OK, so I didn't take this picture with my cell phone camera, it comes courtesy of Vardit's real camera. The sun has just risen above the horizon and is hitting the Old City. Needless to say, "the crowd went wild" at this moment of truth. (BTW: this picture makes a great screen saver)Finally a holiday has come along that combines the unreality of the Ultra-Orthodox Jew with the unscientific creationism of the Evangelical Christian, its called Birkat Hachama. According to one of the world's leading authorities on the subject, Rabbi Bleich (a man by the way who does not use a computer and has a rotary phone) every 28 years the Sun returns to exactly the same spot it was at on the 4th day of creation, which is always on a Wednesday. This year the event is super symbolic because it occurred on the first day of Passover and (if you do the math correctly) it also occurred on the first Passover in Egypt and of course on the 4th day of creation about 6000 years ago. There was talk that such a coincidence could only mean one thing: the arrival of the Messiah.
So to make a long story short, about 50,000 Jews around the world from New Zealand to New York and of course passing through Jerusalem gathered at 6:28a.m. to say a prayer welcoming the Sun and I was one of those Jews. Arriving at Haas Promenade at about 5a.m. to get a good parking spot about 1000 of us sang and shivered as we wait for the Sun to crack the plane of the horizon. It was a little irritating to realize that the West Bank Arabs in Jericho got to see the sunrise about a minute before us Jews, since they would not have understood the significance of the event. There was some criticism about the fact that this whole celebration looked a lot like Sun worship, which if you recall your Bible is the kind of thing that really pissed off Moses in the desert.
I ended up in the middle of the more ecstatic, musical and dancing crowd and the Rabbi asked us all to think about where we were 28 years ago (1981 and recently arrived in Berkeley) and where we will be in 28 years (2037 and probably God-willing not around any more). We then all waited a respectful period of time (about 10 minutes) and when the Messiah didn't show up, we headed off to a cute French restaurant for a nice Israeli breakfast.
This is the view from the Haas Promenade, donated by the famous Haas Family of San Francisco (inventor of Levi jeans), a UC Berkeley graduate, namesake to Haas Pavilion, home of the Golden Bears. A makeshift prayer site was set up with about 500 people, note the improvised curtain which separates the men worshippers from the women worshippers.
This was actually a very spiritual moment, intense singing and praying as the Sun came up and bathed the Old City in an orange glow. It was a teary moment, not sure about the "time-of-creation" thing, but definitely emotional.
Here is Stephen Colbert doing a very funny spoof on Birkat Hachama which shows how flippantly the American public can treat a goofy religious phenomena:
Also a brilliant article in Haaretz by Gideon Levy on the fact that Israel is a religious country in many ways not much different from Pakistan, Iran or Afghanistan, OUCH!! There were lots of letters to the editor criticising this article, but I thought it was right on.
Here is a picture you don't see very often. I'm sitting in the stands at the local soccer game at about 5:30pm on a SATURDAY afternoon and the guy in front of me is wearing a kippa, which means he is an Orthodox Jew (he shouldn't be at the game on Shabbat) and he is eating a matzoh sandwich and of course sitting amongst fans that are yelling things like, "your mother is a whore" and worse. What's a nice Jewish boy doing in crowd like this on Shabbat?" 
This is a picture of the check out counter at the local hardware store and the aisle at the supermarket. The plastic coverings are concealing "snacks" that can not be eaten by the Orthodox on Passover. There is an unenforced law in Jerusalem, the Chametz Law, which forbids the public display of non-Passover approved foods, thus the coverings. Near the end of Passover, the less religious public starts ripping away some of the plastic to sneak out the sacrilegious food.
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