Powder Bowls and the Wisdom in Animism

Tomorrow morning, we take a hiatus from the 'forgotten part' of Israel to visit some slightly more well known places for several days (Jerusalem...) and then have a couple free days until Sunday. As it just so happens that my mother's entire family (well, not ALL of them, she does have 62 first cousins) are in Israel right now, I'll get to kick it with them. Lots to write about before I go (though I couldn't possibly mention everything), so here goes...

We spent Friday morning in a playground. Six students, several interns, and the eternally reliable Moishe piled into one of the community vans for a long schlep to Kibbutz Lotan, a kilometer down the road. (Kibbutzim have warped geometry, our three minute commute to the dining hall is a serious inconvenience and by Kibbutz time we've been living here for near on three months). Lotan is engaged in an ongoing 'creative ecology' game. The rules of the game: What if there is no trash? Alex, a rejuvenated ex-New Yorker who moved to the desert 30 years ago and has never looked back, is the referee. He took us to a grove of circular mud benches, shaded by a canopy of leaves, to explain a bit about the Kibbutz, and one of the benches was peeling, exposing the car tire backing. Aha! So that was how you played! He took us to the coolest playground I've ever seen...igloos, large turtles, slides, mushrooms, life-sized chess games, climbing trees, bird feeders, all mud, all polychrome, all with trash inside and inlain glass windows to see it ("time capsules" Alex called them). After that, it was a brief tour of the adobe buildings, all equipped with state of the art passive cooling and heating systems (a.k.a. thick, mud walls), two tiered roofs for cross breezes, south facing windows for winter sunlight, and top-of-the-line outdoors climate regulating porches (a shady hat of palm tufts encircling the house).

Trash piles as play structures? That was just the first of a series of entirely non-obvious uses for normal things. Starting with, human waste. Alex had us smell a handful of fresh, wet dirt (a rarity in the desert), and then explained the composting toilets (no flush, you pour saw dust instead) and on-sight fertilization of human waste that ends up creating in six to eight months (yup, as you might imagine) the soil we were holding in our hands. (In response to several grossed out glares from the Marc Jacobs clutch carrying New Yorkers, he assured us that the Ministry of Health has come to triple check it was ghiarrdia-free). What's another entirely obvious use of human waste that Lotan has engineered? Bird reserves. They pump black water through a "hydroponic plant horizontal subsurface flow" that essentially uses the nutrients from human waste to grow a swamp (sorry, "constructive wetlands") as pit stops for migrational birds, and gray water, entirely suitable for irrigation, flows out the other end. (Also extensively tested by the Ministry of Health). And what about cow farts from the dairy farm? Use the methane for biogas energy (a study being conducted by a student from that 'other' college in Cambridge). Hmm, what about excess cooking oil? Lather it onto the adobe building to make them rain-proof. No but really, what to do about that infinite stretch of sand? Hand mix it with some water and straw, carve it with blocks into bricks, leave it to bake in the sun, and several days later (as we did) come back to make ovens and fire up a batch of delicious lemon-poppy seed cookies. (I'm making an oven as soon as I get back to p.a., though I'll be sure to leave the pizza-cooking up to someone else).

It was a weekend of good cookies (there are no trans fat or high fructose corn syrups in any of the weekday meals, and the sweet tooth inside me has been seriously suffering). But luckily, Shabbat dinner came with desert (though my Muslim Jordanian buddy had to kindly remind me to say the Jewish prayer for bread before scarfing one down...oh the ills of cross-cultural understanding). Saturday afternoon, a Kibbutz family hosted three of us students for an afternoon of home hospitality-chatting and (much to my delight) baked goods. That was where I really learned how truly abysmal the US educational system is. I mean, I went to one of the (self-proclaimed) 'best' school districts in California, I go to a relatively good school, and I consider myself to be moderately well-educated, especially in comparison to some eight year old kid living on a Kibbutz in the middle of the desert. Well, little Razi starting talking to me in English (it really could have been my language of choice, he's also fluent in Hebrew, Yiddish, and French) about his latest science project, a Ruben's Tube, a perforated pipe with a drum head at one end and gas piping at the other. He was shocked I'd never seen one, don't you study physics he asks? So he explains; he lights it up, and flames burst out of the holes and when he plays a musical frequency at the drum-head end, sound particles bounce down the tube and the differing air pressures cause the fire to make a wave pattern. O right...clear as day... (I read up on it that evening, wondering all the while, why the hell didn't I get to play with fire in my physics classes?)

Sunday (Israeli Monday) was without a doubt, the coolest day here so far, rife with archeology, animism, anarchism, and a fair amount of dune surfing. We had class bright and early Sunday morning (particularly early considering the big Saturday night) and I grabbed a big mug of coffee--mentally steeling myself for four and a half long hours in a plastic chair listening to our 60 year old Prof wearing Lincoln-Road worthy shorts talk about neolithic sand dwellers in the region... He started by expounding some dense archeological theory, developed by some hoity-toity British smuts that based on the Arava's hyper-hyper-aridity index (yes, as we've heard from approximately twenty professors and extrapolated from perpetual dehydration and sun burns, this is in the Xtreme desert) and a slew of archeological studies, that this region is a "no man's land", with civilizations that were "short lived and passing phenomenon" populations that were "hungry, and perpetually on the verge of death" characterized by intermittent, transient settlements and long gaps in the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Early Bronze II, EB IV...yawn, I was trying my very best to keep a minimum of one eye open. WRONG, WRong, wrong, I woke up abruptly. "I don't know where they got this data" Dr. Uzi Avner says, and goes on to talk about the hundreds (no, that is not an exaggeration) of sites that he has excavated in the Uvda Valley, part of the 2000 ancient finds in the 10 percent of the region that they have gotten around to surveying. It ends up the Southern Negev has been populated consistently for over 8,000 years, a hot spot of copper and gold, a pit stop for Saudi caravans traveling North to barter their goods on Mediterranean shores, and a religious and cult site for all manner of polytheistic religions.

Really? People living in this barren, harsh environment 6,000 years before Christ? I can't even stand outside, braced by a.c. and lathered in sunscreen, for more than five minutes between the hours of ten and two, much less do anything constructive. But apparently people have been living here successfully for millenia; Domesticating plants and animals and living in family units of up to 80 people as early as the 7th century b.c.; Building corrals, plowing crops, grinding grains, threshing wheat and storing it in silos in 4000 b.c. (the earliest evidence of many of these agricultural methods found thus far in the WORLD--it took years to convince archeological skeptics of the validity of the finds); Developing several thousands of years old sophisticated run-off farming techniques that comprise a series of massive, slightly angeled terraced dams and soil embankments (quite a feat for an "ephemeral" "moribund" (non) civilization to erect). The dams and embankments mitigate water flow, prevent erosion, and cause healthy, nutrient-rich soil to accumulate and are, in fact, so effective and environmentally conscious that current policy makers are considering implementing exact replicas through-out the country; Establishing, near the Timna copper mines, the first sites (circa 5000 b.c.) of copper smelting, an incredibly complex chemical process that combines 150 kilos of charcoal, 50 kilos of mined copper, 100 kilos of crushed iron oxide flux, and seven hours of laboratory-like intensive work to produce 1.7 kilos of pure, sales-worthy copper (and that doesn't even include the molding). The list goes on and on and on...apparently the ancient cultures here were so skilled in geology, metallurgy, and agriculture that when the highly-touted sophisticated Egyptians came on the scene and 'conquered' the area (in the relatively recent 1000 B.C.) not only did they borrow all the shafting, smelting, etc techniques and replicate them at home, but their gods were placed in subservient positions in local temples (Uzi himself was the first to excavate a temple of this kind and kick start archeologists' re-evaluation of the power relations between these local people and the so-called superior Egyptians).

It was an entire morning of upending conventional wisdom, and just when I thought it was simply no longer possible for Uzi to shake us up anymore, he started talking about the spiritual, cultic practices of the ancient desert peoples. As early as 7,000 B.C. ancients began erecting

stone alters, alternating broad/flattish stones and tall/thinninsh stones in groups of 1,2, 3, 5, 7, or 9, conspicuous landmarks dragged hundreds of kilometers across barren deserts to be placed in particular locations. Not so impressive perhaps. So he starts delving into the extensive tradition (in everything from Indonesian, to ancient Egyptian, to Christian Byzantines cultures) of representing fertility-inspired, broad female goddesses flanked by thin, phallic-like male gods in stone carvings, hieroglyphs, paintings etc. So were the desert cultures just preempting this tradition, but in a crude, simplistic, pre-technology form? (For the stones are non-hewn, taken directly from nature). Not entirely...when you start reading the first written texts in the region, passages such as "if you use a chisel upon it you profane it" abound (exodus 20:22, but there are also nubian and pre-islamic arabic texts on the same subject), and there ARE examples in the region of "sophisticated" alter sites, with hewn, figurative stones, but only the very oldest of shrines have them. So, what's Uzi's interpretation of these peoples' spiritual beliefs after many decades of studying their alter sites, their related sacrificial items, and their symbiotic, light-living reverent symbiosis (in mining, agriculture, etc) with their local environments? That for the desert people it was impossible for them to fashion images in the likeness of gods, for the gods have made us, not vice versa. That for the desert people, the gods are the source of all the creativity, resources, and landscapes and in that in order to live peacefully and successfully in the desert, they had to be sensitive, tuned in, and cognizant of their surroundings and environment. Maybe (minus the whole religious thing) not a bad lesson for modern civilization to pick up on.

There really have been too many chill things going on here to even skim the surface. One of the highlights was the night before the full moon, the Kibbutz arranged a bus to take us out to some sand dunes in the Uvda valley (near all those archeological sites). We hiked around a bit, watched a gorgeous sunset, howled to the rising moon (I'm being somewhat facetious), and then ran down dunes of the finest, softest sand I've ever imagined. They feel like silk, when you walk through them you sink knee deep, and running, rolling, cartwheeling, flipping down them was as sublime as an epic bowl of fresh powder. In other highlights, we've discovered that a population of kittens (who knew that was possible?) live under our house. They are absolutely adorable but nastily feral (we saw one running around with a gerbil this afternoon and when we walked in its direction, it snarled). Also, last night I chilled with some volunteers, one of whom's dad is visiting, and he picked up a guitar and started playing a mix of buffalo springfield, dylan, neil young, and grateful dead as other kids piped in with guitars, harmonicas, or, as in my case, simply voices.

Life here really is different. There still are remnants of ancient ways of life threaded into people's daily fabric. We went hiking yesterday in the Kibbutz "backyard", with an archeologist who pointed out rocky outcrops from thousands of years ago, and several kilometers down the way, a square rock Berber-style hut fashioned by the local kids as a long-term project for halcyon summer days. During a lecture on desertification, our professor was telling us about several years ago, during the peak of the Darfur crisis, when he was training for a long-distance run with a friend of his near the desolate Egyptian border, and they left a package of dates and two water bottles by the side of the road for substinence on the way back. Mid run, they saw a truck in the distance, stuffed to the brim with Somalian refugees, illegally crossing the border. They hid until the truck had passed, and decided to cut their run short, figuring the indubitabley famished, parched refugees had snatched their snack. When they returned to the road, they found that exactly half the package of dates and one water bottle had been consumed. The rest was left untouched. It's the law of the desert--if you come across a man's food and water, you must leave him exactly half so he can get home.