Miflas HaKinneret

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
01 February '10

Among the many important things about Israel you'll never learn by following the media is the matter of the surface level of the Sea of Galilee. About a third of Israel's water is stored in the lake, but since the rest is in underwater aquifers they can't be seen; the Sea of Galilee (the Kinneret) is right out there where we all see it. And boy do we watch: Nachum Barnea, the country's top journalist, once remarked that being an Israeli means getting up each morning and checking how high (or low) the surface level of the Kinneret is.

So much so, that the Hebrew word miflas (surface level) has been loaned to other existential worries: miflas ha-harada, for example, means the level of national dread - a term which doesn't even exist in any other language I'm aware of. (That miflas is actually rather low these days: defeating the 2nd Intifada, building the barrier, hitting Hamas in Gaza so hard that it stopped rocketing; all these things for which much of the world detests us have made life much less stressful, at least for the time being).

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