Some Things about Israel
And now I'm trying to write a real post, which is a bit uneasy going since I just woke up from a nap. Oh well. If I doze off in the middle, you guys will just have to poke at me to wake me up!
The first thing about Israel is that it feels more alive than Canada, far more, in spite that in this climate everything blooms as a matter of course, and there everything that lives has to fight for every drop of water it can. The light is far sharper and more brilliant, and the air is drier, and everything is just more intense and charged with significance than it is here. Not only is there hardly a pebble that doesn't have a long and tumultuous history (also five opinions; I'll get to that later) to it, there's a wild variety to the people and the birds and the plants (and the bugs, ick.) I've never seen so many different kinds of flowers outside of the Botanical Garden here in Montreal (which is wonderful and should be seen by anyone visiting or living here, by the way.)
Also just the fact of Israel's rocky history and climate (to put it mildly) means that everything has to be built from the ground up, and fought over fiercely. There's a Midrash, I think, that asks why the Promised Land is so dry, instead of as water-rich as Egypt, and the answer is that being so dependent on rainfall helps the people put meaning into their prayers. When everything comes easy, you think it's your own doing, and you get lazy. Israel has almost no natural resources aside from the Dead Sea (which is saying something; most people wouldn't consider that a resource!), so it has had to concentrate on human resources and make the best use of everything it haves. The end result is that after fifty-seven years of constant war, a backwater colony of the British that was either impassable desert or malaria-ridden swamp is a scientific and cultural nuclear reactor, with inventions and advances and completely insane ideas bursting into existence as start-ups out of people's garages all the time. Not that there haven't been problems, and mistakes made from haste, and wrong-headed decisions all over the place, but if you lived in a pressure cooker you'd do some stupid things too.
The second thing about Israel is that the people are completely and totally bonkers. You haven't laughed until you've seen a frum (religious) woman zooming through the Old City of Jerusalem on a Vespa, with her snood topped by a motorcycle helmet. (I think someone said once that every single Israeli driver is a homicidal maniac, except for the one you're talking to at the moment.) Or the hill at Bental, site of fierce battles, that is decorated with completely random rusty sheet metal metal statues of dinosaurs. You've got a red welded-iron velociraptor sitting next to a triceratops, with no explanation other than a plaque with the artist's name. Who thinks of a pop art exhibit at a military-history site, I'd like to know? Or the song 'Yechezkel' (Ezekiel), that I heard on the radio, and that made me laugh so hard I went and bought the CD. The first stanza, in rough translation, goes something like this:
We've come to the prophet Ezekiel
We'll go after him with staffs
To every place he leads us
The prophet Ezekiel is a super awesome prophet!
Of course it's a different matter when Yechezkel haNavi is also your long-ago uncle Chezky, and not just the prophet Ezekiel, but it's still such a wonderfully daft idea for a song that I crack up every time I hear it.
I've kind of run out of steam right now, but I'll pick this essay up again tomorrow, and then I'll hammer it into some sort of submittable format later. :) In the meantime, we go back to the fannishness this blog is devoted to, with me actually starting to get pretty interested in all those wretched money-grubbing FF7 sequels - I never thought of Vincent and Cait Sith as a comedy duo, but just the thought of their interaction makes me grin like a six-year-old. KH2 is sounding more perfect everytime I read some new news about it (and how nostalgic it is to be typing a href tags again, after only two weeks away!) that I'm turning superstitious. In fact, in its present state it already sounds like the best game ever, and speculation about a Lilo & Stitch world or Zidane cameo seems like decadent excess in comparison. Or to put it succintly, EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK.
The first thing about Israel is that it feels more alive than Canada, far more, in spite that in this climate everything blooms as a matter of course, and there everything that lives has to fight for every drop of water it can. The light is far sharper and more brilliant, and the air is drier, and everything is just more intense and charged with significance than it is here. Not only is there hardly a pebble that doesn't have a long and tumultuous history (also five opinions; I'll get to that later) to it, there's a wild variety to the people and the birds and the plants (and the bugs, ick.) I've never seen so many different kinds of flowers outside of the Botanical Garden here in Montreal (which is wonderful and should be seen by anyone visiting or living here, by the way.)
Also just the fact of Israel's rocky history and climate (to put it mildly) means that everything has to be built from the ground up, and fought over fiercely. There's a Midrash, I think, that asks why the Promised Land is so dry, instead of as water-rich as Egypt, and the answer is that being so dependent on rainfall helps the people put meaning into their prayers. When everything comes easy, you think it's your own doing, and you get lazy. Israel has almost no natural resources aside from the Dead Sea (which is saying something; most people wouldn't consider that a resource!), so it has had to concentrate on human resources and make the best use of everything it haves. The end result is that after fifty-seven years of constant war, a backwater colony of the British that was either impassable desert or malaria-ridden swamp is a scientific and cultural nuclear reactor, with inventions and advances and completely insane ideas bursting into existence as start-ups out of people's garages all the time. Not that there haven't been problems, and mistakes made from haste, and wrong-headed decisions all over the place, but if you lived in a pressure cooker you'd do some stupid things too.
The second thing about Israel is that the people are completely and totally bonkers. You haven't laughed until you've seen a frum (religious) woman zooming through the Old City of Jerusalem on a Vespa, with her snood topped by a motorcycle helmet. (I think someone said once that every single Israeli driver is a homicidal maniac, except for the one you're talking to at the moment.) Or the hill at Bental, site of fierce battles, that is decorated with completely random rusty sheet metal metal statues of dinosaurs. You've got a red welded-iron velociraptor sitting next to a triceratops, with no explanation other than a plaque with the artist's name. Who thinks of a pop art exhibit at a military-history site, I'd like to know? Or the song 'Yechezkel' (Ezekiel), that I heard on the radio, and that made me laugh so hard I went and bought the CD. The first stanza, in rough translation, goes something like this:
We've come to the prophet Ezekiel
We'll go after him with staffs
To every place he leads us
The prophet Ezekiel is a super awesome prophet!
Of course it's a different matter when Yechezkel haNavi is also your long-ago uncle Chezky, and not just the prophet Ezekiel, but it's still such a wonderfully daft idea for a song that I crack up every time I hear it.
I've kind of run out of steam right now, but I'll pick this essay up again tomorrow, and then I'll hammer it into some sort of submittable format later. :) In the meantime, we go back to the fannishness this blog is devoted to, with me actually starting to get pretty interested in all those wretched money-grubbing FF7 sequels - I never thought of Vincent and Cait Sith as a comedy duo, but just the thought of their interaction makes me grin like a six-year-old. KH2 is sounding more perfect everytime I read some new news about it (and how nostalgic it is to be typing a href tags again, after only two weeks away!) that I'm turning superstitious. In fact, in its present state it already sounds like the best game ever, and speculation about a Lilo & Stitch world or Zidane cameo seems like decadent excess in comparison. Or to put it succintly, EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK.