Foto Friday – Chaim Meiersdorf’s Israeli Weddings
Filed under: Art, Foto Friday, General, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Religion
Mazal tov…almost! This Saturday night is Erev Shavuot, the eve of the Shavuot (Feast of Weeks) holy day, marking the end of the counting of the Omer, the seven-week period from Pesach through Shavuot. Tradition has it that during the Omer, which is a period of mourning, Jewish couples do not marry — with the exception of Lag Ba’Omer (the tradition varies between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews) — but that’s all but over for this year. As of next week Israel’s spring/summer wedding season will open in full joyous force.
Israelis love a good wedding — the gatherings here tend to amass in the hundreds — and making merry is de riguer, as are cash gifts, which are calculated to cover the price of one’s food serving plus a little extra depending on your relationship to the happy couple (an online calculator, Kama Kessef, has been developed to assist in doing the math). Bringing a date to a wedding is optional but an accepted practice, as is eating, drinking and talking durng the chuppah. And of course, pinching the groom’s cheek to the point of pain.
Jerusalem-based Photographer Chaim Meiersdorf has, for the past 30 years, made a career specializing in such happy occasions.
Where sometimes tears are shed, but for joy…
And joy will make you jump, too!
Meiersdorf lives in Jerusalem and his clientele comes mainly from the various Orthodox Jewish communities there and around the country. More of his work can be viewed on his website.
Are you an Adviser or a Chooser?
Seeing the forest for the trees
Two academics, Dr. Rachel Barkan of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Professor Shai Danziger of Tel Aviv University spent more than a little time examining the areas of choice and advice, and their findings look a little bit like the conclusions of writer Malcolm Gladwell in his book, The Tipping Point, but maybe that’s just me. They’re not looking for Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen, nor how a trend is made, but rather Advisers and Choosers, and how and whether positive reinforcement makes a difference.
“It is a matter of seeing the forest for the trees,” Barkan explains, “The advice we give is not anchored in the choice we would make. When we give advice, we do not consider what we would have done in the same situation. Instead, our role as adviser distances us from the dilemma at hand. From afar we see the forest. We consider long term goals that are worthy and desirable. As advisers, we overlook the trees and discount obstacles and impediments on the way to this goal. As Choosers however, we cannot avoid seeing the trees – sometimes to the extent of losing the forest. As choosers, our mindset is oriented toward implementation and we give more weight to concrete details of feasibility and pragmatism.
In other words, are you an Adviser or a Chooser? The goal-reacher or onlooker? It seems clear that the world is filled both kinds of people, and even more possibly, that we all fill both roles at different times in our lives. Clearly, we need advisers when looking to follow a dream, to hear from those who are cheering us on, as well as receive the pragmatic, ‘look at the trees’ advice so that we can anticipate some of the obstacles ahead.
In the research gathered, Barkan and Danziger found that advisers tend to be more idealistic than pragmatic, on the ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’ and tend to act as cheerleaders. And so, they concluded, in order to follow a dream, there need to be two people in the equation, the one who believes in the dream, and cheers on the person actually following the dream.
In other words, positive reinforcement isn’t a waste of time, it may actually help make something happen. Go on, help someone fulfill their dream.
Celebrities r us in Israel
Filed under: A New Reality, Entertainment, General, Israeliness, Life, Pop Culture
Etgar Keret not being bothered in Tel Aviv. (Marc Israel Sellem)
Who can forget the Kotel dustup between Leo’s bodyguards and photographers when he and Bar Raphaeli went to pay a visit, or Bieber escaping the hordes on a moped and running over the foot of a lensman?
But aside from teeny boppers who hang out in hotel lobbies hoping to catch a glimpse of their favorite performer or artist, I think most Israelis are respectful – and even blasé about spotting celebs.
Earlier this week, I met Israeli author Etgar Keret (whom Brian wrote about attending the International Writers Festival) at a café in his Tel Aviv neighborhood.
Now, I’m not attempting to compare Keret to an international celebrity like Madonna, but he is one of Israel’s top authors and on his way to becoming an international icon in the short story field, with glowing reviews in the New York Times for his latest collection Suddenly, A Knock at the Door.
I think most Israelis who read probably know what he looks like (as opposed, say to how few Americans would recognize John Grisham at a local Taco Bell). However, he sat at that café for almost two hours, and aside from the server calling him by his first name (which could be due to the fact that he’s a regular), not one patron or passerby looked, approached or talked to Keret.
Maybe it’s because Israelis have a cool quotient that prevents them from acknowledging things like that – or maybe it’s because there just isn’t that gap between every day people and celebs here. They eat at the same places, take their kids to gan with your kids, and have the same complaints about long lines at the supermarket. In other words, our celebrities – in their own environment – aren’t glamorous, which is kind of nice.
However, if I see Bar Raphaeli in a Tel Aviv café, all bets are off.
Israel’s shake, rattle and roll
Filed under: A New Reality, Environment, General, Israeliness, Life, News, Science
The Grateful Dead used to sing, “If the thunder don’t get you, then the lightning will.” They might have been talking about Israel, where most people would think the existential threats from our neighbors are the thunder and the lightning.
But even when it looks like easy street, there is danger at your door. And I’m not talking about existential threats… but earthquakes.
Friday night was gorgeous, one of those spring evenings with a beautiful breeze that provided a nip to the air. We had dinner outside in our back yard with a few guests, including one visitor from the US on a 10-day tour of Israel.
After filling up on the great food, including delicious challot from Russell’s Bakery in Mahane Yehuda, we were sitting around the table munching on fresh fruit salad and rogelah from Marzipan.
I didn’t know it then, but it was precisely 9:48 pm when I felt my garden chair below being to vibrate. I immediately looked around to see if either of the people sitting to my left and right were shaking their legs against my chair, and was surprised that they weren’t.
After about five seconds, the vibrations stopped. I looked around at the seven people sitting around the table, and none of them had stopped, or expressed any kind of surprise in their faces. Well, I thought, maybe I was experiencing some kind of drug-induced flashback from my wild youth, because nobody else seems to have felt what I felt. So I didn’t mention it.
Imagine my surprise, when on Saturday night, after Shabbat, I went online to check out the news of the last 24 hours and read that a 5.3 magnitude earthquake shook the eastern Mediterranean on Friday night at 9.48 pm.
Thousands of Israelis evidently called the police to report the tremors which were felt from Rishon Lezion in the south to Safed in the north. Luckily, no damages or injuries were reported. Political pundits noted that the quake was probably just the seismic aftershocks of last week’s cataclysmic events in the government. Talk about thunder and lightning…
Israel hosts musical melting pot
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, Entertainment, General, Israeliness, Life, Music
The international musicians of The Bridge Project.
But it was no joke for Ittai Shaked, Andy Bussuttil and Umit Ceyhan who make up The Bridge Project - based in cyberspace but coming down for landing this week in Israel.
All three musicians have a day gig at the successful Israeli startup Waves, which was profiled in ISRAEL21c a few years ago. Violinist Shaked is a quality assurance manager for the Grammy Award-winning company that develops audio mixing software for the digital age for sound engineers and producers. And Bussutil, a multi-talented musician who runs his own recording studio in Australia, and Ceyhan, the Turkish Muslim who currently lives in France and teaches sonic and cinematic arts at the University of Toulouse, are part of Shaked’s team testing the company’s new products.
When, over a year ago, Shaked posted a message to his more than 100 testers around the world asking if anyone wanted to get together virtually and create some music, Bussutil and Ceyhan responded. Thus began ongoing file sharing and music creation between the three, with each adding his own instruments and ideas onto the previous take of their world music combining everything from Middle Eastern sounds to klezmer and Balkan beats.
The chemistry between us was amazing – we found out we shared and loved the same kind of music, more or less, with different spices,” Shaked told me. “And all three of us play instruments that combine together very nicely. At some point, I realized that what we’re doing here is making an album.”
The result is Three Waves Under the Bridge, the fruits of their online efforts, and the arrival in Israel of Bussutil and Ceyhan this week to meet Shaked and each other face to face and perform a series of live shows around the country.
Three Waves Under the Bridge, mixed by Shaked and mastered by Bussuttil, is a reflective world music mosaic brimming with musical ideas, and featuring a genre-hopping range of instruments – North African percussion like bongos and darbukas, strings ranging from violin, viola and cello to clarinet and sax, and traditional Turkish instruments like the duduk, kopuz and saz.
The music is only part of their accomplishments. As Bussuttil said, “Our efforts were an attempt to unify people rather than divide them. And we hoped to demonstrate that people from different backgrounds can create more than conflict, we can create things of beauty as well.”
If you’re in the country, you can catch the Bridge Project on May 14 at the Tmuna Theater in Tel Aviv. Other shows on the mini-tour, supported by the Foreign Ministry and the Australian Embassy in Israel, include The Jame Club in Acre on May 17, The Jazz Club in Mitzpe Ramon on May 18, and Hemdat Yamin in the Galilee on May 19.
But anyone can enjoy their music here.
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