Blessings from Yemen

I had to take a taxi last week to get home from visiting someone at the hospital in Rehovot. Friendly driver at the hospital taxi rank quoted me a fair price and off we went when he had a phone call.

Over the bluetooth connection I could hear someone saying that had food ready to take to a shiva house.

The driver turned to me apologetically "I wouldn't usually do this, but I need to take this food to a mourner's home. If you give me permission we'll take a detour so I can pick-up the food, then after I drop you off at your destination I'll be ready with the food in my car to go on to the family sitting shiva in Ramle"

Of course I said yes, how could I say no to the chance to be a shaliah mitzva (an emissary for a good deed)?

So off we went on a detour to a street of slightly dilapidated buildings in the old centre of town, a neighbourhood where there are still some of the original red roofed little single-storey houses from the early years of the yishuv, the last relics of a simpler and much poorer time before high rises and high tech.

As we drove my driver told me stories of fateful meetings, the hand of destiny and his family history.

He arrived as a small baby from Yemen just after Israel's War of Independence. His family were sent to live in a tent in a maabara (transit camp for immigrants during the severe housing shortage Israel suffered from during the massive influx of olim in the late 40s to early 60s).

"It was the middle of nowhere, even today it isn't really somewhere, but back then we truly were in the middle of nowhere, a cluster of tents and immigrants from Yemen mixed with Holocaust survivors and Maghrebim (North Africans). But we managed.

You know I was almost one of the kidnapped Yemeni babies (a long running controversy in Israel, whether immigrant babies were taken from large families to be raised by childless couples). My mother though was concerned by the stories she heard from other women, so she assigned my older sisters to watch my 24/7"

The family were eventually housed in the central Israeli town of Ramle, in a neighbourhood where one side of the street were all Yemeni immigrants, while the other was new arrivals from eastern Europe, including many Holocaust survivors.

"When I was growing up I learned to speak really good Yiddish, and the Ashkenazi new olim learnt Hebrew with a gutteral Yemeni accent. We were all religious in that neighbourhood, and we shared everything, any kind of help and support you can imagine. Our parents' generation, wow, what a generation, what people, such devotion, such dedication."

He told me that back in Yemen, in their small town in the mountains, his family were quite comfortably off. His father used his comparative wealth to support local Torah scholars, providing food and books for them. This was why his father merited to live to the ripe old age of 105, in good health and with a sharp, clear mind.

"Once he rode on a donkey for three days straight, all the way to Sanaa (the Yemeni capital and a major Jewish centre) just to buy the works of the Rambam for our local rabbis to teach their students.

How did you know if you were rich in Yemen? If you could afford books.

Books were such a precious and expensive commodity that the community usually didn't have enough for each child to learn from their own book, they would gather around one book and some specialised in reading it from the side, some specialised in reading upside down, some backwards, and that is how they enabled the maximum number of pupils to learn"

When his father passed away Yemeni rabbis and their descendants came to the shiva from all over Israel to honour his memory and to tell him that it was because of his father's generosity that they were able to dedicate their lives to Torah and to become rabbinical leaders in the community.

Now I think (and hope) this personal history would have been fascinating to most people, my writing doesn't to justice to his wonderful story telling style. For me though, well, I already knew a lot of the dry historical facts because it just so happens that my major for my masters degree was Jews of the Islamic world, and one of my special areas of study was about the Jews of Yemen.

He told me many other stories too, far too many to add here, like the time a friend asked him to do a favour, to pick up a visiting rabbi from a small moshav and after deciding the young man looked familiar it turned out that his passenger had the same name as him and was the son of his long lost cousin from Nahariya he hadn't seen in 35 years who'd moved to the US to teach. The rabbi had flown all the way to Israel to help free an aguna (a "chained" woman who's husband refuses to give her a Jewish divorce).

"Driving a taxi I am so grateful that I get the chance to be a shaliah mitzva"

With that we had arrived at my destination. He turned around and asked for my name. "Madame it was a pleasure to have you in my taxi, I have so enjoyed swapping stories. Thank you so much for helping me to by a shaliah mitzva for this mourning family."

And as we parted he heaped a pile of blessings on me and my family, that we should always be a party to good deeds, that we should be rewarded for our mitzvot, that we should always merit to be among the compassionate, both as givers and receivers, that we should be blessed with health and long life, just like his father of blessed memory, amen ve-amen.

Faith that the desert will yet bloom

מה רבו מעשיך!!
One of the most amazing things about living in Eretz Yisrael is the living Torah, metaphors that are real and not just stories, the land as peirush, living commentary. A rainy winter like this is what the second paragraph of the Shema is about, is the embodiment of so many images described in the Tanakh.

If you lived in exile in lands where there is no desert and no rainy season then the Tanakh remains just a story, you will not have experienced the real meaning of the prayers for rain, the heartfelt prayer each autumn that there will be enough rain, that you will get to experience this miracle of seeing the desert transformed not by technology or human intervention, amazing as irrigation might be, but by the divine act of bringing rain at its appointed time.

In exile the idea of the wilderness turning fertile seems like a miracle that must be outside of nature. Living in the Land of Israel you see the miracles Hashem has created as part of the natural cycle of the Land, how at a stroke the land languishes in drought, even the hardy acacias whithering with thirst, how one extra rainy season brings the desert to life, moshivi akeret habayit em habanim semeha, Halleluyah. Shabbat shalom!

Yehehzkel's vision of the dry bones - the desert in bloom gives faith that a nation beaten down by the might of Babylon can yet rise again

Faith from the experience of the climate and nature of the Land itself, anyone who has lived here has a faith derived from experiencing the cycle of drought and rebirth, that just as the desert can flood and bloom, so the biblical prophets promises of redemption can be realised.

A belief that miracles can occur naturally as part of the natural order of the world, not as some kind of outside supernatural intervention, a faith that the inconceivable is not the impossible, that it can become real, that dreams and yearnings for returning to Zion can happen. In this sense the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in Israel is a miracle within nature, just because it seemed like an impossible dream did not mean it could not be done, miraculous things happen all the time through the natural order that Hashem created, miracles don't necessarily mean magic.

The bottom right corner of Arabia

 

I visited the Sultanate of Oman in 1997. I've been fascinated by Oman ever since as a little girl I came across an old National Geographic magazine with an article on the Sultanate dated not long after the the recently departed Sultan Qaboos came to the throne. The story of his attempts to develop this small nation and bring it out of a global isolation which had earned it the title 'Hermit Kingdom' intrigued me.

In the mid-1990s there was another National Geographic article on Oman, about it's transformation from a backwater on the Arabian penisular struggling to put down a revolt by tribes near the Yemeni border, to a peaceful fairly prosperous country which had nevertheless succeeded in preserving it's rich heritage despite the dramatic change that had transormed the country in only two decades. The photos showed beautiful landscapes and interesting buildings.I was intrigued all over again, I remember comparing the 70s article with the one from the 90s and marvelling at the change.

In the summer of 1997 I made my dream come true. Well, summer isn't the ideal time to travel to Arabia, in fact it's a pretty lousy time to visit the Gulf, the heat is unbearable and the humidity in the coastal areas is suffocating. I don't think that I understood what heat and humidity really were until my Oman trip! Still, there are advantages to going off season - namely that my mother and I could afford it. The beauty of Oman and the fascinating cultural experience certainly made it worth our while to suffer the trials of an Omani summer. Oman remains one of my favourite places I've ever visited.



One of the lessons I came away with from my sojourn in Oman was a genuine appreciation for the work of Sultan Qaboos and his dedication to bettering the lot of all his subjects. He never married, considering himself married to his duty as sovereign. I didn't get the feeling that the people we met were paying lip service to him out of fear or any kind of enforced reverence for the man. My mother and I were struck by the genuine gratitude and affection local people had for him and the hands on way in which he was reforming and developing his country, whether it was a shiny new project in the capital or more remote rural village infrastructure projects. He seemed to make a point of being very much a man of the people, travelling extensively within the country, hearing the grievances of common people, building, improving and helping as he went.

This is very much in the tradition of the old fashioned local sheikh in the Middle East, a tradition that while not exactly democratic in the Western sense, relies intensely on the support and acceptance of the local people. He is their judge, their arbiter and their benefactor because they consent to his rule and he goes to great pains to care for their welfare.



I only spent a few weeks in Oman, and did not reach all regions of the country, but I did try to speak to as many local people as possible (my Arabic was very basic, but far better than it is today, and we found that many young people in particular spoke decent English)

I realise this sounds very starry eyed, and of course the Sultan also lived a luxurious royal life in beautiful palaces, as one would expect from a Gulf monarch. I am not saying that he was an altruistic saint, but he did strike me as a ruler who took his responsibility to his people extremely seriously.

This responsibility extended to his take on regional Middle Eastern politics too. Oman is in a location that is at once precarious and strategic, on the bottom right corner of Arabia, sandwiched between the instability of Yemen, the power of Saudi Arabia, the glitz of the UAE and with the revolutionary zeal of Iran just across the water. Not an easy place to be.

Sultan Qaboos worked to protect his realm by trying to balance all these players, doing his best to maintain neutrality between these competing powers, but also trying to act as peace maker and mediator between them. It was in this role that he also opened a channel to Israel and hosted visits by both Prime Minister Rabin and more recently Netanyahu. He saw that building bridges, even if for now mostly economic, was in the interest of Oman, but more widely the entire Middle East. In a an explosive region he tried to create calm and lower tensions and make new connections for the common good. His mix of realism and common sense will be missed. One can hope that his appointed successor, his nephew, will be blessed with similar aspirations for regional cooperation and peace.

Singing our tradition

Shuls used to be places where there was singing, where there was a regular professional or semi-professional hazzan, maybe a choir (formal or informal). Reading an article today calling for the introduction of singing in to the weekly Shabbat prayer services I was taken aback to see the writer suggesting writing special new tunes for these prayers, so that they may be sung, as though the problem is that we need to invent tunes.

There is so much beautiful nusah for the Shabbat davening that in the last few decades has been thrown away and abandoned, so much liturgical tradition that Ashkenazim in particular (but much less so Edot Mizrah) have dumped as "old fashioned", as though hazzanut and the niggunim of one's grandparents or great-grandparents is just a fad to throw out if one gets bored of it.

So much of the musical tradition of the Ashkenazi communities was already lost in the Shoah, and yet in recent decades many Ashkenazi communities have abandoned what was left. Even in the UK, a world centre for Ashkenazi hazzanut, most shuls have fired their hazzanim and scrapped their choirs. The music of the synagogue has gone quiet, replaced either with faster mumbled davening or catchy pop-Hassidic tunes to which the text must often be shoehorned, frequently without a connection to the liturgy or context. At the fringes there has been renewed interest in the melodies of the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach or Modzitz hassidic nigunim, but this is far from the mainstream of most modern Orthodox Ashkenazi shuls which have increasingly opted for a fast, mostly mumbled Shabbat morning and even Friday night service.

I understand that people became fed up with long, drawn-out old time Shabbat services. But today the pendulum has swung too much the other way. I see so many children (and many of their parents) feeling a disconnect with the mumbled Shabbat davening. Singing needs to be restored to the Shabbat service, but don't go looking for new music or writing new tunes, revive the many beautiful melodies from the traditional nusah that are in danger of being lost, research historic hazzanut and Hassidish melodies in danger of dying out. Go visit Merkaz Renanim at Heichal Shlomo for inspiration.

Does it occur to the writer that one of the reason people are inspired by the singing on the Yamim Noraim is that these old traditional niggunim and the traditional nusah take people back to memories of their childhoods? Of singing in shul with their parents and grandparents? Of reliving, however briefly, the sweetness of a world that is no longer and loved ones who have passed?

Perhaps Proust's madeleines have become a cliche, but this doesn't diminish from the truth of his observation. Childhood melodies, like childhood foods, have the ability to transport us, to rekindle a connection lost in the haze of time, to be a Tardis of memory.

As religious Jews we have a keen feel for the importance of this connection, a reverence for maintaining a link with our ancestors thousands of years ago who were slaves in Egypt, who stood at Mount Sinai and who witnessed the siege of ancient Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. Our religion and culture incorporates ritual and special days to help inculcate these experiences so that generation after generation will have shared memories that tie us to our roots and the events that formed our nation.

Of course things change with the times. It may be an oxymoron but traditions can also change with time. That doesn't lessen the importance of trying to preserve them though, not just for the sake of conserving a key part of our culture, but because of the way they link us to our ancestors and keep alive that fleeting memory of our departed grandparents or give us an imagined shared experience with great-grandparents we never actually knew.

Judaism is ultimately a balancing act, a culture which reveres tradition, but which is also continuously evolving and creating new traditions. The grandeur of mid-twentieth century synagogue hazzanut is unlikely to make a return, the days of the hazzan and choir on a regular Shabbat seem to have passed from this world in all but a handful of synagogues around the world. It saddens me to see this beautiful art form mostly relegated to the concert hall like a relic, rather than kept alive as a working, breathing practice, but it seems that in today's world people lack the patience for it on a regular Friday night or Shabbat.

That doesn't mean though that all the traditional melodies should be thrown out of the regular Shabbat service. There will always be those that don't enjoy singing, but for many people singing the davening is what helped them learn the prayers as children and helped kids sit through the long service. Communal singing is what made women feel that they had a place in the Orthodox synagogue even if they were in the balcony or behind the mehitza. The music of shul has uplifted so many people, by highlighting the words of the davening, by creating a shared experience that a mumbled quick service cannot. It is high time that more shuls around the world, especially in Israel, included more singing in the Shabbat service for all of these reasons.

We don't need to invent new music though. Ashkenazi nusah contains a rich collection of melodies for all kinds of prayers. We have a duty to preserve that heritage, to return the liturgical songs of our grandparents and great-grandparents to its rightful place in the synagogue. To pass on that immense body of knowledge to our children and grandchildren instead of letting it die out.

The eternal flame of Talmud

It has not been a good news week for Jews in the diaspora, in particular for Orthodox Jews in New York, but also elsewhere.

Today however Jews around the world celebrate a once in 7.5 years event - the Siyum Hashas, the conclusion of a 7.5 year cycle of study during which Jews study one page of Talmud a day, Daf Yomi, in order to complete the entire series of the Talmud from the first chapter to the last, covering a complex array of Jewish legal texts, legends and history in a mix of ancient Aramaic and Hebrew.

It is no mean feat to study the whole of the Talmud, to wrap one's head around everything from the complexities of the cycle of the rain and agriculture in the Land of Israel to legal discussions on the finer points of tort law, kosher observance and divorce to mystical legends and folklore.

The thousands of Jews around the world who have completed this cycle of Daf Yomi are not just engaging in a challenging and rewarding intellectual exercise, not just fulfilling the religious requirement to study Torah, but also celebrating millennia of Jewish culture, language, faith and tradition, a rich heritage which has endured the scattering of the Jewish people to the four corners of the earth, the most horrific persecutions, forced conversions and expulsions, but which has survived intact.

Centuries after the Talmud, originally an oral tradition, was written down, it's text remains at the core of an ancient Jewish literary inheritance passed down through the generations.

Over sixty years ago my grandfather, born in a tiny village in what is today Ukraine, visited Israel for the first time. He boarded a bus in Tel Aviv. Across the aisle sat a Yemenite Jew poring over a Talmudic text. My grandfather leaned over to see what he was learning and the man motioned for my grandfather to take the empty seat next to him. He spoke heavily Yemeni accented Hebrew, a dialect hard to understand by other Hebrew speakers. My grandfather spoke Hebrew with a distinct Galician Ashkenazi accent, equally hard for many other Hebrew speakers to understand. They bonded over the text of the Talmud though, able to share enough of the key terminology to study together all the way to Jerusalem.

It was the highlight of my grandfather's first visit to to Israel, more than visiting the holy places, more than seeing the miracle of Jewish sovereignty restored to Zion after 2000 years. Sitting with a Jew born in Yemen, he a Jew born in Galicia, united together on a bus ride in Eretz Yisrael over a page of Talmud, to him that was living the prophecy of the ingathering of exiles, of the survival of the Jewish people and the Jewish culture and faith across the gulf of centuries of exile, just as the Biblical prophets had promised.

I remember as a child listening to him retell this tale of wonder, who could have imagined, he, a simple Hassidishe boy from a little shteitl, an aspiring rabbinical student who saw his village burned down by the Cossacks during the First World War, the Jews running to flee in the woods thanks to a Russian Jewish officer galloping in to the village to warn them in advance of the main force of Cossacks. And then not long after, my grandfather was forcibly conscripted in to the Austrian army, a young provincial devout Jew, thrust in to the middle of a war he had no hope of understanding and every chance that he might not survive.

By a miracle he found himself alive but alone in Vienna at the end of the war and happened to meet his Rebbe who with his hassidim had had to flee their shteitl, and his Rebbe, seeing how shattered the young man was by his experiences, no longer considering himself worthy of rabbinical training, appointed him his shammes, his assistant, a position that granted my grandfather a valuable visa to emigrate with his Rebbe's entourage to England, saving him and several siblings from the Holocaust that was to destroy the rest of the family and most of Galician Jewry only a couple of decades later.

Building a new life in London was not so easy either, learning a new language, encountering a different, but still painful, type of anti-Semitism, the general hostility to a foreigner with a somewhat Germanic (to English ears) sounding accent in the years after the First World War.

Diving in to a page of Talmud was all that time a refuge, taking him back to his youth before that life was forever banished by the horrific upheaval of the First World War. It would be many years until he could afford to own his very own set of Talmud volumes, but he could always go to his Rebbe or the local synagogue after work or on Shabbat to immerse himself in Talmud. All his life it was one of his greatest pleasures.

Seeing all the articles, posts and advertisements about celebrations of the Siyum Hashas this week I am reminded of that pure joy he found in the Talmudic text. Of the wonder his voice always held telling the story of being able to share that love of Talmudic study with the Jewish immigrant from Yemen on the bus in Israel, the connection it instantly created between Jews from such distant diasporas symbolising for my grandfather the eternal promise that God would one day reunite the Jews from the disparate lands of their exile.

These may be grim days for many Jewish communities around the world as anti-Semitism once again rears its ugly head, but the Siyum Hashas, a celebration of Jewish survival, reminds us that our ancient culture has survived far greater challenges and will survive this too.

Always know your hyenas from your jackals

My young twins have so far certainly picked up my interest in the natural world. They love pouring over photos of flora and fauna, picking out detail, asking questions. So when I recently happened upon some stunning wildlife photos from Israel's Parks and Nature Authority I showed them to the twins, a series on scavengers attracted by a carcass, portraits of birds and mammals.

Twin B's eyes flashed with excitement "It's a hyena!"

Me: But how do you know it's a hyena?

Twin B: Because it is bothering the bird.

Me: Why do you think it's bothering the bird?

Twin B: Because it doesn't like sharing food with the birds.

Me: What kind of food does it like?

Twin B: Meat. Like me. I like to eat chickens. I would share my chicken with a hyena.

Of course we actually live in a town where hyena sightings have increased dramatically in recent years, a function both of the growth of the native hyena population and the growth of the town with its tantalising rubbish and road kill. That said, the twins have never met a real life hyena. I hadn't realised they would recognise one.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised though. We went for a flower hunting walk to a nearby nature area not long after some rainy days. It was muddy and the boys were all excited to see lots of clear paw prints in the mud. Discussion ensued as to whom the paw prints might belong to, cats, dogs, foxes.

Twin A piped up "Ani yodea! Zeh tahn!" (I know! A jackal!) and he proceeded to do a very convincing impression of the jackal howls we heard a few weeks back on a walk in the woods.

Then the big boys, who'd run ahead, noticed some nice patches of autumn crocuses right on the footpath. My middle son almost trod on them in his excitement but my oldest called out "Sitvaniot!" (autumn crocus) and that stopped him in his tracks.

The twins dashed over all bright eyed, enthusiastic but also somewhat confused. "Sufganiyot? (Hannukah doughnuts) Eifo sufganiyot? Sufganiyot zeh Hannukah!" And they launched in to a Hannukah song medley before remembering about the hoped for jelly doughnuts.

Fortunately upon realising that we had found sitvaniot flowers and not sufganiyot doughnuts they were still bright eyed and enthusiastic, crouching down to carefully examine the find before running off to look for more.

Gazelle Valley

As we arrived at Jerusalem's Gazelle Valley nature reserve this afternoon Twin A pointed at the metal silhouettes of gazelle in the car park and exclaimed "Gazelles!"

Now we hadn't mentioned that we were going to Gazelle Valley, not in English, not in Hebrew, we just told the kids we were going to a nice nature area to look for birds. Also this kid hasn't figured out reading words yet.

Me: How do you know it's a gazelle?

Twin A: Because it has little horns. And it looks like a gazelle.

Like duh Imma.

I remember around twenty years ago when I volunteered from time to time with the Jerusalem Bird Observatory (JBO) I was brought here a few times by ornithologists from the centre to learn about the site. It was a dump back then, a mix of wild nature stranded in the city, abandoned agricultural plots piled with junk, and the odd stinking stagnant pond along with lots of mud. It was a haven for birdlife though, and home to one of Jerusalem's last small herds of native gazelle within the municipal boundaries. The good folks at the JBO, along with a number of local residents had a vision, to save this neglected little valley from construction, to save it as an island of nature in the heart of this busy, crowded city.

It looked like an exceedingly long shot, but eventually they succeeded. A few years later, this time with a few little kids in tow, I was back at the valley, this time with a group of family volunteers, planting trees and helping to tidy up the site. A few years after that the site opened with great fanfair, officially declared a nature reserve with a staff, educational programmes and trails open to the general public, along with closed areas to protect the gazelles' (and birds') space and privacy.

So it always feels extra special to me to come here, having seen and lived the area's transformation over the last two decades. We walked down to a lovely pond surrounded by reeds and full of ducks and other water birds. I was enjoying seeing all the different kinds of ducks, some species that overwinter in Israel. I thought the kids might be interested to, in this part of the world it isn't everyday you see a big pond with wild ducks.



They watched for a while, the twins pulling up chairs close to the bank, and then Twin A pulled at my skirt. "I want gazelles. I want to find gazelles."

I tried to explain that even in a relatively small nature reserve with a relatively big gazelle population we might not see any because they are elusive by nature, but Twin A was determined. I drilled them in how you need to be quiet and not get too close and stay still so that if you do see a gazelle, or any wild animal, you don't startle it.

When we finally did see some gazelle the older boys were so excited they kept creeping closer and talking excitedly, my middle son even startled a young female in to a spectacular display of speed and grace as she bounded away in to the brush, her hooves never seeming to touch the ground.

We met her again along the trail and Twin A admonished his older brother to stay away. "I want to see gazelle. You too noisy for gazelle, you need to go away so I can see gazelle."

And the twins watched quietly, enthralled and entranced, as a couple of gazelle emerged from a thicket to graze right in front of them, calm and beautiful.

"You see the gazelle Imma? I am quiet like a gazelle. She is eating the grass. I like to see her eat the grass. I like to see her eat the grass because that is what she likes to eat"

Of course these are the kids who still call most birds "bird", despite me telling them from birth exactly what we were seeing on a daily basis: a jay, a sunbird, a blackbird, a crow, a myna, a laughing dove, a sparrow... Just about the only birds they distinguish by name are ducks, parrots/parakeets and maybe a wagtail (nahlieli, a symbol of autumn drummed in to every Israeli kindergartner)

But nope, as we were walking through the gates Twin B called out "Look Imma, a bird!"

Me: Yes Twin B, that's a laughing dove (tzotzelet), just like the ones we've seen nesting on our outdoor light"

Twin B: Yes Imma, it's a bird