Baila alerted me to the fact that the Tel Dan Nature Reserve, where we enjoyed a wonderful, easy hike with archaeological digs and a cool wading pool, was torched on Saturday night.
Arson: why are some people so destructive? Who benefits from such a misdeed?
Read the Jerusalem Post article.
Also, looking for tips from photographers on how to photograph brightly-lit waterfalls or running water without having them look washed out. Thanks.
When I photographed this guy in early July at Ein Gedi, I didn’t know what he was. Cute, that’s for sure. Turns out he’s (or she?) a hyrax, an animal that frequents these parts.
Does this look at all like a bunny rabbit? Because in Modern Hebrew, a shafan is a rabbit. But in ancient Hebrew, the word shafan probably applies to a hyrax. See Psalms 104:18 —
The high mountains are for the wild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the conies.
הָרִים הַגְּבֹהִים, לַיְּעֵלִים; סְלָעִים, מַחְסֶה לַשְׁפַנִּים
Conies are the translation of shefanim and supposedly refer to these furry fellows.
For more on nature at the Dead Sea, see:
If you like animal photos, see Dina on Parshat Balak.
And to read more inspiring posts by other inspiring bloggers, visit Jack’s Haveil Havalim #173.
It’s time for me to start re-connecting with this side of the Atlantic Ocean. So, in order to do so, I present you with yet one more photo of Israel, this time a blue arrow on a small highway somewhere in between Modiin and Hashmonaim.
Have you ever driven down Rte 27 in Metuchen? Or have ever given anyone directions to drive to Highland Park from the Garden State? You need to take a weird left after Main Street in Metuchen into what appears to be–ongoing traffic? You can’t really tell if you are doing the right thing, can you? When you take that left, not like you really are turning into a different road. It’s all Route 27! One long road that starts–where does it start? But you can drive on that road all the way to Princeton. Google Maps tells me that little scary left is from Middlesex Avenue unto Lake Avenue. Well, my husband has proposed that one of these nice little blue arrows might do the trick. So your guest doesn’t keep going and up on Rt. 287 or some other miscellaneous road.
In other local news, Mason Resnick is trying to lure Trader Joe’s to Highland Park. And Jill Caporlingua was part of Random Acts of Fun last night, as she taught art on Raritan Avenue.
Regarding issues that effect all of us, mommies or not, Mother In Israel posted about nursing moms in malls and Frumhouse continued with her nursing experiences. Don’t you want to live a society that does the right thing?
Taken from a bus in Jerusalem, last week. Click for larger image.
Visit Anna Carson’s photo blog to join all the fun with Project Black.
We visited Tsefat (alternative spellings: Safed, Safad, Tsfat, Tzfat, Tzefat) about two weeks ago. It is my favorite city in Israel: spiritual, up in the clouds (it’s on a hill), artistic, architecturally interesting, walkable, colorful. Lecha Dodi, the lovely prayer welcoming the Sabbath queen that we sing every Friday night, was composed by Rabbi Shlomo Halevy Alkabetz in the 16th century in Tsefat.
Here’s a welcoming sign to the old section on the busy main street at the top of the city’s hill.
Ari Synagogue (Ashkenazi)
Abuhav Synagogue on the right: lots of blue here. Blue is a recurring theme in Tsefat.
My husband and middle son went for a dip in the mikvah of the Ari.
Stay tuned for a post about the simple, delicious, kosher, healthy food that we ate in a little square in Tsefat. Unfortunately, Eldest son, same son who does not like garlic, didn’t care for Tsefat because he found it smelly.
I haven’t done a post on health topics for a while, so here are some recent internet picks:
Allergies And Ubiquitous Presence Of Some Foods
Before the advent of freezers and airfreight most people ate local foods in season. Now most fruit and vegetables are available all year round, so that our systems are exposed to the same foods continually without respite.
There has been a dramatic increase in people experiencing soya allergy, since soya has become a common ingredient in many processed foods. In Europe and North America rice allergy is relatively uncommon, whereas in Asia where it is consumed more frequently it is much more common.
Note: In Israel one still eats local foods in season. It is difficult, for example, to obtain strawberries in the summer.
As I am married to a red wine lover, I’ll conclude with a photo from our trip to the Galil winery:
The wine is stored in these oak barrels (oak is either from France or the US) for a few years before being bottled and sold. We bought some Galil Pinot Noir and enjoyed it with our friends in Hashmonaim.
Tanks for fermentation and storage of wine are the answers to my quiz on this post.
This was my son’s favorite activity in Israel, sliding down this gigantic red slide at a waterpark in the Galil called Luna Gal. As a mom, I got palpitations every time he went down. Oy.
For more red Ruby Tuesday posts, visit Mary the Teach at Work of the Poet.
I believe this is a Tristram’s grackle (onychognathus tristramii), a bird that lives in Ein Gedi, an oasis near the Dead Sea. This bird had no problem letting me photograph him on the picnic table in the visiting area. I have such a harder time getting photos of the birds in my own backyard here in New Jersey!
According to the Wikipedia article,
They are omnivorous, feeding on fruit and invertebrates, and can also be observed grooming Nubian Ibex and domestic livestock for parasites.
Note via email from a Highland Park birder: “It looks very similar to our common grackles except for the bill shape and the bit of color on the wing.”
See my photo of an ibex (yael in Hebrew). Fuzzy, cute hyrax photo coming soon.
Have you ever gone along with a group(family, friend, spouse) and agreed to do some activity, only to find it was a GREAT activity?
Such was my experience with visiting the City of David (see entrance in above photo, with Arab neighborhood of Silwan in the background; there is a valley between the entrance center and the neighborhood that one can’t see in the photo).
All I heard prior to our visit was:
Because my daughter did not want to go through the wet part, called Hezekiah’s tunnel (nor did 3/4 of our tour group), I didn’t even experience the wet, flashlight section.
Getting back to the beginning, here’s what we saw even before we entered that harp entrance:
There is some archaeological dig going on behind that mural. The mural on the right shows up again at the end of our tour, as it represents how the ancient Siloam pool may have looked.
At the beginning of our tour our guide, Oren, pointed to the walls around the “Ir HaAtika”, as the ancient walled section of Jerusalem is called and said: “For the purposes of this tour, those walls are new.” Indeed, they were built by the Ottomans a mere 500 years ago. Oren was an articulate, knowledgeable, enthusiastic guide, as was our tour guide of the day before, who led us on a tour of Herod’s western wall of the 2nd Temple. Oren spoke English well and knew Tanakh and biblical archeology.
Here’s Oren showing us a drawing found in this area, one similar to that on the 5 shekel coin:
Underneath us in that photo is what archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar deemed to be David’s Palace. This discovery took place in 2005, a mere 3 years ago. I first learned about this discovery while working on Prof. Gary Rendsburg’s Bible and History course.
Oren told us how British archaeologists in the early twentieth century dug up a lot of this area, but they did not discover the palace Dr. Mazar found. They did, however, jumble up many of the layers of history, making the job of current archaeologists all the more difficult. Also, the city is on a hill, so many of the precious “trash” of the centuries rolled down into the valley, all mixed up instead of in nice layers as archaeologists would prefer.
A tourist building about the City of David was supposed to be built here. However, all that got built were those concrete walls, because an archaeologist was sent in to inspect before the building could receive a building permit. The permit was never issued, and more digs are going on in this area.
Here’s the plaque inside this room. I would have liked to photograph the English as well, but Oren had put his book bag on top of it. Loosely translated, the first sentence says Prof. Roni Reich in 1995 started excavating the Gihon Spring area here. (Anyone who cares to translate the rest, feel free! I’ll add it). The Gihon Spring is key; this whole area was developed over 3000 years ago because there was water here. The plaque ends with this quote from Samuel 2 5:8
וַיֹּאמֶר דָּוִד בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא, כָּל-מַכֵּה יְבֻסִי וְיִגַּע בַּצִּנּוֹר
Basically, the way King David conquered the Jebusite city situated on this hill was by attacking the water source. Tsinor may mean water source and may refer to the Gihon Spring.
Above is Warren’s Shaft, discovered in the 1860’s. I wrote about Charles Warren previously. It used to be thought that this was the ancient spring from which the city’s inhabitants got water, by dropping their buckets down this shaft to retrieve water. Now this whole theory is debunked, with archaeologists believing this is just a natural fissure in the rock.
Finally, we get to the fun part: Hezekiah’s tunnel. Why was this tunnel built? As you may recall, David conquered the city from the Jebusites by capturing the water source. So when the Assyrian king threatened the Kingdom of Judah in 700 BCE, the smart thing to do was to protect the water source by diverting the water with a tunnel, called Hezekiah’s tunnel.
My daughter and I didn’t go through the wet section, which my son said was a lot of fun. You can see from maps that the water tunnel was built in a twisty, turny way, with two sets of diggers working at two ends and then managing to meet in the middle.
Instead, we traveled through what is referred to as the Canaanite Channel. She declared it ‘squooshy’, and I asked her if she knows the meaning of the word claustrophobia.
Here’s where we came out. Notice how far down the hill we are from where we started. Click on the photo to see larger detail. Towards the top of the photo, where building meets sky, you can see the walls of the “Old” City (that you now know as new).
The tour guide then led us to what may have been the Siloam Pool, a pool that gathered water from the Gihon Spring. We also saw some steps from a little before the Roman period, that alternated wide step, short step, wide step, short step. The wide steps were so donkeys could climb up along with people.
At right is a detail from Siloam pool mural at the end of our tour.
The tour was fun for adults and kids alike, as there was a lot to see and learn and fun passageways in which to traverse. To see if any of you are still with me, I’ll leave you with Oren’s quiz:
Do you know anyone by the name of Yael? This animal is called an ibex or in Hebrew Yael. We saw quite a few ibex on our trip to the Dead Sea, where we hiked up (and back down) Nahal David, the shorter hike at Ein Gedi. As it was quite hot and my daughter got tired from our short Nahal David hike, we are glad we did not do the longer Nahal Arugot hike. Also, unlike our sad Banias experience where we were not allowed to go in the water, there is plenty of swimming, wading and sitting under waterfalls in Nahal David.
Psalms 104:18 —
The high mountains are for the wild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the conies.
הָרִים הַגְּבֹהִים, לַיְּעֵלִים; סְלָעִים, מַחְסֶה לַשְׁפַנִּים
According to the Ein Gedi brochure, the wild goats are Nubian ibex. The conies are rock hyrax, and I have a picture of one of those furry animals, too (for a later post).
