our clients, the companies that do the hiring and pay us for recruiting.

So America's northern neighbor inherits a generation of highly-trained professionals at no cost to itself whatsoever. You have to wonder what future a country has when its predatory lending laws drive a significant percentage of its best and brightest into exile.

Addendum: If you have been caught up in this scam, there is a political action committee, Student Loan Justice, which is dedicated to taking action on this issue. Of course, since this system was set up with government collusion, there is as of yet no legal escape from Sallie Mae (at least as long as you are alive.) But you can at least meet others in a similar situation and learn from their experiences how

It's Hard to be a Jew

2009-04-19T07:07:00.001-07:00

Last Shabbat, i.e. yesterday, Wife2B and I spent a day in my old home-suburb of Pisgat Ze'ev. We went to my old shul, Pisgat Moriah, to hear a very gripping announcement. On the seventh day of Pesach, one of the congregants, a mild-mannered 51 year-old father of four boys had suffered from a heart attack on the seventh day of Pesach. He had been up late studying, when he felt something tickle in his chest. His wife offered to give him a ride to the hospital, but he said to call the ambulance. By the time paramedics arrived, he had expired.

I had not known him personally, but he always carried himself with great dignity, and stood out in the crowd. When his name was mentioned, I immediately knew about whom they were speaking. As I later learned, he and his wife had met at age two and grown up together in Uruguay prior to his making aliyah to Israel. After aliyah, he had continued in his intense Torah study, and maintained contact with his former congregation back in Uruguay, answering whatever questions in halachah or spirituality might arise in the community.

The body is considered muktzeh, an object which can not be touched on Shabbat, so after attempts to resuscitate him failed, he could not be removed from the house until after Shabbat (although I have heard conflicting opinions on this matter.) So the family had to wait with their deceased father in the house.

Even worse, his youngest son's Bar Mitzvah was scheduled for Shabbat two days later. The family is now sitting shiva, the mourning period of intense bereavement following the death of an immediate family member, but all mourning is suspended on Shabbat. For the boy to have not read the Torah at his Bar Mitzvah would have been a sign of mourning, and is expressly forbidden due to this suspension of mourning practices. He was called up to the Torah and read beautifully, with great clarity and precision. But he didn't smile. It was an impossible situation, but it happened.

It's said that anyone who feels they are suffering from the burdens of life needs to understand that Hashem (God) provides him with exactly his measure of suffering. We look out at others and assume that the smiling exterior of our friends belies inner tranquility, but in reality, none of us could handle the burdens of any other. Sometimes it seems like just a nice thing to tell ourselves, but once in a while I get a peek behind the veil into the real burdens of another, and realize the truth of this.

Pesach Cleaning

2009-04-14T05:55:00.000-07:00

Pesach cleaning is usually a drag. The concept of destroying every last chometz (leaven) particle from the house prior to the Pesach (Passover) holiday is symbolic of destroying the puffiness, or haughtiness in our own egos. At least that's what we're told to make us feel better about getting on our hands and knees scrubbing for hours at a stretch.

My own cleaning usually goes long into the night before Pesach. But this year, S., my wife2B, came over and lent me a helping hand. She's small and versatile, and can get to spots I could never reach...

Like on the countertops.

At one point, I came back to find a hand protruding from my fridge.

Looked in side, to find...

Wife2B!

So, we finished at 11PM (a reasonable hour.) Then, the search for chometz began. This usually involves the children searching the house for ten little bits of chometz wrapped in paper. There is a little bracha (blessing) you say at the beginning of the search, and the children run through the house with candles finding them one by one. At the end, all of the chometz is nullified, and the next morning it is burned. Of course, Judaism doesn't really account for the older single living alone, like me. Traditionally people stayed home until bar mitzvah, and for some yeshivah, and then they were married and making more children right away.

For the past decade, I've been forced to go through this ridiculous ritual where I hide the chometz from myself, then say the bracha, then find it right away. Eventually it turned into this wrote recitation:

1. Throw the chometz bits on the table.
2. "Barucha blah blah.."
3. Find the chometz on the table.
4. "Barucha blah blah..."
5. Throw them on the fire the next morning.

Of course, this year, I had S. to hide it from me, and we did a little "warmer colder" game. It was the first time I have actually smiled during my Pesach cleaning and chometz destructon since, well, forever.

I'm Engaged!

2009-04-03T05:37:00.000-07:00

Having dated 73 girls since I made aliyah two and a half years ago, I thought I had it down. Ten minutes before a date, I hit the shower. Five minutes 'till, I slipped into the already-pressed "dating shirt" and "dating slacks" hanging in the closet. Two minutes to date-time, a quick shot of peppermint schnapps to make my breath fresher, my jokes funnier, and the girl prettier. Sixty seconds till date time I was out the door. Crossing the street, I slipped into Cafe Hillel, my first-date location of choice, at just the right second.

Afterward, the shirt and slacks went back on the hangar, and I waited. The girls usually dumped me after the first date or two. Maybe one in ten was gracious enough to give me three before yanking the plug. Some weeks I went out with three girls in a row. Date, dump, date, dump, date, dump, it became regular. Like a beating heart. Why, oh why, couldn't I find someone with whom I could just be?

But after my third date with S., when she actually agreed to a fourth, I knew something was up. Of course, it wasn't like what you see in the movies, the sort of love at first sight. I had my doubts and fears, but I also felt like on some level this person on the other side of my slice of pizza was quietly absorbing one small piece of my soul at a time. It wasn't the intellect, though she's quite bright, and it wasn't the looks, though she drew my eye. It was something else.

Of course, I would sometimes seize up and panic, but I had made a decision that I would never again end a relationship without talking the matter through. And while I felt a growing interest in her, I could never quite perceive whether she was in the same place I was. On the phone with her after our eighth date, uncharted territory for me having never made it past the fifth date, I finally spoke. "I just feel," I told her, "like every date is still our first date. I'm never comfortable. Maybe that's why I'm 30 and still single, but I don't know if I can handle this."

"Love," she responded, "isn't' something you fall into. It's something you grow into. We have the same values, the same ideas."
Well, yes. She was learning full-time at a seminary across the street from the yeshiva where I had studied.
"I can't stop you from going, and it's your decision. But you'll always wonder what could have been." Then I heard her quietly sniffling.

If she felt that strongly, I decided we should go out again. We went to the shuk (outdoor market) at night, looking for a special garment for someone in my family. Unfortunately, most of the stores were closed, so we only checked a few, and later wandered about in boredom. The date was mediocre, but the creeping fear I had was returning. After the date I tossed and turned trying to sleep. Why hadn't I had the guts to end the relationship when the time was right? Perhaps I should do it by email. I began composing a letter. Then next day I was perfecting the touches of a letter which would, as gently as possible, let her down. The phone rang.

"Hi, this is S."
"Oh, uh, hi. How are you?"
"I'm good. I just wanted to wish you a Shabbat Shalom (good sabbath) and let you know that I went back to the shuk. I went back to all the stores that were closed last night in order to find that garment for you."
Wow. In two and a half years, after all the eight dozen girls I had dated talking about their law degrees and their traveling experiences, themselves, themselves, themselves, nobody had ever done a thing like that.
"Uh. Thanks. Shabbat Shalom."

I deleted the letter I had been writing. During that Shabbat, I went to some singles events I had signed up for, and standing there watching all the girls yack on and on about themselves, all I could think of was, "Where's my S.?"

After that, I got really interested, and so did she. As our dates progressed, we found that we were just getting over with the dinner or bowling in order to get to the best part, the end. I would bring her back to her apartment, where on our early dates I used to just say, "I had a good time and I'll call you tomorrow," sat back and wandered through hours and hours of conversation. Or we would lean back and silently watch the clouds pass by. I had finally found someone with whom I could just be. Finally, I decided to tell her, "I want you to know that the fear I had earlier is gone. I feel very confident about us and I think we're moving in a good direction." The look of relief in her face was immediate.

I began introducing her to my Israeli family. We even Skyped my family back in the states. After thirty or so dates, I was ready to propose. On Monday, I brought her up to Kever Shmuel, the grave of Samuel the Prophet, which overlooks Jerusalem, for a lunch.

I gave her a small gift, and wrapped inside was a scroll, reading, "Marry Me?"

She said yes. After the flurry of phonecalls to friends and relatives, we finally called it a night at 12 AM.

The next day, she and I were discussing our plans. In the course of the discussion, I began discussing an issue which we had discussed while we were dating. At the time, I hadn't grasped the depth of this issue, but after having discussed it further, I realized that we have to figure out how we are going to approach it before we can set an official date and make the rest of the arrangements.

But I won't let that distract me from the good news: I'm engaged to a great girl! Who would have thought it possible? Halleluyah!

Jerusalem Post - Wrong Again!

2009-02-22T06:48:00.001-08:00

Just read an interesting, grossly inaccurate article in the Jerusalem Post about the city of Modiin.

A link can be found here: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304824549&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

For those who haven't been to Israel since 1990, what used to be open fields back then is today a city of 75,000, part of a metropolitan area of about 200,000. It's a beautiful, clean city. However, the glowing Jerusalem Post article has some massive factual errors I'd like to set straight here and now:

The main reason for its popularity is its location midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and its excellent transportation links with all parts of the country.

Well, maybe transpportation is excellent if you have a car. Or if you take the train to Tel Aviv (the Modi'in-Tel Aviv rail line opened recently.) But if you want to get to Jerusalem, you have to deal with a private bus system which seems to exist in its own time zone.

It roots go far back, to biblical times. On the outskirts of today's Modi'in are the archeological remains of its ancient counterpart, a settlement built during the Maccabean era that was destroyed by the Romans during the time of the Jewish revolt.

Sorry, but the town is not Biblical, as the Maccabees don't appear in the bible. Due to the success of the Maccabean revolt, we celebrate Chanukah, but because the regime later became corrupted and so deeply assimilated into Hellenic culture, the book of the Maccabees was excluded from the Tanach (the Jewish Bible.) Furthermore, the ruins found on Modi'ins outskirts are not those of ancient Modi'in. Most archaeologists have told me that biblical Modiin was located several kilometers to the south, where route 3 and route 1 intersect.

The present Modi'in is located on a hilly region overlooking the Ela Plain, where according to the Bible, David slew Goliath.

Again, wrong. The Ela plain is about twenty kilometers to the south, south of even Beit Shemesh. Modi'in sits on the edge of the Ayalon valley, where the moon stopped as Joshua and his biblical warriors destroyed the Canaanites during the Battle of Giv'on.

Say No to a Cease Fire

2009-01-07T13:11:00.001-08:00

I've taken to watching CNN and Fox News clips of the war online. It's odd to see people diving for cover in places you've gone for a casual Shabbat walk, eerie to watch your own country reported "objectively" as if it were some overseas war. But I can't help but feel a bit disconnected from it. I drive home from work, do laundry, go on a date, and come home to flip on the news and think, "Wow, Israel must be a really scary place to live." Then I remember I live in Israel.

I suppose there's not much to say about tactics, except to say that this war, so far at least, seems to be run far, far better than the last one. Instead of brash generals giving private interviews to media outlets instead of leading their troops into battle, the army has remained tight-lipped through the whole affair. The message has been so well-controlled that everyone is just sitting around speculating what those bright flashes and enormous columns of black smoke mean.

So far, there have been a few fatalities, mostly from friendly fire, and while each of these ruined lives is an inestimable tragedy, there no major disasters or blunders to report, at least for the Israeli side. On the Arab side, there was, of course, that errant shell that hit a weapons stockpile hidden under a UN school which killed a few dozen noncombatants (and a few combatants as well.) Some incident of this sort was inevitable with the Arabs' tactic of using human shields, but it's unfortunate it came so soon. The incident will probably be remembered as the moment world opinion swung in favor of Hamas, and now the pressure is building to wrap things up and get out.

The main diplomatic push is for a cease fire, or a lull of some sort, and I have to ask: why? Oh, sure, a cease-fire would allow Livni and Barak to come out of this with a piece of paper to show as a "diplomatic achievement" for the sacrifices made. Despite the last eight years of conflict, the rulers of Israel still have not managed to kick their fetish for pieces of paper with Arab signatures on them.

The argument is that because the Arabs abandoned their cease-fire, forcing them to sign one would be a humiliating defeat for Hamas, and a major accomplishment for Israel. But history has shown that the Arabs will always claim victory, regardless of the outcome. If Israel were to sign a cease fire agreement, then tomorrow, Hamas warlords will crawl out of their bunkers and declare to the world, "We fought the Jews to a standstill, and they begged us for a cease-fire!" And if there is no cease fire, they will claim, "The Jews begged us for a cease fire, and we told them to get lost!"

This whole game reeks of the 90's, when Israel tried to play mind-games with the Arabs and offer them carrots and sticks to modify their attitudes toward Jews. It just doesn't work with a society so rigid and fossilized in the dark ages. Furthermore, cease fire agreements always involve some sort of international force to step in between the parties, like UNFIL on the Lebanese border. This not being their homeland, these international soldiers have no motivation to fight to enforce their mandate. International forces generally just stand back and let the Arabs do what they please, and then run away if the situation gets really hot. Cease fires also constrain Israel's ability to respond, since the Arabs are never held to their agreements but Israel is always held to its.

If Hamas chooses not to attack Israel, it won't be because they feel honor-bound to observe a cease fire they signed with a non-Muslim entity. No, what would restrain them is the fear of Israeli smart bombs collapsing the roof over their heads. Therefore, the ideal exit strategy would be to simply exit, with no diplomatic achievements or symbolic bragging rights. Leave Hamas beaten and bleeding to pick up the pieces of Gaza, always afraid where and when the next blow will land.

When the time is right to leave, Israel should just make an announcement, "Our primary objectives of responding to violations of our sovereignty and weakening Hamas are met. While we do not relinquish our historic claim to Gaza based on our biblical mandate, or our legal claim based on the League of Nations Mandate, Israel is concluding major combat operations for the time being and withdrawing. We stand at the ready to act with a disproportionate and violent response, at a time and on a target of our choosing, should Hamas carry out violent actions against Israel or its citizens. Have a nice day."

Of course, a government that could say something like that is still a generation or two away, but I have confidence we'll get there.

The Re-Write Begins

2009-01-06T04:12:00.001-08:00

Since the ground assault on Gaza began, the expected horrifying images of wounded children have begun streaming out of Gaza. With these human shields taking the bullets for Hamas, world opinion is predictably swinging against the Jews and towards the Muslims (or, if you prefer, against the Israelis and towards the Palestinians.) This is a phenomenon well known to Middle East history buffs, whereby the international community sits back and watches with amused interest as Israel is shot and bombed, and then sweeps in to the rescue as soon as the tide turns and the Arabs start to taste the results of their aggression.

It happened in '48, when the British handed over all fortified defensive positions in Israel to the Arabs, and Israel spent seven months of fighting and dying to recapture them, only to see the United Nations come rushing in for a cease fire once the battle had broken decisively in favor of Israel. Ditto 1967, when the UN happily acquiesced to Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser's demand that peacekeeping forces abandon the Sinai Peninsula so he could invade Israel, a demand they happily fulfilled long before the deadline he imposed expired. Suddenly, when Israel ended up turning back the Egyptian menace, there stood the international community with a cease-fire agreement in hand. The same happened in '73 after General Ariel Sharon encircled the invading Egyptian 3^rd army, and in '82, and in '91, when Israel had to pay for America's victory in Iraq by entering into negotiations with the PLO, and in '02 with the road map, and the '06 cease fire with Hezbollah, and on and on.

Today, the historical re-write is beginning, a sort of groundwork to ensure a nominal cease-fire in which explosives and misery continues to rain down on Israel while Israel is constrained not to respond. It showed up in a line Tony Karon of Time Magazine, in his article, "Despite Pummeling in Gaza, Hamas Thinks It Has the Upper Hand," when he states, " Turkey also has historically close relations with Israel and is a key NATO member, although it has angered Israeli leaders by condemning Israel for maintaining the economic siege of Gaza even while Hamas observed last year's truce."

If Hamas observed a truce, that's the first anyone here has heard of it. What about all those missiles that came flying into Sderot during the supposed truce? Of course, Hamas blamed those rockets were blamed on breakaway cells, which it just happened to be supplying. It's reminiscent of Arafat blaming terrorist attacks which occurred during ongoing negotiations on, "splinter cells" over which he had, "no control," although the money trail led straight from the UN to Arafat to the terror gangs. You have to wonder what goes through Karon's head while he's writing. "Well, it's not entirely true, but it's a little lie, and it's for the good of speeding up a cease-fire to help the people of Gaza, so I'll say it anyway."

In normal times, the sneering hatred of Israel, masquerading as unbiased journalism which just happens to accidentally omit a few critical facts, doesn't really get to me any more. I listen to NPR and other liberal-leaning news broadcasts over the internet, but when I hear the words, "And now from Jerusalem our reporter…" I just flip the dial, because I know what's coming.

I figure the best way to defeat hatred is go visit and strengthen a settlement, or paint a building on a hilltop outpost, or even to just live as a Jew in Israel. After all, a radio broadcast lasts a few minutes, and once the words have passed, nothing remains. Put a coat of paint on a building, or plant a tree, and you've created a permanent, albeit small, mark on the Land of Israel that will outlive the reporter and me.

I suppose this is part of the frustration of being Jewish, to experience the unfairness of having to play in an intellectual mind game which was rigged from the start, which can have no other outcome than defeat. When it happens to an individual Jew being unfairly judged and maligned by his fellows in a foreign land, it's called "Anti-Semitism." When it happens to the Jewish state being unfairly judged and maligned by its fellow nations, it's called "Humanitarian Concern."

The flip side, is, of course, that while we've been losing this game for mellinia, we seem to outlive the supposed victors. After all, we're still here, but where are the Romans? Where are the Nazis? Where will the "Palestinians" be in another century? Dead and forgotten.

A Voice From the Other SIde

2009-01-05T12:55:00.001-08:00

I actually find it quite interesting to get a comment from someone on the "Other Side," be it the Islamic expansionists or those on the peripheral right (James Baker) or left (list too long to fit in blog entry here) who serve their interests. If you read the comments section in my blog entry from last week, I actually received a comment, written in halting English, not from Gaza itself, which is now largely incommunicado, but from Egypt. You can read it yourself here: https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=11016252&postID=5865621731299153738

I'm not so interested in a point by point rebuttal of various "facts" cited or arguments made, as they're so cliche as to bore the reader to tears, but more at analyzing his comments, as I think they are illustrative of the Arab mindset which makes peace with Arabs (or even between Arab states themselves) impossible.

First comment, "i refues whut hamas did by lunching rockets" (Translation: I reject Hamas' and Israel's actions launching rockets into one another's territory,) later comment, " ppl want live in peace in gaza they are withou weapon a" (The people of Gaza want to live in peace and are unarmed.)

Okay, so which is it? Are they armed or unarmed? If they are unarmed, how are they firing rockets?

In a deeper sense, this is a conflict of the ethics of civilization versus the ethics of barbarism. When Israel's strikes against Hamas combatants and rocket launchers are morally equated to Hamas' strikes against Israeli civilian targets, and western society acquiesces to this sort of unreal "balance," it has the effect of dragging the west back into a primitive, tribal morality which the west outgrew centuries ago but which still seems to burn strongly in the Arab world. In the Arab universe, the concept of "civilian" is incomprehensible. If one of "my tribe" is killed, then I have the duty to kill from "your tribe," and it doesn't matter whether that's a man, woman or child. If anything, children are considered more expendable. I recall a Jerusalem post interview in Gaza during the Second Intifada, when the sort of "men on the street" of the Palestinian Authority were asked whether they felt worse about seeing a gunman or a child killed, and they uniformly responded "gunman." After all, a child is incapable of inflicting suffering on "your tribe," and so is of less value to society.

The comment is replete with statements of this sort, reminiscent of the screaming, chanting masses you hear on television, one second shouting bloody murder and promising to inflict pain and suffering, the next minute weeping and crying over the unfairness of being defeated in the latest war they started. I seem to recall a rally a month or so ago in which Hamas dragged out an actor in a cage pretending to be kidnapped soldier Gilat Shalit, crying for his mother, while the crowd of thousands of civilians took sadistic pleasure in the make-believe of inflicting suffering on infidel. Now those same voices are weeping that Israel has deprived them of their Israeli-taxpayer-funded free electricity.

The final statement, "if u let them live in peace they will let you live in peace," is the kicker. The ability to take the last eight years of rocket attacks on Israel, and just willfully blind one's self to the reality of eight years of inconvenient history, is not a propagandistic ploy as it would be for a western terrorism-advocate, but an actual belief, something which he has absorbed into his mind as factually true. On some level of consciousness, he understands that eight years of rocket attacks would seem to justify an Israeli response. And therefore, this inconvenient fact is excised from his reality.

The end of the email, "I'm a liberal," says it all. If this is the Arab Peace Now, what does that say about the rest of that society? I do admire that this guy had the guts to write on the blog of a Zionist Israeli, especially coming from the society he does, but I think we're still a few centuries away from being able to have a true heart-to-heart conversation.

The Gaza Matzav

2008-12-31T09:40:00.001-08:00

"You didn't really check it."

The uppity customer seemed to arouse shopping mall security guard from his topor. Nobody wants to work on a Saturday night, just a few hours after the end of Shabbat (Sabbath.) "Just go through."

"No, if you're going to check my bag, you have to open it up and look inside! How do you know I'm not carrying something? There's a matzav!"

I first got word of the matzav, the "situation," in synagogue on Saturday night. Rav Lau, Chief Rabbi of Modiin, was teaching a class on Chanukah, the revolt against our Greek tormentors which had started 2,144 years ago in the very same town of Modiin. Not wanting to desecrate the sanctity of Shabbat, Rabbi Lau had refrained from mentioning the bad news he had heard from his neighbors. After evening prayers brought Shabbat to a close, as everyone turned to leave the synagogue, he stood up and announced that the modern-day tormentors of the Jews, the Arabs, had struck.

"A barrage of missiles has hit southern Israel, and military operations have begun against Gaza. We should stay in shul and recite Tehillim (Psalms) to pray for the safety of our people and our soldiers."

The matzav has been a long time coming. In fact, it never really went away. Maybe it started with the second Intifada, which never really ended. Or maybe it began when the state of Israel was declared, after which the state has not experienced a single day's peace, or perhaps when Mohammed exterminated the Jewish community of Mecca. Perhaps it can be traced all the way back to Abraham, expelling his son Ishmael, the biblical ancestor of the Arabs, from his tent in order to protect his other son Yitzchak (Isaac,) the biblical ancestor of the Jews, from Ishmael's violent impulses.

This particular round of violence was unavoidable. The late Yasser Arafat's gang, Fatach, in English, "Conquest," pulled off some of the most spectacular terrorist atrocities of the 1970's and 80's but then tacitly, although never officially, recognized the right of the non-Muslims of Israel to live free of Muslim rule in the 1990's. The newer gang, Hamas, "Fanaticism," sprung up as a more purist anti-infidel organization and overthrew Fatach, but is now also seen as growing soft. Hamas, like its predecessor Fatach, has been forced to make certain compromises with reality. A "hudna," Arabic for cease fire of fixed duration, of the past few months during which Hamas has reduced its rocket fire at Israeli cities from an average of six a day down to an average of three per day, and in exchange Israel turned the other cheek, has expired. During this hudna, Hamas had been busily arming itself with longer-range missiles for the big fight coming. Meanwhile, breakaway gangs had seen the mere fact that Hamas had been willing to negotiate anything with Israel as a serious violation of Arab pride, and began firing missiles into Israel on their own. In failing to kill a sufficient number of Israelis, Hamas was quickly losing legitimacy and public support, and no choice but to go to war.

Similarly, in Israel, with no military action against the last seven years of rocket bombardment from Gaza, accompanied by endless negotiations to expand the Palestinian State, the country had been swinging hard to the right. With elections only a month away, this war could serve as a welcome distraction for Barak and Livini, the two liberal candidates who were so instrumental in creating the monstrosity of Gaza we face today.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the peace processors who authored the Oslo negotiations of the 1990's, which brought the horror and bloodshed of the Second Intifada, had been safely quarantined to the editorial pages of the New York Times for the last eight years. But with the new incoming administration, they are being pulled off the benches and given rank and influence. With a relatively friendly president in the White House for another three weeks and an unknown Obama administration in the wings, it was now or never.

For us, the little people, life goes on as normally as possible for most, and ends for some. After one of the longer-range Grad missiles struck Ashdod, killing a mother of four, I called my friend Gali who lives there to check in.

"Hey, man, good to hear from you!" he yelled through the receiver, "I've got something you might like. I have a six-outlet extension cord with those weird American plugs!"

"The American plugs are normal," I answered, "it's the Israeli ones that are weird."

"Ha ha. Okay, so I'll put it in a box and write your name on it, and next time you are in Ashdod, you can look through the rubble of my apartment and dig up the box."

One of my friends at my new job got his reserve duty callup.

"You going to Gaza?" I asked him.

"No. I asked my commander. They always send us out there to Shechem or Ramallah to guard the checkpoints. Then they take the young full-time soldiers who were on the checkpoints and send them to Gaza. I'd much rather go to Gaza myself. Checkpoints are boring."

There is, of course, always the concern that a local sympathizer will go haywire and engage in a psychotic jihadist killing spree, as during the Merkaz HaRav massacre or the two bulldozer attacks a few months ago, so security is much tighter. In fact, there was a multiple-stabbing attack in Modiin and riots in majority-Arab East Jerusalem, but thank god no fatalities so far. As I'm writing this, I'm in a car driving up north with some coworkers for a project meeting. There was a brief debate on whether to take the Wadi Ara highway, a short-cut valley through the hills of Carmel which is lined on both sides by Arab villages and sometimes subject to flying rocks when the locals are particularly seething, or to take the hour-long detour. We decided to go for it. The rainy weather which has stifled Arab attempts to set fire to the Jerusalem forest and slowed Israel's air force for the day has probably silenced their stone artillery as well.

The matzav is just something you have to deal with to live in the holy land. Our neighbors in Gaza are raised from birth to revel in the glory of gore and death. Hamas' children's shows look like grade-B horror flicks, with children barley out of diapers brandishing knives and singing of the honor of drenching the land with their blood. Every generation of teenagers is brainwashed with heroic music videos of their older brothers from the previous wars throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli border guards or blowing up Israeli school buses. There's no way to modify such a society, either with carrots or sticks. The only authentic long-term solution is to ask them, as humanely as possible but with full firmness, to please pack up their bags and seek life elsewhere. The modern post-Judaism ruling class of Israel, with its moralistic preening and vanity, is incapable of doing so for fear of losing an international popularity contest they actually lost long ago, and so we must be prepared to bear this matzav for at least another generation.

In reality, this is merely another barbarian containment operation, the sort of thing that must be gotten over with every few years. The situation at the end will likely look the same as it did a few months before it began, but we dare not stand idle. Like India, Indonesia, the Phillipines, or any other state unfortunate enough to be located on the bleeding fringes of the Islamic world, Israel is again being probed and challenged. The question the fanatics of Hamas are asking is whether Israel is ripe for fatach, for conquest through jihad. We must again risk our lives to answer, "No."

Secretary Hillary

2008-12-03T07:51:00.001-08:00

In appointing Hillary to Secretary of State, Obama has made not only a clever political maneuver, but probably the least bad decision possible, at least as far as Israel is concerned. During the election, Obama's paying homage to Jimmy "Israel is Apartheid" Carter and seeking advice from Zbigniew Brzezinski on the middle east was enough to cause any lover of Jewish political freedom in Israel to break a cold sweat.

Hillary, on the other hand, is a known quantity. Sure, there was the time she hugged Suha Arafat immediately after one of Suha's anti-Semitic tirades. I don't think Hillary actually believed Suha's rehash of medieval accusations that Jews poison wells and the like; she was merely doing the smart thing rather than the right thing. And let's remember, Suha's husband Yasser said and did far worse and still received kisses on the cheek from Israeli Prime Ministers. The main thing I like about Hillary is that, despite her failure in this election, no ego that big sits still for eight years. She is running for President in 2016, age or no, and she will need to avoid alienating her Jewish supporters.

Let's be clear; this will be no Bush administration. No more friendly Whitehouse meetings with the latest Israeli Prime Minister, both pretending to care about the lack of a 23rd Islamic Arab state called "Palestine" for the press while dealing with adult issues like Iran and Al Quaida behind closed doors. For eight years, under Bush, the Democratic party has complained of his squandering the goodwill of the world the United States received by the death of over 3,000 civilians on September 11th, or of having alienated anonymous moderate Muslims by passing moral value judgments about America's adversaries. The new focus on America's "image abroad," rather than achievement, is worrisome because a clash of interests is coming.

America's European allies share none of America's sympathy for Israel's predicament. Europe views Jewish political independence not only as annoyingly cumbersome in disrupting relations with their Arab suppliers of energy, but also as enraging to the surging Islamic minorities gestating within their own borders. In Europe you don't need to be a classical anti-Semite to want to see Israel wiped off the map, a realistic assessment of your own self-interest will do. Hence, every time Bush visits Europe he is hounded by dignitaries and world leaders exasperatedly imploring him to please "do something" about the Middle East. "Something" always boils down to accelerating the destruction of Jewish villages, sanitized as "Settlement Dismantling," or lowering Israel's defenses by removing life-saving checkpoints, sanitized as "Easing Up Restrictions."

The real clash of interests will come when Obama's promise to support Israel's freedom clashes with improving America's image abroad. President Clinton's response was to sidestep the issue by having an all too willing Israel feed the alligator of the Palestinian Authority, arguing that supplying them with land, weapons, and vast sums of cash was in Israel's interest. Now that this method has been discredited, and Hillary's husband's foreign policy legacy is forever tarnished by this failure, I have hope she will have learned. I don't have faith in Hillary to do the right thing, but I do have some hope she will do the smart thing, and perhaps give Obama a moment of pause before opting for image over substance.

Solar Dreams

2008-11-25T11:02:00.001-08:00

Last I wrote, I was in a bit of a low. I suppose the nadir was my 30th birthday party, when all 15 of my guests canceled within 24 hours. At the time, I decided it was time to put some forward movement into my life, to get a job, and now I've got one.

I'm working for a Jerusalem-based company which develops solar-thermal power stations. The technology was developed by a now defunct Israeli company called Luz, named for the biblical city where the Jacob had his dream of angels ascending and descending a great ladder (Breishit/Genesis 28:10-15,) which he then renamed Beit El. Back in the 1980's, Luz developed a system for generating power by using parabolic-shaped troughs to concentrate sunlight onto a black pipe.

This collector tracks the sun on its path across the sky throughout the day.

Oil pumped through this pipe is superheated by the concentrated sunlight. The superheated oil is then used to boil water and run a steam turbine generator.

Solar Thermal Collector Array with steam power plant

In 1991, after building several solar-thermal power plants in California's Mojave Desert, Luz went out of business. The failure boils down to an end of tax credits for renewable energy and the falling energy costs of the 90's and early 00's. Now high energy costs and increased tax incentives in Europe and California have revived interest in renewables. Another factor is the worldwide panic over global warming. While neither I nor any scientist or engineer with whom I have discussed the issue over the past 8 years actually believes that there is validity to climate change theory, the enormity of the popular panic, especially among those who were swept into office in the United States earlier this month, will have some fringe benefits. Because solar technology results in zero emissions, if the cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions championed by President Elect Obama is actually passed into law, then there's going to be bonanza of renewable energy projects. To my mind, this can have only positive results. When Iran buys Uranium centrifuges, Russia purchases a new warship to bully its neighbors, Al Quaida finances the training of its next pilot, or a Palestinian Authority "activist" buys C4 explosive to incinerate innocent Israelis, the money that finances this evil can always be traced back to oil. Even from a purely economic standpoint, I think it would be fair to place a heavy tariff on fossil fuels to balance out the lives and treasure lost fighting wars to secure them.

While America is still waiting for some sort of renewable energy program, the Spanish government has commissioned the construction of forty 50-MegaWatt facilities in various locations throughout southern Spain. The deal is that if the facilities are online before the end of 2010 then the Spanish government has agreed to purchase power at a favorable rate for the next several years, which will make the construction economically feasible.

Solar collector arrays like this one have been operating in the Mojave Desert for decades

Meanwhile, the original members of the Luz team have reassembled into several competing companies. One of them, Solel, has stepped up manufacturing of parabolic troughs in the expectation of increased orders.

Most of the engineers from Luz reassembled to form the company Luz II, which is persuing the solar tower concept whereby a series of mirrors tracks the sun and concentrates the sunlight onto a boiler, which is used to generate steam and run a steam-power cycle. Their technology has great promise, in that it does not require sunlight to heat oil, which then heats water, but boils the water directly, resulting in greatly increased efficiency. Of course, their technology has never been tested in the real world, but they are in the beginning stages of designing an enormous facility for Southern California.

A Solar-Thermal Tower

As opposed to Luz II, with its hundred plus engineers, I'm working with a team of 9. We are very much a startup, and are focused on fulfilling the Spanish government's contracts with the more proven parabolic trough technology developed by Luz. On the one hand, working for a startup carries some risk, in that things can go downhill in a hurry. On the other hand, being in such a small company provides an opportunity for much more rapid advancement. Unlike a big engineering firm with layer after layer of bureocracy and waste, with corner offices and reserved parking spots, I get to talk with my CEO every day.

I do miss the hours of yeshivah learning I used to be able to do every morning, but I'm also enjoying the fast-paced startup atmosphere. We're located in Har Hotzvim, Jerusalem's business park, probably the only economically productive neighborhood in the city, with dozens of high-tech companies. There are kosher places for breakfast, lunch, and dinner all over the place, and I get to meet other young professionals from neighboring companies and listen to them complain about their bosses. There's also a shul (synagogue) across the street where I can catch daily prayers, and a few shiurim (Jewish learning opportuinities) as well.

Only In Israel

2008-11-24T01:17:00.000-08:00

Only in Israel do you go to Ikea, pronounced "eekya,"...

... to find a fully-functional shul inside!

Not only that, the Sweedish meatball cafeteria was fully kosher. If I had a house of my own and didn't care about quality furniture, I would live in this place! I only wish I had discovered it before I bought all the stuff for my apartment when I first made aliyah.

Election Day

2008-11-12T02:00:00.000-08:00

Supporters of various parties and candidates set up tables and banners near the entrance of a local Pisgat Zeev polling station.

Yesterday, I was off to cast my vote. In Israel, the government sends you a little card with the address of your polling place, usually a local school, and a poll number, and you take it with you to show at the door. My official address, as far as the government is concerned, is still my cousins' place in Pisgat Zeev where I lived when I first made aliyah. Unfortunately, my card got lost in the bureaucracy and I never received it. I called the tol-free 1-800 number that lets you enter in your identity card number and then responds with the polling location. Busy. I tried again and again over the last 48 hours before the polls opened, but it was busy the whole time. So someone from Nefesh B'Nefesh said, "Why not just find out where your cousins are supposed to go and then go there. You all have the same address so it should be the same place."
So I called my cousins, went to the site, and waited while they checked the list. Of course, I wasn't on. Meanwhile, I bumped into my old friend Tzvi at the entrance.

"Don't speak, do! Arcadi Gaydamak for Mayor"

"Hey," I asked him, "who you voting for?"
"I'm casting a blank ballot."
"You came all the way back here from work during your lunch hour to cast a blank ballot?"
"I want 'em to KNOW I don't like 'em."

"The Hope! Nir Barkat for Mayor"

The polling people couldn't find my name on the list, so they gave me a number in the Jerusalem municipality to call. The municipality gave me the number of the elections division. The elections division told me to call this guy named Avner Cohen and gave me his number. Avner told me to call the interior ministry, who then referred me to the Jerusalem branch. Finally, I received my polling address and poll number. It in a different part of Pisgat Zeev, so it was back to my car to ride across town.

A poster for Meir Porush, referring to the exodus of Israelis leaving municipal Jerusalem for the more affordable outer settlements, "100,000 new residents," and below, a cartoon of Porush, with "Jerusalem will love Porush"

Polling is much more effective here. The poll is in a classroom. Only one voter is permitted in the room at a time, and you are carefully watched by elections officials and representatives of the parties on the ballots. I went in and was asked for the voter card which I immediately told them I hadn't received. From their nonchalance, it seemed that this is the sort of thing that happens all the time. They checked me off the list, and I went behind a cardboard screen. Picked one yellow card for my choice for mayor, and one white card for my party choice for city council. Stuffed them in the envelopes, walked around and dropped them in the ballot box. It's a much more effective system than in America. No hanging chads or guessing at the voters' intent here.

Ballot Slips

A Barkat supporter walks around an intersection passing out flyers while keeping an eye on his campaign posters.

Israeli elections are also see much more involvement. Every street corner is plastered with signs, and activists with walkie-talkies stand guard over their respective candidates' signs. Slogans blasted over loudspeaker from passing cars, flags, activists and candidates shaking my hand. It was like a big party.

Meir Porush supporters got out of school early to guard campaign posters.

Meir Porush's little helpers

What's happening in Jerusalem? Elections!

2008-11-11T02:00:00.000-08:00

Israel's first Hareidi (aka Ultra-Orthodox) mayor, Uri Lupolianski, nicknamed "Loopy," is facing mandatory retirement due to a rotation agreement between the Lithuanian and Chassidic branches of the Hareidi party, United Torah Judaism. To replace him, three candidates have joined in the running.

In last place:

Arcadi Gaydamak

Aliyah isn't just for refugees any more. Plenty of wealthy Anglos have made a home in the holy city, and over the last several years, with the sky-high Euro, rising anti-Semitism in Europe, a wave of French immigrants have arrived as well. Now, even a Russian oligarch has seen the wisdom of living in Israel. Wanted on illegal weapons smuggling and tax evasion charges in France, Gadyamak has been in Israel since the 1990's, and makes his base amongst the Russian immigrants who came at that time. He's spent the recent years digging from his deep pockets to sponsor hospitals, children's homes, and social welfare programs. Still, in a capital city whose voting population is about a third secular, a third national-religious, and a third Hareidi, there is no natural block of voters for a candidate who can barely speak Hebrew and English, and addresses crowds through an interpreter. He seems to be polling well amongst the two non-Jewish demographics; the Russians and the Arabs, but over all, he's still at the bottom of the pack.

Then there are the two front-runners:

Meir Porush

He's being called a scion of a 10th generation Jerusalemite family. (Can someone tell me what a scion is?) As United Torah Judaism's new candidate for mayor, without lifting a finger he already has an automatic voting block of one third of the city. While most Hareidim are personally politically apathetic, their rabbinic leadership always coalesces around a candidate, and these rabbinic endorsements result in turnouts in the Hareidi sector of over 90%, and of almost 100% voting for the endorsed candidate. Porush was recently caught on tape saying, in Yiddish to his supporters, that as the it would be difficult for a non-religious candidate for mayor to ever win in Jerusalem again. Of course the tape was translated and rebroadcast ad nauseum by Israel's anti-religious media, but his point was that on demographics of the city. With Hareidi families having ten to fifteen children and secular families having two or three, in the future secular candidates will not be viable.

Nir Barkat

On the opposite end, there's Nir Barkat. Semi-balding and bare-headed (secular,) at first, Barkat is eerily reminiscent of the previous mayor of Jerusalem, current failed and soon-to-be-indicted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Posters have threatened that, just as Olmert made a 180 degree turn and began advocating a retreat from East Jerusalem once he was promoted from Jerusalem Mayor to Israeli Prime Minister, so too might another secular mayor like Barkat. Some of the bumper stickers reading, "No faith in Barkat ," play off these fears of his lack principle due to his lack of religiosity. I don't buy it. United Torah Judaism was as complicit in the Oslo negotiations with the PLO in the 1990's as were the secular parties. They therefore bear as much responsibility for the grotesque acts violence and terror which subsequently rocked the country, and trying to smear Barkat with Oslo just because he's not religious doesn't pan out in my book

Barkat is no Olmert. He actually made his millions as a high tech entrepreneur, and has spent five years on the city council, unlike Olmert who inherited his position from his position from his father, who was a hero of the resistance to the British and later became a hawkish politician. Barkat has also been actively courting the Anglophonic and National Religious demographics, both of which I belong to. His positions are focused on constructive action, and he favors the rebuilding of Jewish life in East Jerusalem, a topic dear to my heart.

I'll be voting Barkat, if for no other reason than he's the first candidate to make an active appeal for my vote and doesn't assume it's coming his way as a matter of course. Also, he was once a fully-functional, successful human being outside of the corrupt Israeli political establishment, with no investigations or arrest warrants outstanding, which is more than can be said for many Israeli politicians.

As for how the rest of Jerusalem votes, it's up in the air. Despite polling which would indicate Barkat being far in the lead over Porush, the 90% turnout among Hareidim gives Porush a hefty boost beyond what polls might indicate. So it's going to be close, and I'd better get off to the polls.

Three Elections

2008-11-04T08:59:00.001-08:00

I have suddenly been thrust out of obscurity. Being an American citizen, I can vote in the American presidential elections. As a resident of Jersualem, I get to vote for the new mayor and city council next week. Meanwhile, the Israeli national government just fell, and the Prime Minister's unelected replacement, Tzippi Livni, lacked the political skill to build a coalition of her own and now we're going to new Israeli national elections at the beginning of next year.
The U.S. elections are probably the most worrisome, and with the U.S. wielding a virtual veto over Israel's foreign and domestic policy, there's a great deal of concern in this neck of the woods about the new face coming to the white house.
Of course, this whole election is about Obama, the other presidential and vice-presidential candidates being treated as stage props. Among the rumors circulating are those of his Islamic upbringing, but that doesn't bother me. After all, with a Muslim father, according to Islam, he is automatically a Muslim himself, and his nominal acceptance of Christianity carries the death penalty in his father's religion. This might cause him some difficulty in the fundamentalist Islamic regimes like Iran he threatens to befriend. There is also concern over his race, as previous black politicians have toted grievance-mongering anti-Semitism, like Jesse Jackson wanting to destroy Israel or Al Sharpton calling for a boycott of Jewish businesses, but I don't think Obama is an anti-Semite. At least not beyond the fact that his liberal ideology itself, with its belief in a nonracial, irreligious, classless, genderless society is hostile to Judaism's approach of separation between Jews and Goyim, women and men, secular and holy.
There is great fear of Obama in Israel, partly because of his middle name, and partly because violent terrorism against Israeli Jews has become the latest pet cause of the European states among whom he would like to, "Restore America's image." His assembling a team of America's premier Israel-haters as Middle East advisors is cause for grave concern. Given his complete lack of experience, he will likely absorb their politically correct but historically twisted view of the Arabs' century-long Jihad against Jewish emancipation in the holy land as some sort of struggle for Palestinian civil rights. Even Condoleezza Rice referred to Israel's life-saving checkpoints as reminiscent of the Jim Crow with which she grew up.
McCain, on the other hand, is no savior. His positions on negotiations with Iran, the creation of a Palestinian State carved out of Israel's bosom, and other issues of regional concern have recently flipped to being reassuringly conservative. However, the fact that he held views similar to Obama's before he began running for the highest office indicates that he may pitch a steadfast line, but his heart isn't in it. His failure to run a coherent campaign and his selection of a running mate with almost as little experience as his opponent is hardly inspiring. Still, as a person having faced true evil in his past, once subjected to the daily intelligence briefings and being confronted with the depravity of the regional regimes, one would hope that at least some sense of moral clarity would seep in.
By contrast, given the people whom Obama has befriended in the past, having relations with Hamas bus-bombers or Iranian hate-mongers probably wouldn't be such a novel experience for him. Perhaps Obama is divine punishment to the Jews for some sort of misbehavior. Of course, I remember, eight years ago, writing that G.W. Bush would be, like his father, a Country Club Republican, sneering and hostile to Israel. Boy did I have him pegged wrong! Maybe I've got Obama all wrong too, and he will completely break with the views of his friends and advisors to become a truly noble person.
Based on social positions, and my gut, I have to go with McCain, even though the polls indicate Obama will almost certainly win. Still, as a person who believes in the unseen hand of the Creator directing events, I am not all that entranced by politicians. I don't find McCain or Obama, "scary," like some, because I don't see them as being particularly powerful in the long run. A truly powerful person is one who has mastered his ego and can exercise control of his appetites, which pretty much eliminates politicians by definition. As for me, all that's left for me to do is fax in my absentee ballot and try to live a decent life, come what may.

New Job

2008-10-30T13:23:00.001-07:00

So I've started my new job, and so far, so great! It's very startupish; I'm only the seventh employee, and they only got an actual physical office a couple of months ago. There's plenty of potential for advancement, and a lot of risk as well. If they're still here in three months, I might get to be a Project Engineer (my boss' job at my old company) as opposed to a Staff Engineer (what I am now.) If not, I'm on the street, and it could go either way. But it's an interesting project and I think it's going well. The other advantage is that I'm interacting with some of the other companies we've partnered with here, so if I lose this job, I would still have an inside leads at other companies. Unfortunately none of them are in Jerusalem, but we'll worry about that if it becomes an issue.

The other cool thing is I can show up whenever I want (9:30 AM for me) as long as I work a full day, I'm working in Har Hotzvim (a high-tech park in Jerusalem that's really happening,) there's a minyan every hour on the hour across the street, and there are endless places to get kosher lunch. So it's an interesting project, minyans, kosher lunch, nice people, and I'm getting a paycheck in the middle of a recession. Sure beats sitting around the house wondering what to do with myself!

Shabbat Shetach

2008-10-28T12:03:00.000-07:00

This shabbat was my first Shabbat Shetach. The first Sabbat Shetach was organized by local singles for college students all over Israel to have a little get together in nature, a relief after a month of being with families and sitting in shul over the holidays, and before returning to student life. Since the first Shabbat Shetach, some have graduated and begun the rest of their lives, and the group making the semi-annual pilgrimage to nature has grown. I heard about it via an email which led me to a Facebook site. At first, I was hesitant, since it was an Israeli crowd, but it has been my goal to break out of the Anglo bubble, so I took the opportunity, and had a great time.

The Shetach is an area in Gush Etzion, in the settlements south of Jerusalem. In the forrests surrounding the settlement of Alon Shvut, a family of pioneers built a home and inn, really more of an enormous open-air cabin, and constructed a small zoo with all sorts of horses, donkeys, emu, and more.

Horses walking around

The people arrive

The open-air cabin where we stayed.

Sunset through the trees

Sunset through glassIlana, who made it all happen

Ilana and Gadi, the organizers, collecting payment

Ilana (Center) and the gals

After Shabbat, packing up and moving out. Back to real life.

Jennifer and Sharon

Doron and Me

A night-time shot of Beitar, the Hareidi (Ultra-orthodox) settlement city in Gush Etzion

A closer-up of Beitar

So, I was a bit worried about going, being a non-native Hebrew speaker, but I seemed to do well, had a great time, and met many new friends. Hopefully, we'll all keep in touch, and this will be the first of many for me!

A Big Day

2008-10-26T11:18:00.001-07:00

Well, good news: I got a job! I'll be working for a small start-up company which designs large-scale solar-thermal electricity generating stations. The salary is a bit low, but with the world economy in a nose-dive, my own startup in on hold, and everyone trying to grab and hold what they can until things clear up, I figured it was a good idea for me to do the same. I could have made more a year ago, but today isn't a year ago, today is now. They promised me three or four months worth of work, and then more if the company were to continue growing, which is the plan. The fact that there are only six other employees, and plans to fund raise and expand in six months, would also put me in good position for promotion in the future. So there's a bit of risk in taking the job versus taking a more steady job, but the potential for reward is also great. And anything is better than sitting in my apartment reading other people's blogs.

The offer came suddenly last Friday, and I start Monday, so all the tasks I've been putting off for the last few months; renewing my car registration, paying my back electric bill, taking care of my traffic ticket; suddenly had to be accomplished in one day. I made it through security at the Israeli DMV at 10:15 AM. I pulled a number as I strolled into a room stuffed with Jews, Arabs, Bedouin, foreigners, basically the whole world. It would be a perfect poster for the peace process except everyone looked ready to kill their fellow customers to shorten the wait. I read my number: 501. I looked at the LED display, "Now Serving: 238." Oh no. I have to sign the contract for my new job at 11 AM. No way I'm going to be through this mess by then. I walked up to one of the friendlier-looking patrons and asked him his number.

"240"

"And what number were they on when you got here?"
"110"

"And what time was that?"
"Quarter past nine. An hour ago."

Okay, let's do some math here. 240-110 = 130. And he got here an hour ago, so they must be going through 130 customers an hour. 501-238=263. 263 is about twice 130, which means I've got two hours until they get to my number. I strolled out the door and did some shopping, drove to my new workplace, signed my contract, met my new co-workers, and headed back out to the DMV. I walked through the door at 12:10. As I walked through the door, I glanced at my number, 501, and looked up at the LED Display. "Now Serving: 499." Oh, yes! Thank you GOD! Blessed be he who created a world governed by mathematics!

Strolled right up to the front counter and took care of my business. As I walked out I glanced at the numbers being dispensed by the machine for the customers who were just walking in. 989. Oh, those poor, non-mathematical creatures. Feels great to be an engineer again.

I got home flush with victory, but the place was eerily silent and dark. Not even the compressor on my refrigerator made no sound. I tried a light switch: no juice. It appears to be a power outage. Took my daily hour-long jog, figuring the problem would be fixed by the time I got back. Winding down my jog, as I approached the building, I looked through other peoples' windows and saw that their lights were lit. Great, problem solved! But when I came into my place, nothing. Nadda.

I tried flipping the main circuit breaker in the hallway repeatedly. Nothing. I knocked on my neighbor's door and, when she opened, I saw that her lights were on.

"Anything strange about the power today?"
"Yes, it kept going off and on a minute or so ago."

Oops. Apparently I had been flipping the wrong breaker.

Called the electric company and learned that my power had been disconnected due to my, um, tardiness in payment.

To make a long story short, once the power is off, you can't turn on your computer to pay the bill, so you have to go to a neighbor's house. If you try to use your laptop from your neighbor's house, you realize that once your power has been disconnected you are considered a deadbeat and can no longer pay by Internet at all. And if the whole reason you didn't pay was because you never got the paper bill due to unreliable mail service, then you have to go to the heart of the beast, the electric company building on the other side of the city, in order to print up a new bill and pay it in person to get your power turned back on, which "only takes twenty minutes." Then you get home, the lights are still off, and you call the electric company, they will kindly inform you that it should be back on "Around ten tonight."

So now I'm sitting here at my friendly neighbor's house, well-fed, writing this post. Of course, they realized that an adult is now in the house, and took the opportunity to take a night out, so now I've been drafted into babysitting while I blog. What a day. New job starts tomorrow. Gotta get ready here.

The Old City in the Morning

2008-10-24T04:55:00.000-07:00

I recently had a chance to walk through the Old City of Jerusalem at sunrise. Just posting a few shots here.

Looking south toward Abu Tor and Armon Hanatziv

Volunteering at Pnei Kedem

2008-10-22T00:07:00.000-07:00

In my previous post on the Pnei Kedem kite festival, I mentioned that I had volunteered there last summer. It occurred to me that I never actually posted the photos on the blog, so it's time to remedy that mistake.

An areal photo of Pnei Kedem

Map indicating Pnei Kedem's location, somewhere between Jerusalem and Hebron, a bit to the east.

We all met at the bus station pretty early. The bus ride from Jerusalem to Pnei Kedem can take an hour. Unlike Efrat or Tekoa, Pnei Kedem doesn't have it's own express road into Jerusalem just yet. Maybe some day, once the place gets a bit larger.

Mail collection

One thing is for sure, if you like quiet, you'll love Pnei Kedem

Anyway, we set to work.

Guys in "Lawrence of Arabia" head T-shirts, looking busy.

Some of the outpost's smaller residents return home from school.

Looking east, toward the Dead Sea

You can't see it here, but the wind was so strong, it was pretty much impossible to paint while standing on a ladder. I would get halfway up and be blown clear. Locals report that sometimes the winds are so powerful they can tear the roof right off of a trailer.

Yours truly, painting the big green stripe over fiberglass on the molding of the shul.

The girls painted the playground.

And some of the soldiers on guard came through to do some pullups.

The sun slowly set as Shabbat descended over Pnei Kedem

Pnei Kedem Kite Festival

2008-10-20T04:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the last full day of Chol Hamoed Sukkot (the intermediary days of the Sukkot festival,) I had a chance to visit Pnei Kedem, where I volunteered a year or so ago painting the shul. It's a tiny "West Bank" hilltop settlement with twenty six families out in the Judean Desert. It's a great place to visit, but a bit forlorn. Except, once a year, they hold the Afifionada, the kite festival, and suddenly the place swells with thousands of people.

Pnei Kedem from a distance, kites hovering above
Pnei Kedem Closer up.
Kite flying atop the hill
Kids having fun
Live music
A massive fish-shaped kite

Kite gazing
More kite flyers
Sunset over Metzad, the nearby "mother-settlement" of which Pnei Kedem is technically a suburb.
A soldier tries to get his kite airborne.
The last kite flying in the sunset

A Hike Through the Hills

2008-10-17T13:40:00.000-07:00

Earlier in the summer, I took a hike through the hills West of Jerusalem and took a few photos. The Jerusalem forest stretches from Beit Shemesh to Jerusalem, and is dotted with small settlements, established in the 1950s, as well as small streams and springs.

Swimming in a small spring.

We passed a small scorpion scurrying across the road.

In the foregound to the right is the Hadassah Hospital of Ein Kerem. In the distance is the town of Mevasseret Tzion.

All of the small villages in the area; Bar Giora, Kastel, and the like, were originally agricultural. Eventually, as Jerusalem was built out, the settlements became modest villages, and housing prices soared ever upward. Still, the villages are dotted with chicken coops and small agricultural projects, from the old days.

Foreground: Jerusalem forest. Midground: Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital. Background: Har Nof, Jerusalem's eastern outskirts.

It's Sukkot on the Streets

2008-10-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning with not much to do. Actually, that's not true, there's plenty for me to do. But nothing of great urgency, and I don't want to spend the Sukkot festival sitting here at home. So I headed out.

You know it's Sukkot when the steak house builds a sukkah. And when the guy at the bus stop is carrying a lulav and etrog.

I headed downtown by bus (first time in months) since it's virtually impossible to find parking there, walked down Yaffo street. The bridge is finally complete, even though it will be years until the light rail, for which it is designed, is up and running on it.

I headed down to the Ichlu Reim soup kitchen. Volunteering there has been one of those things I've been meaning to do seemingly forever, but never got around to.

Of course, it's not really soup they're serving, but more hamburgers. And it's not in a kitchen, it's in a sukkah this time of hear, so really it's a burger sukkah, not a soup kitchen.

The Ichlu Reim Burger Sukkah

I spent several hours setting up chairs, washing dishes, hauling steam trays of food out to the sukkah, and generally making myself useful.

Yours truly with the chef

It was an interesting crowd that came by. Mostly impoverished Russians and religious. Even a few americans. The other guys working there told me that many of the English-speaking visitors are actually quite well-off, but they have no friends or family in Israel and come by just to have someone to talk to. Still, it was a very Israeli crowd, at least culturally, and the kvetching and demands never seemed to stop. Makes me grateful I'm relatively young, functionally bilingual, and have a profession. I don't know what I'd do if I were in their worn shoes.

Across the street, the Gush Katif Museum has recently opened, so I went over to check it out. The museum is designed to memorialize the destruction of the Gush Katif settlements in the Gaza region, destroyed by the Ariel Sharon government back in the summer of 2005.

The museum entrance

The museum is relatively small (it's a converted 3-bedroom apartment.) But it pack a punch, with paintings by local artists, photos from the "disengagement" (the name given to the operation to destroy the settlements,) and video footage of the event.

Photo of the protest during which protesters linked hands to form a continuous human chain from the Western Wall in Jerusalem to the Gush Katif settlements in Gaza.

A map of the region (Gush Katif settlements indicated in black)

Guided tours of th museum were provided by "expellees," those who had lived in the settlements at the time of their destruction. Unfortunately, the museum was so crowded that I couldn't get into any of the videos or see most of the exhibits. Maybe I'll come back once the holidays are over.

Packed video screening rooms showing raw footage of the evacuations.

Still, it was a sad thing to see.

'Twas the day before Yom Kippur

2008-10-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

Before Yom Kippur, I headed out to Nahal Pratt (see posts 1, 2, 3, and 4.) It's just outside of Pisgat Ze'ev, but feels like it's hours from civilization.

There's a wadi, a sort of gorge cut into the rock by seasonal flash floods. The gorge is cut so deep it penetrates the Jerusalem mountain aquifer, which bursts out of the rock and feeds into the Pratt River (stream, really.)

These natural springs for mayim chayim (living water,) a halachic (Jewish legal) term for a natural spring which flows all year long. The Jordanians, when they controlled the area, made small concrete swimming ponds.

There is a minhag (tradition) in the Shulchan Aruch, the code of Jewish Law, that one should go to mikvah (purification immersion) on the day before Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement.

So I picked up Adam from his new home, smuggled him away from his new wife for a few minutes of serious dunking!

Yours truly and Adam at Nahal Pratt.

When we got to the pool, we, and about ten other men who had come down from Jerusalem for the same purpose, were being watched by a female life guard. This is a problem as mikveh immersion has to be done in the buff. Eventually we made a deal. Everybody jumped in in their underwear. Then we told the lifeguardess to turn the other way as we all stripped and dipped. Mission accomplished.

Background: a cave in the cliffside. Foreground: ruins of an ancient monestary

Religious soldiers heading down the steps to Tovel (dunk themselves)

And now, I'm off to Modiin for the festival of Sukkot. Chag sameach!

Big 30

2008-10-09T14:47:00.001-07:00

The year 30 started very strangely, in the form of a dream. It was straight out of the movie "Aliens." If you've seen it, there are these giant bugs with acid for blood that body-snatch a group of space marines one by one to cocoon them in order to lay eggs in their chests. Except it wasn't a nightmare. You see, I wasn't fleeing the aliens, I was one of them, and was having a grand 'ol time abducting and cocooning space marines. Unfortunately, one of the marines shot me, and I was sprawled out on the floor mortally wounded, when suddenly the dream transferred. I was no longer a mortally wounded alien, I was a mortally wounded Hamlet on the floor of Elsinore Castle in the final scene of Shakespeare's play, giving my confession to Horatio. Except it wasn't Horatio I was talking to, it was the ghosts of Obiwan Kenobi and Yoda from Star Wars. And wasn't really a confession, more a series of one-liners from classic Monty Python skits. "I'm not dead yet." Then I woke up. Spent the rest of the day working and watching the stock market crash some more.

Typically, for birthdays, I'm not a big party type of person. I'd rather just hang out, receive congratulatory phone calls that my heart continued pumping blood for another year, and maybe have a piece of cake with cousins. But 30 is big, like when your car hits 100,000 and the odometer rolls over. So I decided to organize something sufficiently modest but still momentous. I'm not much of an event planner, having learned in college as a committee chair for Hillel that it's usually much more of a burden than it's worth. A big bowling bash seemed to fit the bill, so I sent out emails two weeks in advance. Plenty of people told me they would be there. I had about fifteen confirmed and fifteen maybes, so I figured on twenty people. I even went to the alley a day before and tried to negotiate a group deal.

Twenty four hours before B-day, I sent out an email and a series of SMSes to remind people. Then the calls started coming in.

"Hey, I'm sorry, but I have to work that night..."

"Evan! Happy birthday! Look, I'm sorry but I just vomited and..."

"You know, I'd love to be there, but my family is.."

Each explanation was plausible on its own, but somehow, In rapid succession, everyone who had pledged to be there cancelled over the course of a few hours. And I mean every single last one of them. It was really amazing, like some sort of divinely orchestrated inverse miracle. I went out to the bowling alley and waited to see if any stragglers from the "maybe" column who hadn't responded, but nobody showed.

What a ridiculously lousy way to start your 30's! Was this some sort of bad omen? I looked at my watch: 6:30 PM. Let's see, that would be 8:30 AM in California. I was born at 8:39AM. I'm still 29! It wasn't my 30's getting in their first punch, it was my 20's getting in their last knocks! As I was walking out the door, I bumped into Baruch, one of the maybe's whom I had texted the night before, walking in. "Where are you going? Where is everybody!?" he asked.

"We're it budd!"

Then the phone rang. It was Gali.

"Where the [expletive deleted] is the [expletive deleted]-ing bowling alley?"

To make a long story short, I got my worst score ever, not much higher than my age, and Baruch was a pro bowler, so that we agreed that the contest would be between Baruch's score and Gali and my combined scores. Gali and I still lost by 40 points, but I didn't care. For quite a while, I've really been dreading leaving the 20's but now I'm glad to be out of there. The 30's promise to be far more rewarding.

Reentry

2008-10-05T10:02:00.001-07:00

Landing in Israel is like falling off a fast-moving truck. The bounce of the tires on the runway snaps you to attention before you start to fade again. Followed by the long wait in passport control, your aching legs and groaning joints slowly shuffling forward in line for inspection. You eventually slog past the crowds and slip out the door, only to be slapped by wave of humidity. You are confronted by drivers of shared taxis, each of them screaming orders at their zombie passengers. After forty five minutes of being passed off from one driver to the next, waiting in line, being told to board the taxi, then being told to get out, take off your bags, and get in that taxi over there, you're finally on your way. It's only two more hours to get back to your front door, a thirty minute drive in normal circumstances.

I always seem to land in August, in the middle of a dust storm. The radio blares about Hizbullah and missiles and oh man I'm just too wasted to start translating Hebrew right now. Looking out the window at the anonymous rows of red-roofed clone homes, I'm too tired to be a Zionist, too worn out for religious fervor, and while my guard is down the same thought always seems to percolate up in my mind. "What am I doing here?" I mean, I grew up as a smoothly assimilated suburban American Jewish kid with a good education and substantial earning potential. I own the passport with the eagle which millions of people in this world would gladly kill me to get a hold of, some of them living right here. What course of fate took me into this handkerchief-sized country with a giant target painted on it? And did I mention the dust?

Of course, I know a part of the answer to that: Because I'm a chosen person, and this is the holy land! Because I've never felt more at home anywhere. Really, because Israel is interesting, and boredom is my greatest fear. After a week or so, having readjusted from jetlag and getting back into the swing of things, the dust settles and Israel no longer feels like a foreign country, and I'm walking down Jaffa street asking, "How is it possible that any Jew could live anywhere else but here?"

But this time, for some reason, I've already been back for a month, but I'm still as disoriented as if I've just landed. Maybe it's that the girl I was dating dumped me on arrival; the startup company I was working on, which felt so close, seems to have missed its wave with the banking collapse; and my workload is slowing to a trickle as the American economy implodes. Whatever the reason, I seem to have lost some fire. I go to yeshivah and I wish I were somewhere else. I go home and wish I were out and about. I go to the mall and can't think of what to do with myself. I'm neither here nor there.

I remember during my time in Be'er Sheva back in 2000, it always struck me how many of the family-guy American olim had a burned out look ringing their eyes. I asked one American-born professor why he is in Israel. "Inertia." I davened hard to never end up like them; an inertial post-idealist skeleton, chained to Israel by the bonds of family but dreaming of being somewhere else, like the exhilic Jew in the shtetl of a century ago working himself to the bone silently dreaming of Eretz Israel.

Israel, in its current form at least, has a way of slowly grinding dreams to dust. I could complain about the government and Israel's ruling class, with its Star-of-David-clad flag but spite and revulsion for Judaism itself, the machismo culture where driving to the supermarket becomes a gladiatorial blood sport, or the general volume level in the grocery store itself. But really, I knew about those problems before I came, and they didn't bother me. After all, the saying goes, "If there was another Jewish country, I'd move there in a second."

I still love Israel. Torah, Am, and Eretz (Torah, nation, and land.) But I think I have a more holistic perspective on aliyah. When I first made aliyah, I felt pulled by an overwhelming force, that every Jew in the universe just had to live in Eretz Israel right this second, and if he didn't feel the pull, well, something was wrong with him. But on my recent trip to America, I saw plenty of Jews, even highly knowledgeable and observant ones, in chutz l'aretz (outside of Israel) who have made quite successful lives for themselves dancing between the raindrops of gentile culture, so much so that they don't even feel the foreignness of their surroundings. There's a lot of me which is very American too, instinctive emotions and reactions which couldn't be extracted without killing the patient. It was a relief to step into a bank in San Francisco where everyone stands in a straight line and speaks perfect English.

At this point that I feel that there is not an overwhelming force pulling me in one direction, but a balance of forces holding me in equilibrium. Family pulls me to America, faith holds me here. Parnassah (income) pulls me to America, friends hold me here. The easy English and easy-going culture of America pull me there, the deep-rooted Hebrew language and Jewish culture hold me here. I'm certainly not throwing in the aliyah towel, not by a long shot. Overall, the balance of forces has me firmly footed in Israel right now. But now, when someone tells me he can't see making aliyah because his family is unwilling, or he can't handle the culture, I understand.

Meanwhile, I will be in my twenties for the next five hours and twenty three minutes. The decade rolls over and I hit thirty at midnight. I'm tired of sitting in English-only classes, then coming home to my English-only American telejob, and watching the American news over the Internet before bed. It's getting boring already, and it's time for a new direction. So I've started circulating out my resume and seeking local employment. I even had an interview this morning, which I managed to do mostly in Hebrew (though some technical terms are still a bit tough.) Time to pop life's bubble and see what's out there.

G'mar chatima tova, wishing a new year of success for everyone!

Back in the Holy Land

2008-09-15T05:07:00.000-07:00

Hi Folks,

Sorry for the long delay in blogging. I've been all over the world and not exactly in writing mode. I actually have much about which to write and plenty of pictures to show, but hiatus has been so warm and comfortable that I'm not sure about coming out of it.

Actually, my issues started a bit before my trip. Last July I had bumped up to the high-level Gemarah (Talmud) shiur. Now, when I started at Yeshivah, I was taking two classes per day, an hour per day of Chumash (Torah) and a second hour of either Neviim (Prophets) or Halachah (Jewish law.) totalling two hours daily, four days a week. A year or so ago, I bumped up to the beginning level Gemarah (Talmud) class. As the U.S. recession deepened and the workflow slowed to a trickle, I was spending more and more time in Gemarah (maybe three hours per day) until I was bumped up to the advanced Gemarah class. Now all of the sudden I was at four hours per day. Meanwhile, the startup company I've been working with has been consuming more and more of my time and interest. And, of course, I had to prepare for my visit to the U.S. in August. There simply weren't enough hours in the day. Every day, I would not finish all of the day's tasks and push maybe an hour or two forward to the next day. Then I would fall another hour short, and another, and another. Finally, one Shabbat, I was trying to get to sleep, and it just wouldn't come. 2AM, 3AM, 4AM, the hours ticked by. I was getting very upset and nervous. Finally, at 5 AM, I decided that something had to change. I decided to drop out yeshivah and drop the blog completely, until I could reorganize. Fell right asleep after that decision.

A couple of weeks later, I was able to finally get my head above water, and at about the same time, I started getting phone calls from concerned rabbis wondering what had happened to me. I decided to try easing back into the learning life, but still had a hard time.

Finally, this semester, I went back in, but I decided to seriously limit my commitment. I am now learning only two and a half hours per day. I also dropped back to the beginner's class. It's probably at my level most of the time, sometimes a bit below, but overall I'm happy there. If I need to miss a day here or there, it's not like I walk in the next day and haven't a clue what's going on. So, the learning suffers a bit, but my overall quality of life is greatly enhanced.

And now, I'd like to do something similar with the blogging. I won't be posting every day as I was once upon a time, but I'd like to resume posting a few times a week, as the mood strikes me. Hopefully this will enhance the quality of my posts as well. So I'll see you in the blogosphere!

And the Most In Demand Profession Is...

2008-08-16T22:00:00.000-07:00

I'm not necesarrily back from hiatus. In fact, right now I'm back in good 'ol Walnut Creek, as I scour the surface of the United States gathering investors for Hillpoint Energy, which is going great, and meeting with engineering professionals to learn as possible about current trends in the wind energy field before heading back to Israel to get going on our project.

Earlier I had posted statistics showing that mechanical engineering, which happens to be my specialty, is the profession with the highest job satisfaction rate of any profession. And now, we see that the most in-demand profession with the highest starting salary is...

1. Mechanical Engineering ($57,821)
Mechanical engineers are curious about how things operate. Professionals in this broad discipline research, design, develop, and test tools, machines, and mechanical devices. Along with a knack for science and math, engineers need strong oral and written communication skills.
While most entry-level mechanical engineering positions require a bachelor's degree, continuing education is critical -- protecting engineers from potential layoffs or cutbacks.
Job outlook: As more engineers retire, and many professionals transfer to managerial positions, job opportunities are good.

(See the original report here.)

Perhaps this will convince the company we're starting to hire me. :)

On Hiatus

2008-08-04T13:32:00.000-07:00

OK, so I haven't been able to post recently. When you're trying to start a company, and travel across the world, and keep dating, the blogging thing gets pushed off the list. So I'm officially going into hiatus. I hope to return soon, since all sorts of intersting and crazy things are happening in the holy land, but I just can't for now. Hope you'll understand and we'll meet on the other side. Wherever that ends up being!

Checking into the Blog

2008-07-28T09:59:00.001-07:00

I think this is the longest I've gone without blogging. Let's just say things seem to be taking off. You see, a couple of months ago, my workflow from my tele-job in the U.S. started slowing down, so I started browsing the local job listings and answering job offer emails that breeze by on the Nefesh B'Nefesh email list. One of them mentioned that they were looking for someone with experience in wind power. I answered that I have zero experience in wind power, but I'm a mechanical engineer and I can learn things pretty fast, and shot off my resume. I was invited over and it took me a few minutes to realize that I was not exactly being offered a job.

Bentzi, the engineer with entrepereneurial experience who wrote the email, told me vaguely about this idea he had for a device which would generate electricity from wind at high altitudes. We had thought we would move at a modest pace over the next couple of months until we had an entire plan together to start fundraising, but over the last week things have really taken off. And of course, these investors are always demanding further technical clarifications, much of which falls on my shoulders to produce.

Anyway, whoever is interested, our company is: http://www.hillpointenergy.com/ . Anyone who is interested in investing, please contact me and I'll forward an email with a PowerPoint presentation attached.

You're Probably Wondering Where I've Been

2008-07-21T13:00:00.001-07:00

Well, going crazy is one answer. I've been trying to plan this trip to the U.S. for August, then trying to figure out what to do employment wise. As the American economy continues to choke and sputter, I've got pretty much nothing coming in these days. I looked around here in Jerusalem, and let's just say that there are plenty of options for me to pursue. I've actually been turning down offers and interviews for the time being, because I'm working on this project which may turn into a startup company. It's exciting, but we (the team I'm working with and I) are also under a lot of pressure to produce a report to start fundraising in the next couple of weeks. It means I'm incredibly busy. On the one hand, it's exhilarating to be a part of something new like this, and investing my time in something that might really pan out. On the other hand, working like crazy for non-monetary compensation can be a bit nerve wracking when you are sinking financially.

Between the startup thing, and planning my trip to the U.S., never mind the misery of the dating life, I've been falling deeper and deeper into a stressed-out zombie state. Still an inspired zombie, but a zombie none the less. It culminated about a week and a half ago, when I was lying in my bed wide awake until about 4 AM, every now and then getting really upset and punching the wall (fortunately they're made out of concrete here.)

Yeshivah started out as a one-hour per day commitment. Pretty soon I was in for two or so. Then, I started the beginning Gemara (Talmud) class and it bumped up to three. After that, I moved up to the advanced level, and was suddenly in for four hours a day. Meanwhile, I started falling further and further behind with the rest of my life. Hence the stress-out.

I finally decided something had to give. So I've had to cut back on the blogging, and I decided to take some time off from Yeshivah. After a week, I was slowly getting my head above water. Yesterday morning, one of the Rabbis called and said he noticed I hadn't been around in class for a week. Then another one called asking if everything is okay. I was really touched. Today, I finally made it back in after a week and a half of absence, and everyone was genuinely glad to see me. I talked it over with some of the rabbis, and we figured out how I can cut back on my shiur (class) time a bit, and cut back on chevruta (study partner learning) and still make it into shiur. It should cut back my learning to about 2-3 hours per day instead of the 4-5 I've been doing recently. Of course, the level of my learning is not at the level the 4-5 hour commitment would be, but hey, at least I'm still in the game, even if I'm not as high-scoring. So, we're going to see if I can handle it this way, and go from there. Unfortunately my blogging may also be cut back for a bit, but I'll still post and keep everyone abreast of the situation here. Feels good to be back on some sort of track though.

Sami Kuntar

2008-07-16T01:42:00.001-07:00

As I write, Israel is officially losing the Second Lebanon War. Everyone remembers that the war began with the kidnapping of two soldiers from Israel’s northern border, but there seems to be a blind spot in the national memory as to what came next. Forgotten is the liberating knowledge that, at last, Israel was not caving in to the demands of kidnappers and releasing thousands of Arab terrorists for a couple of Israelis. Rather than the standard Israeli response of retreat and negotiation, as was the case during Hezbollah’s kidnapping of three soldiers in 2000, this time the response would be military. "This time it's different," they told us. After one month, realizing the futility of eliminating Hezbollah, Israel took the cease fire option. And now, two years later, we’re back to the prisoner exchange game.

Captive soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev

I've been reading the book, "Live from Jordan," a collection of travel stories by an assimilated American Jew living and studying in the Arab world. What struck me the most about the book was one small paragraph, in which, listening to the news coming out of "Palestine," one of his roommates launched into an enraged tirade. He reserved his deepest animosity not for the casualties his side was experiencing, but for the lopsided prisoner exchanges. Arab society is what anthropologists refer to as a "Shame Culture," in which one's estimation of self worth is not based on obedience to an inner sense of right and wrong, but on demonstrating domination and in exchange receiving honor from one's fellows. When Israel trades thousands of Arab prisoners in exchange for one or two Israelis, it sends the humiliating message that a thousand of them is worth less to us than one of ours.

But this trade is different. Now, the bodies of the two kidnapped soldiers are to be exchanged for one living terrorist, Sami Kuntar. Kuntar himself is another one of these general-issue psychopaths which our neighbors seem to vomit up on us with great regularity. Back in 1979, he and his comrades beached their boat in Nahariya, invaded the nearest beach house, and took a father, Danni, and his four year old daughter, Einat, to the beach at gunpoint. The mother heard the commotion and hid in the closet with her baby daughter Yael, covering her mouth to prevent her from crying. Meanwhile, Kuntar smashed Einat’s head into the rocks in front of her father, and then fatally shot Danni. The mother then came out of hiding to discover that in her panic she had accidentally smothered baby Yael.

And now Israel releases this animal on humanity again, and in exchange for the bodies of two kidnapped soldiers. And that's what this is really about. Israel’s release of Kuntar is the ultimate manifestation of Multiculturalism, the belief that the values of one’s own society are no better or worse than those of any other. While Kuntar was being given three square meals a day, Red Cross treatment, and even conjugal visits, the leaders of Hezbollah have been releasing snippets of information, neither confirming nor denying whether the kidnapped soldiers were alive. It was just enough information to extract pleasure from torturing the soldiers’ families, which brought honor upon Hezbollah in the Arab world by proving their dominance over the Jews.

Goldwasser and Regev repatriated to Israel

Although his savage actions made him a hero in the Arab world, Kuntar is being paraded through the streets of Lebanon not for their sake but for ours. This is a celebration of Israel’s surrender to multiculturalist nihilism, and Hezbollah wishes to express its dominance over Israel by proclaiming the fact.

Hezbollah prepares for the party of the century

After all, if Israel is willing to exchange Arab psychopaths in exchange for the bodies of soldiers who protect the rest of us from those same psychopaths, this sends the message that we don’t think our values are any better or worse than theirs. That Israel is trading a living Kuntar, along with three of his comrades, for the dead bodies of two soldiers, means that Israel places no premium on keeping soldiers alive, that we place as little value on our lives as they do on theirs. The days of live prisoners being repatriated, as after the Yom Kippur War, are now over. It is unlikely any Israeli soldier taken captive will ever return home alive.

Kuntar (second from left) and his buddies are prepared for release.

Just as their grandparents disposed of Judaism in favor of Zionism, so too this generation of Israelis have disposed of Zionism in favor of... nothing. “Post-Zionism,” the Israeli ethos of the day, defines itself in its very name not as a set of beliefs but merely the absence of Zionist beliefs. Israel is a great country, with a strong and energetic people built on an ancient and beautifully restored land, but this country also exhibits serious moral deficiencies. Not only the immorality of Israel’s abolition of the death penalty, which would have made this travesty impossible, but the equation of soldiers and terrorists, of war and murder, is dragging Israel closer and closer to the barbarism beyond its borders. How I yearn for the day that Israel’s ruling elite abandons its post-ethical worldview and returns to Judaism.

Celebrations in Lebanon: Kuntar takes his place with Saddam, Arafat, and Che, in the pantheon of the faces of atrocity

Wedding of Yosef Bali

2008-07-08T22:24:00.000-07:00

Hi Folks, sorry for the delay in blogging over the last week, but I've been insanely busy getting my voyage to the Old Country, which begins in three weeks, all planned out and squared away. I've also got some potential employment news, and, well, let's just say it's been busy.

Anyway, I was at Shai Diamond's wedding talking to Yosef Bali, when I realized that I had photographed his wedding a few months ago and never posted the photos! Anyway, better late than never:

The chuppah (wedding canopy) wasn't the usual tallit suspended on poles, but it was this 3-D silk hut sort of thing. We saw the ceremony through the veil.
The guys got into the singing.
And they're married. It was a rowdy crowd.
Yosef gets a ride.
Performing arts: the ladder balance.

The man had a chin of steel.
Chatan (groom) and kallah (bride) sitting together.

Daniel and Yosef. Daniel himself just got engaged as well, so more photos are coming soon!

Yours truly in the blue.

The Machon Meir gang
Yosef and Efrat.

Ad meah v'esrim! (Until 120!)

Wedding of Shai and Emunah Diamond

2008-07-07T12:43:00.000-07:00

Our madrich (guide,) our diamond in the rough, Shai Diamond, was married tonight! I had the pleasure of participating in his simcha.

The guys, ready for action.

The wedding was held in a reception hall on the Tayellet, where I go jogging every day. It has a beautiful view of Har Habayit, the Temple Mount.

Children playing around the chuppah

Shai is escorted to meet his kallah (bride)

Emunah

Now we bring him to the Chuppah

Waiting for the kallah

Yours truly
Sunset over Mount Zion
And they're married!

As the sun set I got some nice shots of Jerusalem at night.

Har Habayit.
East Jerusalem

At every wedding, we sing Od Yishamah, "may there soon be heard in the cities of Judea and in the streets of Jerusalem the voice of joy and gladness, the voice of bride and groom, the jubilant voice of feasting and singing. . ." first said by a lamenting prophet Yishaiyahu (Isaiah) as he looked over the ruins of Jerusalem, then a destroyed city, prophesying the dream of return.

Isn't it great to be able to live the prophecy, so sing these words in the cities of Judea, and the streets of Jerusalem? To know it's all for real? How could Jews live anywhere else?

A Bad Day in Israel

2008-07-02T12:27:00.000-07:00

Got home today and checked the news to hear that, in downtown Jaffa street, there was an attack, and there were casualties. Apparently, our unoriginal neighbors, who copied classical European anti-Semitism and called it their own, and who invented Palestinian Nationalism as a twisted imitation of Zionism, do have one creative spark. Then never tire of finding innovative ways to kill Jews. In this case, the suspect in question was a construction worker on the Jerusalem Light Rail. While pushing dirt around with his bulldozer, he apparently got the idea to start running over the parked cars, overturning busses, and generally rampaging through the streets. Apparently, he had been shot several times by police personnel in the area, but kept up his killing frenzy until he was finally put down by an off-duty soldier who climbed onto the bulldozer and shot the perpetrator three times in the head. The soldier who put an end to the rampage happens to be the brother-in-law of the soldier who killed the terrorist in the Merkaz Harav Massacre.

What's interesting about both of these attacks is that they were inside-the-wall jobs. The massive barrier being built by Israel also happens to encompass East Jerusalem, which became entirely Arab after 1948. In 1982, Israel annexed East Jerusalem and offered the residents the ability to become citizens. From 1967 until 2004, very few took up this offer for fear of being branded as "collaborators" with the Zionist entity. However, with the failure of the Second Intifadah to destroy Israel, the collapse of the Palestinian Authority into a hellhole of armed gangs, the emigration of Jerusalem's educated Arab intellectuals, and the deaths of terrorist mastermind Yasser Arafat and Jerusalemite Arab leader Faisal Husseini (grandson of Haj Amin Al Husseini,) there has been a shift in attitude. Today, most Jerusalem Arabs, at least publicly, don't find inspiration from the rapidly dying concept of Palestinian Nationalism. That, coupled with the building of the wall, and the subsequent threat of an end to medical care, law enforcement, and the myriad of other services provided free of charge by the Israeli taxpayer has led to a spike in citizenship applications by those now living beyond the wall. There's a desperate race to gain citizenship in the Zionist Entity.

But as today's attack shows, committed by an East Jerusalemite with citizenship just like the Merkaz Harav Massacre killer, the old hatred is still there, still seething. I haven't heard any reports about the driver, but I'm willing to bet that he was an affable fellow, probably relatively friendly, who showed no signs of his murderous designs, and probably didn't think of it until a split second before going berserk.

This is an example of a known phenomenon, the spontaneous terrorist. I remember during the Intifada, an interview was played with an Israeli factory manager in Atarot, North Jerusalem, who had narrowly survived an attack. He had gathered his workers together during a break and announced that the employee of the month was Mohammad, who commuted daily from Ramallah. He awarded his worker a new cell phone, a cash gift, and some other rewards. A few minutes later, once everyone had returned to work, the factory was rocked by the sound a massive explosion. The factory manager went outside to find his car, and what was left of Mohammad's body, blown to pieces. Apparently, after receiving his award, Mohammad had walked right outside and continued with his plan, to plant a bomb under his bosses seat, when it accidentally detonated.

And that's not the only example. There are cases where families employed a gardener for decades, and went to each others family weddings, and then were one day found killed. "It's like someone who brings home a bear cub," one Israeli explained to me. "He looks so cute out there in the woods, so you take him home, feed him, and raise him. And then one day, when he's a little bit bigger, he wakes up and remembers he's a bear."

This sort of spontaneous switch from functional member of society to murderous sociopath is, of course, the exception, not the rule. But it's not so exceptional that it's shocking. It’s another component of the wildness of the mind which characterizes our neighbors. This wildness is something I think we will never truly grasp, and from which the only sensible protection is to put as much distance between ourselves and the Arabs as possible while we wait over the generations for their culture to evolve into a genuine civilization.

Response to Comments

2008-06-30T12:46:00.000-07:00

On my previous post on hiking in the Golan, I received the following comment, abbreviated for brevity:

(Referring to my comment that the Hareidi boys going down the stairs looked like waddling penguins)

Your penguin comment is offensive.

Okay. Whatever. I don't see what's offensive about it, and since you didn't say, I can't respond.

BTW, "Haredi" is the preferred term, not "ultra" orthodox. It is a misconception to believe that they are one in the same.Please help to educate your fellow Jews, and not denigrate others.

I did use the term Hareidi. However, many Planet Israel readers are not in tune with the Israeli-religious Hebrew lingo that those of us here live in are swimming in, so I had to use the term "Ultra-Orthodox," which is the universally accepted language used in the mainstream media. The fact is, I could be offended about the word "Ultra," since it implies that Hareidim are more stringent in their mitzvah observance than other Orthodox Jews. I could also be offended by the term "Orthodox," since this is a label invented by later breakaway sects of Jews for what used to be known simply as "Judaism," in order to legitimize their own, divergent beliefs, as being just another shade or "stream" of Judaism. But when someone calls me an "Orthodox" Jew, I just smile and nod. Not every conversation has to be a battle.

You're not one of those American Jews who sees Haredim as "The Other," are you?

Well, in some sense I do. After all, the whole point of wearing the clothing of 18th century Eastern European Gentile nobility is to set one's self apart from society, to make one's self the "other." I would think they might be offended were I not to consider them to be "The Other," after all that effort. I saw those kids slogging through the underbrush, pushing their way through thorns and branches, while wearing three-piece suits, and thought, "Gosh, that's odd. It must be hot under there. It must take a lot of work to dress like that all the time." After all, there is something a bit, well, "otherly," seeing people in three-piece-suits and Borsalino hats out in the bush. I admire the effort and hardship they must go through, though I personally consider it a bit misplaced.

And I don't know what the connection between being an American Jew and seeing Haredim as "The Other" is. After all, most Israeli Jews are very hostile to Haredim. Most American Jews, at least the ones I know, are pretty accepting.

The Stalactite Cave

2008-06-28T06:57:00.000-07:00

We met back up at the Stalactite cave, with a panoramic vista of Beit Shemesh.

Unfortunately, the hike was much more difficult than expected, so the group was slowed down. Because the group was slowed down, we weren't able to miss the heat of the day as the sun rose higher and higher in the sky. At one point it reached 94 Fahrenheit, which really wiped everyone out. Some stopped in the shade and waited. Only about half actually made it to the cave.

Note to future coordinators: when you hear it's going to be a hot day, don't be afraid to ask to have the route shortened. There's no shame in changing plans.

Another note to future coordinators: When some people who have hiked the route or read about it say it's an easy hike, but the guide goes and hikes it and tells you it's difficult, take the guide's word for it over the others.

The stalactite cave was fantastic.

The cave was discovered in 1974, blasted open during a quarry. It's about an acre and a half of fantastical, bizarre rock formations formed over the ages.
Looks like brains.
These tendrils of stone actually grew up, defying gravity. Scientists think that this may be caused by magnetic fields, but nobody is sure.

A stalactite and stalagmite reaching towards each other, almost touching. There's only a once centimeter gap, which will only take a few centuries to fill. They call it, "Romeo and Juliet."

Overall, I'd say the cave was spectacular, and would definitely recommend it for anyone in the Beit Shemesh region.

Hiking Nahal Sorek

2008-06-25T04:52:00.000-07:00

It was my turn to organize a hike for MOSAIC, the Jerusalem Anglophonic hiking group, so I called the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and asked for a recommendation. Since it's summer now, and it was going to be hot, we decided to hike to the Stalactite Cave near Beit Shemesh.

Here's a map of the route to the trailhead I made for the group for anyone interested in trying it on their own. The trail starts at Bar Behar (the bar on the mountain,) where you can pick up an ice cream for a good sugar rush.

The group gets started.

We hiked along the Sorek River (stream really,) which empties from Jerusalem down to the coast.

The Sorek Valley.

Made a left turn towards Deir A-Sheikh.

It is, in fact, the ruins of an Arab village abandoned in 1948. Some of the most intense fighting during the Independence War was slugged out in the hills between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, in the "Battle of the Roads," a struggle to keep the roads and supply lines open. Most of the Arab villages in this region were abandoned during the fighting, and today stand as ruin, although a few are still inhabited.

Eventually we reached Dar A-Sheikh, the Sheikh's Tomb.

The ruins made a nice cool, shady spot for the hikers.

The train passes. The Sorek River, now mostly sewage, passes underneath.

Asher the guide points at something of great interest and profound meaning, though I forget what now.

Continuing on, we passed over the Jerusalem-Beit Shemesh rail line.

Some interesting bark.

Unfortunately, at this point, we had an injury, so I escorted our injured hiker to be picked up by the ranger while the rest of the group continued. We met up again at the cave, coming next!For some reason, this dog attached herself to the group at the beginning of the hike and started following us all the way through.

Golan Heights 6: The White Falls

2008-06-24T05:39:00.000-07:00

Previous posts in this series:

Golan Heights 1: On the Road Again

Golan Heights 2: Flowers in the Jordan Valley

Golan Heights 3: The Beit Shean Valley

Golan Heights 4: Up to the Heights

Golan Heights 5: Legitimacy

When the Jews came to the land of Israel, at the end of 40 years' wandering in the desert, they set up camp on the East side of the Jordan River, and Mosheh (Moses) began delivering his final sermon, which would become the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy.) While there, the tribes of Gad and Reuvein (Reuben) decided that the grass actually wasn't any greener on the other side of the river, and they preferred to settle where they were, on the eastern side of the Jordan. Mosheh agreed, on condition that Gad and Reuvein would serve as the shock troops of the Israelite invasion, and would not settle on their land until the other tribes had conquered their sections as well.

They agreed, and one more provision was stipulated. Because the eastern side was materially richer, and spiritually poorer than the western side of the Jordan River, the temptation might exist, after the years passed on, to follow their material desires and begin worshipping idols. Therefore, the tribe of Menasheh (Menasses) was split into two, and the northern half was settled in the far northeast, to keep an eye on Gad and Reuvein. The eastern half of Menasheh was settled deep in the Samarian hills, providing a link between the east and west sides of the Jordan River. Today, this half of Menasheh east of the river is the Golan Heights.

Anyway, on with our hike...
The back of Baruch's head, pushing through the underbrush.

Elazar arrives at the "White Falls" (so-called because of the rock colors.)
Hiking down to the White Falls.

Unable to resist the temptation, I jumped in.
Later, we passed by a Hareidi (ultra-Orthodox boy's school) heading back towards the falls, in the direction we had come.

The Hareidi kids going down the steps looked like little waddling penguins from a distance.

A condor circles over our hiking group, looking for his own lunch.

And that's it from the Golan! Until next time, at least.

Golan Heights 5: Legitimacy

2008-06-23T06:13:00.000-07:00

Previous posts in this series:

Golan Heights 1: On the Road Again
Golan Heights 2: Flowers in the Jordan Valley
Golan Heights 3: The Beit Shean Valley
Golan Heights 4: Up to the Heights

Settling into our tent-cabin on the Golan, we got ready for a day of hiking.
Home sweet home.

Hakey-Sack Warmups after a long bus ride.

We unloaded our stuff, then loaded right back onto the bus to go to the El Al river (no relation to Israel's national airline.)

Despite the fact that both land masses were captured in 1967, Israel's attachment to the Golan Heights is far stronger than it is to Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank".) This, in spite of the fact that Israel has a much stronger legal claim to Judea and Samaria. After all, the Golan Heights was on the opposite side of a mutually recognized international boundary between the sovereign state of Syria and the sovereign state of Israel.

Judea and Samaria, on the other hand, were mandated by the league of nations after the First World War to become a part of the future Jewish homeland. The later partition plan by the United Nations in 1947 would have placed Judea and Samaria (and a good chunk of pre-67 Israel) under Arab rule. However, when the Arabs opted for an attempted genocide of the Jews instead, sending an invading column of five Arab armies, this nullified the UN partition plan. This is verified by the fact that that Israel's pre-67 territory was recognized de-facto, even areas Israel captured beyond the 1947 partition plan, as well as the international community's rejection of the annexation of Judea and Samaria to Jordan.

Moreover, the Jews who moved to Judea and Samaria were, in many cases, returning to villages they had lived in prior to 1947, which were destroyed by the invading Jordanian army. As far as I know, Syria destroyed no settlements in the Golan Heights because there were none in place in 1947. To the extent that international law, which is really just international opinion based on the emotions and passions of the time, is relevant, the settlers on the Golan Heights are less legitimate than the settlers of Judea and Samaria.

So why the wholehearted embrace of the Golan, with it's diminished international legitimacy, by those who would simultaneously expell the Jewish inhabitants and withdraw from Judea and Samaria? Well, the answer is simple. There are no Arabs here. There are a few Druze in the northeast corner of the Golan in villages like Mass'ada and Madjl Shams (an Arab Cognate of Migdal Shemesh, Tower of the Sun.) These Druze, while remaining loyal to Syria in case the Syrians ever return, are not generally involved in terrorism or fomenting problems. In 1982 Israel annexed the Golan Heights and offered them citizenship, which they rejected. They occasionally break out into rioting, but that's not atypical of Israeli Arabs anywhere. It's usually limited to the villages themselves and the problem is manageable.
The Golan is already approaching a Jewish majority, and the vast open spaces and green fields are just too sweet to give away. But there's also another reason. Many Israelis believe (incorrectly) that there is no biblical history on the Golan Heights. It's just nice land, without complications. The pulsating spirituality of the biblical birthplace of Judaism in Judea and Samaria, on the other hand, sends shivers down the spines of dedicated secularist Israelis. After all, the whole point of Zionism was to replace Judaism with secular nationalism. The deepest real claim Israel has to Judea and Samaria is biblical. To make that claim, many Israelis would have to confront the reality that they have failed to sever the connection with their Jewish past, that when they look in the mirror they may see an Israeli, but everyone else looks at them and sees a Jew.

As for me, seeking legitimacy and favor from the same community of nations who showed their true colors in the 1940's is a total waste of energy and time. I'm much happier just hiking and enjoying the scenery.

Yours truly, in the fields of the Golan.

Sheva Brachot of Adam and Chaya Dova Neril

2008-06-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

Last week I had the privilege of attending the Sheva Brachot of my fellow Walnut Creek oleh, and frequent travel buddy, Adam. Two weeks ago, I went to his wedding, but unfortunately, forgot my digital film. Besides, his father drafted me into video recording the wedding by camcorder, so I had my hands full in any event. Anyway, if I manage to get a hold of wedding pictures, I'll post those too, but for now, here's the sheva brachot:

Adam and father Mort singing.

Sheva brachot (seven blessings) is a period after a Jewish wedding which lasts seven days, during which special blessings are added to the "Grace after the Meal" when in the presence of the newlyweds.

Dancing about.

Brother Jonothan (remember his wedding?)

Shelley, visiting from Walnut Creek, reciting one of the blessings

Jonathan recites one of the sheva brachot

The newlyweds

Father and Father-in-law dancing

Yours truly reciting the final blessings over the meal

Golan Heights 4: Up to the Heights

2008-06-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

The Golan Heights, as their name indicates, are at a relatively high altitude. I say "relatively" as they only appear to be at great altitude because the surrounding landscape, the Jordan Valley and the Kinerret (Sea of Galilee) are hundreds of meters below sea level. The highest point on the Golan is only about 520 meters above sea level.

The ascent is hilly and winding. This is the same Syrian-African rift valley which stretches the entire length of Israel beyond the Dead Sea.

On the eastern shore of the Kinerret, looking across at Tveryah (Tiberius).
Climbing the winding road to the Golan Heights. The small hill in the middle of the valley is the ruins of Sussita, the Roman administrative capital of the Golan Heights in ancient times.

We pass by Neot Golan, one of many small rural Jewish settlements dotting the region.

One of the geographic surprizes of the Golan Heights is that, despite the hilly ascent, once you pass the first wave of hills, the region suddenly becomes perfectly flat.

The religious settlement of Chispin.

Golan Heights 3: The Beit Shean Valley

2008-06-13T05:39:00.003-07:00

And now back to my posts of Machon Meir's trip to the Golan Heights. Previous posts in this series:
Golan Heights 1: On the Road Again
Golan 2: Flowers in the Jordan Valley
Continuing on our journey through the Jordan Valley, we come to a massive checkpoint at the "Separation Barrier," back into pre-67 "Little Israel."

The separation barrier / security wall/ whatever you want to call it is a strange monument to the importance of image. Large sections have yet to be built, and last we've heard from news reports, the construction had been so bogged down by legal delays that funding had run out. Vast sections of desert remain unguarded. Meanwhile, on the main transportation arteries running through Judea and Samaria (the West Bank,) the barrier has a look of real permanence. Large sliding gates, severe tire damage spikes, areas for search, and the like seem to indicate that this crossing is secure.
Of course, I've been at this same crossing point at night, and I saw a soldier wave a passing vehicle aside for a security check. The vehicle floored it, burst through the checkpoint, and was on its way. The guards just looked at it, shrugged, and waved the next car over. God knows what was in his trunk.

The kibbutzim (agricultural collectives) in the area have specialized in using the plentiful runoff water in the region for fish farming.
Fish ponds
More fish ponds.

Binyamin, deep in study.

To our left is Har (Mount) Gilboa, where Shaul, the first King of Israel, met his end fighting the Phillistines who were encamped at Beit Shean.

Looking to the east, we see a break in the mountains, where the Yarmouk river

Foreground: Crops in the Beit Shean Valley (in the territory of the tribe of Issachar.) Across the way is the Yarmouk valley. The hills to the left (north) are half of the territory allotted tribe of Menasheh (Manasses,) today known as the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967. To the right (south) is the tribal region of Gad, now ruled by the Kingdom of Jordan.
The spot we're standing in is in the area of Issachar on the above map, to the far east, looking eastward.

This intersection between the Yarmouk and Jordan Rivers was also critical not only as a biblical division of territory, but also 1,908 years later, when this was the scene of an epic battle. The Byzantines, who had inherited the holy land, along with all the other territories of the East after the split of the Roman Empire, had expended their energy fighting endless battles against the Persians. Weakened by this incessant warfare, they were caught by surprise as a small force of Muslims under the command of Khālid ibn al-Walīd, sucessor to Muhammad, who, in an upset victory, defeated the ruling Byzantines and expelled them from the holy land forever in the year 636 CE. The Byzantine Empire itself had been horribly oppressive towards the Jews of Eretz Israel since the adoption of Christianity, and the new Arab Muslim overlords were welcomed.

While, at first, the Arabs ruled as a Muslim minority over a plethora of religions, the Arabs began a gradual process of colonization which continues to this very day, bringing in their foreign language (Arabic,) religion (Islam,) and customs from their far-off homeland in the Arabian Peninsula. Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattāb then built the Al-Aksa mosque on the ruins of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. The term Al-Aksa is a cognate of the Hebrew word "Ktzeh" (edge, extremity) and means, "The Farthest," in Arabic. At that time Jerusalem marked the farthest extent of the Arabs' conquest from their native homeland in the Arabian Peninsula.

Yehudah's Barmie

2008-06-11T12:50:00.000-07:00

In Israel, Bar Mitzvahs aren't the sort of extravagant, multi-thousand dollar affairs they are in the U.S. I think it's maybe because the kids here actually understand what they're saying when they are called up to read from the Torah. In the U.S., at least with the one or two assimilated Jewish kids I went to Junior High with, a Bar Mitzvah had that sort of edgy feeling of being a desperate party to stave off the inevitable farewell to Torah as the child descended to the same level of non-observance as his parents. In Israel, you can rest assured that your child will grow up surrounded with a more pure Torah existance, and will have at least the opportunity to continue to grow spiritually for the rest of his life. Hence the Bar Mitzvah is much more down-to-Earth.

But enough about me, this was Yehudah's Bar Mitzvah. I made the schlep out to Pisgat Ze'ev to wish Yehudah a Mazal Tov and visit my old friends there.

I said hi to Yehudah and his father Steven, from my old Pisgat Ze'ev days.

Someone came up to me, "I have someone you might be interested in."
"How did you know I'm not married?"
"Because your shirt is untucked."

I proceeded to chowed down on copious quantities of food.

Took some pictures.

The Fam

Watched the brothers all sing Yehudah a song they composed. A very talented bunch they are.

Danced around a little bit.

And had a good time fully.

Mazal tov to the Bar Mitzvah boy.

What is the Worst Thing a Person can Be?

2008-06-07T22:27:00.000-07:00

In response to Nina's question on my previous post:

Why do you think the worst thing is to be a Christian? Aren't there a lot of things worse than that? It seems believing in Jesus is just a conclusion of interpretation of scripture that some people make. It doesn't seem immoral, hateful, or anti-holy.

Well, I never said, nor do I believe, that the worst thing a person can be is a Christian. Obviously, after careful consideration, I don't believe in the whole theology, and I'm not a Christian. I'm also not a Buddhist, an Anarchist, a Nudist, or a Libertarian, and I could explain my reasoning there as well. I'm just doing the best I can with the tools I've got.

I have no idea what the worst thing a person can be is, and it may be different from person to person, depending on his or her natural inclinations. Let God make that judgement. According to Judaism, those who descended from Noah (which is basically everyone in the world) is responsible for the seven Noahide laws:

1. Idolatry is forbidden. Man is commanded to believe in the One G-d alone and worship only Him.
2. Incestuous and adulterous relations are forbidden. Human beings are not sexual objects, nor is pleasure the ultimate goal of life.
3. Murder is forbidden. The life of a human being, formed in G-d's image, is sacred.
4. Cursing the name of G-d is forbidden. Besides honoring and respecting G-d, we learn from this precept that our speech must be sanctified, as that is the distinctive sign which separated man from the animals.
5. Theft is forbidden. The world is not ours to do with as we please.
6. Eating the flesh of a living animal is forbidden. This teaches us to be sensitive to cruelty to animals. (This was commanded to Noah for the first time along with the permission of eating meat. The rest were already given to Adam in the Garden of Eden.)
7. Mankind is commanded to establish courts of justice and a just social order to enforce the first six laws and enact any other useful laws or customs.

(These laws were taken from a separate website which also provides a detailed explanation of the biblical basis for these laws.)

That's it. A Non-Jew who follows these laws has a place in the world to come. No need to become Jewish or Christian. There is, in fact, an religion of non-Jews based on this understanding, the Bnei Noach.

There is some question as to whether Christianity is a violation of Noahide Law number one (prohibition against Idolatry) for a Goy (non-Jew.) On the one hand, Christianity has brought the idea of one God to the rest of a humanity which was previously pagan, so it's a step in the right direction. On the other hand, Christianity teaches about three gods, god taking human form, and various other concepts which are completely impossible to square with a Jewish understanding. On the one hand, Christianity has spread the idea of a God who gave the Torah to the Jews at Mount Sinai to the rest of humanity. On the other hand, Christianity has also been responsible for some of the most terrible persecutions of Jews. So, as I said before, I don't think Christianity is necessarily the worst thing a person can be. My feelings are mixed.

I do, however, believe that becoming a Christian is among the worst things a Jew can do to himself. For a Jew, a higher standard exists, and to believe in the trinity and in a human god is definately placing other gods before the God who gave the Torah at Mount Sinai. There are three sins which a Jew is required to give his life rather than commit:

1. Idolatry.
2. Murder.
3. Incest.

Jews throughout the ages have given up their lives rather than make the slightest hint which could be interpreted as conversion to Christianity. Of course, the Jews who did convert to Christianity whom I have met over the years are so ignorant of Judaism that I don't know if they can be held completely responsible for their own beliefs. They are, however, held fully accountable for other Jews whom they lead astray, regardless of understanding, and they certainly aren't doing themselves any favors in the world to come.

A Woman Who Covers Her Head With an Apicorus

2008-06-06T01:59:00.000-07:00

I was recently surprized by a visitor from the Old Country, Walnut Creek. It was Rabbi and Rebbetzin Kagan of Chabad of Contra Costa!

It's always nice when friends come for a visit.

On Motzei Shabbat (Saturday Night) they took me out for a bagel. Of course, you can't eat until you've made havdallah (ceremony separating Shabbat from the week,) so...

Making Havdallah with a match and beer.

I had a great time. Looking forward to more visitors from the Old Country, so let me know if you're coming!

What I learned in Yeshivah today

We’ve been reading in Masechet Shabbat (The Talmud section relating to the laws of Shabbat) about knot tying, a forbidden activity. But, because the Talmud is basically an endless stream-of-consciousness holy debate between hundreds of rabbis over a period of four centuries, our topic of discussion wandered off, to how to deal with Christian missionaries, which I’ve been discussing earlier on the blog.

While reading the discussion, the conversation also occasionally refers to an “apicorus.” An apicorus is a Jew who has, through intellectual or spiritual drift, decided to leave the Torah world and dropped all distinctly Jewish behaviors such as observance of Sabbath and Kashrut (Jewish dietary restrictions.) Most contemporary non-observant Jews were not raised with an authentic understanding of Torah from birth, or they believe the anti-Semitic slander that they read in the press, or see the members of the Torah-observant public who don’t live up to the Jewish standard of ethical behavior. While there is some debate over who counts as an apicorus today, it is widely agreed that although a shrinking majority of worldwide Jewry today is not Torah-observant, they lack the basic knowledge to make an honest intellectual rejection Torah and do not qualify as apicoruses.

The page we read (Tractate Shabbat, Page Ayin Hey, Side Alef) refers to the prohibition of learning from a Magoshta. Two opinions then come from the debating partners Rav and Shmuel arguing whether a Magoshta is a sorcerer or a Christian missionary. Later commentators then debate the subject further, when suddenly, in the Shulchan Aruch (the code of Jewish Law, written about a thousand years later,) refers to a Magoshta as an apicorus. What? Weren’t we just talking about Sorcerers and Missionaries? And the context of the wording is even stranger, that, “one is not allowed to learn the foreign worship of an Apicorus.” But an apicorus is by definition a non-believer, so how could he be worshipping? What gives?

Well, it turns out the Shulchan Aruch was censored. In the middle ages, a Jew would, from time to time, convert to Christianity. These apostate Jews would fight to prove their loyalty to their new friends by becoming the worst of the tormentors of their estranged brother Jews, much the like assimilated Jewish anti-Zionists of today. Because they had inside knowledge of Hebrew, these apostates invaded Jewish Batei Midrash (Houses of Study) and went through Jewish books with a pen knife, erasing any reference to a Missionary and replacing it with the word apicorus.

Of course, such apostates were not exactly the crème de la crème of the Beit Midrash to begin with. They would visually scan the texts, find the word, and replace it, lacking even the ability to read the context. This results in some very bizarre passages. For instance, the term “Nochri” can mean either a missionary or a wig. In one reference, we found a sentence reading, “A woman covering her head with an apicorus.” The student has to back-track through the censorship to figure out the original intent.

In some cases, entire sections or paragraphs were eliminated from the Talmud, resulting in wide blank spots in the middle of the page, which still appear in some contemporary editions. This also results in some misunderstandings of what should be done with apicoruses. A religious Jew might read certain passages which originally described how to handle missionaries which was censored to read, “Apicoruses,” and, God forbid, think that such treatment applies to his non-observant brethren. Fortunately, the Islamic world had its own religious gripes against the Christian world and was perfectly happy to leave the passages intact. Thus, today, many of the original manuscripts brought from Jews in Islamic countries are now being used to restore the original texts.

Golan 2: Flowers in the Jordan Valley

2008-06-03T12:27:00.000-07:00

Continuing on our merry way, we pass through mile after mile of date palms.

Of course, not only is the Jordan Valley, "Occupied Palestinian Territory," it's also a defensive border with Jordan, with which Israel is officially at peace. A border fence cuts close to the road, reminding you of just how tiny this country really is, and the neighborhood it's in.

As we head north up the Jordan Valley, away from the rain shadow of the Jericho plains and towards the verdant Galil (Galilee,) the hills come to be covered with grass and greenery.
We turn a corner and suddenly come upon a field of blossoming flowers.

The bus driver was considerate enough to pull over for us to stretch our legs. It was like in "Wizard of Oz" when they all go running through the poppy fields.
Although in this case they were "Calaniyot." At least the red ones were.

Golan Heights 1: On the Road Again

2008-06-01T12:25:00.002-07:00

As mentioned previously, the current Israeli government is nearing collapse, having entered the "Death Spiral." Over the past week, the PM has both approved almost a thousand new housing units in Jerusalem neighborhoods to grasp at support from the right, as well as continued negotiations with the Palestinian Authority in a desperate reach for support from the left. Never mind the inherent contradiction in this, in that the Palestinian Authority demands the destruction, or preferably the expulsion of Jews and transfer of the properties to the future Arab entity, of those same neighborhoods. Meanwhile, in an attempt to buy some media protection, he's negotiating with Hezbollah up north about the release of captured terrorists, and he's opened negotiations with Syria to retreat from the Golan and wipe out the last forty years of Jewish building there.

It's sad that we have a political system which promotes people of such base moral caliber to such high positions that thousands of Jewish farmers who would have their lives destroyed by one small man trying to keep his job. And that's not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Israeli soldiers and civilians who would be threatened by an Iranian proxy perched on the Golan, looking right into the heart of Israel. Of course, nobody takes his discussions on the Golan Heights seriously. His American overseers feel a deep sense of hostility towards Syria, unlike the Palestinian Authority, and would not support such a deal. He is so deeply unpopular at home that he could never pass any agreement through the Knesset anyway. But still, I figure this is a good chance to show a little solidarity with the unjustly threatened Jewish community of the Golan by posting my photos of Machon Meir's spring tiyul (trip) to the Golan Heights of 2007. Although the photos are over a year old, I just haven't had the chance to post them yet, so here we go!

We'll start the day with chocolate sandwiches. The breakfast of champions!

A quick stop in the outhouse before our two hour bus ride and... wait a minute, can someone explain why there's a toilet seat cover hanging from the wall?

Michael waited until the last possible second to pack. And get dressed.

Yericho (Jericho)

More Yericho date trees and fields.

Passing the Yericho Monastery.

On the hilltops in the distance is Mitzpeh Yericho.

Some sort of agricultural settlement in the Jordan Valley.

Date Palms in the Jordan. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the background.