Back for the 18th year in a row, new reasons I love Israel. Remember that when we were crossing the sea after the Exodus, some looked down and only saw the mud. They missed the miracle.

• 1. Israel’s first-ever competitor in the winter Paralympics, Sheina Vaspi, 20, an Alpine skier, wore a skirt over her ski pants because she’s hassidic.
• 2. Vaspi said it was important for her to represent Israel, because she didn’t go in the army. Her grandfather and uncle both fell in Israel’s wars.
• 3. The most popular Jewish name for a girl is still Tamar, which means date. Date palms are biblical symbols of beauty and sustenance.
• 4. The date palm called Methuselah that grew from ancient seeds discovered in Massada was mated with two-millennia-old seeds from a date tree named Hannah, from a burial cave near Jericho; dates were harvested in 2022. Said matchmaker Dr. Elaine Solowey, “I wanted Methuselah to be the father.”
• 5. Methuselah and Hannah are growing in Kibbutz Ketura. Conde Naste Traveler highlights Solowey’s opening a shelter garden to showcase biblical plants, incense trees, endangered desert plants, a migrating bird habitat, and medicinal herbs important to the local Bedouin community.
• 6. Kibbutz Ketura has an annual rainfall of 25-50 mm. Just saying.
• 7. More treasures in the earth. Eleven-year-old Liel Krutokop from Petah Tikva found a 2,000-year-old coin in a Jerusalem sifting project. Pure silver.
• 8. As a reward for her find, an archaeologist came to Liel’s school to teach the Israeli children about the minting of ancient coins.
• 9. The second Israeli to go into space, Eytan Stibbe, a former Israeli fighter pilot, took a miniature science lab and also a 0.5 square-millimeter silicon nano-chip… of the Bible!
• 10. Stibbe also delivered matzah to the space station before Passover.
• 11. A fifth-generation Jerusalem baker presented President Isaac Herzog and First Lady Michal Herzog with an eight-meter-long matzah.
• 12. When his mother Aura died, President Herzog met heads of state with a scruffy mourning beard.
• 13. Herzog postponed moving into the President’s residence during the three weeks of mourning for the destruction of the ancient Temples, because it is not a time to celebrate.
• 14. The rough-and-ready infantry soldiers of Golani Brigade saw a bride being photographed, joined hands and circle-danced around her.
• 15. The Israel Air Force provides downloadable printable designs for your sukkah to “make your sukkah fly.”
• 16. Surprise – look who’s here: The Air Force arranged for a bus of your grandmas to visit the Israeli version of Top Gun.
• 17 . An advertisement campaign describes modern Israeli grandparents bungee jumping. Go savta!
• 18. Attend any sports event on Hanukkah, and the game only starts after the fans and players chant the blessings on the candles.
• 19. When two Israeli bus drivers came back to Israel after being arrested for taking photos in Turkey, the entire country celebrated their return.
• 20. Special sale in honor of Rosh Hashanah: Pomegranate face cream.
• 21. What’s good for your brain? Israeli-engineered pomegranate pills that cross the blood-brain barrier.
• 22. Train your body and brain at the same time: BlazePod is a light-based reflex training system that brings an element of competition to workouts, offering a fun way to improve your balance, coordination and reaction time.
• 23. Israeli scientists are among those trying to converse with sperm whales that have the largest brains – five times a human brain – in the animal kingdom. Imagine Moby Dick from the whale’s point of view.
• 24. Fusion: The white-haired hassidic singer at a haredi wedding welcomed the bride with “Bo’ei Kallah” to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
• 25. At the YMCA swimming pool, the days of a membership are subtracted for Ramadan and Passover. Easter, too.
• 26 . The religious kidney donation organization Matnat Chaim has made Israel the No. 1 country in the world per capita for altruistic kidney donations.
• 27. Seventh year: A woman reminds the congregation in my synagogue Shira Hadasha that everything in her family garden is free for the taking because it’s the shmita sabbatical year. Come and pick our veggies.
• 28. According to the “World Happiness Report,” this year Israel has broken into the top 10 at #9, behind northern European countries like Finland, Denmark, Iceland and ahead of the US and England. No, we’re not Scandinavia, but we’re still happy.
• 29. Conde Nast Traveler recommends that travelers can boost their endorphins by visiting Israel and improve their health by eating Israeli food.
• 30. Israel has the lowest diet-related deaths in the world.
• 31. Overheard: A woman with wrist problems says she likes to peel pomelos for her occupational therapy homework.
• 32. According to a Gallup poll, year after year, positive perceptions of Israel among the American public at large has risen, from a low of 58 percent in the wake of 9/11 to 75 percent in March 2021. 
• 33. Money launderers beware! The Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units announced the Israel Money Laundering and Terror Financing Prohibition Authority (IMPA) as the winner of the 2021 competition for the best financial intelligence in the world. 
• 34. Valentyna Veretska, a refugee from Ukraine who fled the country along with her daughter, won the women’s race in the Jerusalem Marathon. To celebrate she raised the Ukrainian and Israeli flags.
• 35. Israeli high schoolers won six medals, including three gold medals, at the International Math Olympiad in Russia last summer.
• 36. Taekwondo fighter Avishag Semberg, 19, was the first Israeli to win a medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Semberg defeated the former European champion, Turkey’s Rukiye Yldrm, winning the bronze medal for Israel in taekwondo. On returning home she told other kids: “I’m just a girl from Gedera. Can I really be at the top? So yes, you can be at the top; you just need to dream big and dream it every day.” Great advice for all of us!
• 37. One of the featured programs at Asif, the Culinary Institute of Israel at Start-Up Nation Central in Tel Aviv, demonstrated Syrian cuisine with “with two talented cooks — Safaa, a Druze woman from the Golan Heights, and Sigi, a Jewish woman from Gedera.”
• 38. Israeli company AllCloud has won its Amazon Web Service Partner Award by helping companies sell through the marketing giant.
• 39. And speaking of clouds, the Israel Water Authority and Mekorot announced in February that they’ve stopped cloud seeding – begun in the 1950s – due to the high level of the Kinneret.
• 40. The American army likes Israel-made night-vision goggles so much they reordered $54 million worth. That’s a lot of specs.
• 41. Now-retired Linoy Ashram, 22, became the first Israeli woman to ever win an Olympic gold medal, edging out a pair of Russian identical twin sisters who were the favorites heading into Tokyo. She danced to “Hava Nagila.”
• 42. Real-life fiction: Israeli TV show Tehran wins International Emmy award for best drama (a fictional account of a Mossad agent trying to disable a nuclear reactor – fiction??).
• 43. In a year when kids studied mostly by Zoom, the Israeli series, The Lesson (previously known in English as Zero Hour) from KAN 11, won the top prize for Best Drama Series at the prestigious Canneseries festival in France. KAN Canned it!
• 44. Among the four Israeli inventions mentioned this year in Time magazine’s best inventions of 2021 changing the way we live, is OrCam Read, a handheld device that reads text for those who are sight-challenged and dyslexic.
• 45. Rapyd, an Israeli financial tech company for payment, is valued at $15 billion, but you can still charge at your corner store and the owner knows exactly what you like and how much you owe – and each of your kid’s favorite candy.
• 46. When corona took our grocer, Felix, hundreds of bouquets were laid at the store’s entrance.
• 47. Blessing of unicorns: Israeli tech companies worth a billion dollars or more are on the stampede.
• 48. No unicorns at the Tisch Family Zoological Garden aka Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem, but you can do a five-point matriculation exam in zoo studies!
• 49. Global giraffe numbers have declined 40% over the last three decades, but Jerusalem giraffes, like Jerusalem humans, are prolific.
• 50. Another religiously sensitive aspect of the zoo is the signage about the collared peccary, a mammal with a porcine appearance. To the Hebrew, Arabic and English explanation, has been added the Yiddish: “Das iz nicht a hazir” (This is not a pig).
• 51 Headline: Future gymnastics champion: The first orangutan cub to have been born in Ramat Gan Safari in over 11 years will be named Tokyo, in honor of the Olympic Games during which she was born.
• 52. Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink – but not in Israel. Nearly 90 percent of our wastewater is recycled for agriculture – four times more than any other country in the world. Only 5% percent is discharged into the sea. Israeli companies are helping save water around the world, from Africa to California to India.
• 53. In Israel, we meet 80% of our water consumption requirements through desalination plants. We have found that the desalination process preserves the natural water system as we pump the desalinated water into our river.
• 54. New research by UK-based Small Business Prices reveals that Israeli workers took fewer sick days than workers in any of the other 27 countries studied. Israeli citizens took an average of 3.9 days off per year due to illness. In Germany, the country with the highest work absence rate according to the research, workers take 18.3 sick days per year.
• 55. Win-win with Israel: Fastest rollout of vaccination program, and a great pilot country for the pharma companies.
• 56 . Haifa-born Olympic swimmer Anastasiya Gorbenko, 18, won Israel’s first-ever gold medals in the FINA World Swimming Short Course Championships in water-challenged Abu Dhabi, finishing the women’s 50-m. breaststroke in 29.34 seconds, and winning in the 100-m. medley final.
• 57. Elad Riven Youth Awards: Teens Who Care are awarded every year in memory of the teen who died while volunteering in the Carmel Forest fire disaster.
• 58. One of the Riven winners publishes a feminist newspaper in her Druse village.
• 59. Israel managed to pull off the Miss Universe contest despite COVID-19, BDS and local naysayers.
• 60. An estimated 600 million viewers in 172 countries were deluged with images of Israel and the Miss Universe contestants touring the country and loving the food. When they went to Yad Vashem, the contestant from Puerto Rico shared that her great-grandfather was a Holocaust survivor.
• 61. Dog owners in Tel Aviv may have to provide DNA samples for their dogs to fight against negligent doggie-poop-collection by owners.
• 62. Orri, Einat, Aliza and Ayelet – not a group of Bnei Akiva girls. They’re inventions of the Agricultural Research Organization. Orri tangerines, Ayelet seedless lemons and Einat and Aliza, mixtures of pomelo with grapefruit and mandarin.
• 63. Headline on an Australian website: World’s Most Unlikely Country Keeping Dubai’s Tourism Industry Alive – it’s us!
• 64. Volunteers at the Galilee’s Goats with the Wind farm include Buddhist and Christian monks, and Olympic football coaches.
• 65. Kofi Annan: Cafe Anan is a restaurant on the top of a mountain overlooking the border with Syria, named after the former UN secretary-general, whose name in Hebrew sounds like “coffee in the cloud.”
• 66. Sturdy peppers: Galilee Export will require all their bell pepper vendors to apply the Israeli Save Foods’ treatment to perverse freshness and vastly reduce waste.
• 67. Headline: Israeli farming giant to grow avocados in Morocco.
• 68. We may have traffic jams, but the Israeli innovation VIA global public transport, logistics, and TransitTech company is locating shared vehicles around the world.
• 69. The autonomous cars are learning to cope with non-compliant drivers.
• 70. Hadassah-University Medical Center professors Eyal Banin and Benjamin Reubinoff spent 20 years putting embryonic stem cells into retinal pigment epithelial cells to provide a cure for macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness. The successful trials have led pharma giant Roche to buy the Israeli technology to save the sight of millions around the world.
• 71. Hadassah Medical Organizations doctors and nurses were the first hospital staff in the world to rush to help in Ukraine.
• 72. In addition to medical experts, medical clown David “Dush” Barachi who helped traumatized parents and children. He was recognized by a Ukrainian mom whose daughter was treated at Hadassah Hospital.
• 73. Natan Sharansky: “When growing up in Russia, having ‘Jewish’ on your identity card was a hurdle. Now in Ukraine, it’s a treasure because you have a place to go.”
• 74. Israeli Arab medical students in Kishinev, Moldova provided shelter to fleeing Israeli students, Jews and Arabs
• 74 Plus one. In every crisis, Israel is prepared to bring our people home.

Chag Sameach! Rejoice in the miracle!