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Photo by Clive Kim

Astro-tourism – chasing eclipses, meteor showers and elusive dark skies from Earth

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For years, small groups of astronomy enthusiasts have traveled the globe chasing the rare solar eclipse. They have embarked on cruises to the middle of the ocean, taken flights into the eclipse’s path and even traveled to Antarctica. In August 2017, millions across the U.S. witnessed a total solar eclipse visible from Oregon to South Carolina, with a partial eclipse visible to the rest of the continental U.S.

The interest in astronomical events that this eclipse sparked will likely return with two eclipses visible in the U.S. during the next year – the annular solar eclipse on Oct. 14, 2023, and the total eclipse on April 8, 2024. But astro-tourism – traveling to national parks, observatories or other natural, dark-sky locations to view astronomical events – isn’t limited just to chasing eclipses.

According to a recent study, 80% of Americans and one-third of the planet’s population can no longer see the Milky Way from their homes because of light pollution. As a consequence, most people have to travel to witness meteor showers and other common astronomical events.

I am a space scientist with a passion for teaching physics and astronomy and photographing the night sky. Every summer I spend several nights backpacking in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where the skies are sufficiently dark to allow the Milky Way to be seen with the naked eye. My son and I also like to take road trips – often along U.S. 395, the Eastern Sierra Scenic Byway – that coincide with eclipses and meteor showers.

Can’t miss astronomical events

There are two types of eclipses. Lunar eclipses occur when the full moon passes through Earth’s shadow. Solar eclipses occur when the new moon briefly blocks the Sun.

A diagram showing the Moon's orbit around the sun, with the Moon's two orbital nodes marked, and its orbital plane's 5 degree tilt noted.
Nela (nyabla.net)/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

There are three types of solar eclipses. During a total eclipse, the Moon completely covers the Sun, with totality, or the time during which the Sun is completely eclipsed, lasting as long as seven minutes. During totality, those in the path of the eclipse will see the Sun’s corona, or its outer atmosphere, behind the Moon’s silhouette.

The Moon’s orbit around the Earth is an ellipse, so the Moon can appear to be 15% smaller when it’s at its farthest point from Earth, its apogee, compared with its size when it is at its closest point to Earth, its perigee. An annular eclipse occurs when the Moon doesn’t cover the entire disk of the Sun, leaving a ring of sunlight around the Moon.

Finally, a partial eclipse occurs when the Moon blocks only a part of the Sun’s disk, as the name implies.

Three eclipse images: in the first the sun is entirely blocked, with shadowy light visible from behind the Moon. Second shows the sun mostly blocked, with a thin ring visible behind the Moon. Third shows the sun partially blocked
Credits: Total eclipse, left: NASA/MSFC/Joseph Matus; annular eclipse, center: NASA/Bill Dunford; partial eclipse, right: NASA/Bill Ingalls, CC BY-NC

Meteor showers are a far more common astronomical event than eclipses, and they are visible from any dark-sky location on Earth. Meteor showers occur when Earth’s orbit around the Sun takes it through the dust left behind by a comet. The Earth sweeps up the dust like a car speeding through a cloud of insects on the highway.

Meteor showers are named for the constellations from which the meteors seem to emanate, though it’s not necessary to stare in that direction to see meteors. The most prominent meteor showers, occurring on approximately the same dates every year, are the Perseids, named for the constellation Perseus and peaking on the night of Aug. 12-13; the Geminids, named for the constellation Gemini, on Dec. 14-15; and the Lyrids, named for the constellation Lyra, on April 21-22. The night sky will be mostly moonless for the first two this year, but a nearly full moon will make the Lyrid shower of 2024 difficult to see.

Tips for aspiring astro-tourists

One of the most important factors to consider when planning an outing to stargaze or to watch a meteor shower is the phase of the Moon. The full moon rises at about 6 p.m. and sets at 6 a.m., making stargazing all but impossible because of its brightness. For ideal stargazing conditions, the Moon should be below the horizon, and the best viewing conditions are during new moon. You can use a moonrise/moonset calculator to determine the phase of the Moon and its rise and set times for any location on Earth.

Another important factor is weather. Amateur astronomers always joke that the sky is cloudy during the most interesting astronomical events. For example, most major cities in the U.S. that are in the path of the April 2024 eclipse have had cloudy skies on April 8 60% of the time since the year 2000.

Most Americans live in heavily light-polluted areas. A light pollution map such as lightpollutionmap.info can help identify the nearest dark-sky location, which, in my case, is hours away. These maps often use the Bortle dark-sky scale, which reports 1 for extremely dark skies to 9 for highly light-polluted city centers.

Though you may still see the brightest meteors from city suburbs, the darker your sky, the more meteors you’ll see. In general, expect to see fewer than 25 meteors per hour. To see the complex structure of the Milky Way with the naked eye, look for a location with a Bortle index of 3 or below.

It’s important to arrive at your chosen site early, preferably during daylight hours. Stumbling around in the dark at an unfamiliar site is a recipe for disaster and may also disturb others who are already at the site. Arriving early also gives time for your eyes to adapt to the dark as night falls, as it typically takes 30 minutes or even longer for your eyes to reach their full dark-adapted potential.

Make sure to carry a headlamp or flashlight that has a red light setting, as red light doesn’t ruin night vision. Avoid using your phone, as even a glance at the screen can ruin your eyes’ dark adaptation. If you’re using a sky-viewing app, switch the app to night mode.

Plan ahead if you’re thinking of traveling to view one of the eclipses visible in the U.S. next year. If you’re in the path of the eclipse, stay put! If you’re traveling, staying at the same location overnight before and after the eclipse can help avoid the hourslong traffic jams experienced by eclipse watchers in 2017.

Also, you should never look at the Sun directly with the naked eye, even during a total eclipse. You’ll need a pair of inexpensive eclipse glasses to watch and fully enjoy the eclipse, but get yours early, as many stores ran out of glasses during the 2017 eclipse.

No matter where you travel during the next year, don’t forget to look up at night and marvel at the beauty of the night sky away from city lights.

^^^

Vahe Peroomian, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

This article originally appeared in The Conversation under a Creative Commons License.

Feature image by Clive Kim via Pexels.

Audere orginal feature smaller

Currently Reading Into: Zen, Gumption, Quality, and Motorcycle Maintenance

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Somehow last summer I found myself in the thick central highlands of Vietnam attempting to fix a vacuum leak on my rented Honda CR125. I was a couple of clicks up the now quasi-paved Ho Chi Minh Trail, Creedence Clearwater Revival still vibrating through a pair of loose earbuds back and forth between my ear canal and the expanded polystyrene foam of my helmet, I was trekking, exploring—G.I. cosplaying?—and amidst it all, I seemed to have forced myself to forget that I was on a greasy machine with precarious parts which carried me through this momentary spiritual and adventurous defining of my life.

The extra air was introduced into the fuel-air mix from the carburetors, leaning out the mixture and causing a steady drip between the cylinder head and the carburetor slide (a.k.a. the butterfly). However, then, I did not know this, I simply stalled the machine as it came to a putt-putting stop next to a herd of water buffalo with indifferent stares and swinging tails. As Robert M. Pirsig says, I was overcome by an “egoless acceptance of stuckness”. However, and to my good fortune and privilege, my uncle, the Phaedrus and powerhouse mechanic of our trip, had all the parts and expertise to keep us on our way. He replaced the gas line and cleaned the washers in the carburetor slide with a manly blow and belch. This seemed to do the trick and we got back on schedule, dodging the “chicken mines” that littered the road, and adjusting the volume of whatever psychedelic rock tune to be just above the sound of the RPMs as we shifted gears. As the day went on and we began to engine break cruise down the Marble Mountains into downtown Da Nang, my Uncle shouted through the vrooming and whooshing,

“I got a book I think you should read! It’s about dirtbikes, Buddhism, and philosophy!”

All my favorite things.

He gave me a copy, and I decided to finally give it a go right before I head back to the ‘Nam. This time for a solo motorcycle venture.

I’ll save this from turning into a travel blog. Mostly, because this is not my story nor a place to present my own philosophical and ontological pontifications. These are the words of Robert M. Pirsig, found in the yellowed pages of my first edition copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. As the title of this series suggests, I am not yet finished with the novel as I am still highlighting the elaborate syntax and—in some cases—”philograpahics” that Pirsig uses to explain each of his “Chautauquas”. Nevertheless, this seems like a liminal moment to embark on an “in-the-moment-yet-not-knowing-for-sure” position to give a partial book review or simply a  “so far so good” account. Maybe this is subject to change and therefore an appropriate update or redaction will attempt to erase away the ignorance of the unforeseen. Or this piece may simply come to fruition as a mere documentation of the results of implementing nuanced pearls of wisdom from a quasi-popular philosophical fiction book forty-nine years too late.

Quality and Gumption

In the novel (so far), Pirsig speaks through a forty-year-old man who writes technical manuals for a living and recounts the history and philosophical epiphanies of his former consciousness, Phaedrus, who was subjected to electroshock therapy after a mental breakdown. Following the therapy, Phaedrus’s consciousness shifted to that of the narrator. As the narrator attempts to piece together Phaedrus’s intellectual history, he parallels it with a narrative of the trip he and his son Chris take across the United States…on motorcycles of course.

Through a series of direct talks he calls Chautauquas, The narrator expounds on Phaedrus’ developed philosophy of “Quality”, drawing a parallel to motorcycle maintenance as an apt metaphor to exemplify its practical application. This Quality is essentially a reconfiguration of the subject/object duality that often dominates Western thought, Pirsig suggesting something close to Toaism, but less monistic and with less religious overtones.

Here, it seems that Pirsig wants us to infuse a pragmatic and robust way of understanding the world with a single-personified cleric that has features similar to both that of Lao Tzu and Henry Thoreau.

I can dig it, but I can’t tell if I must accept the world and all its components, attempt to see every part of the world, or fall into it and live every action deliberately. As of now, I assume Pirsig wants us to fully encounter our faith or in his case “gumption”, the “reservoir of good spirits”.

As I pack my rucksack and touch up on the mechanic jargon, I think of what Pirsig sees as the mitochondrial substance of life,

“Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven’t got it there’s no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there’s absolutely no way in the whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed. It’s bound to happen. Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.”

^^^

Coby Hobbs is an Audere Magazine contributor and editor.

Feature image by Coby Hobbs.

LightSpeed

Warp drives: Physicists give chances of faster-than-light space travel a boost

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By Mario Borunda, Oklahoma State University

The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. It is about 4.25 light-years away, or about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km). The fastest ever spacecraft, the now- in-space Parker Solar Probe will reach a top speed of 450,000 mph. It would take just 20 seconds to go from Los Angeles to New York City at that speed, but it would take the solar probe about 6,633 years to reach Earth’s nearest neighboring solar system.

If humanity ever wants to travel easily between stars, people will need to go faster than light. But so far, faster-than-light travel is possible only in science fiction.

In Issac Asimov’s Foundation series, humanity can travel from planet to planet, star to star or across the universe using jump drives. As a kid, I read as many of those stories as I could get my hands on. I am now a theoretical physicist and study nanotechnology, but I am still fascinated by the ways humanity could one day travel in space.

Some characters – like the astronauts in the movies “Interstellar” and “Thor” – use wormholes to travel between solar systems in seconds. Another approach – familiar to “Star Trek” fans – is warp drive technology. Warp drives are theoretically possible if still far-fetched technology. Two recent papers made headlines in March when researchers claimed to have overcome one of the many challenges that stand between the theory of warp drives and reality.

But how do these theoretical warp drives really work? And will humans be making the jump to warp speed anytime soon?

A circle on a flat blue plane with the surface dipping down in front and rising up behind.
This 2-dimensional representation shows the flat, unwarped bubble of spacetime in the center where a warp drive would sit surrounded by compressed spacetime to the right (downward curve) and expanded spacetime to the left (upward curve). AllenMcC/Wikimedia Commons

Compression and expansion

Physicists’ current understanding of spacetime comes from Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. General Relativity states that space and time are fused and that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. General relativity also describes how mass and energy warp spacetime – hefty objects like stars and black holes curve spacetime around them. This curvature is what you feel as gravity and why many spacefaring heroes worry about “getting stuck in” or “falling into” a gravity well. Early science fiction writers John Campbell and Asimov saw this warping as a way to skirt the speed limit.

What if a starship could compress space in front of it while expanding spacetime behind it? “Star Trek” took this idea and named it the warp drive.

In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican theoretical physicist, showed that compressing spacetime in front of the spaceship while expanding it behind was mathematically possible within the laws of General Relativity. So, what does that mean? Imagine the distance between two points is 10 meters (33 feet). If you are standing at point A and can travel one meter per second, it would take 10 seconds to get to point B. However, let’s say you could somehow compress the space between you and point B so that the interval is now just one meter. Then, moving through spacetime at your maximum speed of one meter per second, you would be able to reach point B in about one second. In theory, this approach does not contradict the laws of relativity since you are not moving faster than light in the space around you. Alcubierre showed that the warp drive from “Star Trek” was in fact theoretically possible.

Proxima Centauri here we come, right? Unfortunately, Alcubierre’s method of compressing spacetime had one problem: it requires negative energy or negative mass.

A 2–dimensional diagram showing how matter warps spacetime
This 2–dimensional representation shows how positive mass curves spacetime (left side, blue earth) and negative mass curves spacetime in an opposite direction (right side, red earth). Tokamac/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

A negative energy problem

Alcubierre’s warp drive would work by creating a bubble of flat spacetime around the spaceship and curving spacetime around that bubble to reduce distances. The warp drive would require either negative mass – a theorized type of matter – or a ring of negative energy density to work. Physicists have never observed negative mass, so that leaves negative energy as the only option.

To create negative energy, a warp drive would use a huge amount of mass to create an imbalance between particles and antiparticles. For example, if an electron and an antielectron appear near the warp drive, one of the particles would get trapped by the mass and this results in an imbalance. This imbalance results in negative energy density. Alcubierre’s warp drive would use this negative energy to create the spacetime bubble.

But for a warp drive to generate enough negative energy, you would need a lot of matter. Alcubierre estimated that a warp drive with a 100-meter bubble would require the mass of the entire visible universe.

In 1999, physicist Chris Van Den Broeck showed that expanding the volume inside the bubble but keeping the surface area constant would reduce the energy requirements significantly, to just about the mass of the sun. A significant improvement, but still far beyond all practical possibilities.

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A sci-fi future?

Two recent papers – one by Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire and another by Erik Lentz – provide solutions that seem to bring warp drives closer to reality.

Bobrick and Martire realized that by modifying spacetime within the bubble in a certain way, they could remove the need to use negative energy. This solution, though, does not produce a warp drive that can go faster than light.

[Over 100,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Independently, Lentz also proposed a solution that does not require negative energy. He used a different geometric approach to solve the equations of General Relativity, and by doing so, he found that a warp drive wouldn’t need to use negative energy. Lentz’s solution would allow the bubble to travel faster than the speed of light.

It is essential to point out that these exciting developments are mathematical models. As a physicist, I won’t fully trust models until we have experimental proof. Yet, the science of warp drives is coming into view. As a science fiction fan, I welcome all this innovative thinking. In the words of Captain Picard, things are only impossible until they are not.

^^^

Mario Borunda, Associate Professor of Physics, Oklahoma State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Cover image by Les Bossinas/NASA/Wikimedia Commons. Image is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that “NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted“. (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.)

Chickadee Prince Books publishes science fiction that you will love, such as the Against the Glare of Darkness series by Mark Laporta, and the Watt O’Hugh trilogy by Steven S. Drachman.

Sephardi - Ashkenaz

Aaron Leibel: Solving Israel’s Ashkenazi-Sephardi Divide

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My most embarrassing moment in Israel — nay, in my life — occurred one night when I was still working as night manager for the Plaza Hotel in Jerusalem.

We had specific duties — to work with the cashier to make sure his room charges for the previous day were correct — and, of course, if people checked in or out at night, we had to process them.

But otherwise, our main job was to stay awake. (I never slept but if one of the front-desk people finished his or her work and asked to be allowed to sleep for an hour or two, I usually said OK, although sleeping was forbidden.)

One night, I was sitting and talking with the hotel telephone operator — a young, pretty and pleasant woman who, during the day, was a law student at Hebrew University. (When she slept was a mystery.)

I don’t remember the topic of our discussion, but somehow what I had recently read about Jews from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco seemed apropos.

“These were very primitive people,” I parroted what I had read with an authoritative air. “They had never seen a toilet before and began drinking water from the toilet bowl when they first saw a modern bathroom.”

She had a sad, pleading look in her eyes when she said, “But Aaron, my family is from the Atlas Mountains.”

OMG! Had there been one, I would have gladly crawled into a hole and pulled the dirt over my head. I don’t recall what I said — I’m sure I apologized profusely but what apology could suffice for my egregious insult to this woman and her family?

Unfortunately, at least early on, many Israeli Ashkenazi (Western and Eastern European) Jews shared my ignorance and prejudices. In the 1950s and ’60s, hundreds of thousands of Sephardi (descendants of those expelled from Spain, Jews from southern European and the Middle East) Jews from the Arab world made their way — usually surreptitiously — to Israel to live. Many tended to see the rebirth of the Jewish state as a miracle. They were joyous to be able to leave their native lands where they had endured centuries of discrimination — and in the age of Zionism, sometimes violent attacks from their Muslim neighbors.

Often, they emerged from the airplanes rapturous, dancing and singing, so happy to be home. And then, sometimes officials from the Israeli government sprayed them with DDT.

The early arrivals came to a desperately poor Jewish state that had only recently defeated the Arab armies in the War of Independence and still was trying to absorb thousands of refugees from Nazi Europe — ravaged in body and spirit. So, the newer arrivals often were shunted off to camps of tents or shacks and neglected.

And, they faced bias and discrimination from the Ashkenazi establishment and from some ordinary Israelis.

The bad feelings between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews in Israel have not disappeared but have diminished. The very act of living in the Jewish state, surrounded by millions of people dedicated to your country’s destruction, has helped to bring Israel’s Jewish communities together. So has service in the IDF.

Members of the Sephardic community also are much better educated then were their parents and grandparents and thus able to compete successfully for better-paying jobs.

Most important is the wedding canopy. As more and more members of the two communities marry — like my oldest daughter Lauren — they, in effect, are resolving the problem.

^^^

Photo: Lauren and her husband Dror pose for a photo some 20 years ago. Their marriage in 1991 — like thousands of others between Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Israel — is helping to bridge the gap between the two communities.

Top image by Pontus Wellgraf.

Veteran journalist Aaron Leibel writes for The Jerusalem Post and Washington Jewish Week. He is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Figs and Alligators: An American Immigrant’s Life in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, available from Amazon in Kindle and paperback, Barnes and Noble, and at every local bookstore in the U.S. and Canada.

cats

Aaron Leibel, on his Israeli Cats

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My wife, Bonnie, is a cat person, and, over the years, her creatures have been nice enough to let the two of us share their homes.

For those not familiar with felines, they’re like dogs, except when a bad guy tries to break into the house, they don’t bark. Instead, they run for cover and stay hidden until the danger has passed.

Don’t misunderstand me, I love our animals — at the present time, it’s Trevor and Glenda — and I try not to hold their species against them. After all, they didn’t ask nature (I doubt if the Almighty is anxious to take credit for them) to make them cats.

On the positive side, my long association with Bonnie’s felines have helped to increase my understanding of, and compassion for, the idle and the unemployed.

But my love does not match Bonnie’s Just let me say that if you believe in reincarnation, pray to come back as one her cats. You couldn’t do any better.

Our first foray into the world of cats in Israel was our adoption in the late 1970s of an orange tomcat whom the daughters insisted on naming “Mickey.” One warm summer evening, the window was open in our sixth-floor apartment in the Neve Ya’akov neighborhood in Jerusalem, and Mickey was on the window’s ledge. Maybe he jumped, trying to get away from the cloying affection of the females in the apartment or from the shame of his name, or, perhaps, he fell — I was never able to determine.

In any case, my distraught women immediately had me scurrying downstairs to scrape up Mickey’s body so that he would be given a Jewish (cat’s) funeral. But to all our surprises, I found nothing in the garden into which the cat had plunged.

So, apparently, Mickey had survived his long fall, joining the many wild cats in our neighborhood trying to eke out a living from the scraps in the garbage dumpsters and seeking companionship from those felines of the other sex.

He apparently was very successful in the latter enterprise —he was not spayed before we got him — for we spotted many orange kittens in our neighborhood in the ensuing years.

But I digress. It seems as if Bonnie’s love for felines has been passed down genetically to our daughters — especially to Abby, daughter number 3. (Lauren, number one, takes in strays: Debra, number two, shares her abode with a cat named Golda.)

I recall during a visit to her apartment in Ramat Hasharon, Israel, in the late 1990s — she presently lives in the western suburbs of Boston — how she and her boyfriend, now husband, Meir, fed the hungry felines.

There are thousands, probably tens or hundreds of thousands, of cats who live outdoors on their own in the Jewish state. The humane society tries spaying and neutering them, but there are so many that it’s really mission impossible.

Abby and Meir already had two kittens — Tuli and his sister Tula (in Hebrew, a male cat is a hatul, a female hatula). So, every afternoon when they got home from work, after they fed T&T, they would put two big plates of dry cat food in the parking lot of their apartment building, and some neighborhood strays had dinner.

Not everyone in their building on Naomi Street liked the idea. One of their neighbors threw water at the diners who would temporarily retreat, but quickly returned to the meal when “the rain” ceased.

When they came to America, the four of them lived in the basement of our home while the two humans looked for jobs. Tula, the very incarnation of “scaredee cat,” rarely left their basement room. Tuli is best remembered at our house for stripping the bark from a newly planted tree in our front yard, killing it.

Tuli and Tula long ago have left their earthly paradise for whatever form of gan eden awaits cats.

As if to show how independent of her mother she has become, Abby has replaced them with two dogs.

^^^

Veteran journalist Aaron Leibel writes for The Jerusalem Post and Washington Jewish week. He is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Figs and Alligators: An American Immigrant’s Life in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, available from Amazon in Kindle and paperback, Barnes and Noble, and at every local bookstore in the U.S. and Canada.

Photos: Tuli (left) & Tula

Israeli soldier

Aaron Leibel, on having a daughter in the Israel Defense Forces

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In an earlier post, I wrote about daughter number one Lauren’s service in the IDF.  Debra, daughter number two, also did her army service, but it was much more complicated.

She had returned to America with Bonnie, her sister Abby and me when she was 16, at the end of her sophomore year in high school. She had no legal obligation to return to be drafted, because she hadn’t received her first in a series of call-up orders from the army before we left the country.

But Debra says she never had any doubt that she would go back to do her service. It wasn’t patriotism, she says. Rather, being in the IDF was part of life in Israel. All her friends and acquaintances would do it, and she knew she would join them.

For some reason, by going to summer school the year we arrived and the following year completing the 11th grade — she and her sister, Abby, spent that first year as students at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Md. — she would have enough credits to graduate without going to the 12th grade.

So she graduated a year early and spent what should have been her 12th-grade year at Montgomery College. The 30 credits she earned were considered the equivalent of having passed the bagrut exams — a series of grueling tests that Israeli youngsters need to pass to be admitted to university.

She returned to Israel in July and worked as a waitress in the cafeteria in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), waiting to be called up. She was supposed to be drafted in September. But the army had not finalized her physical profile by that fall, and so her induction was postponed to February. That was very fortunate because had she gone in in September, she wouldn’t have met Nadav — one of her instructors in a course she took, who later became her husband.

Female soldiers then did three weeks of basic training, but after 10 days, she and other trainees left for a three-month-long course in Intelligence.

At the completion of the course, she was assigned to a base in the Negev for the remainder of her time in the IDF. Her job required a good knowledge of English. That’s all she will allow me to say. (Lauren also was in Intelligence, stationed at the main IDF facility in Tel Aviv. After more than 30 years, she still refuses to tell me what she did.)

Photo: Debra, in her uniform, looks a little disheveled and very tired.

Prior to her induction, Debra lived in our apartment in Jerusalem with Lauren and her boyfriend Dror, soon to become Lauren’s husband. After she met Nadav, Debra spent most of her leave from the army at his parents’ house.

She was classified as a hayelet bodida, a lone soldier, someone serving without his or her parents living in the country.

The army provided those soldiers some extra benefits to try to compensate for the absence of their loved ones. For example, Debra got a free but time-limited telephone call to her parents once a month. While taking her course, she and her fellow soldiers got to go home every Friday and Saturday. She was permitted to leave the base two hours before the others — the rationale being that she would have to do shopping for herself for Shabbat. Because the other soldiers would return to the base with baskets of food from their doting parents, she was allowed, as compensation, the privilege of having a toaster in her room.

The more substantive benefits included a salary that was almost twice as large as her fellow soldiers. However, she notes, the sum of money was nonetheless very small, inadequate for paying for housing had she been forced to do that.

She also received three weeks a year to visit us. The first year, we came to Israel for Lauren’s wedding and the visit was in the Jewish state. The second year, Debra came to our house. (This extra three weeks vacation had a downside. She was told that would have been named a mifakedet [literally, commander, but maybe better translated as team leader] in her unit were it not for those extra three weeks off.)

All in all, Debra’s very glad she served in the IDF. Not only did she meet her husband, but those years put her on the path to her current life.

^^^

Veteran journalist Aaron Leibel writes for The Jerusalem Post and Washington Jewish week. He is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Figs and Alligators: An American Immigrant’s Life in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, available from Amazon in Kindle and paperback, Barnes and Noble, and at every local bookstore in the U.S. and Canada.

Shuk

Aaron Leibel: Shopping at the shuk

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In my memoir, Figs and Alligators, I describe in some detail our weekly trips to the shuk (Mehane Yehuda, the market close to the western entrance to Jerusalem).

As I noted, after my wife, Bonnie, and I finished there, we lugged our heavy plastic shopping bags laden with fruits and veggies a goodly distance to Pinati’s Restaurant on King George Street in the heart of the city where we bought hummus and other delicacies to take home for Friday and Saturday lunch.

Sometimes, then we would walk two more blocks to the Atara cafe on the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall for a cup of coffee and, if we were feeling flush, a piece of its delicious cake.

Then we lifted our loads — made even heavier by those restaurant takeout purchases — and trudged slowly back to our car for the long ride home. If it was winter, it might well be raining; in the summer, it would be blazing hot. And for several years we did all this without a car — we bought our very used 1971 Beatle in 1982 —and schlepping bags full of food on and off buses was a pain in that unmentionable lower body part.

As you read about our travails, I’ll probably hear you mutter: “What, they didn’t have supermarkets in Israel in the 1970s? And if they did, they didn’t sell fruit and vegetables?”

Yes and yes. Our neighborhood supermarket devoted almost a complete quarter of the store to those foods — after all, they were a major part not only of the Leibel family diet but of that of most Israelis.

True, the quality was somewhat higher in the shuk, and the prices were moderately cheaper. But even supermarket produce was pretty fresh and cheap — if it wasn’t, everyone would have gone to the shuk. Undoubtedly if we hadn’t gone to town, we would have missed out on Pinati’s delights for lunch.

So, somewhat better food perhaps at cheaper prices, some great hummus and occasionally, a wonderful cup of coffee — all that is one side of the scale. But then there’s the heat or the rain and the walking through crowded streets and the aching leg and arm muscles.

So, in retrospect, was it worth it? Absolutely. Despite all the discomforts, it was great fun. If you  haven’t seen the stalls stacked high with scrumptious-looking goods, heard the stall owners yell out their wares in sing-song fashion as they compete for business (tapuzim taimim, raq esser — delicious oranges, only 10 [shekels a kilogram]; agvaniot achi yafot — the most beautiful tomatoes), felt the people jostle each in their search for the best deals available, put it on your bucket list.

Bonnie and I both worked hard — at two jobs each — during the week. Friday, we could go to the market and unwind. Although we probably would have scoffed at the idea back then, it also was a chance for us to bond.

Bonnie would visit one of her former patients who owned a store across the street from the market. She always would buy a few pieces of fresh coconut from the vendor at one entrance; I always was on the lookout for fresh figs, my favorite fruit, but no alligators please.

Those Friday mornings are among my most cherished memories of life in Israel.

^^^

Veteran journalist Aaron Leibel writes for The Jerusalem Post and Washington Jewish week. He is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Figs and Alligators: An American Immigrant’s Life in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, available from Amazon in Kindle and paperback, Barnes and Noble, and at every local bookstore in the U.S. and Canada.

Photo: Mehane Yehuda market, replete with new roof and flooring, improvements undertaken after we left the country.

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