Ulpan and Bible Lands Museum

This morning I went to an ulpan to ask about when classes start, etc. They just sent me to a class! Presumably if I decide to stick around they will ask me to pay some money, but if they don't say anything...

The class was fast-paced. I was exhausted by the end.

Interesting note, the ulpan is held in the same building where Eichmann was tried and hanged. The classroom where we met today was his holding cell. Creepy, huh?

Most of the class was Arabs, which surprised me. I talked to two Arab girls, A and G, after class. A asked me, "So, are you going to emigrate to Israel?"

"I don't know. Maybe many years from now. Not soon," I said.

"But why would you come here? You are from the United States and you want to come here? If I could go to the United States, I would."

I thought about this for a bit, then said, "Well, there are not many Jews in the United States."

"There aren't?" A seemed shocked.

"2 percent. But here there are a lot of Jews. It's hard to be the only one of something."

"I understand that."

After Ulpan, I went to the Bible Lands Museum. It houses a collection of ancient Near Eastern artifacts. The idea is to give information about the many peoples and places mentioned in the bible. It was a good idea on the part of the curators, I think, to organize the museum around a familiar text. There will be a short quote from the bible, for example mentioning the spears and axes of the tribe of Simon, and then a whole section of spears and axes. It gives the pieces some cohesion. The danger, of course, is that the visitor will draw the erroneous conclusion that Simon's axes looked like these, or that Simon necessarily existed at all. The museum did nothing to counter such inferences, and, on the whole took the bible text at face value in a way that seems to me ahistorical.

But, even when the pieces are well organized, you can only look at so many ancient pots and reliefs. I sometimes wonder what the point is of presenting so many "facts" in a museum exhibition. The exhibition inevitably has to gloss over lots of scholarly disputes to get to a smooth presentation of the facts, and in the end it only presents them according to one scholarly opinion. A lot of conjecture goes into history (especially ancient history) and you don't see the conjecture in a museum exhibit unless you go with a very critical eye and probably a lot of background knowledge. What if there were a museum NOT dedicated to presenting loads of historical facts? I mean, the dry facts of history are usually boring and forgettable. What if there were a museum that focused on the questions? Wouldn't it be so much more interesting and engaging to come out of an exhibit with a sense of the broad historical questions that motivate the study of these old helmets and tablets? If you could allow the viewer to see how that same helmet could serve three different theories, you've made the helmet three times as interesting. But I digress.

I liked the section on Tu Bishvat. An ancient Babylonian cunaiform tablet described how the priests would look for Venus in the evening sky on the 15th of their month corresponding to Shevat. If Venus did not rise, that meant the lunar calendar had gotten out of sinc with solar reality, and they would announce the addition of an extra month (Second Adar) to compensate. If Venus rose, no extra month. The exhibit claimed that the Jews first began observing Tu Bishvat after Babylonian exhile, the implication being that they imported the holiday along with the Babylonian calendar. (It did not explain what the new year of the trees had to do with Venus.) Wouldn't it make a cool Tu Bishvat tradition, though, to go out side and observe Venus?