California Dreaming: This huge slice of a Sequoia tree can be found in the middle of the Hebrew University campus, it is the gift of someone who paid to schlep it all the way from California, hundreds of rings and all. I'm not sure what it symbolizes, longevity, a belief in nature? It didn't quite make me homesick, (I'm not really a tree hugger), but it was nice to contemplate a piece of home. What struck closer to home was the story of the poor schmuck who spent a year sitting up in an Oak tree in Berkeley protesting the University's decision to cut down an old grove forest for a new athletic complex and then he came to Israel to a West Bank protest and was promptly hit in the head by a teargas canister fired by an IDF soldier and might die. Talk about a life on the cutting edge of political dissent.
Matzoh Madness: Its starting, the Passover Fever time of the year. And isn't it fortunate that I just finished reading a book by a revisionist historian (actually he is called a Biblical Minimalist) which says there is absolutely no evidence of a mass Jewish exodus from Egypt. The 60,000 liberated "slaves" have left no trace of their journey through the Sinai Desert and believe me the Israeli archaeologist have been looking diligently. The book also found very little evidence of King David and Solomon and the evidence he did find indicated that they probably weren't that great. Predictably this guy has been vilified by the archaeological community.
You think you have a bad job, how would you like to clean up all of last year's requests from the Wailing Wall. I'm surprised some Israeli techie person hasn't come up with a paperless Wailing Wall.Wailing Wall Mystery Solved: I am often asked, "What happens to all the messages put in the cracks of the Wailing Wall?" You would think that after 2500 years there would be too many messages and two few cracks. Well, today I read that in anticipation of Passover, the Wailing Wall is cleansed of its messages by a guy(s) with a specially purified stick dipped in "mikveh" (ritual bath water) The spring cleaning will get rid of the message for peace written by Barack Obama when he passed through Jerusalem, as well as the tags of my late dog Lily that I inserted in May, 2008, and a request that UCLA win the NCAA basketball championships that I inserted last month. The messages are buried in a grave after a proper burial.
Armageddon: I had my first encounter with a "profit (sic) of doom" yesterday. While waiting for the bus, a crazy guy came up to me and in perfect English started pointing at the gaudy apartment complex that towers precariously over the house I'm living in. (see early picture in this blog series) He said that when the apartment building was completed, presumably in the Fall, the earth would shake and the hillside would give way and all the buildings would come tumbling down. I asked him how he knew this and he said, an "angel" told him that this was the event that was predicted in Revelations for the ending of the world. (I actually felt a little home sick while sharing a Telegraph Avenue moment with this guy.) Afterwards, I told Vardit, who hates these buildings more than life itself, and she was thrilled that their demise was expected in the near future even if it meant the end of civilization as we know it.
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