Kever Benjamin City has been enriched by an American oleh hadash (new immigrant), who has assumed the sacred mission of improving the environment of this corner of the Holy Land. He is an American architect, a true Zionist, an idealist of the old race. "I know I am called naive, a dreamer..." he says. The man is a famous professor, a hero of the American environmental architecture scene. In his lectures he predicts the coming end of fueled vehicles, and the urgent need to think about the problem of tens of thousands of abandoned gas stations. He wrote an award-winning paper about transforming these stations into "green" sanctuaries, all over the world. I am afraid if the stays in Kever Benjamin City, cars will be outlawed and we shall have to ride asses, as our ancestors. The use of energy-guzzling lifts will be forbidden since staircases are available. Street asphalt will be broken up and the city reforestated. The original fauna of wild jackals, rabid wolves, poisonous snakes, pest-carrying rats, Anopheles mosquitoes, will be reinstated. Please, America, take him back!
4 comments:
Could it be that, apart from the very religious, aliyah has the most appeal to the starry-eyed and slightly off kilter subset of diaspora Jews? Perhaps it's just my secular diaspora bias, but I don't see many reasons to be sanguine about Israel's future at all, even compared to ours.
You can keep him. He's your's now. You are always hoping for the Jews to make Aliyah. They say be careful what you ask for - you just might get it.
True. The Chinese curse: May God grant you what you are praying for.
Regarding the comment that we are getting "the slightly off kilter subset of diaspora Jews": Some kind of self-selection must be going on, just as American Jews are descended from a self-selected sub-set of European Jews. Let me believe that we are getting now the vanguard of a mass movement, and of course the vanguard has special qualities. To immigrate to Israel (from anywhere) and to stay here during terror, war and worldwide condemnation (our permanent condition), you have to be more than a little excentric, and we here by definition are so, therefore these American Jews are definitely coming home. Maybe the architect is right and we should break up the asphalt and plant trees on Weizmann Street.
Why is he worried about abandoned gas stations? Has he not heard of that Israeli entrepreneur who wants to turn them into battery-changing stations for electric cars?
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