BITS AND PIECES

This guy is tail-gating out in front of Teddy Stadium before the big soccer game between Hapoel Tel Aviv and Beitar Jeruslaem (my team). His hoka pipe was giving off the smell of strong tobacco and I think some apple flavor. I doubt if this traditional middle-eastern custom will be catching on soon at an American football game.

The most exciting part of the game was a blown call by the referee when it looked like the goalie for Tel Aviv grabbed the feet of a Jerusalem player right in front of the goal. The ref initially threw the goalie out of the game, then changed his mind and the crowd went wild. It was amazing to see 19,000 nice jewish boys all screaming in Hebrew, "the referee is the son of a whore." What would their mother's think?

Purim Update: There was a post-Purim article in the paper which criticized the story of Esther as sending young girls the wrong message. According to this revisionist theory, Esther basically exchanged sexual favors for political gain at the request of her old Uncle. She repeated refused to sleep with the King when commanded to do so by Mordaci, but he concocted this story about saving the Jewish people so she gave up her body for the "tribe." While in the end the Jewish people were saved, it is unclear if they were really in any danger, Uncle Mordaci demanded to be made a big shot in the King's government and all Esther got out of the deal was a book named after her in the Bible. BTW: Of the 22 books in the Bible only Esther and Ruth are named after women.

Gaza Fallout: As you can imagine the Gaza War is turning into a real mess, or should I say the Israelis are just now realizing what everyone else in the world already knew. Tomorrow the report of the IDF comes out and it looks like there was a lot of "Israeli's Behaving Badly." It is supposed to be a bombshell of a story, (excuse the pun). The story that sticks in my mind is of an IDF platoon that took over a house with 10 women and children and a couple of old, incapacitated men. The family was kept captive for many days, without privacy, no bathroom privileges, lack of food and after trashing the house, the soldiers wrote racist slogans on the wall in excrement. But here is the kicker, in the kitchen the Israeli soldiers labeled the cupboards "milk" and "meat" with a magic marker. Apparently in the midst of what probably was a blatant war crime, the soldiers made sure that their rations were kept kosher and that there were no violations of dietary laws. Is that bizarre or what

Circumcision Watch: I met a guy who was interested in having me do volunteer fund-raising work on a special project. It seems that in Africa uncircumcised men have a significantly higher rate of HIV-AIDS which they then give to their female partners. So the idea was why not circumcise African men to cure the HIV-AIDA epidemic and (if you are still following me here) what doctors in the world have the most experience in performing 60,000 circumcision per year. You guessed it. So a team of Israeli surgeons has gone down to various parts of Africa as part of Operation Abraham and in their first test of 3274 men ages 15 to 49 (ugh!), there were 20 HIV infections in the circumcised group and 49 in the uncircumcised group. Bill Gates has signed on to the program and now they need someone to raise money from the American Jewish community. I was a little stunned by the whole idea, Israeli's running all over Africa circumcising 40 year old men, what an image that would be in the "wrong" hands. (sorry for another bad pun)

Pre-Passover Warning: I have been told to get ready for Passover, because it doesn't get any crazier than that. The basic theme of this crazyness is that everyone's house must be so clean that there can be nothing "chametz" inside or put in laymen's terms, no bread crumbs! We have the same tradition, but we call it Spring Cleaning. Watch this space for an update, but already the huge trash bins around the city are starting to fill up with mounds and mounds of thrown away chametzy garbage which are starting to bring out scavengers who take some of the really good garbage and sell it to poor people who don't have this chametzy thing. Garbage pick up is usually every 3 days, now it is down to 2 days and I'm told that just before Passover it will be down to twice a day.

I feel a little creepy showing this picture, but an Arab looking guy got on the bus today wearing a traditional Fatah scarf, he sat directly across from two of the most Ultra-orthodox guys you can imagine. The bus was packed and the Ultra's were totally freaked out as were a number of other people around the Arab guy. I'm pretty sure this was nothing more than just an East Jerusalem guy showing his colors in hostile surroundings, kind of like a Stanford red shirt in a sea of Cal blue and gold (only nobody was shouting "take off that Fatah scarf"). In any case, this is the first time that I really felt the tension in the City, generally everyone just goes about their business.