Victoria Braverman – Haze, Smoke and Mirrors
The sky isn’t always blue here. Sometimes there’s a heat haze, sometimes a thick mist drifts inland from the Mediterranean, occasionally there’s a yellowish polluted tinge to the horizon (a reminder of fighting on or near our borders), and once a year there’s the smell of burning and a layer of grey smoke obscuring the sun.
Lag B’Omer they call it. Which tells you nothing apart from the date in the Jewish calendar. It doesn’t really matter that you don’t know what’s it about. It’s a minor festival but it carries with it an incredibly irresponsible tradition, particularly when it coincides with a well-anticipated extreme heatwave. Even more so when that heatwave follows an extremely long and wet winter which has resulted in massive growth of highly flammable forests. Bonfires.
They were asked, those so called holy men and women, not to light bonfires this year. Temperatures around the country were between 38 and 48 degrees Celsius. For readers still using old money, that’s very very hot Fahrenheit. Anyway, those Rabbis, their political and media representatives and their sheep resented the emergency services and politicians and broadcasters forcing their disgusting secular lifestyle on them. How dare we ask them to curtail their divine madness?
And so, this morning I smell the acrid smoke of wildfire in the air. Towns and villages have been abandoned, some completely destroyed. And the Rabbis and their spokespersons and their sheep are still denying responsibility.
And I am sad.
(Beach photo courtesy of Oda Gabbai)
