Are you ready for the next installment? I am in the Budapest airport coffee shop with WiFi and a wall plug. Hooray!

The four of us visited Wahat al Salaam/Neve Shalom/Oasis of Peace, the intentional Arab Jewish Christian village after the workshop at Adamama.

This village is on a hillside overlooking a valley with a long history of battles. The land was granted to the village by the monastery that owns a lot of the land in that valley. This happened in the 1950’s I believe. We had been invited by the wonderful woman we met who came to the drumming with her son (I don’t use names in my blog) and it was a real pleasure to sit with her, drink tea and eat brownies, to see her family’s beautiful very Arabic marble with archways and fruit trees in the home which she designed, to meet her husband and sons, and see her mother’s paintings. We discussed the workshop we’d just experienced, saw her collection of Goddess figurines from Europe, India, and the middle east, and relaxed. We four were sleep deprived, I was coming out of sickness, and we were all in workshop re-entry. Her neighbor came to visit and asked many interesting questions about magic, witchcraft, and Reclaiming, and then she told us about the House of Silence, a building in the village made as a place for people to go and express themselves in whatever tradition(s) they observe. We all jumped on that and wanted to see it so our hostess took us there. It is a large egg shaped concrete space with a stone floor and the most amazing acoustics. Every sound is amplified. You can sit and listen to your heartbeat. The four of us started to tone and chant and sing and it was so beautiful to be in the sound, to feel it move through me, and to hear the harmonies. It was perfect after the workshop, and to be in that place on the hill looking out at the valley and hills and city in the distance was very moving; the beauty, the contradiction of land and industrial sites in the distance. I will return there. Our friend let me know very clearly that I was welcome to come stay with them anytime, and made a point of letting me know she meant it, and was not just saying it as a courtesy. Her generosity is a beautiful and moving gift.

This village has 55 families there, a guest house and café, a library and more I did not see. Currently there are 300 families on a waiting list to move there. The municipality which governs the village will not allow them to build more houses. They will not allow the correct name in Arabic to be on the signs. Even in a peace oasis beaurocracy and fear have a grip. I am relating what I experienced and learned, which is a tiny fraction of what there is to experience and learn there.

I said to our friend, before I met her husband that he must be a very interesting man to break so with tradition. This is a modern home, and our friend is an accomplished academic, not easy for a woman in Arab culture. She said to me “Yes he is extraordinary, and we are Palestinians who do not do provocative things so we are not perceived as a threat.” That was interesting to me, and kind of sad too. The sadness was about the cloud of suspicion that can exist around people because of their ethnicity, or religion, or skin color, or whatever.

Our visit was short as it was night, we were tired, and we still had another friend to meet for dinner. I don’t feel that this writing does justice to the quality of the visit or the people or the place, so as you think about what I’ve written and the tone of my experience, multiply the beauty I have written about by a factor of 10.

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.