Jewish

Art and A Simple Jew

Art fans: please visit A Simple Jew today for a little treat. I’m planning to post the painting here on my blog tomorrow.

This was sort of like an art challenge, similar to the photo challenges one finds on blogs. It started with his asking me to write something, but I wanted to paint something.
Here’s a quote he sent to me as a suggestion:

The Degel Machaneh Ephraim taught that a person must have two abilities if he wants to be able to serve Hashem in absolute truth and sincerity. First, a person must have the ability to visualize that he is alone in the world with only his Creator. Second, he must be able to join himself to all of Hashem’s creations, no matter how big or small, and to all the neshamos of His people.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this, but after a few emails, we came up with the idea of a man in a forest near a stream contemplating. Another watercolor will be posted next week.

Our Favorite Soccer Coach

Spencer Rockman, a friend and a wonderful local soccer coach who also runs clinics in Israel, was recently on PBS (public television). He starts:

I am a soccer coach. I am also an observant Jew. It was God’s plan for me to be a soccer coach.

In the video, he shows how he leads diverse groups of children here in New Jersey, teaching them not just soccer but values. Two of my friend’s sons are shown (quickly, the scenes change often in the video). He makes us proud!

Watch the whole video.

Featured is also his wife, who talks about the foster children they have had in their home.

Here’s a photo I took of him at a recent shul picnic:

Kosher Cooking Carnival #33: Women Wearing White

As the last Kosher Cooking Carnival came out at the beginning of the Three Weeks, I think it appropriate that I dedicate this one to Tu B’Av and women dressed in white who would go into the fields to dance. In days of old, women were said to dress up in white clothes and dance in the fields:

The Mishnah Taanit (4:8) relates that Tu be-Av was a day for making shiduchim (matches), albeit without the intermediary services of the shadchen (matchmaker):

Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel used to say that there there were no days more joyous than Tu be-Av and Yom Kippur.

[On these days] the maidens of Jerusalem would go out bedecked in borrowed white clothing (in order not to embarrass those who did not own any) . . . And the maidens of Jerusalem went out and danced in the vineyards. And what did they say? “Young man, check us out and decide whom you like.” [*]

Let’s pretend your sister or third cousin once removed has just finished dancing in the field; now it’s time to eat.

If you want some nice conversation, you could talk about “umami” and Torah as the “spice of life”. But I would suggest you wait until after the meal if you want to discuss Rafi’s post on Shechita.

If you would like to discuss hechsherim and the kashrut of restaurants, Rafi posts on kashrut in Jerusalem restaurants and then updates. Larry Lennhoff says this is how kashrut certification should be done.

Lion of Zion asks: is it “assur” (forbidden) to eat at home in Brooklyn during the Nine Days?

What would make a nice summer meal?
A lovely bean salad by Tamar Fox.
A cancer-preventing fruit salad with thyme.
I made a soup from my Farmers Market produce. And I grew an edible flower.

Gazpacho time:
Juggling Frogs suggested Leah Koenig’s gazpacho posted on the Jew and the Carrot.

Gail teaches us how to make her gazpacho.

If you don’t want to spend a lot, but you like delicious food:

Mottel has made this wonderful dish he calls Basement Spaghetti.

One way to really keep it simple is to go out for some bagels.

On the other hand if you really want to live it up and make this meal extra-special, check out the wine selections at http://www.kosherwinereview.com/. Personally, I like Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon. Anything by the Galil Mountain Winery is going to be delicious; we tasted their wine our recent trip to Israel.

Raizy presents us with recipes from the Land of the Magyars.

We could have an elegant meal with Ilana-Davita’s chicken teriyaki or Baroness Tapuzina’s chicken paprika. Ilana-Davita’s roasted peppers would make a lovely side dish.

Like pasta? Try frumskeptic’s Fettucine Alfredo.

Batya teaches us how to roast vegetables in the oven.

Check out Mother in Israel’s new griddle and chickpea patties recipe.

Kosher Whine has a delicious recipe for Swiss Chard. Bet that might work with kale, too.

Here’s a really easy fish recipe.

Batya suggests that because it's Shmitta year, you can go into the field to pick some grapes. She also notes a sign allowing others to enter and pick.

Our options for dessert:

For a dairy meal, you could make the Kosher Blog’s Strawberry shortcake with cream on top.

Or try this easy Shabbat cake.

Not enough recipes? Here’s a blog called Cooking with Yiddishe Mama.

B’Taavon. (= Bon Appetit in Hebrew)

Finally, if you want to organize your recipes, Frumhouse has some nice suggestions. Here’s the cover of her Pesach recipes binder:

Thank you to Batya for founding and managing the Kosher Cooking Carnivals. Thank you to Ilana-Davita for reading the top of this post and giving feedback (or should that be foodback?). Thanks to Lion of Zion for his great Tu Be'Ab Primer. Thanks to Whistler for being a great painter. Thanks to Juggling Frogs for submitting suggestions.

If you missed participating in this edition, September is coming soon!
Submit an article on anything related to kosher food.
Batya is looking for more hosts; please contact her to volunteer: shilohmuse at yahoo dot com

Daughters of Tzlafchad

Tzlafchad. That is one long name. A real mouthful. But what’s more interesting are his daughters, and what we can learn from their ancient petition to Moshe.

Here’s what they asked Moshe (Numbers 27:3-4):

Our father died in the wilderness, and he was not among the company of them that gathered themselves together against the Lord in the company of Korah, but he died in his own sin; and he had no sons. Why should the name of our father be done away from among his family, because he had no son? Give unto us a possession among the brethren of our father.

So Moshe brings their case to God, and God says to Moshe that they should be allowed to possess their father’s land.

A while back I reviewed an essay in a book called Torah of the Mothers. One of the essays in this book, written by Sarah Idit (Susan) Schneider, discusses “The Daughters of Tzlafchad: Toward a New Methodology of Attitude Around Women’s Issues”. I can’t share the entire essay with you; for that, you will need to read the book yourself. However, I can relate to you some of the highlights of the essay, especially the ones I found compelling.

Why is it that women look to the example of the daughters of Tzlafchad? Sarah Schneider suggests they got their timing correct (they asked Moshe at the right time), and they asked in a respectful manner. She quotes Bava Batra 119b as a source for these attributes of their petition, and she further states that they trusted in God.

But it is not just the daughters of Tzlafchad that got something right here. Moshe, too, showed his exemplary behavior as their leader, in that he had empathy for their dilemma. He respected their love of the land, and so he prayed for a favorable verdict. Sarah Schneider writes:

The Torah is teaching a powerful lesson to the Rabbis of today. If they are to imitate Moshe (which they must strive to do) then they must find a place of deep and authentic compassion for the women who approach them with halakhic petitions. Their empathy should be so compelling that it moves them to prayer.

To me, as I review Sarah’s essay, I find the key here is the connection, the relationship. The Daughters of Tzlafchad had a certain basic trust in Moshe, and he had an understanding, an empathy for their needs. It is important to show respect for a leader; at the same time, for someone to be a true leader, the person needs to be a true listener.

Jerusalem in Ruins

Over 2000 years ago, Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian forces breached the walls of Jerusalem after many years of siege. So today observant Jews around the world fast, a fast called the 17th of Tammuz. It is hard for me to be sad on this day; my family greatly enjoyed visiting Jerusalem recently, and I had the opportunity to photograph ruins such as this one. But I can be contemplative. Yes, contemplative, that is a good word for today.

Jameel has more bad stuff that happened today. And hope for redemption.

Fuzzy Wuzzy wuz a Hyrax

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:

• Ibex
• Tristram’s Grackle (a bird)

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.

Tsefat Photos

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.

When Ancient is New

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:

1. What did 98% of people do (for a living) in the times of David?
2. What do 60% of people do today (what motion with his hands did Oren make for this question)?

City of David website