shabbat shalom 14.05.10

Fri, May 14, 2010 6:52:49 AM

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Linda Olsvig-Whittaker ; Linda Olsvig-Whittaker Olsvig-Whittaker Hi everyone, We have another "hamsin" rolling in and I'm sitting in a closed house until the temperture drops towards evening.  It gets hotter in spring than in summer here, when the hamsin air blasts from Saudi Arabia send our temperatures and tempers soaring during 1-3 day interludes from hell.  This one is scheduled to grow through the weekend, peak on Sunday, and break on Monday.  By Sunday, we will all have to tread carefully.  The hot, electrically charged air makes people nervous and gives them headaches.  Under traditional law in this part of the world, murders committed during hamsin are judged more leniently as being rather understandable..... I came close to it myself yesterday.  Scheduled to have dinner with a friend (a red headed Irish friend), I saw her emails getting more erratic and irritable as the hamsin rolled in.  By Thursday morning they were in capital letters and I chickened out of the dinner engagement.  She's furious, of course, but it probably is better than what would have happened if we had met.  We may not have much weather in this part of the world, but it is important to pay attention to what we have..... Wednesday was sweet, however.  It was before the hamsin, and lovely cool spring weather.  My botanist colleague and I drove north to En Afeq Nature Reserve, where I have started a new Dutch graduate student on his M.Sc. thesis.  It's a place where I have done a lot of field work myself, and set a few grad students on projects over the years, a wetlands created in the Middle Ages by a clever watermill canal system built by Crusaders.  The old Templar watermill still stands, which had provided flour to the people of Acre a thousand years ago. We had a lovely day at the nature reserve, also getting reacquainted with the plants, and I left the student there.  He seemed happy enough although I got a report that he's hiding in the air conditioning right now......not yet adapted to our tropical summers.  He will be by the time his work is done. Actually, we picked that day to go north as a way of fleeing Jerusalem Day.  It's the day marking the reunification of Jerusalem in the 1967 war (the Six Day War), and has become a day for nationalistic marches which choke the core of the city, making traffic impossible.  It has also become a flash-point for fights and riots between Orthodox and secular, or Jews and Arabs (who see little to celebrate on this day).  All in all it's become about as much fun as a Likud convention, with a lot of the same atmosphere.  I try to get out of town each year when it happens, and avoid the mess.  Of course the "reunification" remains more in theory than in practice, with East Jerusalem being Arab, still with dirt roads and inadequate infrastructure, while West Jerusalem has developed, and most West Jerusalemites would be afraid to walk in the Arab neighborhoods by themselves.  That's typical for the Middle East, however, where the Platonic ideal still remains more real than reality. Not much more to mention.  I'm quietly working.  Next week is Shavuot (Pentecost) and another small holiday, the one bringing up the rear of the spring parade of them here in Israel.  It's one of my favorites, another true agricultural holiday (celebrating the spring cereal harvest) with a later overlay of religion (giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai) which got more important in the Diaspora when spring cereal harvests made little sense in Russia and Poland.  There was still enough racial memory of the true reason for the holiday to make the traditional reading for the day the Book of Ruth, which is a pastoral romance if there ever was one.  Between the harvest themes and the pretty story of Ruth and Boaz, it's my kind of holiday, sweet and full of good food. My celebration on Shavuot will be to take in a concert in the Abu Gosh Festival series, with its unique mix of classical music and Arabic meals, something I've been doing for many years now.  It wouldn't be Shavuot without Bach and hummus. shabbat shalom, Linda +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://shabbat-shalom-jerusalem.blogspot.com/