What Is a 2,000-Year-Old Marble Dolphin Doing in the Negev?

The archaeologists who discovered a statue not far from the Gaza border are themselves unsure how it got there, writes Ilan Ben Zion:

Alexander Fraiberg, head archaeologist [of the team that discovered the dolphin], said he believes the sculpture dates to the Roman era, but was incorporated into a later, Byzantine-era paved floor. . . .

“It’s interesting because the statuette was lying face down, so it was impossible to see its appearance,” he said. Experts believe that the dolphin, standing about sixteen inches high, may have been part of a larger sculpture, possibly a life-size statue of a god or goddess. . . .

“The mystery,” said Fraiberg, “is where the statue came from, who destroyed it, when, and under what circumstances, and who brought the piece with the dolphin to the site.”

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Ancient Israel, Archaeology, Byzantine Empire, History & Ideas, Negev

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