Thu, September 16, 2010 9:19:08 PM
shabbat shalom 17.09.10 Erev Yom Kippur ...
| Hi everyone, This Friday night is special; this year shabbat and Yom Kippur coincide. Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) is one of the most eerie holidays in Israel. All traffic ceases by sunset. ~Picture All broadcasting (television, radio) stops for 25 hours. All shops, restaurants, places of entertainment, etc. are closed. Kids roller blade on the highways. A large percentage of the Jewish population engages in a 25-hour fast and the synagogues are full of people dressed in white, with the lengthy prayers asking forgiveness, beginning with the "Kol Nidre" prayer absolving everyone from vows, promises, and commitments made in the past year. (This prayer was created in the days when Christians were forcing Jews to convert and subjecting them to torture and threat until they did. It permitted Jews to convert falsely and be forgiven the deception. Otherwise this would be a sin punishable by death, as in Islam.) I've participated in the Yom Kippur fast and services in the past, but found that fasting makes me irritable (leading to more sins than I'd clear that day) and the endless prayers are mind-numbing. I'm sure most people who do this get a lot out of it but I emerged asking myself "why"? Especially when the next day everybody is back at the same stuff for which they had to beg forgiveness; fat lot of good it did. (I have the same problem with confession and absolution; six centuries of Lutheranism in my family left their mark, I guess. Catholics would understand Yom Kippur a lot better than I do.) Still, even if I don't "get it", this is a beautiful and impressive observance. Everyone wears white (symbol of purity) and abstains from leather shoes or other apparal, no jewelry (again, the link with Muslim custom on haj is striking; Judaism is much closer to Islam than it is to Christianity). People eat a light meal before the fast, and end it 25 hours later with another light meal; it's not smart to stuff your face either going into or leaving even a one day fast. That doesn't keep people from jamming the supermarkets as if provisioning for a siege. I'm flying to Sweden a week after Yom Kippur, so I will use this quiet day to put my gear in order and pack. I'll be gone three weeks, an unusually long trip stopping in the Netherlands and Belgium as well. Up north, it is cold and wet in all those countries, so I have to take care to pack appropriate gear when the warm weather here would cause me to estimate wrong. I also got myself a notebook computer for this trip (conferences at both ends so I need it). I got tired of waiting for my office to grind through the paperwork and anyway the IBM laptop I'll get from them weighs a ton and is quite expensive, not really the thing I should toss in a backpack and risk damage or theft. The litte Usus Eee I got fits my needs fine; weighs a kilo, fits in a backpack, and does all I will need while traveling. It will be nice to have this chirpy companion on my travel. (It is so nice that one of my colleagues took one look at it and promptly ordered exactly the same model.) Project work is going full tilt and I'm juggling remote sensing, digital mapping, statistical analysis of biodiversity data, reporting....it's coming together and at this point at least most of my guys have a clear idea where we are going. We aim to establish a biodiversity monitoring network in Israel, modeled on and linked to a similar system in Europe. The way we lay it out is becoming more clear. It's definitely a team effort and will take years, but we will come out of the current project knowing how to move forward. That's great, it's what I set out to do. If I can have this network in place by the time I retire in six years, I can sign off feeling content. That means work is consuming right now, and only from time to time I stick up my periscope to see what else is going on. Ten days on holiday in the Netherlands will be great even though there is illness in the family where I will stay, and at least two of those days will be tied up in working meetings. I might drop into Utrecht to attend the international AA meeting there (which was held in the tiny living room of a retired Dutch army colonel the last time I was there). I wonder if he is still alive; that was sixteen years ago. He endeared himself to me as much for his efforts helping the Hagana in Israel's pre-state days as for his AA work - as a young officer he was sent as part of a Dutch investigative team to see how the British were treating the Holocaust refugees, and these Dutch Gentiles promptly joined the Jewish underground. They were stealing from the British and passing it to the Hagana; their crowning achievement was stealing a jeep. Always did like the Dutch......so practical. That's about all to mention here. I'll fire of another newsletter before I fly, but I trust with the bitty computer I can stay connected until I return home 15 October. shabbat shalom, Linda |
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http://shabbat-shalom-jerusalem.blogspot.com/
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