Oh, Israel...land running with milk and honey...land of Contradiction. The faces of Israel are many and the faces that the public sees are few of those! One needs only to live here in the heart of this country to know that there is an illness here, a disease that if not checked will eventually yield our country over a type of life that is disabled in the eyes of the rest of the modern world.
It is a disease born of difference in Religious doctrine, it has seeped slowly into the very veins of our nation and unless the people here wake from their complacent slumber it will continue on it's insidious path of destruction. "Look around, what do you see when you walk throug the neighborhoods," a friend visiting from the United States asked me over dinner last night." I will tell you what I see" he continued, "I see slums, like the old slums in New York, dirt and filth liter the streets and no one does a thing to clean it up, there are literally piles of garbage along the sidewalks and in the side stairs, it is as if no one sees it!"
What a vsision of Israel to take home...I was at once saddened and again embarassed, he was right! There is so much garbage here in Tzfat in the streets and alleys and sidewalks to fill a landfill as big as a baseball field! It is a disgrace, but I have given up trying to reason why, after a year living here I realize that to the majority of those living here this is acceptable!
My thoughts wandered after we had walked our friends back to where they are staying here in Tzfat, as we walked down the stairs that lead up to where we lived I looked with new sight at the way things are unkempt! It is as if no one realizes that the earth is alive too, that she relies on those of us who have consciouness to be aware and to take care of her!
That however is not the biggest part of what is really wrong here, no not even the tip of the iceberg, This is a town where everyone seems in a trance, asleep and unaware of their surroundings but even worse where they have been lulled into a sort of religious apathy also, they claim to have different types of Jewish worship represented here, but it isn't so, even the one small place that calls itself renewal ISN'T...it is instead a small place where men and women can sit together during service but the service takes on the essence of Orthodoxy, the same prayers are mumbled under the breathes of the men basically at a break neck speed to ensure that every single word is said but with no time for understanding or absorbing any new message that might be there for us! Any pretense of renewal is only that a pretense but not a reality, the dress is the same, the long prayers in Hebrew are the same, the service follows the same pattern.
I worked long years as a Social Worker for a Nonprofit organization that had a program for at risk youth, we brought them in off the street got them back in the classroom for high school diplomas, and taught them how to change their behaivor to suit a polite society so that they could better fit in we helped them learn a work ethic and how to seperated themselves from the gang cultrue from which they came.
After a while we got so that we knew which gang a youth was from by their dress, attitude and slang useage, and we formed a saying..."If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and dresses in the feathers of a duck...well it must be a duck!" The same sadly is true for this place in which we live!
We are spiritual beings, my husband and I, we do not fit this "duck" profile at all, we have studied widely, researched religion and philosophy all our lives, we realized long ago that all religion is man made and that
G-D, Buddah, Mahdi, Avatar, Maitreia, Messiach...just IS.
There are certain beliefs that we hold dear to our souls, that all humanity is sacred, that all humanity is equal, that the earth is alive and dependent on us, that we all live many times not just once, that we all answer each time we end a life to a Creator being and then we start again in our attempt to get it right!
We believe that everything in life is in process, that we are suppose to grow and change and move forward from where we came into this life and that even though we have gained from our tradition tools a means to a higher counsciouness, that these are the vestigages of our religion and not immediately applicable to our current situation.
Due to all that we have learned we have come to understand that there is a great need for change, there is a world vision which exists in the collective consciousness of man and it is not one that is held within rigid rules of a certain performance within a religion, nor is it tied to specific behaivors that must be duplicated by everyone, nor is confined to what one group of people say we must read, or a recipe for prayers which must be repeated day after day in the same fashion.
We believe that our Creator gave us guidlines for our work here on earth but that along with those guidelines we were expected to grow and learn and become all that is possible...not to stagnate in a sepid pool of sameness!
We believe:
1. There are no coincidences and no accidents
2. We are all emersed in the same field of engergy at birth, but we must choose whether to grow or to become stagnant.
3. We believe in a purposeful universe that includes all living things, yes even the plants and animals!
4. We have come to understand that what may have served man's need for religion in the past is no longer working.
5. We believe that there are also other demensions to reality, and that these are valid!
6. We sense that we are in the midst of an accelerating transformation of how we percieve the world.
7. We believe that the only way to truly advance as an individual or collectively is through opening ourselves to the fullest dimension of who we are.
8. We see ourselves as divine beings who are only temporarily in a physical body.
9. We know that we are able to be in communication with the spiritual demension that exists beyond us through intuitive knowing, synchronicity, metanormal events and healing miracles.
10. We choose not to engage in power strugles with those who are trapped inside the performance of strict religious beliefs but rather to surge onward toward the common goal of enlightenment.

We know that it is natural to resist change, and that it is difficult once one is trapped inside the strict rules of a specific religious belief to trust anything new. We know that we grow through guidance that is not of man's making and that this is available to anyone who chooses it.
Lastely we know that each individual must experience awakening alone, that we must go inside and listen to the intuition and relevant messages that come to us through our higher selves...life is a long journey one that isn't to be spent in endless hours of meaningless repetition or route praying. Life calls to each of us to experience and grow from multiple experiences.

So like the dirty streets that my friend pointed out, I should like to point out to any of you who read this that we are supposed to care for all of creation, ourselves included and that this caring must take on a deep desire to know and experience true spiritual growth that comes only through seeking, not staying in the same 'duck suit it doesn't serve your soul, it serves only your id...and that poorly.

If your soul is awake and alive what you see here in the streets, is abominable...worse what you hear on the winds of Shabbat should make us ashamed. Can you not hear the cry of the Creator...wake up, renew yoursleves...stretch as if from long slumber and take up a new path, a path that will lead us out of the darkness into the light. A path that could cause PEACE to come on the earth, in our time!!!