Noah's Diary- 12th Day of Realization

Second Page (needs completion)

Sunday morning we proceeded with our plan to re-visit another place of our history:
Metzoqee-Dragot.

It is where our Tamir and I and our other 4 partners Ya'acov, David, Albert and Mali, had prepared the Makom (place) for the "Makom" community.
It was this community from which my friend Yanina had received the info about the AUschwitz-BirkenAU Interfaith Retreat,
and it was the community's founder, Rabbi Ohad, who functioned there as the representative of the Jewish faith.
Shortly before the retreat - it so happened, that I suddenly found myself up there in "Metzoqee".
I understood it as a chance to get to know Ohad and the community and I did so for 24 hours.

After my visit I had a phone conversation with Yuval and he recommended a man also called "Tamir" as a potential partner.
Being that "Pathetic Partneror", about whom I cried-smiled on my pages about the RedSeaPartnerSHIP, I started to woe him right away.
Now Yuval wanted to show me this Tamir's fantastic secret abode and "permaculture" work, though he was absent and got permission to do so via phone.



It was impressive and encouraging to see, what that Tamir had managed to create,
but "my" Tamir - though watching and enjoying the view while lying on the perched bed with Paz - got quite triggered by "the whole place".
Especially when we went to see the tiny patches of land, where in 1998-9 our tents had been erected...

Yuval chastised us for being so judgmental against the dirty Metzoqee, instead of letting us be inspired by the Community's creations.
But we had to do our mourning work once more.
The time was "ripe" for another triggering between me and Yuval.
Looking with disgust at the barbed wire fence all around and the huge heaps of garbage everywhere,
I said:
"Let me once more return to your question,
why I need to start a new peace project from scratch instead of joining other people.
You were not convinced by all my failures of having done just this:
Can't you see one of those failures right in front of your eyes?
How much time, idea and energy, how much body work have I invested to make Metzoqee a source of inspiration amidst Palestinian Land?"

Yuval didn't move from his perspective ,
and I had the chance to go to the earth triangle of my former tent and cry some more tears.

The award was soon to come.
Before leaving Metzoqee and parting also from each other,
I went to say hello to Ohad, who was - unlike the 3 people we had intended to visit - in his home.
Ohad came to the car to meet his friend Yuval and the rest of us - Tamir, Paz and me.

It could have become an interaction of nice chatting,
but again I felt, that I should come out of the closet.
When Ohad told Yuval (what I had heard before), that part of the community wanted to leave Metzoqee,
but that so far no other place had been found to welcome them,
I heard myself saying- with declared reference to the dispute with Yuval :
"Maybe you are supposed to start from scratch and not join an already existing place."
"Perhaps", Ohad said mysteriously.

It took some more courage to come forward and tell him my own "vision" about a new makom for the "makom" community.
I shall share here only,
that soon enough I found myself in Ohad's car,
who, towards the hour of needing to fetch his children from the school in Kibbutz Mitzpe-Shalem, wanted to see Noah's Shore...

I brought him to the edge of the peninsula and waited, until he would turn around so I could take a photo.
When he did turn around, he was just about to take a photo of me.
We laughed.

What a good laughter.
It melted away the pain, which I had carried with me from our interaction in the moment of his departure from AUschwitz on the 8th of November.

On our way back to his car, we passed the sculpture, which had reminded H. of the Mother without child in the Yad-va-Shem, the holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
I had already shown him the future pond and told him, that it would be a replica of the Ashes'Pond in BirkenAU.
Every new perspective of the sculpture brings up ever new images.
And no matter, how often I photographed it already, it appears always in a new light.

 

Now I was on my own and alone.
The physical work of preparing the curtain helped me to think of all those surprising and encouraging encounters.

I was still in the middle, when night fell.

The full moon reflected in the Dead Sea.

And God is in the small things.

I started to go back to the stone-age and use a type-writer.
I have two handicapped fingers, one of them the middle finger of my left hand
(since an electical, almost fatal accident, when I played the organ in a church at the age of 15)
and typing had always been a bit painful, especially when the weather changed.
That Sunday afternoon I had attracted a tiny cut in the middle finger of my right hand,
insignificant in itself, but painful when the finger- typing blindly - pressed the key.
This is, what I managed to type:

2003_12_08 "Evening in Noah's cave. In the 4 nights and 3 days I was in my Modi'in flat, I had the idea that an oldfashioned typewriter may serve me under my rock. 2 miracles: H., my new friend, had kept his 1961 student typewriter for nostalgic reasons, and when we realized that, of course, the carbon ribbon had dried out and who on earth will sell new ribbons in the computer era, he had the idea, that I could use carbon copy paper, so that the typed text would be visible on the copy. But where do we get carbon paper? Then he remembered, that ages ago he had bought a hundred of this and was sure then, that they would outlast his life. So I am typing now without seeing what I type on a German Olivetti , just as I did, when I first learnt to type at the age of 17, in 1955. I am enjoying an immense upgrade of the quality of my rock life: A kerosine lamp - also from H. and E., and a nylon curtain, which seals the veranda of my cave. When I was asking whoever I talked to, if they had such a lamp by chance, it was again H. and E. who discovered one in the stuff they keep for no known reason, and a type of lamp which suits my needs here much better than those I used in Succah in the Desert. As to the curtain, this is a story of perfect cooperation between seven people. But before I go on, I must prepare more curtains because it is getting colder. By the way, what is this triangular table on which I type? Since my (only paid) job is to clean the staircase and room with the garbage containers for the tenants of my house in town, I always find things to be put to creative use by the Wednesday grandkid quartet. This utensil probably stored wine bottles in its earlier incarnation and I had brought it to the Dead Sea in order to store the plastic bottles to be filled with water, since no other source of fresh water has yet manifested on Noah's shore. But those bottles are too thick for what I brought. "I really don't know why you dragged such a useless thing along among the few stuff you can place here", someone said. "Never mind, I'll find out its usage." For there is a particular angel in my life, who always takes care of utensils I need or I'll need in the future. And so - what table could be more space-saving and symbolic than the wine-bottle holder? Next and last night: I cannot write with this finger, but I want to test if I can write in this position. But please bring me a "Palm Pilot" computer, for this typewriter is just too difficult for my two middle fingers. Why is it that I think that the encounter with rabbi Ohad was the most important experience this week , thanks to the friends of Ohad's community whom we wanted to meet but not him himself? A Fata Morgana once more?

I won't have time to report on the next day, another night and another day, before I was fetched by the man,
who had prepared a model for Noah's Ark, the glass and steel tetrahedron raft, which can be seen on several photos here.
After an exchange of yelling at each other, because he didn't want me to even mention that there was a border
("I assure you, there will never ever be a Palestinian State, only a Jordanian State on both sides of the Jordan!
And you , of the Left, take "patronage" on the Palestinians etc. etc. etc. I belong to the extreme right", he said.
But again - as after our first encounter, when he said: "I don't believe in what you do, but I want to help you",
he did help me , not only by bringing me and equipment, no longer needed, to Modi'in,
but seeing how I struggled with the strips of my sandals, - the velcro was worn out and the strips opened constantly,
he insisted in driving to a mall, invited me to a "Shwarma" and then bought me a pair of new sandals...

In the morning - ducks or storks (?) crossing my rock on their flight to Africa.
In the evening - the sight of my curtain covered home photographed from another rock.

And another morning, always new, always glorious

I start to work on the steps before sunrise.
And when the sun rises, I stop and breathe and sound,
and I try to catch a picture of my work, but the perspective up-down gets ruined, whatever angle I take

The first light on the mountains in the west and the full sun on my cave and the sea in the east.

 

YHWH - It IS HAPPENING
y e s h  !    -    i t    i s  !