organic, socially conscious and delicious.

My roommate Ilana and I joined a CSA this past week. For a hundred shekel a week (a little less than 30 dollars) we get a box of organic veggies from a little farm called Or Gani. Or Gani roughly translates to Garden of Light, a little heavy handed perhaps, but the veggies are delicious and for the sake of a double entendre in a farm name I'm willing to live with it.

You can visit them at www.or-gani.org.il

This week's box included all sorts of the things that I don't know the names for. The few I do know are melaphaphon (cucumber), batzal (onion), Chasa (lettuce), tapuach adama (apple of the earth, or potato), pelpel (pepper, which I'm pretty sure means both bell pepper and black pepper, but there is the distinct possibility I'm wrong about that).

lunch, and more stuff that doesn't grow in maine

I was reviewing my blog yesterday and I realized that other than the exotic flora and photos of fruits in the Shuk, I haven't posted anything about food! This is somewhat surprising for two related reasons.

1. I like food, a lot.

2. I was a culinary professional for many years and have a lot to say about food.

Here is a photo of the lunch I had today. I went to a little kosher cafe called Kadosh. Kadosh (which literally means holy). Kadosh has a bakery, espresso machine and full bar (including several beers on tap). The servers are what can only be described as the Israeli equivalent of hipsters. Needless to say, I love it.

The first time I went, I had Burekas (A bureka is a triangluar Turkish puff pastry, filled with cheese, or mushrooms, or potatos, or spinach, or really anything imaginable). I had potato filled burekas. The lovely folks at Kadosh, sliced open said burekas and stuffed them with pickles, tomatoes, spicy sauce, sliced hard boiled egg and tahina. Along with a cappuccino Hazzak V'Katan (strong and small). It all came to about 28 shekel ($8ish).

Today, I had a sandwich of eggplant, potato, pickles, tomatos, spicy sauce and cream cheese. It came with a small salad. And another cappuccino hazzak v'katan. It came to 37 shekel ($11ish).

Next time I'll break into the full bar.

On my walk back to school from Kadosh, I found this addition to the "Doesn't grow in Maine" category of photos. In fact, it might belong to another category called "Doesn't grow anywhere in the solar system." I've tried to classify it according to some proper scientific taxonomy, but alas...nothing.

So here is what I'm calling Alien Pod Fruit or in a little bit of made up Hebrew. Zera Zar (alien seedpod).

haifa part 3: a fountain that is a kilometer long

As I mentioned briefly in my last post, Mount Carmel (Har Hacarmel) is home to the holiest place of the Bahai religion, the Shrine of the Bab. The shrine is the gold domed building in the photos below. The Shrine is surrounded by gardens, which are about one kilometer in length, stretching from the base of Mount Carmel to the crest of the mountain. The Bahai religion has a focus on justice and equality. It also recognizes the prophets of all religions as prophets bringing different parts of one message from one god.


Bahai Pilgrims walk up the kilometer long gardens as part of a pilgrimage. Visitors take a free tour, and walk down from the top. The gardens are rich with a symbolism that revolves around justice, equality, and a multi-faith/multi cultural perspective. The Golden Dome for instance, uses architectural details from the many different cultures that make up the religions which the Bahai look to as foundational elements. And the Gardens play with symmetry, asymmetry and naturalism in which the Bahais feel represent the different aspects of their faith.


The stairs that bring the pilgrims up and the tourists down are surrounded by fountains. Having been in bustling and sweaty Haifa, walking into the gardens is something else. The water creates a tranquil ambience that is very relaxing and the beautiful gardens provide relief from the bright sun and its reflection off the white stone and concrete of the city.

The tour-guide promised us that for both economic and environmental reasons, the gardens have many kinds of recycling systems for all the water they use and use irrigation techniques that maximize efficiency.

haifa part 2: the world's awesomist subway

Haifa is built on Mt. Carmel. It is the mountain where Elijah the Prophet zapped idols and confronted pagan gods. It is the center of the Bahai Religion (which will feature in Haifa Part 3). It is where the Catholic Carmelite Order was founded. And there is a winery named after it. It is also really steep. Mostly though, Mount Carmel is home to the world's awesomist subway. For my inner six year old who still likes big toys, it's cool, really cool.

It consists of one 1800 meter tunnel with 274 meters of vertical climb from bottom to top. There are two trains of two cars each. They are pulled by cable on one track with a short section of two tracks in the middle so as to avoid collisions. I rode three times (all for legitimate transportation reasons), but could easily have sat there all day and just gone up and down the hill. In fact, I don't have plans for next week...maybe I will.

haifa part 1: the ditz, the asshole and the nudist

I have stayed in a fair number of hostels. They're cheap. Sometimes they're clean, but not usually. The Port Inn, in Haifa, was VERY clean. I walked in the door and was excited by the clean floors, clean walls, lack of dingy carpets and lack of nasty smells.

It does however happen, in traveling and in life, that when one part of the whole seems so good, the rest is not always so. Such is the case with the Port Inn, Haifa. Which is run by a most bizarre combination of Norman Bates and Basil Fawlty. My traveling companion Ilana and I went to check in at our nice clean hostel. The very pleasant young woman behind the counter took our names and wrote down our passport numbers. This took two tries even though her first language was American English. Then she took our money (a deposit on the keys, and would we like to pay in advance?) Yes we would. This took another couple tries, at which point her boss piped in.
"NO NO NO, you're doing it WRONG, THIS is how you do it." Ilana and I looked at each other, uh oh we thought.
"Look," replied the young woman. "I'm not THAT stupid, I know what I'm doing."
Just for the record, she was struggling with making change and with the math involved in taking deposits and with the math involved in writing receipts. But she was getting it done.
"Then why don't you do it right the first time!!" Yelled the asshole.
Ilana and I stood there quietly, feeling for the young woman who wasn't really doing it WRONG, just maybe not right.

Ilana and I then made the mistake of asking about the Bahai Gardens, one of Haifa's many attractions. The young woman started telling us one way of getting to the gardens, then she detailed two more ways. Here the asshole piped in again.
"NO NO NO, don't tell them that way," he screamed. He proceeded to berate her and repeat her first set of directions at the same time. Ilana and I took a deep breath.

The young woman gave us a tour of the hostel. It was long and awkward. Have you ever had a tour of someone's home where you learn all sorts of information that you aren't interested in (and didn't ask) about a grandfather's collection of civil war memorabilia and how best to keep moths out of old quilts? Yeah, kinda like that.

We got up to the room, having learned about the patio; how to access the hostel in the event that the reception is closed; how to access the hotel in the event that the keyless entry doesn't work, which it always does; and how to use the shower (no really, she told us how to use the shower).

Finally, she brought us to the co-ed dormitory. "I'll bring you sheets in just a few minutes she said, but let me show you the room" Really I thought? Is she going to show me how to climb the ladder to the bunkbed as well?

We walked in. A sixty year old Austrian ex-pat (living in Sweden) was lying, without a shred of clothing anywhere near him, on a bunk bed, in the co-ed dorm, in the Port Inn, in Haifa. With a speed and assertiveness I was not expecting, the now uncontrollably giggly tourguide shooed us from the room.

"Excuse me," she said, between giggles. "I'll go tell him to get dressed, he really shouldn't be naked in there." The young woman went back into the room, and between more bouts of giggling I heard something about public places and the need for clothing, etc.

Ilana and I stood there, in the middle of a thought process that can only be described as Fight or Flight. We looked at each other once more, took a deep breath, and opened the door. The Austrian Nudist now had a sheet draped across his middle. It left very little to the imagination. The still giggling young woman told us about something, I can't even remember what. Then, still giggling, she left the room. I put my bag down, Ilana put hers down, and we got ready to depart for a little walk around and a bite to eat. The Austrian Nudist turned to us and pleaded his case.
"It's far to hot in here," he said. "How can they expect us to wear clothing in heat like this? They should really turn the air on."

No dude, you should put some pants on and sweat it out like the rest of us.

A long walk and my first camel.

In Judaism, the formal call to worship is called the Borchu. It is followed by the recitation of the Shema, which affirms the Jewish belief in one and only one God. The first line of the Shema translates “Hear oh Israel, The LORD is our God, the LORD is the one and only” (from The Complete Art Scroll Siddur). This statement of faith comes directly from the Torah. As it is written on the Torah Scroll, two letters are enlarged. The Ayin and the Daled. Rabbinic tradition holds that the two letters spell Eid or witness. This is to say that when we publicly recite the Shema we are bearing witness to God’s “oneness”.

In Islam, the formal call to prayer is the Adhan. It is sung from the Minaret of a Mosque by a righteous upstanding lay person, called the Muezzin. In any movie that’s ever been filmed in a Middle Eastern Arabic City, there is an obligatory shot where the western hero stands against a stunning panorama of the city, and hears the Muezzin chant the Adhan. It’s that establishment of local color shot that, although corny, I’ve always enjoyed. It also means that you’ve probably heard the Hollywood rendition of the Adhan and are at least a little familiar with the Muezzin and the Adhan.

The Adhan is a public statement of faith. “God is the greatest, I bear witness that there is no deity but God.” (wikipedia). I happen to think that’s a remarkable similarity, but maybe it isn’t so surprising, considering that Islam worships the same One God as Judaism.

This is all by way of introduction to a remarkably strange and wonderful day I had last week. My friend Gella has a friend (Rakhel) who has two friends (Yonatan and David) who took Gella and myself on a remarkable tour of some very old things in Jerusalem. Yonatan, a security guard and aspiring English tour guide, took us through Ir David, a late bronze age walled settlement (circa 1800 BCE). Biblically speaking this is where King David lived. In real life there is only a little evidence of someone by that particular name living there. But there is evidence of Jews living there from circa 1000 BCE onwards. This is consistentish with the Biblical history, but who knows. The stories that a community tells itself are rarely historically accurate. George Washington, for instance, never cut down any cherry tree, George W. Bush is from Connecticut, and Hilary Clinton is a robot. From Ir David, there is a beautiful view of the Mount of Olives, and of the Arab Village of Silwan, which is pictured below.
Here is a photograph of two tombs cut into the hillside of Ir David (from sometime after 1000 BCE). They were most likely royal tombs, as the commoners would have been buried outside of the city (in accordance with Jewish Law). The tombs have been empty for thousands of years, looted during one of the 52 historical sieges of Jerusalem.
Yonatan then took us through the Valley of Silwan, which is the empty little stretch of real estate between the Old City and the town of Silwan. The Silwan valley ostensibly divides Israeli from Arab, and it is interesting to think of the differences between the two. For instance we encountered a goat grazing on the Arab side, on the Israeli side there are tour buses.


It was walking through Silwan valley at around the time for afternoon prayers that we heard the Adhan coming from the Al-Aksa Mosque (to my left) and several Mosques off to my right. It was very moving and beautiful to hear from all sides the different Muezzin calling out their affirmation of God’s Oneness. Here are the views of Silwan (top), and the valley (Bottom), on the left side of the valley photo is one little rampart of the Temple Mount, off to the right is the Mount of Olives in the distance.


Part way through the Silwan valley we met up with David, who is a student of archaeology at Hebrew University and working on digs in Ir David. He guided us through several more tombs from the First Temple period (c. 1000-586 BCE). Of the two tombs pictured, one is slightly older (the one with Doric columns) the one with the Ionic pilasters is carved from a single big hunk of rock. It is hard to see in the photograph, but the tombs are covered with old carved religious graffiti. The graffiti is mostly people trying to insert themselves and or their teachers into history.





Another tomb, dating from the period of the Second Temple (516 BCE-70 CE) is called Absalom’s Tomb (Apocryphally the resting place of King David’s Son). Napoleon is credited with blowing the decorative top off of the tomb; just like the Sphynx’s nose…three more myths of the powerful.





Here Yonatan and Rakhel left Gella, David and myself to explore things further. We walked up to the Mount of Olives, past an olive grove with a guy pulling water from a cistern with a bucket and a rope. This was only a mile or so from the city center. It is as if there are people in Brooklyn who still get water from cisterns.

We walked through a Muslim Cemetery that is right next to the eastern wall of the Temple Mount. David is a fairly intrepid fellow, carrying his bicycle up over walls, hopping over thorn bushes with abandon and bringing a pair of slightly timid Americans through a part of Jerusalem that is most assuredly NOT on the Jewish Agency’s list of approved places for Americans to go. That being said, I felt safe. When we walked through the cemetery and encountered the end of a Muslim funeral, I didn’t feel unwelcome, or out of place. We didn’t even get a funny look.

The cemetery is centered on what is called the Golden Gate (pictured below). The Golden Gate was built by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian around 520 CE. It took the place of an older gate (from the Second Temple Period). Jewish Tradition holds, that when the Messiah comes, the Messiah will come from the Mount of Olives through the Golden Gate to the Temple Mount, and the Messianic Era will begin. Now is not exactly the time to critique Messianic Judaism, if you’re interested, I wrote about it a little in an earlier blog entry, and will probably do so again later. Suffice it to say, not that many Jews are holding their breath for Moshiach.

The point of all this, is that Sultan Suleiman I sealed the Golden Gate to prevent the Jewish Messiah from being able to enter Jerusalem in 1541 CE. Later a Muslim cemetery was established there, because Elijah, the prophet who will herald the Messiah is a Kohen (priest) and therefore not allowed to walk through cemeteries (turns out he can walk through non-Jewish cemeteries without a problem, also, we (my friends in the Yeshiva) can’t figure out if Elijah actually was a priest, or just did priestly things. I’ve been trying to go through in my mind all the possible permutations of the meanings behind actions like these.

It gives some idea, I think, of the relationship between two groups of people who worship the same One God. If Suleiman was doing these things to actually prevent the Messiah, then he must have believed that the Jewish prophesies about the world to come were valid enough to merit concern. If he didn’t believe that the Jewish prophesies had merit, then why bother to try and prevent them from happening, except maybe to dishearten the Jews? The truth is probably very complicated, like all religious matters, when it comes to relating to God, people often hold opinions that contradict one another. Yet, these same people are unwilling to accept contradictory evidence from other groups of people. This sort of behavior permeates both sides of the conflict here. But that’s another story than the one I’m telling right now, and this blog entry is already longer than the paper I had to write for my senior thesis (granted that was more of an artist statement and I made a lot of teapots too).


On top is a view of the Mount of Olives, and the Jewish Cemetery there, the Golden Gate, sealed by Suleiman, and my first real glimpse of the separation wall between Israel and West Bank. It was a fairly emotional moment for me, to be feeling five hundred years of conflict all at once. And to see the wall that is the most recent jab from one side to the other. The trajectory of the conflict is heartbreaking. Finally, here is the Dome of the Rock, seen from a side of the Temple Mount not usually visited by young American Jews. But I think they should put it in the book. It makes you think in a way about conflict that is difficult to do from the Wailing Wall. Everything is just right THERE to look at.

David took us from there to view the archaeological dig he is currently working on. At that point I was a little saturated with information and unable to retain all the information he gave us about what was being dug, what was being found, etc. David said he spent the better part of five hours sweating in the sun that was streaming through the gap between tarps, because the work he needed to do could not be done in the shade.

After a walk along the ramparts of the Old City (which I didn’t get a good photo of this time so I’ll do it again some other time), we ran into this camel, my first camel. It was a little embarrassing how loudly I yelled “YESH GAMAL!!!!” (There is a camel!!!!!). And I couldn’t exactly get my camera up in time to get a really good photo, but here you are.

The guy on top of the camel yelled at me “Taxi?” I think, but am not entirely sure that he was making fun of me.

ps. I've now spent more time on this than I spend on that thesis write up.

two markets

I went to the Machane Yehuda Shuk (one of the two covered markets in Jerusalem) the first day I was in Jerusalem. I had met up with a friend from Portland who had been In Jerusalem for the three week session at the Yeshiva that ended before I arrived. It was nice to get to know this culturally strange place with a familiar face. I've been back every week since, to buy food, to smell spices, to soak up the vibrant culture, etc. I finally got around to taking some photographs of the shuk yesterday, while I was walking around with two other students from my program.

The shuk has mostly food. It consists of four or so columns and three or so rows, making it relatively logical and easy to get around It also two main entrance/exit points. There are people who sell latkes and roast chicken, felafel, bread and pastries, coffee and espresso. There are three vendors who sell more kinds of Halva (sweet sesame paste/cake yummy thing) than I knew existed (I am particularly fond of the chocolate swirl and the coffee swirl). There are several butchers, fishmongers, and dried fruit sellers. A few random housewares sellers, a guy who sells five shekel ($1.50) yarlmukes (I bought three), there are vendors of clothing, spices, cheese, fruit and vegetables and, how could I forget, pet supplies. Really anything kosher you could ever want. I still can't hangle worth a damn, but before I buy anything more expensive than the five shekel yarmulkes, I intend to learn.





After a little while in the Machane Yehuda Shuk, my friends and I proceeded to the Old City Shuk. The old city shuk is a very different experience than Machane Yehuda. It is a series of stores/stalls cut into the walls of buildings in the winding streets of a very very old city. It is not strictly kosher, nor is it at all logically laid out. The Streets wind and turn, they exit out onto other streets that aren't anywhere near where you started off. There is a Jewish area, a Muslim area and a Christian area. They all run into each other and over each other. Getting lost seems very easy. I haven't fully explored the Old Shuk yet, I'm not quite mentally ready to be lost there..

The Old City Shuk has mostly goods, pottery, textiles, housewares, nick-nacks, hoookas, samovars, random metal vessels, etc. When I start fitting out my apartment with plates, cups, bowls, towels, tablecloths and cloth napkins, I will make my way back to the Old City Shuk. In particular to this little pottery stall, where the selection of traditional-ish pottery was outstanding, and very inexpensive. Hopefully, I'll be better at haggling then, or at least I should try to be more mentally prepared for it.

botanical additions

This past week has been particularly busy, and somewhat exhausting. It has also been very productive. I learned the infinitive verb construction and a bizarre preposition that precedes direct objects, found an apartment (I move in early next week), learned about the Binding of Isaac, and ate felafel.

Here are two more photos that fit in the "wow, this doesn't grow in Maine" category. Earlier I posted a photo of a pomegranate, (Hebrew: Rimon). Here are olives (Zaytim) and grapefruit (Eshkolit).

photographic bits and pieces of Jerusalem (and the best graffiti on a street sign ever)

Jerusalem is made of stone. It is a limestone sometimes called meleke (which is Arabic for King or Kingly), it is, also, I should point out, similar to the Hebrew word for King (melech). The stone, when it is quarried is soft enough that one can carve at it with a knife. As it exposed to air, it hardens. This makes it ideal for building (apparently). The stone also polishes beautifully, developing a rich sheen very quickly.

Since the British Mandate of Palestine, it has been a Municipal law that all buildings within the Jerusalem city limits be faced in stone. The sidewalks in the city center are also paved in stone. The paving stones are quarried very roughly, leaving many ridges and gouges (for traction). But the tops of the ridges are polished by the thousands of shoes walking upon them, and develop a really smooth finish.

At midday, when the sun is at the top of its arc, the stone is almost blinding. At night, the wind picks up and the temperature drops. The city is lit not just by street lights, but by architectural lighting on many of the buildings. The reflectivity of the stone makes it glow with a beautiful and diffuse light. It's entirely unlike New York, where most of the building and sidewalks suck up the light from the streetlights.

It's time to get ready for Shabbat!