Ain't gonna work on Wednesday (well, not much...)

Diann asked about the prohibition I mentioned which is keeping my hands idle this week. It's not really a prohibition on crafts; it's part of a more general prohibition on work. Of course there are forms of work which cannot be ignored (you wouldn't want all the police or nurses walking off the job for a week, and most office-job bosses won't let you take off the whole time, either), but what work can be postponed should be (for example, my husband is not allowed by Jewish law to work this week, and my wheel and loom sit silently waiting). Work which cannot be ignored or postponed should be minimized (which is why I'm doing only the most necessary work in the yard, just enough to keep it running until next week, when I can get serious again).

Instead of working full-time, we are spending some time hiking as a family. Each holiday we do a section of the Israel National Trail, a trail that covers the country from north to south. We've started on the center of the country, close to home, and have done the section from Nachshonim to Tel Aviv.

We started the day out with a coincidence. Deciding that our usual method of park at the start and find a way back there when we're exhausted wan't the smartest, we parked at our proposed end point and decided to take buses back to the beginning. And where did we find parking in north Tel Aviv?


On R' Yisroel Ashkenazi Street, named after Rabbi Yisroel Ashkenazi, a leader of the Vilna Goan students who moved to Israel in the 1800s. What's so funny about this is that R' Yisroel was B's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. We looked at all the beautiful houses on the block and daydreamed telling the people living there that *they* ought to be the ones forcibly evacuated. After all, it's our street, isn't it?

This is where we started our segment of the walk. The Yarkon River looks beautiful, but in the not too distant past military divers were getting cancer from using it for training runs, so we didn't let the kids get too close.

We stopped for lunch under an overpass.


We gulped our food and left, because it's strange eating when you hear heavy trucks pounding the road just over your head. (Aren't my guys cute? Especially B in his hat from Goodwill Port St. Lucie.)

Another view from the walk:



You can sort of make out some of the garbage in the waterfall.

Tomorrow we're headed up north for the rest of the holiday. We'll hike up Mount Carmel in Haifa and then treat the kids to lots of red meat for dinner. We'll see if they'll honor the 10% off coupon on Passover. Then we'll go sleep at B's nephew, who lives in a small town in the southern Galillee. On Friday we'll do another section of the Trail (this time accompanied by the nephew's 9 year old daughter--I hope she can handle the hike). Then the sabbath/holiday. Monday is back to school, back to work, back to sanity, and back to packing in advance of my upcoming trip back to West Palm Beach.