Too Funny to Summarize
This post by Noorster, our friend in Tel Aviv, had me laughing out loud.
Hint:
In this corner . . . Noorster, who is deathly afraid of bugs, and her cat, Marzipan, who is quite fond of them . . . and in this corner . . . the gi-normous cockroach!
Call to prayer . . . and tolerance
I have no clever way to introduce the following posts/ideas, except that it seems to me that lately there has been a higher-than-usual amount of discussion among Jewish bloggers and friends of mine about the Muslim call to prayer. One of the daily realities of living in a country that allows freedom of religion and has a large Muslim population is that Jews hear the Muslim call to prayer at all hours of the day or night. And it is loud. I wrote about how beautiful and moving it is here . . .
Here is what the Kotel is like at 4:30 am: The sky is dark, but the Wall plaza is lit up by stadium lighting. Approximately 20 women are already there, whispering prayers from their siddurim. The mosque on the Temple Mount is blasting a solemn call for prayer, music that sounds at least 600 years old, and while I know how much many Jews resent the presence of the mosque, I find that the music sets a very appropriate atmosphere for concentration and prayer. Two men in staff t-shirts are on the women’s side, sweeping the floor. When they are done, they bring a hose and jet-spray the plaza clean. A few prayer-filled notes which have fluttered down from the wall trail away in the water and are swept up with a few empty water bottles and a soda can. The women shift their chairs in order to avoid getting wet.
but . . . well, it’s LOUD. I can tell you that when I am up at 4 am (which happens often; insomnia), I can hear the call to prayer from the mosque on the Temple Mount — which is about 3 miles away from me.
Just a couple weeks ago, Israeli police arrested a Jewish man who blew a shofar on Rosh Hashanah at “the small Kotel,” a patch of the Western Wall in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter:
The worshipers said that the police had apparently been called by an Arab woman who said the sound of the ram’s horn disturbed her children.
A Jewish resident of the Old City told Arutz-7, “How ironic. The loud Arab weddings and nightly prayers by the muazzin [over a powerful loudspeaker] at 4:30 AM disturb our sleep every night.” Similar complaints are heard from Jews living near Arab villages in Judea and Samaria.
Meanwhile, I was taking a bi-weekly class at a women’s religious studies institution, in a southern Jerusalem neighborhood with a mixed Jewish-Muslim population. It happens that the lecture began just a few minutes before a morning call to prayer from a local mosque. The rabbi teaching the class, a highly respected and well-known Jewish religious leader, stopped each time, cocked his head, and would proceed each time to wax on the theme of prayer, how important it is, how important it is to pray with meaning and fervor . . . and once, he said that we Jews have much to learn from our Muslim neighbors about praying with passion.
Meanwhile, blogger Sarah Smile recently finished building a new home on the outskirts of a Jewish settlement on the pre- and post- 1967 borders, and has encountered a new problem:
But I can’t sleep!
Call me whatever you want, but I’m really starting to lose my patience with my Arab neighbors!
They feel the need to call for prayer at 3, 4 and 5 AM AS LOUD AS THEIR SPEAKERS CAN GO!!!
I have now turned to sleeping with earplugs, but even they don’t work!
It’s too nice to have the air conditioning running, but with the windows open to catch the nice breeze…
I don’t sleep!
WHY?? Why do they have to call SO LOUD?!?
And, WestBankMama observes, without commentary, the juxtaposition of the call to prayer from a local mosques with the sounds of fervent prayers from a synagogue on Yom Kippur:
My fast went pretty well this year. I usually start to get lightheaded about 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and spend the last few hours of Yom Kippur in bed. This year I was able to sit on the couch and read a bit, and the last hour of the fast I sat outside in my front yard and enjoyed watching the sun go down (I can’t concentrate enough to pray, but I do reflect). My settlement, like most in the Shomron (Samaria) is on a hilltop. Sound carries pretty well, so at the exact minute that the sun set I heard the Muslim muezzin in not one, but two nearby Arab villages, call out his call to Muslims to pray. I would guess that this prayer marks the end of the daily Ramadan fast this month. The prayer call lasted about ten or fifteen minutes, and as it ended, I was able to hear the prayers from our nearby synagogue. The last Avinu Malkenu (Our Father, Our King) is usually belted out loud enough to shake the rafters, and I was able to hear it clearly from my front yard. I thought this set of events was pretty cool – another reason why I love living where I do.
I can’t help but notice that a common thread through all these experiences and blog posts is that Jews, no matter how religious they are, no matter how right wing they are, and no matter how inconvencienced they are, do not seem inclined to demand that Muslims stop their public calls to prayer. There is an understanding that no matter how absolutely annoying and frustrating the noise may be, it is part of a people’s religious service and therefore must be tolerated — or even learned from.
Which is why the incident on Rosh Hashanah – in which Jews were prevented from making a little noise during their own prayer services, ostensibly because certain neighbors could not tolerate it, and because our own police force seems more sensitive to protecting others’ freedom of religion than to protecting their own, just burns me up.
Pretty in the City
Over the last 18 months or so, my neighborhood in southern Jerusalem has been undergoing subtle beautification treatments.
First, the city hired four artists to transform the green paper-recycling bins around the city . . .
And this bench, too.
Then I noticed, a few months ago, that they were remodeling the landscaping inside a couple of roundabouts (traffic circles / rotaries) near my home.
And now the electricity boxes are getting similar treatment.
(This last photo was taken by Dave Bender.)
“Our Father, Our King, grant a complete recovery to all the sick members of Israel”
A year ago, a 22-year-old Israeli army lieutenant was injured by friendly fire during an “incident” against Palestinian fighters in Gaza — injured so seriously, that his survival was touch-and-go, and even if he did survive, doctors found his chances of ever waking up again to be slim.
Yesterday, on Yom Kippur, he walked, unaided, into his local synagoge, approached the lecturn, and interrupted the cantor in order to say a prayer for the healing of the sick, on behalf of the congregation.
David Bogner (aka Treppenwitz) tells the whole story here.
War’s damage to Israel’s economy not as dramatic as initially feared
As we head into Yom Kippur, some relatively pleasant news:
JERUSALEM, Sept 28 (Reuters) – The damage to Israel’s economy from a one-month war this summer between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas appears to be less than initially feared.
A spate of economic indicators from July and August — the months affected by the conflict — showed that growth did not suffer that much, with the exception of tourism, thanks to resiliency in factory output and consumer spending.
“The data we see right now confirms…the effects of the war were temporary and relatively mild,” said Eldad Shidlovsky, acting head of economic research at the Finance Ministry.
As part of the war that ended on Aug. 14, Hizbollah fired some 4,000 rockets into northern Israel from southern Lebanon, forcing many of the region’s 1,800 factories to close or sharply scale back activity.
Tourism during the peak summer season was badly damaged, sliding 25 percent in July and 37 percent in August from the prior year, while farmers were also hit with large losses. Tourism for the first eight months of 2006 was still up 5 percent over the same period a year ago.
Economists estimated the total economic cost from the war at nearly 15 billion shekels ($3.5 billion) and had reduced 2006 growth forecasts to around 4 percent from above 5 percent.
Over recent days, however, economists have once again revised estimates to around 4.5 percent.
“Hard economic data from July and August…increasingly suggest that the economy proved more resilient to the conflict than initially feared,” Jean-Francois Mercier, an analyst at Citigroup, wrote in a report.
Hat tip: Dave Bender
To all those readers who celebrate Yom Kippur: Best wishes for a meaningful day and an easy fast.
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