Kever Benjamin's Golda School has been empty now for a whole school year. The residents of the El Ram neighborhood had been fighting a long war against the Municipality and the Ministry of Health, saying that the sewage odors were killing them. The problem was the stilling tank in the Golda School, which expels polluted air with each start of the new Albar pumping station's pumps.
The Municipality tried to solve the problem by throwing money on it, building a by pass main line along the Ben Yehuda Street, far from the El Ram neighborhood. Having spent millions of shekels and destroyed much asphalt, the Golda School prepares itself to reopen. Only that the parents association will not allow it. They feel that the school is contaminated, and will make sick their sensitive children.
The Chief Consultant of the Municipality, Prof. Uri Marinov, spent a day in the school smelling everything. His diagnosis did not satisfy the association, that qualified his answers as irrelevant and insulting. The bad odour in the gym, according to Marinov, comes from rotten matresses (the place has been unused for a year or more). The Beth classroom smells strange, and Marinov said "It is that open paint can". The residents were seized by a rage attack. The Municipality cleaned the place and invited everybody to come and smell by himself. The Minister of Health Leytzmann spent a full hour in the school and smelt nothing. Being an experienced Haredi politician, he knew better than to say anything.
The residents still get headaches from the fetid, putrid, corrupt environment and are decided that the school will not re-open. I believe they are victims of mass hysteria, smelling odors that are not there, and feeling headaches that are as real as if they were caused by some chemical in the air. I believe the devilish sulphur odors have to be driven out by a ritual, by a religious ceremony. The City Rabbi should organize a midnight ceremony with ten bearded kabbalists burning incense in the gym to definitely expell those noxious spirits. I mean it.
7 comments:
City Rabbi?
Is this person on the municipal payroll, or do you mean that he is the leader of a local synagogue?
This reminds me, have you considered a side business performing ritual purifications? You could sacrifice a goat onsite and sprinkle the blood in the bushes around the school, and then declare the school to be ritually pure.
Ronduck,
Kever Benjamin has not one but two chief rabbis, as does Israel itself. One is the Ashkenazi chief rabbi , the second one is the Sepharadi Chief Rabbi. Of course they hate each other mortally and delegitimize each other's decrees.
I have not considered the ritual purification business because the competition is very strong. Roentgen-vision kabbalist rabbis have established brand names, mostly inherited from their fathers and grandfathers who wee also miracle rabbis. You cannot just call yourself a miracle rabbi and set up shop, you need to start from something. Unfortunately my elders were wealthy provincial shopkeepers and merchants, I can invoke no ancestor spirit to get me started.
1. That sounds like a typical bureaucratic turf struggle. A few months back The Ethiopian Jews came up and I looked their wiki page up to learn a little more, which is where I first came across the two rabbinates. I thought that the national rabbinates were advisory and the local congregations were free to do as they pleased, yet again I was wrong. Have any politicians proposed unifying the rabbinates in order to save money and promote national unity?
2. J, you would be the Water Rabbi, combining ancient practices with modern engineering. You could be called to a site and would suggest either a modern engineering solution or a goat sacrifice, depending on the circumstance.
You could have handled the entire Kever Benjamin school affair from sewage line design to ritual purification.
Maybe a lamb would be more appropriate for a school.
Ronduck
Jews have given up with animal sacrifices since Titus destroyed our Temple in Jerusalem, 2,000 years ago.
Sacrifices may be renewed when the Temple is rebuild, may it be in our time. But even in that time, that is in Jesus times, animal sacrifices were rare and only pidgeons were used, and since then it has been two thousand years of praying and fasting and giving money to beneficence.
Judging by your description of the Jews at your local school some may be ready for sacrifices now.
A few years ago I was browsing the foreign videos at Blockbuster and I picked up an English language Israeli film. The film takes depicts a group of settlers sacrificing an animal, although the actual throat slitting isn't shown on camera.
You confused the Samaritans, which are not Jews but follow antique Jewish customs, with Jews. They sacrifice lambs on Mount Eval over Schem in the Pascal feast.
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