-By Cliff Keller- “Step out of your comfort zone! Muster the courage to approach people! You’ll be surprised by how many new friends you can make.” So advises a relatively recent and popular YouTube video, 10 Tips to Meeting Friends in your Area. But it’s not at all clear that the video’s list of tips […]
– By Cliff Keller –Ir Ganim’s community multi-year archaeology project was about much more than finding artifacts.One morning not too long ago, for what seemed like the thousandth time, I glanced out a rear window of our Jerusalem home in Givat Massuah. Across the notch that separates that hilltop neighborhood from the next, lies Ir […]
– By Cliff Keller – “Wait while my husband puts on his shoes…” Ramot Naftali is an agricultural moshav in the Upper Galilee lying two miles southeast of Israel’s border with Lebanon. Upon a breezy hilltop overlooking the Hula Valley, a scant fifteen miles from the Syrian border and only fifty miles from the fated […]
– By Cliff Keller – Wholly unique yet not unlike othersJerusalem’s Jaffa Gate was built in 1898 by Ottoman governors to allow German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, to enter the city in a triumphal procession. The Kaiser had come to Jerusalem for the inauguration of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, built on land given to […]
– By Cliff Keller – Bring my sons and daughters…Every soul who has left home to live in modern Israel has a story, often fascinating, always a bit mysterious. But the inevitable mysteries embedded in each account—a vanished barrier, a recurring dream, a sequence of seeming coincidences, a nagging longing for the Land, aren’t truly mysterious […]
– By: Cliff Keller – The collective Israeli psyche, if such a thing exists, is ambiguous, capricious, mysterious and odd. Israelis often demand “savlanut” (sahv lah NOOT), or patience, from others, for example, while most of them refuse to stand in line, honk at red lights in traffic as if to insist that they turn […]
– By: Cliff Keller – In about one quarter of a second, a web search will currently return an astounding 191 million links in response to the query, “Israel blogs.” It would take nearly seven years to check them all if one were able to scan at one link per second, working day and night. […]
