•
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
48—Friday, December 13, 1968
Digging for Love in Israel
a.
By various channels it may have
reached the ears of the adventur-
ous that one way of spending a
cheap holiday in Israel is to volun-
teer for an archaeological excava-
tion there. But whoever contem-
plates this plan solely as a means
to a cheap holiday would do well
to dismiss the intention here and
now. Archaeological holidays are
not really cheap. They are fun.
Even in the circumstances and
countries where paid manual labor
is not prohibitive in cost, archaeol-
ogists need intelligent volunteers
when they want to carry out an
excavation. If labor is expensive
or primitive, the problem is still
more acute, but in any case, none
but the most restricted excavation
can be effectively run or made to
yield its full results if the director
alone is the supervisor.
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What can the volunteer from out-
side Israel expect? If he volunteers
for a "dig" he can normally ex-
pect to get his living expenses from
the body running the expedition.
While he will have to pay his own
fare to and from Israel, he can
expect to be free of concern so long
as he is digging. He should, how-
ever, be warned that he may, in
some cases, need to cover his food
and lodgings until the first expense
account comes back at the end of
the month. The other warning is
that no volunteers should join an
excavation for less than two weeks,
because they need time to learn
their elementary duties, and only
after that will they be of profit to
the excavation and in a position to
appreciate the job. The longer they
can stay, the more they are likely
to experience satisfaction and see
something of interest. Good weath-
er, friendliness and the intriguing
quality of the new-old land are to
be found by all open to receive
them.
What about health and physical
fitness? A high degree of physical
work is not usually demanded of
the volunteer on a normal excava-
tion, but stamina is. He is not usu-
ally asked to dig with pick and
shovel, but to supervise or to per-
form delicate operations of search
and cleaning with small tools. But
this is tiring and he should not be
liable to sunstroke or allergic to
dust. Also, the volunteer should
be ready for smple conditions and
equipped with a sense of humor,
possession of which performs mir-
acles even with persons of com-
pletely alien mentalities.
Inquiries from prospective volun-
teers should be addressed to The
Deputy Director, The Department
of Antiquities, Ministry of Educa-
tion and Culture, Jerusalem, Israel.
The telephone is the greatest
nuisance among conveniences, the
greatest convenience among nu-
siances. Robert Lynd,
BR 2-1600
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TOMMY'S
BARBER SHOP
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(Copyright 1967, JTA Inc.)
Historians who specialize in the
history of the Second Common-
wealth (e.g. Zeitlin) claim that the
coffin as such was originally used
only as a means of transportation
when the grave was far away from
the place where the individual died.
Thus, Joseph, whose remains had
to be transported from Egypt to
Israel through forty years of travel,
had his body placed in some type
of coffin. Many Jews who lived
outside of Judea and wanted their
remains taken to Judea for burial,
were brought to their eternal rest-
ing place in coffins. Some, who
wanted to be buried alongside their
parents or in family burial plots,
had their remains transported in
the coffin. Eventually people be-
gan using the coffins as containers
in which the dead were actually
buried. It is interesting to note that
many observant Jews of our gen-
eration insisted that while they be
transported to their burial lot in a
coffin, that they nevertheless be
removed from the coffin and placed
in the grave without the coffin. In
such a case the coffin was usually
burned since its use was prohibited
once it had already been used by
the corpse for which it was origi-
nally acquired.
The face of the deceased is
always covered in traditional
Jewish funerals.
Originally, it seems that some
had their faces uncovered. This
led to a situation where the rich
who could afford to doctor up the
faces of their deceased would have
the faces uncovered while the poor
who could not afford such luxury
would have their faces covered in
embarrassment. It was thus or-
dained that all the faces of the
deceased be covered so as to make
no distinction between rich and
poor. Generally speaking the
rabbis sought to prohibit the bodies
of the deceased from being uncov-
ered so as to prevent people from
concerning themselves with the
spiritual entity of the human being.
For this reason it was considered
a prohibition by the Rabbis for
anyone to gaze upon the face of
the deceased.
Actually the term "aron" indi-
cates a box or container in a gen-
eral sense. However, in the case
of the coffin the expression "aron"
reflects the name given to the box
in which the tablets bearing the
Ten Commandments were carried
by the Levites through the wilder-
ness as the people of Israel made
their way from Egypt to the prom-
ised land. The rabbis tell us that
they carried two such boxes. One
contained the tablets and the other
contained the remains of Joseph.
It was an indication that Joseph,
who rested in one had carried out
the tenets contained in the other
(i.e. the Jewish religion). Today
it also bears the connotation that
the remains will have a degree of
sanctity.
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In his interesting essay "Myths
and Realities in American For-
eign Policy," Prof. Commager
makes this comment:
" . . gradually the Old World
sloughed off many of its vices and
inhumanities and overcame many
of its handicaps, while the New
World acquired some of all of
these for itself. If the relative po-
sition of the two societies were
not wholly reversed, they were,
after a fashion, brought into equil-
ibrium. Old World monarchs were
no longer absolute, and in time
most European governments could
claim to be at least as democratic
as the American. The Inquisition
disappeared and so, too, religious
intolerance; and if anti-Semitism
lingered on in parts of Europe,
racism lingered on in all of Amer-
ica . "
Office and Factory Forms
and Office Stationary
•
ALLEN'S SALON
America's leading thinkers, no-
ted historians, sociologists and po-
litical analysts, have joined in
viewing the status of this land,
the meaning of its institutional
policies, the attitudes of the world
toward us.
In "America Now," edited by
John G. Kirk, director of Free
Europe Press and editor of Diplo-
mat magazine, the conditions of
our land are studied by Henry
Steele Commager, Howard Zinn,
Frank Trager, James Carey, Ken-
neth Boulding, Floyd McKissick,
Eric Mann, Jay Martin, Benjamin
DeMott, George Gallup, Otis
Guernsey Jr., T. George Harris,
William Jovanovich, Russell Kirk,
Robert Maclver, George McGov-
ern, Roger Masters, William Pfaff,
Bernard Rosenberg, Elspeth Dav-
ies Rostow, Richard Rovere and
Edmund Stillman.
This challenging and thought-
provoking volume, published by
Atheneum (122 E, 42nd, NY 17)
deals with the major issues affect-
ing American life, with our domes-
tic and foreign policies, with our
economy and experiments in de-
mocracy.
Praise for the dimensional suc-
cess attained by the authors' who
are included in this book is ex-
pressed in a preface by John W.
Kluge, president of Metromedia.
Editor Kirk of this volume, in
his introduction, comments:
"It is notoriously easier to iden-
tify problems than to propose their
solutions, and certainly it was not
the purpose of this project to do
irresponsible damage to the still-
viable `myths.' But the operative
premise was and is that the via-
bility of many of our national
myths is already in question pre-
cisely because the assumptions on
which they are grounded are no
longer taken for granted . . . "
This sums up properly the ap-
proach to issues that are problema-
tic, to the "myths" that are often
realities, as outlined in the many
essays by the scholars who have
joined in this effort.
Commercial
• • • HELEN ZINBERG
• • .
•
R.E.
•
Best Wishes for A Happy and Healthy Hanuka
Leading Thinkers View 'America Now'
Hanuka Greetings
IN-SINK-ERATOR
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