Israel Museum

Thursday, January 9, 2020

We tried to be good.  Really!  We had noticed that Sam’s Bagels is nearby, and we decided that when Victor arose earlier than everyone else, today, instead of chocolate-filled pastries, he would go to Sam’s and get us healthy bagels.  It was not to be.  It turns out that Sam doesn’t have any bagels ready until late morning, as San’s Bagels is mostly a lunch place.  When I got there, about a ten-minute walk from our apartment, there were no bagels.  But there is a bake shop across the street, so this morning I came back with chocolate-filled pastries from a different bake shop.  They were delicious.

With rotten weather, our options were limited.  Our major activity today was the Israel Museum, an enormous and extremely well-done repository of incredible riches, including the Dead Sea scrolls.  Of the giant selection of exhibits, we chose three.  Initially we went to a temporary exhibit titled, “Veiled Women of the Holy Land” which was extraordinary.  It focused on covered Muslim women, plus a completely new phenomenon of completely covered Jewish women, and finally, mostly covered Christian women.  The web site is here:

https://www.imj.org.il/en/exhibitions/veiled-women-holy-land

Here are a couple of photos of the Jewish women from Mea Sharim:

Besides the clothing, there was a very well-done video, using models rather than the women themselves, but using the words of the covered women.  They wore many layers, up to eight, and in the video they partially undressed and re-dressed, while explaining why they chose to be covered.  The problem we all had with the video is that all three of the women portrayed had been in the real world before choosing to become covered.  There was no mention of girls who grow up in the families of covered women and what options they may have to choose to be covered or not.  The exhibit was eye-opening.

The second temporary exhibit we saw was on picture-writing, making a parallel between Egyptian hieroglyphics and emojis!

It worked well for me, less so for Leah and Joyce.  They both feel that emojis are transient faddish things which will disappear.  I think the parallel with hieroglyphics is powerful.  Whether emojis will ever become a complete language is up in the air—right now it’s hard to write a sentence in emojis, but the day might come.  Joyce and Leah think not, although in one of the exhibit videos there were people who had received strings of emojis laying out a thought.  Here’s a 3000 year-old artifact with both a man and a woman and the hieroglyphics representing them:

The third exhibit we visited was one on Jewish life-cycle events, with a great collection of things dealing with birth, marriage and death in various Jewish cultures.  Here’s a 19^th century Hungarian funeral society carriage:

We never had lunch (we had gorged on chocolate pastries for breakfast) and so we went for an early (5:30 PM) dinner at another local Italian restaurant.  It was excellent.  At the end of the meal we ordered a bread pudding dessert to share and they brought us a large portion of lemon meringue pie as a present.  We finished that too.

The weather is supposed to improve tomorrow, so our plan is to go to Ben Yehuda street for some shopping, and then to the Kotel for the onset of Shabbat.  More then.