A few weeks ago, we visited a highly touted local cheese farm – Shai Seltzer Goat Farm. Many in the region covet this cheese. The owner, Shai Seltzer, is a legend in Israel and is written up in all of the tour books as being a bit of a character; a genius with goats and cheese, standoffish to tourists and somewhat of a hermit. The farm was hard to find – it’s nestled inside a national forest and you have to follow the signs with a small goat on it. It’s like Seltzer doesn’t want anybody to know where his farm is located. But we did find it – up a narrow dirt road that looks like it’s going nowhere. Than we noticed the goat pens built into the hillside and a number of old wooden outbuildings.  It was interesting; and we’re venturesome, so we meandered up the hill past the goat sheds to the “store.”

Whoa, what a store. It’s carved out of the rock of the mountain with one table and one small counter with a refrigerated cheese display. Another couple was just finishing up their purchases. The couple behind the counter was Seltzer’s son and daughter-in-law. They had a half dozen or so cheeses to offer as samples – from the soft to the very hard (aged 2-years). Taste? Each morsel was a burst of flavor; nutty, creamy, pungent, semi-sweet, sweet, earthy …… As we were buying what we liked (actually we liked them all) who but Mr. Seltzer comes wandering into the cave (I mean store). In the first two minutes of our encounter, he lived up to his reputation. He was thin, tanned, about 65-75 and sported a long snow white beard, wore a white tunic and white cap (sorry, no photo). As he was talking to his son, Carol mentioned that we admired his goats and had read that they were the offspring of a male goat from Virginia. Suddenly his demeanor changed. We talked about his goats, their lineage, what kind they were (Anglo-Nubian), how his wife learned goat husbandry in Charlottesville (She was born in the US (Shai might have been too) and did her undergraduate work at Bryn Mawr), etc. He even offered us a drink. After 10 or so minutes, off he went. Very strange, very interesting, very very good cheese!

Carol at a table in the store

Carol admiring the goats

The son packaged the cheeses in waxed paper and aluminum foil so they would stay cool as we headed back to Jerusalem (about a 45 minute ride). On the way out of the farm we stopped to photograph the ancient olive trees by the side of the road.

Two customers buying cheese

Very old olive trees on the way to (from) the goat farm

Our blog posts (and emails to family and friends) have been more infrequent lately; in part due to work as well as taking an amazing tour in the north of Israel this past weekend (more on that in a future post).  For those of you who might be interested in the work – what follows is a brief description of why we are in Israel.

I’m interested in applying accurate quantum mechanical techniques to the characterization of molecules in alternative sources of energy such as oil sand and oil shale.  I’m in Israel, in Sason Shaik’s lab, to better learn a technique called Valence Bond Theory. After spending the first few weeks reading the literature (and keeping up with the work my research students are doing in Richmond!), I’ve decided to use VBT to characterize the bonding in the benzyne series:

The first step is to use Rumer’s Rules and the Weyl formula to figure out how many possible spin-paired structures (basis functions) are possible, including all covalent and ionic structures.  There are a lot!  If we focus just on the pi and sigma radical electrons/orbitals (8 electrons distributed in 8 orbitals) – there are 14 covalent structures and 1750 ionic structures (I’m going to try to write a mathematica script to auto-generate the ionic structures!)  These structures are then used in a variational way, minimizing the energy by adjusting the weights of each structure, and from this we can determine which structures are most important, thus obtaining a very detailed picture of the bonding.  I plan to construct different basis sets in order to assess, in each benzyne,  the 1.) importance of sigma and pi bonding in the ground and excited states, 2.) coupling between the sigma and pi orbitals and 3.) amount and nature of through-space and through-bond coupling.

A week or so ago, we rode our bikes up a nearby hill to visit the national military cemetery at Mount Herzl.  This is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful and sentimental memorial cemeteries we’ve ever seen. It was a vast area of many acres. The combination of gravesites, trees, flowering bushes, marble monuments, stone walkways, open patios, benches, plaques and so forth, was not only inspiring, but also emotionally wrenching.

A small burial section of the cemetery

A typical path through the cemetery

The cemetery is named after Theodor Herzl, who is considered to be the father of modern Zionism, i.e. the need and desire for Jews to have their own homeland so as to be free from anti-Semitism. Herzl died in 1904 in Vienna, 44 years before the establishment of the State of Israel. His will stipulated that he have a simple funeral, without flowers or speeches, yet 6000 people attended. He was originally buried in Vienna and in 1949 his remains were reburied on Mount Herzl, overlooking Jerusalem.

Herzl’s tomb