Resurrecting the Judean Date Palm

The Judean date palm, once found in abundance in the land of Israel, has been extinct for some 1,500 years. In 2005, the botanical researcher Elaine Solowey tried planting an ancient seed that had been discovered in the ruins of Masada. The resulting tree (nicknamed Methuselah) has now produced offspring. April Holloway writes:

For thousands of years, the date palm was a staple crop in the kingdom of Judea, as it was a source of food, shelter, and shade. Thick forests of the palms towering up to 80 feet and spreading for seven miles covered the Jordan River valley from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the shores of the Dead Sea in the south. So valued was the tree that it became a recognized as a symbol of good fortune in Judea. It is chronicled in the Bible, Quran, and ancient literature for its diverse powers . . . and as a cure for a wide range of diseases including cancer, malaria, and toothache.

However, its value was also the source of its demise and eventual extinction. The tree so defined the local economy that it became a prime resource for the invading Roman army to destroy. Once the Roman Empire took control of the kingdom in 70 CE, the date palms were wiped out in an attempt to cripple the Jewish economy. The effort eventually succeeded, and by 500 CE the once plentiful palm had completely disappeared, driven to extinction for the sake of conquest. . . .

[Elaine] Solowey now hopes she will be able to plant an ancient date grove. To do that, she would need to grow a female plant from an ancient seed as a mate for Methuselah, and it’s looking promising—Solowey has managed to sprout a small handful of other date palms from ancient seeds recovered at archaeological sites around the Dead Sea, and at least two of them are female.

Read more at Ancient Origins

More about: Ancient Israel, Archaeology, History & Ideas, Land of Israel, Masada, Science, Yigael Yadin

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society