Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

I have not updated my blog in nearly one month.  My initial plan was to simply describe, in the simple style of a travelogue, my final weekend in Israel, and my return to North America.  The kidnapping of the three Israeli settler teens from Hebron had occurred shortly before my departure, and the search was still underway when I left.  Before I had even had time to recover from my flight, they had been found to have been murdered, and around 150 rockets had been fired from Gaza into Israel.  In response to a friend's repeated anti-Israel posts on Facebook, I then resolved instead to write about terror and the ongoing occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, in an attempt to show that Palestinian Arabs were not the only victims, that many Zionists such as myself condemn the actions of the תג מחיר (Price Tag) vandals regularly committing hate crimes against Palestinian Arabs.  I began composing such a post, but then left Ithaca rather immediately and without much premeditation, and was away from my keyboard for nearly a week.  It was while I was visiting friends in New Jersey, New York City, and Philadelphia that war broke out, and I first heard the phrase "Operation Protective Edge," or, in the original Hebrew, "מִבְצָע צוּק אֵיתָן."  Although I returned to Ithaca, I was overwhelmed with material, personal and geopolitical, and, also prioritized finding a job for the coming year over my literary pursuits.  Now that I have found a job, and the IDF has launched a land operation in Gaza, I feel compelled to publish my thoughts on the newest horrific chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian.

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On Thursday morning, I listened to the report on the radio of the Israeli Air Force bombing of a mostly-empty beach, lacking any apparent military targets, or even civilian buildings converted for military use.  The beach was located near a hotel where a large number of international war correspondents were residing, hence the series of heartbreaking photos that emerged following the killing.  According to the New York Times article issued that same day, "the Israeli military acknowledged later that it had launched the strike, which it said was aimed at Hamas militants, and called the civilian deaths 'a tragic outcome.'"  Although I agree that the murder of the four Arab children is certainly "tragic," I cannot possibly comprehend how four children in beach clothes could possibly be mistaken for the scarf-wearing, gun-bearing Hamas militants firing rockets at Israel.

This brings me to an important point.  Among defenders of Israel's occupation of Gaza, as well as of Operation Protective Edge (and before that, Operations Pillar of Cloud and Cast Lead) is that Israel's military is morally clean, even to the point of being immaculate.  I could chose among dozens of quotations, past and present, but I will content myself with citing President Peres, who said the other day, following the foiling of Hamas's terror tunnel, "There is no more humane army than the IDF."  Mr. President, your statement is empty of meaning.  I do not care if you find Tzahal less repugnant than the rest of the world's armies; even if that oft-repeated claim were to be true, it merely shows that warfare, no matter who conducts is, is brutal and inhumane by its very nature.

IDF Propaganda attempting to create a strong moral
dichotomy between the IDF and Hamas.

There is plenty of IDF propaganda attempting to show how dronestrikes avoid populated area (this video is an excellent example).  Those of you who are regular readers might remember the Security and Diplomacy Shabbaton of November, 2013, when I met Colonel Bentzi Gruber, a sub-commander in the IDF Reserves who has around 20,000 soldiers serving under him.  His talk was about "Ethics in the Field," and he tried to give the audience an idea of what it is like, as a soldier and officer in the IDF, to be in charge of protecting Israel from rocket fire, suicide bombs, and other terror threats.  Bentzi was a highly competent communicator, and although he was clearly convinced of the importance of his work, he did not present himself as overtly emotional. Some of the topics that he discussed included the blockade of Gaza, Gaza's economic reliance on Israel, Israel drone strikes and the warnings it gives beforehand, Israel's policy regarding demolishing houses, the use of U.N. ambulances by terrorists, PA and Gaza school curricula, medical treatment of terrorists, Israel's targeted assassinations of terrorist leaders, the IDF's anti-suicide-bomber-car tactics, and his own portrayal as a war criminal.  After the talk, I asked the Colonel whether people were ever injured in the IDF's tactic of "knocking on the roof" (the dropping of smaller bombs on houses where Hamas hides weapons, and that are still occupied by their civilian owners) that he had described to us, and his response was bluster.  Afterwards, one of the facilitators commented on my question, saying that of course civilians are injured in "knocking on the roof."  The IDF is not going to publish and circulate its civilian casualties, and any person relying entirely on Facebook updates by the IDF for their most accurate news of the conflict is denying the IDF bullets and bombs that have already killed too many Gaza civilians, of all ages, and of both sexes.
  Describing the initial occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip following their capture in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that "Israelis liked to believe, and tell the world, that they were running an 'enlightened' or 'benign' occupation, qualitatively different from other military occupations the world had seen.  The truth was radically different.  Like all occupations, Israel's was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation" (Righteous Victims, 341).  (As a volunteer working in the English Center in Ramla, I had the opportunity to help teach a group of Arab teenagers who were the children of such informants.  Their lives had been severely disrupted because of their parents' involvement, and, to be frank, none of them had any chance of a decent score on the Bagrut, Israel's matriculation exam taken at the end of high school.)  As a student of history, I cannot think of any campaign across time or space that qualifies as a "clean war," no matter how compelling the ideology motivating one side might have been.  Israeli apologists and American Jews need to get over the fact that Tzahal is an army, and, by the very definition of an army's function, will commit horrible acts of violence upon innocents, children included.  Already, on Friday evening, on the second day of the ground invasion of Gaza, the death tolls among Palestinians has risen to nearly 270 (according to NPR's Evening Edition), 70-80% of whom were civilians, and at least thirty of whom were children.  These statistics alone should make anyone hesitate to make blanket statements in support of Israel.

George Orwell, perhaps my favorite among 20th-century political thinkers, has a penetrating passage concerning warfare and atrocities in his 1943 essay "Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War."  Orwell himself had fought in the war a decade before, had been shot in the neck by the Fascists, and, while recuperating in Britain, wrote Homage to Catalonia, describing his experiences, in the hopes that he could encourage the British to support the Spanish Republicans against Franco's Italian- and German-backed rebellion. Concerning the cruelties in Europe and the war, he wrote "atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence... But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen... The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads — they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late."  We might add that mentally-ill Israeli Zionists set Palestinian teenagers on fire in revenge for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens.  All of these deaths really happened, and the fact that, even while the search for the three teens continued, Arab MKs refused to refer to the event as a "kidnapping," insisting that the teens were merely "missing," is as sure a proof of any of Orwell's thesis that belief in atrocities is determined largely (entirely?) upon political alignment, or simple tribalism.  When I participated in a pro-Israel student rally nearly two years ago in support of Israel's launching of Operation Pillar of Cloud in order to stop rocket fire from Gaza, I honestly wondered how many of my fellow protestors had anything but a vague notion of the events since 2009 (or 1967, or 1948, or 1917, or 1871, or 1492, or 136, or 73, or 516 B.C.E... you get the picture).

Example of IDF Propaganda
cited by Al-Jazeera.  The
sub-text: "civilian houses
are legitimate targets."

The following Al-Jazeera article does, I believe, highlights the subtler messages of IDF propaganda.  The writers explain the Israeli logic that "insofar as Hamas hides weapons in houses (illegitimate), Israel can bomb them as if they were military targets (legitimate). Within this framework, a single function (hiding weapons) out of many existing functions (home, shelter, intimacy, etc) determines the status of an urban site (in our case the house), so that the edifice's form loses its traditional signification.  The question 'when does it become a legitimate military target?' is merely rhetorical. Its real meaning is: 'All houses in Gaza are legitimate targets' since all houses are potentially non-homes."  The authors treat the issue of "human shields" in Gaza as if the "human shields" issue were merely one of lack of alternative places to seek refuge, i.e. that civilians passively acquire the status of "human shield" because the house, school, mosque, or factory where they happen to have taken refuge from the bombings outside is always and only forced upon them by cruel circumstance.  However, although the title of the article is "On 'human shielding' in Gaza," the authors fail to mention how the Hamas leadership encourages civilians to stand on the roof, and to quite literally protect weapon caches with their bare bodies.  In fact, the author makes no mention of why the IDF would have any interest in bombing such a target!  I find Al-Jazeera to be a dependable news source, and I agree completely with the authors' statement that "in the context of contemporary asymmetric warfare, the weak do not have many options. When there are no bomb shelters, people remain at home during extensive bombardment."  The war is very asymmetric, but the writers seem entirely uninterested in the fact that in Gaza, some civilian homes contain stockpiles of arms, and some schools are filled with rockets.

Gaza City has one of the highest population densities in the world, with 5,046 people per square kilometer, more than twenty times the population density of my own capacious home town.  Hamas's weapons stores are scattered indiscriminately, and wherever they hide weapons, civilians are certain to be found nearby.  Let's think for a moment about a man who decides that the best hideaway is near his local mosque (or, better yet, someone else's local mosque), or across the street from his children's school (or, better yet, someone else's children's school).  The graphic below showing the Hamas gathering site should look familiar to you; it's very similar to the graphic released by the IDF in Operation Pillar of Cloud, showing a Fajr-5 launch site in Gaza, located in the very near vicinity of mosques, factories, and a school.  Why the writers of this Al-Jazeera article that protest the bombing of civilian sites fail to mention this reality is beyond me.  

As if the my lack of satisfaction concerning a relatively respectable international media outlet's coverate of events, consider how I view social media reports on Gaza by pro-Palestinian activists, after having read how Hamas instructs its cyber-reporters to describe the war.  The following excerpts are taken from Hamas Interior Ministry's Facebook page.  They include instructions to social media activists reporting on the war: "Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine, before we talk about his status in jihad or his military rank. Don't forget to always add 'innocent civilian' or 'innocent citizen' in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza... Begin [your reports of] news of resistance actions with the phrase 'In response to the cruel Israeli attack,' and conclude with the phrase 'This many people have been martyred since Israel launched its aggression against Gaza...' Avoid publishing pictures of rockets fired into Israel from [Gaza] city centers. This [would] provide a pretext for attacking residential areas in the Gaza Strip. Do not publish or share photos or video clips showing rocket launching sites or the movement of resistance [forces] in Gaza... To the administrators of news pages on Facebook: Do not publish close-ups of masked men with heavy weapons, so that your page will not be shut down [by Facebook] on the claim that you are inciting violence."



Likewise, in case you chose not to view the above video of a Hamas leaders encouraging Palestinians to stand on their roofs in order to protect Hamas weapons with their bodies, the two pictures below should be clear to see.  The first is Hamas propaganda, which states that a "strong people" (apparently a wordplay on Operation Protective Edge's Arabic translation) stands on the roof in times of airstrikes.  All that is needed is to reprint and translate what they are telling their followers to do; no embellishment is necessary.

 As if that weren't enough, the photograph below show Palestinians complying, and doing just what is depicted above:

Did you see my words "these people had it coming to them?"  Is that my message?  If that is what you think, you shouldn't even bother finishing to read my article.  Were the above house to be bombed by the IDF, it would be as much a tragedy as any other bombing killing civilians.  These people are civilians, period.  Complying with Hamas, and sitting on the roof does not transform a civilian into a "legitimate target."  The purpose of these photographs is to show how different the reality of Hamas's "human shields" is from the notion embedded in the Al-Jazeera article.  I do not care if the house in this photograph contains rockets; I would condemn an airstrike.  The existence and capability of the Iron Dome defense system does not exempt the Hamas terrorists shooting rockets out of Gaza at Israeli civilian targets from their actions, i.e. attempted murder, but it is reliable enough to lower the human cost of failing to bomb a bomb-filled, civilian-shielded house.  However, as one of my friends pointed out to me, if Iron Dome were less efficient, Israel might receive more international sympathy, because death Israeli death tolls would be much higher.  The stupidity of the situation is that because Israel defends its civilians so well from rockets from Gaza, "asymmetrical  warfare" becomes the slogan of those who cannot bring themselves to condemn Hamas for its terrorism.

Speaking of rockets, the accompanying graphic from the IDF shows the number of times that Hamas has fired on its own civilian population since the beginning of the conflict.  Hamas's goal is to create havoc, and cause death, no matter who the victim happens to be.  If a Hamas rocket falls in Gaza, it only increases the bitterness and acrimony, the sorrow of wartime, among the civilian population.  If the rocket lands in Israel, then even if the rocket results in zero Israeli casualties, the scream of the Code Red siren, the terror of the 15-second scramble to the nearest bomb shelter, the flash of the Iron Dome interceptor missile launch, and the ensuing explosion of shrapnel generates a deep fear among Israeli civilians, especially the children.


Speaking of children, I left Israel not even three weeks ago, and spent my past year working with elementary and middle school students, who are currently in range of Hamas's rockets.  I lived nowhere near Gaza, and had no reason to fear Qassam missiles throughout the year.  However, according to the teacher with whom I worked, sirens are going off at least once per day in the town where I spent last year working.  If you have read this far in my article, you should know from this that I cannot bring myself to be impartial about the war.  There are quite literally terrorists shooting rockets at my students, the students who were my reason for getting up in the morning, throwing myself into my work and my study of Hebrew each day, and continuing to live in Israel no matter how lonely I felt at times.  These men want nothing more than to kill my students; my ten-year-olds as well as my twelve-year-olds.

I cannot agree with you if you respect the above statement.
My reasons are entirely subjective.  Those are my kids under his fire.

I have just five minutes left before I need because of sundown, so I'll conclude with a few links, and perhaps pursue another, related post, after Shabbat. On Tuesday, the PA refused to allow MaDA (that's the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross) to supply blood to Gaza.  Here is a fascinating video of Egyptian news anchors slamming Hamas leadership.  Yes, I know that Egypt is controlled by Sissi, who hates Hamas because of its MB ties, but the fury of these pro-Palestinian men at the hypocrisy of Hamas is still worth noting. Thank you, Brend♥, for posting this example of orthodox idiocy, callousness, and blatant male chauvinism.  

Oh, and one last piece of propaganda:

I predict that DY, KN, SL, SD, and, perhaps, AM are all going to be annoyed-to-furious with my Zionist bias, and that, likewise, LP, IC, and ES, among others, are going to be irritated with the way I portray IDF airstrikes.  And BF is just going to think that I'm an idiot.

A note on my media sources.  For the above information, I have consulted with, in alphabetical order, Al-Jazeera, Democracy Now, Haaretz, the IDF Facebook page, the Ithaca Journal (a Gannett newspaper), Jerusalem Post, National Public Radio (Morning and Evening Editions), the New York Times, On Point radio, Times of Israel,

~JD

Final Week in Israel

I'm preparing for my last week spent in Israel, at least for the foreseeable future.  I'll be going to work on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week, and I am very much looking forward to seeing my students one last time, during my final week of school.  Among the Israelis whom I have befriended here in Israel, I am not as close to any as I am to my students, many of whom I will very much miss.  My greatest concern is for their continued education.  As I've mentioned in the past in this blog, many of my students come from very disadvantaged families, and the more time I spend with them improving their English skills, the greater their opportunity to improve their own educational and economic chances.  I choose my diction carefully: it is my students who have the opportunity to improve their own selves, all I do is offer them the possibility, in granting them access to a native English speaker who, I hope, has been a good instructor.  Many of the students whom I have taught reject the opportunity that I proffer to them, because they don't realize (or don't care) that it is by excelling in school, learning, and understanding, that they will be able to make their own lives as well as the lives of their families much happier.  Still what will happen next year, when I will not be around to help, to encourage, to guide, and to motivate?  Will my students realize that, although I'm gone, they are still just as capable of excelling?  Those that do understand that will be the ones who continue to improve.

Meanwhile, almost the entire West Bank is being searched high and low by Tzahal for the three kidnapped teenagers from Hebron.  It's been more than a week so far since the three boys went missing, and the Israeli media, especially the right-wing Times of Israel, has been putting the story into its top headlines.  To my grief, if not to my surprise, Tzahal soldiers have already clashed multiple times with protesting Palestinian youth, throwing rocks and homemade bombs.  Israeli soldiers have already killed two Palestinians with live fire, one of them fourteen years old, sent several others to the hospital, arrested several hundred Palestinian men (most of them with ties to Hamas), and damaged hundreds of buildings.  The Palestinian Authority, despite its support of the pursuit of the terrorist abductors, is showing signs of impatience at the thus-fruitless search.  The Israeli government continues to broadcast optimism that the boys are alive and will soon be found, and the international community seems to be condemning the kidnapping as an act of terror.  I'm upset.  Interestingly enough, the story is not very prominent in the U.S. media.  Checking the websites of a few major American newspapers (plus the BBC), I can't find anything about the kidnappings; the only Israel story being featured in the American news seems to be about the Presbyterian divestment (which, unsurprisingly, made top headlines in Times of Israel and Haaretz, but not Jerusalem Post).  I wonder if NPR's "On the Media" will mention anything about this discrepancy.

As if there weren't enough strife in the Middle East already, the radical Sunni uprising in Iraq is getting worse each day.  There are only few thousand insurgents who make up the army of the ISIL (which is sometimes also referred to as ISIS), although reportedly as few as 800 captured Mosul.  In response to their takeover of regions in the north, including Mosul (from which around half-a-million people fled, many of them to the the Kurdistan region), the country's most respected Shi'ite cleric, Ali Sistani, issued a fatwa calling for "all able-bodied Iraqis" to suppress the insurrection.  Although the counter-insurrection (I don't know what else to call it; most members are volunteers, with only a small percentage of the troops made up of Iraqi regulars) speaks the voice of Iraqi unity, by the numbers, it's a Shi'ite force.  There are paramilitary parades in several cities in Iraq.  According to the New York Times article on these events,  "The Mahdi Army rally in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad on Saturday was the largest and most impressive paramilitary display so far, but there were also mass militia parades in other cities, including Najaf and Basra on Saturday, and smaller rallies in Baghdad on Friday, equally motivated by what participants described as patriotic and religious fervor...  as Iraq lurches toward sectarian war, the prominent role of Shiite-dominated militias could also exacerbate sectarian tensions, hardening the sentiments that have allowed the Sunni militants to succeed... Some commanders have been linked to death squads that carried out campaigns of kidnappings and killing against Sunnis, including from hospitals [all italics added for emphasis]."  In other word, what could unfold in Iraq over the coming weeks (and months) is civil war with religious, ethnic, nationalist, and revenge-driven motives.  I don't foresee a happy ending or peaceful situation in Iraq anytime soon.

I remember how, as a freshman in university, I read about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, and about how, in their ignorance and arrogance, the Europeans broke apart and shoved together various regions to be divided among the victors as colonies, dependent kingdoms, and, of course, "mandates."  The creation of Iraq was among the most egregious cases of European hubris; had Wilson, Lloyd-George, and Clemenceau not all had classical educations, they might not have reified "Mesopotamia," and decided that it was a good idea to turn it into a unified country under West-friendly Hashemite client-King Faisal I.  I am, of course, exaggerating the ridiculousness of the situation, and glazing over details, but I truly wonder if the Middle East would not now be a safer, more peaceful place had the Paris Peace Conference been a more democratic process, rather than a foursome of old white men sitting around a table giving away countries that they've never visited, belonging to peoples that they've never even heard of.

On a significantly happier note, my older brother Sam is now engaged!  I'm extremely excited to see him and Sarah again soon, presumably on Drew's wedding, the week after I return. 
I'm looking forward to seeing Becky, as well as the remaining members of my group, one last time before I leave on Thursday evening to visit Eli for my last Shabbat in Israel.  Perrin is going to come over tonight, and I'm hoping to have a pleasant evening with her :).

~JD

Father's Day 2014

JD and Dad at Cornell Graduation, May 2013

Happy Father's Day, everyone!  In Israel, where I'm living right now, Father's Day isn't a "thing" the way it is in the United States.  However, the importance of appreciation doesn't diminish because of geographical distance.  So tonight's (brief) post will be about a few important life lessons that I can attribute to my own Father.  I'm going to try to avoid tautology, and stick to just five concrete ideas and lessons that I can fully attribute to my Dad.


1) Science is a method and an approach, not a collection of facts.  For those of you who don't personally know my Father, or haven't heard me speak about him, my Father is a professor in Cornell Univerity's Department of Plant Biology.  He is, in short, a scientist.  Although the U.S. public education system (New York's, in any case) does a better job than Israel's at informing its students about the fundamentals of science, many people in our society don't really know what "science" is (for my criticism of how the movie industry mis-educates people about science, see this post).  Science is not a list, however accurate, of facts about the natural world.  Science is the method of collecting data; it is a form of empiricism, but not all empiricism is necessarily science.  A true scientist formulates a hypothesis, then designs a replicable experiment, the results of which are capable of disproving her hypothesis.  Aristotle made many empirical observations; however, he never once in his life conducted an experiment.  Aristotle was not a scientist.  Neither were many of the great thinkers of the middle ages, such as Maimonides.  Galileo, by contrast, was a true scientist, and designed and conducted experiments.  He even used a precision water-clock in order to time very exactly his experiments on acceleration.  This lesson which I learned from my Father is something that I encounter time and time again, often when speaking to misinformed people with strong opinions.  Interestingly enough, one of my favorite writers produced a short article addressing just this point, back in 1945, in the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

2) Thoroughly study subjects outside of your own area of expertise.  My Father, as I mentioned, is a biologist.  That being said, he is conversant on a number of other topics, including geology, baseball, linguistics, politics, and various fields of history and literature.  Knowledge broadens the mind, and the more that one knows, even if the material is outside of one's field of expertise, contributes to one's understanding.  It is because of my Father that I make a serious effort to acquire more of the fundamentals of fields other than my own specialty, history.  One of the best classes that I took in university was my course on Vertebrates, out of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.  I distinctly remember that I was the only student in the entire class outside of the sciences, but probably asked more questions than anyone else.  Likewise, readers of this blog probably remember my discussion on the books on physics that I have borrowed from Eli recently, and, back when I had access to a university library, I made it my business to investigate books on topics that seemed interesting, which often proved to be some of the most interesting reads.  I hope that I am not coming off as self-aggrandizing; rather, I am trying to explain how many of my choices to delve into new books and new intellectual topics have been encouraged by my father.

3) Be considerate around the workplace, and don't take your job for granted. On my first day of my first student job, working as an assistant in the archives at the Kheel Center, my Father told me that I should be ready to work hard, act professionally, and do everything that my supervisor asked of me with a smile on my face.  This is what I told myself every single day of my first job, and I believe that, because of this advice, I conducted myself well throughout both of my student jobs; I was a professional, and could not afford to be the child in the room.  Although I sometimes have difficulty maintaining all of my composure in my current job as a teacher, and committed an embarrassing mistake during my first month of work, I have since maintained more control over my emotions, and my expressions thereof.

4) Work hard, and take pride in your work.  I really don't know anybody who works harder than my parents.  My Father devotes many, many hours to his research and to his students.  He very frequently has a six-day workweek, entirely self-imposed, and works late.  The rest of the family always knows when he is aligning sequence of DNA in his office, because we can hear him playing the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.  Although I am prey to distraction, which plagues many others in my generation, I nevertheless try to maintain my focus.

5) When you read, read well.  When you write, write well.  Something that multiple professors of mine in university noted about my work was that it was always very thorough and detailed.  This I attribute entirely to method of reading that I learned from my Father.  I do not know anyone else who is as careful to read every word printed on every page, not missing any of the details.  Regardless of whether the book you are reading is Of Mice and Men or The Mismeasure of Man, the author wrote every word with intention and deliberation, and understanding of a text comes with thorough reading.  This is an appreciation that comes with being a writer and an editor.  Unfortunately, clear writing, as championed by authors such as E.B. White and George Orwell, is incredibly rare.  As someone who peer-reviewed many papers in my years as an undergraduate, I was frequently astonished at the flagrant imprecision and poor syntax of many of my peers, however, gifted they might have been in other fields.  Unfortunately, undergraduate education leaves many students with their writing problems even more engrained, and, according to my Father, who is a painstakingly careful editor of his biology publication, poor writing is especially common among students of the natural sciences.  One of the most memorable moments of my senior year was reading a Nutrition paper (on the metabolic effects of the consumption of green tea) written by my friend Sarah, and being amazed at the high quality of her writing.  Her paper was more clearly-written and more thoroughly-edited than most other papers I had read that year, even when editing Ezra's Archives, Cornell's undergraduate history journal, which demanded a high caliber of writing from its contributors.  George Orwell (of whom my Father is also a reader) has made one of the best statementsof why the clarity of writing is important: "If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy... When you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.  Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."  Let's all try to read a little more slowly, to think a little more clearly, and to write a little more accurately.

Happy Father's Day to all!

~JD

ITF Graduation, English Day at Sapir, and Pride in Tel Aviv

I have just two short weeks left in Israel before I return to the United States.  What can I say?  יש סוף לכל דבר.  I'll soon be moving on to a different stage of my life.  For those of you interested, I now know that I will be spending next year in North America, although where still remains to be seen.
School began again this week, I'm pleased to say, and after six days without my students (due to Shavuot break), I returned to school on Monday.  I had a busy week, and did my best to stay on top of my workload.  My students seemed happy to see me again, too, and some of them behaved surprisingly well.  Throughout the week, more of the school's walls received decoration and embellishment; there seems to have been a real effort to beautify Rambam over the past few months, and it's a much more attractive and colorful building than it was when I first visited it nine month ago.

On Thursday afternoon, ITF Ramla had its graduation ceremony, even though the program doesn't officially end until June 27th.  Veta and I had spent most of our free evening hours together preparing the slideshow for the event.  It was a lot of fun, except for the moment when I thought that I had irretrievably corrupted the entire file (I hadn't).  Guess who fixed my bungling?  There is a reason why the file name of the final version of the show included the acronym VITB: Veta Is The Best.  We watched the video at the Veradim House, then Carmel and Einav drove us to Palmachim Beach in Rishon Letzion.  Carmel brought fruit, and made fondue, and we had a small picnic on the beach.  Alex, Veta, Natalie and I all frisked about a little bit in the Mediterranean, which was quite warm.  Our pedagogical advisor Marsha, as well as Moshe and one of Noach's teachers joined us.  Carmel spoke a little bit about each of us, and handed us our diplomas.  I had my favorite job as tzalam rash'i.  I got quite a few good pictures, thanks partially to my having adjusted my camera's settings ahead of time (check FB, for those interested).  If during the Community Involvement graduation, Juliana and Alex were the most photogenic, Natalie and Alex win this award this time around.  After everyone except Noach and I went to Tel Aviv, I realized that I had forgotten to ask Veta or Alex for the key to my apartment, and was locked out for the night.  Eventually, I ended up spending the evening with Noach, which was fun (I even had the opportunity to annotate his siddur).  When Perrin arrived, she gave me Veta's key, and I arrived back in my apartment at around 12:50 am -- not terrible, really.  Throughout the whole process, I remained calm -- I was in too good of a mood to be upset.

I was up at 6:00 am on Friday morning.  I needed to finish my morning routine in time to catch the morning bus to Sapir school, where Natalie and Perrin were having their English Day.  Alex and I rode the 247 together, and arrived well on time.  Scott (from Petakh Tikvah) and Noah were also at Sapir to help.  I had maybe twenty minutes to meet the Perrin and Natalie's students.  I spoke mostly to the eighth graders.  They were quite diverse; most were chiloni Jews, but there were also a few datim, Christians, and non-Jews.  The level of English (and academics in general) seemed to be, on the whole, higher than that at Rambam, but not as high as that at Ofek (where Noah teaches).  When they realized that I was dati, they gave a surprisingly positive response; it seemed to endear me to them quite quickly.  Noah and I were assigned to help out with a basketball-themed English game, but, unfortunately, there had been a printing error with the schedule, and nobody ever came to our station.  We spoke in English to the older students assigned to help us.  One of them, Dani, seemed quite anxious to continue spending time with us, and when we eventually moved to Scott's soccer station, he ended up running half of the station.  It was a lot of fun to work with Scott.  He's a very friendly, energetic person, and I wish that he were part of our program, so that we would all see him more often.  I think that Natalie and Perrin did a much better job with their English Day than I did with mine.  They were very well-organized and well-prepared, and the activities that they planned were both fun and informative.  Although I do not question that I made a difference while teaching English here, I honestly do believe that the other members of this team are better teachers than I am.  After 10:00 am, we had finished helping, and we all said goodbye to Perrin and Natlie, who needed to assist with a spelling bee, and to Scott, who wanted to remain until the end of the school-day.  Before I left, Scott revealed to me that one of the eighth-graders had offered to sell him marijuana, presumably seriously.  All the more reason that this city needs more volunteers.  Noah returned to Ramla, while Carmel drove Alex and I to Tel Aviv for the Pride Parade.

The atmosphere in Tel Aviv right before and during the parade reminded me a little bit of Slope Day from Cornell.  The main differences were more politicization (I ended up wearing a rainbow-sticker from the Meretz party) and less clothing.  But the event was a real party.  Unfortunately, there was less of a cohesive message than I had expected (there were no speeches about human rights, about harassment in school, about restrictions on marriage, etc.), and, like Slope Day, it was a whirlwind of colorful clothing, loud music, and alcohol.  Carmel had to leave, and we never met with Veta and Maor, but Alex, Alex's boyfriend Dennis, Alex's co-worker Lior, Lior's cousin, and I all marched together.  I was still wearing the button-down shirt and dress pants that I wore to school that day, and because of that and my kippah, I attracted a lot of interest from passers-by, who thought that I was gay and dati (they were only half-correct), because, unfortunately, there aren't many dati gays or allies in Israel.  To me, this is perplexing, to say the least.   As an American Jew, I am accustomed to Jews taking especial interest in causes of social justice, especially younger Jews, of my own generation.  Several people asked to take my picture (or just took pictures without asking), and one person even had Alex and Lior pose for a picture kissing me.  I had an enjoyable time, and it lightened my heart to see Alex excited by the drag-queens, etc.  I headed back to Ramla at around 3:00 pm, went shopping for fruit, and then, tired and sweaty, returned to Ramla for the evening, taking one of the most welcome showers of the day.  I went to synagogue in the evening, and was so exhausted that I fell asleep at around 10:00 pm, while Alex was at Maggie's birthday party.

I spent most of today, Shabbat, reading Homo Mysticus, which I have nearly finished.  I only have two more Shabbatot here in Israel, and two more weeks of school.  I am becoming increasingly anxious to return to the United States, especially due to recent developments.

Love from Israel

~JD

חלב ודבש וחברים

Shavuot has just passed, and it's now Veta's birthday, another important festivity.  I continued to count the Omer right up to day forty-nine, although there's a small possibility that I forgot to count to seventeen.  School and Hebrew both continue fairly well, although I know that they will both soon end; or, more specifically, when I am back in the United States, they will both continue in significantly altered forms.  Also, I've had to say some goodbyes in the past few days; you'll here all about this presently.

To begin with, after Ulpan on Thursday (May 29th), I collapsed in my apartment.  More specifically, I collapsed on a fantastic book about spacetime that Eli had lent me, entitled The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene.  If this name and topic sound familiar to you regular readers of this blog, it's likely because I wrote a review of another one of Professor Greene's books, The Elegant Universe, after my time serving in Sar-El.  The Fabric of the Cosmos, despite overlapping slightly in theme, is nevertheless an altogether different book than The Elegant Universe, and although I greatly admired and enjoyed reading them both, I consider The Fabric of the Cosmos to be slightly more appealing to the general readership.  On Friday morning, after stopping by the Ramla shuk for a few items to bring with me, I rode the train to Savidor Station, and even managed to exit from the proper side of the station, into Ramat Gan.  I walked to Eli's apartment on Bialik, where I met up with both him and his sister Judy, whom I'd only met briefly before.  Judy, like her older brother, is serving in the IDF, but services humvees, rather than working at a desk job as a jobnik.  The two siblings remind me a little bit of Sam and Andrew, and are more similar than I think either one of them realizes.  Eli and I identified what ingredients we needed to make Eli's Grandpa Salad and to cook Josefin's lentil soup, and went shopping on Herzl street for everything we needed.  It was surprisingly difficult to find lettuce that didn't look suspiciously old, but we succeeded.  Soon after our return, Josefin arrived.  When we realized that Josefin actually knows how to cook the Persian-style rice that Eli wanted, we realized that the most efficient division of labor was also the most sexist: Josefin and Judy remained the home (specifically, the kitchen), while the men went out and bought last-minute ingredients, and we thus chose competence over progressiveness.   At least the rice turned out well.  Soon afterwards, Eliana showed up, and we found ourselves, by the end, lighting candles just moments before sundown, but we made it to synagogue, and then back.  There were no running-up-and-down-the-stairs adventures this time, unfortunately.  I really need to be with Rachel Silverman for that to work out, I guess.  The five of us stayed up quite late eating and speaking.  Judy and I slept on couches in the main room, and I fell asleep first, predictably.  My body just isn't used to the kind of strain with which I encumbered it throughout my years as an undergrad at Cornell, and it's hard for me to go to bed much earlier or later than midnight.  I did manage to finish The Fabric of the Cosmos before bed, and was therefore able to pick up Jose Faur's Horizontal Society the next day.

On Saturday, I was up a little bit before eight, and had several uninterrupted hours of reading, of which I took full advantage.  Then, Josefin got up, and the two of us spoke for about an hour, mostly about our academic plans for the upcoming years.  Josefin is going to learn Ancient Greek, which is going to be very hard, but, I hope, rewarding, for her.  Although, it probably won't be as difficult for her as it is to the typical monolingual American -- Josefin can already speak a few languages, two of them fluently, and Ancient Greek will probably provide less of a mental stretch for her.  Anyway, eventually, all five of us were up.  I read a lot throughout the day, and enjoyed Eli's Grandpa Salad; I think that it gets better every time that I've tried it :).  Somebody found a copy of Isreali pseudo-monopoly (Kesef Gadol; grandparents' houses always contains games, if you search hard enough).  After Havdallah, Josefin and Eliana returned to Jerusalem, leaving just Eli, Judy, and I in Ramat Gan.  My reasons for not returning to Ramla immediately were two-fold: 1) I love being around Eli; 2) Elliot was arriving, and I hadn't seen him in a few months (last I saw him, I was driving him to Wegmans and the wine store downtown, and trying not to kill us both in my parents' car).  Elliot arrived shortly after midnight, in the middle of our viewing of Revenge of the Sith (which I still hadn't seen), and I was very excited to see him.  I wonder if I came across to him as tired and worn-out as I've begun to feel.  My job in a school has been wearing me down, mentally and physically, and, much as I enjoy it, and am proud to have an opportunity to do the work that I have been doing, I think that I need a vacation.  At least my Hebrew has improved since I last saw Elliot (and since I last studied in chevruta with his sister Ranana), but there's not much more that I can say for myself.

Sunday morning, I headed back to Ramla by train, while Judy returned to her base, and Eli and Elliot left to visit a museum.  I returned to my apartment, took a run, and went to where I was supposed to meet a student, who never appeared for the lesson that we had arranged.  At around 6:30 pm, however, I arrived at the English Center for the Community Involvement graduation.  For those of you who don't live with me here in Ramla, my group of Israel Teaching Fellows lives in the same town as another group of volunteers, whose job it is is to volunteer in various capacities in the community for five months (for those of you who remember my former three roommates, they were enrolled as part of the same five-month program).  Both programs, ITF and CI, are sponsored by the same company, Israel Way (also known as Oranim).  In short, volunteers were leaving town, and we decided to have a party for them in the English Center, where several of them volunteered.  Carmel was there, of course, but Amit, sadly, left two weeks ago :'(.  I hope that I'll see her at the ITF graduation next week.  I took pictures, and had a fantastic time because of this.  Note to those planning to take part in a photographed ceremony in a room painted entirely white; wear brightly-colored clothing!  Juliana won the "most photogenic subject of the evening" award in my book.  The highlight of the ceremony for me was telling my story about why I will miss Florencia.  Afterwards, we all decided to party in Tel Aviv (20 minutes away), in order to celebrate both the CI graduation and Veta's birthday, and those with cars drove those without.  I got to drive with Carmel ha-ahuv <3, as well as Julia, Juliana, and Noah.  There was some confusion about the restaurant where Natalie had made reservations, but we (almost) all eventually ended up in the same place.  Ma'or even made a surprise appearance :).  I ended up splitting a drink three ways with Natalie (who became very, very sleepy) and Shira.  After a couple of hours, those of us returning to Ramla took a monit sherut to the bus station, and, from there, a monit sherut to Ramla.  The sherut to Ramla took a while to fill up;  Noah made a new friend (he's much better at that than I am), and Florencia made a surprise appearance.

On Monday, I was back to work, and had what was probably the worst day of school that I have had yet.  I should have predicted it though: we were giving the students a test, and test days are always the worst.  The way that the school system gives students evaluations that are too difficult for their ability level makes them feel cornered, powerless, resentful of those administering the tests, and altogether willing to cheat in any means possible (often without realizing that extracting translations from proctors, sharing solutions with classmates, opening to the dictionary appendices in their textbooks, and using computer dictionaries all qualify as "cheating").  As the son of two academics, I have always been taught that cheating (only one step away from plagiarism) is anathema; clearly this creates conflict when testing occurs, and I honestly would rather that I never again be in a position where I am administering a test in an Israeli school.  I was exhausted by the end of my schoolday, but, luckily for me, I still had my private lesson with Nati and Yosi afterwards.  I taught them about comparisons in English (extremely useful, although probably seemingly arbitrary to a non-native speaker), and also ended up helping Yosi's father with his fax machine, the interface of which is entirely in English.  This is not the first time I have needed to come to the rescue, so to speak, with my English; Sabba also had a medicine, the label of which was printed only in English (can you believe this?  Imagine if there were medications that were sold in the U.S. and designated for senior citizen use only, but with directions written only in Japanese.  It would rightly cause an outrage).  Anyway, I took the bus directly from my students' apartment to the house on Veradim, where I came 20 minutes late (I had already told Carmel not to count on my arrival), at 4:20 pm, to the Shavuot enrichment.  Perrin and I were teaching Underground at 6:00 pm, and I begged some chumus off of Natalie to last me until night.  Natalie was my hero for the day for feeding me <3.  Underground was excellent, and continues to be one of my favorite parts of volunteering here.  Perrin is 100% in charge, and very good at instructing, and it is my job to provide Hebrew support to students who are lagging (this time, it was two Arabic women).  I finally returned back to my apartment, and continued to read Horizontal Society.

Tuesday was Erev Shavuot.  I took a nice long shopping trip to the shuk where I picked up, among other things, fresh dill and sale-price medjoul dates for the holiday.  I ran, prepared food, and invested a fair amount of time in studying Hebrew.  Then I went to synagogue in the evening (running into Micha'el, Tamar, and Shiloh on the way), and, after a dinner that included some excellent homemade flan by Alex, I tried to stay up all night reading.  I failed miserably, and fell asleep around 1:00 am.  I'm just not the student I was when I studied at Cornell.

Wednesday, Shavuot, was a day of getting up early and immersing myself in study, for most of the day.  To my enjoyment, I also visited the Veradim house.  Natalie was in Eilat, but I talked to Noah for a while until he left to attend his teacher's barbecue, and then spent about two hours speaking with Perrin.  It was time well spent.  I do wish that I had made more friends here in Israel, but I do feel as if I can rely on those that I have.

Today, I woke up feeling disgusting.  This is the second or third time in a row that I have developed coldlike symptoms, most notably a sore throat and clogged sinuses.  I am getting quite tired of it.  I spent a rather unproductive day.  I unsuccessfully tried to pick up something that I needed from the pharmacy, although I did manage to finish the end of vol. I of Horizontal Society, and write down a few thoughts to some friends.  Now, it's late, and I need to get to bed.  Before, I do, however, I'll just mention the following slideshow that I made for my school's English Day (see last post).  Enjoy!
 
English Day at Rambam Slideshow 

~JD

English Day at Rambam

On Sunday, my school finally held its annual English Day!  After a series of changes to scheduling and procedure, everything eventually came together on the 25th.  The following is the description that I wrote for the school newspaper (for some reason, the principal wanted me to write it in English, as if to definitively prove to parents that the school has a real anglophone on its faculty):

"On Sunday, May 25th, 2014, Rambam School in Lod held its annual English Day.  Prior to the 25th, each class prepared materials for use on English Day.  Each class decorated posters depicting the flag, capital city, continent, national food, and primary language of a particular country.  For example, the sixth grade's chosen country was United States of America, and the students created an American flag from construction paper, as well as posters representing Washington, D.C., North America, hamburgers and soda, the English language, and the Statue of Liberty.

"On English Day itself, students traveled from classroom to classroom with handmade paper passports which the English teachers had designed.  Upon visiting each classroom, students wrote down the critical information of the class's country, thereby familiarizing themselves not only with world geography, but also with English terms such as "flag," "capital," and "language," the knowledge of which was necessary for completing the passports.  At the end of the day's special activities, students also received copies of an English newsletter which was a collaborative work of students from different classes, featuring articles on such diverse topics as the Chinese New Year, the construction of the Eiffel Tower, and the contemporary Argentine soccer star Lionel Messi.  The day was organized and facilitated by the school's English teachers Chani, Moshe, and D'vori.  Furthermore, a team of four American volunteers — Harry, Natalie, Noah, and Perrin — came to assist the school's regular English faculty.  Not only did the volunteers' kindness and friendliness quickly endear them to the students, but the volunteers' help was crucial in making English Day a success."

That, anyway, is what happened, according to the books.  I left out a number of details that I considered unimportant to parents, such as the fact that English Day has been one of my most stressful days since I arrived in Israel (possibly related to the fact that I spent Monday, today, home sick from school).  There were so many things to worry about, and, I realized, that, despite all of the planning that the English Teachers and I had put into the day, things just didn't go as planned.  Everyone seemed very pleased with the results, though, which is ultimately the important thing.  The students enjoyed going from room to room, drawing the various countries' flags, and filling out the rest of the critical information on their passports.  The teachers seemed genuinely pleased that students were learning new vocabulary terms.

The most unbelievable part of the day for me, though, as well as the most gratifying, was the way that the members of my program came to help out the students at my school.  I had at first expected only Noah and Harry to come, after I had helped them at English Day at Ofek, their school, a few weeks ago, but then Veta volunteered to help out, to make up for the fact that TZ left the program.  The school suddenly changed the date from a Friday to a Sunday, making it impossible for Veta to come (she spends half of her week in Haifa).  Just a few days after the schedule change, much to my relief, Perrin offered to help, bringing our English Day team back to seven.  Furthermore, when I was riding the bus to school at around 7:15 am, I received a phone call from Natalie.  She told me that she was coming all the way from Petach Tikvah to help me.  I'd like to add that not only was this everyone's day off from work, but that the men needed to wear kippot, and that the women needed to wear modest dress.  Absolutely everyone came, not only arriving early, but instantly making friends with the students and with the school's English teachers.  Perrin, Noah, Natalie, and Harry instantly got to work preparing for the day's activities and meeting students.  It's been a while since I've worked at school with other volunteers (TZ stopped working with any regularity many months ago, because of her health problems), and I've forgotten how much better with students they are than I am.  Much as I struggle with the Hebrew language, my colleagues consistently show themselves much better at communicating, as well as at functioning in general.  Amit and Carmel, our group's two madrichim, also came to assist with English Day, and succeeded in making the day run more smoothly.  All of the other members of the team really threw themselves into their work, and were the reason that the day worked out at all.  I think that the English teachers, too, were very happy to be working with a new group of Americans.

It's getting late here, and I need to go to bed.  I'm hoping that I'll feel well enough to go to school tomorrow.

~JD

Altneusprache

If you've been reading my blog since 2011, you'll remember my ill-fated attempts to buy oatmeal in Tours, France, among other amusing misadventures resulting from my poor French skills.  With my Hebrew skills still weaker than my French skills were when I left France, it goes without saying that I've said some ridiculous things since I've arrived.

Hebrew is very exciting to learn.  Unlike English and French, it has a certain structure to it that is very elegant and simple.  Hebrew is a Semitic language (English and French are both Indo-European), and all (or, rather, almost all) natively Hebrew words are constructed around a three- (or four-) letter "root" which has some kind of core meaning.  For instance, the word root "כ-ת-ב" indicates writing.  The verbs "לִכתוֹב" (to write), "להכתב" (to be written), "לְהַכתִיב" (to dictate), "לְהִתְכַּתֵב" (to correspond); the nouns "מִכְתָּב" (letter) and "כְּתֹבֶת" (address); and the adjective "כִּתוּב" (written) are all words formed by manipulating this root.  After learning the meaning of a particular root, one can predict and anticipate the meanings behind other words of the same root.  A couple of times, I've even (correctly) used verbs I've never before seen or heard, because I have learned how to correctly manipulate a root.  This is something that can't really be done with English or French, although it reminds me a little bit of taking reflexive French verbs and making them non-reflexive, and vice-versa (such as learning the meaning of tromper, to mislead someone, from the verb se tromper, to make a mistake).  

This, anyway, is the very academic way of looking at the language.  It's very useful for reading and writing, and sometimes also helps with conversation.  Unfortunately, this analysis of the language can only get one so far, and there are several good reasons for this.  This is because Hebrew is a spoken language, and Israelis don't think any more about the elegance of their grammar any more than typical Anglophones think about English grammar.  Yes, some Anglophones have read The Elements of Style, consistently use "whom" correctly, and can identify a sentence as subjunctive; most of us cannot  (most of my students don't know the difference between a verb and a noun, and I don't really blame them).  Israelis just speak, and learners of Hebrew must learn the actual words that Israelis use; just as in English, a word that is grammatically correct and conveys the correct meaning is not necessarily the correct word.  For instance, at least three times, I have used words with which the children around me are unfamiliar: "לִלְעוֹג" (to mock), "לְהִתגַעגֵעַ" (to miss someone), and "לְהַבדִיל" (to distinguish).  Even though all of these verbs are found in my 501 Hebrew Verbs book, they are not colloquial enough to use around Israeli schoolchildren.  Furthermore, just as in English, knowledge of synonyms is crucial.  For example, the words "לִכתוֹב" and "לִרְשׁוֹם," are both frequently-used organically-Hebrew verbs meaning "to write," and my students freely interchange them.  Although I tend to use only "לִכתוֹב" when I speak, it is important that I know both words, in order to understand, and effectively communicate with my students.

In addition to the large number of organic Hebrew words, a great deal of loan words have infiltrated Hebrew (many of them from English), in some cases replacing native Hebrew words, and often having a definition differing from that of the original word.  For instance, there is a perfectly good Hebrew word for sandwich,  "כָּרִיך," but everyone just says "סֶנדוִיץ."  The English word "private" (פְּרַיְבֶט) has also become a Hebrew word, but the word "פְּרַיְבֶט" is a noun meaning "personal vehicle" (as opposed to public transportation), rather than an adjective indicating that something is confidential, personal, or for restricted use only.  The languages that most frequently lend words to Hebrew tend to be English (because English infiltrates everything thanks to globalization), Yiddish (because of heritage), Arabic (because of both heritage and proximity), and Greek (because of the large number of Greek words that entered Hebrew during the Rabbinic era.  On a daily basis, it's frequent to hear such words as "סבבה" (Arabic for "cool"), "צִ'יפְּס" (which follows both the British and American meanings, and can therefore refer to either potato chips or french fries), "נוּ" (an untranslatable Yiddish slang word), and "אַפּוֹטְרוֹפּוֹס" (Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew for "guardian").  However, I have heard at least two French words: "סְטָז'," meaning "internship," and "רוֹמָן," the word for "novel." Finally, the rules of root-manipulation don't always work out as expected.  For instance, "לְחַפֵּשׂ" means "to search," whereas "לְהִתְחַפֵּשׁ" means "to wear a costume," verbs without any apparent connection, despite the fact that they share the same root.

Hebrew's word roots, among many other aspects of the language, haven't significantly changed in the past few thousand years, and it was possible for me to carry over a fair amount of useful vocabulary words from my study of Jewish texts (thanks again, Drisha Institute).  In fact, one of the most wonderful things about Hebrew is the way in which ancient Hebrew roots and verbs are recycled, and become Modern Hebrew verbs.  Following is a list of my top five favorite:

5) In last week's Torah portion, Emor, we read of the holiday of Sukkot that "עֲצֶרֶת הִוא כָּל מְלֶאכֶת עֲבֹדָה לֹא תַעֲשׂוּ" (Vayikra 23:36).  JPS renders this verse's meaning as "it is a solemn gathering: you shall not work at your occupations."  The noun "עֲצֶרֶת," which JPS translates as "solemn gathering," can now mean something along the lines of "political rally" or mass meeting.

4) The noun "חַשְׁמַל" makes its appearance in the Bible in Yechezkel 1:4 -- "וָאֵרֶא וְהִנֵּה רוּחַ סְעָרָה בָּאָה מִן הַצָּפוֹן עָנָן | גָּדוֹל וְאֵשׁ מִתְלַקַּחַת וְנֹגַהּ לוֹ סָבִיב וּמִתּוֹכָהּ כְּעֵין הַחַשְׁמַל מִתּוֹךְ הָאֵשׁ" (and I saw, and behold, a tempest was coming from the north, a huge cloud and a flaming fire with a brightness around it; and from its midst, it was like the color of the chashmal from the midst of the fire).  Seeking to explain this rare and obscure word, the late 11th-century French commentator Rashi offers the following lengthy explanation: "'Chashmal' is an angel bearing that name, and he [Ezekiel] saw [something] like the appearance of its color in the midst of the fire. And so did our Sages say: There was an incident involving a child who was expounding on the account of the Chariot. He perceived the meaning of 'chashmal,' [whereupon] fire emanated from the chashmal and consumed him. They said further that the word itself is a combination: When they asked, 'What is chashmal?' replied Rav Judah, 'Living beings (חֶיוֹת) of fire (אֵש) that speak (מִמַלְלוֹת).' In a Baraitha we learned: Sometimes silent (חָשּׁוֹת), sometimes speaking (מִמַלְלוֹת) when the speech emanates from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He, they remain silent. When the speech does not emanate from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He, they speak; that is, they laud and praise the Lord (Chag. 13). [Addendum: Possibly, 'chashmal' is the name of the color resembling the color of fire, for he said, 'Chashmal from the midst of the fire,' and he said (verse 27): 'the color of chashmal, the appearance of fire within it found about, from the appearance of his loins and above.'  And, he says in the second vision (8:2): 'and from his loins and above was like the appearance of a splendor, like the color of chashmal.'] And from the midst of it, [i.e.,] that fire, I saw something like the color of chashmal that appeared from the midst of the fire. But we do not know what it is, and the midrash that our Sages expounded on it, [defining 'chashmal' as] living beings of fire that speak, does not seem to me to the context.]"  That's a very long explanation for what has become a mundane word -- "חַשְׁמַל" is the Modern Hebrew word for "electricity."

3)  In Shemot 30:34, in the instructions for preparing incense for the golden altar, Moshe receives the command "קַח לְךָ סַמִּים," (take for yourself samim).  The rest of the verse goes on to list the "סַמִּים" that Moshe needs to take: "נָטָף | וּשְׁחֵלֶת וְחֶלְבְּנָה סַמִּים וּלְבֹנָה זַכָּה," a list which JPS renders as stacte, onycha, galbanum, and pure frankincense.  Based on the context, "סַמִּים" clearly means something along the lines of "spices," "fragrances," "aromatics," etc., and the Rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud (Kereitot 6a) spend quite a time expounding on the exact substances in their own time to which these Biblical ingredients correspond.  In Modern Hebrew, though, "סַמִּים" simply means "drugs!"  I need to thank my beloved student Hagus for demonstrating to me just how funny this particular word, read in its original Biblical context, seems to modern Hebrew speakers (at least, if they're 12-year-old boys).

2) In chapter 17 of Shmuel I 17, in the archetypal story of the victory of the underdog, the future King of a united Israel, David, faces the champion of the Plishtim, Galyat.  In 17:49, the narrative describes that "יִּשְׁלַח דָּוִד אֶת יָדוֹ אֶל הַכֶּלִי וַיִּקַּח מִשָּׁם אֶבֶן וַיְקַלַּע וַיַּךְ אֶת הַפְּלִשְׁתִּי אֶל מִצְחוֹ" (David sent his hand to the container, and took from it a stone, and shot it, and it struck the the Plishti in his forehead).  The key verb here, "לִקְלוֹעַ," is a Modern Hebrew verb, too.  Although it retains its original meaning of "to strike a target," it is also used in basketball to mean "to sink a basket."

1) In Bereishit 43:2, Joseph instructs his Egyptian servants "וְאֶת גְּבִיעִי גְּבִיעַ הַכֶּסֶף תָּשִׂים בְּפִי אַמְתַּחַת הַקָּטֹן" (and my goblet, [that is] the silver goblet, place in the opening of the bag of the youngest [brother]), the word "גָבִיעַ" indicating a goblet or chalice, which 43:5 indicates clearly to be a vessel used for drinking and for some form of ancient divination.  In Modern Hebrew, the word "גָבִיעַ" means "ice-cream cone!"

 By the way, this post is dedicated to the Feldman sisters, Penin♥h and L♥ni, who have helped me a lot with Hebrew in the past, and know the language a lot better than I do.

Love from Israel,

~JD