I really enjoy sites that use this cute little widget called Mr. Linky.
I first learned about these little projects for blogs to which one adds one’s own link from Robin, who regularly posts on Wordless Wednesday. I found Robin because she sometimes comments on Mother In Israel. And I want to wish Mother in Israel a safe and happy trip to America. And thank her for coming to visit us when we were at the Kings Hotel in Jerusalem.
OK, back to Mr. Linky. At one point several months ago, I posted a composition for Project Blue, which also uses Mr. Linky. That was a lot of fun. Soon after, Ilana-Davita posted for Ruby Tuesday. I also posted a recipe in a recipe box swap that uses Mr. Linky. Today, I “met” a blogger named Dina, who was posting as part of an ABC project that uses Mr. Linky. Dina, who lives west of Jerusalem, wrote about the attack last week. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Linky, I wouldn’t have found her blog.
What is very cool about all this is that you can connect with people you really wouldn’t otherwise meet. What you have in common is the desire to share something simple, a photo or a recipe. But it’s a nice start, sort of like an ice-breaker at a party full of guests.
It seems you can use Mr. Linky on almost any blogging platform, including one’s own WordPress installation, like mine. More about using Mr. Linky here. So if anyone has any good ideas for a Mr. Linky scheme, let me know. I was thinking of an alephbet one, like every week bloggers write something about a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Would it work? An artistic one, where artists can post a link to their latest creation? Any ideas welcome. Also, if you have a favorite Mr. Linky project that you’ve found on someone’s blog, please let me know.
I haven’t done a post on health topics for a while, so here are some recent internet picks:
Allergies: why are they on the rise? Lots of theories, such as a possible link to vaccines. Feel free to argue with any theory. I’m going to highlight this idea:
Allergies And Ubiquitous Presence Of Some Foods
Before the advent of freezers and airfreight most people ate local foods in season. Now most fruit and vegetables are available all year round, so that our systems are exposed to the same foods continually without respite.
There has been a dramatic increase in people experiencing soya allergy, since soya has become a common ingredient in many processed foods. In Europe and North America rice allergy is relatively uncommon, whereas in Asia where it is consumed more frequently it is much more common.
Note: In Israel one still eats local foods in season. It is difficult, for example, to obtain strawberries in the summer.
Can a good B vitamin help reduce susceptibility to sunburn? I’ve heard that B vitamin supplementation can ease the mosquito bites. However, my son claims he eats a lot of cereal, so he doesn’t think this is true. He gets very itchy mosquito bites.
As I am married to a red wine lover, I’ll conclude with a photo from our trip to the Galil winery:
The wine is stored in these oak barrels (oak is either from France or the US) for a few years before being bottled and sold. We bought some Galil Pinot Noir and enjoyed it with our friends in Hashmonaim.
Tanks for fermentation and storage of wine are the answers to my quiz on this post.
This was my son’s favorite activity in Israel, sliding down this gigantic red slide at a waterpark in the Galil called Luna Gal. As a mom, I got palpitations every time he went down. Oy.
I believe this is a Tristram’s grackle (onychognathus tristramii), a bird that lives in Ein Gedi, an oasis near the Dead Sea. This bird had no problem letting me photograph him on the picnic table in the visiting area. I have such a harder time getting photos of the birds in my own backyard here in New Jersey!
According to the Wikipedia article,
They are omnivorous, feeding on fruit and invertebrates, and can also be observed grooming Nubian Ibex and domestic livestock for parasites.
Note via email from a Highland Park birder: “It looks very similar to our common grackles except for the bill shape and the bit of color on the wing.”
See my photo of an ibex (yael in Hebrew). Fuzzy, cute hyrax photo coming soon.
Have you ever gone along with a group(family, friend, spouse) and agreed to do some activity, only to find it was a GREAT activity?
Such was my experience with visiting the City of David (see entrance in above photo, with Arab neighborhood of Silwan in the background; there is a valley between the entrance center and the neighborhood that one can’t see in the photo).
All I heard prior to our visit was:
Our legs were going to get wet.
We needed to take our flashlights to Israel just for this tour.
Because my daughter did not want to go through the wet part, called Hezekiah’s tunnel (nor did 3/4 of our tour group), I didn’t even experience the wet, flashlight section.
Getting back to the beginning, here’s what we saw even before we entered that harp entrance:
There is some archaeological dig going on behind that mural. The mural on the right shows up again at the end of our tour, as it represents how the ancient Siloam pool may have looked.
At the beginning of our tour our guide, Oren, pointed to the walls around the “Ir HaAtika”, as the ancient walled section of Jerusalem is called and said: “For the purposes of this tour, those walls are new.” Indeed, they were built by the Ottomans a mere 500 years ago. Oren was an articulate, knowledgeable, enthusiastic guide, as was our tour guide of the day before, who led us on a tour of Herod’s western wall of the 2nd Temple. Oren spoke English well and knew Tanakh and biblical archeology.
Here’s Oren showing us a drawing found in this area, one similar to that on the 5 shekel coin:
Underneath us in that photo is what archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar deemed to be David’s Palace. This discovery took place in 2005, a mere 3 years ago. I first learned about this discovery while working on Prof. Gary Rendsburg’s Bible and History course.
Oren told us how British archaeologists in the early twentieth century dug up a lot of this area, but they did not discover the palace Dr. Mazar found. They did, however, jumble up many of the layers of history, making the job of current archaeologists all the more difficult. Also, the city is on a hill, so many of the precious “trash” of the centuries rolled down into the valley, all mixed up instead of in nice layers as archaeologists would prefer.
A tourist building about the City of David was supposed to be built here. However, all that got built were those concrete walls, because an archaeologist was sent in to inspect before the building could receive a building permit. The permit was never issued, and more digs are going on in this area.
Here’s the plaque inside this room. I would have liked to photograph the English as well, but Oren had put his book bag on top of it. Loosely translated, the first sentence says Prof. Roni Reich in 1995 started excavating the Gihon Spring area here. (Anyone who cares to translate the rest, feel free! I’ll add it). The Gihon Spring is key; this whole area was developed over 3000 years ago because there was water here. The plaque ends with this quote from Samuel 2 5:8
Basically, the way King David conquered the Jebusite city situated on this hill was by attacking the water source. Tsinor may mean water source and may refer to the Gihon Spring.
Above is Warren’s Shaft, discovered in the 1860’s. I wrote about Charles Warren previously. It used to be thought that this was the ancient spring from which the city’s inhabitants got water, by dropping their buckets down this shaft to retrieve water. Now this whole theory is debunked, with archaeologists believing this is just a natural fissure in the rock.
Finally, we get to the fun part: Hezekiah’s tunnel. Why was this tunnel built? As you may recall, David conquered the city from the Jebusites by capturing the water source. So when the Assyrian king threatened the Kingdom of Judah in 700 BCE, the smart thing to do was to protect the water source by diverting the water with a tunnel, called Hezekiah’s tunnel.
My daughter and I didn’t go through the wet section, which my son said was a lot of fun. You can see from maps that the water tunnel was built in a twisty, turny way, with two sets of diggers working at two ends and then managing to meet in the middle.
Instead, we traveled through what is referred to as the Canaanite Channel. She declared it ‘squooshy’, and I asked her if she knows the meaning of the word claustrophobia.
Here’s where we came out. Notice how far down the hill we are from where we started. Click on the photo to see larger detail. Towards the top of the photo, where building meets sky, you can see the walls of the “Old” City (that you now know as new).
The tour guide then led us to what may have been the Siloam Pool, a pool that gathered water from the Gihon Spring. We also saw some steps from a little before the Roman period, that alternated wide step, short step, wide step, short step. The wide steps were so donkeys could climb up along with people.
At right is a detail from Siloam pool mural at the end of our tour.
The tour was fun for adults and kids alike, as there was a lot to see and learn and fun passageways in which to traverse. To see if any of you are still with me, I’ll leave you with Oren’s quiz:
What did 98% of people do (for a living) in the times of David?
What do 60% of people do today (what motion with his hands did Oren make for this question)?
Do you know anyone by the name of Yael? This animal is called an ibex or in Hebrew Yael. We saw quite a few ibex on our trip to the Dead Sea, where we hiked up (and back down) Nahal David, the shorter hike at Ein Gedi. As it was quite hot and my daughter got tired from our short Nahal David hike, we are glad we did not do the longer Nahal Arugot hike. Also, unlike our sad Banias experience where we were not allowed to go in the water, there is plenty of swimming, wading and sitting under waterfalls in Nahal David.
Psalms 104:18 —
The high mountains are for the wild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the conies.
הָרִים הַגְּבֹהִים, לַיְּעֵלִים; סְלָעִים, מַחְסֶה לַשְׁפַנִּים
According to the Ein Gedi brochure, the wild goats are Nubian ibex. The conies are rock hyrax, and I have a picture of one of those furry animals, too (for a later post).
Here’s a photo of my daughter trying to walk backwards at the Kotel, the Western Wall. It is considered respectful not to put your back to the Kotel. The wall that one can see at the Kotel plaza is actually a mere fragment of the walls of the Second Temple renovated by Herod Around 19 BCE.
We took an underground tour that showed us the full extent of the wall on the west. On this tour we passed by Warren’s Gate, an ancient entrance to the Temple. I was surprised to see women davening (praying) as we tourists tramped on through them. The men had less interuption in a balcony above. This is considered the closest one can get to the Kodesh HaKedoshim, the Holy of Holies. The gate is named after the explorer Charles Warren, whom our tour guide told us to Google to find out more about this fascinating man. According to our guide, at some point in his tunnel explorations Warren seemed to have accidentally come upon the bathroom of some nuns, but I couldn’t find any evidence of this anecdote online. He was also known to have failed to find Jack the Ripper when he returned to England.
I am working on a post of Ir David, the most fascinating of the tours we took, because every few months they discover something new. And this is by far the most ancient section of Jerusalem (it is right outside the Dung Gate, outside of what is called the Old City). Charles Warren shows up again in Ir David.
A photo of a flower I took at Latrun, site of an important 1948 battle and now home to a memorial museum and many tanks on display. Many Israeli flowers are different than the ones here in New Jersey. Maybe some day I will learn the names. (update: bougainvillea or paper flower, I think)
While we were in Jerusalem this week, there was a terrorist attack on Jaffa Road. We only found out because an Israeli-American friend called to find out if we were OK (we were having a great time). To find out more, you can readtheseIsraelibloggers. I know as much as anyone who watched the news! Life went on as usual for us, for Jerusalem Israelis, and for the abundant number of tourists in the city. There were so, so many tourist groups of teenagers (Birthright, USY, NCSY) and young visitors. Older visitors, too. What a pleasure to see! I’ll be happy to be the one to report the good news.
Therefore thou shalt say unto them: When ye set apart the best thereof from it, then it shall be counted unto the Levites as the increase of the threshing-floor, and as the increase of the wine-press.
Ilana-Davita (5.) was the closest thus far. I’ll post the answer with more photos and explanation next week.
Here’s a photo of my daughter trying to walk backwards at the Kotel, the 
