Lethargic Man (anag.)

I've been writing recently on WhatsApp about the places in and around Berlin I've been visiting by bike recently, because it's easier to bung photos onto there; but it strikes me I should make a bit of an effort to blog about them here too, so I'll start here.

You've all heard of Checkpoint Charlie, the main crossing point between East and West Berlin for foreigners. (There were, it turns out, a number of other ones for goods vehicles and for Berliners.) Well, there were also Checkpoints Alpha and Bravo, the former where the motorway connecting West Germany and Berlin crossed the inner-German border, and the latter where it crossed into Berlin (near where it got moved, which I posted about here recently), and I went for a visit two or three weeks ago.

There was a vast compound on the East German side of the border for checking vehicles, almost all of which has been torn down or repurposed now; it's now a commercial estate called Europarc, and is where eBay has its Berlin office (which is why I decided not to apply for a job with eBay, because it's in the middle of nowhere). However, the commandant's watchtower remains, inside which is a little museum (shut when I was there), and outside some infoboards (in German only).

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Not far from there one can also find the tank monument. This was originally a Soviet tank on a plinth to commemorate the dead of the battle for Berlin in 1945.

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It was first set up on one of the main roads out of Berlin after the Soviet occupation of the city but before the division of the city amongst the four allies, which led to it ending up in the American sector. During the Berlin blockade (when the Soviets stopped delivery of supplies to West Berlin, in an attempt to force the western Allies to give up the whole city to them, which the Allies foiled with a huge long-running airlift operation), anger against the Soviets from the West Berliners led to anti-Soviet graffiti and even the tank being set on fire.

Eventually the Soviets relocated the tank (twice) to East German territory, near the border, with the gun barrel pointing at West Berlin.

After the fall of communism, the tank got taken away and replaced with a pink... snow loader, whatever that is. (I think it's a type of snowplough, but it's not the normal German word for snowplough, and it doesn't look like one either.)

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Here's a higher-resolution photo made available under a Creative Commons licence by Wikipedia user Lichterfelder:

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From time to time I have something delivered to my father's place in Newcastle, when having it shipped to Germany would cost an arm and a leg. This year, however, as I was not able to make it to the UK to collect these, I got my father to forward them on to me in a single parcel (along with a year's worth of post to his address). Thus I now have waiting for me to read/watch as appropriate:

• A copy of the Exagoge of Ezekiel, which is a 2200-year-old retelling of the Exodus in the form of a Greek play, which plays to my interest in the neglected (except by academics) Jewish literature of the Second Temple period.
• A copy of the play Journey's End, set during the First World War. I studied this at school, and wanted to reread it, not least in the wake of having recently (well, a year ago) rewatched Blackadder Goes Forth, which I was astonished to discover is now itself also used for teaching about the war.
• A copy of the Tom Baker Doctor Who serial Shada, the production of which in 1979 got derailed by strike action, and which was finally completed in animation, with voiceovers by the original cast members, almost forty years earlier. My interest in this is that it was the source of elements of the Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, which elements Adams, who was the Doctor Who screenwriter, cannibalised from his abortive earlier creation.

An eclectic selection, I hear you say? Hell yes, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Way back when, I started keeping track on a map of whereabouts in London I'd cycled. There's probably apps for this nowadays, but when I started this, smartphones didn't yet exist (as far as most people are concerned). When I moved to Berlin, I started doing the same for that city. There were probably apps for this, but I didn't have a smartphone until a few months ago, so I continued drawing lines on a (digital) map the way I had for London.

After approaching four years, I suddenly realised, with an inner wail of despair, that I should have been doing this in a layered image, so that I could turn my exploration of Berlin into an animation. Now of course it was too late, and Berlin was already quite explored, and I had few earlier versions of my map graphic left.

But then, when I realised I would be moving shortly to southwest Berlin, and there would be a whole new wave of exploration, I decided to start using image layers anyway. And then of course the lockdown happened, and I started going on bike rides to keep myself fit rather than simply cycling the same route to and from work all the time.

So here is the result, as it currently stands. There's quite a lot of new territory covered within the course of this year, and I haven't even made my flat move yet! (I will continue updating this graphic as I cover new territory.)

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After designing my „Ich bin ein Berliner geworden“ sweatshirt, I was on a roll, and designed another one for my father to get me for my birthday. (Shame it could be months before anyone sees it except on Facebook.)

Click through for higher resolution.

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Here's something I've been wondering about for going on for twenty years, but had (some) new insights into in the last year or two, as I shall explain. Orthodox Judaism of today portrays itself as being how Judaism has been practised for millennia (until the rise of the Reform in the early nineteenth century), but is that really the case? ( Read more... )

Sometimes I look at Judaism and think the fundamentalists took over the religion. This is not, however, I think a recent phenomenon. Looking at the literature in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it seems to be the case that the fundamentalists had taken over there too (for at least the Qumran sect). And even in the time after the return from the Babylonian exile, we see Nehemiah imposing much stricter standards on the returnees than they had themselves been adhering to.

Of course, there was a group of people who did take over Judaism almost two thousand years ago: the rabbis, whose movement represented the continuation of Pharisaism. ( Read more... )

Last Shovuos the topic came up in conversation with Rabbi Reuven Firestone of the kingdom of Ḥimyar in present-day Yemen, which was Jewish (or at least its royal family and much of its population) in the final century or two of its existence before its destruction in the sixth century. Why were there so many Jews there? Reuven told me that after the Mishna was written, it—meaning rabbinical Judaism in general—was generally accepted in the Land of Israel, but not in Babylonia. The rabbis sent emissaries to Babylonia to convert the Jews there to accepting the Talmud; thus the people the Talmud portrays as "ignoramuses" were actually not non-practising Jews but those practising a different stream of Judaism.

As the Babylonian community gradually became increasingly hostile to non-rabbinical Judaism, it is thought, so Reuven said, that Ḥimyar became a refuge for those who would not accept the authority of the Talmud. With the destruction of the kingdom however, the last bastion of pre-rabbinical Judaism came to an end.

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So what are we left with, when we manage to avoid looking at Jewish history through rabbinically-tinted glasses? Sometimes I think Judaism as we have it came "off the derech" centuries ago. But the corollary of Judaism having come off the derech is that there is a derech. The question is only one of how to find it, when the Torah doesn't give clear instructions on how to obey it.

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I only recently discovered the remark of an early advocate for reforming Jewish law (his name was Jesus of Nazareth, you may have heard of him) that the Sabbath was made for people and not the other way around". I think there's a lot to be said for this. But the solution is not to simply junk three thousand years of tradition and just go with what you like (or not if you're not a Reform Jew at least, which I'm not). The solution is to pore through the evidence and try and find what Shabbos observance (or kashrus, or whatever) looked like before the fundamentalists got ahold of the religion, or to put it another way: what the essence of these practices is.

But that's not really possible because the earlier (i.e. Biblical) writers took knowledge of this all for granted, and evidence from the Second Temple period either suffers from a taboo on writing down oral law, or is sectarian (i.e. divergent from the path that led to modern Judaism. So what, then, am I to do?

The answer is of course keep grappling with the issue. After all, "wrestles with God" is what the name of my people, Israel, means.

Now that must have been an interesting discussion: the ultra-Orthodox rabbit, the secular Jew and the Christian saint:

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Whilst Bar-Navi was busy with that, Jane went on an expedition to view the Hippopotamus Fountain:

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Be careful, Jane; hippos are very aggressive animals!

Meanwhile the hunters are searching very hard, but they just don't seem to be able to find the hippo.

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When the fountain is turned on, water jets upwards out of the hippo's nostrils, but apparently I chose the wrong time to visit.

A few years ago, aviva_m and I visited the Danube delta in Romania.

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Holidaying in the Black Forest this year, I thought it might be cool to visit the river's upper end; I don't think there's another river which I have visited both source and estuary of.

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What to do when your baby has grown too big for his cute bunny slippers:

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I received a pleasant surprise on Sunday,^* when I got an email from my brother Darren telling me he was at the National Museum of Computing (at Bletchley Park), where, he told me:

There's a room full of Beebs^†... all fitted with a custom ROM of every single game ever released for the BBC...

Well Michael, I didn't realise you have been forever immortalised in this museum!

Congratulations :)

* British understatement, for my German readers: It made my day.

† The BBC Microcomputer, which was pretty much universal in schools, and also in many homes, our own included, throughout the 1980s.

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At the end of last year, I saw a couple of people posting online saying they had read 150 books during the course of the year. 150! I'd read... *tot*tot*tot* thirteen.

Well, I've always said I was a slow reader for a bibliophile; but it occurred to me that maybe last year wasn't representative; after all, having a child born was fairly disruptive to my established patterns. So I went back over my reading log to find out, and the result was a little surprising.

There are a few expected correlations, which I have marked on the graph; but there are other things I expected to see affect the graph which did not: the start of my first job, the start and end of my sole previous long-term relationship; and I had to struggle to work out the causes of some of the observed features, some of which still elude me. (Why did I read so few books in 2012? I moved to Berlin for two months, but that shouldn't have dented the yearly total so badly.)

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