It seemed as if the long dry summer would never end. While places in Europe, North America and Asia were in the throes of winter our sun-parched land craved rain.
Prayers for rain were said all over Israel and even in secular Ein Harod a small group gathered in our synagogue to pray for rain.
At this juncture I hasten to correct a possible misconception. By and large our founding fathers were secular Jews. Admittedly a few clung to certain “traditions” but the majority favoured a secular lifestyle, albeit firmly entrenched in Jewish tradition and custom.
Soon after their arrival in the Jezreel Valley some of the pioneers invited their parents to join them. The parents, observant Jews required a kosher kitchen and a synagogue. So a special kitchen for the parents was set up and one of the huts served as a makeshift synagogue. After the parent generation died a few traditionally minded members maintained the synagogue and somehow managed to muster a minyan (prayer quorum).
In the mid nineteen sixties the British philanthropist Sir Isaac Wolfson provided Kibbutz Ein Harod Ihud with a synagogue. A small inconspicuous structure, compact and ideal for our modest needs. A short distance away, across an expanse of lawn the spacious Mishkan L’Omanut, museum of art stands in sharp juxtaposition dwarfing the tiny synagogue.
The museum, the third largest art museum in the country is jointly owned by the two Ein Harod communities.
Well the rain didn’t come, or at least it came late, too late to douse the flames of the largest forest fire recorded in this country. More than 10,000 acres of parkland and forest were consumed in the flames. In addition considerable damage was caused to a number of communities on the mountain and forty two people lost their lives.
While waiting for the rain a few lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” came to mind:
“If there were the sound of water only
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water.”
Of course Mount Carmel has an ancient association with fire. I refer to Elijah and his confrontation with the prophets of Baal - “Then fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood and the stones...” 1 Kings 18:38. Elijah knew a thing or two about rainmaking too. Then as now there was a drought and the showdown on the mountain with the prophets of Baal was part of the drought breaking process.
After showing the false prophets how it’s done Elijah had them slaughtered by the Brook of Kidron (a stream nearby), all three hundred of them. Then he turned to the fickle King Ahab of Samaria and prophesied the coming rain “Get thee up, eat and drink; for there is a sound of abundance of rain.”
1 Kings 18:41.
It seems rainmakers are to be found only in arid places. You won’t find any in rainforests or plying their trade in the Norwegian fjords.
The Australian aborigines tell of a powerful rainmaker called Wirreenun. The rainmaking abilities of the Mà'dí tribe in Sudan and parts of Uganda are legendary and they are highly revered by neighbouring tribes in the Congo.
However, it’s difficult, if not impossible to link the invocation to the rain when it arrives.
Early Monday morning I was awakened by the sound of water, the sound of water over rock and concrete paths. It rained!
Does it count if the rain came more than a week after the supplications in our synagogue? However, perhaps the people who never stopped praying deserve the credit.
I confess that the night before when the weather girl on TV channel 10 predicted rain I was prepared to place my trust in her meteorology.
In our search for rainmakers let’s page down a few hundred years after Elijah to the best remembered rainmaker of them all. A man who made his mark in more than one way.
During the first century BC, towards the end of the Hasmonean dynasty, a number of people claiming to possess special attributes began making a name for themselves.. Some of these miracle workers practised much as Elijah and Elisha did. Some of them are mentioned by Josephus Flavius in his "Antiquities of the Jews" and in the Talmud as well. One of them in particular, Honi the “Circle Drawer” received more than usual attention. .
He was called the "Circle-Drawer" because when he prayed for rain, he would do so by drawing a circle around himself in the dry dusty ground and swear not to leave the circle until his prayer was answered
Apparently his threat had the desired effect. It rained, at first too little, then too much and finally enough to satisfy everyone. However, his too familiar attitude with the deity, haggling over the amount of rain required, almost got him excommunicated.
According to Josephus Flavius Honi lived and died during tumultuous times. He had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Forced into a no-win situation during the civil war fought between Hyrcanus II and his brother Aristobulus II. Honi tried to take a neutral stand and was stoned to death by followers of Hyrcanus.
The Talmud describes his death differently. He simple sinks into a deep sleep and wakes up seventy years later. Unable to adapt to the changed world he begs God to let him die and his request is answered.
All this happened nineteen hundred years before Washington Irving and Rip Van Winkle.
Some time at the beginning of the thirteenth century Jewish visitors to the Holy Land identified a burial cave in Upper Galilee as the place where Honi the Circle Drawer and members of his family were buried. The site near the town of Hatzor is a not-to-be-missed stop if you happen to be touring Galilee. Ignore the awkward fact that Honi was active in Judea and somehow is buried in Galilee.
At the time of writing it seems the Mount Carmel fire started near Osfiya a Druze town. A local 14 year old youth inadvertently started the fire when he threw away coals from a nargila he had smoked. The dry undergrowth soon caught fire and strong winds changing direction from time to time turned a minor brush fire into a full scale forest fire
Israel’s fire-fighting services are hopelessly inadequate. It’s antiquated fleet of fire trucks is too small to douse the flames in situations like the Mount Carmel fire and more frightening is the unthinkable possibility of multiple conflagrations during wartime. There is no national fire-fighting force. Local authorities are responsible for their own fire-fighting services. Only part of their budget comes from government sources. Whenever a large scale fire breaks out firemen at the site have to depend on voluntary help from neighbouring authorities in order to extinguish the flames. Most of the local fire departments are under staffed. There are 1,500 firemen in Israel – one per 6,000 citizens, compared to a ratio of 1 to 1,000 in most Western countries.
Journalists outdid one another blasting the government and the minister responsible for firefighting services, Minister of the Interior Eli Yishai. One of them Ben Caspit wrote in the daily Ma’ariv ,"A country that has its spy satellites orbiting the globe, to which foreign sources attribute chilling military operations around the world, a country that plans to attack the nuclear infrastructure of a distant regional power, is also the country that has its firefighting material run out after seven hours, a country whose fire trucks date back to the previous century".
The fire triggered a wave of arson attacks throughout Israel and the West Bank. These fires, which initially created confusion regarding the source of the Carmel blaze, were all extinguished quickly. The motivation for the attacks was not immediately clear, but The Jerusalem Post stated in an editorial that they were carried out for political reasons by Arab Israeli terrorists , who were intensifying a campaign which had involved an average of two arson attempts per day over the past twelve months. It remains to be seen if the paper’s sweeping accusation is born out by the results of the pending police investigation.
It was Prime Minister Netanyahu’s finest hour. The fire was out of control, the inadequate and antiquated firefighting equipment couldn’t stop the blaze from spreading further and engulfing whole neighbourhoods of Haifa. With no specialised firefighting aircraft to supplement the ground firefighting crews, we needed help immediately. Netanyahu appealed for help. Eleven countries sent 24 firefighting planes to help extinguish the fire. Finally the prime minister hired a private US company – “Evergreen” and its Boeing 747 Supertanker. The addition of this flying monster carrying a payload of 77,600 litres of water and fire-retardants tipped the scales in favour of the combined efforts to smother the flames.
Long before the supertanker arrived here the news media and some politicians started a much publicised head-hunt.
They drew on earlier disclosures claiming our firefighting capabilities ranked us in the third world league. Already in 1998 the Ginosar Committee recommended beefing up the firefighters’ ranks to 2,400, replenishing outdated equipment, linking firefighters’ salaries to those of police and enforcing an early retirement age of 55 .The committee also called for reorganising the forces, presently split up into regional commands funded by a combination of state and municipal budgets, and placing them under a single command rubric funded entirely by the state, similar to the police.
But 12 years later, when this unprecedented blaze erupted, nothing had been done.
In 2007, State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss issued a critical assessment of Israel’s firefighting capabilities in the wake of the Second Lebanon War. A barrage of Katyusha missiles fired by Hezbollah from south Lebanon could spark enormous fires in the North’s many dense forests, warned the comptroller, and the firefighting infrastructure was “the weak link” in the chain of rescue and first aid entities tasked with dealing with this potential danger.
Nevertheless, while other home front forces were revamped in line with lessons learned from the war, firefighters continued to be neglected. At the beginning of this year, the comptroller issued a follow-up report, distributed among the relevant ministries, warning that firefighting services were deteriorating as the population continued to grow and old equipment became even more outdated.
In response, on July 4, at the initiative of Minister of Interior Eli Yishai, the government transferred $25 million of a requested $125 million. Too little too late! The new fire trucks will arrive some time next year. If Eli Yishai had fought for the fire department with only a fraction of the fervour he demonstrated for his religious sector needs the situation would have been different. In the past he was prepared to bring down the government for the sake of special religious education needs.
Yishai was the first minister to call for the setting up of a state commission of inquiry. He knows from experience that the best way to bury a scandal, ministerial shortcoming or other failure is to have a Knesset committee investigate the matter. Better still push for a state commission of inquiry to
look into what went wrong. Both are guaranteed to drag on for years.
It’s fair to assume that by the time they are ready to write their reports the government has changed, the ministers have exchanged portfolios and nobody cares any more.
I’ve turned again to my TV channel 10 weather prophetess. Her meteorological magic predicts a very wet weekend. I hope so.
Beni 9th of December, 2010.
No comments:
Post a Comment