Terry Bozzio в представлении не нуждается, а вот девушка по имени Yael барабанит в группе My Ruin. Очень не плохо, кстати. Подкупает прекрасно поставленная техника игры руками.

Quelques belles photos d’un vieux thème que je placerai bien dans mes “inéquations” …

Yael mariée dans l'oubli

Yael mariée dans l'oubli

Yael mariée dans l'oubli

Merci à Yael pour sa patience et sa résistance au froid :p

So I realize I havent been good at updating recently, I’ve just been so busy!  My parents have been in town for almost two weeks now and I have been spending a lot of time with them, and my friend Dave.  Not to mention I leave Israel/Palestine in a little over ONE WEEK (can you believe it?) so I am really working hard to finish up some projects here at work.  I promise I will write much more fun stuff soon and share some of these amazing pictures from recent days.
In the meantime, here are two pics from the wedding I attended earlier this month of my friend (and former ACYPL delegate) Alon Rozen and his new wife Yael!

Neely and me @ the wedding

Yael singing a song to Alon =)

8:O6. Yael komt apetrots de slaapkamer binnengestormd: “Mijn tandje is er uit!”.

Vorige week nog kwam ze in grote paniek vertellen dat haar tandje wiebelde. Dat mocht niet, want ze wou niet oud zijn… Dagen achtereen.

We hebben het tandje vanmorgen plechtig in het potje van tandenfee gestoken. Vanavond brengt diezelfde tandenfee nog een cadeautje om het ‘leed’ te verzachten.

Yael oefent even op straat met de step.

En Yoram probeert zijn driewieler uit in de tuin.

I will try to upload this blog much more frequently than I have been, because every day brings something new and exciting. So I have been here for a week now, and I think I will use the next few blog posts to play catch-up:

After that initial little issue with airport security I was spoiled rotten with hospitality. Hours later my dear friend Adi was still waiting for me at the airport. I went to her home and showered. She offered me her bed for the evening and a cell phone to use for several weeks until I settled in. We met up for a late dinner on the beach in Tel Aviv with another friend, Nily. Nily offered to let me borrow her car whenever I needed. They were both terribly embarrassed about my airport hassles, and nervous about my decision to live in the West Bank for the summer. I love them for all of their concern.

The next day I left Adi’s around noon for IPCRI, the organization that I am working with this summer. It is located on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, on the Israeli side of the Green Line right next to the Bethlehem checkpoint. I am living in Bethlehem, and commuting through the checkpoint into Israel every day.

At IPCRI I will be working on this amazing project on Israeli settlers and Palestinian refugees. They just finished months and months of literature review and I arrived just in time to start interviewing settlers and refugees. Fate? I think so.

That afternoon (Thursday the 18th still) I attended a group for Israeli and Palestinian women that Yael, a woman at my office, is trying to start. I had my camera on hand so you can see some of the photos below. One of the Palestinian women, Manal, escorted Ayaka and I to our apartment in Bethlehem. (oh yeah, Ayaka is my roommate, she is from Japan but is getting her Masters at the University of Chicago, don’t know if I mentioned that yet) We went to the souq and got some amazing falafal (be jealous). Everyone and everything has been amazing so far, I will write more soon.

(hover over a photo for more info)

You can’t go wrong with 9th Wonder!

>>>DOWNLOAD<<<

Yael als lieveheersbeestje in de schoolmusical ‘Het Land van Kwien’. Ontroerend mooi… een uur en een kwart lang. En neen, de foto is niet mislukt. De andere kindjes zijn ‘vakkundig’ gesmudged

Yael’s slide are here

May 21, 2009

You can download this week’s show by clicking HERE

OR

Download past shows by viewing the recent entries on the right.

            You can probably tell that I am just doing the show ay any point during the week.  My goal is to still keep doing it once a week.  Thank you for taking the time to read this and listen.  It means a lot.  I can’t say that enough.

            This week’s show is action packed.  For some reason, even when I think I don’t have any more songs to share, I manage to find something I love to share.

From left: Kristofferson, Cash, Jennings, Nelson

 Waylon Jennings made last week awesome for me, and I shared a song he recorded with you.  He formed a group with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson called The Highwaymen.  Hopefully I can get around to listening to a CD that was handed off to me so I can get some Highwaymen on for you soon.  For now you get a song about cowboys since we all have a little bit of cowboy in us, right?

There is a cover of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” by Yael Naim.  Naim is an Israeli-born Parisian whose self-titled debut is definitely worth checking out.  She has a great voice and even sings in Hebrew and French on the record.

            There is a little “Did-you-know?” segment after “Epistrophy” by The Thelonius Monk Quartet with John Coltrane.  You will be schooled – or not. There is some Bo Diddley, 2pac, Outkast, and an awesome OK Go song mixed in there too.

            Other than that, the rest are songs that I think are either really pretty, catchy, fun, meaningful, danceable, or any combination thereof, so please enjoy and don’t hesitate to contact me if you want to hear anything or tell me whatever.  Pass it on to your friends who may like this, and have a good week.

            I picked up some awesome stuff at the store yesterday, so look for some A.A. Bondy and Gnarls Barkley, amongst other things, next time.

            Thank you so much for reading and listening.

-Ray

Playlist for May 21, 2009

OK Go – What To Do / ST

Waylon Jennings – Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys / Greatest Hits

Nappy Roots – Awnaw /Watermelon, Chicken And Gritz

Bo Diddley – You Can’t Judge A Book By Its Cover / Say Man: 20 Greatest Hits

Dashboard Confessional – A Plain Morning / Swiss Army Romance

The Raspas – Sensi / Cani Bus

Christina Aguilera – Ain’t No Other Man / Back To Basics                                               

Paul McCartney – Jenny Wren / Chaos And Creation In The Backyard

Tupac Shakur – Brenda’s Got A Baby / Greatest Hits

Michael Jackson – P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing) / Thriller

Sublime – Same In The End / ST

Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane – Epistrophy / At Carnegie Hall

Tristan Prettyman – Simple As It Should Be / twentythree

Outkast – B.O.B. / Stankonia

Sia – Little Black Sandals / Some People Have Real Problems

Yael Naïm – Toxic (Britney Spears cover) – ST

Jim Croce – One Less Set of Footsteps / Photographs & Memories: His Greatest Hits

Outkast - Stankonia

Zo doen ze dat ongeveer aan de kassa bij Colruyt…

Voila, hole in one.

Have you ever felt like you just don’t quite belong? I know! What a cliché? Some poor, self-pitying girl, who has everything, doesn’t feel like she belongs. NEXT! Just wait a moment. I’m not the same. Whilst the premise of my story might sound familiar, I can assure you, it is quite unlike the story you think you know.

A short intro to my life: Hi! My name is Yael. I am a girl, a daughter, a sister, a student, a baby sitter, a friend, and an outsider. I have friends. Don’t get me wrong, and we are all totally BFF (well for now anyway), but at the same time I sort of make myself fit the mould if you know what I mean. I can adapt to my surroundings to make life easier and less lonely. But deep down, I don’t quite belong. One problem is the fact that no one in my grade or any of my family or friends outside of school have the quality I look for, when I try to describe where I feel like I ‘belong.’ You see, I go to a school, I live in a home, and I socialise with people who are all of the same orientation. Not in terms of sexuality, or in terms of the process of thinking, what I mean is slightly more physical. Slightly more, how you say, Caucasian. The problem is, deep down, I want to be black.

 A few months ago, I started my own website, a sort of charity program, “Pennies for Pigments.” The aim of the program is to help me save up for what I like to phrase a “reverse-jackson” operation, aka “black to the future.” In my free time, apart from updating my website, I practice my hip-hop and break dancing. I have managed to successfully perfect my finger-snapping. I attend Hillsong in an attempt to improve my gospel outreach, and I write scripts for movies. Two weeks ago I began filming my first film, “Blacktion”. The story is sort of a memoir of my life so far. Whilst I have lived for a short 17 (soon to be 18) years, I feel as though my story is quite unique, and through film, I am better able to express myself. It isn’t so much a film, more a documentary really. It has only begun, and will not be complete until I am able to find my true identity. I want to feel “blind,” where all I see is black. I’ve always had a problem with finishing things I set out to do. I make a start, then my short attention span kicks in, and I forget what I was doing and move on. Not this time though. You’ll see.

That pretty much brings you up to date. Currently, I’m sitting on my bed, admiring my Will Smith pin-up and trying not to mess my Jamie Foxx print bed spread, all the while, typing this up in my first blog entry. FYI, a blog is basically an online journal, and since I’ve filled my Oprah Winfrey diary, I thought I might as well just jump on the bandwagon and begin my own blog. Gah! My hand is resting against Jamie’s cheek. It’s so white, and unnatural. That reminds me. *Mental note: add purchase black gloves to my to-do-list. Also book in some more appointments at the tanning salon. Enquire at local surgery how much it would potentially cost to have fat from my thighs sucked out and injected into my badoinkah-doink.* Just before, I was reading a site that was talking about the best way to introduce your blog to the big wide world, and they said to talk about your past, present, and dreams for the future. So we have covered my past and present, which brings us up to the future. One day I want to be just like Queen Latifah. Lenny Harry will be my husband. P Diddy my admirer. Missy Elliot my dance teacher. And Morgan Freeman will god-father my children. I’m going to live in the Bronx in NYC, and drive a push bike. My bruthas and sistas will hang with me on the stoop at the front of our townhouse apartments, blasting Destiny’s Child through the boom box, so I can work out some dangerous moves. Hey a girl can dream.

Heroes and Villains Explored – Yael (Judges 4-5)

Right mouse click to save this Podcast as a MP3.

If you have found this resource helpful to you, please do prayerfully consider making a donation. You can support via PayPal, the universal and most secure way to donate money online. You do not need to be a member of Paypal to use their facilities. Thank you

Tonight, we start a new series. This series I have called HAVE – Heroes And Villains Explored – and it will be a series of Podcasts discussing some of the heroes and villains in the Bible, and learning to apply lessons from these people to life in the 21st Century. An example of those who can be seen to be faithful to God (such as King David – a Hero) and unfaithful to God (such as King Saul – a Villain).

It is perhaps a sad fact of church life (and of church history), that very rarely do we hear the stories about the minor women characters of the Bible. So in this series, we will discover together something about the lesser known characters of the Bible as well as the more famous ones. These people from the Bible are like you and I, and we have lessons to learn from them, in order that God is glorified and honoured through our lives. They have a lot to teach us, so the first three in this series will be minor women characters, of whom you probably have never heard spoken about.

Yael (Judges 4&5)

Judges 5v24 – “Yael shall be blessed above women, the wife of Heber the Kenite; blessed shall she be above women in the tent. The first person we are going to look at is Yael. Yael is mentioned in one place and 5 times in all the Bible. Yet as was just read in Judges 5:31, she was accorded great honour and blessing? Why?

Yael’s name, like other Bible names, means more than just a name. It means goat, a graceful goat and the term implies that she was an attractive woman.. In the west, comparing your wife to a goat would be an insult, so most translations apparently use the word hind or deer. So we could quite properly, call Yael the name ‘Yael Doe’.

Yael was the wife of Heber the Kenite. The Kenites were not true Israelites, but were the descendants of Moses’ non Jewish wife. Because they were a roaming nomadic people they lived in tents. In the days of Deborah they had camped at the foot of Mount Tabor. In fact, they were situated very near the place where Barak and Deborah had destroyed Jabin’s mighty army, including his 900 chariots of iron. Jabin had permitted the Kenites to stay in his country because he hoped they would prove to be his ally against the Israelites whom he hated intensely. But they disappointed Jabin’s hopes. Perhaps from the beginning, because they remembered Moses’s great deeds, the Kenites had occasionally sided with Israel.

Yael was a friend of Israel. She rejoiced when she heard of Jabin’s defeat and would have wept when she heard that Sisera had defeated Israel with his chariots. Yael received the honour that Barak would like to have had. By her hand, as though by a judgement of God, Sisera, the enemy of Israel, was killed. Barak would have had that honour if he had not hesitated on the day Deborah had asked him to attack Jabin. But because he hesitated at that time, Deborah, as a prophetess, told him the word of the Lord in Judges 4v9: She said, “I will surely go with you: nevertheless, the journey that you take shall not be for your honour; for Yahweh will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.”

Sisera showed himself to be made of wiser stuff than his soldiers, or so it seemed at first. The survivor in any kind of work, sport or conflict is the person who can keep cool in a crisis and take rational action. Sisera abandons his chariot, which had made him an easily seen target for Barak, as well as of being no use in the mud when it rained, and so he disappears on foot in the direction of Barak’s own town which was perhaps the last direction Barak would look for him.

Near Kedesh, there was land which belonged to the Kenites. Their name likens them to Cain, whose family made all kinds of bronze and iron (Genesis 4:22). More recently they had become friends by marriage with the Israelites, through Moses’ marriage to a Kenite. But a nomadic group such as the Kenites survived by the friends and allies they made, and in this case with Jabin. Given their expertise, they would be natural chariot makers and repairers. These chariot experts had in the past been the key to Sisera’s success but are now the key to his failure.

Then Sisera meets Yael. When Sisera arrives at her home, he expected to be on friendly territory if these Kenites were true allies of his boss Jabin, he has travelled almost fifty miles. Yael comes out to greet him and offers him a warm and smooth welcome. There is a contrast to be seen here. At the time of Yael, when a woman alone, invites a man into her bedroom, in any other context, it would be the act of the seductress in Proverbs 7. Like Yael, she might well be expected to offer a man refreshing drink and comfort, invite him to lie down and relax, reassure him that everything will be all right, and that she will tell him no-one will know of his visit and then be the death of him.

Yael knows the predicament she was in. As a married woman, though at the moment alone and vulnerable, with all the personal insecurity that that means in a time of ware, and as a Kenite wife, she would have been treated by the people of Israel as a traitor on the losing side. At this point, she behaves just like an independent woman, takes her destiny in her own hands, and acts in a way that brings the victory of Israel to its completion in the death of Israel’s enemy commander. Because she was a woman she easily won the confidence of Sisera. He relaxed, after being so careful on the run to Yael’s house, and it cost him his life. Like Barak, Sisera no longer wanted to be involved and was probably fed up of playing the tough macho hero guy. He was physically exhausted, but when he lets himself fall asleep, it is as if he wants to leave everything behind him for a short time. Perhaps he knew that Kenite people were a very caring people to strangers, because in the desert a mutual commitment to hospitality can mean the difference between life and death. He thought he could trust Yael. But perhaps Yael knew that sometimes this hospitality meant more than just sleep and food, and wanted a role reversal. Sisera made a mistake in telling Yael to lie if anyone asked if he was there. Being a wise woman, she concluded that Sisera was running from the battlefield, which meant that the Jews had won the battle and the Canaanites grip on the land was gone. If she protected Sisera, she would be in trouble with her Jewish relatives.

Yael gets together her woman’s weapons – gentleness and consideration, cooking, hospitality and courage. She also had a tent peg and hammer at hand, because it was the job of the woman to put up the tent. She probably gave him milk and not water, because warm milk is known to cause people to become sleepy. So when Sisera shortly falls into a deep sleep, she takes the tent peg & hammer and hits it through the head of Sisera as he sleeps. She must have used a lot of violent force in this horrid incident. Yael joins the role of honour of those who have acted for themselves, and either knowingly or unknowingly acted to free Israel. She becomes a deliverer too. Her story is to be remembered for a long time (Judges 5:31).

However, some questions naturally come to us.

1. Did God answer the prayers of Israel through this bloody and violent act? We don’t know from what the Bible says. Yael is in the Bible (so the prayer for her to be celebrated for a long time is answered) yet her story is not often read (so the prayer isn’t answered). It is not merely that the church has tended to prefer men’s stories in Scripture, though that is almost certainly a historical fact. It is that the violence of the story should make us feel uncomfortable. It makes us aware of the violence within each of us, which we prefer to avoid.

2. Should we bless or blame Yael for what she did? She invited Sisera into her tent, treated him kindly, and told him not to be afraid; so she was deceitful. The Kenites were at peace with Jabin, so she violated a national treaty. She gave Sisera the impression that she would guard the door, so she broke a promise. She killed a defenceless man, so she was a murderess. Yet Deborah sang, “Yael shall be blessed above women, the wife of Heber the Kenite; blessed shall she be above women in the tent.’ (Judges 5v24) So how are we to understand this question? To begin with, let us not read into the time of the Judges, the spiritual standards taught by Jesus and the apostles. Also let us keep in mind that the Jews had been under terrible bondage because of Jabin and Sisera; and that it was God’s will for the nation to be delivered from its enemies. Both Jabin and Sisera had been mistreating the Jews for years, and if the Canaanite army had won the battle, hundreds of Jewish girls would have been captured, raped and probably killed (Judges 5v30). Yael not only helped to deliver the nation of Israel from bondage, but also she helped protect vulnerable women from vicious enemies. She was a courageous woman, in the middle of a war, and she stopped being neutral and took her stand with the people of God.

3. How is God’s purpose realized in the world? It is achieved; through kings like Jabin who are involved in the fulfilment of God’s purpose, without them knowing, in ways they enjoy and in ways they wish they could escape; through the people of God crying out to God in the middle of their suffering (even when the suffering was deserved); through a woman of insight who become a woman of a violent act, using her female wiles to become a traitor and assassin. Yael succeeded because God was with her. She played a part in the purpose of God, and in the introduction of 40 years peace in the land, for the sake of which it might almost seem worthwhile to be a victim.

As we conclude, one question for you to think about and enact upon:

What principles and lessons for living as a Christian, can I learn from God, through the life of Yael?

Right mouse click to save this Podcast as a MP3.

If you find have found this resource helpful to you, please do prayerfully consider making a donation. You can support via PayPal, the universal and most secure way to donate money online. You do not need to be a member of Paypal to use their facilities. Thank you

Zelfs op het verjaardagsfeestje van Sander in het Speelgoedmuseum neem ik even de tijd om te dagdromen.

Dat iedereen in zijn hart en in zijn leven,

de kaarsen van het licht aansteekt.

~~~~

Que chacun, dans sa vie, dans son coeur,

allume les bougies de la lumière.