Beresheet bumped up
Israelis love festivals. The Israel Festival is a five-week affair this year, currently in progress. Hardly a week goes by without some kind of event being dubbed as the next big festival, from the Cinema South Film Festival in Sderot, which wrapped up two weeks ago, to this past week’s kosher food extravaganza in Petach Tikva.
The most lively mainstream events on the annual festival calendar in recent years have been the big three hippie festivals, Boombamela, Shantipi and Beresheet, each taking place during a major Jewish holiday, times when the nation more or less goes on vacation. Intoxicating blends of new-age spirituality, corporate sponsorships, Eastern ethnic jams, family camping, teenybopper-friendly pop, nudism, all-night trance parties, beach living and even Carlebach-style Jewish outreach, the big three have drawn crowds in the tens of thousands since before the millennium.
But stretch marks have begun to show. Shantipi, the first one in the game, tried to reposition itself as less tween-oriented and more family-friendly in 2004, and when efforts were met with lower attendance, planners attempted and failed to backtrack on the move. Shantipi didn’t even take place this past Shavuot, earlier this month.
Even the most robust draw in recent years, Passover’s Boombamela, has seen a drop in attendance. “I reckon we’ll have twenty-five thousand or even thirty thousand people this year,” the festival’s artistic director Mathaus Waldorf told The Jerusalem Post’s Barry Davis a few months ago. It didn’t pan out. While something like 15,000 tickets were sold, a solid turnout by any means, it was a mere half of the load that planners had invested in infrastructure to accommodate. Plus, many of the revelers didn’t stay for the entire four-day shindig – the schoolteachers’ strike of the autumn had made for a shortened vacation from classes, and Hamas missiles falling in nearby Ashkelon surely inspired many parents to ask their children to come home early – lending the proceedings a feeling of emptiness.
The Beresheet festival, which started out ten years ago as a Rosh Hashanah production, has also attempted to rebrand itself as something bigger and longer in recent years, opting instead to take place during the longer holiday of Sukkot since 2004. Brought to you by the same production crew that organizes Boombamela, this year’s Beresheet is set to take place over three days starting on July 14 on the sores of the Sea of Galilee, a far safer bet in terms of minimizing school schedule conflicts and a somewhat safer bet in terms of minimizing the chances of a missile attack. The move might just mark a return to the millennial days of booming attendance, but the pre-commercialized purity of the early days will probably remain elusive.
Weird Wednesday
Israeli researchers have discovered that the initial appearance of green beads in ornamentation in the ancient Middle East coincides with the beginning of agriculture.
Let me run that one by you again: although bead-making began 110,000 years ago in these parts, an emphasis on green beads emerged only about 11,000 years ago. Archaeologist Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer of the University of Haifa in Israel and geologist Naomi Porat of the Geological Survey of Israel in Jerusalem theorize that the rise in use of green beads was directly related to the onset of agriculture. In excavating sites, the researchers found that hunter-gatherer societies used white, red, yellow, brown and black beads, while green was used occasionally – until agriculture began. “Green jewelry mimicked the color of young leaf blades, thus signifying a wish for successful crops and fertility… Green beads remain popular in agricultural groups today,” Science News reports.
I did a Google search to find out if that last statement was true, as visions of emerald-encrusted farmers wives flashed through my mind. I didn’t find much to back it up. No matter. The burning question for the researchers is whether the green sought after by early farmers was the same green used to ward against the evil eye.
Now this is a very big deal in the Middle East. There is always some old crone sitting on the corner, at a bus stop, running a stall in the shuk, or living on the ground floor of your building, biding her time and storing up energy so that, when the time comes, she can let loose a full throttle laser beam of bad karma. And if you don’t have a red string, hamsa amulet or some blue-green beads on you, you’re as helpless as Superman in the face of Kryptonite. Green Kryptonite.
Or, as the researchers put it, “Mesopotamian texts from around 5,000 years ago mention the evil eye, a belief in a kind of curse caused by a person praising someone while looking enviously at that person. Evil eye traditions still exist, especially in Mediterranean and Aegean regions. It’s not known when evil eye beliefs originated, but they go back at least to the increasing complexity of spiritual belief that occurred at the dawn of agriculture.”
Whew! That’s a pretty heavy for some little green holey bits of stone. Curses, spiritual beliefs, fertility gods, harvest gods… I’m beginning to think that diamonds, purportedly the strongest material known to man (at least according to the DeBeers folks), might be better suited to bear the load. Perhaps that’s why they’re so popular today. Although, there is that one curse they can’t seem to escape…
Workaholics
It seems that Israelis are bonafide workaholics, according to a recent study by the Bank of Israel. Five percent of Israeli professionals earning more than NIS 30 an hour (more common than you think) work more than 60 hours a week, and those kinds of hours are beat only by three other OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, namely South Korea, Japan and Mexico. Just think; Japan!
Moreover, the phenomenon applies mostly to educated males between the ages of 35 and 44, many of whom work in public service, academia, high-tech and research and development.
It’s not an incredibly surprising finding, given that most of the people I know — many between 35 and 44 and older — work tremendous hours, partially because they like what they do but also because they find they can’t get it all done in 40 hours a week. Of course, email, as we know, is an incredible time-sucker, as is facebook and the forwarding of random videos and jokes. And as someone who’s been a freelancer for a long time and recently returned part-time to an office setting, I’m also amazed at how much time is spent in meetings, on conference calls and in just general office chitchat. When you work by yourself, there’s very little distraction, except for laundry and the dishes in the sink, but I’m not sure that many male freelancers stretch their legs by separating whites from darks.
And finally, it’s fascinating to think that the central bank’s discovery is limited to men, given the number of women in this country who work from 8 to 4 or 7 to 3, and then rush home to pick up kids and handle homework, drive carpools to chugim,run miscellaneous errands, do laundry and handle dinnertime. The good ‘ol second job that takes up at least 35 hours a week.
But, the study adds, most workaholics who earn relatively high wages are less likely to forgo work in favor of a family obligation, and are also less likely to contribute to housework at home. Maybe that’s why my husband kept on ‘forgetting’ to wash the kitchen floor this week…
Urban chic witch doctor
Shuk Machane Yehuda’s resident shaman, Uzi-Eli Chezi runs his retail stall like it’s part theme park attraction, part spiritual folk remedy center. Uzi-Eli bases his natural remedies (various juice mixtures, soaps, creams, serums) on recipes from the writings of Rabbi Moses Maimonides, a North African Jewish philosopher from the Middle Ages who is also known for his contributions as a physician.
“Both of my grandfathers – who were brothers – would make holistic energy drinks,” Uzieli recently told Jerusalemite, the Jerusalem culture guide. “When I finished my army service, I spent five years traveling through 12 different countries, learning about herbs and natural medicine. I used this knowledge to create formulas for healing drinks,” which he soon began to market out of his own home, before opening his shop in the shuk five years ago.
These formulas rely heavily on gat (khat, a leaf known for its energizing properties) and etrog (citron, the local yellow citrus fruit most famous for being shaken with the lulav during the holiday of Sukkot), and he buys all of his ingredients from his neighbors in the open-air market. He also creates remedies from kombucha mushrooms, dates, fenugreek, passion fruit, goat milk yogurt, pomegranate and apple.
Uzi-Eli explains:
Drinking etrog juice leads to strength in the body, and feelings of satiation and calmness. It also improves heart health, and will make a person smell better. It helps fight depression, helps cure hot flashes in women and gives men strength and virility.
But even if one questions the true healing merits of Uzi-Eli’s concoctions, one surely must give him credit for the place he holds in Jerusalem’s cultural landscape. The guy has regulars and potential customers alike constantly approaching him (or sometimes submitting to his offers) for consultations, which almost universally end with some gat extract being schpritzed down the throat. Plus, he is just about as esoterically charming an institution as one can find in the shuk, so who cares if his schug (a traditional Middle Eastern condiment of ground fresh chili peppers and herbs) isn’t as spicy as the next guy’s?
Driving hazards
Every Sunday morning, the news is filled with stories of people injured and killed in traffic accidents on the road during the weekend. This past Sunday was no different, with five people killed, including a couple and their daughter. I’m always horrified to read these accounts, because the stories behind the accidents seem to be easily prevented by, let’s say, better driving, pedestrian-awareness, less passing on two-lane highways and the like.
I never feel I’m taking my life in my hands when I get behind the wheel in Israel, but I am generally aware of the need to meld the American and Israeli aspects of my personality. For instance, given that I did learn to drive in the suburban surrounds of Long Island, New York, I tend to give the right-of-way to pedestrians, cars backing out in front of me and drivers in the many roundabouts (traffic circles) in these parts.
At the same time, you can’t be a freier, god forbid, and let every other car cut you off. When I bought my first car, one Israeli friend advised me to let one person each day cut me off on the road. That way, he said, you’re allowing for your American mentality while allowing for your Israeli driving personality to develop.
Of course, all bets are off when stuck in going-home traffic in Tel Aviv on a weekday afternoon. When I found myself yesterday in the wrong left-turning lane on my way toward the Ayalon Highway, I quickly insinuated my car into the next lane, earning a sharp beep from the driver to the right. In that situation, you can either accept a window-to-window confrontation with the driver, or turn your head and ignore said driver. When the driver and I were next to each other, he beeped again, rolled down his window, and I, reluctantly, did the same, fearing the worst.
I fixed him with a tough look, and he asked, “How do I get to Azrieli?”, referring to the mall that’s next to the highway entrance. I grinned to myself, realizing that here I had assumed the worst, and this guy was just trying to get directions. I told him where to go, and made my left. But while waiting to make the final turn onto the Ayalon, I must’ve let in at least five other cars creeping up on me. Sometimes, you can just cut fellow drivers some slack.
Subscribe
Subscribe to Israelity via email:
Social Media
Categories
- A New Reality
- Art
- Blogging
- Business
- coexistence
- Crime
- design
- education
- Entertainment
- Environment
- Food
- Foto Friday
- General
- health
- History and Culture
- Holidays
- Immigrant Moments
- Israeliness
- Life
- Medical Breakthroughs
- Movies
- Music
- News
- Nostalgia Sunday
- Picture of the Week
- Politics
- Pop Culture
- Profiles
- Religion
- Science
- Social Justice
- Sports
- Technology
- Travel
- tv
- War
The Face of Israel Today
-
About Israelity
Free newsletter
Stories from ISRAEL21c.orgPopular Posts