At the Ramat Gan Safari, near Tel Aviv, the animals were treated to sweet fruits and honey in celebration of the approaching of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish new year).
I went looking online for an answer to a troubling question: is honey good for bears? I mean, those beasts are heavy enough as it is, do they really need all that added sugar?
But I couldn’t find a single serious source on this issue. Some suggested the bears are really after the bee larvae inside the hive, but others said unflinchingly that bears have a sweet tooth and that’s it.
Except, with so much sugar, will they get to keep their teeth?
The bear in the picture was offered a lovely assortment of fruits and vegetables, which he is examining, but not yet devouring as of the snapping of this shot.
Do bears really subsist on fruits and vegetables? That’s so monkey…
Couldn’t they give him a nice, juicy salmon for Rosh Hashanah?
We’re celebrating our first new year in our old-new land. This, from now on, will be our only two-day Jewish holiday of the tear.
According to the sages, Rosh Hashanah is actually one long day stretched over 48 hours.
It’s a legal fiction.
When our Israeli guests ask what to bring for the holiday dinner, we say strange fruit. For the second night of Rosh Hashanah, so we can make a blessing over them and circumvent a halachic dilemma created by the concept of a 48-hour “long day.”
Our sages made up more legal fiction than Agatha Christie.
And I salvaged this one OK joke from an awful website full of bad polar bear jokes:
Q: What are polar bears called when they get caught in the rain? A: Drizzly bears.
Shabbat Shalom and a happy new year.
