The Old City in the Morning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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..."

"Ephraim! 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

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

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...

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

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!