His vision was that “the state of Israel cannot tolerate a condition of maintaining a desert inside it. In 1955, the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, established the still commonly used Hebrew expression, translated literally as “the revival of wasteland.” This statement implies a negative view of wasteland, so that one must “give life” to it in order to make it more appealing for human habitation. Almost any other area will in some way be fragmented and modified by human intervention. Being a small country with a continuous flux of immigration, where every single bit of land is evaluated for its settlement potential, only the most arid areas are able to remain undisturbed by human activity. One reason why the term wilderness in Hebrew is closely associated with drought and dryness may be the fact there are no wholly wild areas in Israel, at least from an English speaker’s perspective. However, in the south of Israel, in the Juda Midbar, in Negev, and in the Arava, one finds versions of the Eretz Bereshit (or romantic wilderness), which more closely approach “wilderness” in the sense it is used in English: these are wild deserts. This was the first of 375 nature reserves that now cover over 5,317 km 2. The first movement for creating a nature reserve for specifically preserving its natural traits happened around 1950, following the desiccation of a large lake called Hahula. We are currently facing the extinction of these Lands of Genesis, here and across the entire planet, and so we are also losing forever this opportunity to experience these places.Īlthough not exactly the same as the land of Genesis, a close Israeli counterpart would be the nature reserve concept, termed Shemourat Teva (שמורת טבע), with its definition being “a land defined as protected from processes that may change wildlife, vegetation and inanimate characteristics.” n the Land of Genesis, far from ‘civilization’, one experiences the primary sources, the foundations of creation, one’s identity for understanding one’s true values…. Here there is a total freedom to live or die, to breathe clean air, to get lost in vast spaces without any purpose except for the experience itself, to feel the forces of nature, where an undisturbed equilibrium is the true expression of absolute morality…. It includes the area’s natural flora and fauna and a few human inhabitants whose traditional land-uses have not disturbed the equilibrium … his region is valued for its physical, mental, and spiritual experience. In Israel, the desert and the Negev region meet this definition. Untouched, undisrupted large area, where dimensions are part of its identity. In 1968, one of the first Israeli environmentalists, Abraham Shaked, described the land of Genesis as an Eretz bereshit is associated with wilderness, yet the noun of wilderness still refers mostly to a desert land. In a more sentimental and romantic way, an undisturbed area could be described as eretz bereshit, or the land of Genesis. Intuitively, I would substitute “wilderness” by praee (פראי), which might be translated back into English as “the wild.” In addition, when defining an “undisturbed” area, a Hebrew speaker would say ezor lo mufar (אזור לא מופר), an unaltered space. In the Hebrew mind, wilderness suggests an uninhabited place lacking any water. The absence of humans is a secondary characteristic of Hebrew wilderness. While the English concepts of “wilderness” focus on wildness, or perhaps rich biodiversity and the quality of being unmodified by civilized human activity, wilderness counterparts in Hebrew mostly emphasize dryness. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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