shabbat shalom 22.05.09

Hi everyone,   There was NO way I was going to be able to get into the center of Jerusalem yesterday.  I had a meeting at 5 pm, and thought leaving at 4 pm was plenty of time.  I forgot it was Jerusalem Day, but remembered as soon as I reached Sacher Park and saw the police, the ribbons closing roads, and the masses of teenagers with kippas and Israeli flags marching around in what seemed like every direction.  Okay, I followed directions to turn north, passed through the open air market and ended up in Mea Shearim, with an easy route to the Dead Sea, but not to the center of town.  Circled around and thought I would try it from the south, through Rehavia, but nope, more cops, more ribbons closing roads, and more %#$!ing kids.  I circled some more.  No way.  After inching in frustrated traffic for more than an hour, I threw up my hands, muttering curses at flags, teenagers, their mothers and their grandmothers, and anybody who celebrates holidays by blocking traffic, and went home.   Okay, I'm Scrooge.  I hate holidays.  I'm sure the kids were having fun in their brainless, hormone-pumped way.  For me it is just a disruption of my routine and things I have to do.  I had a dinner appointment with a friend who I may not be able to see otherwise on this short visit she has to Israel, and that for me outweighed all the marches, speeches, and blahty blah of a national celebration.....I've heard and read the speeches so many times in my 14 years working in Jerusalem that I could write one myself.  "Jerusalem the undivided  capital of the Jewish people" (except facts on the ground and neglected Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem with potholed roads and no sidewalks speak louder than politicians' speeches) -- all the flag-waving emotion-exploiting cynical exploitation by demagogues and politicians justs disgusts me now.  In 1981, my first year in the country, I found it thrilling.  By 1992 I was beginning to wonder.  By 2002 I was tired of it.  And now I avoid irritation by heading in the opposite direction.  God save me from cynical politicans and pumped up teenagers.   Aside from that baloney, it's been a good week.  I have been totally focused on my European project, quietly shaping its direction.  I have a graduate student intern from Wageningen University, so four of us on the project went up to Ramat haNadiv (our mediterranean site where he is working) to inspect and map out the sites where he is analying the biodiversity data.  One of the four is my boss, who is on the team but hasn't been in the field with us at all.  This time he is helping on the diversity data so I dragged him along.  He did okay.  Work was involved in vegetation survey, thrashing around in the shrubbery, getting good and dirty.  I tore my shirt on thorns (some mediterranean shrubs have spikes like barbed wire) but no worse happened.    We put in a long, hard day (up at 4 am) and by 3 pm we were really tired.  Staggered back to the park office, downed some coffee, caught our breath and headed home.  We stopped in Pardes Hannah, a small coastal farming town, for some of the best falafel I've had in years.  (You have to go to these small towns to really get good falafel, which I would guess is our national dish.)    Sitting there in a dusty small farmiing town, tired and dirty, torn clothes, munching our falafel-stuffed pita and flaming hot chili peppers, watching the traffic on the main street and thinking about our next steps......I think this was a more honest celebration of life in Israel than all those flag waving kids in Jerusalem yesterday have yet experienced and may never know.    The best part of life in Israel is the opportunity to build stuff, even when (or especially when) you sweat and get torn clothes and cowshit on your boots.  I am guiding a team that is building a national biodiversity monitoring system, sometimes with our butts in the air and our noses on the ground, sometimes more dignified.  Getting from the grunt work to the vision is hugely satisfying, and I see my team being transformed, maturing as scientists in the process.  "To renew the land and be renewed by it" is the old Zionist phrase.  Well, we are doing Zionism, without the blahty blah, and it's open to anyone willing to work hard and get little thanks for it, whether Moslem, Jew or Christian.  That's Zionism MY way......   It is still spring, but at the tail end of it.  The fields are browning off, and only a few flowers are left, the borages and some thistles mostly.  The long, hot, rainless summer is still ahead of us when we will avoid going outdoors in the middle of the day, and the dust will penetrate our pores.  I don't really mind it any more.  As I get older, the baking heat is welcome, and my arthritis vanishes.  After more than a quarter century in the Middle East, I dread rain and snow.  Quite a transition from a Minnesota Norwegian to a desert rat.....   shabbat shalom, Linda