There’s a disconnect in what Bibi’s doing – it doesn’t make any sense at all. The only thing I can think of is that he’s adopted Jerry Brown’s ‘Canoe’ theory of politics: “Paddle on the right, paddle on the left, you keep going straight down the middle.”

On Friday, Bibi went to Ariel -- it’s in Samaria, what the Community Organizer likes to call the “West Bank” when he’s feeling generous, and “the future state of Palestine” when he’s not. Anyway, Bibi went to plant trees in Ariel in honor of Tu B’Shavat, the Jewish New Year for Trees.

So Bibi planted the tree in Samaria and referred to Ariel as “The capital of Samaria” adding that it was “an indisputable part of Israel”. "Everyone who sees the geography here understands how important" Ariel and the surrounding areas are, he said – which is certainly a truism. Here’s a map – of course Ariel is an indisputable part of Israel.



Moreover, Bibi said he wasn’t just planting a tree, but instead setting forth three principles: “Growing strength, Jewish settlement and culture in the heart of our land of our forefathers and where we will remain and build."

Huh?

Hey – great to have the Prime Minister recognize that indeed Samaria – and Judea, and Jerusalem – are the heart of our land, and that we will remain and build there. Good to know he agrees with that – because when he paddles on the left, he appears not to understand that concept.

But this is the same Prime Minister who knuckled under to the Community Organizer’s demented and illogical demand for a building freeze in..... you guessed it, Samaria. (And Judea and Jerusalem, of course). When Bibi finally gave in to Washington’s pressure machine and agreed to a ten month freeze on all “building” and “settlement activity” he was admitting, tacitly or otherwise, that Samaria, Judea and parts of Jerusalem would, at some point, be handed over to the terrorists who surround us, so that they could create yet another terrorist state from which to attack. That was the alleged point of the building freeze: Jews would no longer build in those areas, because they were about to become part of the “Palestinian” terror state.

So now, the Prime Minister plants trees in Ariel, pictured below, “the capital of Samaria”, averring that “this is the land of our forefathers... where we will remain and build.”



As I said, Huh?

Ariel was an interesting place for Bibi to make his quizzical comments – Ariel University, founded in 1982, and today, home to some 11,000 students, including Jews, Arabs, Druze and Circassian Israelis. As it happens, it’s the fastest growing university in Israel.



For what it’s worth, Bibi also planted trees in Gush Etzion and Ma'ale Adumim, two other Israeli communities that also happen to lie over the infamous “green line” and hence are subject to US, UN and Arab demands for inclusion in some future terrorist state.

There must be some logic to what the Prime Minister is doing and saying, but it’s not obvious – unless it really is as simple as Jerry Brown suggested: paddle on the right, paddle on the left….

The problem with Brown’s kind of political pragmatism is that it rarely wins you any friends. Much more common is for the canoe to spring a leak, and leave you alone in the lake, gasping for breath.

As Matt Drudge says, “developing…”

I made a mistake. I knew better, and I went ahead and did it anyway. Now I’m suffering the consequences.

The story starts long ago, and if you want the whole real story, go read Eli Evans’ magnificent book, “The Lonely Days were Sundays”, because that was indeed the origin of the underlying problem.

Evans writes about the problem of Sundays where he grew up in North Carolina, but the issues he identified – boredom, loneliness, feeling of isolation -- were oddly similar to those I experience in North Dakota. Sunday as a day by itself was deadly – and worse yet, it was coupled with the threat of school the next day. I developed a system for distracting myself from Sundays. In North Dakota, it involved stacks of books I’d purposely save for that day. I'd spend the day holed up in my room, reading.

When I got to San Francisco, Sundays had become quite tolerable. I’d walk out by the Bay, talk to some of the Italian fishermen angling off the coastline. Or I’d go shopping at Cost Plus, the original store, where stuff from all over the world was simply offered, still in the packing boxes and shipping crates, at ridiculously low prices even a starving student could afford. Or I’d go walking in one of the City’s neighborhoods I wasn’t familiar with. I found a lot of delights – especially in the Mission District. I love that part of the City.

Then came Sacramento. When the kids were little, the days -- all of them -- were too busy to have time to fret about Sundays. But once they had become more or less independent, with friends and activities of their own, I was back to my original problem: what to do on long and frequently dismal Sundays.

Because San Francisco offered so many diversions, I took to driving the two hours back to Baghdad by the Bay and enjoying the day there, just as I had when I lived there. Sometimes the kids came along, sometimes they didn’t. The dogs always did, but with the kids or without, the dogs and I had a fine old time in San Francisco again, Sunday or not. We’d do pretty much the same things I used to do when I lived there – Cost Plus had turned into a regular store with regular prices, so that wasn’t much fun anymore. But sometimes we’d go to the beaches, watch the kite flyers in the Marina, go shopping downtown looking for bargains, or head out to the Friends of the San Francisco Library book sale places. There were always lots of interesting places to go in San Francisco.

No matter what we chose to do with the day, driving-home time came right at about 5:00 pm. And because Sunday was Sunday, there wasn’t much of interest on the radio, either, to fill up the two hour trip home. This was well before the advent of books on tape, although it was right about then that I started to lie, telling the ‘books for the blind’ people that I was blind so I could get books on tape – read (sometimes massacred) by amateurs. That’s where my addiction to audio books started, actually. Those long drives home from San Francisco on Sundays.

Before that, though, I was limited to whatever was on the radio for diversion. Then, as now, I suspect, the radio programs on Sundays exemplified Newton Minnow’s “vast wasteland” every bit as perfectly as TV. There were no political talk radio shows, the kind of thing I loved. All that existed were a handful of ‘self-help’ programming thick enough to make you gag.

The one tolerable show that came on late on Sunday afternoon was a real estate program hosted by Bruce Williams. People would call in with their housing and real estate questions, and he’d give advice – most of it relatively interesting.

Insofar as housing was concerned, Bruce Williams had a mantra that he drilled into the heads of his listeners: “Never fall in love with something that can’t love you back.” In other words, keep in mind that a house is just a house. It’s a place to live. Don’t invest too much emotional energy in it – it can’t love you back.

Good advice. I should have been paying attention and remembering that during the last 18 months, because I did the dirty: I committed the cardinal violation of the Bruce Williams Law. I fell in love with the house I was renting, hoping to buy.

So last Friday morning, one week ago, I was stunned to get a call from someone I didn’t know: “Hi”, the man began. “We’re the new owners of your house. We’re wondering if we could come over and take some measurements – and by the way, when do you think you’ll be able to move?”

Good grief.

My problem was two-fold: first was the obvious problem of finding a new place to live, in a city where the real estate market is so hot an awful lot of other renters are also out pounding the pavement, trying to find a new place – any place – to live, their homes having been sold out from under them, too.

But second -- and far worse -- was that I’d fallen in love with this house.

It’s stupid, I know that. The house is small, old, and nothing at all to look at. It’s just that for me, as a single person with dogs and birds, it’s perfect. It’s the right size, in the perfect location, with neighbors I both enjoy and appreciate. Right after moving in, I started to realize how much I loved this place. I know now I should have acted sooner to do what I could to buy it myself – but who knew?

Anyway. I’ve spent the last week going through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief – which applies just as well to emotional devastation as it does to physical death, by the way.

At first, I denied it: Surely there was a mistake. They didn’t really sell the place, did they?

Second, I was angry – unreasonably so, with no actual grounds. The truth is, I have a valid lease until June. The owner – or owners, because they are five adults, in their 40’s and 50’s who inherited the place -- understandably want to sell now while the market is so hot. Rationally, I don’t blame them at all, and they’re being very generous about my actual moving time – but, I was angry. No question about it.

Third, I tried bargaining: Surely we could work this out. Could I outbid the new owners? It didn’t take long for that stage to pass – the new owners loved the place as much as I did, and had considerably more money. That wasn’t going to work.

Then depression set in. Woe is me. How can I ever leave this wonderful place? Depression, by the way, includes panic attacks, especially those that bloom best sometime after midnight. What will become of me?

Now, a week later, I’ve moved into acceptance – or almost, anyway. I’ve turned the corner from ‘what a disaster’ to thinking of this as an adventure. The possibility exists that I will find something I like even better – why not? That’s perfectly possible. (And this time – trust me! I will buy something if I like it. This moving business is no longer fun.)

So here I am: I violated a rule I knew to be true: I fell in love with a house that couldn’t love me back. Dumb, dumb, dumb, but I did it anyway. Now I’m looking for some other place to live – and this time, I will be far more philosophical.

A house is, after all, just a place to live. Whatever I find will be just fine – it’s just going to take some time.

Shabbat shalom, everyone! (And on Sunday? I’m going to Jerusalem! Now there’s a sure cure for the blues!)

Yossi Katz, Philadelphia native, a former Israeli boxing champion and 30-year veteran teacher at Alexander Muss High School in Hod HaSharon, has written a fascinating book, “A Voice Called: Stories of Jewish Heroism”.

Published by the venerable Gefen Publishing House, it’s a fascinating little book, mostly because for each of the 32 Jewish heroes Katz chose, he includes a little personal story about how, why or where this person or his story came to touch his heart.

The chapters include the frequently-listed “great” Jewish heroes – Herzl, Hannah Senesh, Natan Sharansky – but even more interestingly, some lesser-known heroes are also presented, people like Roi Klein, Tal Brody, Naomi Shemer. Even a couple of notable Jewish boxers who were heroic for something in addition to boxing have their stories told.

I had a chance to interview Katz yesterday, and without scooping a formal book review that will be published next month in UpFront Magazine, something Katz said about heroes in general came to mind this morning as I was reading the Internet news.

First off, I was following links, moving from one thing to another, and came across a video of some numbnuts rapper named “T I” who was sharing his expertise on the sad state of the US economy. Try as I might, I can’t get the video itself to upload, but you can see it here: http://www.cnsnews.com/cnsnewstv/v/ydnznzqGSU

The rapper “T I” – who almost but not quite manages to pronounce the word “prevalent” -- tells us that President Obama’s plan to raise taxes on people who earn over $250,000 a year is the best way to create jobs. With what’s apparently intended to be a deep-thinking, nay wise, scowl on his face, he pontificates as to how that will work: raising taxes will mean that the government has more money, he says, so then it can hire more people. Therefore raising taxes will create jobs.

Uh huh.

Shaking my head, I moved along to another website, where I see that Mel Gibson is coming out with yet another anti-Semitic movie, this one to open in March. Gibson, of course, is famous for supporting his father’s belief that the Holocaust never happened. All major studios passed on this newest film, called “The Edge of Darkness” which was co-written, directed and co-produced by Gibson, but one smaller studio has agreed to distribute the $25 million film for a fee.

According to one review, “The movie has probably created more controversy than any other movie in recent years. Some commentators have charged that the movie is anti-Semitic because it blames the Jews for the death of Christ. The film portrays Jews who adhere to their Jewish faith as enemies of G-d and the locus of evil... “

Well, that sounds enlightening. I can hardly wait.

All of this sends my mind reeling into the past, when the likes of Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins -- the list is endless – also ‘shared’ their political wisdom with us, speaking from their vast wisdom and knowledge about economics and public policy. Worst of all, they reveled in all the positive attention their adoring publics lavished on them, all courtesy of the equally slavish media.

During the interview, I asked Yossi Katz why he’d decided to write a book about Jewish heroes. “Heroes and heroines are the people who inspire us, who shape us into what we are. They’re our role models, people we look up to,” he said. “I’m worried because kids today – both American and Israeli – look up to people like Kim Kardashian or Bar Rafaeli (Israeli model and IDF-service dodger, best known for her relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio) as their heroes. It’s fine to watch a TV show, but when these performers become a national obsession and focus of hero worship, then there’s something wrong with society. When I was a kid we looked up to astronauts and national leaders, but there’s less and less of that today. So I wanted to put together a book that would give both adults and young people worthy role models, people who would inspire them.”

Boy, he’s right about that. For a little insight into some real heroes, people worthy of learning from, go buy “A Voice Called” by Yossi Katz.

Read just one story a day – they’re short, 3-4 pages each. Keep the Kleenex handy.

On Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Voice-Called-Stories-Jewish-Heroism/dp/9652294802/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264485569&sr=8-1

Tsk tsk, those Democrats in Congress are getting touchy.

A very interesting exchange occurred on the Dom Giordano Show, a Pittsburgh radio station, 1210 AM, between Pennsylvania Republican-turned-Democrat Sen. Arlen Spector and Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann. It was a worthy matchup, almost guaranteed to spark fireworks: Spector is old-line-liberal regardless of which party he calls home, while Bachmann is a feisty young Republican upstart.

For me, it brings up memories of Madeline Albright, President Bubba’s Secretary of State, known primarily for her amusingly revealing mini-skirts that made many an Arab head of State gasp, not to mention the fact that she claimed she never knew she was Jewish.

But first, here’s what happened on the talk radio show (you can hear the exchange itself at Real Clear Politics)

Michelle Bachmann spoke first when Spector interrupted her. Then she interrupted him, so Spector told Bachmann to “Stop interrupting”, adding, “I didn’t interrupt you.”

"Now, wait a minute, I'll stop and you can talk," Spector said. "I'll treat you like a lady. Now act like one."

"Well, I am a lady," Bachmann responded, sounding almost amused.

They go at it again, talking over each other. Then Spector repeats the “lady” thing again, telling Bachmann she should "act like a lady."

Specter responds, "I think you are too, that's why I'm treating you like one. But just don't interrupt me."

The program continues for a moment, then erupts again. Specter complains that Bachmann, who insisted she voted for "prosperity" when Specter asked her about a specific vote, is "talking from talking points.” Spector again repeats his line, “"Now, wait a minute, I'll stop and you can talk. I'll treat you like a lady. Now act like one."

So. Is anyone out there offended? That Sen. Spector pulled the “act like a lady” thing on a female member of the US House of Representatives? A woman elected to her office just as he is elected to his?

Personally, I’m virtually impossible to offend – if someone is crude or insulting, I tend not to take offense so much as I question the sanity of the person who said it. So for me, I can’t read “offended” into this, but in that I seem to be alone. Most of the commentary – especially from women – is that Spector was profoundly “offensive”.

As for the politics of interrupting, that’s a different story. This is where Madeline Albright comes into the picture.

Back in the days when I was a CSPAN junkie, I very clearly remember an interview with Mrs. Albright when she was Secretary of State. The interviewer asked her what her advice would be to young women who wanted to get into politics. “I would advise them to interrupt,” Albright said. “Women should not wait to ask permission to speak.”

That struck me as interesting – like most children of my generation, girls and boys both – I was taught not to interrupt. Breaking into someone else’s speech was rude, we were told – not to mention counterproductive. You only get respect when respect is given, was the line of thought.

This was mindboggling. Here was the United States Secretary of State telling women that it was their obligation to interrupt! That they needed to be aggressive in making their presence known if they want to get ahead.

Recently, Mrs. Albright repeated that advice on a Women’s Media forum:

“I tell women to act in a more confident manner. You need to learn to interrupt. Ask questions when they occur to you and don’t wait to ask. Also, you don’t need to ask permission to ask a question. Be a risk taker; business appreciates risk takers. This trait is desirable in prospective leaders.”

Today two elected officials battled it out. Each interrupted the other, not once but several times. Then the male of the pair, the much-embattled Sen. Spector – who in his own race for reelection is trailing Republican Pat Toomey 49 percent to 40 percent – played the gender card: “Act like a lady.”

So here’s the question: if a woman interrupts, is she not a “lady”?

Maybe this is just a variation on an old joke. Madeline Albright counsels women to interrupt. Sen. Spector says that when they do, they aren’t “ladies”.

Maybe Madeline Albright isn’t a lady -- “That ain’t no lady. That’s the Secretary of State”

Maybe the Congresswoman from Minnesota isn’t a lady either. Maybe she doesn’t need to be.

Quoth the raven: Nevermore.

Ahhhh. Is it all over? The tradition lost for good?

Since 1949, every year on January 19, Edgar Allen Poe’s birthday, a mysterious secret visitor, sometime between the hours of midnight and 5:30 am, would leave a bottle of Cognac and three roses at the monument marking Poe’s gravesite. Last night he failed to appear.

That makes me very sad. I wonder what happened.

As a serious lover of Edgar Allen Poe, one of my most memorable “tourist” excursions was a “back east” Washington DC trip with my good buddies, Theresa and Mary Alice, sometime during the mid-1990s. All three of us are big time readers, lovers of everything Poe, so we made a special trip to Baltimore to pay tribute to Poe, visiting several of the sites that honor him.

In our rented car and armed with a decorative but seriously unspecific tourist map, we finally located the church where Poe is buried – which is to say, Poe is buried in the church yard, but not where the big grave marker is. It was late afternoon when we arrived and a wedding was just about to begin. There we were – in sloppy tourist duds -- while elegantly-clad people were filing into the church. Several people looked askance at us, apparently wondering what we were doing -- I guess local residents take their most famous author for granted.

It was raining – misting, might be more like it. Nicely gloomy for a graveside visit. Because of the wedding festivities, we didn’t go into the back of the churchyard where Poe’s remains actually rest, but when we’d looked, touched, and had our fill of that site, we decided we had time to try for one more.

We set out in search of 203 Amity Street, the old Baltimore house where Poe lived from 1833 – 1935, where he wrote “The Raven”, “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary….” You know the rest. Here’s what it looks like.



The map was terrible. Time and time again we were lost, several times we came close to giving up. What complicated the situation was that by now it was very dark, street signs were either non-existent or obscured, and clearly this was not a popular tourist spot, at least not at that hour. Another issue was that this was most definitely NOT a good neighborhood – a terrible place, in fact, for three dedicated but somewhat clueless lady tourists to lurk and prowl by themselves. Finally, finally, we found Amity Street, and kept following what house number we could see until there it was – an undistinguished red brick row house.

At that exact moment, a fleet of police cars, sirens wailing, passed us, slammed on their brakes a few feet ahead of us. Leaving their light bars flaring, the officers jumped from their cars and proceeded to arrest, or at least pursue someone. Now we really knew we had to get out of there. The possibility of gunfire seemed very real. We’d been told there was a memorial plaque on the house’s door, but there was no way we’d get close enough to see it. None of us wanted to leave the safety of the car to go up to the house itself.

Instead, I opened the car door, barely stepped outside, and with my silly little tourist camera, turned and -- without focusing – snapped a picture of the house.

By virtue of pure luck, that photo was probably the best I’ve ever taken. Because of the misty weather, together with the lights flashing from the police vehicles, the photo of the house turned out to be the very incarnation of spookiness – slightly blurred from the mist, strangely lighted from the cars. I don’t have that photo here in Israel – this was long before digital -- but it’s somewhere, I know that. Once in a while you get lucky, and that was my day.

Once I’d snapped the picture, we left immediately, even as more police cars arrived on the scene. We never did know what was going down – a drug bust most likely.

So for decades, now, every year on January 20, I’d check the Baltimore news, to see if Poe’s most dedicated fan had showed up with his toast of Cognac and bouquet of roses the night before. Every year, he -- or she – did. The Poe “toast” was even better than the swallows coming back to Capistrano – another of my favorite traditions. This one had a human benefactor. Someone, some actual person, was doing this, year after year.

My eternal question was, how can this visitor be so mysterious? With all the hoopla, why isn’t he – or she – identified? The simple answer was, because no one wanted to. It was a lovely mystery. Why ruin it?

All that said, in 2007, the Baltimore Sun reported that 92-year old Sam Porpora claimed he’d started the tradition, calling himself the “Poe Toaster”. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, but this year, the 35 or so people who gathered outside the church yard’s iron gates, hoping to see the ‘Toaster’, were disappointed. He never showed up.

"I'm very disappointed, to the point where I want to cry," said Cynthia Pelayo, 29, who’d stood at the gate for over six hours, hoping to see him. "I flew in from Chicago to see him. I'm just really sad. I hope that he's OK."



Others in the pack of fans, all of whom huddled in blankets during the long cold night outside the churchyard, above, came from as far away as Texas, California and Massachusetts. Everyone speculated about why the mysterious visitor failed to appear. "You've got so many possibilities," said Jeff Jerome, the local curator, who has attended the ritual every year since 1977. "The guy had the flu, accident, too many people." He says he’ll continue the vigil for at least the next two or three years in case the visits resume. "So for me it's not over with," he said.

It’s not over for me, either. I hope someone will pick up the tradition. Lest our longing for the lost Lenore turn into a lament for the lost Poe, himself.

What would you think a headline in USA Today read, “Federal Reserve Board to visit Lourdes”?

You’d think ‘Uh-oh. Things must be tougher than I thought’, right? The people who control the nation’s economic situation, looking for a miracle from Lourdes? Good grief.

See, that’s where Israel is different. Today, a local headline reads, “Bank of Israel Workers Visit Babi Sali's Grave”. Few of us are surprised to hear it, and most of us think, “Isn’t that great?”

Indeed, today – January 19, or more correctly the 4th day of the Hebrew month of Shevat – is the 26th year since the passing of the great Moroccan Kabbalist known universally is “Baba Sali” (‘praying father’) Rabbi Yisrael Abuchatzeira. And indeed, a group of Bank of Israel employees – not to mention thousands of others – will travel today to Netivot to visit his gravesite.

An arranged communal visit to Netivot by high-flying financial gurus is nothing to sneeze at, all by itself. Netivot is just down the road apiece from Beersheba, and is one of the little villages, along with Sderot, that our Arab cousins enjoy pelting with their rockets and mortars.

Baba Sali is a familiar presence in Beersheba. Look in most of the little shops in the Old City, and there you’ll see his picture. In most of these small businesses, Baba Sali’s face looks down on shoppers even more often than does that of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, although his smiling face is almost universal, too. Baba Sali enjoys universal respect from almost everyone, heads of state down to man on the street, even among those who regard themselves as secular.

As a wonder-worker, Babi Sali, in modern times, is unequalled. Accounts of healing, both physical and spiritual, abound. Here’s one recounted by Rabbi Lazer Brody on his blog, Lazerbeams

http://lazerbrody.typepad.com/lazer_beams/2010/01/baba-sali.html

"A young man who was injured in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. He underwent a series of operations, but was rendered a cripple. One of his legs was so bad that the doctors want to amputate it. A friend suggested that he visit the Baba Sali, who was known to work wonders with his prayers. At first, the soldier (a secular Jew) refused. But in despair, he decided to give it a try.

He was ushered into the Baba Sali's study.

"Do you put on tefillin every day?" Baba Sali asked.
"No."
"Do you keep Shabbat?"
"No."
"If that's the case, " Baba Sali replied, "you should be thankful that only one leg is in such a serious condition. We believe that Hashem gives us healthy limbs so that we may serve Him. Those who don't keep the mitzvot should regard their healthy limbs as gifts."

At that, the young man burst into tears.

Baba Sali looked him the eye and asked, "If I bless you that you will be able to stand, will you begin to observe the mitzvot?"

"I promise," the young man eagerly replied.

"Then give me your hand, and may you have a complete recovery, with Hashem's help."

After the young man kissed Baba Sali's hand, Rebbetzin Abuchatzeira told him to try and stand up. To his surprise, he was able to stand up immediately, and even take a number of steps without assistance.

Startled by the remarkable change in his situation, the young man ran out of the house in search of a telephone. The nearest telephone was in Yeshivas Hanegev, a few feet away from Rav Yisroel's home.

The young man raced over to the yeshiva, and called his family to tell them about the miracle. The yeshiva students, who overheard the conversation, were stunned. Taking him by the hand, they broke out into a fervent dance.

A short while later, the young man returned to Rav Yisroel's house with many of the yeshiva students, and a special festive meal was held in honor of the miracle. The young man's story spread like wildfire throughout the country, and caused many to adopt a Torah lifestyle.

May Baba Sali's holy and beloved memory invoke Divine compassion on all of us, amen.”

"Mashiv haruach umorid hagashem" –
"Who causes the wind to blow and the rain to fall"


Not until you’ve been through a winter rain storm in Israel can you really comprehend the meaning of those words – which is something I don’t say lightly.

I grew up in North Dakota -- a land of extreme weather if there ever was one. Yes, there’s wind there, and of course rain -- not to mention snow. But never rain with the intensity of what you see in the Negev, when it really gets going.

In the early evening last night a very gentle rain started. It was lovely – we need rain so much, and it had been so hot for January, that I loved sitting in my outside room and just listening to it. After a while, it was too cold. so I came inside – and not a moment too soon, either. The storm – make that STORM – started. Wind, pounding rain, an amazing display of lightning and thunder. By counting seconds between the thunder and the flash of lightening, I could tell the actual storm was still quite far away, but even on that front edge, it was impressive.

What’s interesting about rain in the Negev is how it pounds straight down, with an amazing intensity. The rain squalls don’t usually last very long – minutes, maybe, of serious intensity – but the noise on the roof is incredible. I finally decided to go to bed – mostly because there’s a big window in the bedroom, and I knew I’d be able to look out and watch the storm – hey, in Beersheba, the sun shines 360 days a year. When we get something as interesting as a storm with thunder and lightning, I don’t want to miss a minute of it. I want to enjoy it, save it up, to remember it sometime next July, when we’ve had nothing but unmitigated sunshine for about five months already, and the idea of a rainstorm sounds seriously attractive.

As intense as this storm was, it wasn’t quite as strong as the first winter storm I experienced here. That winter -- like December of 2002 -- the thunder was so loud it set off everyone’s car alarms. So not only did you have the tremendous clap of the thunder, but the wailing of about a dozen car alarms, too. It was very strange.

Last night’s storm went on all night long – something else that’s unusual. Thunder, lightning and rain continued on into the morning, then abated – but never really cleared – all day. Now, in the late afternoon, the thunder and lightning started again, and the winds picked up from a different direction. I had to go take down all my flower pots from the railing around the outside room – the wind was blowing them over, so it’s better to just set them on the ground than have them blow off.

As rare as these events are, my roommates never have a chance to get used to it. Molly Goldberg, the mostly Border Collie, suffers the most. If I had some doggy Valium, I’d probably give him some. Poor thing – Molly is a pretty big critter, and spends most of the time trying to crawl into some teeny space – like behind the toilet – trying to get away. He’s definitely not a happy camper right now.

Rachel, the mostly Poodle, is definitely a dog’s dog. She didn’t care much for the thunder last night either, but decided that the best way to handle something she didn’t understand was to bark at it, and maybe it would go away. So the thunder roared, and Rachel barked. None of us got very much sleep.

As lovely and interesting as I find the storm, of course it’s caused damage – not to mention loss of life. A hiker was killed in the flooding further south, in the Arava. His companion was brought here to Soroka Hospital and as of this moment, a third companion is still missing. Four other hikers were trapped in their car and rescued by helicopter.

It’s funny – all the hiking experts around the country caution people to never go hiking when rain is predicted. But there’s always a few who do it anyway. The thing is, because the rain is so intense, the ground can’t begin to absorb it, so flash floods occur, and once you’re in the path of one, it’s exceedingly dangerous.

In another incident, two people were rescued from a truck that got stuck in flood waters near Eilat, in Israel’s far South. In the same area, two IDF officers were also caught in the floods, and were rescued.

In property damage, roads have been closed down here, a bridge has collapsed, and streams all over are overflowing. Schools are closed in some areas, and the rain is expected to continue for the rest of the week – although perhaps more in the north than down here.

Israel needs the rain – no question about that. But for Beersheba, the rain that falls here – at this moment – is basically wasted. None of the rainfall here ends up in the Kinneret, which is Israel’s major source of fresh water. Some may replenish Beersheba’s numerous aquifers, but none of them are currently in use for water supply anyway.

What’s interesting is that by this time next year, it could be that this kind of abundant rainwater would be very useful. The new -- upcoming, work in progress – Beersheba River Park will include a 100 dunam lake. Not only that, but recycled water will be used to fill the ancient Nahal Beersheba that runs on the south edge of the Old City. By next year, all of this rainfall would be adding to the scenery in the Old City, making Beersheba

This year, we just get to enjoy it.