A Wisconsin Yankee in King David's Court

Postscript

2008-08-21T04:05:00.013+03:00

Mark Twain concludes the remarkable account of his “pleasure excursion” to Europe and Palestine this way: “At last, one pleasant morning, we steamed up the harbor of New York, all on deck, all dressed in Christian garb – by special order, for there was a latent disposition in some quarters to come out as Turks – and amid a waving of handkerchiefs from welcoming friends, the glad pilgrims noted the shiver of the decks that told that ship and pier had joined hands again and the long, strange cruise was over. Amen.”

I arrived in Chicago by airplane without welcoming friends (that would come later), waving of handkerchiefs, or other fanfare, and instead of the shiver of the decks, it was the jolt of the wheels touching down on the runway that signaled the end of my own nearly seven-month visit abroad. I had no Turkish garb to show off, but I did return with a few gifts, packages of food, and articles of clothing I had bought in Israel, all duly declared for customs inspection.

To pass the time on the long flight back to the States, broken up by an overnight stay in London, I read one of the last remaining things on my spring reading list: Bernard-Henri Lévy’s American Vertigo, cleverly subtitled Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville. It seemed appropriate. After all, I began this travelogue with a discussion of Tocqueville, and my return to the exceptional country he visited for nine months in 1831-32 was imminent. Would it look different to me, I wondered, after half a year in Israel?

Lévy’s book is a fascinating, often insightful, and sometimes amusing account of his own journey through America in 2005. Some of the things he describes – the driving habits of Americans, for instance, or the “calm, discipline, a mixture of docility and courtesy, gregarious submission and civilization” of American crowds (“Here … when people bump into each other, there’s a flurry of ‘It’s okay,’ ‘You’re welcome,’ ‘Enjoy your trip’”) – reminded me of all the little things that make America distinctive, while other observations, like the profusion of American flags he witnessed in Newport, Rhode Island (so much like the profusion of Israeli flags I saw everywhere, but so different from Lévy’s native France, “where the flag has, so to speak, disappeared”), suggested some possible affinities between Israel and the United States.

But perhaps the most interesting part of Lévy’s book, for me, was his speculations about why Europeans have for so long been fascinated with traveling to America and writing about it. This got me to thinking about my own fascination with traveling to and writing about Israel, particularly this past semester. Partly, of course, it has to do with my ethnic background, but reading American Vertigo convinced me that my fascination springs as much from being American as it does from being of Jewish descent.

There are, Lévy suggests, at least three reasons for the European’s fascination with America. First, America is “not the exotic but the nearby; not the other but the same.” (Compare Claus Offe in Reflections on America: “‘America’ … has for Europeans always been not an exotic growth but a branch on the same tree.”) America, Lévy remarks, is “a way of changing places whereby you travel a very long route to meet not the other but yourself, once again and afresh.” For this reason, the European’s journey to America has “the structure of a phenomenological odyssey,” like Hegel’s Geist (consciousness) coming to realize that the Other it confronts is in fact an expression of itself.

For an American traveling to Israel, the latter country also often feels the same. In part, perhaps, this is because of the creeping Americanization that I wrote about in my inaugural post, which so troubled Moshe in Tzfat. But I think this feeling of familiarity has a deeper foundation and that the cultural influences run the other way, too. Lévy writes about the aspiration of America’s Pilgrim fathers to create a City upon a Hill; the way that Americans of George Washington’s generation turned him, just after his death, “into the ‘Aaron,’ the ‘Moses,’ of this new exodus from Egypt that was to produce the country”; the “odd,” deeply rooted, messianic conviction that “the American people is a chosen people,” a “new Jerusalem,” a “Canaan of modern times,” “the reincarnation of the ancient Hebrews crossing that avatar of the Red Sea that is the Atlantic,” “born under the sign of the Universal and elected by God to build here, on this land promised to it, a new kind of nation, freed from the corruption, rottenness, and aberrations of old Europe.” These spiritual motifs, to which I alluded in an early post on liberty, which are so constitutive of American culture and identity, are altogether different from the crass commercialism, materialism, and egoism that Moshe associated with America, though perhaps no less troubling in their own way (Lévy found them “problematic”). More to the point, they are constitutive ideals and myths that America shares with Israel. Is it any wonder that a traveler from a country that fancies itself to be a new Jerusalem would feel so at home in the old one? “Israel,” Lévy points out, “along with France and America, is one of the rare countries founded on … a ‘creed.’” What he neglects to mention is that, at least as far as Israel and America are concerned, their creeds have common roots.

Lévy suggests a second reason why Europeans are so fascinated with America: because America represents to them the future, an advance guard, which, “according to your taste, according to each person’s temperament, threatens us or is promised to us.” Again, Israel holds a similar fascination for the American visitor. At 232 years of age, America is still a new country, but Israel is newer still. (I remember wondering, during Israel’s sixtieth birthday, what Independence Day in America must have been like in 1836, just after Tocqueville visited.) Israel’s very establishment, I noted in previous posts, was premised on the perceived absence or active negation of a constraining past and the astonishing creation of new social facts, and it is today an ultra-modern country replete with gay pride parades and a booming high-tech industry (the very combination that civic groups were paying Richard Florida to promote in cities across the United States a few years ago).

Finally, Lévy suggests that Europeans are fascinated with America because it represents not only the future and the “ultramodern” but also, paradoxically, the past, “landscapes of the dawn of the world” (Death Valley, the Grand Canyon), “the extremely archaic.”

Israel also represents the archaic past to the American visitor, but a human and not merely natural past. “Here in Israel,” I wrote at the beginning of my journey, “even in the new and modern city of Tel Aviv, I find that remnants of the past have a way of sticking around and lingering in the present.” The past is present everywhere, from the countless ruins that A. and I inspected (Jerusalem, Joppa, Caesarea, Masada, Baram, En Gedi, and so on) to the holidays in which the historical tragedies and triumphs of the Jewish people are continually recounted (Purim, Passover, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day). Like Mark Twain, I found that “no single foot of ground … seems to be without a stirring and important history of its own,” and that it was impossible to “steal a walk of a hundred yards without a guide along to talk unceasingly about every stone you step upon and drag you back ages and ages to the day when it achieved celebrity.”

Perhaps, then, as Lévy remarks about his journey to America, my own journey to Israel had the peculiarity of giving me a taste of both past and future at the same time. That should hardly be surprising. After all, Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel imagining what a future Jewish society in Palestine would look like was entitled Altneuland (Old New Land).

Whatever the reasons, I remain as fascinated as ever with Israel and its people.

Hebrew Troubles

2008-07-31T15:52:00.013+03:00

A recent and interesting article in The New York Times noted that Hebrew had ceased to be widely spoken for 1,700 years before its revival in the twentieth century. That revival, The New York Times added, “is often hailed as one of the greatest feats of the Zionist enterprise; today Hebrew is the first language of millions of Israelis, a loquacious and literary nation that is said to publish an average of 5,500 books a year.”

The revival of Hebrew was, to a great extent, the accomplishment of a single man: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew. We read a short text about him in my Hebrew class. (Click on the image below to enlarge it.)

Here is my rough translation from the Hebrew. (If you catch any mistakes, please leave a comment to correct them.)

Today, as in the time of the Bible, Hebrew is a living language, and people of all ages and in every place in Israel speak Hebrew, but this was not always so.

For a long time the Jews were in different places in the world and didn’t speak Hebrew. Hebrew was a book language, and in everyday life it was a dead language. All over the earth the Jews spoke in another language. For example, in Germany they spoke German, in Morocco they spoke Arabic and French, and there were also special Jewish languages, like Yiddish in Europe and Ladino in Spain. The majority of researchers think that already in the second century before the counting [B.C.E. – W.Y.] they didn’t speak Hebrew. They continued to read the Bible and the Mishnah in Hebrew, they prayed in Hebrew, and they even wrote in Hebrew, but not many Jews spoke Hebrew outside the synagogue.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a Zionist Jew named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda came from Russia to Israel. He thought that all the Jews need to return to the Land of Israel and to speak Hebrew. He said: “The land and the language – without these two things the People of Israel cannot be a people.”

Very religious people did not want to speak Hebrew. They said it is forbidden to speak Hebrew everyday because it is a holy language. They thought that Ben-Yehuda was crazy, and it was forbidden to speak with him. Other people wanted to speak Hebrew, but they said that they could not because they didn’t have enough words. They also thought that Ben-Yehuda was crazy and it was not possible to speak with him. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda did not agree – not with the former nor with the latter.

It was not only Ben-Yehuda who was “crazy” about Hebrew. There were in the Land of Israel more idealistic “crazy people” – professors, teachers, writers, journalists, doctors, and others – all of them were “soldiers” in a Hebrew army, and they looked for new words to revive everyday in the modern world. They said: We need to open Hebrew schools. In the Hebrew schools, the teachers need to speak always only Hebrew and to teach Hebrew in Hebrew.

Ben-Yehuda was also a journalist. He wrote several newspapers in Hebrew. In these newspapers he used new words; in the morning he thought of a new word [often derived from Biblical roots - W.Y.] and in the evening he wrote it in the newspaper. In this way people in the Land of Israel learned the new words, knew them, and began to use these words in the street and at home.

Ben-Yehuda wrote an important, great, and historic dictionary. In this dictionary there are words from the time of the Bible to the twentieth century. In the dictionary there are also all the new words of Ben-Yehuda and his friends. For example: soldier, ice cream, dictionary, clock, newspaper.

Most people say that the great miracle of Zionism is the revival of the Hebrew language.

From a sociological perspective, the revival of Hebrew as a language of everyday life is one of the most remarkable things about Israeli society. In 1895, at the very time that Ben-Yehuda was engaged in his seemingly quixotic pursuits in Palestine, the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim defined the subject matter of sociology as social facts. A social fact, he explained, was any way of acting, thinking, and feeling that constrained the individual from the outside: “Not only are these types of behavior and thinking external to the individual, but they are endued with a compelling and coercive power by virtue of which, whether he wishes it or not, they impose themselves upon him.” And one of Durkheim’s chief examples was language: “I am not forced to speak French with my compatriots … but it is impossible for me to do otherwise. If I tried to escape the necessity, my attempt would fail miserably.” (Just try going to Paris and speaking English, and you’ll see what he means.) What is so fascinating about Ben-Yehuda and the revival of Hebrew is that he and his followers, rather than being constrained by pre-existing social patterns, instead created new social facts. The revival of Hebrew, to use a bit of sociological jargon, was an astonishing imposition of agency upon structure.

Once a new social fact is created, of course, it creates the possibility of unintended and sometimes humorous deviations. Arthur Ruppin, the sociologist for whom the street on which I lived in Tel Aviv was named, tells the following story in his diary: “Jerusalem, 29 November 1936. Yesterday and the day before, Hanna and I were in Tel Aviv for the Schocken-Persitz wedding. Tremendous gathering of people. In my Hebrew speech, I committed the howler of the evening by saying of Mrs Schocken ‘ha-geveret ha-shokhevet al yadee’ instead of ‘yoshevet’ [the lady lying beside me, instead of sitting]. Much amusement. Nevertheless, I decided to make no more Hebrew after-dinner speeches.” After reading this, I felt better about my own frequent mistakes in Hebrew.

A colleague of mine at the Hebrew University told me a similarly funny story about the great German-Jewish émigré historian George Mosse, who came to Israel many times and even lectured at the Hebrew University but never learned more than a few Hebrew words – and even those he didn’t always get quite right. When he wanted to get the attention of his waiter at restaurants, Professor Mosse would call “Adonai!” (Lord) instead of “Adon!” (sir). One night at dinner he turned to my colleague and declared, “I always get the best service in Israel!”

In the end, parole always has its revenge against langue. The gist of the story in The New York Times was that modern Hebrew, like any living language, changes and develops over time; that, as a consequence of these changes, it has begun to diverge more and more from Biblical Hebrew; and that this divergence is causing a lot of anxiety among some Israelis, who view it as a corruption of the language. That, I’m afraid, is the price of Hebrew’s revival: no living language can remain static for long. In short, Ben-Yehuda may have created a new social fact, but millions of ordinary Israelis in small, gradual ways are continually recreating it everyday.

News Round-Up

2008-07-31T02:33:00.035+03:00

During the several months that I lived and worked in Israel, I flagged a variety of interesting, unusual, or simply amusing news articles that I intended to comment upon in this blog. Unfortunately, I never had time to write about most of them. With my semester in Israel now at a close, I thought I would take note of them here, all in a single post, in rapid-fire, abbreviated fashion. So, without further ado:

1. At the end of 2007, shortly before my arrival in Israel, Haaretz reported that the Israeli military had become much better at minimizing civilian casualties during aerial attacks on Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. "The rate of civilians hurt in these attacks in 2007 was 2-3 percent. The IDF has come a long way since the dark days of 2002-2003, when half the casualties in air assaults on the Gaza Strip were innocent bystanders.... The data improved commensurately. From a 1:1 ratio between killed terrorists and civilians in 2003 to a 1:28 ratio in late 2005. Several IAF mishaps in 2006 lowered the ratio to 1:10, but the current ratio is at its lowest ever: more than 1:30." This is very welcome news, generally under-reported outside of Israel, which belies the frequently made suggestion that Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counter-terrorism are somehow morally equivalent. Better yet, it appears that Israel is minimizing civilian casualties without compromising the effectiveness of its struggle against terrorism, which suggests that the goals are not mutually exclusive. In May, The New York Times reported that Israeli tactics (including the much maligned West Bank separation barrier) have drastically reduced the number of suicide bombings in Israel, "from a high of 59 in 2002 to only one in 2007, and one so far this year." The article worries that these tactics may have a downside: they may make it harder to achieve peace with the Palestinians. Perhaps, but the high rate of bombings in the dark days of 2002-2003 was not exactly conducive to peace either.

2. In May, Israel's Welfare Minister Isaac Herzog and its National Insurance Institute unveiled a plan to open government-funded savings accounts for Israeli children. "According to one method, the government would open an account for each child at birth and place the funds in that account, to which the family could also contribute. NIS 50 a month at a 5 percent interest rate would give each child NIS 17,600 [about $4,900 - W.Y.] by the age of 21. According to the second method, the government would give each infant a grant of NIS 3,500 at a preferred interest rate, yielding NIS 11,000 (at 2008 prices) [about $3,000 - W.Y.] after 21 years." Interestingly, this is a variation on an idea outlined by American law professor Bruce Ackerman in his 1999 book The Stakeholder Society, which also formed the basis for the United Kingdom's Child Trust Fund. When are we getting these in the United States?

3. The Israel Baseball League struck out! That was the unwelcome news at the end of May. "The much-hyped Israel Baseball League," The Jerusalem Post reported, "which was slated to begin its second season June 22, has been cancelled for 2008 and its future is in jeopardy." A. and I, who were looking forward to rooting for the Tel Aviv Lightning during our stay in Israel, were bitterly disappointed.

4. In May, Haaretz reported that Israel, having already withdrawn from Gaza in 2005, was now proposing to withdraw from most of the West Bank, leaving only about 8.5 percent of the territory in Israeli hands. "Israel wants to keep West Bank land with its main settlement blocs, offering land inside Israel in exchange. The land would be between Hebron in the southern West Bank and Gaza - at least part of a route through Israel to link the two territories." What Israel offered, in other words, was contiguous territories, and the 8.5 percent it proposed to keep is close to the 5 percent proposed by Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and U.S. President Bill Clinton at Camp David in 2000. (Barak also offered to dismantle most of the settlements and to swap land in return for the remaining settlements, near Israel's 1967 border, which he didn't want to remove.) The Palestinian reply? Not interested, in part because they only want to swap 1.8 percent of the West Bank for Israeli land, and in part because the Israeli proposal postpones the difficult negotiations about Jerusalem till a later date.

5. To be fair, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority aren't the only ones who have shown themselves capable of acting in a foolish and shortsighted manner. In July an Israeli defense committee approved the construction of 22 homes for the families of a former Gaza settlement in the sparsely populated West Bank settlement of Maskiot. As I suggested above, any future peace agreement with the Palestinians will likely allow Israel to keep a few major settlement blocs near its 1967 border in exchange for land inside Israel. However, Maskiot is far from that border. Israel should be dismantling it, not expanding it. (That said, I do think the government should approve the construction of new homes for the former Gaza settlers inside Israel.)

6. The problems plaguing Israel's universities, which I blogged about in an early post, continued to fester during my semester in the country. In June, Haaretz reported: "The past two years were among the hardest experienced by Israel's higher education system.... Leaders of the higher education network claim that the current crisis has only just begun, and that the finance ministry dried out the higher education system over recent years, bringing academic instruction and research to the brink of collapse. University heads say that without additional resources, it will not be possible to open the next academic year." As if the universities didn't have enough tsuris, six Israeli Arabs -- including two students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem -- were arrested in July for allegedly plotting to shoot down President Bush's helicopter earlier this year. I was at least relieved to discover that none of these would-be terrorists were sociology students. The only good news for Israeli universities that I read before returning to the States was about the launching of a new academic exchange program with Britain -- a pointed response to the misguided efforts of some British trade unionists to "boycott" (more accurately, blacklist) Israeli academics and universities.

7. People sometimes ask me whether I felt safe living in Israel. The answer is yes, and apparently I am not alone. A recent poll found that 76 percent of Israeli Jews believe it is safer to live as a Jew in Israel than in the Diaspora.

8. In June, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) published an official document on “Vigilance Against Anti-Jewish Ideas and Bias.” Sounds like a good thing, right? In principle, yes, but last-minute changes in the document's language pertaining to Zionism and Israel strained Jewish-Presbyterian relations. The Forward published an excellent editorial about the controversy here.

9. One of the interesting features of Israeli society is that it is, in civic republican fashion, a nation of citizen-soldiers in which nearly all Israelis serve in the armed forces. At least it used to be that way. The Jerusalem Post reported in early July that military service is becoming less and less universal, which will undoubtedly have interesting and important sociological consequences for the country.

10. In July, Saudi Arabia hosted an international conference to promote religious tolerance and reconciliation. Public worship and display by non-Muslim faiths is prohibited in Saudi Arabia. Does anyone else see the irony here? (Apparently not al-Qaida: they called on Muslims to kill Saudi Arabia's king for hosting the conference. Tolerance is in short supply in Gaza, too. At the end of July, Haaretz published an interesting story about a former Hamas member who had converted to Christianity and thereby put his life in danger.)

11. In case you missed it, here's how to seize the day in Tel Aviv. Haaretz called it a "love letter" from The New York Times.

12. There was no love lost between me and Tel Aviv's jellyfish. In August, The New York Times reported: "From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread.... The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets." Couldn't they have told me this before I got stung at the beach in Tel Aviv?

Farewell to Jerusalem

2008-07-29T23:39:00.002+03:00

It’s the end of July, and my seven-month odyssey in Israel has nearly come to a close. The semester is rapidly winding down, the class I am teaching is wrapping up, and pressing matters require us to return to the States at the end of the month. But there are still a few things left to do in Jerusalem: an excursion to Mount Herzl, Israel’s military cemetery and the burial site of many of the country’s greatest leaders; a meeting with Professor E., the doyen of Israeli sociology; a trip to the hotel where Mark Twain stayed when he was in Jerusalem; and a final visit to the Western Wall.

I went to Mount Herzl, above all, to visit Theodor Herzl’s tomb and to pay my respects to the great visionary who, by his own admission, laid the foundations for the Jewish state in 1897. “If you will it,” he taught Jews around the world, “it is no dream.” By chance, our visit coincided with the yahrzeit (anniversary) of Herzl’s death, and we found his tomb temporarily closed to visitors in preparation for some official state ceremonies.

But I was not entirely disappointed; I was at least able to pay my respects to former Israeli prime minister and fellow Wisconsinite Golda Meir. (Golda was born in the Russian Empire in 1898 but lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from 1906 to 1921, when she emigrated to British Mandate Palestine.)

During my time in Israel, I met many brilliant and interesting colleagues from universities all over the country; I even met a visiting German colleague whose mother’s maiden name, it turned out, was the same as my last name, making her perhaps a distant relative; but I was most excited about meeting Professor E. He is an extraordinary scholar, so prominent that I can’t bring myself to call him by his first name despite our formally equal status as colleagues. He was born in Warsaw in 1923, came to Palestine at a young age (eleven or twelve, I think he said), earned his doctoral degree in sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1947, began teaching there in 1959, and became professor emeritus in 1990. He has held guest professorships in Europe and in America and has received numerous and distinguished prizes. He is a comparative-historical sociologist who has written scores of books on topics as varied as immigration, empires, patrimonialism, modernity, revolutions, the public sphere, and democracy. At age 85, he remains as sharp as ever, and the breadth and depth of his erudition is readily apparent within the first five minutes of our conversation.

As if this wasn’t impressive enough – dayenu! – he turned out to be a real mensch. Without ever having met him or even spoken to him before, I sent him a brief e-mail message explaining who I was and asking to meet him on campus for coffee or lunch. I was expecting a polite no or, worse yet, the kind of terse response I received from another prominent Israeli social scientist whom I contacted: “I AM CURRENTLY ABROAD AND WILL RESPOND WHEN I RETURN LATER THIS WEEK.” Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a prompt and courteous reply from Professor E. explaining that a campus meeting was not possible but that I was welcome to meet him at his home in Jerusalem for coffee. I eagerly took him up on this offer, and A. and I ended up spending two fascinating and very enjoyable hours with the professor and his wife. We peppered him with one question after another about his work, about Israeli society, about his and his wife’s biographies. Others of his stature (or even a lesser stature) might have been content to talk only about themselves – it wouldn’t have been the first time I had a meeting with a colleague like that – but he and his wife were curious about us, too; they were interested in a genuine dialogue; and they, in turn, asked us about ourselves and our work. Since Professor E. expressed some interest, I even left him with a copy of my book (so far my only book) before leaving. I thought perhaps that he only asked about it to be polite, but less than a week later he surprised me again with a telephone call to say that he had read it and liked it! Coming from him, I felt this was quite an honor.

We learned one other thing about Professor E.: he has a wonderful sense of humor. During our meeting, the conversation turned briefly to a colleague who recently wrote a new book about the seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Another book about Spinoza? That reminds me of a joke, the professor said. An unemployed Jew learns about a watchman job in a neighboring shtetl. He travels to the shtetl and inquires about the job. The job, he is told, is to climb everyday to the top of a tall tower at the edge of the shtetl and, if he sees the Messiah coming, to alert the shtetl’s residents. He asks, does the job pay well? No, they reply, but it’s a permanent job. Just like writing about Spinoza.

My third bit of unfinished business took me from Professor E.’s home in Kiryat Shmuel, a neighborhood in West Jerusalem that is also the location of the Israeli president’s residence, to the Old City in East Jerusalem. It was an article in Haaretz that brought me there again. “A group of researchers and archaeologists,” it explained, “has recently located the Jerusalem building that housed the famed Mediterranean Hotel, which served in the late 19th century as the intelligentsia’s cultural, social and tourist hub in the Holy Land.”

Based on photos, blueprints, maps and observations, the research team was able to pinpoint the institution to the Wittenberg House in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Today, the building houses the religious seminary of the Ateret Cohanim non-profit organization.

In 1867, however, the structure saw a very different guest: The American humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by the pen name Mark Twain. Twain, who stayed in the Mediterranean during a trip to the Land of Israel and Europe, wrote in the hotel at least one of the 50 letters that served as the basis for a book on his travels, entitled “The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims’ Progress.” To this day, the book is considered the most widely-read travel guide in the history of American literature.

The article, humorously entitled “Mark Twain and Ariel Sharon shared the same roof in Jerusalem,” went on to explain that “former prime minister Ariel Sharon also has a connection to the building – he purchased one of the apartments in it 20 years ago. Sharon eventually sold the apartment to the religious seminary.”

(By a strange coincidence, around the same time that Haaretz reported the discovery of Mark Twain’s hotel in Jerusalem, The New York Times reported that the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, “may be forced to close because it is running out of money.”)

If I was going to retrace Mark Twain’s footsteps in the Holy Land, then a visit to his old hotel was clearly in order. Given how poorly it was marked, A. and I had a difficult time finding the building, but we think this is it.

The last thing I did on my last night in Jerusalem, after having dinner with some friends, was to pray at the Western Wall.

I took one last look at the moon rising over the Mount of Olives, seen here from the Jewish Quarter of the Old City ...

... and a final gaze at the Temple Mount in the Old City, seen here from Mount Scopus,

... and I was on my way.

I did not leave Jerusalem with the sense of finality that Mark Twain expressed upon his departure. He knew that he would in all likelihood never see it again, that his visit was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Even that was more than most people in his time – Jews especially – could hope for. Generations of my ancestors read, dreamed, and prayed about this place, but few could ever make the journey and see it with their own eyes. In contrast, I have not only seen it, but I know that I will return. And that is an extraordinary privilege for which I am deeply grateful.

En Gedi

2008-07-26T23:30:00.015+03:00

On July 24, A. and I embarked on our final road trip in Israel: an excursion to En Gedi, an oasis located on the eastern edge of the Judean Desert and the western shore of the Dead Sea.

Jews have lived at En Gedi for a very long time. In fact, the history of En Gedi is inextricably intertwined with the history of the Jewish nation. In the Bible, En Gedi is one of the cities that Joshua assigned to the tribe of Judah (Josh. 15:62), and David sought refuge there from Saul (I Sam. 24:1–2). When Jeroboam’s rebellion split the kingdom of David and Solomon into two, En Gedi became part of the southern kingdom of Judah: “The report was brought to [the Judean king] Jehoshaphat: ‘A great multitude is coming against you from beyond the sea, from Aram, and is now in Hazazon-tamar’ – that is, En Gedi” (II Chron. 20:2). When the Babylonians conquered Judah and destroyed the Temple of Solomon, they also destroyed En Gedi. And when the Persian conqueror Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonians and allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild their Temple, the Jews rebuilt En Gedi, too. En Gedi flourished under the Hasmonean (Maccabean) kingdom, established after the Jewish revolt against the Syrian tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes that is commemorated by the holiday of Hanukah. The Romans brought the Hasmonean kingdom to an end when they occupied Judea, and they destroyed the settlement at En Gedi -- and the Second Temple -- during the First Jewish Revolt (66 - 70 C.E.). The Romans later rebuilt En Gedi and used it to garrison their troops, but it again fell under Jewish control during the Second (Bar Kokhba) Jewish Revolt (132 - 135 C.E.). (Interestingly, the Christian sect refused to join the Bar Kokhba revolt, perhaps because some Jews believed Bar Kokhba, the leader of the revolt, to be the Messiah.) The Romans bloodily suppressed the revolt – Jewish war casualties numbered 580,000, not including those who died of hunger and disease – and destroyed En Gedi once again, but the Jews established a new settlement there in the third century C.E. Eusebius, one of the Church Fathers, described En Gedi during the Roman-Byzantine period as a very large Jewish village. A fire destroyed it in the sixth century C.E., and – with the exception of a Mameluke village in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – En Gedi remained in ruins until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, when Jews once again returned to rebuild this ancient settlement.

Today En Gedi is the site of a kibbutz (collective farm) and a nature reserve. A. and I hiked through the nature reserve and swam in the streams and pools fed by the natural springs.

Now, as in the past, human beings share the oasis with desert wildlife.

En Gedi has long been famous for its excellent dates; the Roman scholar Pliny, for example, wrote about them in his Natural History. We picked a few dates and ate them at home, but we decided that either they were not ripe yet or else we preferred them dried.

The Dead Sea apple (also known as the Apple of Sodom) is also common in En Gedi. Mark Twain described it this way: “Nothing grows in the flat, burning desert around [the Dead Sea] but weeds and the Dead Sea apple the poets say is beautiful to the eye, but crumbles to ashes and dust when you break it. Such as we found were not handsome, but they were bitter to the taste. They yielded no dust. It was because they were not ripe perhaps.”

We also saw the remains of an ancient synagogue from the Byzantine period, discovered during the plowing of a field in the 1960s.

The synagogue’s beautiful mosaic floor depicts peacocks eating grapes.

Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions on the mosaic floor include a genealogy from Adam to Japheth, a list of the months, the signs of the zodiac, and dedications to donors who contributed to the erection of the synagogue. Another inscription threatens to curse “anyone causing a controversy between a man and his fellows or who slanders his friends before the gentiles or steals the property of his friends, or anyone revealing the secret of the town [probably the method used to cultivate and process persimmon, the source of the town’s wealth – W.Y.] to the gentiles.”

The nineteenth-century philosopher Nachman Krochmal believed that the eternity of the Jewish people was assured by the continual renewal of its national life. All nations, he argued, experienced the same three stages of development: growth, vigor, and decline. But unlike other nations, whose development culminated in their eventual disappearance, the Jews have repeatedly risen from the ashes, Phoenix-like, to commence the process all over again. Seeing En Gedi rebuilt amidst the ruins of this ancient synagogue, it’s hard not to be convinced by Nachman Krochmal. Perhaps, for the Jews, the twentieth century was not the End of History, but another renewal out of the ashes of annihilation.

A New Consignment of History

2008-07-25T19:02:00.012+03:00

On the third and last day of our northern Israel excursion, we parted ways with Mark Twain to visit some sites he skipped. We left Kibbutz Menara in the morning, drove west along the Lebanese border to an ancient synagogue in Kfar Baram, continued to Rosh HaNikra in the northwestern corner of Israel, and then turned south and drove down along the Mediterranean coast back to Tel Aviv.

The Baram synagogue, about three kilometers from Israel’s present-day border with Lebanon, was built during the Talmudic period (in the third century C.E.) by the Jewish community that survived in the Galilee after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and Judea. The synagogue has been partly restored by the Israel Department of Antiquities. A., ever the astute sociological observer, noticed right away that the three doorways of its front entrance symbolically face Jerusalem.

A Maronite Christian Arab village was built in the nineteenth century on the ruins of the Jewish village of Baram, but the Arab residents deserted it during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Most of them relocated to the nearby village of Jish (in present-day Israel), but their church is still standing, not far from the ruins of the synagogue.

I’m struck by how often we have seen this in Israel: successive settlements, all built in a jumble on top of one another, each on the ruins of the one before it. “From time to time a new consignment of history arrives,” as the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote, “and the houses and towers themselves are its packaging which is then thrown away and piled in heaps.” It brings to mind the “urban ecology” view developed by the Chicago School of sociologists in the early twentieth century, according to which urban neighborhoods are continually transformed by the invasion and succession of different groups. Here one sees urban ecology writ large – regional ecology, perhaps. And when you see enough of this, you realize how inadequate the notions of “colonialism” and “settler society” are for understanding the creation of the State of Israel. According to this view, axiomatic in certain left-wing academic circles, the Jews are European colonizers who displaced the indigenous Arab population. This view is only possible, of course, on the basis of a kind of historical amnesia that filters out what Max Weber called “inconvenient facts,” that forgets the long history of Jewish settlement in Palestine, the conquest and dispersion of the area’s Jewish population by the Roman Empire, and the Arab conquest of Palestine in the seventh century C.E. (not to mention the fact that half of Israel’s Jewish population is not “European” at all but refugees or descendants of refugees from Arab countries). I am not suggesting that the colonial paradigm should be inverted, that we should recast the Arabs in the role of the bad colonizers and see the Jews as the virtuous indigenous population. My point, rather, is the absurdity of this distinction in the context of a long history of succession in which, if you scratch deep enough, today’s indigenous population turns out to be yesterday’s invaders, and yesterday’s invaders only remain so until the next invasion. Baram is a case in point. At first glance, it seems to be Exhibit A for the notion that Israel is a European colonial outpost built on the displacement of Arabs, but dig a little deeper (literally) and the story turns out to be more complicated. But then, historical truth is always more complicated than the Manichean parables crafted by those with an ideological axe to grind.

From Baram, we traveled to the stunning white cliffs of Rosh HaNikra, from which one can see Haifa Bay, the Galilee, and the Mediterranean. This cape has been a gateway in and out of Palestine for centuries,

and here too, even more so than in Baram, the continual transformation of this region by the invasion and succession of different groups is well evidenced. The ancient Ladder of Tyre, a steep road that connected the territory of Akko (Acre) with that of Tyre, once passed here; the Talmud mentions it as the northern limit of the Holy Land. Alexander the Great entered the Land of Israel through Rosh HaNikra, and he is said to have led his army through a tunnel his troops dug in the cliffs. Later, the Muslim conquerors renamed the area A-Nawakir (the grottoes), from which the present Hebrew name (Rosh HaNikra) is derived. In the twentieth century, the British army invaded Lebanon from Rosh HaNikra and dug a railroad tunnel here. When the British withdrew from Palestine in 1948, the Palmach blew up the railway bridges to prevent the Lebanese army from invading Israel. Three decades later, the movement of troops flowed in the other direction as Israeli forces invaded Lebanon from Rosh HaNikra. Most recently, just a few days before our arrival, Hezbollah returned the bodies of two Israeli reservists here – the same ones whose kidnapping started the Second Lebanon War two years ago – in exchange for five Lebanese prisoners, including the notorious child-killer Samir Kuntar, convicted thirty years ago of smashing the head of a four-year-old Israeli girl after murdering her father, and the bodies of 199 Lebanese combatants and infiltrators.

But it is not just the continual invasion and succession of human beings that has transformed and reshaped Rosh HaNikra; it is also the unending war of attrition waged by the sea. As its name suggests, the main attraction of this cape is the natural grottos, accessible only by cable car, formed by the sea in the white seaside cliffs over thousands of years. No less than the social ecology of this region, natural ecology has also made it what it is today.

From Nimrod Fortress to the Hula Valley

2008-07-25T18:59:00.037+03:00

On the second day of our Golan Heights excursion, we left Kibbutz Menara, passed Dan (the ancient city that marks the northern border of Biblical Israel), and continued to Nimrod Fortress, just south of the Hermon Mountain; then to the nearby Banias Nature Reserve; and finally down through the Hula Valley to the Hula Nature Reserve.

Mark Twain visited Nimrod Fortress in 1867 on his way from Damascus to the Holy Land, and it seems to have been one of the few places here that impressed him. It was his description that made me want to visit the fortress and see it for myself.

We reached the foot of a tall isolated mountain, which is crowned by the crumbling castle of Baniyas, the stateliest ruin of that kind on earth, no doubt. It is a thousand feet long and two hundred wide, all of the most symmetrical and at the same time the most ponderous masonry. The massive towers and bastions are more than thirty feet high, and have been sixty. From the mountain’s peak its broken turrets rise above the groves of ancient oaks and olives and look wonderfully picturesque. It is of such high antiquity that no man knows who built it or when it was built. It is utterly inaccessible except in one place, where a bridle path winds upward among the solid rocks to the old portcullis. The horses’ hoofs have bored holes in these rocks to the depth of six inches during the hundreds and hundreds of years that the castle was garrisoned. We wandered for three hours among the chambers and crypts and dungeons of the fortress, and trod where the mailed heels of many a knightly Crusader had rang and where Phoenician heroes had walked ages before them.

Either Mark Twain didn’t have a very good tour guide or archaeologists have since learned more about who built the fortress. He imagined it to be a Crusader castle, but in fact it was the Muslim governor of Damascus who built the fortress in 1227 to defend the road to Damascus and prevent the Christian Crusaders from attacking and conquering the city. The Crusaders tried but failed to conquer the fortress in 1253. With the expulsion of the Crusaders from the Holy Land at the end of the thirteenth century, the fortress became less important; it became a prison in the fifteenth century, and eventually it was abandoned altogether. It is now a national park, and thanks to the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, we were able to drive up to the castle on a paved road instead of taking the ancient bridle path that Mark Twain had to ascend.

Here's the view from the foot of the mountain.

We spent about two hours (an hour less than Mark Twain) wandering among the chambers and crypts and dungeons. In the first picture below, A. is entering through the front gate; the stones of the arch shifted in an earthquake in 1759.

The picture below shows an Arabic inscription from 1275 eulogizing and praising the Sultan Baybars. (You would think that an inscription in Arabic might have tipped off M. T. that the fortress was not built by the Crusaders.)

You can see the castle's donjon or keep in the background of the first picture below.

The first picture below shows the castle's cistern, which once collected rain water.

Mark Twain wrote:

We wondered how such a solid mass of masonry could be affected even by an earthquake, and could not understand what agency had made Baniyas a ruin; but we found the destroyer after a while, and then our wonder was increased tenfold. Seeds had fallen in crevices in the vast walls; the seeds had sprouted; the tender, insignificant sprouts had hardened; they grew larger and larger, and by a steady, imperceptible pressure forced the great stones apart, and now are bringing sure destruction upon a giant work that has even mocked the earthquakes to scorn! Gnarled and twisted trees spring from the old walls everywhere, and beautify and overshadow the gray battlements with a wild luxuriance of foliage.

The trees are still there, working their slow destruction upon the fortress.

From Nimrod's Fortress, we drove about a dozen kilometers (a little over seven miles) to the Banias Nature Reserve. Here again, it was Mark Twain's intriguing description -- his own disinterest notwithstanding -- that made me want to visit the place.

The ruins here [in the village of Baniyas] are not very interesting. There are the massive walls of a great square building that was once the citadel; there are many ponderous old arches that are so smothered with debris that they barely project above the ground; there are heavy-walled sewers through which the crystal brook of which Jordan is born still runs; in the hillside are the substructions of a costly marble temple that Herod the Great built here – patches of its handsome mosaic floors still remain; there is a quaint old stone bridge that was here before Herod’s time maybe; scattered everywhere, in the paths and in the woods, are Corinthian capitals, broken porphyry pillars, and little fragments of sculpture; and up yonder, in the precipice where the fountain gushes out, are well-worn Greek inscriptions over niches in the rock where in ancient times the Greeks and, after them, the Romans worshipped the sylvan god Pan.

The “Corinthian capitals, broken porphyry pillars, and little fragments of sculpture” that Mark Twain mentions are now on display in a small archaeological garden.

The pools of the Banias Springs may be what M. T. meant by the “heavy-walled sewers through which the crystal brook of which Jordan is born still runs.”

The cult of Pan was practiced here as early as the third century B.C.E., but, as Mark Twain noted, it was none other than Herod the Great who erected a pagan temple on the site around 20 B.C.E. Quite the equal opportunist, Herod; he also rebuilt the Second Temple in Jerusalem for the Jews.

Pan's Cave, visible in the upper left-hand corner of the picture below, was part of the temple. Ritual sacrifices were cast into a natural abyss reaching the underground waters at the back of the cave. If the victims disappeared in the water, this was a sign that the god had accepted the offering. But if signs of blood appeared in the nearby springs, the sacrifice had been rejected. (As a sociologist, I found this fascinating, but I’ll restrain my natural tendency to go into a long digression here about Mauss and Hubert’s classic study Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function.)

It was the worship of Pan that gave this place its name: Paniyas, pronounced Baniyas in Arabic. But after Herod’s death, his son Philip made Baniyas the capital of his kingdom in 2 B.C.E. and renamed it Caesarea Philippi. As Mark Twain notes, it was in Caesarea Philippi that Jesus said to Peter, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my church,” etc. (Matt. 16:17-18).

Below are the ruins of the Palace of Agrippa II, the seventh and last king of the family of Herod the Great (and thus the last of the Herodians). This is probably the citadel that Mark Twain mentions.

These aqueducts, through which water still flows, could also be the “heavy-walled sewers” that M. T. mentions.

This structure among the ruins of Caesarea Philippi has been identified as the remains of a synagogue from the eleventh century C.E.

Here are the remains of Caesarea Philippi's cardo (or cardus maximus), the city's main north-south thoroughfare. As I mentioned in a previous post, there is also a cardo in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Here is A. standing under Mark Twain’s “quaint old stone bridge,” constructed by the Romans near the junction of the Guveta and Hermon Streams.

Mark Twain's account of Baniyas was intriguing, but he failed to mention some of the best parts: the cool streams and the magnificent waterfall.

From Baniyas/Caesarea Philippi, A. and I drove through the Hula Valley to the Hula Nature Reserve. Mark Twain rode through the valley and saw Lake Hula, the Biblical Waters of Merom, on his way south from Damascus to the Sea of Galilee. Unlike us, however, he didn't have to worry about land mines along the way -- a legacy of the wars that have been fought in the region since his time.

Mark Twain described the Hula Valley in 1867 as a region with very limited agricultural potential:

We were now in a green valley five or six miles wide and fifteen long. The streams which are called the sources of the Jordan flow through it to Lake Hule, a shallow pond three miles in diameter, and from the southern extremity of the lake the concentrated Jordan flows out. The lake is surrounded by a broad marsh grown with reeds. Between the marsh and the mountains which wall the valley is a respectable strip of fertile land; at the end of the valley, toward Dan, as much as half the land is solid and fertile, and watered by Jordan’s sources. There is enough of it to make a farm. It almost warrants the enthusiasm of the spies of that rabble of adventurers who captured Dan. They said: ‘We have seen the land, and behold it is very good…. A place where there is no want of anything that is in the earth.’

Their enthusiasm was at least warranted by the fact that they had never seen a country as good as this. There was enough of it for the ample support of their six hundred men and their families, too.

Mark Twain went on to contrast the Biblical history of the Hula Valley – it was, he reminded his readers, “the scene of one of Joshua’s exterminating battles” (Joshua 11:1-9) and “another bloody battle a hundred years later” in which Sisera was defeated by Barak and slain by Jael (Judges 4:1-22) – with the desolation of the valley in his own time.

Stirring scenes like these occur in this valley no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent – not thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of [nomadic] Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings.

To this region one of the prophecies is applied: ‘I will bring the land into desolation; and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it. And I will scatter you among the heathen, and I will draw out a sword after you; and your land shall be desolate and your cities waste.’ [Leviticus 26:32-33 –W.Y.] No man can stand here … and say the prophecy has not been fulfilled.

As I noted in a previous post in May, the Hula Valley now looks quite different than it did in Mark Twain's time because Israel drained Lake Hula and its surrounding malaria-ridden swamps in the 1950s for agricultural purposes. (The drainage added 60,000 dunams of farm land for cultivation.) In the 1990s, to address ecological problems caused by the drainage, Israel re-flooded a portion of the original lake and swamp region, creating the present-day Lake Agmon.

Today's visitor finds a carefully balanced mixture of nature ...

... wildlife ...

... and farming.

I think Mark Twain would have been astonished by the degree to which Israel has transformed the region. Standing in the same valley one hundred and forty-one years later, I would reply to Mark Twain's invocation of Leviticus with a very different verse from the prophet Amos (9:13-15): “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will turn the captivity of My people Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be plucked up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy G-d.”

Nazareth, Capernaum, Tiberias

2008-07-25T12:34:00.016+03:00

From July 16 to July 18 we were on the road again, traveling in the north of Israel. On the first day of our trip, our little Daihatsu Sirion took us from Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean shore to the Arab city of Nazareth in the Galilee, to Kfar Nahum (Capernaum) on the shore of the Kineret (Sea of Galilee), and then south along the western shore of the Kineret to Tiberias. Once again we found ourselves retracing some of Mark Twain’s footsteps, and in Twain-esque fashion A. kept referring to our Daihatsu Sirion as a Sudoku.

“At Nazareth,” wrote Mark Twain, “we camped in an olive grove near the Virgin Mary’s fountain…. This ‘Fountain of the Virgin’ is the one which tradition says Mary used to get water from twenty times a day, when she was a girl, and bear it away in a jar upon her head. The water streams through faucets in the face of a wall of ancient masonry which stands removed from the houses of the village.” Mark Twain observed that the Arab girls in Nazareth still collected water from the fountain in 1867, but he felt compelled to dissent from his companions’ effusive praise of their “Madonna-like beauty” and to inform his readers (with some disappointment, I gather) that in fact “the Nazarene girls are homely” and “sadly lack comeliness.” Well, they are not as pretty as girls from Tel Aviv -- or Moscow -- but Mark Twain's judgment seems a little harsh to me; I would rate Nazarene girls about average.

At Nazareth, Mark Twain also visited “the great Latin convent which is built over the traditional dwelling place of the Holy Family” and the “scene of the Annunciation” (where the archangel Gabriel is said have announced the future birth of Jesus to Mary). Below are pictures of the Basilica of the Annunciation today, though I should note that there is apparently some controversy about whether it really marks the correct location; the Greek Orthodox Church claims that the annunciation occurred at nearby St. Gabriel's Church. (Perhaps Gabriel made the announcement twice?) In any case, the church didn't look like this when Mark Twain visited; the current church was constructed in 1967 (a century after his visit) on the site of an older Byzantine-era and then Crusader-era church. The lower level inside the church contains the Grotto of the Annunciation, which is said to be the site of Mary's childhood home. It was “curious” and “exceedingly strange,” Mark Twain marveled, that “personages intimately connected with the Holy Family always lived in grottoes” and that the most “tremendous events” of their lives “all happened in grottoes” – “and exceedingly fortunate likewise, because the strongest houses must crumble to ruin in time, but a grotto in the living rock will last forever.” “The world owes the Catholics its goodwill … for the happy rascality of hewing out these bogus grottoes in the rock,” he added. “If it had been left to the Protestants to do this most worthy work, we would not even know where Jerusalem is today.”

The second floor of the Basilica of the Annunciation.

Mark Twain also “visited the places where Jesus worked for fifteen years as a carpenter and where he attempted to teach in the synagogue, and was driven out by a mob. Catholic chapels stand upon these sites and protect the little fragments of the ancient walls which remain.” We visited both of these chapels as well. Here is the interior of the Synagogue Church, where the synagogue in which Jesus is said to have preached once stood.

There is one place we visited in Nazareth that Mark Twain was unable to see. Fittingly, A. found Nazareth's Moskubiyeh, built in 1904 as a hostel for Russian pilgrims. Since 1948, it has housed the city's courthouse, post office, and police station.

After our visit in Nazareth, we drove to Kfar Nahum (Capernaum), but unfortunately we arrived too late to see most of the sites. If Mark Twain is to be believed, we didn’t miss much. “It was only a shapeless ruin,” he wrote. “It bore no resemblance to a town and had nothing about it to suggest that it ever had been a town.”

The one place in Kfar Nahum that we did manage to see was a beautiful Greek Orthodox church on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. We spent about an hour there looking around and talking to the monk who tends the church. I discovered that he had a rather critical view of Protestants, which was an interesting counterpoint to the Protestant and generally unfavorable view of the Catholic Church that sometimes appears in Mark Twain's writings.

As we were leaving the church, a random cow spotting made me wonder if I was back in Wisconsin.

After we left Kfar Nahum, we found a nearby beach on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee and took a swim there – “a blessed privilege,” as Mark Twain says, “in this roasting climate.”

In the evening, we arrived in Tiberias and spent a few hours walking around the old city and enjoying a leisurely fish dinner at a restaurant on the water. Since I already wrote about Tiberias in a previous post, I won’t describe it again here.

In the evening, we drove north from Tiberias to Kibbutz Menara, located in the Golan Heights close to the Lebanese border, where we stayed overnight. We arrived very late, after the reception office was closed, but we were greeted at the entrance to the kibbutz by a friendly dog (named Efi, we later learned) who followed us around and helped us find our guest house, and we had a very pleasant conversation with two warm and friendly kibbutz members who were up late chatting outside at a picnic table.

Here is our kibbutz friend Efi lounging in front of our room...

... and the view from the balcony of our room at Kibbutz Menara.

Reflecting on the places we visited, I must confess to sharing Mark Twain’s astonishment at the “exceedingly small portion of the earth from which sprang the now flourishing plant of Christianity.” The longest journey that Jesus ever performed, he points out, was from Capernaum to Jerusalem, a distance of “about one hundred to one hundred and twenty miles” (it’s about 200 kilometers by our count, which is roughly 125 miles). “Leaving out two or three short journeys,” he concludes, Jesus “spent his life, preached his gospel, and performed his miracles within a compass no larger than an ordinary county in the United States.”

Masada and the Dead Sea

2008-07-19T22:06:00.023+03:00

While staying in Jerusalem in 1867, Mark Twain made a trip to the Jordan River, Jericho, and the Dead Sea -- to combat a growing "disposition to smoke and idle and talk" in the holy city, he said. Ten days ago, A. and I made a similar trip from Tel Aviv to fight a similar disposition that we noticed setting in there. Forgoing a visit to Jericho, which is now located in the West Bank, we substituted Masada instead. Although Masada was visited by an American missionary in 1842, members of an American naval expedition in 1848, and Charles Warren (the same one who discovered Warren's Shaft) in 1867, Mark Twain did not go and seems not to have been aware of it.

Masada is a fortress – the name means "stronghold" in Hebrew -- on a remote mountain plateau in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea. According to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, it was built by unspecified "ancient kings" or by "Jonathan the High Priest." Later King Herod expanded the fortress, adding lavish palaces, bathhouses, storerooms, and cisterns, apparently as a precaution against "a twofold danger: peril on the one hand from the Jewish people, lest they should depose him and restore their former dynasty to power; the greater and more serious from Cleopatra, queen of Egypt." During the Great Revolt of the Jews against the Romans, a band of Jewish rebels – nearly a thousand men, women, and children altogether – fled to Masada and took refuge there. It was the last rebel stronghold in Judea. In 73 or 74 C.E., an army of 8,000 Roman troops besieged the fortress and, within a few months, built a ramp that allowed them to breach its walls. With their defeat imminent, the leader of the Jewish rebels persuaded his followers to take their own lives rather than be killed or enslaved by the Romans. Only two women and five children, who survived by hiding in one of the cisterns, lived to tell the story. In the twentieth century, Masada became a symbol of Jewish resistance to oppression, and I have heard that the recruits of Israel's Armored Corps swear an oath at Masada that the fortress will not fall again.

Here is a photo of the Northern Palace at Masada, built by Herod on three rock terraces. In the distance you can see the Dead Sea.

Here are the remains of Masada's synagogue; it is one of the only synagogues dating from the time of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, which the Romans destroyed in 70 C.E.

Herod's storerooms.

Remains of a Roman camp at the foot of the mountain.

Looking down at the ramp built by the Roman army.

Ruins...

... and breathtaking views.

Admission to Masada: 61 shekels. Freedom: priceless.

From Masada, it is a short trip to the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is the lowest place on earth, about 1,300 feet (400 meters) below sea level. In the Bible it is called Yam ha-Melah ("Sea of Salt"; Gen. 14:3; Num. 34:3; Josh. 15:2, etc.), Yam ha-Aravah ("Sea of the Aravah"; Deut. 3:17; Josh. 3:16; 12:3), and "eastern sea" (to distinguish it from the Mediterranean) (Ezek. 47:18; Joel 2:20). It is still known in Hebrew today as Yam ha-Melah (יָם הַמֶּלַח, "Sea of Salt"), though for months, I must confess, I thought it was Yam ha-Melech (יָם הַמלך, "Sea of the King"). In Biblical times, the eastern shore of the sea was divided between the tribe of Reuben and the Moabites, and the western shore was occupied by Judah (the tribe and the kingdom). In the Talmud, the Dead Sea is called Yammah shel Sedom, "the Sea of Sodom," and according to Rabbi Dimmi, "no one ever drowns in the Sea of Sodom" (Shab. 108b). It was considered the juridical boundary of the Land of Israel (TJ, Shev. 6:1, 36c). It was the Romans who gave it the name Dead Sea, so called because the waters are so salty that no fish or vegetation can live there. During the Jewish War (66–70/73 C.E.), Vespasian's ships pursued the Jews fleeing by way of the Dead Sea, and it is said that he ordered a bound man to be thrown into the sea to determine whether he would sink.

Here's what Mark Twain had to say about the Dead Sea when he visited in 1867, one hundred and forty-one years before us:

The desert and the barren hills gleam painfully in the sun around the Dead Sea, and there is no pleasant thing or living creature upon it or about its borders to cheer the eye. It is a scorching, arid, repulsive solitude. A silence broods over the scene that is depressing to the spirits. It makes one think of funerals and death.

The Dead Sea is small. Its waters are very clear, and it has a pebbly bottom and is shallow for some distance out from the shores. It yields quantities of asphaltum; fragments of it lie all about its banks; this stuff gives the place something of an unpleasant smell.

The shore of the Dead Sea has become slightly more developed since Mark Twain's time. We were able to enjoy the hospitality of a spa, owned and operated by Kibbutz Ein Gedi, that included a restaurant and bathing facilities. That livened things up a bit. But for the most part, the Dead Sea remains scorching and desolate.

Mark Twain provided an amusing description of what it's like to swim in the Dead Sea.

All our reading had taught us to expect that the first plunge into the Dead Sea would be attended with distressing results [because of the high salt content -W.Y.]: our bodies would feel as if they were suddenly pierced by millions of red-hot needles; the dreadful smarting would continue for hours; we might even look to be blistered from head to foot and suffer miserably for days. We were disappointed. Our eight sprang in at the same time that another party of pilgrims did, and nobody screamed once. None of them ever did complain of anything more than a slight pricking sensation in places where their skin was abraded, and then only for a short time. My face smarted for a couple of hours, but it was partly because I got it badly sunburned while I was bathing, and stayed in so long that it became plastered over with salt.

No, the water did not blister us; it did not cover us with a slimy ooze and confer upon us an atrocious fragrance; it was not very slimy; and I could not discover that we smelled really any worse than we have always smelled since we have been in Palestine. It was only a different kind of smell, but not conspicuous on that account, because we have a great deal of variety in that respect. We didn't smell, there on the Jordan, the same as we do in Jerusalem; and we don't smell in Jerusalem just as we did in Nazareth or Tiberias or Caesarea Philippi or any of those other ruinous ancient towns in Galilee. No, we change all the time, and generally for the worse. We do our own washing.

It was a funny bath. We could not sink. One could stretch himself at full length on his back, with his arms on his breast, and all of his body above a line drawn from the corner of his jaw past the middle of his side, the middle of his leg, and through his anklebone would remain out of water. He could lift his head clear out if he chose. No position can be retained long; you lose your balance and whirl over, first on your back and then on your face, and so on. You can lie comfortably on your back, with your head out and your legs out from your knees down, by steadying yourself with your hands. You can sit, with your knees drawn up to your chin and your arms clasped around them, but you are bound to turn over presently, because you are top-heavy in that position. You can stand up straight in water that is over your head, and from the middle of your breast upward you will not be wet. But you cannot remain so. The water will soon float your feet to the surface. You cannot swim on your back and make any progress of any consequence, because your feet stick away above the surface, and there is nothing to propel yourself with but your heels. If you swim on your face, you kick up the water like a sternwheel boat. You make no headway. A horse is so top-heavy that he can neither swim nor stand up in the Dead Sea. He turns over on his side at once. Some of us bathed for more than an hour and then came out coated with salt till we shone like icicles. We scrubbed it off with a coarse towel and rode off with a splendid brand-new smell, though it was one which was not any more disagreeable than those we have been for several weeks enjoying. It was the variegated villainy and novelty of it that charmed us. Salt crystals glitter in the sun about the shores of the lake. In places they coat the ground like a brilliant crust of ice.

We had a similar experience swimming in the Dead Sea.

And, like Mark Twain, I came out coated with salt.

A. tried the Dead Sea mud, which is said to have therapeutic and rejuvenating properties, but I declined.

The only thing missing from our Dead Sea excursion was a glimpse of Lot's wife. According to the Bible, Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt near the Dead Sea (Genesis 19:26), but we could not find her. Like Mark Twain, "we looked everywhere as we passed along, but never saw grain or crystal of Lot's wife. It was a great disappointment…. Her picturesque form no longer looms above the desert of the Dead Sea to remind the tourist of the doom that fell upon the lost cities."

We left for Masada and the Dead Sea at 7:30 in the morning, and -- marveling at how we could traverse such diverse landscapes and climates in so short a time -- we were back to smoking, idling, and talking in the lush and modern seaside city of Tel Aviv by 7:30 that evening.

The Seven Species

2008-07-11T17:15:00.012+03:00

The Bible describes Israel as a land blessed with seven fruits and grains: "a land of wheat and barley, and (grape) vines and fig-trees and pomegranates; a land of olive-trees and (date) honey" (Deuteronomy 8:8). These seven fruits and grains are called the seven species (שבעת המינים).

We bought five of the seven species -- wheat (bread), grapes, fresh figs, olives, and fresh dates -- at the Carmel Market on Friday afternoon before Shabbat. (The grapes in the picture below are mixed together with cherries, and the bread is olive bread.)

We have seen the fifth species (pomegranates) growing on trees ...

... and we eat them in our yogurt.

We have also seen figs, olives, and grapes hanging from trees or growing on the vine here in Israel.

That leaves only the second species, barley. Not to worry: A. and I celebrated the Fourth of July with a few beers (made from malted barley) at a bar in Tel Aviv called the Dancing Camel. Our first two beers were on the house; the owner (an American expatriate) offered a free beer on the Fourth of July to anyone with an American driver's license. The Dancing Camel brews its own beer, which is very good, and the kosher hotdogs weren't bad either. A belated Happy Independence Day to all our peeps back in the States!

מזל–טוב לשירין וצחי

2008-07-04T16:54:00.009+03:00

On July 3, we attended the wedding of our Israeli friends S. and T. in בית יהושע. It was the first Israeli wedding we had ever seen. We discovered, first, that Israeli weddings are huge events with many guests (we arrived at the wedding on a chartered bus that left from the British embassy in Tel Aviv, and some Israelis jokingly asked us why Jenna Bush's wedding was so small); second, that Israel has some beautiful wedding halls; and third, that Israelis really know how to throw a party -- we stayed in בית יהושע and danced into the wee hours of the morning.

Here are the dashing groom and the beautiful bride ...

... and the late-night dancing.

The day before the wedding, we made a visit to David Ben-Gurion's house in Tel Aviv. The house is now a museum, preserved to look more or less the same as when Israel's first prime minister lived there. We were impressed by the vast library that Ben-Gurion had assembled in various languages.

There were quotes from Ben-Gurion displayed on the walls, and I was amazed that in the early 1960s he not only predicted the fall of Soviet Communism, but he was remarkably accurate about the timing and the causes as well. I was also proud to see statements in which he urged stringent protection for Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem after the city was reunited under Israeli rule in 1967, despite the desecration of Jewish religious sites when the city was divided. But my favorite quote may still be, “In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles” -- and this from an avowed agnostic!

Terror, Again

2008-07-02T22:29:00.011+03:00

Terror struck Israel again today. A Palestinian man from East Jerusalem deliberately plowed a bulldozer into heavy traffic on Jerusalem’s Jaffa Street shortly after 12 noon, slamming into automobiles and pedestrians, crushing cars, overturning one Egged passenger bus and badly damaging another. The Jerusalem Post reported that “the attack … set off a panic in the area and left a large swath of damage in the heart of the capital. Traffic was halted, and hundreds of people fled through the streets in panic as medics treated the wounded. A car was dragged several meters by the bulldozer before being crushed under the vehicle. A baby was pulled out by a passerby before the vehicle was crushed, with the child's mother still inside.” The perpetrator methodically continued this rampage, ultimately murdering 3 people and wounding 66, until police officers and an off-duty soldier shot him to death. This latest terrorist attack came less than four months after another Palestinian man from East Jerusalem walked into the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in West Jerusalem and gunned down eight students in cold blood.

What can one say about these attacks? Hamas, the fascistic group that now rules Gaza and which is devoted to establishing a Greater Palestine cleansed of Jews, was not at a loss for words. While careful to avoid taking credit for today’s rampage -- Hamas is after all in the midst of a shaky truce with Israel – the organization praised it as a “natural reaction” to Israeli occupation. This is, of course, not only bad sociology (see here for an explanation why) but also a convenient evasion of moral responsibility. The occupation is wrong and it should be opposed, but it doesn't follow that all means are legitimate -- or even effective. I'm reminded of Max Weber's discussion of the ethic of ultimate ends in “Politics as a Vocation”: “You may demonstrate to a convinced syndicalist, believing in an ethic of ultimate ends, that his action will result in increasing the opportunities of reaction, in increasing the oppression of his class, and obstructing its ascent – and you will not make the slightest impression upon him.” For his part, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack, but his condemnation didn’t prevent the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, which is affiliated with the Fatah movement that he leads, from claiming responsibility. And what about the political activists who promote disinvestment from the Caterpillar company because it sells vehicles to the Israeli army? Will they express similar outrage about today’s use of Caterpillar equipment to murder and terrorize Israelis? Somehow I doubt it.

For me, this attack struck closer than any previous attacks since I arrived in Israel. The Mercaz Harav Yeshiva is distant from my daily life, I’m unlikely to visit Dimona, and I’m too far from southern Israel to be affected by the Palestinian rockets that until very recently have rained down there on a nearly daily basis. But I take buses on Jerusalem’s Jaffa Street regularly, and if the timing of the attack had been a little different I could have been on the Egged bus that was overturned. I should be thankful that I was not there today. Instead, I mostly feel outraged. The Torah teaches us to seek peace and to pursue it, but it takes two to make peace.

(Addendum: See also Bradley Burston's column in Haaretz, which is very good and mostly on target, though I resist the conclusion he reaches at the end. No doubt there is a portion of the Palestinian population who seek vengeance more than statehood, but it's not clear from these attacks how large of a portion and whether it constitutes a "critical mass." See also his excellent follow-up column is here.)

Trip to the Galilee

2008-06-30T16:38:00.023+03:00

On the last Thursday in June, A. and I rented a car in Tel Aviv, picked up our friend M., who was visiting Israel from the States, and the three of us made a road trip to the Galilee. What could be more quintessentially American than a road trip? We even took Israel's Route 66 on the way home. We soon discovered that gas prices are much higher in Israel, which puts American kvetching about "high" gas prices in the States into perspective. (Gas here in Israel is almost 7 shekels per liter, which works out to slightly more than $8 per gallon.) Even so, the high cost of gas didn't dampen our enthusiasm. I was especially excited about the opportunity to retrace some more of Mark Twain's "pleasure excursion" to the Holy Land.

Our first destination was the beautiful mountain town of Tzfat (Safed), one of the four holy cities in Jewish tradition (with Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias) and a historical and spiritual center of Jewish mysticism, a topic in which I have long been interested. When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, some of them came to Tzfat. According to our guide book, it was these Jews who "turned Safed into a spiritual center for kabbalah studies," and it was here that the kabbalists established the custom of going into the fields on Fridays at sunset to welcome the Sabbath with prayers and hymns amid nature. Perhaps they were inspired by the breathtaking views the town provides of the Sea of Galilee and Mount Hermon.

M. wanted a kind of spiritual tour of Tzfat from the kabbalah center located there. After we negotiated an acceptable fee, the center paired us up with a guide named Moshe. Moshe was a local resident and a student of kabbalah, in his 40s with an ample beard, and something of an eccentric. (He was dressed in a white Arabic dishdasha and a white head scarf, which gave him something of a Biblical look. At one point, another local resident who was apparently friends with Moshe hailed him jokingly as Spartacus.) For me, Moshe was one of the most interesting parts of our visit to Tzfat, in part because of his unusual and candid anti-American views. (From what I've seen, anti-Americanism is extremely rare in Israel, which is partly why I found Moshe so fascinating.) In his eyes, America represented a greedy commercialism and soulless materialism. Accordingly, he was troubled by American power and influence (political and cultural) on Israel. (Interestingly, if I recall correctly, Moshe said he had never been to America and was a little afraid to go.) When I asked him whether it was Americanism that he objected to or modernity itself, he explained that for him America embodied all of the negative aspects of modernity. But he wasn't anti-modernist, he explained; rather, he wanted to uplift and redeem modernity by suffusing it with spirituality. I thought Moshe's critical views were not completely unwarranted -- after all, Tocqueville too warned about the dangers of commercialism, individualism, and materialism in America -- though I did find them somewhat one-sided and even a caricature. However, unlike my friend M., I didn't want to engage with him, either to agree or disagree; I was more interested in simply understanding his views and what America meant to him.

Mark Twain never visited or wrote about Tzfat; it was not part of his itinerary. However, we passed through other places that he wrote about in The Innocents Abroad. He and his companions went to Magdala to see "a Roman-looking ruin which had been the veritable dwelling of St. Mary Magdalene." He was not impressed. "Magdala," he wrote, "is not a beautiful place." He described it as a "squalid, uncomfortable and filthy" slum inhabited by "vermin-tortured vagabonds" who adorned their houses with dried camel dung. Given this description, who could resist a visit? So when we saw a road sign for Migdal (formerly Magdala), I drove into town to see what it looks like today. I'm happy to report that the city, as you can see below, is much improved since Mark Twain's time.

After his visit to Magdala, Mark Twain camped in Tiberias. He described it this way: "It was built by Herod Antipas, the murderer of John the Baptist, and named after the [Roman] Emperor Tiberias…. The Sanhedrin met here last, and for three hundred years Tiberias was the metropolis of the Jews in Palestine. It is one of the four holy cities of the Israelites [What did I tell you? –W.Y.]…. It has been the abiding place of many learned and famous Jewish rabbis." Mark Twain seems to have been less impressed by the descendants of those Jews. He described the Jewish residents of Tiberias in his own time in very unflattering terms: "They say that the long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking body-snatchers, with the indescribable hats on and a long curl dangling down in front of each ear, are the old, familiar, self-righteous Pharisees we read of in the Scriptures. Verily, they look it. Judging merely by their general style, and without other evidence, one might easily suspect that self-righteousness was their specialty." In general, Mark Twain found the city just as unappealing as Magdala. "Squalor and poverty," he wrote, "are the pride of Tiberias."

We drove through Tiberias on our way to Tzfat. The authors of our guide book seemed to concur with Mark Twain; they said the city's port and beaches are dirty and that it "has a feeling of a rundown city belonging to a bygone era." Like Rodney Dangerfield, Tiberias gets no respect. We didn't stop in Tiberias or take any pictures of it, but we were not nearly so put off as everyone else seems to be. As far as we could tell, Tiberias is a perfectly charming and picturesque seaside town entirely devoid of self-righteousness. (And most of the city's Jewish residents today lack the hats and side curls that Mark Twain found so strange.)

After our visit to Tzfat and a brief stop at Rosh Pina, a village founded in 1882 by Jews from Tiberias and Tzfat and later supported by the Baron de Rothschild, we continued on to Kibbutz Ein Gev on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, where we stayed overnight. This lodging arrangement is not so unusual as it may sound. As The New York Times recently reported, many of Israel's kibbutzim (socialist collective farms) have in recent years been transformed from places where one goes to volunteer one's labor into places that provide guest houses and other services for tourists on holiday. While happy to enjoy the hospitality of Kibbutz Ein Gev, I must confess that I found this shift from labor to luxury a bit ironic and a little troubling, especially when we learned that Ein Gev outsources the cleaning and maintenance of its guest houses to an outside contractor whose employees are not kibbutz members. We wondered whether they were they unionized and what kind of pay and benefits they received.

Mark Twain was no more impressed by the Sea of Galilee than he was by the towns surrounding it. "The celebrated Sea of Galilee," he wrote, "is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe…. And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow." He found it to be "dismal," "repellent," and "dreary," surrounded by "unsightly rocks," " banks unrelieved by shrubbery," and "low, desolate hills." His disappointment, however, didn't prevent him from taking three swims in the Sea of Galilee, including one at twilight. We too swam in the Sea of Galilee at Ein Gev, once late at night under the stars and again in the morning before departing. With all due respect to Mr. Twain, I must again dissent from his description. I have never been to Lake Tahoe, so I can't compare the two, but we found the Sea of Galilee to be simply beautiful. Perhaps the Israelis have improved it since Mark Twain's time, when it was under Ottoman rule.

"We did not go to the ancient warm baths two miles below Tiberias," Mark Twain wrote. "I had no desire in the world to go there … simply because Pliny mentions them. I have conceived a sort of unwarrantable unfriendliness toward Pliny and St. Paul, because it seems as if I can never ferret out a place that I can have to myself. It always and eternally transpires that St. Paul has been to that place and Pliny has 'mentioned' it." Since we hadn't read Pliny and Mark Twain didn't go, we had the ancient warm baths all to ourselves and resolved to go. Today they are part of the Hamat Gader Park near the Jordanian border. According to our guide book, these "famous natural thermal springs" were "first discovered by the Romans in the 2nd century" and are supposed to be "therapeutically beneficial." While M. visited nearby Kibbutz Degania, A. and I, in spite of the hot summer weather, took a dip in the baths.

After our dip in the ancient warm baths, we joined M. at Degania and took a stroll around the grounds. Founded in 1909, Degania is Israel's oldest kibbutz. Degania Alef was named after its chief inspirer, A. D. Gordon, and it was later the birthplace of Moshe Dayan. When the Arab armies invaded Israel from the north in 1948, it was the defenders at Kibbutz Degania who stopped their advance. A Syrian tank still stands at the gate to the kibbutz as a memorial to the battle.

All of the farm equipment at Kibbutz Degania reminded me that this year is a shmitah (sabbatical) year. The Bible, you may recall, mandates the shmitah every seventh year for the Land of Israel, during which the land is supposed to be left fallow (Exodus 23:10-11, Leviticus 25:20-22, Deuteronomy 31:10-13). In modern Israel, some Jewish farmers authorize the Chief Rabbi to temporarily sell their land to a non-Jew so that the fields can be farmed (since the commandment doesn't apply to non-Jews). At the end of the sabbatical year, the land is returned to its original owners and the buyer's check is also returned.

Our last stop in the Galilee before heading back to Tel Aviv was the Kibbutz Kinneret Cemetery on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, where we paid our respects to three of the greatest theoreticians of socialist Zionism: Moses Hess (whom Karl Marx derisively called the "Communist rabbi"), Nachman Syrkin, and Ber Borochov. I can't think of a more peaceful resting place for these giants of the Zionist movement.

On our way to the Kibbutz Kinneret Cemetery, we had to cross a bridge over the Jordan River. We excitedly pulled the car over and scrambled out to take a better look. We saw a Christian baptism in progress, which was interesting, but on the whole I have to agree with Mark Twain's assessment of the Jordan: "When I was a boy I somehow got the impression that the River Jordan was four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles wide. It is only ninety miles long, and ... It is not any wider than Broadway in New York." See for yourself.

On the road back to Tel Aviv, I was amused to spot a road sign to En Dor, "famous" as Mark Twain says "for its witch." (En Dor was the village where Saul consulted with the witch in 1 Samuel 28: 4-25.) His description of En Dor is even less flattering than his descriptions of Magdala and Tiberias: the village consisted, he said, of a "horde" of two hundred and fifty "half-naked savages" living in "caves in the rock." "It was Magdala over again…. Dirt, degradation, and savagery are Endor's specialty." We didn't visit, so we can't say for certain, but I think it's safe to assume that living conditions have probably improved there considerably.

Mark Twain also mentions in passing "the insignificant village of Deburieh, where Deborah, prophetess of Israel lived." He adds: "It is just like Magdala." We passed a road sign for Deburieh, took a brief drive through it, and found it to be an unremarkable Arab village, though considerably cleaner and more comfortable than his scathing depiction of Magdala in 1867.

Lastly I'll mention that we drove through the Jezreel Valley, also known as the Plain of Esdraelon, which divides the Galilee in the north from Samaria (the West Bank) in the south. According to the Bible, Gideon's armies defeated the Midianites and Amalekites there (Judges 6 and 7), and Saul was killed in a battle with the Philistines on the slopes of Mount Gilboa, which overlooks the plain (1 Samuel 31; 2 Samuel 1). The valley is also the site of the ancient town of Megiddo – right off Route 66 – which some believe to be the location of the future Battle of Armageddon. Mark Twain mentions the valley only in passing: "The Plain of Esdraelon – 'the battlefield of the nations' – only sets one to dreaming of Joshua and Ben-hadad and Saul and Gideon; Tamerlane, Tancred, Coeur de Lion, and Saladin; the warrior kings of Persia, Egypt's heroes, and Napoleon – for they all fought here."

Before returning to Tel Aviv we made one last stop in Zichron Ya'acov, a beautiful moshava (communal agricultural settlement) founded in 1882 by Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Russia and Romania.

Here is Route 66 in Israel...

... and in America (as shown on a poster in Zichron Ya'acov).

All of this packed into just two days! We seem to have had a better time than Mark Twain, who perhaps comes across as more cantankerous than funny in these excerpts. But then again, we had more comfortable lodging and means of transportation and a friendlier reception in the places we visited.

American Jazz in Caesarea

2008-06-30T16:37:00.029+03:00

The Jewish holiday of Shavuot, commemorating the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, came and went uneventfully for us on June 9. Traditionally, Jews engage in all-night Torah study on the evening before, when the holiday begins. In the States, A. and I would have taken part in the all-night Shavuot activities at the Manhattan JCC, but here in Israel we were ironically limited by the dearth of such activities in English. So the two of us stayed at home, reading and discussing the Book of Ruth together.

The following weekend we attended a concert by the Jeff Barnhart International All-Stars Jazz Band at the 2008 Caesarea Harbor Jazz Festival. The setting was beautiful, the performance was first-rate and lots of fun, and we enjoyed it all immensely. Here we are with our Israeli friends T. and D.

Caesarea (קיסריה in Hebrew) is an ancient port city that now lies between Tel Aviv and Haifa. King Herod once had a palace there facing the sea. According to our guide book, “it took King Herod 12 years to build his much beloved abode on the beautiful Mediterranean coast of the Province of Judea.” (The Jews at that time were under the yoke of the Roman Empire, and it was the Romans who appointed Herod to rule over them.)

Today one can still see the ruins of the hippodrome where horses and chariots once raced for Herod’s pleasure, the 4,000-seat amphitheater where gladiators battled for his entertainment, and of course his once sumptuous palace on the shore.

The amphitheater was locked up for the evening, but we walked through the hippodrome, which brought to mind Mark Twain’s amusing “translation” in The Innocents Abroad of an ancient newspaper review of a gladiator battle at the Roman Coliseum.

Walking amongst the ruins of Herod’s palace, I was reminded of a more sober piece of literature, Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.”

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The Crusaders came to Caesarea many years after Herod and built a massive fortress there, which served as the backdrop for the concert. I found it a little strange to hear American jazz in this setting, echoing off the walls of the old Crusader castle.

I know, of course, that according to the public relations and marketing department of Bin Laden & Co., America is the latest incarnation of the Crusaders, but to my mind the Crusaders were in many ways the antithesis of America: Old World, medieval, European, and (as Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court has recently reminded me) the embodiment of a feudal and anti-democratic caste society. (Israel too is identified with the Crusaders in radical Islamist propaganda, which is ironic considering the bloody pogroms that the Crusaders perpetrated on their way to the Holy Land upon Jews.)

I had a great time at the concert, not only because I love jazz music, but also because it was a pleasure to experience an evening of Americana so far from home. A. raised the question whether jazz is still distinctively American music. It would be interesting to know whether Israelis (and, more generally, other people in the rest of the world) continue to associate jazz with America today. To my mind, the two are still very much inseparable. (Certainly, their name notwithstanding, the particular New Orleans style of the Jeff Barnhart International All-Stars is distinctively American.) It was this association that led the U.S. government to send jazz bands on international tours to bolster America’s image during the Cold War. As The New York Times recently reported:

The idea behind the State Department tours was to counter Soviet propaganda portraying the United States as culturally barbaric. [Harlem congressman Adam Clayton] Powell’s insight was that competing with the Bolshoi would be futile and in any case unimaginative. Better to show off a homegrown art form that the Soviets couldn’t match — and that was livelier besides. Many jazz bands were also racially mixed, a potent symbol in the mid to late ’50s, when segregation in the South was tarnishing the American image.

Jazz was the country’s “Secret Sonic Weapon” (as a 1955 headline in The New York Times put it) in another sense as well. The novelist Ralph Ellison called jazz an artistic counterpart to the American political system. The soloist can play anything he wants as long as he stays within the tempo and the chord changes — just as, in a democracy, the individual can say or do whatever he wants as long as he obeys the law. Willis Conover, whose jazz show on Voice of America radio went on the air in 1955 and soon attracted 100 million listeners, many of them behind the Iron Curtain, once said that people “love jazz because they love freedom.”

By the same token, hostility to America sometimes expressed itself as a rejection of jazz. In his fascinating and insightful historical study of anti-Americanism in Europe, Uncouth Nation, Andrei Markovits describes the reaction of European elites against jazz in the early twentieth century, a reaction that was often suffused with racism and anti-Semitism: “As would be the case with rock and roll after World War II, after World War I jazz was vilified as decadent ‘nigger music’ purportedly promoted by profit-hungry Jews who, by undermining the authentic and indigenous qualities celebrated by the elite, ultimately seemed intent on undermining the very fabric of European life.” Such reactions to American popular culture have by no means entirely disappeared today; one can still find them, though sometimes in more muted forms, in Europe, the Middle East, and other parts of the world.

There were no signs of such cultural antagonism in Caesarea. On the contrary: For his part, Jeff Barnhart repeatedly emphasized what a pleasure it was for his band to come to Israel and play here, and for their part, the large Israeli audience reciprocated his enthusiasm and seemed to enjoy the performance every bit as much as I did. Of all the countries in the world, Israel is probably the one that least needs American jazz ambassadors. Nonetheless, I was very happy that they came.

Return to Joppa

2008-06-30T16:37:00.015+03:00

Back in February, some of you might recall, I blogged about the Biblical city of Joppa, better known in Hebrew as יפו (Yafo). Joppa is within walking distance of Tel Aviv, and I have returned to it several times on various occasions since my first visit.

Here I am with my friend and fellow sociologist B. in the narrow streets of Joppa.

I was delighted to discover that B., whose mother is a prominent Israeli sociologist and whose father is a prominent Israeli archaeologist, helped his father to excavate the remains of an ancient Egyptian arch in Joppa when B. was still a child. Upon learning this remarkable fact, A. and I promptly renamed it B.'s Arch. We hope that the guidebooks will soon follow suit.

B. brought us to an extraordinary restaurant in Joppa that evening called Blackout. What makes the restaurant extraordinary is that the chefs and the waiters are blind, and the diners sit in complete darkness. The idea, I suppose, is to demonstrate that the blind are more capable than one might think, and at the same time to allow diners to experience, even if only for one evening, what it's like to be blind. At first I thought I would find the experience annoying. Imagine how troublesome it is to have dinner without being able to see! Pouring a glass of wine becomes a real challenge, and more than once I discovered that my fork was empty when I lifted it to my mouth. At first, I found the darkness so disorienting that it was hard to concentrate on the dinner table conversation. In the end, however, I found the experience fascinating and -- if you will excuse the pun -- eye-opening. From a sociological perspective, it made me keenly aware just how much the simple act of having dinner with friends is in fact a highly complicated instance of collective action that requires a great deal of coordination to pull off successfully. (Howard Becker once suggested that this is the core problem of sociology: “How do [people] act together so as to get anything done without a great deal of trouble, without missteps and conflict?”) And, of course, it also reminded me of how much most of us rely on sight for such coordination. I wouldn't want to dine this way every night, but I was glad to have had the experience, and I would recommend the restaurant to anyone visiting Joppa. I can honestly say I've never had a dinner like that one.

A. discovered another unusual feature of Joppa: a tree suspended above the ground.

On another occasion we visited Joppa with our friend M.

On that occasion I finally found the house of Simon the Tanner, which I wasn't able to find the first time I visited Joppa. "Simon the Tanner formerly lived here," Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad. "We went to his house. All the pilgrims visit Simon the Tanner's house. Peter saw the vision of the beasts let down in a sheet when he lay upon the roof of Simon the Tanner's house." (Twain is referring here to Acts 10:9-47 -W.Y.). This is what the house looks like today.

But my favorite thing about Joppa is still the beautiful sunsets on the Mediterranean.

Gay Pride in Israel

2008-06-30T16:36:00.011+03:00

Thousands of people attended the tenth annual gay pride parade in Tel Aviv on June 6, including A. and me. Since the parade went up Ben-Yehuda Street, just a block from our apartment, it was easy and convenient for us to attend, and we managed to get a few photos.

The signs in the picture below say "because education brings change."

What, I joked, would Theodor Herzl have made of this? I don’t know what Herzl would have thought about a gay pride parade – probably it would have shocked his nineteenth-century bourgeois sensibilities – but in a funny sort of way, it seems to me, the parade points to a realization of Zionist aspirations. As David Hazony recently noted in the June 11, 2008, issue of The New Republic, the Zionist movement expressed a yearning and a desire for Jews to become a “normal” nation. (For Zionists, that primarily meant an end to their abnormal mode of existence – “refusing to assimilate into other cultures, they were expelled from countries across Europe, forever needing to regroup in another host nation” – and possession of the “normal tools for [national] survival – such as land and [political] power.”) Hazony raised the questions whether Israel is now a normal country, and whether normalcy is overrated. Leaving aside the second question, it seems to me that gay pride parades have become a kind of indicator of normalcy, at least in the liberal democracies of the West. To put it differently, normal countries (in the West) have gay pride parades, and Israel is no exception. This is not to say there is no hostility or intolerance toward homosexuals in Israel – more on that below – but it does mean that homosexuals are not violently suppressed with the sanction of the state, as they are in the Palestinian territories and in other countries in the Middle East.

In Israel, opposition to gay pride parades is far stronger (or, to put it differently, the parades are less normalized) in Jerusalem than in Tel Aviv. “Unlike similar events in the more religious capital [Jerusalem], which have sparked bitter right-wing protests and violent demonstrations,” Haaretz reported, “the Tel Aviv parade faced little resistance.” “The parade here is different from the one in Jerusalem,” said one Tel Aviv parade participant. “Here, we celebrate the freedom and rights that we have – it's a festival, a happening, it's a joy. In Jerusalem, it’s simply a demonstration for human rights.”

Last year, a group of mostly religious Knesset members tried to ban the gay pride parade in Jerusalem. (According to Haaretz, their effort made little progress.) And, as the date of this year’s gay pride parade in Jerusalem neared, there was a spate of legal maneuvers and public denunciations from the religious sector. (I should add that opposition to the gay pride parade is not confined to ultra-Orthodox Jews, but seems to unite religious communities – Jewish, Muslim, and Christian – that are more often divided. Sadly, nothing unites people like intolerance.) The ultra-Orthodox have demanded a halt to the gay pride parade on a variety of grounds. Some appeals (presumably the ones intended for their own communities) have been overtly religious. For example, one rabbi flatly declared that homosexuals are “evil criminals that have no place with the God of Israel.” Other appeals have been non-religious (probably with non-Orthodox Israelis in mind) or have combined religious and non-religious rationales. For example, it has been argued that the parade threatens public order or (as Jerusalem’s Orthodox mayor put it in a letter to the Israeli Supreme Court) “offends, deliberately and unnecessarily, the feelings of Jews, Muslims and Christians, who view its sheer existence, and the blatant manner in which it takes place, as a desecration of the holy city and of the values with which they were raised.”

All of this grousing in Jerusalem about gay people marching in a parade grates against my American liberalism. (Of course, there is plenty of intolerance of homosexuals in America too, but it doesn’t comport easily with what Gunnar Myrdal once called the American Creed.) The British liberal John Stuart Mill said it best: “As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself.” That goes for homosexuals, I should think, as much as heterosexuals. So what struck me as interesting about the denunciations of the gay pride parade in Jerusalem was how religious opponents of the parade sometimes used liberal language and reasoning to justify their illiberal ends. I suspect that this reflects the constraints of Israeli political culture (which, though not exclusively liberal, nevertheless contains important liberal components), and the ineffectiveness of overtly and purely religious appeals beyond the ultra-Orthodox sector. I say that these appeals used liberal reasoning because they did not seek to ban the parade for the sake or well-being or salvation of homosexuals (a kind of we-know-what’s-best-for-you paternalism), but rather to prevent homosexuals from inflicting purported harms on others. Within liberal political thought, as the quote from Mill indicates, this is usually deemed a legitimate reason – sometimes the only legitimate reason – for restricting the liberty of competent adult individuals.

I don’t find this ploy very convincing. In his celebrated essay “On Liberty,” Mill defends individual liberty as a necessary condition for individual self-development. Objecting to what he calls the “Calvinistic theory” that “man needs no capacity but that of surrendering himself to the will of God,” Mill argues that G-d could not intend human beings to be “thus cramped and dwarfed,” but rather “gave all human faculties that they might be cultivated and unfolded” and “takes delight in … every increase in their capabilities of comprehension, of action, or of enjoyment.” Regarding the prevention of injury to others, Mill explains that “the means of development which the individual loses by being prevented from gratifying his inclinations to the injury of others, are chiefly obtained at the expense of the development of other people.” In other words, while restrictions on individual liberty are generally bad because they stunt the individual’s self-development, it is justifiable to restrict X when X’s actions would stunt the development of Y. The implication here is that “injury of others” consists chiefly in hampering their self-development. But I don’t see how the gay pride parade hampers the self-development of ultra-Orthodox Jews. On the contrary, it could be argued that the parade fosters the self-development of its religious opponents.

In the first place, as Mill points out, they might learn something from “different experiments of living.” “This cannot well be gainsaid,” he notes, “by anybody who does not believe that the world has already attained perfection in all its ways and practices.” Now, I suppose this argument would hardly convince the haredim because they believe the Torah (as interpreted by their rabbis) has already revealed the best and most perfect ways and practices for them. Consequently, as far as they are concerned, they have nothing to learn from others, least of all from homosexuals. And perhaps they are right. As Mill points out, “different persons … require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate. The same things which are helps to one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another.”

Even so, the gay pride may still benefit its opponents in another way: it may force them to reflect upon and better understand the reasons for and value of their own ways and practices. As Mill points out, though customs may be good and suitable to the person who practices them, “yet to conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it…. He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties…. It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it.” Without the stimulus of “different experiments of living,” especially those that are perceived to challenge or threaten one’s own, there is little impetus to develop the human faculties that Mill describes here, and instead of “an intelligent following of custom” one is likely to wind up with “a blind and simply mechanical adhesion to it.”

Three thousand people attended Jerusalem’s seventh annual gay pride parade on June 26, almost three weeks after the Tel Aviv parade. A. and I were not in the city then, so we didn’t attend. I don’t know if any of the parade’s religious opponents used it as an opportunity to develop their mental and moral faculties and to cultivate a more intelligent following of custom. However, I was happy to read that at least they did not mar this year’s parade with violent demonstrations, as they have done in the past. Perhaps that’s a start.

Hebrew Book Week

2008-06-30T16:35:00.006+03:00

Dear חברים ומשפחה, apologies for the long hiatus since my last post – the last few weeks have been busy ones.

I’ll begin by backtracking a bit. On May 29, before our trip to Jerusalem, A. and I got to experience what is known here as שבוע הספר העברי (Hebrew Book Week). I had learned about it before in my Hebrew classes (click on the image below to enlarge it):

Here’s my translation for those who are even more Hebrew-challenged than me:

Hebrew Book Week

Every year in June there is in Israel a festival: the Hebrew book festival. In the stores there are books, in the streets there are books; children buy books, ladies and gentlemen buy books, everybody buys books!

Every year in June I have a problem – I want to buy a lot of books… I go from shop to shop, from salesman to salesman and buy books: books for friends, books for children of friends, books for mother, for father, for me.

In my closet there are only books. My shirts are on the chair, the dresses are on the bed, the cassettes are on the table, because I am crazy for books.

But this year, this year I want to buy only one book, something old, something classic and good.

In the street they sell books. I say to the salesman: “Excuse me, mister, maybe you have something by Tolstoy?”

“I have a new book by A. B. Yehoshua, a new book by Amos Oz, a new book in Hebrew by Margaret Atwood, an excellent writer from Canada.”

“No, no, I want to buy only one book.”

“You don’t want to see the new books?”

“It’s possible only to see?”

“No problem! Please.”

I stand and read from the book by Amos Oz, I read a little of the book by A. B Yehoshua, from the book by Margaret Atwood… and I go home with three new books.

Is it any wonder that Israel would have such a festival? After all, Jews have long been known as the People of the Book.

Despite our limited Hebrew literacy, A. and I were excited about Hebrew Book Week and enjoyed it. We even bought a few children’s books in Hebrew to bring back to the States for our friends J.R. and A.G. and their son. Here we are browsing books at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv.

All those books made me dizzy.

Here is A., looking for טולסטוי perhaps?

Happy reading!

Modern Jerusalem - The New City

2008-06-06T11:18:00.009+03:00

A. and I devoted the fourth and last day of our Jerusalem excursion to the New City. We didn’t have time to see the beautiful stained glass windows created by Marc Chagall for the Hadassah Medical Center or walk the solemn grounds of Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust museum). We weren’t able to pay our respects to that great visionary Theodor Herzl at his tomb on the mountain that bears his name. We didn’t even tour the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), though it wasn’t for lack of trying. (It was temporarily closed.) All of those places will have to wait for another trip. What we did manage to see on our last day was the Supreme Court and the Israel Museum.

The Supreme Court -- which since 2004 has included an Arab Israeli judge among its permanent members -- is the highest judicial authority in Israel and, alongside the Knesset and the executive, the nation’s third branch of government. It functions both as the highest court of appeal and as a high court of justice that can (and sometimes does) invalidate legislation that violates the human rights guaranteed by Israel’s Basic Laws. It is worth adding here that not only Israeli citizens, but also Palestinians in the occupied territories are permitted to petition the court against acts and decisions of the state. Among other things, the court’s decisions have altered the route of the West Bank separation fence to minimize hardships that it causes to Palestinians.

The Supreme Court building, which has only housed the court since 1993, is a beautiful structure flooded with natural light. The architectural design includes many symbolic elements, most notably the combination of lines and circles that represent, respectively, law (“Your laws are straight,” Psalm 119:137) and justice (“He leads me in circles of justice,” Psalm 23:3). Here is a picture of one of the building’s court rooms.

Our other destination for the day, the Israel Museum, is widely considered the acme of Israeli cultural institutions. The museum is extensive and impossible to see fully in one day. It includes the Shrine of the Book, containing the famed Dead Sea Scrolls; an archaeological museum with the world’s largest collection of artifacts found in Israel; the Judaica and Jewish Ethnography Wing, which houses Jewish ceremonial artifacts from all over the world; the Fine Art Wing, which during our visit housed the exhibit “Real Time: Art in Israel, 1998-2008”; the Ruth Youth Wing, which housed the exhibit “Orphaned Art: Looted Art from the Holocaust” (the works that comprised its sister exhibit, "Looking for Owners," had already been returned to France when we visited); and a huge model of Jerusalem as it existed in the time of the Second Temple.

I mainly wanted to see the “Real Time” exhibit and found it interesting, though not for the most part very moving or inspiring. Unfortunately, I can’t show any pictures of the exhibit except this clandestine one of Ohad Meromi’s “Boy From South Tel Aviv.” (I say clandestine, because photographs were apparently not permitted, though I didn’t realize that until a gruff Israeli security guard saw my camera and nearly confiscated it from me.) However, The New York Times published a fairly good and exhaustive review of the exhibit here.

No pictures were permitted in the “Orphaned Art” exhibit either, but for the Associated Press review see here.

Here is the Shrine of the Book from the outside (again, no pictures permitted inside).

And here is the model of Jerusalem. The large structure on the right is the Second Temple.

With the museum closed, we are ready to follow once more in Mark Twain’s footsteps and set out for Tel Aviv (Jaffa in his case). Like him, “we are exhausted. The sun has roasted us almost.” After four days in Jerusalem, we too are “surfeited with sights…. They swarm about you at every step; no single foot of ground in all Jerusalem or within its neighborhood seems to be without a stirring and important history of its own.” We look forward to returning to a modern city where one can “steal a walk of a hundred yards without a guide along to talk unceasingly about every stone you step upon and drag you back ages and ages to the day when it achieved celebrity.” I’m sure we’ll return for more sightseeing. But for now, like Mark Twain, we pause on the summit of a distant hill, take a look back, and bid farewell to the “venerable city which had been such a good home to us.”

Venturing Outside the Walls of the Old City

2008-06-06T11:16:00.028+03:00

We began our third day in Jerusalem with a visit to the City of David. This statement is bound to cause some confusion: isn’t Jerusalem the City of David, and consequently weren’t we there already? In fact, despite its name, Jerusalem’s Old City is a more recent settlement than the original city – King David’s Jerusalem – which overlapped but did not exactly coincide with it. If you venture just outside the walls of the Old City on its south side, you can pay a few shekels to see the archaeological remains of a portion of David’s city, including Warren’s Shaft, Hezekiah’s tunnel, and the Pool of Siloam (Shiloach in Hebrew).

When Jerusalem was a Canaanite city, Warren’s Shaft provided its inhabitants with secure access during times of siege to water from the nearby Gihon Spring. The shaft is said in the Bible to have been used by David to sneak into Jerusalem and conquer the Canaanites from inside their own city. But apparently this clever feat wasn’t enough to give David title to the shaft. That honor instead went to Charles Warren, the man who rediscovered the shaft in the nineteenth century before going on to head the London Metropolitan Police during Jack the Ripper’s infamous crime spree. Apparently Mr. Warren was better at finding fissures than murderers.

Here is solid archaeological evidence that the ancient Canaanites preferred Coke over Pepsi.

Hezekiah’s tunnel also provided Jerusalem with water from the Gihon Spring when the city was under siege. Surely you remember Hezekiah. He was the thirteenth king of Judah. The Book of Isaiah mentions his tunnel in chapter 22. Why Warren’s Shaft wasn’t good enough for Hezekiah is a mystery to me, but Hezekiah’s own tunnel remains in good working order 2,700 years later. I waded about knee-deep into it, but A. and I decided against going the whole length because we weren’t properly clothed and equipped. Being supporters of the Jewish Labor Committee, we wondered whether the workmen who dug the tunnel had been unionized and whether Hezekiah had paid them the prevailing wage.

Finally, the Pool of Siloam is the place where Hezekiah’s tunnel brings the water. The pool is mentioned in Isaiah 8:6, it is where Solomon was anointed king, and Jesus is said to have done some healing here. (The Gospels do not record whether the beneficiary had health insurance, but apocryphal sources say his HMO refused to cover the treatment because it hadn’t been authorized in advance.) Mark Twain mentions in passing that he and his traveling companions dismounted from their horses and drank from the Pool of Siloam during their 1867 visit to Jerusalem. “The pool,” he wrote, “is a deep, walled ditch, through which a clear stream of water runs, that comes from under Jerusalem somewhere, … and reaches this place by way of a tunnel of heavy masonry.” “Oriental women came down [to the pool] in their old Oriental way,” he adds, “and carried off jars of the water on their heads, just as they did three thousand years ago, and just as they will do fifty thousand years hence if any of them are still left on earth.” I can’t comment with any certainty on the accuracy of this prediction; A. and I skipped the pool because we were hot and tired from climbing up and down outdoors in the sun. However, Mark Twain might be surprised to learn how well the women of Jerusalem have accommodated themselves to indoor plumbing.

Leaving the ancient ruins of David’s city behind, A. and I returned to Mount Scopus in time for me to teach my afternoon class. But in the evening, we took a bus back into Jerusalem to have a drink at the King David Hotel. On the way to the hotel, we took a stroll through Mishkenot Sha-ananim (“Peaceful Habitation” in Hebrew), the first Jewish residential quarter established outside the walls of the Old City. British-Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore built the settlement in the 1850s, but Mark Twain doesn’t mention it in The Innocents Abroad. Perhaps it was too new to interest him and his traveling companions. When it was built, people were still too afraid of bandits and wild animals to live outside the walls of the Old City, and many of the people who bought homes in Montefiore’s new neighborhood refused to stay there overnight. In 1866, the year before Mark Twain’s visit, a deadly cholera epidemic swept through the Old City and changed their minds.

The most notable feature of the neighborhood was the windmill that Montefiore built to provide jobs for Jerusalem’s burgeoning Jewish population and produce cheap flour for the city’s poor. During the British Mandate, the British blew off the top of the windmill (the Jews jokingly dubbed it “Operation Don Quixote”), but it has since been restored and turned into a museum.

Eventually, we reached our destination, the luxurious King David Hotel.

The King David is one of the most famous landmarks in Jerusalem. Its main claim to fame is that an armed Jewish underground organization called the Etzel bombed it in 1946, killing ninety-one people and injuring another forty-five. This act of terrorism committed by Jews in their struggle for independence is sometimes compared to Palestinian terrorism today, with the implication that the movements employed the same methods for the same goals and are thus morally equivalent. I do not condone the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel. However, this analogy strikes me as misleading for several reasons. First, it is important to recall that the offices of the British military command in Palestine and the British Criminal Investigation Division occupied an entire wing of the King David Hotel in 1946. Thus, the bombing was primarily aimed at the British government and military in Palestine, not civilians. Second, the Etzel sought to avoid civilian casualties by warning the British in advance of the bombing. In fact, according to Menachem Begin, the Etzel issued not one but three warnings: it made telephone calls to the King David Hotel, the French Consulate, and the Palestine Post. The call to the hotel was received but ignored; the British official who refused to evacuate the building reportedly said, “we don’t take orders from the Jews.” (Although the British denied receiving the warning, a British Member of Parliament introduced new evidence in 1979 that the warning had in fact been received and ignored.) Third, the bombing horrified the rest of the Zionist movement, which swiftly, publicly, and unequivocally condemned it. David Ben-Gurion even went so far as to urge Jews in Palestine to turn in members of the Etzel to the British authorities, and the Haganah actively foiled a subsequent Etzel plan to bomb the British police headquarters in Tel Aviv. In all three of these respects, it seems to me, the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel was quite different from contemporary Palestinian terrorism. In contrast to the Etzel’s operation, Palestinian terrorism has primarily targeted civilians, struck without warning, and is widely lauded rather than condemned among Palestinians. (True, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority issued pro forma condemnations from time to time for public relations purposes, but the involvement of the PA and its officials in terrorist activities during the second intifada has been well documented.)

This post has taken a very serious turn, but I’ll close with a bit of levity. The King David Hotel’s other claim to fame is that it appeared several times in the 1960 film Exodus, which starred Paul Newman as the heroic and dashing Ari Ben Canaan. Newman’s character was one of the good guys, a leader of the Haganah, not a member of the Etzel. Here I am borrowing a cigarette from A., drinking a gin and tonic, and trying my best to emulate Paul Newman in the scene where his character has a drink with the American nurse Kitty Fremont on the balcony of the King David Hotel.

I couldn't help but think that Mark Twain, who so appreciated a good cigar (he once said “If I cannot smoke in heaven, I shall not go”) would have found the King David Hotel much to his liking. Unfortunately for him, it didn't open until 1931.

I can’t close without mentioning a superb little family-run Ethiopian restaurant called Megenana at Jaffa Street 17, not far from the Jaffa Gate to the Old City, where A. and I had dinner after our drinks at the King David. The restaurant is tiny but inexpensive, the couple who run it are very nice, and the food is kosher (despite the restaurant lacking rabbinical certification) and delicious. I highly recommend it.

Jerusalem Day in the Old City

2008-06-06T11:10:00.025+03:00

A. and I celebrated Jerusalem Day, appropriately enough, with a visit to Jerusalem’s Old City. (The Old City is only a small portion of modern-day Jerusalem, which I can only describe as one great traffic-congested mass of urban sprawl.) The Old City has been continuously inhabited for nearly five millennia, which sometimes leads people to believe that the walls that currently enclose it are ancient, but in fact they were only built some 470 years ago by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Each of the Old City’s four sides is about 3,000 feet (900 meters) long; Mark Twain noted that “a fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour.” There are seven gates in the walls through which one can enter: the New Gate, Damascus Gate (where Mark Twain entered), and Herod’s Gate on the north; Lion’s Gate on the east; the Dung and Zion gates on the south; and Jaffa Gate on the west. (A. and I entered first through the Jaffa Gate, but we made it a point to enter or exit through each of the seven gates at least once during the course of the day.) An eighth gate on the eastern side, the Golden Gate, is sealed, but according to Jewish legend it is through this gate that the Moshiach (Messiah) will enter the city. Mark Twain described it this way: “the Golden Gate, in the temple wall … was an elegant piece of sculpture in the time of the temple and is even so yet. From it, in ancient times, the Jewish high priest turned loose the scapegoat and let him flee into the wilderness and bear away his twelve-month load of the sins of the people. [Twain is referring to the Biblical rite described in Leviticus 16 –W.Y.] … The Muslims watch the Golden Gate with a jealous eye, and an anxious one, for they have an honored tradition that when it falls, Islamism will fall, and with it the Ottoman Empire.” The Ottoman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate (which Al-Qaeda wants to resurrect) fell after the First World War, but the Golden Gate remains standing. Here is a picture of it today:

When Mark Twain entered the Old City in 1867, he was struck by the narrowness of the streets. They were so narrow, he said, that he saw cats jump across them from one porch roof to another, and “the cats could have jumped double the distance without extraordinary exertion.” He adds that such streets were obviously “too narrow for carriages.” In this respect, the Old City hasn’t changed much. A few of the streets are just wide enough to accommodate automobiles in single file, which force pedestrians to dodge out of the way and press themselves up against the buildings on the left and right, but many of the streets (like the one below) are not more than eight or ten feet across.

Mark Twain writes that the population of Jerusalem was 14,000 in his time. Today Jerusalem – and here I mean the entire city, not just the Old City – has 724,000 residents. That is roughly ten percent of Israel’s entire population, making Jerusalem the largest city in the country. In 1867, according to Twain, the city’s population was “composed of Muslims, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants.” These same groups are present today, though the proportions may be different (and the Abyssinians one sees now are usually Jewish Israelis who immigrated from Ethiopia). Jews were already the largest single religious group in Jerusalem by the third quarter of the 19th century, they became an absolute majority by the late 19th century, and they formed an overwhelming majority of the city’s population by 1946. Ironically, however, the Jewish proportion of the city’s population has declined since 1967, from three-fourths to about two-thirds today. The rest of the city’s population, for those who may be wondering, is mostly Muslim (32%) with a tiny smattering of Christians (2%).

A. and I began our day with a three-hour walking tour of the Old City. Mark Twain and his traveling companions called all of their tour guides Ferguson because they couldn’t pronounce or remember foreign names. Our tour guide was an elderly gentleman named Asher – easy to say and remember, so we had no need to give him a new name – who had come to Israel from Cologne, Germany, before Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Asher took us through the Old City counterclockwise from Jaffa Gate through the Armenian Quarter, whose main attraction is the St. James Cathedral; on to the Jewish Quarter, where we viewed the Cardo (once the main thoroughfare of Jerusalem when, under Roman rule, it was renamed Aelia Capotolina and Jews were forbidden to live here), the Hurva Synagogue (now being rebuilt), and the Kotel (known in English as the Western or Wailing Wall); through the shouk (market) in the Muslim Quarter; and then west along the Via Dolorosa (“Sorrowful Way”) to the Christian Quarter, whose most prominent site is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Here is a section of the Cardo, four meters below present-day street level. Mark Twain did not see and does not mention the Cardo because it was not until a century after his visit that Israeli archaeologists found, excavated, and partly restored it.

Here is the Hurva Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter. It served as Jerusalem’s main Ashkenazi synagogue until Jordanian soldiers destroyed it during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Although the original synagogue was standing when Mark Twain visited Jerusalem (his contemporary Moses Montefiore had visited it the year before and donated a silver breastplate for one of the Torah scrolls), Twain doesn’t mention it. The Hurva Synagogue is now being rebuilt and is scheduled to be completed by next year, but knowing how things operate in Israel, there will probably be delays.

Here is the pièce de résistance of the Jewish Quarter: the Western Wall (Kotel in Hebrew), a part of the supporting wall of the Temple Mount that remained intact after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 C.E.

For Jews, it is sacred not only because it is a remnant of the Temple, but also because it is close to where the Holy of Holies once stood (the innermost and most sacred part of Solomon’s Temple, which held the Ark of the Covenant), a place from which it said the Shekhinah (Divine Presence) never departed. After the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jews from the Land of Israel, it became a site of mourning, which is how it acquired the moniker “Wailing Wall.” Under Muslim rule, Arabs humiliated Jews and provided them with additional reasons for wailing by sometimes dumping garbage at the Wall. Mark Twain described it this way: “At that portion of the ancient wall of Solomon’s Temple which is called the Jew’s Place of Wailing, and where the Hebrews assemble every Friday to kiss the venerated stones and weep over the fallen greatness of Zion, anyone can see a part of the unquestioned and undisputed Temple of Solomon, the same consisting of three or four stones lying one upon the other, each of which is about twice as long as a seven-octave piano and about as thick as such a piano is high.” You may have noticed that the Western Wall is now higher than he describes. That is because the ground in front of the Kotel was excavated in 1968 to expose two buried courses of stone. Today eight courses of massive Herodian stones from the Second Temple period are visible below four layers of smaller stones added in the eighth century. Twain adds that when he entered the Al-Aksa Mosque, he saw there built into the walls “costly marbles that once adorned the inner temple [of Solomon].” These marbles, he wrote, bore “a richer interest than the solemn vastness of the stones the Jews kiss in the Place of Wailing.” I cannot say, since today only Muslims are allowed inside the mosque. One last thing I will add about the Kotel: Mark Twain complained about the ubiquitous throngs of beggars constantly demanding baksheesh in Jerusalem. They are nearly all gone now – except for a few shnorrers at the Kotel who noodge you for tzedakah so incessantly that it’s hard to find a quiet moment to pray.

Mark Twain provides a very funny account of retracing the Via Dolorosa – he was clearly skeptical of some of the stories and embellishments he heard from his guide – which included a stop at what was purported to be the house of the Wandering Jew. I cannot speak of this mysterious and sorrowful house here – because I did not see it. Perhaps the house was destroyed in 1948 or 1967, or perhaps it’s just too hard to find after so many wandering Jews returned to Israel in the twentieth century.

We ended our walking tour of the Old City at the place Mark Twain visited first: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over the site of the crucifixion of Jesus. (A sepulcher, for any reader who may be wondering, is a vault in which somebody is buried.) Mark Twain devoted an entire chapter of The Innocents Abroad to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which could not have been hard because it’s a huge structure filled with seemingly endless altars, chapels, niches, and relics. Even here, describing one of the most sacred and solemn sites in Christendom, he is unfailingly funny. His general description of the church – “chanting priests in coarse long robes and sandals,” “pilgrims of all colors and many nationalities,” “a somber cathedral gloom freighted with smoke and incense” – remains more or less accurate 141 years later. As in Mark Twain’s time, “monks … perform everywhere – all over the vast building and at all hours. Their candles are always flitting about in the gloom and making the dim old church more dismal than there is any necessity that it should be, even though it is a tomb.” In this setting, he remarked, it was hard to remember that the crucifixion took place outdoors, “in the open air, and not in a gloomy, candlelighted cell in a little corner of a vast church.”

Here is the church from the outside:

At the entrance to the church, Twain saw Turkish guards whose presence, he explains, was necessary to maintain order, “for Christians of different sects will not only quarrel, but fight, also, in this sacred place if allowed to do it…. All sects of Christians (except Protestants) have chapels under the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and each must keep to itself and not venture upon the other’s ground.” “It has been proven conclusively,” he adds wryly, “that they cannot worship together around the grave of the Saviour of the world in peace.” Today the Turkish guards are gone, but Israeli policemen have taken their place and perform the same function.

When Mark Twain entered the church, the first thing he saw was “a marble slab, which covers the Stone of Unction, whereon the Savior’s body was laid to prepare it for burial.”

“Entering the Rotunda,” Mark Twain continues, “we stand before the most sacred locality in Christendom – the grave of Jesus. It is in the center of the church, and immediately under the great dome. It is enclosed in a sort of little temple…. Within the little temple is a portion of the very stone which was rolled away from the door of the Sepulchre” and the sepulcher itself, with “the stone couch on which the dead Saviour lay.” Twain was somewhat disappointed upon entering the sepulcher; he described it as “scandalized by trumpery, gewgaws, and tawdry ornamentation.” I cannot comment on the sepulcher myself, because A. and I did not have the patience to stand in the long line of pilgrims waiting to view it.

“When one enters the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” Mark Twain wrote, “the Sepulchre itself is the first thing he desires to see, and really is almost the first thing he does see. The next thing he has a strong yearning to see is the spot where the Saviour was crucified…. It is the crowning glory of the place.” Unfortunately, I can’t show it here because the monks don’t allow photographs. It occurred to me that taking photographs has now replaced the practice of chipping off pieces of monuments and relics as the preferred method of obtaining souvenirs. (Mark Twain has some very funny and disapproving things to say about all the chipping that his traveling companions did.) Graffiti, however, seems to have lost none of its appeal; A. and I spotted plenty of graffiti in the church, some of it dating back to the nineteenth century (no, I didn’t see Mark Twain’s name), and some of it more recent.

One other thing about the church is worth noting. “It is a singular circumstance,” Mark Twain wrote, “that right under the roof of this same great church … Adam himself, the father of the human race, lies buried.” “How touching it was,” he adds, “here in a land of strangers, far away from home and friends and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation.” A. and I thought we had found Adam’s tomb in the church, but a Russian tour guide told us that we were mistaken, so were unable to pay our respects to dear old Grandpa Adam.

After leaving the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and taking a break for lunch in the Jewish Quarter, A. and I exited the Old City and stumbled on to Zedekiah’s Cave, also known as King Solomon’s Quarry, and paid a few shekels to enter. The cave runs under what is now the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. This is another place that Mark Twain didn’t see and didn’t describe, perhaps because the Ottoman authorities forbade people to enter the cave after an American missionary rediscovered it in 1854. Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, is said to have fled into the cave when the Babylonians besieged Jerusalem. Before that, the cave is said to have been the quarry for King Solomon’s Temple, which is how it acquired its other name. I have to admit that A. and I, behaving a little like Mark Twain’s souvenir-hunting traveling companions, pocketed a few rocks from the quarry. Here is A., fearlessly leading the way down:

After exiting King Solomon’s Quarry with our precious load of stones, A. and I spotted some interesting-looking tombs in the Kidron Valley. (The Kidron Valley runs along the eastern wall of the Old City and separates the Temple Mount from the Mount of Olives.) When we asked a couple of young Israeli soldiers what these structures were, they shrugged and said (indisputably) “some dead people.” Perhaps inspired by the new Indiana Jones movie, I convinced A. to climb down into the valley to explore the tombs with me. Only later did we discover that they were the tomb of Absalom and the tomb of Zechariah. You will remember Absalom and Zechariah, no doubt. Absalom was King David’s third and favorite son, who revolted (unsuccessfully) against his father, and Zechariah was the son of the Jewish high priest who denounced his king and his people for their rebellion against G-d and then, for his troubles, was stoned to death (2 Chronicles 24:20). After discovering whose tombs these were, I felt a little badly about sitting so cavalierly on poor old Zechariah’s tomb. He deserves better. Mark Twain, by the way, mentions riding through the Valley of Jehoshaphat (the Kidron Valley) on horseback and seeing the tombs of Absalom and Zechariah, but only in passing.

Here is the Tomb of Absalom:

And here is the Tomb of Zechariah:

Toward dusk, we returned to Jaffa Gate to watch what seemed like an endless crowd of young people streaming into the Old City to celebrate Jerusalem Day. They came to walk through the liberated Old City, where for nearly twenty years (1948 to 1967) Jews were denied access, and to gather at the Kotel – once called the Wailing Wall – to sing and dance.

I have to admit that I found this spectacle more moving than any ancient relic or Biblical monument. Never have I seen so many joyous and happy Jews assembling together in one place, and the city seemed positively charged with what Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence.” Without a doubt, this is the single biggest difference between the Jerusalem of Mark Twain’s time and today. “Jerusalem,” he wrote, “is mournful and dreary and lifeless.” No description could be further from the truth on Jerusalem Day.

Arrival in Jerusalem

2008-06-05T20:15:00.009+03:00

On Sunday A. and I left Tel Aviv for a four-day excursion in Jerusalem. I taught on Sunday afternoon and Tuesday afternoon, which meant that it was partly a work excursion for me, but mostly it was a pleasure trip. For A., it was especially exciting because she hadn’t been to Jerusalem before. We arrived in the afternoon and went straight to the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus, where we had made reservations at the Maiersdorf Guest House. Toward dusk, we took a brief unguided tour of the campus, including an outdoor amphitheater with a beautiful panoramic view, and crashed an outdoor party and reception for the university’s board of governors. The reception was crowded, so it wasn’t hard for us to blend in and nosh on the food that was laid out for the guests.

Perhaps here is a good place to say a few words about the university where I have been teaching and its location. Mount Scopus, known in Hebrew as הַר הַצּוֹפִים (Har Hatzofim), rises to a height of 2,684 feet (826 meters) above sea level. It has rightly been described as a site of incomparable beauty and impressiveness, affording breathtaking views of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the hills of Judea, the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea, and the Mountains of Moab. Because it is high ground close to Jerusalem, Mount Scopus has been strategically important for the defense of the city since ancient times. The Roman armies that conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple camped here in the year 70 of the Common Era, and the Crusaders followed suit a thousand years later.

The foundation stones for the Hebrew University were laid on Mount Scopus in 1918, and I take special pride in noting that a Goldberg (American author Isaac Goldberg) purchased the land for the site. Albert Einstein gave the first lecture here in 1923 – he lectured on his theory of relativity and spoke the first sentences in Hebrew – and the university officially opened in 1925. Like the New School for Social Research in New York (another institution with which I have some acquaintance), the Hebrew University provided a haven for scholars and scientists fleeing the Nazis. During Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Mount Scopus was the scene of an infamous ambush in which Arab forces murdered a civilian convoy of doctors, nurses, and students delivering medical supplies to the university’s Hadassah Hospital. At the war’s end (or rather cease-fire), Mount Scopus became an Israeli-controlled but demilitarized area within Jordanian territory that was inaccessible to Israeli teachers and students, and the university relocated to Givat Ram in the Israeli-controlled sector of Jerusalem. After the Six Day War reunited Jerusalem under Israeli rule in 1967, the Hebrew University was able to return to Mount Scopus, and it now uses both campuses. I heard an amazing story from a young scholar at the Hebrew University a few months ago, the kind of amazing story that one can only hear in Israel, about a relative of his who taught at the Hebrew University before the 1948 war. The professor, who had to flee his office during the fighting, returned nearly twenty years later to find the book he had left on his desk still open at the same page.

Here is a photo of yours truly taken from the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, with Jerusalem visible in the background. (The gold dome to the right is the Dome of the Rock; it stands on Mount Moriah, the site where Abraham came near to sacrificing his son Isaac and where King Solomon's Temple once stood.)

Following our informal, early evening tour of the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus, A. and I decided to take a bus into Jerusalem and have dinner at the famous Ticho House. Once the home of the painter Anna Ticho (one of whose pictures was hanging in our room at the Maiersdorf Guest House) and her husband Dr. Abraham Ticho, it is now a well-known gallery and café. Here is A. at the entrance to the Ticho House:

On the way, we passed another famous house: the home of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of modern Israel (and one of the many luminaries present during the opening ceremony of the Hebrew University in 1925). Here is the entrance to his house:

From the windows of the house we heard beautiful singing, which reminded us that our visit to Jerusalem happily coincided with Jerusalem Day, the anniversary of the liberation and unification of Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty in 1967. (For readers who might prefer to describe Israel as an occupier rather than a liberator of Jerusalem, it is perhaps worth pointing out here that the Jordanians – who seized control of the Old City and most of east Jerusalem in 1948 – were occupiers, too. In the 1947 U.N. partition plan, Jerusalem was to be a “separate entity” under a governor appointed by the U.N., but this plan was never implemented. In fact, the whole history of Jerusalem has been the history of one conquest and occupation after another, making it difficult to find an “unoccupied” point in time which one could restore or to which one might return.) Arriving at the Ticho House, we found it closed for a private party, but we had a superb dinner at El Gaucho, a kosher Argentinean steak house not far from there. At the end of the evening, we shared a taxi cab back to Mount Scopus with two young American students who were studying at the Hebrew University, one of whom had made aliyah (immigrated to Israel). Upon our return to the guest house, we were tired but well satisfied with our first day in Jerusalem.

Let Gaza Students Go to U.S.

2008-05-30T12:43:00.007+03:00

Haaretz reports that eight Palestinian students in Gaza lost their Fulbright scholarships to pursue advanced degrees in the United States because the Israeli government denied them exit visas. This denial is unjust, foolish, and short-sighted. If Israeli policymakers want to discourage hatred and extremism among Palestinians, this goal would best be served by facilitating rather than closing off opportunities to study in the United States.

Right-wing Knesset member Yuval Steinitz (a member of the opposition Likud Party) offered this flimsy and utterly unconvincing justification for the government’s refusal to grant exit visas: “We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges. So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior.” Not only is Steinitz’s statement a non sequitur, it is also the same reasoning used by some British trade unionists to justify a blacklist (misleadingly described as a “boycott”) of Israeli academics and their institutions. The principle espoused by Steinitz and the British boycotters is the same: that scholars should be punished for the policies of the governments under which they live. As my union has pointed out (here and here), this is a dangerous notion that all educators ought to oppose, out of professional interest as well as moral considerations.

To Israel’s credit, the move has stirred up criticism and opposition here, even from the right. Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, political prisoner, and activist in the campaign to free Soviet Jewry, who is considered quite hawkish (he opposed Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005), spoke eloquently about the foolishness of the decision. “We correctly complain that the Palestinian Authority is not building civil society,” he said, “but when we don’t help build civil society this plays into the hands of Hamas. The Fulbright is administered independently, and people are chosen for it due to their talents.” The chairman of the Knesset’s education committee also spoke out against the decision, criticizing it as “collective punishment” that was “not in keeping with international standards or with the moral standards of Jews, who have been subjected to the deprivation of higher education in the past.” The New York Times reports that the education committee has asked Olmert’s government and the military to “reconsider the policy and get back to it within two weeks.” Let’s hope this bad precedent is overturned before it causes any more harm.

Following in Mark Twain's Footsteps

2008-05-29T16:49:00.007+03:00

As I mentioned in my inaugural post, I began reading Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad when I came to Israel in January. The book is essentially a travelogue of a five-month “pleasure excursion” that Twain took to Europe and Palestine in 1867; he wrote it for a San Francisco newspaper, which in return paid for his fare on the steamship Quaker City. I am now nearly finished with the book -- it has taken me roughly as long to read it as Twain took to travel through Europe and Palestine, so I almost feel as though I have been reading his travel reports in “real time.” I highly recommend it; it’s interesting and very funny, so much so that it sometimes made me laugh out loud.

Now that A. and I are planning some “pleasure excursions” of our own in modern-day Israel, I had the bright idea of revisiting some of the places that Twain describes and comparing notes with him here, in my own on-line travelogue. I thought of it as a kind of “virtual dialogue.” Since The Innocents Abroad was an inspiration for this blog, it seemed only fitting to follow in his footsteps. And by now, after reading some 430 pages of Twain’s travel reports, I feel like I’ve been one of his traveling companions and have gotten to know him over the past five months. Reading a new chapter feels a little like receiving a letter from a friend.

Once I began to think through this idea, however, it dawned on me that it wouldn’t be as easy as I thought. For one thing, some of the places that Twain visited simply don’t exist anymore. For instance, in chapter 46 he describes Lake Hule, the Biblical “Waters of Merom.” However, Israel drained Lake Hule and its surrounding swamps in the 1950s for agricultural purposes. A small portion of the lake and swamp region was re-flooded as part of a restoration project in the 1990s, creating present-day Lake Agmon, but it is much smaller and shallower than the original lake.

Another problem is that many of the sites Twain visited are located in the West Bank. He “stopped to lunch” at Shechem, the site of Joseph’s Tomb and Jacob’s Well, which is now the Palestinian city of Nablus. (Israelis are currently not allowed to visit Joseph’s Tomb, which Palestinians vandalized and demolished in 2000. [For two updates on Joseph's Tomb since this post was originally published, see here and here. -W.Y., June 13.] Incidentally, Nablus is also the home of the Samaritans, whom Twain describes and who still live there.) Twain “passed Shiloh, where the Ark of the Covenant rested three hundred years,” and which is now the site of an Israeli settlement and the Palestinian town Turmus Ayya, 28 miles north of Jerusalem on Route 60. Twain visited the “shapeless mass of ruins” at Bethel (“it was here that Jacob lay down and had that superb vision of angels”), about 10 miles north of Jerusalem, which is now the site of the Palestinian village of Beitin and an adjacent Israeli settlement. Twain even camped at Jenin, which achieved notoriety during the second intifada as a major source of suicide bombers, provoking an Israeli military incursion in 2002. I’m not too keen on traveling to any of those places in light of the latest travel warning from the U.S. State Department: “The security environment in the West Bank remains volatile. Violent demonstrations, kidnappings, and shootings are unpredictable and can occur without warning. The Department of State urges Americans to defer travel to the West Bank at this time.” Mark Twain had much less to worry about; he feared the “quixotic heroism” of his traveling companions more than the “fierce Bedouins” that supposedly lay in wait for them: “They have their hands on their pistols all the time, and every now and then, when you least expect it, they snatch them out and take aim at Bedouins who are not visible, and draw their knives and make savage passes at other Bedouins who do not exist. I am in deadly peril always, for these spasms are sudden and irregular, and of course I cannot tell when to be getting out of the way.” I only wish the terrorists of today were as imaginary as Twain's Bedouins.

Even if A. and I can’t revisit all the places that Mark Twain describes, we can at least go to some of them: Banyas, Capernaum, Tiberias and the nearby “ancient warm baths” (now part of the Hamat Gader Park), the “Plain of Esdraelon” (the Jezreel Valley), Nazareth, and of course Jerusalem. We start with Jerusalem next week!

Final grades are in!

2008-05-28T14:02:00.013+03:00

Received yesterday in the mail from Tel Aviv University (click on the letter to enlarge it):

It's the report card I've been expecting for my Hebrew class! As you can see, the university informs students of their final grades in Hebrew only, which makes the report card the real test of how much they've learned. Despite some unfamiliar words and bad penmanship (can you believe my chutzpah, chiding sabras for their poor handwriting?), it was not hard to understand the gist of it. In brief, I earned 98% for the intensive four-week ulpan that began in mid-January and 97% in the longer but less intensive follow-up course from February to May. I'm still far from fluent, but I'm reasonably sure those grades are high enough that my colleagues in Wisconsin won't consider revoking my tenure.

(Lag Ba-Omer) לַ״ג בָּעֹמֶר

2008-05-26T22:36:00.015+03:00

Lag ba-Omer, a minor Jewish holiday commemorating the cessation of a plague that killed 24,000 disciples of the great Rabbi Akiva, began last Thursday night and continued on Friday. According to one interpretation, the “plague” is in fact a coded reference to the Romans, who bloodily suppressed a Jewish revolt in Rabbi Akiva’s time and eventually murdered the rabbi himself in a particularly cruel and gruesome way that I won’t describe here. The cessation of the plague, accordingly, may refer to a temporary Jewish victory over the Romans in the struggle for national independence and political sovereignty. The name of the holiday simply means the 33rd day (33 was written with the Hebrew letters לג before the adoption of Arabic numerals) of the Omer (the period between the holidays of Passover and Shavuot).

In modern Israel, Lag ba-Omer is a school holiday celebrated with bonfires in the evening (mainly lit by kids and teenagers) and picnics the next day. A. and I were in Rehovot having dinner with some Israeli friends of ours on Thursday evening, but from the balcony of their thirteenth-floor apartment we could see lots of bonfires springing up down below. We saw more bonfires on the beach in Tel Aviv when we returned home. Apparently, it’s customary for children and teenagers to begin pilfering wood from construction sites weeks before the holiday, which led the Tel Aviv Municipality to supply firewood this year. No word yet on whether it reduced pilfering. I tried to take some photos of the bonfires, but none of them came out well.

Lag ba-Omer became known as the “Scholar’s Festival” in the Middle Ages, apparently because the merrymaking of rabbinical students was especially enthusiastic. (Ironically, Akiva was said to be not only unlearned in his early years -- an עם הארץ [am ha-aretz or ignoramus] – but also a bitter enemy of scholars: “When I was an עם הארץ I said, ‘Had I a scholar in my power, I would maul him like an ass’” [Pes. 49b]. No doubt a few of my students and colleagues have had the same thought about me.) A. and I, scholars that we are (though of a secular sort), decided to celebrate the “Scholar’s Festival” with a picnic in the Yarkon Park on Friday. Here are a few pictures of our excursion.

The park:

The scholars:

And the best snack food ever, "Bambah":