Dinner with Eli and Batya – Thoughts on the Bible Lands Museum, Jerusalem |
Every year, I spend time in Israel. This year, I am here as a film producer and writer for two documentary films and two books that will be based on these documentaries, all on Jewish themes of one sort or another.
And every year my wife Mira and I visit the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. It is a marvelous place dedicated to exploring the relationship of the Bible to its wider Egyptian and Mesopotamian (as well as classical) cultural context.
The artifacts are artfully displayed, and it is always a joy to contemplate the past in this well-designed, well-lit and quiet facility. As a former museum conservator I take my hat off to the management. The Museum contents were once the private collection of the late Eli and the still active Batya Borovski. They donated them to the Municipality of Jerusalem and the Israeli public. The Museum attracts thousands of visitors each year.
Many years ago Mira and I had the privilege of being the dinner guests of Eli and Batya at their house in Toronto, Canada. The food was good and the conversation stimulating.
We had been introduced to each other through a common friend. He had told Eli that I was a student of ethnomusicology interested in the then and still fraught academic argument about the relationship between the music of the ancient near east and that of the medieval middle east.
Had there been a total break in musical cultures with the rise of Islam in the area that had once been the Roman Mediterranean or, was there some sort of still to be discovered continuity? The debate is still open.
Eli asked me about my research on the matter. I explained to him that I recently had done a year of ethnomusicological fieldwork among the Sinai Bedouin who still wandered its eastern wastes near what was once the Biblical oasis of Kadesh Barnea. At the time I was writing up my results which I later shared at an international conference on ethnology in Montreal.
Having first consulted every then living........