Flower Power

Ataliah is a flower child, but she denies it. It's easy to pick her out from our group. The floppy polka dot hat and the red bell bottoms are a sure giveaway. She's too young to realize that when she talks about her dad who "gave up" his American citizenship and came to Israel from New York via Canada in the late Sixties, she's saying "draft dodger" to me. So regardless of what she claims, yeah, she's a second generation hippie.

Ataliah isn't the kind of name you expect for a hippie. In fact, regular Jews don't name their girls Ataliah 'cause the one in the Bible was a wicked queen who grabbed the throne by killing off her brothers in law after her husband the king got himself assassinated. A pretty cynical thing to do that doesn't square with stuff like peace, love and nature. Hippies have names like "Dandelion" and "Moonbeam". The only thing I can imagine is that when our Ataliah was born, her folks were trippin' on some really good weed and it sounded, like, groovy at the time.
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Now, I've gotta come clean; I'm genetically biased. Back then when hippies were doing LSD in Central Park and demonstrating against the war in Vietnam, my people were on the other side of the barricades. They were chanting peace and free love, and we were shouting back country and patriotism. It's not like we were against equal rights or crazy about young men dying in Southeast Asia, but it was a clash of values. As far as we could see, at best flower children were naïve, at worst leading the next generation down a garden path to destruction.

Ataliah is a sweetie, but from where I'm coming from, I'm a bit skeptical about Flower Power.

I wonder what's Ataliah's take on our Negev Campus last week. We spent 4 days in the desert. We learned how its unique landscape was molded, carved and painted, and about the phenomena of Jewish settlement reclaiming the wilderness for the modern state of Israel.

Chaim "the motor mouth" was our guide mercifully for only the last day of the campus. From the moment he boarded the bus until well after dark he didn't give his vocal chords, or us, pause save to inhale air or take a slug from his canteen. The scuttlebutt is that in his day he was employed by the Mossad, interrogating enemy agents, wearing them down with endless, inconsequential trivia until they were singing like canaries. I spent the better part of the day in the hot seat across from him slipping in and out of consciousness.

The Negev has always been uninhabitable wasteland; a buffer between the land of Israel and Egypt, the highway of armies. Save for notable exceptions, such as the Nabataean civilization, it had been abandoned to nomads. At first it was even overlooked by the Zionist movements struggling to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

But by 1943 there was talk of partitioning the British mandate in Palestine between the Jews and Arabs, and word of the Holocaust making its way out of the death camps in Europe. The Jewish leadership knew that independence was fast approaching, and when it did they would have to have the means to receive and support large numbers of survivors from the camps. They needed land and lots of it. The Negev, by default more than choice, was the solution, and it had to be settled before the map dividing up the mandate was drawn.

The first settlers had to overcome two major obstacles. First of all, the British White Paper prohibited new Jewish settlement. This was solved with semantics; they called them "agriculture experimental stations". The second problem was the climate. Living at first in a "cave" (Which was actually a cistern abandoned by the Nabeteans) they build a stockade for defense, and then set about trying to grow something. The local well water is brackish, but by trapping desert flash floods they were able to dilute the salt content of the water enough for agriculture. At Kibbutz Revivim, among their first attempts as farmers was half an acre of gladiolas. Flowers in the Negev? At best, naïve.

The kibbutzniks were kinda like hippies, living off the land and sharing their stuff in a commune. Then some members of the U.N. commission partitioning Palestine showed up at Revivim. The kibbutzniks thought this was far out. They led the commissioners down the garden path and paused at the gladiola patch in full bloom.
"Really now", said one of the commissioners, "We didn't just fall of the turnip wagon! You probably stuck those in the ground yesterday."
To make his point, he grabbed one and pulled - and ended up with flower, bulb and roots in his hand. One of the kibbutzniks handed him shears.
"Dude, cut as much as you like, but it's, like, a real bummer to uproot the bulbs."
The commission returned to headquarters with a recommendation that the Negev be included in Israel. The kibbutzniks celebrated by smoking some of the stuff they were growing. (As an experiment, of course.)

So maybe there is something to Flower Power after all. Looking back, those hippies were right about Vietnam and played a big part in the movement for civil rights. Ataliah isn't at all like her namesake, but she isn't naïve either. She was a combat soldier in the army and recently helped organize "Walkabout of Love". Ataliah isn't leading anyone down the garden path; she just has more faith than most, including me. I'm glad she doesn't pay attention to me and my stereotypes.

Like, if she did, that would really be a drag.....

The Bean

Jack and the beanstalk. A boy and a bean and dream. The story is ancient, and everyone knows it thanks to Joseph Jacobs who published it about 200 years ago. Jack outwits an evil giant who in addition to being stingy, is a bad poet:

"Fee-fi-fo-fum!
I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Be he 'live, or be he dead,
I'll grind his bones to make my bread."

In the end, Jack lives happily ever after with his mother in the shadow of the dead giant, who was clumsy and fell off the beanstalk and landed in their backyard.

The Russian language edition translates the giant's ranting thus:

"Ya choi blat!
I smell the blood of the working class proletariat.
Be they alive or be they dead,
I'll grind their bones to make my matzo bread."

This caption is next to an illustration of the giant bearing a striking resemblance to Yankle, the Jewish tinker in the market in Mimansaslav, Ukraine. Jacobs was Jewish, so it's little ironic that his works provided documented evidence for what the locals had always suspected, namely that the Jews use Christian children to make matzos. Of course, this is total nonsense; everybody knows that Jews grind up Christian boys and girls to make kneidelech. Not ones to be hindered by the facts, Russian Orthodox priests brandishing crucifixes and a copy of "Jack and the Beanstalk" at the head of a mob of ignorant peasants set off on yet another pogrom leaving burning Synagogues and terrified Jews in their wake.

It was time for European Jews to move on. Russian peasants are very convincing. But to where? How? One group of Zionist activists had the answer. A bean.

Called "Lovers of Zion", they planted the bean in a plot of land purchased in Zammarin, Palestine, which was then smack in the middle of the Ottoman Empire. It wasn't a giant that troubled them at first, rather the monster was very small. A mosquito. Entire families were wiped out by malaria and many of those who survived physically put an end to their lives broken hearted. Today, only rows of silent graves in a pioneer cemetery remain to tell their story.

Of course, a bean isn't enough to make dreams come true. You need a giant. The pioneers found a friendly one in Baron Edmund James de Rothschild who took it upon himself to supply funds and advisors to jumpstart the failing experiment in Jewish settlement. In return, he asked that they name the place Zikhron Yaakov in memory of his father, James (Yaakov - or Jack) Mayer de Rothschild.

With Rothschild's help, the community took off. They built small homesteads and a synagogue and a winery. Today Zikhron Yaakov is a bedroom community between Haifa and Tel Aviv. The 19th century stone houses are galleries and tourist cafes along the cobblestoned main street. The winery is still up and running, but better know for the drinking and dancing fests held in the old wine cellars.

And like every happily ever after, they live in the shadow of a dead giant. Edmund de Rothschild purchased an enormous estate just out of town on the chalk cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean for his grave site. Today there is a center dedicated to educating the future generations of Israelis. Designed to friendly to the environment and to the visitor, it is built underground with an air conditioning system that works by circulating air through subterranean springs. The grounds around Rothschild's mausoleum are immaculate, rivaled in Israel only by the Baha'i Shrine in Haifa.

Being a gardener by trade, I couldn't resist breaking away and admiring my competitors work. And indeed, there is no limit to what you can do when money is no object. A greenhouse on site to grow perennials, and fountains and pools with a recirculation system. The paths are cleverly designed to be accessible to the handicapped and there's even a section devoted to herbs and fragrant plants for the benefit of the blind. There's literally something here for everyone.

I bumped into a couple of the staff that care for the grounds. One introduced himself as Sidney. Do I smell the blood of an Englishman? Well, yes. But more remarkable is the fact that he's in his eighties and going strong. He used to work in the office, but filled in for a woman on maternity leave and stayed on when she didn't return. That was 15 years ago. Very encouraging, me wondering if I will be able to go on landscaping until retirement.

Jack and the beanstalk is an incredible story, even for a fairy tale. Of course, 200 years ago when Jacobs first published it, who would have ventured that a wealthy suburban tourist town would be sitting on the Carmel overlooking the sea in an independent Jewish state.

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No, that's a bean too hard to swallow.