Israel is entering the rainy season and - no rain. The experts say that the winter will be dry. It will be our seventh year of drought. No one dares to say out loudly that the climate has changed for good. Or for bad. We in Israel are drinking desalted sea water and growing crops with recycled wastewater. We take care of the Palestinians, but what the other neighbors will do I dont know. Pic: Hony Ha-Me-Agel, a gold medal with the Biblical saint who drew a circle in the ground and fasted in it till the rain was forced to fall.
15 comments:
Hony's story is an interesting one, in that it's one of the few well-known myths from the Maccabean period, other than the revolt itself. Maybe the only one?
What do you mean? That the revolt is a myth? What about Hanukkah?
What is that medal? I know of Honi Ha'me'gel, but where was this medal used? (It looks a little like a 1/2 shekel coin, although that's obviously not the design on that coin).
That the revolt is a myth?
I'm using another definition of "myth".
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/myth
J - would you say that the story of the oil lamp burning for 8 days is a myth? There's no doubt that the Maccabee rebellion happened, but it seems to me that the historical details have been embellished over time because the facts were not quite sexy enough. This is very common in history - there really was a George Washington but he did not chop down any cherry trees.
K
I have a different question- why do religious sites that are administered by the Orthodox (e.g. the tomb of Honi) always look like dumps?
I was just in Lakewood, NJ yesterday (unfortunately for the funeral of my uncle, my mother's youngest brother and the last of my uncles - that generation is gone, guess who's turn is next?) , which is nowadays dominated by the Orthodox, and it was the same: the cheder bochers were playing in dusty school yards that looked like dumps. Maybe because gay men are suppressed by the Orthodox there is a shortage of interior decorators?
K
I have a different question- why do religious sites that are administered by the Orthodox (e.g. the tomb of Honi) always look like dumps?
I was just in Lakewood, NJ yesterday (unfortunately for the funeral of my uncle, my mother's youngest brother and the last of my uncles - that generation is gone, guess who's turn is next?) , which is nowadays dominated by the Orthodox, and it was the same: the cheder bochers were playing in dusty school yards that looked like dumps. Maybe because gay men are suppressed by the Orthodox there is a shortage of interior decorators?
K
The gold medal is for collectors and has no commercial use (except the gold plus collector's added value).
Regarding why Orthodox look so unkept, I think it is a learning society of adult men, all of whom are married from age 20 and with children, so they have no time, money or need for being presentable. They are not selling anything and they are definitely not trying to impress any female.
But may be I am being insincere, we Eastern Jews were always considered unwashed and may have been some truth in it.
It's funny how these libels change - it's true that the original rap was that the Jews were "dirty" but in the US the legend inverted and Jewish mothers were considered to be germ phobic obsessive housekeepers. Blacks, Irish, Italians, etc. were considered "dirty" but the Jews had other slurs attached to them, more involving cheating at business or miserly behavior than dirt. But this I think coincided with the period when most American Jews were not Orthodox, certainly not in the modern sense where they are full time "scholars" who do not work.
K
I should add that the "dirty Jew" legend was so thoroughly erased in America that when I first explained it to my (American Jewish origin) wife she was completely puzzled by it - all the Jews she knew growing up were in of the (largely secular) obsessively clean school and "dirty Jew" registered on her as a non-sequitur like "genius Arab".
K
K-
Are you sure that that slur "dirty" originally had an actual connotation of uncleanliness? I always thought it was usually just a generic pejorative.
Yes - see what J (who lived as a child in Hungary) wrote - the Jews were considered unwashed or dirty in the literal sense (and given the extreme poverty and lack of indoor plumbing in much of E. Europe this was at one time not far from true). I know you may be incredulous because this is so opposite to the modern stereotype of Jews.
K
I should add that the attribution of lack of cleanliness was mutual - a non-Jewish (male) youth was referred to as a shaygetz by E. European Jews (and there were equivalent feminine and plural terms). This is derived from the biblical term "sheketz" which means impure or unclean (though in the ritual rather than literal sense) - more or less the same thing as "trayf" - nonkosher (however the common translation is "detestable" or "abomination"). This is a little over the top - the "treatment" prescribed for touching a "detestable" thing was that you would have to wash your clothes and be unclean until sunset, so clearly it was not that big a deal. See Leviticus 11. The charitable version was that only a Christian youth who harrassed Jews was referred to as a shaygetz, but realistically this was an all purpose term for non-Jews, though over time it lost its association with filth. Likewise, in Yiddish "gey kibenye matri" is considered a mild epithet (mild enough that my mother would say it) even though it was originally derived from the Russian for "go to your f*cked mother" - most Yiddish speakers (especially outside of Russia) had no idea what it literally meant or they wouldn't have said it as often as they did.
K
Eastern Jews were dirt poor when arrived to the West. They were poorly dressed, their soles had holes, never heard of ties so the antisemites did not admit them in their fancy restaurants.
It went way beyond that. As the economic position of the WASPs in the US was threatened by the Jewish upstarts, they suddenly became aware of their history - that they were here first. Penniless immigrants were not going to stay in fancy resorts anyway. The ones excluded (and this lasted until the 1960s) were the middle and upper class Jews who had neckties, especially and ironically the German Jews, who had always tried to comport themselves as WASPs who happened to attend synagogue twice a year (they even put church organs in their reform schuls and made an ostentatious show of NOT keeping kosher).
My father-in-law told me that in the mid '60s his Jewish owned company (which built truck trailers) held a meeting at the famous Greenbriar Resort, newly opened to Jews. At the end of the meeting the manager of the resort commended my f.i.l. for his group's behavior and told him that they were "a credit to their race", which was a backhanded compliment. My FIL chose to focus on the backhanded aspect and not being a shy kind of guy, he replied, "f*ck you", which I assume lowered the Jews again in the manager's estimation. So be it. The Greebriar Resort declared bankruptcy this year - it was too old and stuffy and did not appeal to modern sensibilities.
K
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