hodayot [thanksgivings] for today

9:04
My Body, my Partner, my God
I give thanks to our nerves,
or whatever in you is transmitting our feelings,
for being so balanced and serene.
Please let them function with such serenity in the coming days!

            

I am grate-full that E's fierce attack - in the name of the other Five -
did not trigger or even hurt me.
I do felt grief for the fact, that my family is so un-whole,
and I do feel "parental" to this lack of wholeness.
I cope with the "fact", that I'm forever triggering and not righteous,
but I have no doubt, that I was right to express my wish so clearly.

I'm grate-full for the good time I had with Mika out there on "the hill"
(E.: "when she walked with Abba yesterday , she said:
'Savta hasn't been here for a long time!' " )
and for the good time I had with Efrat despite that "discharge".

Finetuning to my Present

While intending to phrase a desire concerning Nella, the dog,
and doubting, if the issue was "wothy" to be appear on my "altar"
I came across this sculpture of October 2005 [see left frame] about

"The beaten-dog image!" and
"If true feelings don't want to accept a beating"
and my sentence to Efrat against her anger about the "stupid" dog:
"If Nella reacts to having been beaten for peeing in the flat
by now peeing everytime, when someone wants to walk her outside,
it means, that she is not stupid at all, but sensitive."
She agreed to this,
but when this morning Nella ran away and hid even from me,
and when E. called her nervously,
reacted with peeing even more, in fact with all she had in her bladder,
E. asked me to take Mika into my room, and then we only heard whining.
She had stuck the dog's head into its urine, as one is taught to do in this case.
I am not a fan of dogs, despite my long experience with them,
but seeing poor Nella now, my stomach aches. What can we do?
I try to give her attention now
(even when only I am around, she hides under a table),
I talk to her: "please, Nella, heal your fear", etc.
but the point of this entry on K.i.s.s.-l og is
that I see a sign in her behavior:
Even dogs will no longer agree to be beaten!

And aside from this metaphor
I must express my pain about what I've been reading in the Gritli-Letters:
Franz Rosenzweig, ever since his engagement - Jan. 6, 1921 -
and marriage - March 18, 1921 - with Edith, my mother-in-law,
(which he calls "suicide", and his "living" since then as the "living of a corpse") ,
is the epitome of a beaten-dog-image, though in an unusual situation:
a relationship in which the true love of a good woman could not be answered.
The torturous lack of communication (in the sense of Maleachi 3, 16
"Then those who see Ha-Shem, will talk among each other, and he listens and he hears"
made him grateful for the other plight in his life -
the lack of resonance to what he had to give to people,
and not having found a way to realize his vocation-
Since this plight was communicable, understandable, justifiable, acceptable.
Though highly aware of his feelings and totally honest about his situation,
he did not know, that it wasn't God who had staged this excruciating drama...

Finetuning to my Present

Continuation of coping with the "shadow" of my birthday-wish.

I felt reminded of my metaphor of the Mona-Lisa,
which has often helped me to explain,
that the person who triggers me is only an instrument,
while I'm the one who attracts the trigger
to point out a hole in my wholeness that now wants to be healed.
"If somebody would tell the Mona-Lisa, that she is ugly,
she wouldn't be effected by this, would she?
For she KNOWs that she is beautiful, whatever somebody else will think or say."


The tricky - really cleverly manipulating blame - was :
"You whose main goal in life is that people may love themselves,
you yourself cause your own children to hate themselves,
since their inability to fulfil your wish forces them to refuse your wish
and by refusing - risk to hurt you.
But you, you simply don't care, you override everybody with your wish."


Feeling, that by referring to my greatest goal - that people love themselves -
she had "hit a nerve", as one says in English,
I could also observe at the same time,
how I still was in danger of succumbing and giving up on myself
for the sake of "not causing others to hate themselves", especially not my children.



But I felt the strength and the wisdom to explain:
"You must differentiate between the expression of a desire, a wish,
and the expectation that somebody will fulfil this desire, this wish.
I have a right, yes an obligation, even a responsibility to express my desires.
How else shall things change in my life and in the world?
You, too, express the wish that Jews and Palestinians may live in peace,
though most people will tell you cynically that you are naive etc. etc.


" But if I would expect from others that they fulfil my wish,
then I would, indeed, perpetuate self-hatred in the world,
because I would, indeed, cause myself to feel hurt and others to feel guilty."


[If I had more time to explain, I would have added:
also: how do I know if the time for the fulfilment of my desire is right?
or if the way I imagine my desire to be fulfilled is right?
There is that famous movie where the woman so ardently desires
that her husband may come home from his work on an oil drill plant at sea.
He does come home - but with a broken spine!
Isn't this my fierceful objection against all those,
who nowadays claim - in the name of "thought creates energy" -
that I can "get" all I desire?
I also would have liked to quote Fritz Perl's "Gestalt-Prayer":
"I do my thing and you do your thing
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
and you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you
and I am I
and if by chance we find each other,
it's beautiful." ]



I reinforced, that I had to express my deepest and greatest wish
- the healing of my children's relationship with their mother
together with the recognition of what they are grateful for -
[this "together" made E. especially mad]
and to create a chance not of "one-to-one", which cannot be done,
but a togetherness at this one-time opportunity, my 70th birthday.
Efrat exploded again:
"You know perfectly well, that there is no chance for this kind of togetherness.
Even if somebody would express "suffering" and "gratitude" as you wish,
s/he wouldn't do it in this circle."
I smiled and said:
"I'm reminded of another such situation.
Shim'on Peres, then Prime-Minister, had ordered his closest advisor to meet me,
when - after the murder of Rabin in 1995- I came to him with a beautiful project.
While I, - in the company of my "partners", David Troim and Gadi Lybrock -
explained the project,
this advisor - a very old man - got terribly triggered and screamed:
"You are dreaming, Rachel, you are dreaming!"

Efrat had used the slang of nowadays:
"you live in a movie, Rachel, you live in a movie"!

I'm grate-full that this attack gave me the chance to check,
if I could accept it finally,
that my greatest goodness - doing everything so people can love themselves -
also casts my greatest shadow,
- that it's exactly my very existence which causes my actors to not love themselves...

****


Efrat's discharge was cut off, when we arrived at the kindergarden to fetch Mika.
Only late at night there came a little light into my sadness.

Though we had already parted: "Go to sleep, Rachel, you are tired",
Efrat came in, sat on my bed beside my chair and computer,
and showed me a song she had just heard again on TV (see below).
This may have been a very nice pretext for the real reason of her coming,
something she obviously wanted for the family's birthday project:
"I want you to choose a verse in the Bible which expresses your vision
and then send it to me by e-mail until tomorrow."

Since there are many such "verses", I decided to listen inside
and not go about the time-consuming task of finding and choosing.
The first verse, which popped up, was the latest I learnt:
the one which I found, when I searched for Lior's name - "li or" - to me is light,
or in the order it appears one single time : "or li" - light is to me, Micah 7:8

"..when I fall, I shall arise;
when I sit in darkness, YHWH shall be a light unto me. "

So I went out to Efrat who smoked on the veranda
and told her my choice.
She wasn't content:
"I should have made it clearer to you:
I meant your vision concerning your tribe..."

I went back to my room and the answer appeared rightaway.
Back with Efrat on the veranda I told her,
that the verse -Maleachi 3, 16 - I was going to tell her was so important for me,
that I am singing it in five languages:

"az nidberu yir'ee YHWH ish el re'eehu va-yaqshev YHWH va-yishma' "

"Then those who see Ha-Shem, will talk among each other,
and he listens and he hears"

"yatakaalamuna allathina yarau'na-hu , va-yusri va-yasma' "

"Dann die IHN sehen, werden reden miteinander, und er lauscht und er hoert"

"Puis ceux qu'ils voient Ha-Shem, se parlent l'un a l'autre - il entends, il ecoute"

She seemed to understand the depth of the sentence and accepted it.

On my way out I moved my head to her once more and said softly:
"This expresses my birthday wish!"
And when I copied the Hebrew verse into an e-mail for her I added:

"Zalman Shachter sees this as a prophecy for inter-religious dialogue,
I myself see it as a prophecy for inter-familial dialogue."
{By the way I think I met Shachter thanks to Jonathan Jacoby on our Partnership-tour,
and maybe Jonathan's sudden letter at this time came to point to this prophecy...)

Because of the line:
"Where you once believed yourself

to be only good and righteous,

you will find your goodness has also had its

shadow"
the shadow cast by my very expression of my birthday wish,
I decided to re-study this my favorite Godchannel file,
and to also re-edit it
( without the comparison between old and new phrasings in the orignal material
and without referring to the quotes in many puzzle-pieces of "God has Evolved")

This is what I saw, when I took Nella out in the morning,
though she already peed on the floor at home.
Later, when I did my work of soothing her and talking to her,
I wanted to find out, how her facial expression and body posture
were different from "the beaten dog image".
She let me take her picture only while sitting close to me.

Nourishment from Others
Late at night Efrat came in wanting me to listen to a song, which she loves very much:
The Sea of Compassion by Kobi Aflaalo, a man from Ma'ona in the Galilee (memories from "Partnership"....),
who had belong to a band called "Shim'ouna", which she had brought to Ma'alot, when she was the municipality's speaker.

.... and you live in the time of times counted on a table, and hope to drink life to the fullest. And between all these you, after all, want to be joyous and are on the way of fulfilling a dream. Perhaps you'll reach heaven after all, perhaps you'll rejoice about life after all say thanks and transform suddenly into water, and join the Sea of Compassion.....

The song without images

I want to relate to another passage [see right frame] in God's letter [see above]
I once agreed with it totally.
Yet today my situation is not with "the power structure around me"
but with my family.
To express my birthday wish
is not at all a "temptation to assert myself and my rightness".
So what am I meant to do?

Moreover, I feel grief, when "God" assumes,
that I have "immediate peers in healing".
It's difficult enough not to judge myself
for not being able to attract peers in healing..
I constantly remember the passage in Old Heart New Heart
about empowering my desire for peers by accepting my desire,
"unfulfilled and all",
but "God" shouldn't assume, as he does in this letter,
that these "peers in healing" already exist.
Whatever I "did" to attract them - the last time with Yaacov - failed pathetically.
Once in Succah in the Desert, when I invited people to study RUOW with me,
I simply became their teacher - without learning from them anything at all...

While continuing to study that message, I'm coming across another sentence:>>>>
I feel it pertains to what I'm going through with my birthday wish,
but the problem is not "terror", the problem is guilt and shame which say:
"You can't even make your children love themselves,
on the contrary, you, you are another cause for their self-hatred,
so what is it you have achieved in all your seventy years?":

"You will experience
a great increase in personal power
as you near wholeness,

and there may be a temptation
to assert yourself and your rightness
against the power structure around you.

But this will be unnecessary,
and for the first few,
important to avoid entirely.
You will be able to 'slip through the cracks'
of the matrix of the dominant power-over paradigm on Earth
because you will have nothing to say and nothing to prove.

"What has been happening in yourself
and in your immediate peers in healing
will be the only proof you'll need."