Lag Ba'omer

Photo Caption: Fires in the park celebrating Lag Ba’ Omer.

For those of who are keeping track, last night was Lag Ba’ Omer. Don’t remember what that holiday represents? Well neither does anyone else I spoke to around here, but it is a school holiday and that seems to be sufficient reason to celebrate. The holiday is actually 33 days after the 2^nd day of Passover, (my how time flies when you are no longer a slave building the pyramids) and is composed of the letter “lamed” which represents 30 and a “gimel” which represents 3. This nomenclature is often given as an example of why Hebrew is so easy to learn, you just use letters like building blocks and you can end up with the name of a holiday on which there is no school. What is distinctive is the method of celebration. For the last (presumably) 33 days, kids (mostly boys) have been collecting wood for making bonfires on Lag Ba’Omer night. Why this is,was not explained to me in the Wikipedia entry and certainly none of the boys I talked to who were having a great time lighting fires had any explanation. I live near the huge Kikar Ha-Madenia square and there must have been 100 fires and about a thousand people. For those of you who are gender sensitive, there were a lot of pre-teen boys having a great old time making fire and an equal number of Jewish mothers going absolutely berserk. This holiday is a Jew mother’s nightmare, there are sticks to put out eyes everywhere, flames to catch clothes on fire and young boys and girls running off into the night in packs. I couldn’t understand the Hebrew, but clearly words of caution were being screamed everywhere.

Sabbath Shopping: Finally, I figured out that if you need to do grocery shopping you better do it before 3p.m. on Friday. I heard a great explanation for the Sabbath from an ecologist. The bible orders people once a week to take no action against nature. It is really not just a day of rest for people, but more importantly a day of no human mucking around with nature; put another way, this is the day that nature gets to heal itself without cars, electricity, farming, slaughtering, etc. Kind of cool way to look at it, (not that Tel Aviv gives a shit)

Cell Phones: This is absolutely a fact, when God made cell phones, he/she had the Israeli people in mind. Apologies for the racism, but when you take a race of people who already are a bit noisy and don’t really have a very good concept of personal space and you give them a cell phone, you are basically putting a knife in the hands of a child. Here’s a true story and you can draw your own conclusions.

I am sitting in the café of the Tel Aviv Museum eating a very nice, over priced pastry (like every museum café) with people sitting around quietly discussing art. A middle aged husband and wife are sitting next to me and his cell phone goes off, but unlike Vienna with a Chopin sonnet, the ring tone is a jarring sound that gets louder and louder the longer it goes unanswered. So the man fumbles around and finally gets the phone out, but can’t figure out how to answer it. The wife, obviously the technophile in the family, grabs it and goes to turn it off, the husband not to be outdone, grabs it back, there is a lot of shooting in Hebrew. The gist seems to be (I’m projecting) that the wife keeps telling him and pointing to the key that turns it off and he keeps yelling back that he knows what he’s doing and doesn’t need her help, while at the same time pushing every key on the phone. Suddenly, the irritating ringing which has now gotten really loud, stops. The husband gives his wife a cocky look, as if to say, “see I figured it out, without your meddling.” Of course the call stopped automatically when it went into voice mail, but the husband is undeterred and start softly with “Shalom, (no response) shalom (this time louder imitating the ring tone cycle), finally SHALOM!, and still nothing. The wife then starts explaining to him that he now has to check voice mail (or at least I hope that is what she was saying.) and their fighting and grabbing resumes over how to access voice mail. Ok I think you get the picture, since all of this is happening in a very pleasant, esthetically pleasing museum café you can imagine what happens on the street or on a bus. I assume there are cities that are more cell phone oriented (I think Tokyo might be one), but Tel Aviv must surely be in the top 5 of irritating users.

Cigarette smoking: I’m not going to say much since I come from Berkeley where cigarette smokers are stoned (literally and metaphorically) or at the very least publicly humiliated. My sense is that Tel Aviv is not as bad as say Eastern Europe, but I have been sitting in a café and a person comes in and sits right next to me and lights up a cigarette without any awareness of my presence and when finished they throw the butts anywhere on the ground. This is not noteworthy other than to say it is an earlier stage of human evolution and I assume these people will start to die out, it’s not a question of “if”, but only “when.”

I’m starting to learn my numbers from 10-100 which as you can imagine is opening up all kinds of new things that I can now buy, there goes the budget!

FOX update: I was just told that CNN was dropped from the cable and replaced with FOX because CNN was considered "too pro-Palestinian." Go figure!!