It was here that a battle between the followers of the Maccabees and the Greeks took place. People took refuge in the caves and later in time, partisans of King Matityahu Antigonus fought against King Herod and the Romans.
The second time around the Romans dropped down from above and killed the people hiding in caves.
It’s a gorgeous place, but apparently it is not really wise to hide in caves
With this rare miracle of the confluence of dates, we have this amazing opportunity to celebrate both holidays together. But I don’t feel much like celebrating. I want to say humbug to both holidays and maybe bring back Festivus. The more we can find in common the better our lives can be.
hannuka, christmas Read Post »
We went to the birthplace of Mary Magdalane, Magdala, today but it turned out that the chapel of Duc in Altem was closed for Christmas. It is a magnificent chapel and is meant to be a place of contemplation, but since it was closed we concentrated on the ancient synagogue they unearthed, the houses of the high priests, the drainage system, and all kinds of archeology.
The stone, that perfectly imitates the original temple, was made, our guide Sara said, by someone who was actually in that temple, so it has to be somewhere before or during the time of Jesus.
It’s really worth seeing:
https://www.magdala.org/
Christmas eve in Magdala – 24.12.24 Read Post »
A friend of mine asked me today about moral complexity here, and I wound up writing a little incident about my afternoon:
Today the elevator in our building got stuck (it’s been stuck almost 20 times in the past month). One of the Arab girls who lives here rang our doorbell to tell us that a tenant, a Holocaust survivor, was inside. Ezi managed to pry open the door and get her out, but it took more than a quarter of an hour, and the woman was white we she emerged. The company did not want to come to repair it until the morning, but the new widow upstairs complained that there are mostly very old people in this house and they can’t always walk the five floors. What the underlying problem with the elevator company is that most of the repairmen have been in the reserves for the past year, so they are operating on an emergency basis.
Complexity is part of our lives.
Living Together – 23.12.24 Read Post »
kugel – 22.12.24
I was ready to hate this series – it’s a prequel to Shtissel
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3069894/
And as soon as I turned it on, I was horrified by the terrible Yiddish of the Haredi Jews living in Antwerp. But soon I realized that the fractured yiddish was part of the plot. I also loved the petty evil of some of the characters, the smallness of their world. And many of my favorite Sephardi actors manage to create these Haredi Ashkenazi characters. https://www.kveller.com/kugel-the-shtisel-spinoff-will-stream-in-the-u-s-soon/
This is nothing to do with religion. Or the character of Jews. One might, however, see it as a denigration of Ashkenazi Jews by Sephardi Jews. And one might see it as antisemitic.
Not me. I see it as a Kugel – sweet, peppery, and very filling.
The Houtis seem to have discovered that we’re a bit more vulnerable at night, and they’re sending us rockets to wake us up. So we’re back to sleeping in our clothes. I’m sure it will take a day or two to figure out how to shoot them down before it gets to heavily populated areas but right now we don’t even have enough time to hide.
Today they were interviewing some of the people whose apartments were shattered last night, and what surprised me the most was that after their complaints they remembered to add that the most important thing is to get the hostages back. In these cold, wet days, we particularly remember those people hidden deep in the wet ground, hungry and cold. Every time I think of them I want to go back to my eiderdown.
Nights in Tel Aviv – 21.12.24 Read Post »
Adir Miller’s film, “The Ring,” opened yesterday, and because it is about Hungary and the Holocaust, we went to see it. We didn’t think it would be as good as it was – we thought it would be great to see Jewish Budapest again.
But it was good. The fact that it was a version of the biography of members of the family, didn’t make it less good. Most people in Israel have horror stories that brought them to find shelter here – if not now then one or two generations back.
The fact that the hotel in the film was the Gellert, and Ezi’s grandfather built the spa there, was a detail that made the film more real to us, but not what made it authentic and genuine. (I can even add that there is a shot of Budapest that was taken from the room we stayed in at the Gellert).
The sense of the truth of the story, and the relevance of the importance of survival to the people of Israel today is what got me. Even though I could find many places where it could have been edited, I was really happy to see this film. Go see it.
The Ring – 20.12.24 Read Post »
Since Israel was forced to close its embassy in Ireland because of the anti-Israel atmosphere in the country, I thought it might be nice to remind the Irish of James Joyce’s use of the dream of the Jews in Ulysses to revive their homeland. Here are just two quotes:
What anthem did Bloom chant partially in anticipation of that multiple, ethnically irreducible consummation?
Kolod balejwaw pnimah
Nefesch, jehudi, homijah.
—
and: Three cheers for Israel!
The renewal of the language and the return to the ancient culture that Joyce was witnessing was his inspiration for the future of Ireland.
and: —Three cheers for Israel!
James Joyce – 17.12.24 Read Post »
