Is this why case rates remain high despite high vaccination rates and some (but quite limited and poorly enforced) lockdown measures?

Reminder that when this lockdown was declared due to skyrocketing infection rates the government and the Ministry of Health wanted to close schools. The Ministry of Education opposed closing schools and the Knesset Education Committee vetoed the government decision, forcing schools and kindergartens to remain open.

So despite the supposed lockdown schools were (except in red zones) operating as usual, with the following results:

"Health Ministry data shows that one in three confirmed cases in recent weeks are below the age of 20 and one in eight are below the age of ten.

According to Education Ministry, there were 23,549 students who tested positive — 4,000 of whom are in preschool, 11,680 in elementary school and nearly 8,000 in high school."

When life gives you lemons...

The saying about life giving you lemons is truth be told rather misleading. 

Lemons are in my opinion wonderous fruits, far more useful then just as ingredients for lemonade.

If life has given you lemons, or even better, a whole lemon tree, than truly you are blessed, because these are some of the most delightful multi-purpose products of the fruit world.

The song is just as mistaken: lemons are many things, but impossible to eat is not one of them. From using the grated rind and juice in my daily salad, to brightening flavours in soups, stews and curries, enhancing a fruit salad, prevent apples and other fruits from browning, making soothing teas, cheerful lemon curds and lemon cream for tarts, the famous merengue pie, playfully sweet-tangy biscuits and scones, a zingy partner for fish and chicken to simply adding a few slices or a little fresh juice to a humble glass of water, lemon, or occasionally its green cousin, lime, is a staple in our home year round.

We are very thankful to have a lemon tree. When it is in blossom it fragrances our garden with a heady sweet perfume. When its fruit is ripe it is a delight to just stand near the tree and inhale the delicate scent. I love the way the kitchen smells when grating the rind, especially on freshly picked lemons. After Sukkot I use another lemon relative, our etrog, to make a pomader, preserving the delicious lemonyness with clove spikes to use as our besamim for havdalah each week.

In these rollercoaster covid times we are profoundly grateful for our fruit trees more than ever. This is our third lockdown and truly I have come to appreciate these trees in a much more visceral way. They have become like friends, I feel I know them so much better for spending so much time looking out the window at my little patch of green among the concrete and stone.

They mark the passage of time when days and weeks feel as though they have lost meaning. The evergreen lemon doesn't lose its leaves like the mulberry or the pomegranate, but it still changes through the months, alternately budding, blossoming, raising its young or groaning under the weight of fruit ripe for harvesting. Sometimes it does a few of these at once.

We do not possess the greenest of thumbs and for the most part our garden is in shade, not ideal I fear for most of our trees, but of all of them the lemon and kumquat have been the most forgiving and the kindest. Of these two, there is no contest that the lemon provides us with the greatest benefit, though we are very fond of them all.

Today felt a bit festive despite the lockdown because we harvested about 4 kg of ripe lemons. How I adore the aroma of the fresh lemons as we pick them. Our tree flowered twice last year so these were just the first batch of lemons. Plenty of green ones still growing on the tree that look like they will need a while longer to ripen.

Lucky then that we love lemons so very much.

For all that I am a lemon fan I confess that I have not identified the variety we grow. The tree was planted by the previous residents. They have amazing flavour, a pleasant almost sweet-tartness when fresh picked, which certainly does put me in the mind of Meyer lemons, though I don't think that is what they are.

On the day I pick fresh lemons, when they are at their most fragrant and juicy, I love to make lemon pasta. The recipe is very simple, learnt from cookery writer Debbie Koenig, but it's just perfection: olive oil, grated lemon zest and juice, salt, black pepper, some grated parmesan, kashkeval, grana padano or kishk.

I experiment with whatever pasta I have in the cupboard, delicious with rice or kasha as well. This time I found amazing whole wheat papparadelle which married beautifully with the aromatic lemon sauce. Everyone licked their bowls clean.

It's become something of a family tradition, a personal Lemon Festival. The children help to pick the fruit. Then we weigh it to calculate the trumot and maasrot, the biblical tithes religious Jews living in Israel must take from fruits and vegetables they harvest. Until the trumot and maasrot have been deducted the produce is tevel, not kosher for consumption.

The tradition reminds us to share our good fortune by donating to the poor and links us to our ancient past by remembering the contributions the farming population gave to the priestly tribe of Levi, which was not allocated agricultural land because their job was pastoral, as teachers of Torah and to serve in the ancient Tabernacle and later Temple. To the best of my knowledge there were no lemons in ancient Israel, but simply growing some of our own produce here and preserving these customs connects us to generations of our ancestors and their fruit trees.

And then we feast together over a lemon pasta dinner, with salad dressed with lemon juice, and tea with slices of our lemons. Basic and filling and our own mini family celebration to thank God for this wonderful treat we have been granted, these bright, sunny lemons that ripen in the middle of winter.

You gotta have faith

So much is still closed in Israel and with numbers rising we may be heading to another lockdown, but at least we can go out and enjoy this wonderful time of year and the beginning of the most impressive wildflower season.

It's not just the enjoyment of beautiful flowers but experiencing each year anew the magical transformation of the landscape during the rainy season. Living in this region where rain is seasonal and we have no great rivers you have to maintain a certain kind of faith all through the dry season that this barren earth can be fertile again, long after you can't even remember what rain feels or smells or tastes like.

This is the annual miracle of the rebirth, of brown hillsides turned green and covered with flowers, of seasonal waterfalls or seeing bone dry desert canyons suddenly flowing with rushing floodwaters. The imagery is familiar to many from the bible, in the lands of the bible this is a very real, living reality, not simple metaphor.



If you know that the desert really can bloom, that the dry ravine really can turn in to swirling torrent, that the forest burnt by a dry season wildfire will turn green once more, then you know hope. Every year the turn of the seasons here reminds us that the seemingly impossible is possible, that the bleakest hour will pass.

Seeing the autumn rains bring out the winter wildflowers is a reminder that this difficult crisis we find ourselves in is not forever. 

Here comes the rain again

 
The rains have finally come to Israel and our neighbours, and what rains, pouring down with such intensity that many areas received half the month's average rainfall in just a few days, accompanied by stunning lightning shows.

After several months of the dry season folks have almost forgotten what rain is. People, and especially kids, go out to delight in the first downpour and drink in that delicious scent of the first autumn rainstorm, the forgotten novelty of droplets falling from the sky, fresh rain water on hair and skin. It feels so exotic to pull out the rainboots and raincoats packed away at the top of the wardrobe in May. Who truly imagined then that we would all still be mired in this covid crisis when the rains returned. Still, the cycle of the rains is also comforting, other routines may have been thrown into disarray, but here we are in the Hebrew month of Heshvan and here is the rain and with it the first new green shoots and the delicate autumn crocuses in pastel hues, the promise of renewal and hope for the arid earth. The first rainstorm of the season is so special it even has its own name in Hebrew, going all the way back to biblical times, the Yoreh, some say from the word moreh, teaching or showing, because the Yoreh is the sign to get ready in earnest for winter, to fix the roof, strengthen the barn and prepare the fields. In a region where we don't have major rivers rain is very important to our culture, ancient Hebrew has many terms for the different types of rain: geshem, matar, revivim and more. If the rains are late the custom is to institute emergency prayers and communal fasts until it finally rains. How intense can a good rainy season be? For comparison, Tel Aviv and London receive about the same annual rainfall, just in Tel Aviv all that rain is compressed in to just a few short months.

Brushing away the lockdown cobwebs

How refreshing to brush away the lockdown cobwebs with a drive through the wide open desert all the way to the rugged red Eilat mountains that give way to narrow strip of coast.

Infections here have declined drastically and as a result we are no longer confined to within one kilometre of our homes. We decided to take a day off to drive down to Israel's southern tip, the port and resort town of Eilat on the Red Sea. We have been missing both the sea and the desert so much during lockdown.

The Red Sea's waters are wonderfully turquoise and clear. There are beaches with corals in the shallows where you can snorkel but even just standing on the jetty over the water you can look down and see schools of fish in a rainbow of colours from matt purples and yellows to iridescent metallics to monochrome rainbow stripes. We even got lucky enough to glimpse a sea turtle.

Normally the bay is full of pleasure craft, but the sea was quiet, a solitary cargo ship docked in the port. In the stillness of lockdown many sea creatures have felt comfortable edging closer to the shoreline with giant manta rays and other larger species sighted by locals.

From Israel's narrow strip of Red Sea coast you can wave over to Eilat's twin, the Jordanian resort and port town of Aqaba. Somewhere out in the desert mountains south of there across the bay you can glimpse the northern tip of Saudi Arabia. Out to the south-west the coast continues over the border in to Egypt's Sinai desert.

It's good to look out at neighbouring countries and feel a little connection to the wider world, even if it is only our small corner of it. To stand at a northern tip of the Red Sea and in my mind's eye see how it continues on south down to Bab Al Mandeb, the Horn of Africa and Yemen. To wonder which of the sea creatures swimming in the bay might have travelled that distance. In these strange times this is the closest we are likely to come to international travel for quite some time.

Once upon a time Eilat sustained itself from copper mining (probably the original King Solomon's Mines) and the port, but in recent decades the town's chief industry is tourism with a skyline of glittering hotels by the waterfront and a cluster of older guesthouses back in the old town centre popular with students and backpackers.

Right now all of them from the fanciest to the most basic are dark, just the odd light on where lone security guards still sit at deserted reception desks. The hotel district is like a ghost town, eerily silent and unlit, like old ships abandoned out to sea. The pleasure yachts and glass bottomed boats rest draped in tarps tied to the moorings of silent quays. My heart aches for all the local residents who's livelihoods depend on tourism.

As always we pray for better days for everyone and look forward to the day when we can once again welcome visitors from around the world.

Israel and the school quandary

It's a mistake comparing countries on this matter. Israel has about double the number of children per capita than other Western countries. Average class sizes are bigger, physical classroom are smaller and more crowded.

Schools being closed is much more disruptive to our economy because simply we have more young kids per capita so more people who have to stay home or try to WFH with little kids under foot. We also just in general have a younger population with more families of childbearing age.

This is part of what makes our country so dynamic and innovative, but in the case of covid it may make our school system something of an Achilles heel.

The parameters are simply very different for Israel than the UK or Sweden or the US or the Netherlands or any other Western country many of us naturally compare Israel to.

Maybe opening schools in the US and UK for example has gone for the most part relatively smoothly, especially primary schools.

That doesn't necessarily mean that having the same policy in Israel will yield the same result. It doesn't mean that enacting the same policies and safeguards will work the same way.

We need to be making our own model based on our own demographics, climate and resources not just saying "but in the US/UK/Sweden/Germany" etc.

Many of the schools here closed in September not because of the lockdown, but well before, due to outbreaks among pupils and staff that left schools logistically unable to function due to large numbers of teachers and kids in quarantine or infected.

Schools can't function normally when infection rates are through the roof. I saw primary schools where hundreds of pupils were in bidud at any one time with dozens of teachers either infected or in bidud.

Lockdown or no lockdown a school can't function like that. Certainly a situation of rolling recurring quarantines and infections will not yield any kind of stable school routine and it will still disrupt the economy and parents ability to work.

More than many other Western countries with colder climates we are in a position to make a lot of use of the outdoors. Yes, even in the rain.

I realise this is not mainstream, but among Israel's homeschoolers and at the margins there is a "forest school" type movement, there are communities where learning happens at least in part outdoors and in most weathers. There is the Shomrei Hagan organisation which has educational programmes running outdoors throughout the year in all but the most foul weather.

These are resources which MoE could be looking at to apply on a wider scale to facilitate learning through the covid crisis. We have a country blessed with a relatively mild winter with lots of winter sun. We have stunning nature and archaeology sites, many within or close to urban areas, including in more deprived locales and especially, but not only, in the periphery.

Even if we have to in part continue by distance learning it should be possible for classes to have regular weekly socially distanced meet-ups outdoors, with nature and archaeological classes and activities. These are mostly free resources located near to so many of our schools.

Yes, it will mean that academically there is less emphasis on the conventional core curriculum but frankly I don't think that is key during a global pandemic. Facilitating learning lishma and the social connections between kids, class cohesion, contact with their teachers, healthy outdoor time, these are all fundamentally important to the well being of our communities and our kids.

Maybe they will still be zooming maths and English part of the time, but outdoor schooling away from screens at least a couple of times a week could do a great deal to support their physical and mental health.

None of this is to say that MoE has the foggiest idea how to enact any of this. MoE policy makers are unlikely to look to homeschoolers or fringe educational movements for their covid policies (or any others), but in principle the concepts and resources are there for innovative alternatives.

Will the Ministry of Education do any of this? Sadly I think that is doubtful.

I see a lot of innovative teachers and school headteachers who would like to get more creative and more flexible in their response to covid and who see how critical it is to maintain that bond between them and their students, who appreciate that creating an alternative framework for learning together is far more crucial than plugging away at some kind of traditional core curriculum. 

My impression (and I hope that I am wrong) is that the MoE itself is characterised by policy makers who are far more set in their ways and unable to deviate from a more traditional curriculum and teaching methods. I fear that this will mean continued attempts at re-opening schools and doing the same attempt at "regular school" over and over with the same results we had in May and in September. 

Virtual Ushpizin

Here in Israel it is the start of the week long festival of Sukkot (Tabernacles, Festival of Booths). The holiday is celebrated with the construction of huts outdoors, on people's balconies, in yards, even in parking areas and on the pavement in buildings where that is the only open space.

The sukkah, the temporary dwelling we live in for the week of Sukkot, represents the uncertainty and frailty of human existence. It has at least a couple of walls, but the roof must be sparse enough that at night you can see the moon and stars through the cracks, even though it offers shade by day.

It reminds us of our ancient ancestors wandering in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt and later our agricultural ancestors who built temporary huts in the fields this time of year during the autumn harvests, a season focused on the delicate change in weather on the margin between the hot dry summer and the hoped for rainy season.

We need the rains, but if they come too early they may damage the harvest, not to mention rain out our fragile sukkah huts. If they come too late they will damage the coming autumn agricultural seasons. Everything hinges on the rains coming at their appointed time, a seasonal reminder of the fragility of human life.

One of the central themes of Sukkot is hospitality. Traditionally this is a holiday with much inviting and hosting, to the extent that the President of Israel opens his sukkah to the public and citizens from all over the country can come to visit.

This year though Israel sadly has one of the world's highest covid infection rates and the country is under lockdown. No one may host in their sukkot, immediate households only. An especially lonely holiday for those who live alone.

Among the customs related to the sukkah is the symbolic inviting of the Ushpizin, the biblical figures Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron and King David. This year these will be our only "guests", representing for us all the family and friends we would usually share this festival with.