Saturday we finished our workshop at Adamama. This started Wednesday afternoon and concluded Saturday before lunch. Adamama is a permaculture farm in the south of Israel. The nearest town is Netivot. This is just east and slightly north of Gaza, so occasionally one hears bombs. We had our big workshop there last year as well. This year the workshop was called Aspecting and Shapeshifting.

Tuesday evening, before the workshop, a bunch of folks gathered at a very amazing horse rescue home for an evening of drumming for peace. More on that shortly.

Wednesday the heat wave started. When I say heat wave I mean temperatures around 43 or 44 C, which is between 105 and 110 F. This was uncomfortable for me on Wednesday, but by Thursday it began to be debilitating, and by Thursday evening I was quite ill, with a high fever, sore throat, body aches etc. Basically, the flu. By Friday afternoon I was nearly unable to function and stopped actively participating in the workshop. Saturday morning I was much better and by the time we devoked our circle I was better still. Of course I had invoked fire on Wednesday, and when I devoked it on Saturday the fever left me completely. And people say there is no magic in the world. Hah!

The drumming was sweet. The intention was drumming for peace with Jews and Arabs. In my naïveté I had hoped that there would be more of a “mixed” crowd. There were two persons at the drumming who are Arab, a woman who had come to a workshop the previous week, and her son. I mentioned them in a previous blog entry. The little boy is around 4 or 5, a real cutie who played with the dogs, and danced around. His mother drummed and watched him a lot as he was sometimes a little close to the fire. This is a very wonderful woman who I will write about more shortly. The other people were mostly 20 or 30 something “Jews” pagans, most of the people who would attend the workshop starting the next day, and two of my land mates (a couple actually) from California, one of whom is Israeli.

Now something I am coming to understand more is that here, an Israeli is either a Jew or an Arab, even though “Jew” is a religious designation and “Arab” is a cultural identity. One can be an Arab Jew, Christian, Muslim, or even Pagan, but if you are descended from Jews and you are Israeli then you are considered a Jew as your cultural identity. This is the only place where the name of a religion is inseperable from the cultural identity. This use of language is powerful in defining and in maintaining a sense of difference. The Jews who moved here to make a homeland and later founded the state of Israel were doing so under duress because of religious persecution, so the need to affirm identity and to have a place of safety were deeply intertwined, which has led in part, a few generations down the line, to the current set of conditions.

The workshop itself was intended for experienced practitioners of magic, so the material was predicated upon the ability of the participants to manage their energies and consciousness. Wednesday afternoon and evening was focused on arrival, intention setting, all the beginning stuff you do in a workshop. Thursday morning we worked with aspecting, which is the process of making space for and inviting deity or another presence (i.e. love, unity) to come into one's body and inhabit it for a (usually brief) time. Sometimes a person feels called to invite in a particular deity or sometimes a person calls to a particular presence, perhaps an ancestor, or an element. This worked well. I tend to stress the “health administration warnings” (as one participant put it) involved with this work because I take it very seriously. I view aspecting as a very useful tool but one which is actually not needed often. The reason for teaching it to this group is that these folks wanted to deepen their skill levels. These people are priestessing in the world and as they are mostly young people, they are especially aware that they are in training for what is to come in their lives, in the world. And this is Israel! There is a lot of magical work to do here!

By the time this piece of work had finished it was so hot, it was not possible to continue with focused work. The woman who co-taught the workshop with me (a truly fantastic priestess and teacher who taught with me last year as well) and I had planned for the afternoons to be break time and ritual planning for the evenings, since we knew it would be hot. We just didn't know it would be so hot.

This was the second unseasonal heat wave of the year. Usually Israel gets winds from the east, from the desert, as heat waves starting in May. This year the first one was in March and the second one in April. Last year we had the first heat wave of the year during our workshop at Adamama, make of that what you will. In any case, climate change is apparent here.

The group (those who wanted to) met Thursday afternoon to plan the ritual for that night, and through a process of dropped and open attention came up with a pretty amazing ritual intended to shift perspective on one's relationship with duality, working with the history of this land and Goddesses from Babylon and Egypt, Ishtar and Black Isis respectively, in aspect.

It was, however, so hot, that we decided not to do the ritual, or anything else, that evening. I went to bed early in the little cob dome house I was staying in, and had a night of deep sleep and lots of fever and sweat.

Friday morning I felt significantly better, and we did a morning session of shapeshifting; moving consciousness into different forms. People worked with fox, butterfly, fly, flower, and other natural beings. By mid day though it was very hot again and I was not doing well at all, so after lunch it was suggested that I be taken to the B & B where one of the participants was staying, about a kilometer away, so I could nap in a cooler space, before we finished planning the ritual. The group also had their own Beltaine ritual to plan, which will happen after I leave Israel. I napped, it was good, we planned ritual, and then I felt again so sick that it was clear I would not participate in the ritual. All along my internal dialogue had been about whether or not to deep witness this ritual, and while I participated in the creation of the ritual plan and felt very interested in it, somehow this wasn't my ritual. This was for the people living here. This intense magic, summoning and asking for help from two Goddesses to a mud house on the edge of the desert, near a war zone, to work on issues of duality and shifting awareness, needed to be made by people of this place. I am a visitor. I come to offer what I can, and willingly to sacrifice, in this case my comfort and temporarily my health, and the work was not mine. So I went to sleep and did not attend the ritual.

The next morning I felt a lot better, and people told me about the ritual. I am not going to write the details they told me because that is theirs to tell, and I wasn't there, and that was clearly part of the magic. Suffice to say that this ritual went deep and was not easy or comfortable, and fear was transformed. This was not living room magic. This was on the edge of the world magic. And all the tools we worked with last year in our workshop, and this year, and the work people have done before and during this year, all were brought to bear.

We spent Saturday morning debriefing from the ritual, making sure the aspected deities were completely gone, and integrating the work, preparing people to leave. We had lunch and then we left, but not before visiting with the woman who made the amazing Earth Shrine cob building where we did our work. She is the priestess of that place and lives 10 meters away up a little hill.

Four of us left Adamama together to visit Wahat al Salaam/Neve Shalom/Oasis of Peace, the intentional Arab Jewish Christian village not far from Jerusalem. More on that next posting.

Dear Mira:

I know you are not a hater. I know you are a beautiful person who loves, who is doing their best to grow and learn and who wants peace. What you wrote moved me. We are really all in this together endeavoring to find our way to truth and healing and love and peace. And this process of transformation which I personally am experiencing, which we as a world are in together, is confounding and can be confusing. As you said before, there are not simple answers. Even the questions are not simple! I want you to know you are not in this alone!

love,
Baruch

I feel I must respond to Mira's comment.

I am not saying there are not terrible acts perpetrated by both "sides" in this conflict. I am also not faulting anyone who doesn't choose to cross the green line.

Something I have learned living in the racist US is that when an oppressed minority retaliates, while it may be truly terrible, it is somehow different from when a powerful majority perpetrates a terrible act. An ongoing argument or discussion regarding race in the US has been...can african-americans be called racist when they hate euro-americans, given the history of euro-americans oppressing african-americans? The context plays an important part in how we view events.

There is a child's game called "Who will stop the hurting?" where kids take turns punching each other, harder and harder, until finally someone chooses to stop. It seems to me that it is incumbent upon the strongest to stop punching first, even if they end up taking the last punch. Maybe that is naive of me, or too idealistic. I don't know how else to see it though.

Mira I do not in any way mean to diminish the pain and suffering of Israelis who are hurt or injured or who lose loved ones. I do think, though, that the one with the most weapons and the most force at their disposal has got to be the one to stop the fight, to extend the olive branch. Otherwise it just keeps going, as it has for so long.

Last night we had a workshop which was new, something I have never tried to teach before, based on a dream I had many years ago. The gist of the dream, what I was attempting to communicate last night, is that everything is love; all matter, all of the universe. I didn’t do a great job of communicating this, but the real reason for the workshop was something else, which became clear.

The promotion for the event was not particularly effective for a number of reasons. Only two people responded that they would come, so we ended up doing it at the home of one of the organizers rather than at the spiritual center where it had originally been scheduled to happen. The two women who came are Arab women. One of them has been working as a therapist. She is currently in the process of transitioning to different work. The other woman works as a professor at university teaching gender studies to jews and Arabs, which is no small thing!. This woman lives in the only village in Israel which is an intentional community of jewish and Arab people. It is called Neve Shalom, which means Oasis of Peace.

The discussion that happened, after I presented my material, was really amazing. I mostly sat and listened, realizing that I know nothing about Arab culture. I didn’t know about pre-Islamic Arab goddesses. I saw that I don’t even know what it is I don’t know about Arab culture and her/history. It was humbling and I feel so honored that these two amazing women came to a workshop taught by someone named Baruch, clearly a jewish name, to the home of a stranger, to learn about something relatively obscure. They had read the book of one of the people who host and organize my workshops, a priestess here in Israel who is of jewish ancestry. She teaches magic in Israel; not new age “pop” magic but Reclaiming and other practice of the craft, which is also very unusual in this “jewish state.”

We invited them to come to the Drumming for Peace event happening next week and the woman from Neve Shalom said she would come and would also invite people from her village. I am SO looking forward to this! This is what I was hoping would happen. I have been wanting to meet and connect with Arab people here, and not found a way to do that with my Israeli friends. There is such a deep racism here against Arabs, and the government promotes so much fear and maintains the sense of difference. Most of my friends here are afraid to cross the green line (the line drawn by the 1967 war) because they have been told they will be arrested, or they will be killed if the go to the other side of the line, so I haven’t found anyone willing to go with me across the line.

Last night was the beginning of friendships (I hope!) and connections. Now my dream of somehow participating in peace work here begins to manifest, to take shape. Where this will lead I don’t know, and I am very excited to find out! I am very small in this. Small as in young to it, and a small singular person, while there are actually many people here who live peace work.