Peace Work

At a Rainbow Gathering in Turkey, Israelis and Iranians bond

Being The Peace

At a Rainbow Gathering in Turkey, Israelis and Iranians bond.

Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi

One Nation

In the high mountains of Turkey, there was a gathering that some would call miraculous and unbelievable, but seemed for everyone that was there so natural, as if it couldn’t have been any other way.

In those mountains we sat around a campfire, Israelis, Turks, and Persians, about one hundred men and women, young and old. We sang, cooked, ate and laughed, played and danced like best friends, as if we were one nation with no state borders, a nation at peace.

How I Got There

My good friend Gabriel suddenly arrived at my weekly Kabbalah class in TLV. Gabriel has a good sense for pointing to the places in which our society can grow. Therefore, I pay close attention to his suggestions. “Are you coming to Turkey?” he asked me right after the class. “It’s one of the most important things going on right now! We’re meeting with people from Iran, with our Persian brothers. Come!” he tells me. And so a few days later my wife and I find ourselves making our way through a small remote village in the mountains west of Anatolia.

Hours of travel bring us to a small Turkish village so rural that the paths beyond it can only be navigated with a tractor. A villager communicates with us using hand gestures, and takes ten Israelis at a time, crowded into a cart with their camping gear by tractor up the mountain. We climb higher and higher. With each new turn we are sure we have arrived, but who ever chose this place opted for a truly remote location.

Rainbow

The Rainbow Tribe began in the 1960′s in the United States. Rainbow gatherings don’t have a defined structure or leadership. Everything is done for free, and out of good will. People hear about gatherings by word of mouth and arrive from every corner of the world. But in every Rainbow Gathering that you come to you will always be greeted with “Welcome home”…

At gatherings, volunteers build a communal kitchen in the outdoors. They also collect money into a magic hat in which every person contributes what he wants and can, and then supplies are purchased at the nearest town. One day there might be a lot of money in the magic hat and the meal will be especially lavish, and another day there might be little money and the entire circle will feel it in their bellies. Food is divided equally, everyone eating what there is, regardless of how much money one had put in.

During a Rainbow you learn how to be in nature, how to be part of a circle, respect the space of others, and how to sing prayers before meals. You also learn that the work that needs to be done can only be accomplished through good will and joy, and that part of the “work” is also about creating a positive atmosphere. Therefore, if for example you are a musician, you are likely to find yourself making music for people peeling potatoes in the kitchen and this may be your contribution to the community effort.

A few years ago there was an International Rainbow Gathering in Turkey where Israeli friends were surprised to meet Rainbow friends from Iran that challenged all their preconceptions about Persians.

There was a definite feeling that this was a gathering that should be repeated. And that is how we found ourselves having many conversations with new Persian friends and discovering some sophisticated and open minded people with a wonderful sense of humor.

Revelations About Iran

One evening we had a conversation with Istahar (fake name). Istahar told us about the place she grew up in. Her parents used to read Osho to her in Persian, and sometimes translated and published Osho’s materials in Iran.  She grew up in a spiritual house and her parents aspire to create an Osho-style ashram in Iran. According to Istahar, books and other materials pertaining to the spiritual world, yoga and meditation classes, avant-garde theater performances – a whole world of open life reminiscent of the Western spiritual world – exists underground in Iran.

Ishatar told us that it is illegal for a woman in Tehran to wear make-up in public. If a woman is caught wearing make-up she will be arrested by the police and thrown into jail, but many women do it anyway. They will not surrender their right to wear makeup; they go to jail and meet other women who were arrested for the same crime, and then are released after a day or two. The Iran prisons, in her words, have revolving doors – people come and go.

“I’ve been living with my boyfriend for two years now, even though it’s technically forbidden. We have learned how to deceive the government and play the game in order to live the way we want and believe,” she adds.

I have met with peace activist Muslims many times before, but meeting these people from Iran was a pleasant surprise. Unlike other occasions, I felt almost no cultural gap. To my surprise I didn’t meet any suppressed women or chauvinistic men that spoke about peace between nations without knowing how to have peace in their own homes.

Rather I met men that allow the women to be themselves, and spoke to us as friends, without victim or inferiority complexes. It seems to me that these people that live under extreme Islamic occupation passionately desire equality.

Peace Begins Within
Rainbow people know peace is not a political slogan, but something that lives within, something that you project outwardly when you truly seek to live in awareness, without letting fear draw the map of your world.

Next year the gathering will be dedicated to deepening our connection. And, maybe we will even be blessed with a few Palestinians, and rainbow sisters and brothers from Kuwait or Qatar will join the Middle East peace celebrations…People that want to come together to live and be peace. Because, as one of the Persian woman said, “We are the Peace.”

———————–
This article was translated and published by: Essence of Life, Public Benefit Company Ltd

www.eolife.org

Peace Work

MY MURMURS OVER THE MARMARA

MY MURMURS OVER THE MARMARA

Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi, Jewish Spiritual Teacher of the Hebrew Path

English tr., Yair Ohr

As a peace activist, I am hurt and frustrated to see supposed “peace activists” attacking other human beings with violent rage: that is NOT the way to bring peace. As an international peace activist, I want to say to those who were involved in the violence on board the Marmara flotilla: You are not peace activists. You came as confrontationists looking for a fight, and you are personally responsible for the bloodshed that took place. I would have expected other peace activists from around the world to come out loudly and say this unambiguously, but it seems that their voices have suddenly gone silent.

And as an Israeli, it frustrates me to see the Israeli Army so foolishly falling into this trap. Could the Israeli army with all its advanced intelligence gathering systems not have obtained more accurate information about what was planned for them on board the ship? Couldn’t they have just neutralized the ship’s engine by some simple commando action in order to stop the ship dead at sea, without direct confrontation, thus avoiding any bloodshed?

The State of Israel has become a very clumsy bully that strikes out heavily against anyone who irritates it, then justifies by crying, “But he started! He spit on me! He insulted me! He hit me with an iron rod!” The modern Israeli Army resembles the Golem of Prague, which was sent to protect the Jews, but was an inept and dangerous creature. But unlike the original Golem, it seems that the modern Israeli version lacks any sage guidance to control it, and no one knows to erase the Divine Name from its forehead and return it to dust at the right time, as did the Maharal of Prague in the famous story.

Many of us right now want only to hide our faces in the ground out of shame: ashamed of “our” state that conducts itself with such inane stupidity; ashamed of the “peace activists” who tried to murder soldiers with clubs and knives; ashamed of the hypocritical reaction of peace lovers around the world who are taking a lopsided and cursory stance, ignoring the complexity of the issue.

So what is the real problem? For years I have been saying that the State of Israel, as a society, is exhibiting the collective psychological symptoms of post-trauma. Our collective psychology resembles that of someone who was traumatized as a child, such as sexual or physical abuse, but never had the opportunity to work it through in any form of therapy. This person grows into adulthood full of relentless rage and fear. He is always “on guard,” responding disproportionately to anyone who spits in his direction.

And as known to experts in the symptoms of post-trauma: whoever suffered violent trauma in childhood will recreate for himself the very same reality that will only prove to him that the world is exactly as he fears it to be: aggressive, violent, and that everyone is against him, so to protect himself, he too must be aggressive and violent—even more so than all the others. It is very difficult to prove to such a person that he himself is an active contributor to the creation of this violent reality. He is not only defending himself against it—he is actually creating it, for only in that situation does he feel “at home.”

That is our situation here in Israel: only if the entire world is against us do we feel comfortable. It has that familiar sensation of massacres and pogroms. Only when “they” want to annihilate us are we relieved, feeling that at least this is how we always knew it to be. Not long ago on Pesach we sang, “In each and every generation they rise up to destroy us…,” so reality has once again slapped us in the face and proved that we are right, as always—and this time, they have tried to do it by hurling broken beer bottles at us with slingshots…

What am I saying? I am saying that the time has come for us to seek treatment. If we don’t get reparative therapy for the fear that controls and manipulates the Israeli society, we will not survive.

Nowadays, God does not need to save us from “them”—He needs to save us mainly from ourselves! We, the Israelis, as a society and as individuals, need therapy—urgently. Preferably it should be some type of alternative therapy, but any type of therapy requires the willingness of the suffering one to acknowledge his situation and seek help. Perhaps, as a society, we can agree to forgo for a while our hopeless clinging to the “righteousness of our path,” and to declare to ourselves and to the world that we are in trouble, and that we need help.

Peace Work

Inter-religious Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz

Rabbi Ohad is among the clergy officiating this year at the Zen Peacemakers  Bearing Witness retreat in Auschwitz,Poland, with Roshi Bernie Glassman, along with religious leaders from all faiths.    This will be Ohad’s 7th year  joining  this very powerful retreat to bear witness to the pain and atrocities that took place there.

Bernie visited the camps on his own some 15 years ago. After witnessing the  pain that people had upon seeing the camps on  their  first encounter, he saw that there was no outlet for the devastation which the people were experiencing when they visited. They would go in and have a tremendous rush of  feelings and despair, and leave. After viewing this Bernie vowed to bring a group back to bear witness. The next year he took 150 people, and for the past 15 years there have been bearing witness retreats following that first one.

There are three tenents of the Socialy Engaged Buddhism of which this work is a part of.

The first is not knowing,

the second is Bearing Witness,

the third is loving Action.

During the retreat we first have a tour of the Jewish ghetto in Krakow. Then the next day we go to Oschwintzen, known by the Germans as Auscwitz. We stay in simple lodgings in a hostel near by the camps. we start the day with a tour of the camps. in general the days are broken down into morning  council sharing groups, where you might be with a polle, a german, children of perpetrators, and victims together. It is a very necessary and important component of the retreat. Here we have time to sort out our mixture of feelings, and share in one another’s feelings,and listen from the heart..

Later in the days we go to the camps and sit in one of the camp sites, barracks or yards for meditation sessions. The never ending reading of names of those perished in the camp is the mantra for all meditation sessions.

Every day there are also rituals taking place, of all the religions and paths present in the retreat – Christian, Buddhist and Jewish. R. Ohad is holding the Jewish ritual, accompanying it with his guitar and praying with old and new Hasidic tunes of Dvekut (= devotion, surrender).

Dawn is also coming this year for her second time to the retreat, with an intention to serve the retreat.

One thing is important to know: Auschwits is not over. it is not merely a historical site. It is a testimony to what humanity can cause to itself.

R. Ohad is planning to take part in the spiritual holding of the next retreat, coming on Nov 2010. For more info about the bearing Witness retreat and Socialy Engaged Buddhism visit the international Zen Peacemakers family website