Jerusalem’s 2,000-Year-Old Aqueduct Was a Wonder of Ancient Technology

From the 1st century BCE until the 20th CE, one of Jerusalemites’ major sources of water was the so-called Low-Level Aqueduct, which ran through what is now the Armon Hanatsiv neighborhood in the southern part of the city. Amanda Borschel-Dan describes archaeologists’ ongoing efforts to understand it better:

Used until the British Mandate, when it was discarded for new electric-pump technology, the newly uncovered segment of the Hasmonean-era water line—currently some 40 meters—will be conserved and integrated into a neighborhood park in cooperation with the Jerusalem Municipality and the Moriah Jerusalem Development Corporation.

It was used and maintained (or not) by a succession of rulers, said Yaakov Billig, [an expert in ancient aqueducts]—including those from the three major monotheistic religions—through the end of the Ottoman empire, when it increasingly began to crack and decay.

Billig said that the new excavations are not being conducting merely for the sake of nostalgia, however. Rather, researchers are still amazed and even somewhat mystified by the precision technology constructed in antiquity without the aid of GPS or modern computation methods.

The Low-Level Aqueduct dates to circa 100 BCE, said Billig, and was used for public needs specifically at the Temple Mount. It was at the outer limits of the contemporary technology, he said.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Ancient Israel, Archaeology, Jerusalem

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