Garden of the heart - Haaretz

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Thu., January 10, 2008 Shvat 3, 5768

Israel Time: 22:47 (EST+7)

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Garden of the heart

By Ariel Hirschfeld

Tags: Neot Kedumim

Two months ago, Nogah Hareuveni, a naturalist and the founder of the biblical nature reserve Neot Kedumim, passed away. Hareuveni was not occupied with botany or "nature" as such. He was a man with an idea. The progenitor and teacher of an idea - actually, a far broader, indeed all-embracing, conceptual cluster. He was occupied with nature in this land, with the Hebrew language, the Bible, the writings of the ancient Jewish sages, the legends and traditions of the Arabs and the Bedouin, and above all, he was immersed in words and their interpretations. Nogah Hereuveni was a whole school of thought that emerged as an offshoot of the ideas of his parents, Ephraim and Hannah Hareuveni.

The Hareuveni school sought to reconnect the ancient Hebrew and Aramaic words referring to nature to the world of nature in the Land of Israel. The premise was that the Hebrew language as a culture of speech was created in this region, and the fact that it was severed from the region during years of exile cut off the words of the language from their natural habitat, leaving its earthly realm gaping and insubstantial. True, Hebrew speakers knew, albeit sometimes only vaguely, what the Four Species and Seven Species were, but for most of the world of flora and fauna - the vital core of existence - there were no words, and if there were any, they floated about without a specific designation. What exactly were an alon (oak), dror (sparrow) or shrakrak (European bee-eater)?

The linguistic and scientific clarification of such terms had its genesis in Mendele Moykher Sforim's "Sefer toldot hateva" ("History of Nature," 1856). This was mostly a translation of a German book of popular science. However, Mendele's fascinating Hebrew interpretations of the animals' names and the ramified network of sources he developed to this end constitute the inception of Zionist biology, and of a riveting intellectual movement within it, whose luminaries are the great poets Bialik and Tchernikovsky: the movement to revitalize Hebrew-Jewish nature as a universe of feeling and physicality, work and art. Knowledge of the words concerning flora was naturally the primary thrust of this clarification, because plants were the prime symbol of the national ethos of uprooting and replanting.

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Into the high linguistic and national drama in the heroic age of Zionism strode Ephraim Hareuveni, a young botanist from the Second Aliyah (the wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine from 1904 to 1914), who developed his investigation of the words and the plants in a distinctive way, based on a close reading of biblical sources and the works of the sages, and on cross-referencing them with the Arab names of plants and with Arab traditions relating to the local flora and fauna. Following the establishment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Hareuvenis were among the first members of the botanical department, and they founded the Museum of the Plants of Bible and Talmudic Literature, which was located on the university's Mount Scopus campus until 1948.

Since the university's inception, Ephraim Hareuveni had dreamed of establishing a Hebrew botanical garden on Mount Scopus, to be called the Garden of the Prophets and Sages, which would exhibit flora from the Land of Israel based on the groupings of the ancient sources in which the plants were mentioned ("Song of Songs," "Isaiah's Vineyard," Talmud). This intriguing idea obtained Bialik's thrilled encouragement and the support, temporarily at least, of the university. But forces stronger than any idea of this kind brought it tumbling down: The Hareuvenis were obdurate people, and a nimbus of dark antipathy shrouded their deeds. In addition, Ephraim Hareuveni's militant style, which enveloped his ideas in layers of eccentricity, tarnished his reputation and ultimately led the other botanical researchers of his generation to break with him. His important and invigorating idea, which should have been a stable and valid component of the introduction of Hebrew words congruent with the local natural world, was lost.

The severance that ensued between "Hebrew botany" and "pure" botany, as pursued by that generation's leading researchers of Israeli botany (Michael Zohari and Naomi Feinbrun), and the implicit confrontation between "the scientific" and "culture and language," isolated the Hareuvenis and turned them into a kind of counter-school. At the same time, Israeli botany was left without in-depth explanation of the Hebrew sources and was effectively cut off from all serious thought regarding words and nature. This development is responsible for the repulsive lexicon of the world of Hebrew flora, which contains such monstrosities of language as hardofnin hatsitsit (oriental viper's grass) and Aaronsohnia factorovskyi (Faktorowsky's Aaronsonia).

The Hareuvenis' children, Ayelet Hashahar and Nogah, grew up amid this ideological tension, and as is often the case with children who are raised in a home rife with idea and struggle, both of them became crusaders for their parents' idea. Nogah Hareuveni was passionate about that idea, and many people (David Ben-Gurion among them) sensed his seriousness and needs. Much of the energy that coursed through him stemmed from his parents' feelings of persecution and discrimination, but Nogah possessed a number of traits that opened doors that had been closed to his parents. He was extremely practical and understood that the sphere in which to implement this idea was not academia, but the Israeli culture of nature and hiking. He was also able to offset his militant ardor with great personal charm, warmth, simplicity of manners and impressive charisma.

Thus did Nogah Hareuveni create, in the wake of the "Hareuveni idea," one of the most interesting of the nature reserves in the country, and certainly the most important project in the realm of education for this physical place - for the cultures that inhabit it, for its flora and fauna: Neot Kedumim, the Biblical Landscape Reserve in Israel.

Neot Kedumim extends across a few hills west of Modi'in, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It does not possess the baroque order conceived by Ephraim Hareuveni in his plan for the Garden of the Prophets and Sages, which was to have consisted of concentric rings of groupings around a hill, on which would be planted moriah (which Hareuveni preferred to marvah, for sage) with the Temple menorah towering above.

Neot Kedumim is a delicate fusion between natural fields, shrubbery and groves, where indigenous fruit trees are planted, alongside agricultural sites dating back to antiquity (an olive press, a wine press) - among them some very "Hareuveni-type" plots, which display the plants mentioned in biblical verses or in Mishnaic tractates. Even if not everyone will be persuaded by the identity of every shoshanat amakim (lily of the valley) or hoah (thistle) here, it is impossible not to be thrilled by these landscapes, which have been created in affinity with the well-known verses, so meaningful and precious, of the Song of Songs; by the simple, sublime beauty of the groupings of dates, figs and pomegranates; by the capers, vines, oaks and grasses of the fields; and by the straightforward, unscholarly presence of the Hebrew words in these natural expanses.

In the various traditions of the world's gardens, the plants have been laid out according to many different orders and logics: by heavenly cycles, by geographical regions of the world, by colors and by the symbols of the ascent of the soul along the degrees of wisdom. A garden is always a planted symbol, even if it is as modest as a boulevard. Among the gardens in this country, few were planted with thought given to the feel of the plants in this actual place, in the soil of the land and in its seasons. The garden of Nogah Hareuveni at Neot Kedumim, only part of which is planted - its planned sections are scattered in the landscape almost randomly - illustrates a form of garden that brings together a powerful landscape, potent words and tremendous skies. There is nothing in it of the logic that forces itself on nature, only a quest and a heightened way of looking at the vistas of the place. Of the Israeli gardens, it is certainly the most Israeli.

It is not superfluous to mention here, after Nogah Hareuveni's death, that he was born, in the Hebrew year 5684 (1924), on Tu Bishvat - the Jewish Arbor Day.

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