poppy

poppy
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

gone to seed

gone to seed
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

lev

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Lev on Independence Day, defending the nation from poppies and wildflowers gone to seed. We went to a local celebration on Tuesday night, which featured Israel's Corey Hart - someone who was huge in the nineties but now is relegated to playing for rowdy six year old audiences. We managed to just miss the fireworks - I could hear them but not see them on the way home, which is such a tease. The next day we walked from Hadassah hospital to Ein Kerem, site of several picturesque churches, which were all closed, and a very good ice cream store, which was open.

ben with one less tooth

ben with one less tooth
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

For the record.
April 23, 2009.
After wiggling the thing grotesquely for over a week.
We had ice cream after school to celebrate.

poppies

poppies
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Jerusalem smells and looks so good like now. The jasmine and orange blossom and honeysuckle smells are so overwhelming, it's like being mugged by a perfume store when walking down the street.

Lev at his party

Lev at his party
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We had a birthday party on Monday for Lev at Gan Ha-Paamon - Liberty Bell park so named after a confusing replica of the cracked liberty bell in Philadelphia. Mostly I was focused on not losing any of the children who attended but I think everyone had a good time. We ordered pizza to the park and did a brief but highly acclaimed treasure hunt.

ben and lev

ben and lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We had a slow morning on the boys last day off school (though they go back to school for only half a day before the weekend - that's just a tease). We spent some time reading children's poetry in honour of national poetry month -- a blog on children's literature has managed to get thirty different poets to contribute a new poem for each day in the month of April (http://gottabook.blogspot.com/). Later that day, Benjamin sat down, furrowed his brow.
And wrote a poem.

me and lev

me and lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Happy birthday Lev!

benjamin and hat

ain yael 045
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

They had a storyteller at Ein Yael today and Benjamin was chosen to play the part of the advisor to the king, who has gone on a quest to find the milk of the "leviah". It would have helped if I knew what a Leviah was - my guess is, some kind of a monster.
There is more to tell...the shelves in the grocery stores are covered with newspapers and white plastic to hide all non-Passover products. I saw some Chinese guest workers trying to buy a bag of flour and being refused. They barely understood what was going on. And in the old city yesterday, Scottish bagpipers piped in Easter.

potter's wheel

ain yael 013
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Lev's finger in Jeremy's hand. He's turning four this week and is a deliciously random child.

mud

ain yael 006
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We had a really lovely day at Ein Yael in artland. Mosaic, woodwork, weaving, painting, wandering donkeys. I think Benjamin would have been glad to move in. When they aren't using these bins to stomp mud into clay they use them to stomp grapes into wine.

tree branches, sunspots, Passover eve

sun
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

white cosmo

white cosmo
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

lev's hair

lev's hair
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

So according to rabbinic tradition every 28 years the sun is in the same position as it was on the day of creation and people get up very early in the morning to say a special prayer. A lot of the yeshivas here have been having special sessions on the significance of the occasion, including one - a Rabbi Ganot - who claimed that although "many questions remain over the thesis of a certain Polish priest named Copernicus....anyone who believes in the new system is not considered a heretic." So after 500 years or so the Copernican heresy is still being debated in Meah Shearim. Ha'aretz interviewed a Prof. Ariel Cohen at Hebrew University who seemed irritated about the whole thing and said, "Birchat Hachama is an embarrassing tradition, testifying to a complete, blatant and intentional disconnect from modern science." Well, yes. But it was a beautiful morning. The sun rose - it always rises. Jeremy got up early and went over to the promenade. And Lev's hair caught the sunlight on the way back from our picnic a little later that day.

solidarity march um el fahm

solidarity march um el fahm
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Yesterday I went to a solidarity march in Umm-el-Fahm, which is one of the largest Arab cities in Israel. Almost all of the residents are Arab-Israeli citizens. A few weeks ago, a man named Baruch Marzel led a group of right-wing settlers through the city in a march designed to provoke and intimidate the residents - in the subsequent riots about 27 people were hurt and many more were arrested. The counter-demonstration could not have been more different - we gave out roses and they brought us water and sweets.
I am reading The Bostonians by Henry James which is, among other things, a critique of activism. One of the primary targets is a suffragette named Miss Birdseye who is described as "a confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow creatures, if possible, after fifty years of humanitarian zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify to the iniquity of most arrangements." This is in part a description of what keeps me distant from activism - a combination of the fuzziness of political idealism, the complexity of political situations and finally, fear of the law of unintended consequences. But right now I'm feeling like I need to be stand up and be counted for this very basic right - for citizens of a country to be treated equally and with respect.

handstand split

ben capoeira
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

ben capoeira

ben capoeira
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Benjamin got his belt on Friday at a Capoiera festival that involved a three hour roda (the musical circle in which capoiera-ists spar, two at a time). The auditorium was too dark to get a good picture of him on the stage - besides, his five-minute sparring session with a senior teacher involved the teacher doing back flips and handstands around him while Benjamin ducked and wove like a boxer. But I did get some pictures in the hallway afterwards. Some people say capoeira was a stealth martial art practiced by African slaves in Brazil who were forbidden to learn to fight - there are even people who believe it was used to fend off slavers.

lev and ice cream at the crater

lev and ice cream at the crater
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This worlds-end town has a long promenade on the crater, and a single bar/cafe with outdoor tables and really excellent cappucino which is an absolute prerequisite for fully enjoying the view. Or, in Lev's case, ice cream. In this picture he's already split his lip at the hostel but hasn't yet split his chin in the byzantine wine cave.

Apparently, Mitzpe Ramon was founded when the government dumped a group of Moroccan immigrants in the middle of the desert and told them they were an hour and a half from Tel-Aviv (ummm - two and a half hours, and that's without traffic). The setting is unreal and beautiful but the town is a little sad and run-down, and the major presence is an army base that fills the two restaurants (pizza and falafel/shwarma) with a steady stream of customers. And the ibex, who have no fear.

ramon crater

ramon crater
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

It is difficult to get a sense of the scale of the crater. There is something flattening in the view from the promenade at the rim - even before I took a photograph it already seemed miniaturized, condensed. I only began to get a sense of the immenseness of the crater when I walked around inside it. The sand is all different colors - ashy lavender, black, spots of deep red like blood stains. In the fifties, lots of people came to mine the crater -that parti-colored sand suggested all kinds of treasures - but they never found much, so it's been relatively undisturbed. To which Ben said, like a character in a Disney special, "But the crater is the treasure."

We've been watching the films at all of these different attractions - the crater, the tower of David museum in Jerusalem, the observatory at Eilat. The one in Eilat had moving chairs, like an amusement ride, and a sentimental story about illegal whaling in Africa which featured a strategically multi-racial cast of pirates in torn t-shirts. The film at the visitor's centre at Mitzpe Ramon talked about the early settlement of the area in the Nabatean period, and then by the Romans and Byzantine empire. Then the silhouette of a rider on a horse crossed the screen and a deep voice-over said, "This period of civilization ended with the coming of the Arab invaders." Fast forward to the Jewish state. Honestly. At that point I would have welcomed the pirates.

ben and the pistachio tree

ben and the pistachio tree
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

On the way to the crater, we also stopped at Ein Avdat, a nature park. Here Benjamin is sitting under the northernmost pistachio tree in Israel - well, not the actual single northernmost tree, but one of several in this latitude. We climbed a series of very steep stone steps up to the top of a ravine bordering the waterfall, and signs warned us to watch out for the abyss.

poppies

jer lev poppies
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We went away last week, to Machtesh Ramon, which is the largest erosion crater in the world. On the way we passed this field of kalaniyot (poppies) and waded in.