ok, a little late for Yom Hatzmaut. What? We're on Lag B'Omer already?
> Why love Israel? Let me count the whys. Here, in no particular
> order, is an updated list, with new additions and highlights of
> recent years.
> 1. Jerusalem is so quiet on Shabbat that you can hear birds
> singing even on the main streets.
> 2. We change our calendars on Rosh Hashana, not January 1, because
> that's the real new year
> 3. Just hours after leading his Chelsea team to its first
> Champions League final, Petah Tikva-born coach Avram Grant joined
> the March of the Living in Auschwitz, and told all of Europe that
> his pride at Israel's emergence from the horrors of the Holocaust
> surpassed any football achievement.
> 4. We serve kosher food in the trendiest malls.
> 5. Streets bear the names of prophets and medieval poets. Our
> communications satellite is called "Amos."
> 6. Land of milk and honey: Big news when Israeli archeologists
> recently discovered evidence of the beekeeping industry - even
> beeswax - that goes back 3,000 years.
> 7. Land of milk and honey: We're so successful at making milk
> products that we have hundreds of choices of cheese and advise New
> Zealand about making sheep cheese.
> 8. The Nahariya-based Strauss company, started by dairy farmer
> immigrants from Germany in 1936, together with the Elite company
> started by a candy-maker immigrant from Riga in 1934, are the
> largest coffee manufacturers in Central and Eastern Europe, and
> second biggest in Brazil. Aviv Matza exports its unleavened bread
> to Egypt.
> 9. We have laboratories to check for the biblically prohibited mix
> of linen and wool,/ shatnes/, and we're the first country to make
> men's suits from recycled plastic bottles, for sale soon at Sears.
> 10. At Jerusalem's Biblical Zoo, the loudspeaker announces
> "afternoon prayers (/minha/) are now being held near the elephants."
> 11. The Biblical Zoo is kosher for Pessah. The primates eat matza;
> the parrots get rice.
> 12. Every kindergartner knows that frogs are the second plague in
> the Haggada, but our "save the frogs" campaign was launched at the
> Biblical Zoo on Passover.
> 13. Mega investor Warren Buffet's first investment outside the US
> ($4 billion) was in Israel's Iscar company. He got so much
> positive publicity that he told Iscar's CEO: "I was nobody before
> I bought your company."
> 14. Sixty years after statehood, even young people refer to
> something old-fashioned as "from the days of the (British) Mandate."
> 15. Theodor Herzl's bearded image welcomes visitors to hi-tech
> Herzliya, and we celebrate Herzl Day.
> 16. My five-year-old grandson can tell you all about Theodor
> Herzl. Also about Spiderman.
> 17. Combat soldiers aren't embarrassed to phone their moms and
> grandmothers.
> 18. While Intel Haifa workers were working in an underground
> shelter because of the missile attacks in the Second Lebanon War,
> Intel announced the new multi-core processor developed there.
> 19. Entire families show up for military graduations, and bring
> enough food to feed an army.
> 20. Name droppers. The poet Chaim Nachman Bialik named the Egged
> bus company and also the Tishbi winery
> 21. Youngsters travel far to visit the Kibbutz Kinneret cemetery
> where poet Rahel and national song laureate Naomi Shemer are buried.
> 22. First graders read the Bible in the original Hebrew, and
> celebrate with a party.
> 23. We follow the level of the Kinneret more faithfully than we do
> our stock portfolios.
> 24. We have only one Pessah Seder but Purim, our dress-up holiday,
> lasts three days. In Jerusalem on Purim, it's hard to tell who's in
>
> costume and who isn't.
> 25. We have the highest concentration of hi-tech companies outside
> Silicon Valley, and also the most yeshivot anywhere.
> 26. After a calamity, police have trouble keeping away bystanders
> who want to help.
> 27. Thousands of free-loan societies flourish. You can borrow
> wedding dresses and pacifiers.
> 28. Despite the tensions and political dissension, Israel has the
> highest Jewish birthrate in the world.
> 29. Despite the tensions and political dissension, Israel is the
> fastest growing Western country in the world.
> 30. "Jerusalem of Gold" is still voted the favorite national song.
> 31. We have timeless cuisine: You can order Israeli breakfast,
> business lunch and dinner simultaneously at Israeli cafes.
> 32. Our pilots fought over the honor of taking part in a fly-by
> over Auschwitz 60 years after liberation.
> 33. Israeli fighter jets accompanied tourists safely home from
> Mombasa after they were threatened.
> 34. We have 120 members of the Knesset because that's how many
> were in the ancient Great Assembly.
> 35. We first developed candy-sweet cherry tomatoes as a
> TV-watching nosh.
> 36. On Remembrance Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day, the act of
> remembering halts traffic. Even kindergartners stand silently, and
> understand why.
> 37. While dining rooms are shrinking in Western homes, Israeli
> dining room tables are getting longer.
> 38. We invite strangers for a home-cooked Shabbat meal.
> 39. An Israeli artichoke farmer with a sore back developed the
> sophisticated Hollandia beds and exports them from Sderot to many
> countries, including Holland.
> 40. Strangers feel free to tell a parent to put a hat on the baby
> in a country where we wear scarves, snoods, spodiks, streimels,
> wimples, fedoras, berets, tarbushes, homburgs, kippot and keffiyot.
> 41. While other Western nations debate immigration, we absorb more
> immigrants per capita than any other country in the world. Almost
> immediately all learn the Hebrew word for patience,/ savlanut/.
> 42. Our street musicians can play in symphony orchestras; our
> supermarket clerks know calculus.
> 43. Our biggest shopping seasons precede Rosh Hashana and Pessah.
> 44. Municipalities' decorating contests feature succot, not trees.
> The Succot holiday is high season in Israel; book hotel rooms a
> year in advance.
> 45. Even politicians from anti-religious parties say "/Baruch
> Hashem/."
> 46. "Where were your grandparents from?" is a common question.
> Where else would anyone care about my grandparents?
> 47. We celebrate Mother's Day, now Family Day, on the/ yahrzeit/
> of Henrietta Szold who, with Recha Freier, organized Youth Aliya
> but who had no children of her own.
> 48. For all the talk about the greening of the planet, we're the
> only country in the world that started the 21st century with a net
> gain of trees. (Thank you, Jewish National Fund)
> 49. During the Second Lebanon War, JNF rangers stayed in the
> forests during Katyusha attacks to save the trees
> 50. We're among the most Internet-connected people on the planet.
> We invented the cellphone, instant messaging, the chat room and
> the silent prayer, but still talk best with our hands.
> 51. Before Purim, the TV weather forecast relates specially to the
> day the kids go to school in their costumes. For a week before Yom
> Kippur, the weather report focuses on the upcoming fast.
> 52. We love children, and have more IVF per capita than any other
> country. It's free up to the first two children.
> 53. We celebrate Independence Day with a Bible Contest.
> 54. Israelis developed both the system to see photos from Mars and
> cameras to monitor crime on buses in Brazil.
> 55. Despite our soul connection to chicken soup, per capita we're
> the world's biggest eaters of healthier turkey, bigger even than
> America. Go figure!
> 56. We're among the first to help countries that experience
> disasters, and the first to have our field hospitals up. When
> Israel helped Turkey after an earthquake, an Israeli doctor made
> an incubator from a matza box.
> 57. Jewish soccer players for Bnei Sakhnin compete against Arab
> players for Maccabi Tel Aviv.
> 58. Childbirth and burial are free. Even the homeless have health
> insurance.
> 59. On Saturday night, the radio summarizes the news for all those
> who don't listen on Shabbat.
> 60. We're agricultural high achievers, producing seven times the
> output with the same water we used 25 years ago. Our date trees
> average 182 kilos - 10 times more than the average in the Middle
> East. One date tree is growing from 2,000-year-old seeds found in
> Masada.
> And, as on a birthday cake, one for next year:
> 61. We come from more than 100 countries and dream in Hebrew.
(from an email that goes around and around).
and I came out of the mall at 6pm to sunny weather and said what if we missed a beautiful day outside? we knew there had been a storm when we got home and the furniture on the deck was sopping, but didn't check the news until later tonight.
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