Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual
teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law.
He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their
search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money,
and spiritual engagement.
Chanukah, like Succoth, is a time of joyous Jewish celebration. Work can be done, phones can be used, and we bring to life events from over 2000 years ago that celebrate our Jewish heritage.
I have one word for you about Chanukah. Enjoy!
The Three Musketeers at the Kotel
The
Three are Rabbi Yehuda Glick, famous temple mount activist, and
former Israel Mk, and then Robert Weinger, the world's greatest shofar
blower and seller of Shofars, and myself after we had gone to the 12
gates of the Temple Mount in 2020 to blow the shofar to ask G-d to heal
the world from the Pandemic. It was a highlight to my experience in
living in Israel and I put it on my blog each day to remember.
The articles that I include each day are those that I find
interesting, so I feel you will find them interesting as well. I don't
always agree with all the points of each article but found them
interesting or important to share with you, my readers, and friends. It
is cathartic for me to share my thoughts and frustrations with you about
life in general and in Israel. As a Rabbi, I try to teach and share the
Torah of the G-d of Israel as a modern Orthodox Rabbi. I never intend
to offend anyone but sometimes people are offended and I apologize in
advance for any mistakes. The most important psychological principle
I have learned is that once someone's mind is made up, they don't want
to be bothered with the facts, so, like Rabbi Akiva, I drip water (Torah
is compared to water) on their made-up minds and hope that some of what
I have share sinks in. Love Rabbi Yehuda Lave.
Cyprus, our friendly yet little-known neighbor, is rich in heritage
Roman, Crusader, Venetian, Ottoman, British, and even Jewish. Thickly forested mountains, quaint villages, vineyards, and pristine beaches offer a cool relief from the Mediterranean summer heat. Since 1974, the island is divided into the Republic of Cyprus and the North, occupied by Turkey. Diverse Greek, Turkish, British, and other communities add color to the visit.
In 1946, the British set up internment camps in Cyprus for illegal Jewish immigrants to Mandatory Palestine. Until February 1949 more than 52,000 ma'apilim passed through these camps. Many young couples soon stood under the chuppah and 2,200 babies were born on the island - a baby boom that continued after the aliyah.
Since 2016, the Cyprus Heritage Trips have been expertly organized by Yaron Amitai, author of popular guidebooks to Cyprus and Greece. This tour is led by Yochai Copenhagen, whose father came to Israel on board the Yagur, the first Hagana ship to be diverted to Cyprus.
These pictures were taken by the whole group and uploaded by me.
Most Of The World's Barley Comes From This Country
A farmer has unearthed an ornate belt made from gold near the city
of Opava, located in the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic.
Upon an initial inspection, it was proposed that the object is a
diadem, a type of crown or headband worn as a symbol of authority by the
ruling elite.
Measuring 49 centimetres in length, 9cm wide, and weighing 56.5
grams, researchers now propose that the object is an ornate belt dating
from the Middle to Late Bronze Age.
The belt is made from a thin metal alloy, with a composition
of more than 84% gold, less than 15% silver, and traces of other
elements such as copper. Artisans decorated the surface with a series of
five large concentric circles, surrounded by smaller concentric circles
and an enclosed border decoration.
Determining whether the belt was crafted by local artisans or comes
from the regions inhabited by the Carpathian or Balkan Culture requires
further investigation, however, archaeologists propose that the artefact
dates from the period of the Urnfield Culture around 1300 to 750 BC.
This is based on a preliminary examination of the object’s decoration
which is comparable with ornamentation found in prehistoric cultures
from the Urnfield Culture period.
Speaking to Czech Radio,
Silesia Jiří Juchelka said: “The belt must have belonged to someone in
high society, as this type of production was not common. Its owner
therefore had to be someone esteemed.”
The belt has been sent to the Museum in Bruntál for
conservation, where it will be added to the museum’s collection and
placed on public display.
Israeli Archaeologists Find First Whole Sentence Written in Canaanite. On a Lice Comb
“All the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt” Exodus 8:16.
How
much truth there is in the Exodus story is unclear; after all, in some
translations of the Bible, the lice are flies. But we can be confident
that lice were a perennial plague in biblical times, as they are to this
day. We can know this because Israeli archaeologists have found a
Canaanite lice comb made of elephant ivory around 3,700 years ago.
Found
in 2017 in the biblical city of Lachish, the artifact joins the
pantheon of ancient combs assumed to be for lice that have been found up
and down the Holy Land. But this one is different.
This
one bears the earliest sentence ever found in Israel, seven words in
the world’s first alphabet, archaic proto-Canaanite: “May this tusk root
out the lice of the hair and the beard.”
And
we almost never knew. Almost four millennia after an elephant in Africa
died and its tusk was fashioned into a tiny comb, the writing had
become almost invisible.
The
comb was unearthed and studied by researchers from the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, as well as from Southern Adventist University
and Lipscomb University, both in Tennessee. The project was directed by
professors Yosef Garfinkel, Michael Hasel and Martin Klingbeil, and the
comb was cleaned and preserved by Miriam Lavi.
But
the exhortation was noticed only this year by research associate
Madeleine Mumcuoglu at Hebrew University. The writing was deciphered by
semitic epigraphist Daniel Vainstub of Ben-Gurion University in Be'er
Sheva. Their findings were published in the Jerusalem Journal of
Archaeology.
“The
whole thing is just 3 centimeters [1.2 inches] long and each letter is
about 2 to 3 millimeters in size, and they were very shallowly incised,”
Garfinkel says. ”Under ordinary light the inscription wasn’t visible.
But after six years it was examined again, maybe thanks to light from
the side – and suddenly the inscription was observed.”
The
inscribed comb has six big teeth on one side, to untangle hair or a
beard, and 14 finer teeth on the other side that could snag the
parasites and their eggs, aka nits, Mumcuoglu reported in 2008. All the
teeth were broken in antiquity and the middle of the comb became eroded,
maybe because it had been gripped tightly while being dragged through
the offending locks.
The
source material, tusk, was determined through analysis by Prof. Rivka
Rabinovich of Hebrew University and Prof. Yuval Goren of Ben-Gurion
University. Who might have owned an artifact like that in the Bronze
Age?
The
ivory for the comb was likely imported from Egypt, suggesting that the
infested owner was wealthy, Garfinkel says. “It would have been like a
diamond today, a crème de la crème luxury item. Others likely had lice
combs too, but made of wood that would have decayed,” he says, adding
that the ivory, being bone, weathered the ages.
Other
lice combs have been found at Lachish and throughout Canaan. Twenty
were found in a just one Middle Bronze Age cemetery in Jericho, made of
wood. Another such site is ancient Jerusalem, including in a Second
Temple-period house on Mount Zion, Prof. Shimon Gibson says. None until
the current one bore exhortations to divine powers against parasitic
affliction, but given the belated nature of the inscription’s discovery,
Garfinkel suggests that other combs deserve reexamination.
And
yes, the scientists found a dead Canaanite louse in the comb, on the
second tooth, they report, though they qualify: “The climatic conditions
of Lachish, however, did not allow preservation of whole head lice but
only of the outer chitin membrane of a first or second nymph stage head
louse.” They even tried to extract DNA from the corpse for genomic
analysis, but it didn’t work, Garfinkel says.
To
be clear, this is far from the first proto-Canaanite inscription found
in Israel: 10 have been found just at Lachish, a major Canaanite
city-state from the second millennium B.C.E., the Bronze Age, to the
early Hellenistic period. Writing at Lachish is “nicely attested” from
various periods, notes the renowned epigrapher Christopher Rollston of
George Washington University in Washington, D.C., (who was not involved
in this research). But this is the first actual Canaanite sentence, says
Vainstub.
The
inscription also contains the earliest known representation of the
letter "sin", which in hebrew today is pronounced the same as "samekh",
or the letter "s" but then had a different sound, Vainstub explains.
Today the ancient sin persists only among some peoples in southern
Arabia, he adds.
How
did he interpret the words for louse, hair and beard? Canaanite has
significant similarities with the most ancient stratum of biblical-era
Hebrew, for one thing. "The first word is the root natash which
serves like in Hebrew – to root out," he explains. The Canaanite word
for hair is se'ar, the same as in all semitic languages. Beard is zakat, similar to the Hebrew zakan. Though at about 3,700 years old, the Canaanite comb predates the Israelites' arrival by centuries.
Rollston
confirms that in his opinion, the writing is indeed early Canaanite
script, adding: “This is a wonderful inscription, both because of the
content of the inscription as well as the object upon which it is
written: a comb. And it also reminds us yet again that pesky little
insects such as gnats and flies (mentioned as the third and fourth
plagues in Exodus 8) and lice (mentioned in this new inscription) have
been problems since time immemorial.”
Proto-Canaanite
is not the earliest form of writing. Proto-writing emerged in
Mesopotamia and/or ancient Egypt at the dawn of the Bronze Age; also
perhaps in Harappa in the Indian subcontinent. Small clay tokens were
incised with an image, for instance a cow, and marks that may have
denoted value, name, owner – we really don’t know. Then cuneiform
emerged in Mesopotamia and hieroglyphics in Egypt, which involved
scribes learning thousands of symbols, Garfinkel notes.
The
thinking is, that’s why Canaanites working for, or in, Egypt invented
the first alphabet. The earliest examples of alphabetic writing were
found at Wadi el-Hol in Egypt’s Western Desert, and at Serabit el-Khadim
in southern Sinai. There the writing is called proto-Sinaitic, dating
to about 3,900 years ago. Proto-Canaanite is believed to be the same
system, devised to represent sounds by Canaanites who couldn’t or chose
not to learn hieroglyphics.
To
be clear, several inscriptions in proto-Canaanite have been found to
date, including 10 in Lachish itself, but all had only isolated letters
or two or three words. One vessel, the “Lachish ewer” (found in 1934),
bears drawings of animals and trees, and some writing; it seems to date
to the late 13th century B.C.E. A shard with letters found at Lachish
came from of a pot imported from Cyprus about 3,500 years ago and inked in Canaan.
Unlike
the exhortation to the god against parasites, it’s too incomplete to
hazard a guess at what it said. Other examples of proto-Canaanite
writing were found at Gezer and Shechem.
Asked
if the comb could cast light on literacy in the Bronze Age, Garfinkel
surmises that at first, probably only elites could read and write. But
in time, the simplicity of the alphabet compared with, say,
hieroglyphics and cuneiform, made reading and writing accessible to all,
he says.
“Today
we all use alphabets, in Hebrew and Arabic and Arabic and French – the
whole world. Intellectually it’s the most important contribution of the
Canaanite culture to human history,” Garfinkel says.
Rollston
adds that in the ancient Near East, powerful and wealthy elites would
commission scribes to write on prestige objects, noting the Kefar
Veradim Bronze Bowl from the Galilee, and an inscribed bronze dagger
from Lachish also from the Canaanite period. But that doesn’t mean the
comb inscription demonstrates widespread literacy among ordinary folk.
“In
other words, it would be a real stretch for someone to use this
inscription to try to suggest that farmers, blacksmiths and potters were
literate. They weren’t,” he says.
It
seems the working class would remain unlearned a while longer. Rollston
notes the writing of Second Temple Jewish teacher Ben Sira (around. 180
B.C.E.): “The scribe’s wisdom increases wisdom; whoever is free from
toil can become wise” – Ben Sira 38:24-29:11. The sage goes on to extol
workers' vital role in society while stressing that they had no role in
government.
Later,
proto-Canaanite would inspire the emergence of other alphabets,
including this one. Yes, our letters stem from lice-infested peoples of
the Levant