Hi everyone, This has been an odd week. On Sunday I went to the funeral of Professor Zev Naveh, a dear old friend who has been like a foster father to me for 30 years. He died on last week at the age of 91. Jewish funerals are supposed to take place 24 hrs after death but the sabbath intervened, and Zev wasn't buried until Sunday afternoon. I took the train to Haifa and a bus to Technion, where I met a colleague who was driving out to the kibbutz for the funeral. Gal-Ed is a lovely little kibbutz in the Menashe Hills, south of Mt. Carmel, and Zev was buried in a spot fitting for a landscape ecologist like himself, overlooking Tabor oak savannah. All the Old Guard were there, veteran kibbutzniks and some of the grand old ecologists I have known since I first came to Israel, most of them not much younger than Zev. It was a hardy generation, and I'm not very surprised to see so many 80+ field biologists still standing upright without a cane, and mentally and physically active. Zev had been married and deeply in love with his wife Ziona for more than 60 years. None of us can imagine the one without the other, yet here was Ziona left alone at last and looking very tiny and frail. I doubt she will survive another year without Zev. She was shaking so hard at the gravesite that I put an arm around her to keep her from falling in. Another long train ride home; it took me all day but a duty I had to observe. I will go up again during Passover week to visit the family, while the children (the grey-haired children; now I do feel old) before they return to America. One of Zev's sorrows is that both his son and daughter left for America and never came back, but he lived to see his grandchildren come home to Israel. I stayed quietly at work all week although the rest of my department went on a 2-day excursion. I just couldn't face a road trip with twenty people while I'm still mourning Zev. So it was totally quiet in the office and in fact I got a lot of work done. My experience has been that work is the best therapy for sorrow, and it was true this time as well. Unlike most people, I don't want to be around other people when I'm grieving; I just want to bury myself in the computer. It passes; now I am fine. Yesterday there was an ecological conference at Hebrew University. It is a memorial conference held every year, for a scientist who was to some extent an ancestor of mine. I inherited her database system when I joined the Nature and Pwas arks Authority. Like me, she not a computer specialist, but a biologist. She had worked on birds in the Arctic and just about evercy kind of animal while with our conservation organization, a good zoologist. But she had quarreled with the administration and left rather suddenly, which is how I got the job. Moving over to Hebrew University, she built the database for their biological collections and did some rather interesting work in paleontology. So like me, she was more a dabbler in many fields rather than an expert in one. She died rather young, at 60, of cancer; quite a shock at the University, where she had been quite popular. I knew her a little bit, and she was indeed a nice person. Stubborn, though, and prone to resentments; I can see how the explosion at our organization may have happened. Anyway, it was a lovely spring day and the lovely university gardens were in full bloom. They had planted the central road with a row of Angels Trumpet trees, and this was the first time I had seen them in bloom:  (not from the university) Those flowers are amazing, about 15 inches long. cascading in a mass like a floral fountain. The effect of a long row of trees of them is stunning. The conference was a grab bag of uneven quality but some talks were interesting. Of more importance, it brought out the old veterans again, this time of HUJI academics, and even some from as far away as the Negev. So the coffee breaks and lunch were deliberately quite long, to give people a chance to catch up. I did as well. Grey haired myself, I'm now moving into the "alte kaka" category of veteran academics who know you but can't quite place your name. So it was a nostalgic week. I was glad to see so many of the old trees in the academic forest are still standing, and so many still fit and active. I heartily miss the Israel I knew when I was first in the country; the liberal and optimistic Israel of the Labor Party, with its European values and its scientific bent. It had problems too, major ones, but was not yet bitter and vengeful like the Israel of today. The people I saw this week were the remains of the Israel that I loved in the 1980's. They do have heirs; I suppose I am one of them. I saw others, younger than me, at the funeral and the conference, but they don't have the cocky self assurance of the old guard. These liberal, educated, humanistic, constructive, hopeful young people are in the minority now, and they know it. On the other hand, they are our hope for the future, so now I have to do my best to strengthen them. shabbat shalom, Linda |
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