Dispirited Dust

Jerusalem, Sep 8, 2015

Soupy, moldy, thick, brooding, dark, moist, dank. This is our weather and the forecast calls for more of the same. I walk outside and feel as if I am entering a wet sauna. I try to breathe deeply, but there is little oxygen to enter my lungs.

Is that the sun or the moon? Is it morning or evening?

The world is silent, still. I look up and can barely make out an orb in the sky. Is this the sun? Or the moon? Is it evening or morning? Time has stopped. The wind has abandoned us, the air all but seeped away.

This thick, damp mush takes me back to a distant memory: an old, creaky attic filled with dusty, moldy furniture, cobwebs, darkness. Or is it a basement with old, wet carpets, dust balls, moist cardboard. Where am I?

Poetic fallacy was a term coined by John Ruskin in the 19^th century. In this literary convention, nature mirrors human events. We have read of dancing flowers, moping owls, angry winds and happy larks in poetry.

How about today's morose moon, dispirited dust and lugubrious layers? The Middle East is being smothered by a sandstorm so large, it can be clearly seen on satellites from space.

NASA photo of the sandstorm.

With origins in Syria and Iraq, the massive dust cloud sits 600 metres high, coating Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt’s Sinai, Cyprus and Israel with sand particles, forcing the thermometer to soar to 100 degrees Fahrenheit with humidity levels reaching 85 percent.

The Middle East is shrouded in a foreboding smog and the countries affected all simmer in this thick, unbearable soup together. As we try to catch a breath, the world powers sit from afar and judge us. Their vision is as clouded as the air, our future endangered like the dust particles we are forced to breathe.

If this sandstorm plays in the practice of poetic fallacy, just wait for the next blood moon. That will be on September 28, the last of the four tetrad lunar eclipses. The skies looked similar in 1492, 1948 and in 1967, years that changed the Jewish world forever.

We are now entering a new year and the signs outside are rather brooding.  At least we have front row seats over here in Israel.

A sweet and good year are necessary ingredients in our stagnating soup, so let’s pour them in.

The Tower of David, Jerusalem.