From the Wizard of Oz

During Pesach we took a trip to the Negev and visited the ancient Nabatean city of Mamshit. We toured the ruins there and enjoyed the beautiful desert vistas. On the way home we decided to visit another national park, Beit Guvrin, but did not manage to get there before they closed.

Right across the highway from the site was a field filled with thousands and thousands of bright red poppies.

Bees arrive tonight

After months of studying and preparation we are finally ready to start our first hive.

Why bees?

Over the past few months I have been thinking about how different life is in Israel compared to our lives in Canada. Besides the constant pressure of not knowing when a war might break out or if there will be yet another hafsakat chashmal (power outage), life is just not the same.

Life in Canada was great. Canadians on the whole are wonderful people and Canadian society was pretty pluralistic. Toronto especially was an amazing city, teaming with immigrants from around the world, each adding a special flavour to the city.

Despite the pleasant lives we led in Canada, we found that we were not closely in touch with things around us. We followed the news and knew what was going on across the world and down the street but we had slowly become disconnected with life. Waking up in the summertime in our air conditioned home, getting into our air conditioned car and driving to the air conditioned mall where we bought fruits and vegetables that were in season somewhere – but not here. As I kid I remember being excited when my mother came home from the grocery store with green grapes. Yay, they were in season! Or sometimes we were treated to kiwis that came from far away and were a special treat. Its not that we were underprivileged kids, we weren’t, its just that the world was a bigger place then and we were more sensitive to the specialness of nature.

It wasn’t just foods that excited us, one day our family doctor called my parents and said that we HAD to go out and buy the current issue of Life magazine. It contained photos by Lennart Nielsson of a human fetus. Today, we are inundated with images blaring at us from TV sets, computers and illuminated signs on the highway.

Life is not like that here in Israel. Other than certain vegetables such as garlic apples, If the food isn’t in season you are not likely to find it in the stores. It is true that with cable TV, the Internet and Israeli’s penchant for travelling abroad, the country is becoming more westernized and less Israeli. This country may lose its unique character but it will not happen overnight. Many things are slow to change in Israel. This place is filled with people from so many countries, each hanging on to his culture but all learning Hebrew with foreign accents.

 When I think of all the people who make up this country and the difficulties in getting along with each other, I am reminded of a picture I will always keep in my mind of a day I experienced soon after making aliyah. When the windows are open and the noise from the cars on the street is not too deafening, you can hear an Arab man driving down the street calling out “alte zachen” old things… He is form of a recycle person who drives around, using the Yiddish to reach out to people to sell their old fridges, stoves, sofas, heaters or whatever is old and can find another life someplace. We are so used to seeing Arabs calling out in Yiddish and think nothing of it now. Later that day we went to wedding in Jerusalem where we heard a chassidic fiddler with a long beard and black jacket play an Irish jig. More than one person attending the wedding was familiar enough with the music to actually get up an dance a jig.

 Life in Canada was quite stratified and although Canadians are probably less provincial than the average resident of New York City, we didn’t exactly live in a blended society. Attending shul in Israel, I might be sitting next to a nuclear physicist from the Weizmann Institute or a soldier. My walk to work every morning takes me through a field where I often see a flock of sheep with a Bedouin shepherd and a stone’s through away is a particle accelerator on the grounds of the Weizmann Institute. Daily life here is closer to real life. Yes, there is air conditioning and the occasional imported vegetable but there is no such expression such as “raining on your parade” because if it rains, you are happy for the country.

About a month ago I decided to investigate the field of bees and honey. The little bugs are pretty amazing and produced the next best thing to maple syrup, which we really miss. I started reading about the nectar and realized that I had no idea of what was in bloom and when. We are so detached from the cycle of life that we depend on yet we seem to know who starred in what movie, and who is getting Botox treatments.

We needed to get our connection back to the land.