Food is an important part of a balanced diet

Ich bin ein Berliner

On June 26, 1963 Jack Kennedy spoke four words of German during a speech in Berlin, "Ich bin ein Berliner," and drew a large line in the sand in front of the Communist menace. What JFK mean to say was, "I am Berliner," of course. For years I went about my business believing a common misconception that although well intended, what Jack's words had actually meant was "I am a jelly-filled donut." You see, a 'berliner' is a particular type of German pastry similar in many ways to American jelly-filled donuts. As it turns out, there are some exquisitely precise and pedantic rules in the German language (insert your own joke on German national stereotypes) dealing with who gets to say "Ich bin Berliner" (an actual Berliner) and who should say, like Kennedy did, "Ich bin ein Berliner," (everyone else) meaning, "I'm not a real Berliner but I'm saying that I am in solidarity with you."

You are what you eat

If it's true that you are what you eat, then during the Hanukkah season most Israelis should say with JFK, "I am a Berliner." The only difference is that we call our berliners "sufganiot."  

Traditional Jelly-filled Hannukah Donuts (Sufganiot)

Holiday-specific foods figure large in Israeli culture and Hanukkah is no exception. If you're not familiar with the Hannukah myth, it goes something like this (and I'm oversimplifying things here greatly): 

• Greeks conquer Israel, use the Temple for... whatever.
• After rebelling against the Greeks (Syrians really, but let's not get into that just now), the Maccabees decide that they should rededicate the temple. Sorry, the Temple. 
• To do this, they needed a special kind of oil to light candles for eight days. Problem is, they can't find the right kind of oil anywhere. After much searching they do find one container of oil, good for maybe one day of light. 
• Undeterred, the decide to use the oil and light the lights.
• When they go and check on the empty oil container the next day... a miracle! It still holds enough oil for one (extra) day!
• This business with the oil goes on for eight more days until extra quantities of suitable hydrocarbons can be found or manufactured.
• Ta-dah, the Festival of Lights is born.

Fast forward roughly twenty-two hundred years and the way we celebrate the festival of lights is by eating as many oily foods as we can cram into our bodies. Deep-fried hash browns? Bring them on. Deep-fried 'Berliners'? Let me have a dozen. Per family member. Per day. 

The Higgs Boson

Hanukkah is the time of year when cardiologists go on high alert (think CPAs on April 14th) and hospitals stock up on industrial grade degreasing agents. I don't want to overstate matters, but these donuts are not your run-of-the-mill jelly-filled poseurs. The obscenities that you can buy at any Krispy Kreme are a light and fluffy souffle by comparison. 

Let me put it another way. The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have been hard at work looking for something called a Higgs boson, which is the subatomic particle that actually confers mass to everything. Just last week we heard from them that they thought that they had found evidence for the boson but that it wasn't quite conclusive yet.

Silly, silly, physicists with IQs in the high 190s. If you are going to look for the particle that makes up mass, shouldn't you be looking for it in something well, massive? All you have to do to find the boson is ship some of our donuts from Israel to Geneva and stick them into your accelerator. Results guaranteed.

CERN, looking for bosons in all the wrong places.

Darwin Wept

When I came to live in Israel in the late 90s, it was easy to escape the torture-by-fritter that sufganiot embody.  Back then, all sufganiot were filled with some sort of reddish jelly (strawberry or raspberry, it was difficult to tell from the flavor alone). Large, oily, and hardly fresh, they were easy to avoid. I'm sure that they were enticing to kids, but having even one during the eight days of Hannukah was more than enough.

And then they mutated. In a display of adaptability that would have made Darwin weep with joy, the donuts became smaller and started adding flavors and textures. It started out slow. For a couple of years a limited number chocolate-filled donuts appeared, still large but you could tell at a glance that these were not your grandpa's donuts. Then they subdivided like single-cell organisms and became smaller; more flavors started showing up at the bakery: dulce de leche made its entrance, then vanilla, then coconut, halvah a couple of years later. 

And now we're surrounded, there is no escape.

To make matters worse, they're only here for the Hannukah season and then they're gone. Get them now or make do without them for a year. Damn.

Did I mention they're delicious?

Happy holidays everyone!

Beer

Last week I had the opportunity to taste for the first time two beers produced in the area. On Wednesday I went out with some friends to a micro-brewery that's been operating for a couple of years now and tried their wheat beer. On Saturday, we were invited to a very interesting tour of Nazareth; when that was done we found ourselves with some friends at a wonderful restaurant that served, among many others, Taybeh beer.

One of these two beers was atrocious and the other one was really good, which led me to think that I really should blog about the experience. I kept thinking about it as the "Zionist" beer vs. the "Palestinian" beer. I was already to make all sorts of analogies between the two beers and their methods of production, maybe trying to stretch the analogy to encompass a larger statement about the entrepreneurial culture in each of the peoples, natch, the very culture of the two peoples.

Sometimes, I'm just full of crap.

I got pulled into the trap of seeing everything around here, including food and drink, through the lens of national conflict. Beer wouldn't be the first victim of this distortion. Some idiots on both sides have been waging an ongoing battle of falafel. Yes, falafel. Little balls made out of garbanzo beans, deep-fried in oil and served in a pita. A battle of that. Who can make the bigger falafel portion and so get into Guiness's Book of World Records.

I understand about national pride and looking for ways to bring honor to your nation, but falafel? Really? What's next, changing the words of the American anthem? And the burners red glare, the chickpea balls bursting in air. Not only does it kill the metric, it really doesn't have that ring of authenticity, does it?

Silly, I know. So why is the drive of nationalistic politics so seductive? No, not seductive, that implies that there was some persuasion involved. So ingrained. I didn't see it coming and it got me good. It might have been Albert Einstein that said, "I don't know what fish talk about, but it isn't water," and that is the best explanation I can give. This nationalistic mumbo-jumbo works on all of us because it is so pervasive. It just permeates every aspect of our living to where we don't even notice it. Like fish and water, it has become part of the context in which we live, defining so many of our choices without us even being aware of it.

So last week I went out twice with friends and had two different beers. From one of those beers I'll happily have a second and a third glass. From the other, let's just say that the glass I already had was worth three: first, last, and one too many. And no, I'm not going to tell you which was which.

Just to close the subject, some more words of wisdom from W.C. Fields:

I never drink water. Fish f*** in it.

Rain

Several decades ago, the inimitable Isaac Asimov published a short story called "Nightfall" about Lagash a world without night. Lagash had six suns of varying luminosity that took turns shining upon the world, sometimes with a large amount of light, sometimes with very little. The practical result was that the Lagashians had never seen the stars, hadn't developed any concept of what the universe looked like beyond their own planet (how could they, really) and so on. They would have happily lived on like that except for the fact that every two thousand years or so night fell. Once, every two millenia, only the smallest, dimmest of Lagash's suns was left in the sky and when Lagash's large moon eclipsed that, darkness fell. As expected, shenanigans ensued.

Here in Israel we hardly have any rain. It's not as bad as Lagash not having any night but I imagine that the feeling is similar. I've lived in other dry regions in the past: Southern California certainly qualifies, but it just doesn't compare. Living in SoCal I was aware of the need to conserve water, sure. But the lawns were always green, there were rivers and streams that flowed year-round, and if he water we drank always tasted a little funky (the result of having it piped hundreds of miles from the Colorado river), then that was a small price to pay.

Here in Lagash, er, Israel it's different. When the weather forecast on the radio calls for rain, you can just hear the smile on the announcer's voice. There is even a special word in Hebrew for the first real downpour of the year, "Yoreh." Our need for water is so strong, and our relationship with the stuff so tenuous, that I know of no other culture where it is acceptable to toast someone with just water in your glass.

So it's been quite a surprise to us all that for the last four days there's been water pouring for the sky in sheets. Cats and dogs doesn't begin to describe it. I can't remember when was the last time that I could see the traffic lights reflected on the wet pavement. This really is very unusual. The "rainy" season in Israel, such as it is, usually comes later in the year, most often on a Thursday and then it's gone. So this is very different, it's a sure bet that tonight's news will be filled with video of streams running and the people that went down just to see water flowing, not from a faucet, but naturally.

And so, a final word of wisdom from Douglas Adams:

I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

Have you no decency sir?

By now we should all be inured to the incredible callousness of the professional politician, a subspecies of the common twerp whose only qualities are loyalty to the party's leader and a low-level cunning and brutality that no doubt come in handy to that same leader every once a while. Sort of like Luca Brasi but without the charm and the elegant manners.

Please meet: Rabbi Meshulam Nahari. Member of the Knesset for the Shas party and Minister of Nothing in the current Israeli Government, party-hack extraordinaire.

As you may of may not know, here in Israel we have a number of political parties that under the cover of religion have taken racketeering to levels of excellence not seen since Caligula made his horse Senator in Rome.  Which might very well be where we got Meshulam Nahari. In my imagination it went down something like this:

A bunch of the Shas guys where sitting around the table some time ago, shooting the s*^t, as wise guys trend to do. They were probably congratulating one another on how smart they were, how they managed to extort some in ungodly amount of money from a government too weak-willed to stand up to them. They might have had something to drink but not necessarily. 

Anyway, Wiseguy No.2 tells the leader about Caligula's horse stunt.

-"For real?", exclaims The Leader, "he really got his horse a job in the Senate?"

-"Just so," answers No. 2, "although I think that they waived the whole wearing-a-toga bit for him."

-"Now THAT is real power," adds No. 3, "getting an unthinking brute into the Senate."

This was beginning to feel like a challenge to The Leader, a real test of his political prowess. So he gives the matter some thought and comes up with this jewel:

-"Appointing a horse to the Senate is nice, but that's not so much of an accomplishment when you're already Emperor of Rome. I'll bet you anything that you want that I can do him one better. If Caligula could get a horse appointed to the Roman Senate, I'll bet you that I can get not only an unthinking brute but a real horse's ass elected to the Knesset."

-"Yeah, right.  And how exactly are you going to accomplish that?"

-"I have some ideas. Do you know Meshulam Nahari?"

In truth, it might have gone down a little differently, but you get the idea.

And what, you might ask, has gotten me so riled up about someone so demonstrably small, so obviously insignificant, so absurdly dumb as bad ol' Meshulam. Well, here it is:

Gilad Shalit (you remember him, don't you?), went to the beach with his dad on the Saturday following his release. Good for him I say, the beach sounds like the right place to decompress and spend some time with family. So far, so good.

Enter the horse's ass. The YNET news service has quoted him saying that instead of going to the beach, Gilad should have gone to the synagogue and recited the traditional prayer of deliverance.

You. Little. Shit.

Religion in Israel is not only big business, it's big politics too and of course right now there is no bigger potential political asset than Gilad Shalit and his family. I'm sure that any party would be happy to have Gilad's endorsement.  However, there are oodles of distance between wishing for Gilad's endorsement and openly, cravenly, seeking to cash in on his notoriety. How Gilad feels about religion is no one's business but his own, how he wishes to spend his time is a decision left only to him. And to you, Minister Meshulam Nahari I say this:


Have you no shame, sir? 

And lest we think that this was Horsey acting on his own, it turns out that he's been 'tasked' by Shas' Great Leader (that's the Leader's boss, in case you're wondering) with "bringing these people [the Shalits] closer to religion." 

Well, Meshulam. If you were to stand on your Leader's shoulders, and he were to stand on the Great Leader's shoulder in turn, you still wouldn't reach Gilad's ankles, so where exactly do you get off telling him what to do or to whom and what to pray for? Do the world a favor and after you apologize contritely to Gilad and his family take a step back and just STFU. OK?

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Mmmmh. That was kind of a long and very angry rant, wasn't it? Pity to waste it. If you, dear reader, would be so kind to help along I think that we could keep this train of thought going for a little longer in the comments section just below. 

If you disagree that Nahari is an idiot I would really like to know why. If you agree, could you help illustrate to the world just how dumb he is? 

Personally, I think that Nahari is so dumb that he's a taco short of a combination plate; a melon ball short of a fruit salad; and that if you moved his plate five inches to the left he'd starve to death.

Your turn.

File under: Different jackal bites man

Three different people, all of them Israeli, have taken the trouble to point out that it was the Islamic Jihad that took responsibility for the recent rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. It is possible from reading the previous entry of this blog to mistakenly assume that it was Hamas that launched the rockets.  It was not, let that be clear.

It doesn't make the least bit of difference.

It is important not to fall for the trick that the fact that it was Islamic Jihad somehow absolves Hamas of culpability, it doesn't. Hamas rules Gaza, they are responsible for what happens there. There's a reason that Hamas hasn't held democratic elections in Gaza and it all goes to the same point. They rule by force and fear, and they simply did not exercise that force to cow Islamic Jihad into behaving like civilized human beings.

So the whole convoluted 'logic' of this situation is as follows:

1. Israel releases prisoners after reaching an agreement with Hamas;
2. The exchange strengthens Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority and Islamic Jihad.
3. Islamic Jihad, feeling their masculinity threatened, come to the conclusion that they must do something to enhance their street cred; and what better way is there to show how courageous, valiant, gallant, and noble they are than to shoot rockets at civilians?
4. Hamas quite obviously doesn't feel obligated to prevent such attacks and pretty much allows Islamic Jihad to do as it pleases, as long as it's directed at Israelis.
5. Palestinians from Gaza shoot rockets at Israeli civilian populations resulting in dead, wounded, and quite a bit of damage.

Put another way, Islamic Jihad and Hamas are in a contest to see who has got the biggest... rocket launcher, and the way to keep score is by dead and wounded Israelis.

Mmmmh, that makes perfect sense, don't it?

File under: Jackal bites man

Over a thousand Palestinians convicted of terrorism were released just a few days ago in return for Gilad Shalit. Last night rockets were fired at Israeli population centers in the south of the country killing one and wounding several. (link)

There is a logical fallacy that goes by the Latin name of "cum hoc, ergo propter hoc." Or in simpler words, correlation does not imply causality.  This is all to say that I shouldn't jump to conclusions just because the attack on civilians in Israel closely followed the release of the Palestinian convicts. I really shouldn't, but it's hard not to.

One would think that releasing over one thousand prisoners would qualify in anyone's mind as a "confidence building gesture."  A gesture that maybe would inspire the Hamas leadership to seek some sort of understanding with Israel. Apparently not.

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In related news: the sun will set tonight in the west and rise tomorrow morning in the east.

What else does Gilad Shalit owe his country? Nothing, I thought. Shalit himself begs to differ.

I was going to pass on commenting on the release of Gilad Shalit from captivity. Quite frankly, it's been covered well, covered to death, and commented almost as much. Click here to read a really good piece by Bradley Burston on the strange pride we all felt around here on seeing Shalit returned, regardless of the enormous price we paid and the risks we're all taking even after paying it.  There are other pieces of course, there are even timelines with detailed explanations of what happened and where if you're really interested.  To all this river of comment I'd like to add my two cents worth.

Duty

What duty does a soldier owe his country after five years in captivity?  I asked myself this question fleetingly as we all waited for Gilad to make his way from the Gaza Strip to Egypt to Israel.  My answer of course was "none." If anything, we owe him.  Whatever duty he had to us he's paid in spades and then some. So I waited, together with millions of others, to see the pictures and the video of Gilad landing the Tel-Nof air force base where he was to meet his family.  The pictures were slow in coming. Obviously someone had given strict instructions to keep the flashes and the intrusiveness of the camera lens to a minimum around Gilad.  So the first pictures we saw were of a young man, pale and rail thin, dressed in his army uniform, carefully exiting a military transport.  Let me emphasize something that you might have missed just now:

Dressed in his army uniform.

Wow.

As it turns out, the people handling his return had the presence of mind to bring along uniforms (in the different sizes) for Gilad to wear. The important part was that they also brought civilian clothing and that the assumption was that Gilad would change into civvies before going home.  It was Gilad that asked for the uniform.  

The second image that so stuck in my mind was Gilad coming down from the helicopter to find the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister, and the Head of the General Staff of the State of Israel waiting for him.  And what does he do, this bespectacled slip of a man? After five years in captivity he stands ramrod straight and snaps a perfect salute to his commanding officers:

First Sergeant Gilad Shalit reporting for duty, sir.

It's not true that a picture is worth a thousand words, this one was worth only eight, but they're the right eight (and no, he didn't actually say the words, he didn't need to).

Keep this image in mind when you think next of devotion to duty, of courage, of presence of mind, of strength, of grace under pressure.  I'm not a soldier so I don't get to salute 1st Sergeant Shalit, but I can take my hat off to him.