Jerusalem Day in the Old City

A. and I celebrated Jerusalem Day, appropriately enough, with a visit to Jerusalem’s Old City. (The Old City is only a small portion of modern-day Jerusalem, which I can only describe as one great traffic-congested mass of urban sprawl.) The Old City has been continuously inhabited for nearly five millennia, which sometimes leads people to believe that the walls that currently enclose it are ancient, but in fact they were only built some 470 years ago by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Each of the Old City’s four sides is about 3,000 feet (900 meters) long; Mark Twain noted that “a fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour.” There are seven gates in the walls through which one can enter: the New Gate, Damascus Gate (where Mark Twain entered), and Herod’s Gate on the north; Lion’s Gate on the east; the Dung and Zion gates on the south; and Jaffa Gate on the west. (A. and I entered first through the Jaffa Gate, but we made it a point to enter or exit through each of the seven gates at least once during the course of the day.) An eighth gate on the eastern side, the Golden Gate, is sealed, but according to Jewish legend it is through this gate that the Moshiach (Messiah) will enter the city. Mark Twain described it this way: “the Golden Gate, in the temple wall … was an elegant piece of sculpture in the time of the temple and is even so yet. From it, in ancient times, the Jewish high priest turned loose the scapegoat and let him flee into the wilderness and bear away his twelve-month load of the sins of the people. [Twain is referring to the Biblical rite described in Leviticus 16 –W.Y.] … The Muslims watch the Golden Gate with a jealous eye, and an anxious one, for they have an honored tradition that when it falls, Islamism will fall, and with it the Ottoman Empire.” The Ottoman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate (which Al-Qaeda wants to resurrect) fell after the First World War, but the Golden Gate remains standing. Here is a picture of it today:

When Mark Twain entered the Old City in 1867, he was struck by the narrowness of the streets. They were so narrow, he said, that he saw cats jump across them from one porch roof to another, and “the cats could have jumped double the distance without extraordinary exertion.” He adds that such streets were obviously “too narrow for carriages.” In this respect, the Old City hasn’t changed much. A few of the streets are just wide enough to accommodate automobiles in single file, which force pedestrians to dodge out of the way and press themselves up against the buildings on the left and right, but many of the streets (like the one below) are not more than eight or ten feet across.

Mark Twain writes that the population of Jerusalem was 14,000 in his time. Today Jerusalem – and here I mean the entire city, not just the Old City – has 724,000 residents. That is roughly ten percent of Israel’s entire population, making Jerusalem the largest city in the country. In 1867, according to Twain, the city’s population was “composed of Muslims, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants.” These same groups are present today, though the proportions may be different (and the Abyssinians one sees now are usually Jewish Israelis who immigrated from Ethiopia). Jews were already the largest single religious group in Jerusalem by the third quarter of the 19th century, they became an absolute majority by the late 19th century, and they formed an overwhelming majority of the city’s population by 1946. Ironically, however, the Jewish proportion of the city’s population has declined since 1967, from three-fourths to about two-thirds today. The rest of the city’s population, for those who may be wondering, is mostly Muslim (32%) with a tiny smattering of Christians (2%).

A. and I began our day with a three-hour walking tour of the Old City. Mark Twain and his traveling companions called all of their tour guides Ferguson because they couldn’t pronounce or remember foreign names. Our tour guide was an elderly gentleman named Asher – easy to say and remember, so we had no need to give him a new name – who had come to Israel from Cologne, Germany, before Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Asher took us through the Old City counterclockwise from Jaffa Gate through the Armenian Quarter, whose main attraction is the St. James Cathedral; on to the Jewish Quarter, where we viewed the Cardo (once the main thoroughfare of Jerusalem when, under Roman rule, it was renamed Aelia Capotolina and Jews were forbidden to live here), the Hurva Synagogue (now being rebuilt), and the Kotel (known in English as the Western or Wailing Wall); through the shouk (market) in the Muslim Quarter; and then west along the Via Dolorosa (“Sorrowful Way”) to the Christian Quarter, whose most prominent site is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Here is a section of the Cardo, four meters below present-day street level. Mark Twain did not see and does not mention the Cardo because it was not until a century after his visit that Israeli archaeologists found, excavated, and partly restored it.

Here is the Hurva Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter. It served as Jerusalem’s main Ashkenazi synagogue until Jordanian soldiers destroyed it during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Although the original synagogue was standing when Mark Twain visited Jerusalem (his contemporary Moses Montefiore had visited it the year before and donated a silver breastplate for one of the Torah scrolls), Twain doesn’t mention it. The Hurva Synagogue is now being rebuilt and is scheduled to be completed by next year, but knowing how things operate in Israel, there will probably be delays.

Here is the pièce de résistance of the Jewish Quarter: the Western Wall (Kotel in Hebrew), a part of the supporting wall of the Temple Mount that remained intact after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 C.E.

For Jews, it is sacred not only because it is a remnant of the Temple, but also because it is close to where the Holy of Holies once stood (the innermost and most sacred part of Solomon’s Temple, which held the Ark of the Covenant), a place from which it said the Shekhinah (Divine Presence) never departed. After the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jews from the Land of Israel, it became a site of mourning, which is how it acquired the moniker “Wailing Wall.” Under Muslim rule, Arabs humiliated Jews and provided them with additional reasons for wailing by sometimes dumping garbage at the Wall. Mark Twain described it this way: “At that portion of the ancient wall of Solomon’s Temple which is called the Jew’s Place of Wailing, and where the Hebrews assemble every Friday to kiss the venerated stones and weep over the fallen greatness of Zion, anyone can see a part of the unquestioned and undisputed Temple of Solomon, the same consisting of three or four stones lying one upon the other, each of which is about twice as long as a seven-octave piano and about as thick as such a piano is high.” You may have noticed that the Western Wall is now higher than he describes. That is because the ground in front of the Kotel was excavated in 1968 to expose two buried courses of stone. Today eight courses of massive Herodian stones from the Second Temple period are visible below four layers of smaller stones added in the eighth century. Twain adds that when he entered the Al-Aksa Mosque, he saw there built into the walls “costly marbles that once adorned the inner temple [of Solomon].” These marbles, he wrote, bore “a richer interest than the solemn vastness of the stones the Jews kiss in the Place of Wailing.” I cannot say, since today only Muslims are allowed inside the mosque. One last thing I will add about the Kotel: Mark Twain complained about the ubiquitous throngs of beggars constantly demanding baksheesh in Jerusalem. They are nearly all gone now – except for a few shnorrers at the Kotel who noodge you for tzedakah so incessantly that it’s hard to find a quiet moment to pray.

Mark Twain provides a very funny account of retracing the Via Dolorosa – he was clearly skeptical of some of the stories and embellishments he heard from his guide – which included a stop at what was purported to be the house of the Wandering Jew. I cannot speak of this mysterious and sorrowful house here – because I did not see it. Perhaps the house was destroyed in 1948 or 1967, or perhaps it’s just too hard to find after so many wandering Jews returned to Israel in the twentieth century.

We ended our walking tour of the Old City at the place Mark Twain visited first: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over the site of the crucifixion of Jesus. (A sepulcher, for any reader who may be wondering, is a vault in which somebody is buried.) Mark Twain devoted an entire chapter of The Innocents Abroad to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which could not have been hard because it’s a huge structure filled with seemingly endless altars, chapels, niches, and relics. Even here, describing one of the most sacred and solemn sites in Christendom, he is unfailingly funny. His general description of the church – “chanting priests in coarse long robes and sandals,” “pilgrims of all colors and many nationalities,” “a somber cathedral gloom freighted with smoke and incense” – remains more or less accurate 141 years later. As in Mark Twain’s time, “monks … perform everywhere – all over the vast building and at all hours. Their candles are always flitting about in the gloom and making the dim old church more dismal than there is any necessity that it should be, even though it is a tomb.” In this setting, he remarked, it was hard to remember that the crucifixion took place outdoors, “in the open air, and not in a gloomy, candlelighted cell in a little corner of a vast church.”

Here is the church from the outside:

At the entrance to the church, Twain saw Turkish guards whose presence, he explains, was necessary to maintain order, “for Christians of different sects will not only quarrel, but fight, also, in this sacred place if allowed to do it…. All sects of Christians (except Protestants) have chapels under the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and each must keep to itself and not venture upon the other’s ground.” “It has been proven conclusively,” he adds wryly, “that they cannot worship together around the grave of the Saviour of the world in peace.” Today the Turkish guards are gone, but Israeli policemen have taken their place and perform the same function.

When Mark Twain entered the church, the first thing he saw was “a marble slab, which covers the Stone of Unction, whereon the Savior’s body was laid to prepare it for burial.”

“Entering the Rotunda,” Mark Twain continues, “we stand before the most sacred locality in Christendom – the grave of Jesus. It is in the center of the church, and immediately under the great dome. It is enclosed in a sort of little temple…. Within the little temple is a portion of the very stone which was rolled away from the door of the Sepulchre” and the sepulcher itself, with “the stone couch on which the dead Saviour lay.” Twain was somewhat disappointed upon entering the sepulcher; he described it as “scandalized by trumpery, gewgaws, and tawdry ornamentation.” I cannot comment on the sepulcher myself, because A. and I did not have the patience to stand in the long line of pilgrims waiting to view it.

“When one enters the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” Mark Twain wrote, “the Sepulchre itself is the first thing he desires to see, and really is almost the first thing he does see. The next thing he has a strong yearning to see is the spot where the Saviour was crucified…. It is the crowning glory of the place.” Unfortunately, I can’t show it here because the monks don’t allow photographs. It occurred to me that taking photographs has now replaced the practice of chipping off pieces of monuments and relics as the preferred method of obtaining souvenirs. (Mark Twain has some very funny and disapproving things to say about all the chipping that his traveling companions did.) Graffiti, however, seems to have lost none of its appeal; A. and I spotted plenty of graffiti in the church, some of it dating back to the nineteenth century (no, I didn’t see Mark Twain’s name), and some of it more recent.

One other thing about the church is worth noting. “It is a singular circumstance,” Mark Twain wrote, “that right under the roof of this same great church … Adam himself, the father of the human race, lies buried.” “How touching it was,” he adds, “here in a land of strangers, far away from home and friends and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation.” A. and I thought we had found Adam’s tomb in the church, but a Russian tour guide told us that we were mistaken, so were unable to pay our respects to dear old Grandpa Adam.

After leaving the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and taking a break for lunch in the Jewish Quarter, A. and I exited the Old City and stumbled on to Zedekiah’s Cave, also known as King Solomon’s Quarry, and paid a few shekels to enter. The cave runs under what is now the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. This is another place that Mark Twain didn’t see and didn’t describe, perhaps because the Ottoman authorities forbade people to enter the cave after an American missionary rediscovered it in 1854. Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, is said to have fled into the cave when the Babylonians besieged Jerusalem. Before that, the cave is said to have been the quarry for King Solomon’s Temple, which is how it acquired its other name. I have to admit that A. and I, behaving a little like Mark Twain’s souvenir-hunting traveling companions, pocketed a few rocks from the quarry. Here is A., fearlessly leading the way down:

After exiting King Solomon’s Quarry with our precious load of stones, A. and I spotted some interesting-looking tombs in the Kidron Valley. (The Kidron Valley runs along the eastern wall of the Old City and separates the Temple Mount from the Mount of Olives.) When we asked a couple of young Israeli soldiers what these structures were, they shrugged and said (indisputably) “some dead people.” Perhaps inspired by the new Indiana Jones movie, I convinced A. to climb down into the valley to explore the tombs with me. Only later did we discover that they were the tomb of Absalom and the tomb of Zechariah. You will remember Absalom and Zechariah, no doubt. Absalom was King David’s third and favorite son, who revolted (unsuccessfully) against his father, and Zechariah was the son of the Jewish high priest who denounced his king and his people for their rebellion against G-d and then, for his troubles, was stoned to death (2 Chronicles 24:20). After discovering whose tombs these were, I felt a little badly about sitting so cavalierly on poor old Zechariah’s tomb. He deserves better. Mark Twain, by the way, mentions riding through the Valley of Jehoshaphat (the Kidron Valley) on horseback and seeing the tombs of Absalom and Zechariah, but only in passing.

Here is the Tomb of Absalom:

And here is the Tomb of Zechariah:

Toward dusk, we returned to Jaffa Gate to watch what seemed like an endless crowd of young people streaming into the Old City to celebrate Jerusalem Day. They came to walk through the liberated Old City, where for nearly twenty years (1948 to 1967) Jews were denied access, and to gather at the Kotel – once called the Wailing Wall – to sing and dance.

I have to admit that I found this spectacle more moving than any ancient relic or Biblical monument. Never have I seen so many joyous and happy Jews assembling together in one place, and the city seemed positively charged with what Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence.” Without a doubt, this is the single biggest difference between the Jerusalem of Mark Twain’s time and today. “Jerusalem,” he wrote, “is mournful and dreary and lifeless.” No description could be further from the truth on Jerusalem Day.

Arrival in Jerusalem

On Sunday A. and I left Tel Aviv for a four-day excursion in Jerusalem. I taught on Sunday afternoon and Tuesday afternoon, which meant that it was partly a work excursion for me, but mostly it was a pleasure trip. For A., it was especially exciting because she hadn’t been to Jerusalem before. We arrived in the afternoon and went straight to the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus, where we had made reservations at the Maiersdorf Guest House. Toward dusk, we took a brief unguided tour of the campus, including an outdoor amphitheater with a beautiful panoramic view, and crashed an outdoor party and reception for the university’s board of governors. The reception was crowded, so it wasn’t hard for us to blend in and nosh on the food that was laid out for the guests.

Perhaps here is a good place to say a few words about the university where I have been teaching and its location. Mount Scopus, known in Hebrew as הַר הַצּוֹפִים (Har Hatzofim), rises to a height of 2,684 feet (826 meters) above sea level. It has rightly been described as a site of incomparable beauty and impressiveness, affording breathtaking views of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the hills of Judea, the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea, and the Mountains of Moab. Because it is high ground close to Jerusalem, Mount Scopus has been strategically important for the defense of the city since ancient times. The Roman armies that conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple camped here in the year 70 of the Common Era, and the Crusaders followed suit a thousand years later.

The foundation stones for the Hebrew University were laid on Mount Scopus in 1918, and I take special pride in noting that a Goldberg (American author Isaac Goldberg) purchased the land for the site. Albert Einstein gave the first lecture here in 1923 – he lectured on his theory of relativity and spoke the first sentences in Hebrew – and the university officially opened in 1925. Like the New School for Social Research in New York (another institution with which I have some acquaintance), the Hebrew University provided a haven for scholars and scientists fleeing the Nazis. During Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Mount Scopus was the scene of an infamous ambush in which Arab forces murdered a civilian convoy of doctors, nurses, and students delivering medical supplies to the university’s Hadassah Hospital. At the war’s end (or rather cease-fire), Mount Scopus became an Israeli-controlled but demilitarized area within Jordanian territory that was inaccessible to Israeli teachers and students, and the university relocated to Givat Ram in the Israeli-controlled sector of Jerusalem. After the Six Day War reunited Jerusalem under Israeli rule in 1967, the Hebrew University was able to return to Mount Scopus, and it now uses both campuses. I heard an amazing story from a young scholar at the Hebrew University a few months ago, the kind of amazing story that one can only hear in Israel, about a relative of his who taught at the Hebrew University before the 1948 war. The professor, who had to flee his office during the fighting, returned nearly twenty years later to find the book he had left on his desk still open at the same page.

Here is a photo of yours truly taken from the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, with Jerusalem visible in the background. (The gold dome to the right is the Dome of the Rock; it stands on Mount Moriah, the site where Abraham came near to sacrificing his son Isaac and where King Solomon's Temple once stood.)

Following our informal, early evening tour of the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus, A. and I decided to take a bus into Jerusalem and have dinner at the famous Ticho House. Once the home of the painter Anna Ticho (one of whose pictures was hanging in our room at the Maiersdorf Guest House) and her husband Dr. Abraham Ticho, it is now a well-known gallery and café. Here is A. at the entrance to the Ticho House:

On the way, we passed another famous house: the home of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of modern Israel (and one of the many luminaries present during the opening ceremony of the Hebrew University in 1925). Here is the entrance to his house:

From the windows of the house we heard beautiful singing, which reminded us that our visit to Jerusalem happily coincided with Jerusalem Day, the anniversary of the liberation and unification of Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty in 1967. (For readers who might prefer to describe Israel as an occupier rather than a liberator of Jerusalem, it is perhaps worth pointing out here that the Jordanians – who seized control of the Old City and most of east Jerusalem in 1948 – were occupiers, too. In the 1947 U.N. partition plan, Jerusalem was to be a “separate entity” under a governor appointed by the U.N., but this plan was never implemented. In fact, the whole history of Jerusalem has been the history of one conquest and occupation after another, making it difficult to find an “unoccupied” point in time which one could restore or to which one might return.) Arriving at the Ticho House, we found it closed for a private party, but we had a superb dinner at El Gaucho, a kosher Argentinean steak house not far from there. At the end of the evening, we shared a taxi cab back to Mount Scopus with two young American students who were studying at the Hebrew University, one of whom had made aliyah (immigrated to Israel). Upon our return to the guest house, we were tired but well satisfied with our first day in Jerusalem.

Let Gaza Students Go to U.S.

Haaretz reports that eight Palestinian students in Gaza lost their Fulbright scholarships to pursue advanced degrees in the United States because the Israeli government denied them exit visas. This denial is unjust, foolish, and short-sighted. If Israeli policymakers want to discourage hatred and extremism among Palestinians, this goal would best be served by facilitating rather than closing off opportunities to study in the United States.

Right-wing Knesset member Yuval Steinitz (a member of the opposition Likud Party) offered this flimsy and utterly unconvincing justification for the government’s refusal to grant exit visas: “We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges. So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior.” Not only is Steinitz’s statement a non sequitur, it is also the same reasoning used by some British trade unionists to justify a blacklist (misleadingly described as a “boycott”) of Israeli academics and their institutions. The principle espoused by Steinitz and the British boycotters is the same: that scholars should be punished for the policies of the governments under which they live. As my union has pointed out (here and here), this is a dangerous notion that all educators ought to oppose, out of professional interest as well as moral considerations.

To Israel’s credit, the move has stirred up criticism and opposition here, even from the right. Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, political prisoner, and activist in the campaign to free Soviet Jewry, who is considered quite hawkish (he opposed Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005), spoke eloquently about the foolishness of the decision. “We correctly complain that the Palestinian Authority is not building civil society,” he said, “but when we don’t help build civil society this plays into the hands of Hamas. The Fulbright is administered independently, and people are chosen for it due to their talents.” The chairman of the Knesset’s education committee also spoke out against the decision, criticizing it as “collective punishment” that was “not in keeping with international standards or with the moral standards of Jews, who have been subjected to the deprivation of higher education in the past.” The New York Times reports that the education committee has asked Olmert’s government and the military to “reconsider the policy and get back to it within two weeks.” Let’s hope this bad precedent is overturned before it causes any more harm.

Following in Mark Twain's Footsteps

As I mentioned in my inaugural post, I began reading Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad when I came to Israel in January. The book is essentially a travelogue of a five-month “pleasure excursion” that Twain took to Europe and Palestine in 1867; he wrote it for a San Francisco newspaper, which in return paid for his fare on the steamship Quaker City. I am now nearly finished with the book -- it has taken me roughly as long to read it as Twain took to travel through Europe and Palestine, so I almost feel as though I have been reading his travel reports in “real time.” I highly recommend it; it’s interesting and very funny, so much so that it sometimes made me laugh out loud.

Now that A. and I are planning some “pleasure excursions” of our own in modern-day Israel, I had the bright idea of revisiting some of the places that Twain describes and comparing notes with him here, in my own on-line travelogue. I thought of it as a kind of “virtual dialogue.” Since The Innocents Abroad was an inspiration for this blog, it seemed only fitting to follow in his footsteps. And by now, after reading some 430 pages of Twain’s travel reports, I feel like I’ve been one of his traveling companions and have gotten to know him over the past five months. Reading a new chapter feels a little like receiving a letter from a friend.

Once I began to think through this idea, however, it dawned on me that it wouldn’t be as easy as I thought. For one thing, some of the places that Twain visited simply don’t exist anymore. For instance, in chapter 46 he describes Lake Hule, the Biblical “Waters of Merom.” However, Israel drained Lake Hule and its surrounding swamps in the 1950s for agricultural purposes. A small portion of the lake and swamp region was re-flooded as part of a restoration project in the 1990s, creating present-day Lake Agmon, but it is much smaller and shallower than the original lake.

Another problem is that many of the sites Twain visited are located in the West Bank. He “stopped to lunch” at Shechem, the site of Joseph’s Tomb and Jacob’s Well, which is now the Palestinian city of Nablus. (Israelis are currently not allowed to visit Joseph’s Tomb, which Palestinians vandalized and demolished in 2000. [For two updates on Joseph's Tomb since this post was originally published, see here and here. -W.Y., June 13.] Incidentally, Nablus is also the home of the Samaritans, whom Twain describes and who still live there.) Twain “passed Shiloh, where the Ark of the Covenant rested three hundred years,” and which is now the site of an Israeli settlement and the Palestinian town Turmus Ayya, 28 miles north of Jerusalem on Route 60. Twain visited the “shapeless mass of ruins” at Bethel (“it was here that Jacob lay down and had that superb vision of angels”), about 10 miles north of Jerusalem, which is now the site of the Palestinian village of Beitin and an adjacent Israeli settlement. Twain even camped at Jenin, which achieved notoriety during the second intifada as a major source of suicide bombers, provoking an Israeli military incursion in 2002. I’m not too keen on traveling to any of those places in light of the latest travel warning from the U.S. State Department: “The security environment in the West Bank remains volatile. Violent demonstrations, kidnappings, and shootings are unpredictable and can occur without warning. The Department of State urges Americans to defer travel to the West Bank at this time.” Mark Twain had much less to worry about; he feared the “quixotic heroism” of his traveling companions more than the “fierce Bedouins” that supposedly lay in wait for them: “They have their hands on their pistols all the time, and every now and then, when you least expect it, they snatch them out and take aim at Bedouins who are not visible, and draw their knives and make savage passes at other Bedouins who do not exist. I am in deadly peril always, for these spasms are sudden and irregular, and of course I cannot tell when to be getting out of the way.” I only wish the terrorists of today were as imaginary as Twain's Bedouins.

Even if A. and I can’t revisit all the places that Mark Twain describes, we can at least go to some of them: Banyas, Capernaum, Tiberias and the nearby “ancient warm baths” (now part of the Hamat Gader Park), the “Plain of Esdraelon” (the Jezreel Valley), Nazareth, and of course Jerusalem. We start with Jerusalem next week!

Final grades are in!

Received yesterday in the mail from Tel Aviv University (click on the letter to enlarge it):

It's the report card I've been expecting for my Hebrew class! As you can see, the university informs students of their final grades in Hebrew only, which makes the report card the real test of how much they've learned. Despite some unfamiliar words and bad penmanship (can you believe my chutzpah, chiding sabras for their poor handwriting?), it was not hard to understand the gist of it. In brief, I earned 98% for the intensive four-week ulpan that began in mid-January and 97% in the longer but less intensive follow-up course from February to May. I'm still far from fluent, but I'm reasonably sure those grades are high enough that my colleagues in Wisconsin won't consider revoking my tenure.

(Lag Ba-Omer) לַ״ג בָּעֹמֶר

Lag ba-Omer, a minor Jewish holiday commemorating the cessation of a plague that killed 24,000 disciples of the great Rabbi Akiva, began last Thursday night and continued on Friday. According to one interpretation, the “plague” is in fact a coded reference to the Romans, who bloodily suppressed a Jewish revolt in Rabbi Akiva’s time and eventually murdered the rabbi himself in a particularly cruel and gruesome way that I won’t describe here. The cessation of the plague, accordingly, may refer to a temporary Jewish victory over the Romans in the struggle for national independence and political sovereignty. The name of the holiday simply means the 33rd day (33 was written with the Hebrew letters לג before the adoption of Arabic numerals) of the Omer (the period between the holidays of Passover and Shavuot).

In modern Israel, Lag ba-Omer is a school holiday celebrated with bonfires in the evening (mainly lit by kids and teenagers) and picnics the next day. A. and I were in Rehovot having dinner with some Israeli friends of ours on Thursday evening, but from the balcony of their thirteenth-floor apartment we could see lots of bonfires springing up down below. We saw more bonfires on the beach in Tel Aviv when we returned home. Apparently, it’s customary for children and teenagers to begin pilfering wood from construction sites weeks before the holiday, which led the Tel Aviv Municipality to supply firewood this year. No word yet on whether it reduced pilfering. I tried to take some photos of the bonfires, but none of them came out well.

Lag ba-Omer became known as the “Scholar’s Festival” in the Middle Ages, apparently because the merrymaking of rabbinical students was especially enthusiastic. (Ironically, Akiva was said to be not only unlearned in his early years -- an עם הארץ [am ha-aretz or ignoramus] – but also a bitter enemy of scholars: “When I was an עם הארץ I said, ‘Had I a scholar in my power, I would maul him like an ass’” [Pes. 49b]. No doubt a few of my students and colleagues have had the same thought about me.) A. and I, scholars that we are (though of a secular sort), decided to celebrate the “Scholar’s Festival” with a picnic in the Yarkon Park on Friday. Here are a few pictures of our excursion.

The park:

The scholars:





And the best snack food ever, "Bambah":

Opening of the Second Semester

It has been a busy week in ארץ ישראל (the Land of Israel). While Palestinian rockets continued to slam into southern Israel, the President of the United States came to visit the country (he did not call on us), and Israeli President Shimon Peres hosted the "Jewish Davos" in Jerusalem (we did not receive an invitation, but our friend S. went). Traffic in Jerusalem, reported J. J. Goldberg, which is "impossible on a good day," became downright hopeless. This enraged residents, making the City of Peace decidedly less placid. Yet through some act of divine providence, I managed to avoid this balagan (mess) despite making two trips to Jerusalem on Sunday and Tuesday.

I went to Jerusalem to begin teaching my sociology class at the Hebrew University. The spring semester, postponed because of the university lecturers' strike earlier this year, is just now beginning. I have a very small group of students: only four so far, though a fifth showed up for the second meeting and may join the class. All of them are Israeli, though one was born in America and made aliyah (immigrated to Israel) a few years ago. Despite the small size and the worries expressed by some of them about their English-language proficiency, we had a great discussion about the liberal tradition in America. (I mean classical liberalism, the kind that sought to maximize individual liberty by means of limited government, the rule of law, and a competitive market economy. For a bit of background, see this brief tribute to Louis Hartz that Alan Wolfe wrote for The New York Times three years ago.) Interestingly, despite plenty of historical evidence of illiberal and inegalitarian practices in American history, all of my students defended the Hartzian thesis of a "liberal consensus" in America and rejected the rival "multiple traditions thesis" propounded by the political scientist Rogers Smith (namely, that liberalism is only one of several traditions that constitute American political culture, none of which is dominant). Nobody in America but us liberals? Perhaps my Israeli students idealize America a little; I suspect they are more critical of their own country than they are about America.

The resumption of my teaching role this week coincided with the conclusion of my student role, conveniently sparing me from any potential "role conflicts" (as sociologists say). I had my last Hebrew class and final exam at Tel Aviv University last Wednesday, but I won't know how I did until later this week. As my friend M. pointed out, "It's humorous that, as a tenured Wisconsin sociologist, you're taking a final exam in some course and awaiting your grade in the mail! But thank God, at least, you won't have to wake up early anymore." I am indeed elated that I will no longer have to wake up at the unholy hour of 6:45 a.m., though I will miss the class, my teacher, and my fellow students (mostly American undergrads, whom I found very likeable). I hope the experience has benefited me in ways that will outlast the class itself. Besides improving my Hebrew language skills, I think it has made me more sensitive and sympathetic to the anxieties and concerns that my Israeli students expressed about reading, writing, and speaking in a second language. With my own experiences in mind, I tried to be especially careful to listen patiently to each of them. Who knows, with an attitude like that in a city where patience is in such short supply, maybe I'll get an invitation to the next "Jewish Davos."