Hit the road on Sukkot
View from the top: the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway
The Jewish festival of Sukkot begins tonight and, 25 hours later, the country heads to the highways. Seemingly the entire state of Israel can be found outside, lounging at the beach, barbecuing at a national park, or hiking the Israel Trail.
The reason is called hol ha moed – the days in-between the start and end of the 8-day Sukkot holiday – where there’s no school in sight and many employers give their staff half-day holidays.
Over the past several months, I’ve written about a number of wonderful tiyulim that Israelis – and visitors to Israel – can traipse, often with the whole family. Now, as hints of cooler weather poke their cloudy heads through the perennial sunshine, I want to share one last hike for hol ha moed.
This one, which starts on the famed Burma Road, is a little bit on the tough side, so hopefully you’ll avoid some of the crowds. Nevertheless, get out early to avoid the gridlock that stops traffic cold by noon.
The Burma Road holds a critical historical role in helping besieged Jerusalem survive the Arab stranglehold on the city in the 1948 War of Independence. With the main highway to Jerusalem blocked to Jewish convoys, Israeli forces constructed a clandestine bypass route that kept the city from starving.
The route for this tiyul starts at the parking lot and picnic area near the Paz Gas station on road 38 (just off the exit from Highway 1, the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway).
The hike isn’t actually on the Burma Road itself – you turn off fairly quickly onto the Israel Trail which parallels the famous path and which is now a well-traveled Jeep trail (not so fun for walkers).
The first hour and a half of the hike is an intense climb up to the village of Beit Meir with little shade except for some rest stops with breathtaking views of the entire region, from the Mediterranean Sea to the foothills of Jerusalem.
From the summit, it’s all down hill as the path plunges into a thick forest, heading steeply into the Kessalon Ravine before bottoming out at the Bnei Brith Cave. This walk is treacherous – the route is slippery and blocked by fallen trees in several spots.
This whole section is known as the Martyrs’ Forest and is built to symbolize specific events during the Holocaust (the steep sides of the valley are supposed to recollect the ravine at Babi Yar).
Hikers have the option of continuing on the Israel Trail towards Shoeva and Kibbutz Tzova, or cutting out early at Eshtaol, ending up back on road 38 near Beit Shemesh. We opted for the latter and caught a taxi back to our car a few kilometers away.
Jacob Solomon wrote a series of articles about hikes along the Israel Trail in The Jerusalem Post back in 2005. The erstwhile hiker provides great detail, covering every twist and turn, flora and fauna, and historical sites along the way. It was his article on the Burma Trail and Martyr’s Forest that set us in the right direction. Here’s a link to a complete archive of his pieces.
A polite public
Filed under: education, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life
Dry Bones from January 31, 1973; nothing really changes...
(This kinda corresponds to my last post about cellphone etiquette, now that I think of it.) In any case, it seems there is a correlation between a person’s level of politeness and the level of their income, but not level of education and level of politeness.
Surveying 992 adult Jewish Israelis, the questions included, natch, talking on cellular phones in public, driving, attitudes to the elderly and the disabled, use of foul language and much, much more.
What they’d find? Seems that it is irrelevant whether a person is married or has children, but the more polite a person, the higher their income. I liked this part: The survey found that men are less polite than women, immigrants are more polite than native born Israelis, haredi (ultra Orthodox) Israelis are more polite than their religious, traditional and secular compatriots, and older people are more polite than young people.
What else? 78% of Israelis always or frequently encountered people talking loudly in public on their cellular phone; 71% always or frequently found people driving aggressively or without caution, and 53% frequently heard crude language in public places.
Sounds familiar. The question is, do we or can we fix it?
Cellphone education
You just know they're listening to music...(Image by © C. Devan/Corbis)
So I’m sitting and waiting for the bus yesterday morning, heading into town to cover an assignment, when I realize that the tinny music I’m hearing is coming from the cellphone of the teenage boy sitting two seats town. In between us is an older woman. I politely ask the boy to turn down his music, as he’s listening to it without an earphone (rude), and it’s just bad music. He does so without comment. At that point, the woman turns to me and says, “Why is it that these kids think we want to listen to their music? They should use earphones.” I nod in agreement because she’s absolutely right, and I can’t stand walking around and hearing someone else’s music blaring out of their cellphone.
She continues. Seems that three years ago – she remembers that it was three years because her mother, ‘ala hashalom’, died three years ago — she was on her way to visit her mother in Beersheva on an Egged intercity bus. And wouldn’t you know it, but as always, there was this one soldier having a loud conversation on his cellphone with someone named Ortal. Ortal, she tells me, is a name she will never forget. Now, as she and I both know, it is very annoying to always be privy to everyone’s private cellphone conversations in public places, such as the bus, the bank, the supermarket, the sidewalk. “I,” she says, “also have a cellphone. But I speak quietly, and briefly, I don’t tell my whole life on the phone.” I nodded.
Anyway, she — and the rest of the people on the bus — spent an hour and a half listening to this soldier tell Ortal how sorry he was for what he’d done, and that he’d do anything to make it up to her from the minute he arrived home. At some point, she reached her limit. Turning around, she snatched the phone out of his hand, and said, “Ortal, stop making him beg. There’s a hundred of you out there, and he can easily find someone else. Enough!”
And with that, she handed the phone back to him, as the rest of the bus passengers burst out laughing.
“It’s a great memory,” she told me. “And I can always do it again; these kids need to be educated.”
Teenagers on cellphones: Beware of my bus bench neighbor. She’s looking to educate you.
Technology comes to the cemetery
Illustrative photo from Ynet (Reuters)
I recently went to the funeral of a friend’s father in Jerusalem. I arrived on time to where the eulogy was to take place but there was no one in sight. An electronic signboard announced the time of the next funeral, but it wasn’t for the family I had come for. At that moment, several other befuddled friends headed in my direction, informing me the funeral I needed was at the other location down the road.
Too bad the Chevra Kadisha’s new electronic GPS cemetery software wasn’t up and running. Israel’s burial society is significantly upgrading its web and mobile presence with a whole range of services, from a Facebook genealogy-type program linking all those deceased in Israeli cemeteries (starting in Tel Aviv) to the ability to create your own commemoration page including email reminders of upcoming anniversaries.
The most intriguing service, though, is the location finder which will, according to Yossi Zrock, head of Chevra Kadisha IT Services, use GPS to lead the bereaved “directly to the desired gravestone and will allow them, en route, to view photos of the deceased, read about his life and access the required prayers.”
Don’t have a smart phone? No worries. You can text the name of the deceased to *4664 and directions will be sent to your mobile. Or rent a PDA on arrival for only $5.00.
What about people who can’t attend the funeral? Webcasting is coming. For only $50-$80, you can watch online. Then buy a CD for $15. The Chevra Kadisha in Tel Aviv says that most cemeteries in Israel already have cameras, although I’ve never seen one in Jerusalem.
Alter Hoz, chairman of Chevra Kadisha, put a positive spin on the morbid mix: “We will continue to use technology in favor of the families,” he said, “who encounter Chevra Kadisha at their most difficult hour and need any support we can lend them, both human and technological.”
Classroom politics
Filed under: A New Reality, education, General, Israeliness, Life, Politics, Social Justice
My son received a first-hand lesson in democracy and politics this week.
His fourth-grade class had elections to choose a representative to the school student council, a body that meets once a month and lobbies for improvements to student life at the grammar school.
No matter who runs for the council, there’s a perennial promise to establish a cafeteria at the school, a pie in the sky notion that no group of adult parents have been able to achieve for years, let alone students.
Matan, along with the other seven students in the class of 26 that were running for the slot, had to prepare a campaign poster, listing the planks of his platform and then he had to give a speech outlining his campaign. Among his promises were to work for putting in vending machines with healthy snacks (a more modest proposal than a cafeteria), establishing a petting farm in the courtyard run by the students, and holding an art show with proceeds going to charity.
The next day, he handed out little homemade tags with his name on them (students were specifically banned from giving out candy and other treats as campaign bribes).
On the day of the vote, the students were told they could each vote for three candidates, and the ballots were handed out. Matan topped the vote getters, besting his nearest oppenent by one. He came home in a triumphant mood, elated that his hard work had paid off, and looking forward to attending the student council meetings in the lofty teachers’ room.
However, his teacher told the class that because three students were out sick, they would be allowed to vote the next day, which could sway the close race. And sure enough, when the final votes were tallied, Matan ended up one under, and not one over his closest competitor. So like Shimon Peres and Adlai Stevenson, to name a couple, he had defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
Matan took it well, though, and said that it didn’t bother him. But I’m not so sure. I think that a future prime ministerial candidate’s career might have been sunk before it even got off the ground.
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