shabbat shalom 01.05.10

Hi Everyone, It's been a busy week.  My Dutch student, the one who spent the last two months in the Negev collecting field data for my EBONE project, spent the last few days in Jerusalem with me before completing the assignment and flying home to Amsterdam yesterday.  We had to go over the data, check for errors, make plans for analysis during the summer.  He did a great job, and apparently enjoyed himself in the desert too.  I've arranged for him to have a "volunteer" status in the Dutch institution where our project is based, so that he can continue to participate while he is looking for a real job.  In my experience, it is good to have a foot in the door in order to hear about job possibilities and something may turn up for him from this contact too. We had oddly cool weather for the end of April, even some rain yesterday.  It's not unknown to have rain at the end of April but it is unusual.  It's been a long spring with good rainfall patterns (with us, it's the timing as well as the total amount that matters) so I am expecting a good cereal harvest this spring and a good olive harvest in the fall.  Nice change after so many years of drought, even though the total rainfall this year is below average. Yesterday I went to the Old City to meet two visitng Quakers from England.  They were a physician and his wife, both in their high 70's but still fairly fit and alert.  The wife was from a Jewish family and had relatives in Haifa; she was a Quaker by choice and a nurse by training, met her husband fifty years ago in the hospital wards.  They had moved to rural Lancaster-shire and set up six health care clinics over the years.  Passing from Haifa to Ramallah, they stopped to see me in Jerusalem, and continued on, hand-carrying funds for Palestinian Quakers in Ramallah.  Good way to stay active in old age: be a subversive! I met them in the Gloria Hotel, a beautifully restored and maintained traditional casbah building with the low arches and thick stone walls typical of the Old City and probably a thousand years old.  Typical Crusader construction.  You don't see this kind of building too often, and certainly not this well maintained; most are shops and warehouses in the casbah.  I was enchanted to prowl around.  The furniture was exquisite Damascus inlay (mother of pearl).   The building is massive with stone walls several feet thick, built to last another thousand years.  (After 27 years in the Middle East, I have developed a certain nervousness about flimsy wooden houses, and especially wooden floors.  Stone is the only material fit for a real house....) Beyond this, not much else to mention.  As the weather warms, I feel better and my activity level goes up.  One thing sure from this; it is going to be necessary to install some decent heating in my house for the coming winter.  I'm getting too old to be chilled for several months and electric space heaters are not sufficient, while my wood-stove is only effective if it can run for several hours.  I will be checking into air conditioning for heating, which I understand is the most efficient  and cost-effective system these days.  (Summer cooling is not needed in this cottage at 1,000 meters.)  Electric makes sense in this country, where fossil fuels are expensive. Our holiday season is almost over.  Lag B'Omer is tonight, and is a nightmare for homeowners and foresters.  The kids light bonfires all over the country and steal wood wherever they can.  Wildfires get started too.  I already bribed the local kids with spare wood to leave my woodpile alone, but they will make off with construction materials, furniture, whatever they can.  By tomorrow morning the whole country will stink like the aftermath of a forest fire.  Pet owners also worry; there has been a frightening trend of kids thowing cats and dogs onto the bonfires for fun.  (I shudder and my hands itch for the chance to throw a kid on the fire if I caught him doing that.)  Fortunately there is little chance it will happen in my village; I'm not the only one here who would cheerfully murder an animal abuser.  As you can tell, I don't like Lag B'Omer.  Forecast is for cool weather and rain, so maybe we are lucky this year. After that, Jerusalem Day, which celebrates the "reunification" of Jerusalem.  It used to be a joyous event.  These days the fanatics have taken it over as a means of demonstrating Jewish dominance in the city, marching deliberately into Arab neighborhoods where they are resented.  I haven't seen an effort to bring Arabs into the celebration.  So in the end it has become a matter of pissing to mark the turf.  This I don't need either.  So that's another holiday I ignore as much as possible, except to try to avoid the way it screws up traffic patterns. Ah well, Sukkot is coming in April too.  Sukkot, or Pentecost, primarily marks the end of the spring harvest season when farmers would bring their first harvest to the Temple as an offering.  It acquired collateral importance over the centuries as the date of the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai, and for Christians, the arrival of the Holy Spirit on early Christians.  So all these themes are in play on Sukkot here.  The food emphasizes the harvest and dairy products (this is also the time of kids, calves, and lambs,when dairy production is at a peak).  The Book of Ruth, a pastoral romance, is read in the synagogues during the night.  Protestant Christians dance around in all kinds of interesting gauzy costumes, ecstasizing (or whatever the verb should be). It also marks the spring Abu Gosh music festival, and I will celebrate Sukkot by attending a concert of Rossini's Festive Mass in this odd Arab village which holds week-long classical music festivals.  I've done it every year for more than a decade and now it is a tradition.  At least it is an innocent, non-aggressive, relaxing and healthy way to celebrate a spring festival, which is getting to be rarer all the time in this part of the world.  So I plan to stick with it. shabbat shalom, Linda