Also north 5: It might have been an etching on a marker of a grave

Maybe you will see it as you're passing by alone
Below the moss forgotten where some words adorn a stone...

All over northern Israel, but particularly in the greater Tzfat area, are "graves" of various tannaim and amoraim, and even the prophet Habakkuk. Some are just at the side of the highway, while others are further in, but are also marked with signs on the main road. If anyone knows the origin of these sites, I'd be very interested to know. I mean, it's highly unlikely that these are the actual graves of the people whose names are on them, but are they 100 years old or 500 years old or what?



More anti-littering signs, this time taking a more spiritual tack:







"Moshe Rabbeinu's cow"? I don't get it.



The donors who made it possible, from Queens NY and London:



If the light goes out, call this number:



Now you'll have to keep your browser on this page forever! (I don't think this inscription is meant to indicate who is buried there.)



The other two tzaddikim remain unnamed.






Rabbi Tarfon, a much bigger name:



"The father of all Israel"!









I once wrote, "The city of Tzfat was founded in the sixteenth century as an extension of the Jerusalem Syndrome ward at Hadassah-Ein Kerem hospital." This remains as true as ever, of both Tzfat itself and the surrounding hills. Thus, the scene below, next to Rabbi Tarfon's grave on Friday morning. Several groups of apparently secular Israelis were touring the site; one group had children, and another group had all-terrain golf carts. The man below was speaking to one of the groups; it's not clear whether he was connected to them in any way or whether they had just met. He identified himself as "Dan ha-Mesapeir" (Dan the Storyteller) and said that he tells stories to children and adults. The book in his hands is a haggadah, and he read the story of the 5 rabbis in Benei Berak (including Rabbi Tarfon!) and then started giving Chasidic-style perspectives about Pesach.





Dan ha-Mesapeir began singing a song for Shabbat that he said was written right there in Tzfat, and some people sang and clapped along, while others didn't. This video captures the scene.

Also north 4: Around the Upper Galil

The Kinneret:

Also north 3: Beit She'an valley

Kibbutz Tirat Zvi:



Sahne:







Swimming required!



The first "chomah umigdal" settlement:



The view from the tower:

'

Some sort of functioning aqueduct:



The famous synagogue floor at Beit Alfa:

Also north 2: Beit She'an

We got to Beit She'an and knew there were substantial archaeological remains from the Roman city of Scythopolis that had stood on that site, and knew from the guidebooks that there was an amphitheater. So we got to this amphitheater and said "Hey, that's pretty cool." Certainly more extensive than anything we've seen from that period in Jerusalem or Istanbul.



The intersection of old and new:







Crying wolf: (The sign says that littering in the Beit She'an National Park is totally forbidden, and violators will be punished. Clearly the punishment must not be severe enough to be an effective deterrent. Nowhere in Israel is free of litter.)



Then we ventured further and realized that that amphitheater was nothing - just a little side attraction. There is an entire preserved city: (In the background is the Canaanite tell.)



The real amphitheater: (The stage is not original, and is used for performances.)













The city was destroyed in the earthquake of 749, and the collapsed buildings were just left there.



Aerial view from on top of the tell:



The kosher McDonald's is new. Since Scythopolis was mostly Greek/Roman, it wasn't kosher at the time.





Egyptian artifacts found in the tell, dating to the period when Egypt controlled the land of Israel. I hadn't realized that there was such a period -- funny enough that no one (including the Tanakh) bothered to tell us about this.





On the way back out to modern Beit She'an, sheep graze freely.

One year away!

[CORRECTION (8/12/08): The sources say that the sun (along with the moon and stars) was created at the beginning of the fourth day, i.e. Tuesday night -- NOT sunrise on Wednesday. The blessing is said at sunrise because that's the first time that the sun is visible. So everything in the analysis below should be shifted 12 hours earlier, but the result of a 28-year cycle is the same.]


(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

One (solar) year from today, Wednesday, April 8, 2009, is birkat ha-chamah, the blessing for the sun that is said only once every 28 years!

Why every 28 years?

The short version: It's based on bad science, but it's still cool to have something like this that only happens a few times per lifetime. We should brainstorm about how to take advantage of this opportunity!

The longer version:

There are two Jewish calendars. One is the lunar calendar (with leap months added to keep it generally in sync with the solar year), which determines the dates of all the holidays. The other, much less well-known one is the Jewish solar calendar, which is used for only two purposes: birkat ha-chamah (the subject of this post), and the date to begin praying for rain in Babylonia and by extension the rest of the Diaspora (in this century, December 4).

The Jewish solar calendar is in essence the Julian calendar: it assumes that a solar year is exactly 365 1/4 days (thus adding a leap day every 4 years). This approximation is off by about 3 days every 400 years, which is why the world has switched to the Gregorian calendar, which eliminates 3 leap days every 400 years to account for this discrepancy (1600 was a leap year; 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not; 2000 was; 2100, 2200, and 2300 will not be; etc.).

This error in the Julian calendar is the reason that the date to begin praying for rain in the Diaspora is on December 4, despite the statement on Ta'anit 10a that it should be 60 days after the equinox (which would be around November 20): because of the error that has crept in over the centuries, "November 20" on the Julian calendar is now December 4 on the Gregorian calendar. In 2100, the error will increase by one day, so the date to begin praying for rain in the next century will be December 5, and after 2200, it will be December 6, and so on.

So, birkat ha-chamah.

According to the biblical creation story, the sun was created on the fourth day of creation, i.e. Wednesday. What time? At sunrise, of course. What time of year? The vernal equinox (according to Abaye on Berachot 59b).

So we say birkat ha-chamah every time the sun returns to the position it was in when it was created, at the anniversary of its creation: Wednesday at sunrise on the vernal equinox. Let's calculate that anniversary, using the Jewish solar calendar, in which 1 year = 365 1/4 days = 52 weeks 1 1/4 days. If we start with Wednesday at sunrise and add 1 year, we can disregard the complete weeks and just add 1 1/4 days, so we get Thursday at noon. Add another year and we get Friday at sunset. Add a third year and we get Saturday night at midnight. Add a fourth year and we get Monday at sunrise. So now (after 4 years) we're back at sunrise, but on the wrong day of the week. We have to cycle through all 7 days of the week before we can get back to Wednesday. So we get back there every 4 x 7 = 28 years!

The "vernal equinox" currently occurs on April 8 on the Gregorian calendar, due to the aforementioned error that increases over the centuries. So during the 20th and 21st centuries, birkat ha-chamah is always on Wednesday, April 8, at sunrise. The last one was on Wednesday, April 8, 1981, and the next one will be Wednesday, April 8, 2009! After 2100, it will be on Wednesday, April 9; after 2200, it will be on Wednesday, April 10; and so on.

There's no way to "fix" this error in regard to birkat ha-chamah, because once you get rid of the fiction that a year is exactly 365 1/4 days, you lose the entire premise (outlined above) for the 28-year cycle. In real life, there's no reason to think that the number of days in a year (i.e. the ratio of the earth's revolution around the sun to the earth's rotation about its axis) is any simple rational number. So birkat ha-chamah is what it is.

So the reason I'm posting this now is so that we can start thinking about what we're going to do next year to celebrate this once-in-a-generation occurrence. What are your plans for birkat ha-chamah? If you did anything for it in 1981 or 1953, what did you do? What are your creative ideas? What are our communities going to do? Start commenting away!

Things get a little bit sticky when we cross-reference Wednesday, April 8, 2009 with the normal lunar Jewish calendar. Turns out it's Erev Pesach. (Not surprising, given the connection to the vernal equinox.) So the Jewish community will be busy. But we should see this, too, as an exciting opportunity. (Say the blessing over the sun, and then take out a magnifying glass and use it to burn our chameitz? Anything is possible!) So if we're traveling for Pesach, we can participate in the awesome birkat ha-chamah event we're going to come up with in the city where we live early in the morning, and then hop a plane to wherever we're going for Pesach. (Heck, some of us will have to take the day off anyway to accommodate Pesach travel, which frees us up to do birkat ha-chamah stuff in the morning.)

Bonus question: For those who observe Ta'anit Bechorot (I don't, for various reasons, though I'm a firstborn), is birkat ha-chamah itself sufficient justification for a se'udat mitzvah so that people can break the fast? This question would have last come up three cycles ago, on Wednesday, April 8, 1925, which was also Erev Pesach.

Also north 1: On the road

Scenes from a recent road trip to the north, part 1.

The separation barrier, seen from Kvish 6 (the new Trans-Israel Highway resembling an American interstate), near Tul Karem.




Here's the video (with the radio on in the background):



The goat farm (where they sell goat cheese) was closed. One graffiti artist had already asked when it was open, and another had responded.