The Place to Take Children in Portland that You Haven't Thought Of

I've had occasion recently to visit a couple of shiva houses and I've been thinking of King Solomon's statement (Koheles 7:2) that it's better to visit a house of mourning than one of feasting. I was kind of reluctant to visit the first one -- "I am going so the mourner can talk about the person who passed away but others there are going to make small talk, it's a long walk, it's raining, there's a lion in the road, do I HAVE TO??" and yes, yes I did, so I went; and I was glad I did; the mourner was telling stories about her mother, and what it is like when someone passes away, and what it's like for the family, and it was a meaningful experience for all of us.

Fast forward to a recent trip to Portland.

My mother proposed that we ride the tram that flies across the city on a cable, which was built ten years ago to transport hospital staff from one OHSU campus to another. The ride is a few minutes long and quite beautiful, and we all enjoyed it, although Loops thought it would be more like a roller coaster and said she thought it ought to bump a little more. You can see all the mountains, even Mt. Adams; and I noticed for the first time that Portland's Mt. Tabor closely resembles the original Har Tavor in Israel; and the area below the tram is the old turn-of-the-century Jewish neighborhood of Portland, which is nice to look down on; and if you, reader, are wondering along with everyone else who rides the tram what the big round building you passed on the OHSU tram is, I can tell you: it's a synagogue built by Jews from the Isle of Rhodes, still in occasional use and known affectionately to the community as "the beehive."

Once we got off the tram we stayed in the station for another cycle to watch how the mechanism works (I'm glad we rode it before I saw that the whole thing boils down to just three wires - it's very elegant) and then we discovered that a set of stairs leads down from the tram to other parts of the hospital.

The best banister to slide down in Portland is the one in the Hilton hotel downtown; the second banister disappeared in a remodeling years ago and the third (the Keller Auditorium) and fourth (the Arlene Schnitzer) are nothing too out of the common; so I am pleased to tell you that the new banisters up at the OHSU tram station are almost as good as the one at the Hilton, better than any other banisters in town for sliding down.

Should you be weighing the merits of taking children for a ride on the tram (and down the banisters), the factor you haven't considered is that the tram station was built as an addition to the Doernbecher children's hospital and that of all the wonderful things we did that morning (it's only early July but the salal berries up there are already ripe -- OH JOY), walking through a children's hospital en route was an unexpected but very important experience for my kids.

There are exhibits in the halls of art by the children in the hospital and their families. A thousand paper cranes... sneakers the children designed that were made by Nike... and installations in memory of others.
It's all very beautiful and well-designed (children's hospitals usually are) and it served as a good opening for conversation with Loops.

Highly recommended.

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for that is the end of every man, and the living shall lay it to his heart.

בטוֹב לָלֶכֶת אֶל בֵּית אֵבֶל מִלֶּכֶת אֶל בֵּית מִשְׁתֶּה בַּאֲשֶׁר הוּא סוֹף כָּל הָאָדָם וְהַחַי יִתֵּן אֶל לִבּוֹ:

More Victorian Jewish Miscellany: hats, secession, and Schone Aussicht

1. In high school, I searched earnestly online for the paintings of Moritz Oppenheim, and found only tiny, blurry reproductions.

Today I searched again and lo! Quite a number of them are on Wikipedia, in extremely high resolution – yay!

You know in vol. VIII, where a man in the train pokes fun at a young woman for having her hair covered? – I always wondered, How could he tell? – because in the pictures of Rav Hirsch's family all the women look (to my untrained eye) perfectly à la mode in their headdresses, such that a stranger would have a hard time telling whether a woman was covering her hair or not – well! here is the answer. You can see in the Oppenheim paintings that those beautiful frothy bonnets are worn over a sort of under-cap, which was not the case in the non-Jewish population.

this young lady is also standing under a tallis, at her chassuna.

  

2. Q. What did the rabbanim of the time have to say about the US Civil War?

A. IIRC somewhere in Rav Hirsch, after slavery ended in the South, he mentions its end with some relief.

Today I re-found a website that I misplaced years ago, which has --among a great many other curios -- lectures on the subject from American rabbis. Here, for one thing, is R' Illowy's lecture on States' Rights, which apparently pleased the secessionists of New Orleans so much when it was published that they invited him down to become rabbi of that city.

 

3. Schopenhauer lived in the same building as Rav Hirsch and at the same time, but apparently there is no evidence that the two ever met. I always thought that fascinating, wow, like a particle accelerator gone awry.

Anyway, because Schopenhauer also lived in that (now vanished) house on Schone Aussicht, it is a famous house and there are loads of pictures and a virtual tour of it online – here.

Notes from Bryant Park

Manhattan is an unspoilt wilderness of tall buildings. In the midst of this landscape of native species is an art installation of ungainly and asymmetrical sculptures. They are short, which contrasts strongly, almost pathetically, with their surroundings. These artificial structures are called “trees”. They are really striking. I can't stop wondering how someone came up with the idea to interrupt the Manhattan landscape with such an alien species.

We walked through Times Square, where the sides of the buildings are large screens. Everything in Times Square is moving, flashing, fast. When the advertisements in Times Square want to call your undivided attention to their product, therefore, they cannot get your attention with color, contrast, or speed. The only thing they can do that really stands out is... to slow down the film and show the product in slow motion.

A fast-paced society can either go faster and faster until it runs itself into the ground, or decide that speed is outmoded and the hip thing is to go slowly. Rome just kept expanding and expanding until it burst. The advertisers of Times Square have made the wiser choice. I feel like in Times Square I see the future, or the end, or both, of this civilization.

Mine host for this excursion said we must walk past the wax museum, because the statue in front of it looks so lifelike that we would do a double-take.

I did not do a double-take. The difference is that a real human face is more luminous.

The Chrysler building is beautiful, not because its design is inherently beautiful – really it's a bit spiky – but because it is more story than building. That is excellence in architecture. I want to sit here for a long time and read that building.

M & J Trimmings is proof that G-d loves humanity.

New York is a generous city, probably one of the most generous cities in the world. I've always said that I love New Yorkers because they keep up both sides of the conversation. The city is the same: it furnishes you with such diversity of experience that you could live here for a long time before you ever felt the need to become anything. At one point I found myself walking down the street, not because I was headed anywhere in particular, but because the sixteen people around me were walking that direction. With such richness of company, who needs direction? You could easily forget about going anywhere. Every one of those people is a small world in himself; and their histories are diverse. The buildings are richly and beautifully ornamented. You could walk around New York and just admire and admire and admire all its richness and its people for a long time before it would occur to you that you need to have your own life, too. Then you would have this incredible trove of artistic inspiration to draw on.

Even the acanthus on the columns of Bowery Bank is not flora but people: New York's flowers are its faces.

Observations in the park. Skinny artists smiling into their mail the smile of the loved. At their feet, obese pigeons.

Young Italianate men in shirtsleeves and fisherman's caps tossing wooden balls: a scene from a hundred years ago.

As I am making these notes on the passersby I notice that two of them are also making notes on me.

You can see in the style of many buildings that this used to be New Amsterdam. It is Amsterdam writ about ten stories taller.

Grand Central Terminal has a view of constellations on its ceiling. Mine host says that when this ceiling was finished, someone pointed out to the designer that the constellations are shown in mirror-image. “O, yes,” he said, “that was deliberate. It is God's view of the heavens.”

So you can stand at the bottom of this tall hall and look down on the world.

Starbuck's. Q. What is the connection between the noble, self-sacrificing First Mate of the Pequod, and a cup of coffee?

Ruskin says, and I agree, that wrought-iron is suited to sculptures of flora, and to nasty fences keeping robbers out. Wrought-iron fences are not suited to friendly, inviting delineations of space.

The English language is in a fair way to run out of profanity. Those words that were once unspeakable are now commonplace, and there are no worse words lined up to replace them.

Q. Why does the large button sculpture in the Garment District have five holes in it?

In the library, a replica is shown of the pencils manufactured by Thoreau. They don't look like pencils at all – more like glorified twigs. How fitting.

I went into the library, not because I had anything particular to look up, but because I like to browse and admire long shelves of expertise in every conceivable subject.

It is a long climb before you get to the reading rooms, as if the star of the place is not books but stair-steps. In the reading room I saw many people on computers.

“I have a dumb question,” I said to the librarian. “Where are the books?”

She drew from behind her desk an illustration – I guess a lot of people ask the question. “There are seven stories of books under your feet,” she said. They are populated by dwarves. You look in a card catalog, identify the book you want, and send down your request by pneumatic tube. The dwarves mine that book for you and send it up. The stacks extend even under Bryant Park.

(That must be where the trees came from! They sprouted from all the paper.)

You may not look at the books.

Oh. So, for my purpose of browsing and wondering, I went to the room of manuscripts.

You have to buzz in. I buzzed.

The Butler of Manuscripts came to the door. “Yes?”

“Must one have a particular quest in mind to enter this room, or does general interest suffice?”

“It does not,” said the Butler of Manuscripts. “This room is for Researchers.”

I cannot wrap my mind around the New York Central Library. It is the only library I have ever seen where you can do anything but look at books. It is, I suppose, excellent training in focused thought and delayed gratification. You have to first identify your Quest, then the book you want, then wonder and wonder what it is going to be, and know that human labor brought it to you. No wonder 90% of the young people in the reading room are on computers.

It is appropriate, then, that the library's lions are named Patience and Fortitude, since those are what it takes to get a book in the library.

The reserve of the library is in striking contrast to the in-your-face generosity of the rest of the city.

Loops says her favorite thing in New York is the subway, because it is spicy.

Whatever New York is, it is enthusiastically and uninhibitedly – grimy, ornamented. To a certain degree, what Jerusalem is in kodesh, New York is in chol.

New York is like Adar: the chaos of it, the very extremeness of its pratius, points to it not being under the control of any mortal.

My Dream House from When I Was, Oh, Much Younger

I unearthed an old journal recently and found in it the description of my dream house which follows.

The house was meant to be constructed in an ideal world in which lavish expenditure no longer presented  moral difficulties.

If I were to design my dream house today, it would look rather different.

Ovens like this - more or less - actually do exist.

Errors sic:

Now then. A kitchen must be primarily warm colors, and there must be much sun. Everything must be eminently cleanable. The oven must be the most efficient thing this side of the Nile. Therefore I shall have, in one corner, a great mud oven like the Tryphillians. It will not be a massive block; it will have nooks and crannies cut into it. So on winter days, one can tuck one's shoes in to dry, and climb on top to sit in a warm seat and smell baking bread and read. There will not be only flat benches. I shall have seats at strangely comfortable angles, and mounds to be used for tables... in fact there will be a pair of seats with a table between them expressly for studying Gemara. And there will be seats where one can easily reach over and adjust the oven without losing one's place in one's book. The inside of the oven will be large enough to bake pies and breads and casseroles and lasagnas and what-have-you, and it will have several doors so that one need not burn oneself to reach the back. In fact – as I don't know the laws of oven kashrut – perhaps we will have two ovens in this mud complex. Never fear, it will be painted with traditional Scandinavian designs, and will not be too large. It will be a thing of beauty and a joy forever and extremely useful. The smoke will go out a chimney from the two ovens and from the fireplace (dear me, we must have a fireplace!). And it will smell so delicious on Friday afternoons that all the hobos and whatnot from miles around will come to the door, and I can feed them my wonderful challah from my large oven, and they if they like can stay for Shabbos and we will have all these yeshiva-bachurs sitting around on the stove learning Gemara in the winter. Our house will be a meeting place for Sages […] Yes, that's what we'll have. A traditional Scandinavian/Ukrainian kitchen, with wonderful Scandinavian/Ukrainian/Italian/Israeli/etc. food, full of Eastern-European etc. yeshiva-bachurs, and they can hang their kapotes or whatever on the oven and they will dry nicely. (There will be stovetops, too.)

I think I will have a mud floor in the kitchen, to reflect the light. In some rooms I shall have mud and in others wood. I shall wax the floors in some rooms (the mud will have a sealant on it) so that we can all go sliding around in our socks.

Hanging from the wood beams on the ceiling of the kitchen, I have drying herbs and my pots and pans, which are copper. If one needs for whatever reason to go atop these beams (for they are sturdy and support weight, being broad) one simply need climb the oven. So I can have all these Gemara-kops sitting on the ceiling, learning – what fun would that be, to learn Gemara on the ceiling, fragrant herbs dangling below? By the way, the mud is a lovely light color. And it is easy to clean, being smooth.

The sink will face a window. And beside it, cut into the wall, I will have cupboards with cute little door in which to store sponges and soap. The doors will be of delicate wood sticks, and they will be sliding doors. There will be no dishwasher if I have anything to say about it. Ah, I know! Some of the people who spend Shabbos with us will stay on and we will teach them a trade, and they will help us if they wish if we have not time to get all the cleaning done. Nor will there be a dryer, though I suppose we must have a washing machine. It will be in a room just off the kitchen so all the soapy water things are in one area. The room will be quite dark, so it will be good for testing flashlights and whatnot. It will have however a powerful bulb with a cord (not a switch; I think cords are more fun) so probably halogen, so that one can easily determine if one's clothes are stained. It will be the ideal room for make-believe for children because of the darkness. We can string clothes from wall to wall, or what-have-you. The washing machine will be something quite small; we will tuck it into a closet with a cute little door. It will be silent.

The floor in this wash-room will be of wood. It will be squares of different colors of wood and each color can be used for a different pile of clothes. Thus one can toss dark clothes on the ebony square, and light clothes on the birch, and extra-hot water on the palm, and delicate on the willow, or whatever woods they use these days. It will be an easy way to teach children to sort clothes. And inlaid in these woods will be pictures of the trees whence they came, so that laundry-sorting will be an aesthetic exercise. There will be a broad swing that can be lowered from the ceiling (exposed beams are not always beautiful, but we can make them so, and they will be wonderfully useful in all things) so that one can sit beside one's laundry pile if one wishes, and swing back and forth above the piles, tossing clothes as one passes.

Another room off the kitchen is the parlor/living room/dining room. Perhaps the Remarkable Oven forms part of the wall between them, if there is one, so one may have the fireplace in the parlour. It is exceedingly Scandinavian, with built-in benches. It is a wood room, with many windows. We will eat in this room. Inside the built-in seats is storage space.

Two rooms open off this humble room; both are for entertainment. One is the spare room with no ostensible purpose. It is all Middle Eastern à la Sheharazad. Brilliant colors of tapestries, and silks, and all other exotic materials (all, I assure you, from fairly-paid workers!) adorn the walls; the floor is piled high with pillows. There are low tables here. Some of the furniture – though there is very little – is made from the odd materials people make things out of on islands (but of course none of it comes from animals that died anything but a natural death). There is mother-of-pearl, and horn, and coconut-shell, and quill, and shell. It is a lovely room. When we have lots of guests we use both it and the parlour. For both are parlours.

The other room opening off these parlours is the fancy-shmancy room. It is large, for when we host dancing events or NCSY parties or what-have-you, it is here. This is the only room of the house with a Versailles/Winter Palace-ish theme, and even that is restrained to be tasteful. As you ought to have figured out, the rest of the house is vegetable. This room is mineral. The floor is of black-and-white stone  à la Delft, in checks. The walls, I must confess, are gilded BUT ONLY HERE AND THERE, FOR I AM NOT A ROMANOV. They are wood, with twining inlays of flora and fauna, and many mirrors. There are great sweeping draperies. Inlaid into the inlays are precious stones, in the most tasteful places. In short, it is the royal ballroom, a sight for sore eyes, and the place of elegance.

Let me see. The kitchen is fire. The Scandinavian parlour is earth. The Sheharazade parlour is water. The grand ballroom is air. Perhaps I ought to do solid, liquid, gas, plasma... or the four humours. Hee hee hee.

Adjoining the grand ballroom is the library, and it is breathtaking. Its wood is more refined than the rough lumber of the Scandinavian parlour, but it is still a dark color. There is inlay in places, but it lacks the jewels of the sweeping ballroom. And it does not twine quite so much. Think not grapevine but sealing wax. The library is full to the brim of books. It is a most amazing sight. The banisters leading up to the second level – for it is a two-level room – are perfectly polished and curved to effect a most enjoyable ride. Velvet couches are placed here and there on which to sprawl and read. There is one of those funny round chairs as well, and a porch swing beneath the stairs. If necessary, the doors can be opened so that the library adjoins the ballroom. It has high, tall windows, with the draperies to match. It is a room full of light. It opens onto the gardens, which I shall get to later, about the time I assign a color scheme to everything. Or perhaps it is in the center of the house. I shall decide later.

Somewhere in this house there are bedrooms and bathrooms. I think all these rooms shall be on the second floor. So let me first put a ground-floor bathroom in place. It is a sensible guest-bathroom, with a toilet and sink. And a mirror, of course. The floor is of the same black and white check as the ballroom, but the bathroom is small. Tapers frame the mirror above the sink. The counter is generous, so guests preparing to dance can dump all their makeup on it.

As the guest bathroom is downstairs, I suppose the guest bedroom had better be as well. It is a sweet, homey thing. It is a sunny room.

O, I nearly forgot part of the ballroom! Cut into the outside wall – if there is one; if not I will move it elsewhere – is a clear glass case. In it, each in its own tiny pigeonhole, is a collection of clear glass marbles. So we can take them out and play marbles on the vast marble floor, and the rest of the time the light shines through their many colors.

Now can I go upstairs? Yes. The children's rooms will be connected to each other with sliding walls à la Japan that can be locked on either side. So that when everyone is in a good mood, the rooms are really one long row of beds in a long room. They are all of birch wood and are well-lit.

Defining Gothic

I just discovered this definition of the Gothic in print; then someone asked me to "share the link" -- so here it is.

John Ruskin was a Victorian champion of Gothic architecture. His list of its defining characteristics tickled my fancy, not only because I like metaphor but because it seems an apt description of Gothic subculture.
Any Goths reading this will kindly bear in mind that Ruskin was a great admirer of the Gothic:

I believe, then, that the characteristics or moral elements of Gothic are the following, placed in the order of their importance:
1. Savageness.
2. Changefulness.
3. Naturalism.
4. Grotesqueness.
5. Rigidity.
6. Redundance.
These characters are here expressed as belonging to the building; as belonging to the builder, they would be expressed thus: -- 1. Savageness or Rudeness. 2. Love of Change. 3. Love of Nature. 4. Disturbed Imagination. 5. Obstinacy. 6. Generosity.
...I shall proceed to examine them in their order.

The entire chapter is entitled The Nature of Gothic. I am sure it is all over the Internet.
I don't agree with everything he says, but it makes for highly entertaining reading.

The Town Mouse and the Suburb Mouse

The Suburb Mouse grew up in a suburb where computers outnumbered civilians. He was accustomed to living among perfect green lawns and perfectly square houses and one car per human and not much in the way of crumbling Victorian woodwork or burly trees shedding leaves which would turn to mud on the sidewalk.

One day, he overheard the Town Mouse muttering the lyrics of
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes by the Interstate
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same
There's a pink one
and a green one
and a blue one
and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.
&c.

and requested a translation.

The Town Mouse explained that this was a song about the suburbs, and that the little boxes signified the identical houses plunked down in perfectly straight lines.
"What's wrong with that?" asked the Suburb Mouse.
The Town Mouse, to her surprise, was hard-pressed to come up with an answer. Was there something wrong with building an efficient but uninteresting neighborhood?

"Anyway, the houses in my hometown don't all look alike," said the Suburb Mouse. "There are four different models of houses, and they are painted in five different colors."
The Town Mouse thought he was kidding. He wasn't.

I suppose (concluded the Town Mouse) that ideally, architecture and city planning should be a positive influence on a city and on those who live in it. Imaginative planning can completely alter the character of a city -- Portland's row of Park Blocks is a classic example.

I guess (said the Town Mouse) there are people who find the suburban aesthetic uplifting, or at least reassuring. Personally I find the old, intricate, and be-foliaged more conducive to keeping my head on straight.

Until recently (reflected the Town Mouse) I did not believe that attractive suburbs exist. But I actually found one the other day, when I was driving around Tualatin and wound up on Tookbank street, and then on Withywindle.

New York hasn't changed much since 1704.

"The city of New York is a pleasant, well-compacted place, situated on a commodious river which is a fine harbor for shipping. The buildings brick generally, very stately and high.... The inside of the [houses] are neat to admiration.... The hearths were laid with the finest tile that I ever see, and the staircases laid all with white tile which is ever clean, and so are the walls of the kitchen which had a brick floor.
"....They are sociable to one another and courteous and civil to strangers and fare well in their houses. The English go very fashionable in their dress. But the Dutch, especially the middling sort, differ from our women...wear French muchets which are like a cap and a headband in one, leaving their ears bare, which are set out with jewels of a large size and many in number. And their fingers hooped with rings, some with large stones in them of many colors as were their pendants in their ears, which you should see very old women wear as well as young.
"...Their diversions in the winter is riding sleighs about three or four miles out of town, where they have houses of entertainment at a place called the Bowery, and some go to friends' houses who handsomely treat them. Mr. Burroughs carried his spouse and daughter and myself out to one Madame Dowes, a gentlewoman that lived at a farm house, who gave us a handsome entertainment of five or six dishes and choice beer and metheglin, cider, etc. all which she said was the produce of her farm. I believe we met 50 or 60 sleighs that day--they fly with great swiftness and some are so furious that they'll turn out of the path for none except a loaden cart. Nor do they spare for any diversion the place affords, and sociable to a degree, their tables being as free to their neighbors as to themselves.
"Having here transacted the affair I went upon and some other that fell in the way, after about a fortnight's stay there I left New York with no little regret."
--The Journal of Madam Knight, Dec. 6, 1704

Duckpond

The approach to Duckpond is beautiful: green fields with white fences, real farm country. And then the mansions appeared, followed by rows of what are popularly called McMansions, each on its perfect green lawn, all made out of brick, with shutters.

The people in these houses were unpretentious, down-to-earth, and exceptionally nice, but we had been staying in large, new houses since we landed in America and honestly, the endless newness and expanse of space was beginning to make me homesick. It made me bizarrely happy to visit a family living in Duckpond in a tumbledown little farmhouse with well-trodden wooden floors and shelves for preserves in the basement.


Duckpond is a quiet but nice town, with rabbits and wild tiger-lilies and fireflies. You East Coasters don't realize how blessed you are to have fireflies. And deer! My daughter and I stood transfixed by a deer standing fairly near to us, watching us as we watched it.
"There's a deer!" I exclaimed to a passerby.
"Yeah, they're cute, aren't they," she observed, without stopping.
"We saw a deer!" I exclaimed to our hostess.
"Deer are suburban rats," she explained.
Well, they eat our yard in Portland, too; but I do find them enchanting.

What I found most striking about the observant Jewish community of Duckpond is not what a close-knit community it is, or that all its members, no matter their background and personality, are committed to spiritual growth, but that when I asked them what they like about the Duckpond community, every one of them described these attributes of the community in near-identical terms. That's unusual.

To Engelond They Wende

London always strikes me as a dreamlike city -- perhaps because I always land in it in what is for me the middle of the night, and with just enough time to whizz out of Heathrow for tea and fly back into the night.

What little I see of London on the way is pleasing. If it has skyscrapers, I've never seen them -- only rows of brick houses with long yards (gardens, I am corrected, whether or not they've actually been planted with anything); and there is something about those houses - which are probably quite old - that always strikes me as beautiful. Is it the proportions? The windows? They are all more or less alike, but they do not have the monotony of the homes in a US suburb; each house appears to remember the people who designed and built it.

The people reinforce the dreamlike impression of the city: the many men I've seen walking down the street singing - one singing opera at the top of his lungs - and the chap who gave my daughter a present, just like that; and all the elderly men with professorial faces, wearing tweed suits - no one can look as professorial to an American as an elderly Englishman.

Perhaps it is the language barrier (what, if you please, is a slip road?), but it seems to me that signs in England require more thought than signs in America. On a US bus, there will be a line drawn in front of the door, and beside it the floor (and probably both walls and the lintel) will say in large letters DO NOT CROSS or DO NOT BLOCK. On the Tube, there is no line, and a single small sign says, gently, "Obstructing the door can be dangerous," and it is up to you to decide what you want to do about it.

Similarly, in a US train station, there will be large signs all over, and painted on the floor, saying DO NOT LITTER, and perhaps threatening you with the long string of numbers that signifies which law you break by littering, whereas in England there are small signs hung here and there making complex and humorous references to the problems that litter can cause, should you choose to leave it.

I also love the injunction to MIND THE GAP -- Americans watch and beware of a great deal, but they don't mind much besides children. One wonders what mischief the gap will get into if it is not well minded.

Someday, perhaps, I shall be able to spend some more time in Engelond, to get to know the city a bit better, and to stop trying to get into cars from the right, and to see what a moor and  a heath look like off the page; but in the meantime, it is a nice dream to have between Seattle and Lod.

Ramat Beit Shemesh

I spent Shabbos in Ramat Beit Shemesh. I think it's considered a suburb of Jerusalem, though it's a good hour away by bus, through some lovely (and uncommonly diverse) woods.

You know how when you drive down the highway in America and see a mall, you wonder whether anyone actually lives behind it, or if it is just a mall in the middle of nowhere? I discovered a few years ago that there are suburbs behind such malls: block after block of square houses on square green lawns, all of the same vintage. The houses look like children's drawings of houses: triangular roofs, a door between two downstairs windows. Thus far, the American suburb.

Ramat Beit Shemesh does not look like an American suburb: it is row after winding row of short, red-roofed apartment buildings sheathed in limestone. The streets are all named after rivers and it is an apt analogy: they are really like dark rivers flowing through a limestone landscape. There are trees and shrubs - enough to make the place look alive - but no lawns.

Ramat Beit Shemesh is surrounded by green hills (at least at this time of year) with olive trees, shrubs, and the ruins of ancient terraces tumbling down their sides. At least two of these hills are already slated to become Ramat Beit Shemesh C -- before you mourn the development, you have to understand that practically every hill in Israel is covered with shrubs, olive trees, and the ruins of ancient terraces; and remember that the development comes about because the cute little babies in Jerusalem grow up and get married, mazel tov, mazel tov. Taking a walk around RBS on a weekday will bring you to wilderness where you can pick up shards of ancient pottery.

We visited a few young couples and it is surprising to me how seeing that a young lady is in the command of an apartment with high ceilings makes me think of her as more mature than her counterparts back in my neighborhood with low ceilings... until I stop to realize that it is the ceilings conveying this impression. There is something magic about high ceilings. I think my sense of aesthetics froze a hundred years ago, when books were wide & short, and rooms (and their windows) were narrow & tall; since then in popular culture the two have swapped shapes.

What really surprised me in Ramat Beit Shemesh is the quiet: on a Shabbos afternoon in Jerusalem the streets are empty of cars but packed full of children jumping rope and playing tag. In Ramat Beit Shemesh I saw a few tag games, but nothing like Jerusalem. Perhaps I was just out at the wrong time, or perhaps there are not that many seven-year-olds in RBS.

On the whole, Ramat Beit Shemesh reminded me of this insight: One of my teachers was once approached by a gentleman who had spent several years working on an intensive and grand project. Now that the man's project was finished, he was ready to move on to another impressive project -- and none was forthcoming. He felt the lull keenly. "I don't know what to do next," he said. "Life for the past few years has been one thrill after another. Now that I have finally reached my goal, I am bored."
"When life gets boring, make yourself interesting," my teacher told him. You can work on a grand scale, doing astounding things that affect or at least impress the public. And sometimes what is necessary is to become a deeper person -- which is a different kind of thrill.

Ramat Beit Shemesh, unlike a large city, cannot really be said to offer interest of its own: it is new, it is tidy, it is hospitable and welcome; but it is hardly a tourist attraction. I don't think it will last longer than a month as a substitute for living an interesting life. If you live in Ramat Beit Shemesh, you must make yourself interesting.
The people that we visited in Ramat Beit Shemesh have done that: they are all very nice, very thoughtful, very mature (and it's not just the high ceilings).

A nice Shabbos.