Noah's Diary- 40th Day of Realization
Second Page

A verbal-visual requiem
to what was my Salt Sea abode
from April 1999 to April 2004

 

 

Sunday, the 37th day, finally allowed for rest.
But with the relaxation after so much tension,
a deep depression took over.
Once an all too familiar "guest", depression means, that I just want to NOT BE.
Since dying is not an option and death is an illusion,
depression is always coupled with anger:
"Why is it not possible to simply not exist?"

This state of soul suited my plan
to finally say good-bye to my former springs 2,5 km to the south...

Cold sulphurous water bubbles and fizzes now, where once - 5-6 m above this level - I had my Salt Sea abode.
The tamarisks - now dying - were not even born then.
This is the "Dead" Sea - the great destroyer and the great rebirther.

I knew from the beginning that I had to do that,
and now I had no longer an excuse for not doing it.
I also needed to take some utensils from my secret cache there.

While in the cave I had been sitting and working with 3 layers of clothes on me,
now - with the noon sun in my face - I felt the heat, though dressed lightly.
This brought up the memories of the terrible heat in June 2000 -
and with it the panic about Noah's Shore in summer.
I have an idea for a proper technology - fanned sprinkling of water -
but still: who would be able to live here in summer?

At the beginning of the 20th century everyone was certain,
that the white man could not live at the Dead Sea.
"So Noah's Shore won't work from July to September,
what's so bad about that?"
said Yuval-David the next day.

 

But let me first tell myself again the story of that spot on earth.
What is the meaning of the "rise and fall" of this mini empire?
What lesson is there to learn for Noah's Shore, 2,5 km further north?
"Drive backward into the future"
is the first "commandment" of the evolving "God"
with whom I am communicating incessantly
in my feelings, in my mind, in my body.

Walking towards the south I approach the once green "cushions", which grew nowhere on this shore except above my springs

It began with my transition from Metzoqee-Dragot to the Ein-Gedi Fieldschool.

Metzoqee started as an army stronghold high up in the mountains.
Later it was converted into a kibbutz, called Mitzpe Shalem,
and after the kibbutz was reestablished further south and closer to the Sea
Metzoqee became a desert hosting business.
Four of our RedSeaPartnerSHIP were accepted to live at Metzoqee in June 1998.
The manager of the hosting business, employed by the kibbutz, both loved and feared me.
In January 1999 he warned me friendly, that he was looking for a pretext to evict me.
He found it, and on Febr. 21, I got an ultimatum to leave with bus and tent within 3 days.
Tamir, who had lured me from the Red to the Dead Sea, said, he would leave too.
But where to?

I worked frantically to find a place for us .

One idea was, to station the bus at the shore of Qedem ,
north of the no-man's-land of what I now call "Noah's Shore",,
and to attract people to concerts, with the slogan:

"SUN TRANSFORMS INTO SOUND".

After all, my solar-powered electronic church organ in the bus was still working well.

I went twice to the army headquarter at Bethel, close to Jerusalem, for permission.
Qedem is the highest dry waterfall in Israel, or more exactly: in Palestine.
Commander Blumenthal said,
that he was just about to forbid any night camping all along the shore.
He meant the Palestinian shore, which is bordered to the south by Qedem .
"But" - he added after I pleaded and implored him -
"if Kibbutz Almog agrees, I may permit you to park there!"

Thus I learnt, that all the land along the Dead Sea had been "distributed" to Jewish settlements.

Almog is a settlement south of Jericho, south of the road to Jerusalem.

In those 3 days of the ultimatum I went to Almog twice.
I had to talk to a woman with the promising Spanish name "Sol", i.e. sun.
But the second time she said bluntly :
"No".
The pretext was, that they had their own plans for that spot.

Fortunately - f o r t u n a t e l y -
nobody really dares to build anything along the Palestinian shore of the Dead Sea.

Leafing through the articles of Matthew Gutman in the "Jerusalem Post",
which he e-mails to me, since we met at "Succah in the Desert" some months ago,
I get an idea of the grand war of "the sons of light against the sons of darkness",
which the Jewish settlers on occupied territory plan in the near future
against the Israeli government and the majority of the Israeli people .

The five settlements between Mitzpe-Shalem and Vered ("rose of") Jericho,
which make up the municipality of "Megilot", located above Jericho,
are even by people like me hardly perceived as "settlements".
They have nothing in common with the infamous settlements on the Westbank and in Gaza.
It must be the Salt Sea which renders these places and inhabitants such a different character?
Just as it must be the Salt Sea which renders the border above "Noah's Shore" undiscernable as a border.

 

When - after having done my mourning work on the destruction of my former abode - I returned to the level of the "cushions"
- I discerned the protrusion of the shore, from where the dust-road to the no-man's-land begins

Utensils from my cache under a little rock - like the pail and the jerrican in it - may serve now at Noah's hot sulphur spring.

 

From the present perspective the chasing around for a place to stay in February 1999
gave me valuable information,
without which I would not have found the location for "Noah's Shore" in 2003.

And as for a place to stay, a miracle was underway.
It manifested through this man,
who played such a decisive role on Noah's Shore last week.

This very minute - 2004_01_11, 17:50 - Yuval called me from the cave,
where he cooks his dinner, though he sleeps at "his" place on the shore.
He said, that he watered the sage plant alright , and that everything is fine,
except that the mice nibbled from the keys of his cell-phone while it was being charged by my solar system .

Yuval has given me permission to take his photos and to tell about him,
"also about the psoriasis you came to heal here".
"Also about the psoriasis".
He is one of the few persons who follow "God's" advice,
"I release the judgment, that I have something to protect!"...

 

About two or three weeks before the ultimatum I was lying in my tent with a severe influenza.
At that time the partnership between me and Body was not yet as great as it is today...

It was evening and a man "knocked" at my open entry,
Yuval Zuckermann from Ein-Gedi Fieldschool.
I treated him crabbily,
"did you come to see an animal in the zoo?"
until he left and - after 2 hours - returned with a warm, healthy soup...


This is, how Yuval was prepared to become my "angel-on-duty".

He heard from Tamir about the ultimatum,
talked to the heart of Joel Oren, his boss and friend,
and gave us refuge in the fieldschool "for a short time".

One of the first photos I made with my digital camera, on April 16, 2002 shows the "Ein-Gedi-Fieldschool Juncture", which I'm now mentioning ever so often, in order to explain people where "Noah's Shore" and my cave are located: 3 km north of this juncture. What can be seen, is not the Fieldschool which must be imagined up the road to the right, but the youth hostel, from which my Shabbat Shore friends, Dor and Erez, Karin and Marlene, fetched the water for me. The canyon in the mountains is "Nakhal David", the David waterfalls, which feature so beautifully in my page about my grandson Jonathan.

Israeli Fieldschools look similar to spread out youth hostels in nature. They belong to the Israeli Society for the Protection of Nature. People came here to learn and get guidance about the environment. The artificial slope seen from my spring, littered with garbage, is not really compatible with love for nature. It always pained me, especially when I built a path down it. They thought they needed a new dining-hall. But when they had heaped up all that sand, they needed to insert enormous pillars of concrete to support the building. Money ran out and the building - started 7 years ago - was never completed. What irony! [2008_01_03: It is still not completed!] The watertower to the right is fine, the 3 storey building for tenants, called "monster", is not. The roof of the nice architecture of the planned dining-hall, is visible. It was in front of this incomplete building - in August 1999 - that Tamir and I were finally allowed to erect our "Palace of David" only to soon get an ultimatum, that we had to leave the Fieldschool by Oct. 31....

On the last day of the ultimatum of February 24,
after an incredibly strenuous campaign of packing,
the bus with the tent and all its equipment was towed to the fieldschool.
and since there was not yet a place to settle down,
I went straight to my daughter and her family in Modi'in.

It was on my daughter's desk that I discovered a newspaper cutting about
"W A T S U".
Water-Shiatsu.

I was totally taken by this teaching,
the teaching about how to lovingly hold and gently sway a person in water.

A month later - with the last money I had - I participated in a 6 day Watsu course.

And when I came back, I looked for sweet water on the shore of the Salt Sea.

At that time there was an Australian man with wife and three daughters,
who made their poor home under the few tamarisks that had started to populate that shore.
The man showed me a little spring, some 200 m further south.
When I came to explore the spring, David was with me.
A little digging and the flow became ever stronger.

We carved a little space out of the low wall for me to sit or sleep on
and deepened and widened the flow of the spring.
How careless, how inconsiderate , how stupid were we then.

Please, guardian angels, do not let me repeat those errors!

June 2002, after a night at my springs

 

I learnt the hard way, the very, very hard way,
that the Salt Sea is an entity, which does not allow to be raped.
I did not ask the spring, if it wanted to serve me and my good goal.
For me there was no question, that I could do with it as I pleased.

After only a short time of carving out the pond,
a monstrous cough started to torture me.
Not only my throat and chest were effected.
but the increasing pain in my intestines
- squeezed into impossible positions with every new cough -
drove me towards madness.
I don't remember, how I got to my daughter,
who consulted Achinoam Nini's husband, a lung specialist,
and treated me with inhalations and all kinds of medicine.

Slowly I got better,
but I didn't "get it".
I went on digging.
I didn't heed the spring's warning.

 

Since I wanted to reach the spring more easily,
I decided to create a shortcut up from the fieldschool down to the spring.
Immense digging was involved.
Again - I did not listen to my Body nor to the spring.
Soon my back got "caught", as we say in Hebrew.
I ignored it and went on digging.
An hour later, when I was not working on the pond itself -
my back sort of "shrieked" and simply "flipped out" with incredible pain.

There I was lying, unable to make the tiniest of moves.
I already had a cell-phone then and asked Yuval and Tamir to bring some equipment.
They suggested to find a stretcher.
I screamed just imagining that they would lift me and move me to this stretcher.

As if preparing for this experience,
I had already installed palm-fronds above the carved-out spot.
I also had made a tiny canal around it, to drain the sulphurous water from the soil.
With excruciating efforts and pain I moved to the blanket inside the canal.
There I was lying and suffering for 7 days.
Tamir brought me food and water and took my phone to charge it.
He also found me a diaper, into which I could pee and then wash it - lying - in the canal.
As to shitting, my Body functioned without the need for it,
as always in situations where no place to shit is available.

While lying in my pains,
my Australian neighbor and another beach dweller came to continue my digging.
As a result the neighbor attracted some illness, which was the beginning of the end of the family's SaltSea life.

But still, I didn't get the message...

 

These are the only photos of the "brekhat-ha-brakhah", "the pond of blessing", which I carved out in 1999, with the purpose to help people heal, by cradling them in the water (the "WATSU" way).

Watch the little green "cushion" next to the "bridge",
and the dry stalks of a tiny tamarisk in the front in May-June 1999,
and see, how the cushion (seen from the back) spread out in January 2004
and how the tamarisks fill the pond instead the water,
which had dried up already in 2000.
See also the crack which predicts the next collapse.

After a month or two I saw a frightening phenomenon.
A local irresponsible jeep-driver had discovered the pond.
Whenever he found some chicks, he drove through the nature reserve,
and started to ruin the fragile environment.
I pleaded with him: "at least walk there on foot!"
He mocked me.

It was then, that Yuval reminded me of Jesus:
"Didn't he intend the best for the people?
And see, how they misused and perverted his mission.
Wasn't this his responsibility?"
(3)
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken
And stoop and build'em up with worn out tools.
I understood, that my good intentions had attracted the destroyers,
even before anyone came to enjoy my healing in the "Pond of Blessing".

I was devastated.

The second phenomenon started a year later:
The spring started to die.



In September I had gotten another ultimatum, of 6 weeks this time,
by the "Israel Society for the Protection of Nature",
which established and operated the fieldschool.
In time I understood that I could no longer hold on to my mobile home.
I bequeathed it to Tamir and on Oct. 31,1999, I left to live with my -resently divorced - son.

It was clear, though, that the turn of the millenium had to be spent at my pond.
It was then - between the last hour of the second millenium and the first hour of the third millenium,
that I knew, I needed to come and live there, right there, where I had lain in pain.
I knew, this should happen on March 13, a significant date in my life.

Towards this date I prepared carefully.
I stitched a two-dimensional tent , a triangle, of the same black and silvery material as the pyramical tents.
All the equipment had to find place in two huge bags, in case I needed to leave and had no one to drive me.

My daughter did drive me there on the 13th of March,
and when she saw my pristine pond, next to two (first) little tamarisk bushes, she said:
"This is a little garden of Eden.
I know, you will be happy here."

 

It wasn't yet a garden of Eden, but I made it one.

I wondered about the happiness, though,
since I didn't know at all, why I was driven to live there,
without any assignment, project, dream, vision, plan, goal.
Leave alone ~~~~ permission!
When I wasn't in the water or improved and beautified my place,
I listened to the BBC Arabic News on my walkman and refreshed my Arabic.
Or I studied the Right Use of Will books.
Or received friends.

It was not until after two months, that the persecutions started.

It was a nature reserve, but only a few people knew about it.
The rangers discovered me,
Avi, or Abraham ben David, felt personally triggered by me.
Immensely...

He fined me for camping there,
He fined me for having made a fire there.
He fined me for having dug the pond.

I left for a few days to be with my daughter,
when I came back, the equipment, I had hidden in deep cracks of the rocks,
like the little solar panel which charged my cell-phone,
was gone.
Avi at least bothered to call me and tell me, he had sent it to Jerusalem.
In Jerusalem I was promised, that they would cancel the fines,
if no new complaint about me would arrive for the next 3 months.
I relied on that.
I didn't inquire after three months, if they really had cancelled them.
A year later I got a horrendous fine - via the Court of Justice.
The last payment was done by me in February 2003.

Am I telling this as a victim of those people who should see in me their closest partners?

It may look like that, but it is not my intention.
The point is yet to come:

In order not to violate the law of the nature reserve,
I did not erect my two dimensional triangle,
but sat under an umbrella in the newly created sulphur pond 10 meters to the south.
Nor did I make a fire to cook or bake unleavened bread as I had done for 3 months.
And I searched for a place, where I could dwell between 5 PM and 8 AM.
I found it beyond the border of Israel, which is also the border of the nature reserve.
I found it in the no-man's-land, or so I thought.
Happy with this solution I went to Avi and told him.
But I triggered him all over again:
"Do you think, this will help you?
I'll inform the army which controls that area."

I was shattered. How naive of me!
The persecution took its toll on me.
I hid next to a rock, where truly nobody could detect me.
I disguised the spot as well as I could.
I was still afraid.
Why was I so stubborn?