Leon's No News Bulletin 95 Tues 30th Dec 08

Shalom everyone,

On Monday morning, while waiting at 8 in the morning at Ben Gurion Airport for my latest group of tourists, a family from New York, I had a telephone call from my son Ariel with the good news that his wife Lilach had just given birth to a bouncing baby boy. I welcomed the tour family with a big smile, as usual, a smile of two joys; their arrival (I’m always happy to see tourists arriving in Israel) and the arrival of my new grandson, Allon.

With this happy arrival even the overcast weather couldn’t dampen the tourist’s enthusiasm to visit the great sites of Israel I had planned for them. It seemed that winter had waited for just this day to make its entrance, but Neot Kedumim (Gardens of Antiquity), near the airport, on the Modiin road, en route to Jerusalem, looked like a bride waiting to be nourished by the long awaited rain that would make it blossom and bloom. Everything was ready to burst into flower, all it needed was the rain which came after we had spent more than 2 hours walking the narrow, neatly laid out paths among the Almond trees, the Sycamores, the Palms and the little, prickly shrubs (the prickly Sirrah) which forms the characteristic ground cover, like a blanket covering the rolling hills of Judea.

This tranquil countryside carries one back to the days of David and Solomon when the Jews ploughed these hillsides, planted their seed, waited for the rain and carried the first sheaves of Barley on Passover to the Temple in Jerusalem. Then on Shavuot, when the farmer and his children scurried down the slopes to the cool valleys where the nut trees grew in little gardens and the hot sun didn’t manage to beat down on them because the leafy nut trees around the pool cast their shade and made them feel cool.

Probably then they sang this song from the Song of Songs:

TO THE NUT GROVE

I went down into the nut tree grove,
to see the green plants of the valley,
to see whether the vine budded,
and the pomegranates were in flower.

Let us get up early to the vineyards.

Let us see whether the vine has budded,
its blossom is open,

and the pomegranates are in flower.
There I will give you my love.

Last week I was privileged to sit in on two workshops; the first on religion and sociology, the second on the Mamlukes (the slave soldiers of Islam)

I considered myself lucky to have these days free to attend the workshops because, although much of the deliberations were beyond my understanding and much deeper than I wanted to delve into the subjects, I learned a few things: In the first workshop I learnt the surprising conclusion that:

Scientists agree that identities which divide individuals according to groups, religious, ethnic, national, political are easily interchangeable and do in fact keep changing, however slowly. New techniques of communication like the internet and TV may facilitate more rapid change than in past eras but there is no agreement on this.

In the second workshop I learnt that there is an enormous amount of military information which comes from many texts, written by great Arab historians and koranic teachers like al Tabari and  Yacubi.

Although these writers are considered historians, geographers, expounders of the Koran because they give accounts of the spread of Islam, they are really telling about the caliphs who through their brave military exploits spread the belief in God.

The object of most military campaigns was to spread the belief in one God, not to conquer territory. A rebel wasn’t someone who set up a separate state in Moslem conquered territory but someone who rejected the belief in one God.

This is how separate Moslem states could develop and how ultimately to this day there is no unity in the Moslem world. Separate states are tolerated as long as they are godly states where the people are Moslems.

Wishing you a great no news day

Yours truly

Leon