Sarah Novah, as I called her, who knows herself well enough to keep her feet firmly planted on the ground.


Jess, looking south.


The 9th century BCE storehouse. This, and the house beside it from the 8th century (I could very well be mixing up my centuries regarding these two structures), were moved rock by rock from where they were originally discovered near the temple/palace to where they are now. The end-of-season feast was held in this building.


Part of Area A3. The line of rocks about halfway down the wall is where excavations in this area began at the beginning of the six week season. I came along half-way through this, and worked mostly to the left of where this photo shows our area.


Again, from atop the roof, looking west to the hills of Naphtali. At night, and in the early mornings, the hills twinkled with electric lights. It was very pretty. During the day, every day, it was hot, humid and combined with the work we were dirty and sweaty. It was amazing.

Tel Hazor II

Getting here: I love that the majority of signs in Israel are in Arabic, Hebrew and English.


The roof that was constructed to cover the palace/temple at Tel Hazor.


The view of our site, A3, from atop this roof! To get the dirt we had dug out of the area, we formed a bucket chain - swinging each full bucket from hand to hand - and piled all the buckets at the base of the ladder. Then, each bucket would be hoisted up the ladder, along another chain to where we would dump the buckets full of dirt into two wheelbarrows. From here, the barrows were wheeled to a huge pile where the dirt was dumped. This would be done between four and eight, sometimes ten, times a day. I'm pretty sure bucket chains were my favourite part of the dig - we joked and laughed, played music and sang, helped each other and coached each other. Bucket chains were definitely a huge part of 'the fantastic-ness that is Area A,' as Cat put it. The man in the white t-shirt is Ron, our area supervisor.


Cat, Joelle and Sarah. Looking east; I'm pretty sure that's the Golan in the distance, or at least the southern part of the Golan.


Ryan and Dan. Looking west; those are the Naphtali hills in the distance.

Tel Hazor

The Cistern - amazing from two perspectives: ancient technology and archaeological excavation.



Joelle and I at the Cistern. This was during Cookie Break at 7a.m.


During Cookie Break, in a small grove of trees not far from our dig site and even closer to the 9th century BCE store house. The shade was necessary, even at 7a.m.


Looking east, at around 6a.m. one morning. Normally, there were never any clouds or very few. I like to think of the sun shining like this as my grandparents stopping by to say, 'hi!' while I'm here.


The sentry/lookout tower on the westernmost point of Hazor. From what I remember, this is the 'youngest' area on the tel, but I can't remember the exact time period and haven't written it in my journals. (if I'm wrong, please correct me!) I took this photo from the road - this is what we saw, although in shadow, every morning at 5a.m. on our way to dig.

Tisha B'Av

Sunday 10 August was Tisha B'Av. "The ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av has been set aside as a day of national mourning for all the tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people throughout their history." Originally a day marking the destruction of both the First and Second Temples, Tisha B'Av now is also a day to remember those murdered during the Holocaust. Two busloads of students from the student village went to Yad Vashem (The Hand of God), the Holocaust Museum, where we toured at our own pace the New Museum. The place was packed with people of all walks of life to envision what had transpired during this terrible time in history. The short documentary films, personal video-taped accounts, artefacts, photographs, and historical detailing of the circumstances of those persecuted throughout Europe and Northern Africa, made for an incredibly somber and powerful experience. I walked with tissue ready, amazed at the endurance of the survivors, the capability for cruelty, and the necessity for remembering such an atrocity so as never to repeat it.

Outside the New Museum is the Avenue of the Righteous. For every group or individual who helped the Jews escape from the Nazis, a tree has been planted. There are certain requirements for being considered Righteous: from the website: "Trees, symbolic of the renewal of life, have been planted in and around the Yad Vashem site, in honor of those non-Jews who acted according to the most noble principles of humanity by risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Plaques adjacent to each tree record the names of those being honored along with their country of residence during the war. More plaques appear on walls of honor in the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations."

Early in my visit to the museum, I saw this quote which struck me: "A country is not just what it does - it is what it tolerates." -- Kurt Tucholsky. I think is the same for people: it is not just what we do, but also who we tolerate. I think back to a conversation I had with my father, where he was telling me about discussing intolerance with my stepmother. It went something like, "We consider ourselves intolerant of intolerance, but where does that place us on the scale of intolerance? As intolerant as those who are intolerant of others? Are we better than intolerant people, for having recognized that we will not tolerate intolerance?...?" - and we are left with ellipses. Better to be left with the ellipses, and the knowledge that we will tolerate in others what is different from ourselves. Better to be left with ellipses than the alternative - an alternative, potentially, as tragic as the Holocaust. Perhaps that is part of my T-ness, that I try to spread wherever I go - tolerance, acceptance, remembrance. Everywhere I go is the opportunity not only to practice tolerance, but to be tolerant.

Thoughts? Insights? Essentially, I'm struggling with the right words to convey how powerful it was for me being at Yad Vashem, but wanted to let you know I was there during an extremely special time in the Hebrew calendar.

Cookie Break - The Best Meal of the Day

As promised, an entry dedicated to the nasty food served via a catering company at Kibbutz Mahanayim. The two (kosher) meals for which the caterers were responsible was lunch (meat), served at 2:30 when we returned from the dig, and dinner (dairy) at 7:30. If this were one's only judge of kosher fare, one would remain confused about the definitions and further believe that kosher = nasty. Let's just say that the words of my room-mate, Sonja, summed up the experience very well: how is it possible that these people ruin perfectly good food? And, having eaten fantastic kosher food before, I knew that this was a non-issue regarding flavour. (I'll have to wait till I get home for Inna's brisket, but will never give up hope that one day it will show up in my mailbox here.)

So, some examples of what they fed us: eggs, my favourite food, ruined in a tomato sauce (another fav) because it wasn't hot, nor was any spice of any sort used; grayish mystery meat in a gravy-like sauce; peas and rice (yet again, a fav) but cold and flavourless - you get the idea. Whatever hot food they served was generally cold, as though placed on the tables when we'd left that morning, and spiced with humidity found for free in the air it sat in. When I tell you that hummus was the ketchup on the kibbutz, I'm not joking. Occasionally we'd get meat in a hot dog-like form and there would be red sauce available - but it was sweeter than ketchup. I personally did not try this and stuck with tried and true hummus - I ate it with tomato and cucumber salad, potatoes, rice, beets, soggy lukewarm vegetables, chicken and meat.

On the bright side of the gastronomic offerings, the watermelon, peaches, apples and plums were amazing and twice there was this beef stew that was so yummy. It was no Kickass Guinness Irish Stew, nor was it my Gramma's, but it was tasty. Suffice it to say, I lived for cookie break every morning at 7 on the tel. Chocolate and vanilla and tiramisu and lemon wafers; jammie dodgers; these firm little log-shaped biscuits filled with chocolate or halva; Pims. Cookies became a food group unto themselves for three weeks. Thank goodness the sugar in them was needed to fuel our digging, else I would've ballooned. As it is, I've gone down a clothing size.

On the tel, breakfast was at 9:30. This meal was consistently very tasty (see itinerary in last entry) but I had to modify what I ate. The dairy was not a good idea in the heat combined with a fairly steady stance of being bent over at the waist and doing manual labour... with a pickaxe, sometimes (I love saying that), or hunched over brushing dirt. By the end of the first week, the most I could really stomach at this meal was bread with jam.

And, not all the food is nasty here, just that which was served at the kibbutz. Truly, for the first few days I didn't think it was all that bad, then they served the egg-tomato scary surprise and I was a disillusioned little digger. Thankfully, within a five minute walk of the kibbutz was Mahanayim Junction. There they have restaurants for falafel, tasty pizza, and the best ice cream I've had in a long time. On several evenings, Sonja, Steve, Marion and I - and occasionally some of the others, but always we four - would head for ice cream. Are you ready for the flavours? Are you sitting down? I tried: coconut, chocolate with chocolate crispy bits, date, caramel, kinder egg, oreo cookie, chocolate/vanilla swirl. Total yum. If I could've lived on that, I would've. That and the falafel. Falafel is a thousand times better here - as are the figs. The figs are four times as big as the tiny ones we're sold in Toronto. I don't think I will ever get tired of figs and would seriously consider moving here permanently just for them. Maybe I should marry a fig farmer. Or be a fig farmer. I'd keep all my friends in figs, and you would love me more than you already do, that's how big and beautiful the figs are in Israel.

Speaking of fantastic food, on my first Sunday here, I roadtripped with Jess, Sarah and Joelle to Tsfat. It's a very lovely little town with many artisans, and it was here that I went into my first synagogues. On the way home, we decided to go to Rosh Pinna for dinner to a chocolate restaurant. Restaurants here are either dairy or meat - you can't, for example, get a cheeseburger. So, the choco-resto was dairy. I had eggplant rolled and stuffed with goat's cheese and sundried tomatoes, in a tomato sauce, with more cheeses melted on top and sprinkled with pine nuts - to die for. Flavour! Spice! A treat for your tongue AND your tummy! For dessert, we all shared a chocolate fondue with marshmallows, chocolate croutons and fruit for dipping - apples, watermelon, pears, bananas, and some others whose names I don't know but were soooo delicious. We were going to return with more chocolate desserts, but were very full and had already purchased some chocolate halva in Tsfat. Halva is an extremely rich dessert made from sesame seeds, and though not to everyone's taste, I thought it wonderful in small doses. Sonja and I had it for breakfast the next morning. The fun of being an adult!

After a particularly bad meal, Jess and I discussed returning to Tel Hazor as the cooks for hungry diggers. Then, after this discussion, if I was lying in bed and even remotely wired at 9 pm, instead of counting sheep I'd make meal plans for large groups. They wouldn't have to pay me - just look after expenses and pay someone else to do the cleaning-up. I had just-before-sleeping daydreams of the gratitude of future volunteers and archaeologists; of the latter including me in their list of acknowledgments in publications of their research or of the former telling all their friends that they HAD to come dig at Hazor because the meals made every digging day complete. How much rice would I need to serve You Are So Dirty Rice to 50 people?

And then I think of Deborah. Did she worry about feeding people as she sat beneath her Palm tree, or while she marched in the general direction toward where I spent the better part of the past three weeks? How would she have solved this dilemna - with a glass of milk and a few cookies? (Which is pretty much what we did.) The cookie break was important for me, not only for all that sugar, but also because I sat with her while I ate wafers and drank strong, sweet coffee. I looked at the hills of Naphtali daily which, according to the biblical narrative, was the area belonging to one of the tribes who fought in her war against the Canaanite oppressors who lived in the city I was helping to unearth. How can you top that? That's right: by eating more chocolate wafers with chocolate bits, that's how. Cookies at Hazor go hand in heavy-duty-work-glove.

Live from Jerusalem

That's right, folks, I made it to the city as described in the Talmud: "Of the ten measures of beauty allotted to the world, nine were given to Jerusalem." This blog post is dedicated to the beauty of the people I have thus far encountered in Israel, beginning with the space from which I am presently writing, and ending with my first adventure in Tel Aviv. Then, in the next few days I will fill in events between Tel Aviv on 12 July and now, as well as add some photos. As a preface, before leaving I told some people that I had this strange impression in my head of coming to Israel and being in a bubble during these travels, of being completely on my own. It was as though I was observing myself in my imaginings, as though I were a spectator projecting myself as a third-person narrator in this adventure. This preface is, therefore, an official bursting of that bubble because, as you shall see, I have been anything but alone.

Today, I write to you from Ortal's room in her apartment at Hebrew University's (HU) Student Village. Ortal is an archaeology student at HU, and worked at the dig at Tel Hazor. Two Thursdays ago, I asked her advice for finding a place to stay for a couple of nights close to campus and she offered me her room. She contacted her roomies, and they were cool with having me here, so here I am. The buildings and the apartments in them are modern, well-conceived, and clean; this one is a five bedroom, whereas others are two- and three-bedrooms. Ortal is at her parents' for the weekend, but her roomies, Sharon (from Haifa) and Ollie (from Berlin) have welcomed me with open arms. Already, they have taken me to the supermarket (yesterday) and today made me egg and hashbrown lunch with toast and pineapple juice and coffee. So yummy and helpful in the fight to forget the food at the kibbutz...don't worry, that post is in the near future!

From where I sit typing, I can look over my right shoulder out the bedroom window and see the Dome of the Rock in the Old City. If I stand up and look out the same window to the left, I can see HU, the hospital and its helicopter pad, and a cemetery. I wonder if this is the same cemetery that I saw in a documentary a few years ago about a group of older Jewish friends who met there every week for picnics. The temperature today is pleasant and the breeze is refreshing. A haze does, however, stand around the city's perimeter. Beyond the university's campus, the hills are sand-coloured and treeless; beyond the Old City the hills are greener. Jerusalem's green is a deep green of fir trees.

So, 3 weeks ago I left the Olimpia Hotel and grabbed a cab to the bus station. There are four bus stations in Tel Aviv, and I went to the one that the MofT guy had written at the top of a downloaded schedule for buses from Tel Aviv to Mahanayim Junction. The cabbie started to get out of the car when I heard a sickening crunch. I looked up from my purse, where I was pulling out shekels for him, and a huge truck had clipped his driver's side mirror and narrowly missed him. No one stopped to exchange insurance info, life continued: the truck moved on and the driver moved to the trunk to get my suitcases and knapsack.

Then, he vaguely motioned me in 'that direction' to the buses, got in his cab and left. It's noon, it's hot and superhumid, I'm not wearing a hat, I'm thanking god or whoever for my full waterbottle, and I'm looking at my luggage. It's very heavy. I put the small suitcase on top of the large one and strapped them together. I put the knapsack on my back. I began the trek to the little building resembling an old-school Dairy Queen or chip wagon that said 'Information.'

I get to this info-stand, and one of the women inside looked at me in disgust and got up and left. The other woman said this was for Dan Bus Lines, and I wanted Egged; she vaguely waved me in the direction of the Egged office. (ok, for clarification, I'm not including these women for their 'kindness,' and the same for the cabbie, but they are a part of the story.) I grabbed my stuff, crossed a parking lot meant for buses with some platforms to the left, got to the Egged office and it was closed. I'm not panicking about this (this is sincere and not sarcastic), after all, it can't stay closed forever. As I'm standing there, two young guys come along and they're speaking English so I asked for their help: 'Do you know where the platform is for the bus to Mahanayim?' They told me to stay where I was and they'd find out, and they came back shortly to tell me that it was on the other side of yet another parking lot, and added, 'you're heading to the Golan. That'll be one helluva ride.' Then they eyed up my heavy bags and were gone.

Now, most parking lots take what, 5 minutes to cross? Maybe 7-10 minutes if they're really big parking lots? Half an hour. It took me half an hour to cross this parking lot with all my stuff, stopping and drinking water and rearranging the smaller suitcase as it slipped off the larger. My face was dripping and sweat rolled down my back so that my shirt stuck to me and to the knapsack. (Um, ew.) Then, as I reached the street where the platform I needed was said to be, I thought a few things to myself:

1: The platform is probably the last one.
2: I wish someone would help me with these bags.
3: Did I really need all the stuff I brought? (yes, yoga mat, yes)
4: Big deal. You just need to get there, to the platform. You'll make it. Of course you'll make it - this will be over soon and you'll get through it just fine.

All this was thought in the last 30-40 seconds of that half hour of hell. As soon as I had finished thinking it, another young man (younger than me, older than the first two) approached me and asked if he could help. I looked at him, hesitated briefly, and said, 'Thank you.' He took the big bag, and we wheeled together down the sidewalk. I would like to take this opportunity to kiss the feet of whoever invented wheeled luggage.

As we approached (you guessed it) the final platform in a long line of platforms, an older man approached us offering sherut services to Tiberias. (For those of you who don't know, or if I haven't mentioned it yet, a sherut is a shared transport service taking usually ten people from point A to B and it's a little more than a bus but less than a private taxi as we know them.) I told the man where I was going, and he apologized that they don't go that far. I thanked the luggage-dude for helping me, and the bus pulled up. I watched all these people, including soldiers with their guns over their shoulders, throwing their knapsacks and bags into the bus' hold, and knew that taking a bus would be a bad idea for two reasons: a) loading and unloading would be, to put it mildly, a bitch; b) once I reached Mahanayim, I knew that I would have to walk about 800 meters, and if I could barely make it across two parking lots, what would 800 meters be like?

Quick thinking took over, a trait I'm not known for. Usually I have to ponder decisions for days. Not this day. I waved over sherut-dude, and asked him: if he gets me as far as Tiberias, what do I have to do to get to Mahanayim? (As I'm asking him this, I'm praying that Tiberias is where I remember it being on the map - just south of where I need to go.) He said no problem, he'd call his friend who would drive me from Tiberias to the kibbutz. We agreed on prices, I lit a smoke and finally stood in the shade. In Tiberias two hours later my stuff was transferred clickety-click from sherut to taxi, and in another half an hour/forty minutes I was at Kibbutz Mahanayim.

Till next time, darlings - let's say later this evening or tomorrow afternoon. Mwah.