Koogle

Just found this. A Jewish search engine. I just loved the name, and took a peek. Speech therapist in Netanya listed. With my phone number! Somehow they found me, and listed me. That's Koogle for you.

Headlines in Israel

This is what should be in the headlines you read, in the newspapers from "chul". Chul is an abbreviation of Chutz L'Aretz, meaning outside the Eretz. There are two places in the world: haAretz (the land) and chutz la'aretz (outside of the land). Yes, here are the things your should be reading about in your papers.
*the waves along the shore. The way Murray and Eleanor walked the whole Galloping Goose in Victoria, we walk the entire coastline of Israel, wading in the shallow waves, sometimes surprised by sudden bigger waves. All of my clothes have saltlines. From Netanya you can see waves, fainter and fainter along the scalloped coastline, to the northern tip of the land, and to the south. This land is not so big.
*the figs ripening on the trees. You are never hungry, on a walk. Grapes and figs fall sweet into your mouth wherever you go.
*La Scala in the Park. 100,000 people of all ages gathered to picnic and listen to a huge choir and orchestra from La Scala within a bandstand decorated as if it were the real La Scala in Milan, complete with chandelier. You may not have known that Verdi's Requiem includes fireworks at the end. It was grand.
*Last Shabbat we slept at Kibbutz Beit Alfa, at Dani and Sima's. Singing the old Israeli songs under the stars at night, I understood that Israel is the Israel each one of us creates. You wish it were the Israel where people dance and sing the old songs under the stars? So pull out your guitar, and everyone is singing and it feels like the Israel you hoped to find. There's a song about that.
Omrim yeshna Eretz
They told me there was a land
with Maccabis and tzaddikim.
Where are the Maccabis? Where are the tzaddikim?
Aha! You be the Maccabi. You be the tzaddikim.
That's what this land is.
We then drove to Sally Bar's art show in the artist's village of Ein Hod.
*In a restaurant, a glass broke.
Everybody in the whole restaurant yelled, "Mazel Tov".
Moments like this, you know you're not in chul.
Moments like this, you are in Israel.
And that should make the headlines.

Grapes on the vine, translating sun into sweetness

Click right on the grapes in the picture. See Dani Bar's reverence for life,
for grapes that translate sun into sweetness,
for the fig he picked for me, high up in the fig tree.
Pablo Neruda writes this, about lemons. More luscious in its original Spanish, but here's as much of a translation as a translation can be.
Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold
.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.

 

Click on this picture to make it big. See the light bursting from the cracks in the pomegranate.
Ring the bells that still can ring!
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in every thing.
That's where the light gets in.
(Leonard Cohen)
I've been writing little stories for the children I work with. I asked how to say, "safe and sound" in Hebrew. "Shalem v'bari". Shalem means "whole".
Interesting, how much emphasis there is on wholeness. The "How are you?" greeting is, "Ma Shlomcha?" How is your wholeness, your proximity to the ideal state we long for, where there are no holes in our soles (one of our holiday guests wrote in the guest book about the "soul full" time they had with us).
"Shalem" means "Whole"
and "Shalom" is......Shalom.
There is nothing as whole as a broken heart.
For it is from our broken places
that we can connect with one another.

Ironing and Intersubjectivity

Lots of ironing today, as we said farewell to one family, and will welcome a new bunch after Shabbat. Both families have members participating in the Maccabiah games. I love my ironing time. Words and thoughts smooth themselves with the billowy sheets and pillowcases. Suddenly, while ironing the white duvet cover for the master bedroom, with eyelet that matches the lacy white ice cream table on the balcony overlooking the sea, I had an aha! about intersubjectivity. If "I" am the subject, ("I" is the subject?) and everyone else is an object, an instrument to use, a source of income, an object of my anger, of my jealousy, or even an object of my love, then we are talking about subjectivity. Suddenly, if we have intersubjectivity, I am a subject and you are a subject. "We" is a loop. "We" is a strange loop, a magical loop, a mystical I-thou, both of us mattering, both of us thinking the thoughts, our caring for one another a natural process; no virtue of generosity or empathy need be invoked, because these are inherent to intersubjectivity. Must think about this more, but first, must fold beach towels.


Between guests, we're off to Kibbutz Beit Alfa for Shabbat. Dani and Sima will come with us to Sally Bar's Opening of a new show at the artists' village of Ein Hod, near Haifa.

Am I a Spiritual Being in a Physical Garment?

I'm interested in what's more "real", the idea or the thing.
Am I a physical body with a spirit, or a spiritual being in a physical garment? Meaningless and dualistic, to split the physical and the world of ideas, in this way. But fun. Tzvi Freeman writes, "There are not two forms of matter, the physical and the spiritual. Rather, to each thing there are two faces, the more tangible and the more abstract. Our senses and perception grasp that which is tangible and we call it 'physical'. Our mind's eye is able to grasp the more abstract, each according to his level."
Who said, "I woke up this morning from dreaming I was a butterfly. Or....am I a butterfly who is right now dreaming he is a man?"
My uncle Izzie talked about poem-writing as gilding the lily, and I responded to him,
A real poem, I think,
presents the lily to you,
right there on the page:
fragile petal,
a slight powdering of pollen,
dew.
Poempetals wait there
word on page
in closed books
or whispered on computer screens,
until you open the page
again.
Unlike the lily itself
which was too full of cells,
of water,
of living,
to last,
a real poem
waits
and is there for you
when you come to it again.