What is my soul telling me?

I read the cards from right to left. 

Consider what shaped you.

Observe those who were raised differently.

Plant a seed and grow into a new person.

When I was nearly 40, my mother spoke words she hadn't uttered for decades. She threatened to kill me. A wave of nausea washed through my whole body and then a number of different thoughts flashed through my mind. Memories of my childhood fear of her resurfaced, yet I couldn't ignore the absurdity of her threat now that she was aged and diminished.

When I was growing up, my parents were really the only people in my life as we relocated incessantly. Whenever I forged connections with other children, my father's voice would erupt in a blend of anger and teary distress, admonishing, "They aren't your friends!"

Decades have passed and I've labored to ignored what Dad tried to teach me, that he was right. Slowly, it dawned on me that he was right. Even if I had the energy to sow another seed of hope, I don't want to risk deceiving myself again.

 

* Cards from the Aquarian Tarot.

Korban Pesach - the holiness we no longer recognize

I’ve long been curious about the ancient practice of sacrifice. Why, I’ve often wondered was the Book of Leviticus, filled with descriptions of these rituals, considered by many to be our holiest text? Yet, I confess that I cringed yesterday, upon reading that some Orthodox men planned to enact the ancient practice by sacrificing a lamb near Temple Mount before Passover.

Undoubtedly, my reaction is a product of modern sensibilities, the misconception prevalent in our era that meat originates from styrofoam packages in grocery stores rather than from once living beings. Kosher slaughter was designed to minimize animal suffering, but today, arguments from vegans and vegetarians challenge the morality of this practice under contemporary moral attitudes.

I am convinced that comprehending why our ancestors offered animals to God as sacrifices is important. However, I cannot bridge the gap between modern perspectives and ancient practices. Even Rav Kook was uncomfortable with the idea of animal sacrifice and predicted that only grain would be offered in the Third Temple.

Would watching the video of yesterday’s sacrifice provide me with some insight or merely be an act of voyeurism?

While studying Leviticus with my chevruta in the Tucson library, I did not come any closer to an understanding or acceptance of sacrifice. However, I stumbled across a book which includes a passage describing something like a sacrifice that occurred on the Navajo Reservation. While the significance of the ritual was lost to me, it clearly held meaning for its participants. I invite you to ponder this passage and share your thoughts.

But Native American Week officially ended in the courtyard.

Only the eighth-grade students were allowed to go there. We gathered in a loud crescent inside the courtyard that morning, while teachers monitored to make sure none tried climbing the cedar tree.

The smell of snow on cedar mixed with the metallic scent of clay when they brought Dibé (the sheep) from Mr. Bahe’s auntie’s ranch near Kinlichee.

Dibé had lost his fight during the fifteen-mile drive in the back of the pickup truck. Mr. Bahe carried him in like an old laundry sack, the legs bound with hay-wire. Mr. Yazzie followed in with a cedar log and a bowl large enough to toss a salad for eight. At least three students volunteered to hold them for him.

Jeers and laughter greeted Dibé as soon as he entered. My friends whistled, snapped fingers, raised eyebrows, and shouted breath-calls until Dibé rolled his eyes in his small skull and bleated loud and hoarse. We pushed close enough to smell the thick, sweet scent of alfalfa on his wool, to see the clay stains on his feet, dark like blood. But I noticed that everyone’s hands stayed in their pockets, and the feet furthest from Dibé bore most of the weight. The crowd grew silent.

This was the respect for animals that most Navajos practiced. Sheep were the “everlasting money” that had delivered the Navajos from starvation and poverty during many winters. Many traditional Navajos still refer to sheep as “the mother of the tribe” or “our mother,” and are as attached to their animals in the way some Anglos latch on to their cats or dogs. You didn’t insult or berate them.

Dibé never felt the cold concrete under him. His wool was still thick from the long winter. When they put him down, his neck began to swing, as though shaking away gnats in some sage-meadow of his obscure, fleeting memory.

Mr. Bahe, the eighth-grade algebra and geometry teacher, cupped the sheep’s head with his hand, lifted, and turned it to the sky. Mr. Yazzie, our wood-shop teacher, came behind him and braced the neck with the cedar log, so that it bowed and Dibé saw the world upside down. Mr. Bahe held Dibé under the chin and stretched him as his hand slipped into the pocket of his thick denim jacket. It came out holding a knife with a dark, six-inch blade. Mr. Yazzie came around Mr. Bahe with the bowl. No students stepped back. Some had seen this before.

Dibé was bleating hard now, and the steam from his breath clouded in the cold March air. In Diné Bikéyah—the traditional Navajo country—spring is slow, but the grass would be growing when winter was done. The grass would push up through the sand when it had collected enough water from the runoffs of the mountains. Dibé had never seen those mountains, but he’d been fed by them.

Mr. Bahe lifted his hand—as though to trace a parabola-graph or parallelogram model on his chalkboard—and used the dark knife for what it was meant. Dibé bleated until the knife cut his throat, and his hard gasps sprayed blood over his white wool like spots of warm rust. His bleating faded, flooded, as though Mr. Bahe had pushed a rag down Dibé’s throat, and the students made no noise while they watched the bowl fill. All of them, but Gabriel Smith.

Gabriel Smith, the son of a bilagáana from New Mexico, laughed.

The crescent of students turned on Gabe, as though he were chuckling at a paraplegic who’d fallen out of a wheelchair.

Angelo James put his fist into Gabriel’s shoulder and the laughing stopped.

Dibé sought the ground with his bound legs, tried to run, but only kicked at empty air. He flexed out, relaxed, then opened up. Steaming olive pebbles fell from his rectum. He was dead.

Mr. Yazzie pulled out his own knife and unbound the legs. Mr. Bahe ran the blade around the wrists in a neat circle, then cracked the bones with a sound like chalk breaking against a blackboard. The two teachers slit down the limbs, intersected to run along the chest and belly, and then took the skin away with careful, passing cuts of their knives to avoid damaging the thick, winter wool. Finally, Mr. Bahe cut through the neck and hewed off the head. He gave it to his aide, Roberta Tahe, who ran toward the fire pit at the far corner of the courtyard with the severed head dripping blood over her pink snow-boots. They would roast the head until the wool singed away. Two lucky students would get to eat the eyeballs.

Mr. Bahe took Dibé to the cedar and gave him to the highest bough. They hung the body by a single rope, and it glistening like plastic in the sun. Mr. Yazzie cut into the inverted belly and Buddy Nez brought a large mixing bowl to catch the pale stomach, firm and shiny like wet rubber, that slid out of Dibé. He ran it inside to the kitchen at the far end of the gymnasium.

Gabriel Smith snickered again. Phil Begay hit him this time, between the shoulders, and Gabriel grunted and squinted to hide his tears.

Mr. Yazzie, as his parents had taught him, found the pale joints of cartilage at the shoulders and hips, and cut away the hindquarters and front limbs one after the other. He gave them to the larger boys—mostly football players like Alfonso Wauneka—to take to the school secretaries tending the meat at the fire-pit.

Buddy Nez ran back from the kitchen, and, since his auntie was cooking at the pit, he got to eat the first cut from one of the thighs. He returned to the crescent, his mouth shiny and smiling. The rest of us moved to the fire pit, while one of the school secretaries met us with paper plates and thick paper towels. The far side of the fire pit was used to cook frybread. The fire hissed under the drops of fat falling through the iron grill and the flattened dough hovered over the sputtering lard in the pan.

There really is no taste like fresh mutton, one of the Navajo staples. It’s also one of the fattiest meats you can eat. Grill a mutton steak, then let it sit for more than twenty minutes, and it develops a white film of congealed fat over it that shines like shortening.

We ate strips of the salty, dripping mutton, wrapped in oval sheaves of frybread and joked about who kissed whom after class, who would be fighting after school and where it was going to be, or how Charles Kee quit the basketball team because he threw up on the last leg of sprints and slipped on—and into—the stripe of vomit he’d left on the waxed court of the Fieldhouse.

I went with some of my friends to the cafeteria kitchen, where two of the custodians showed us how to clean the intestines by filling them at the sink and rinsing over and over until their surface was clean like the skin of water-balloons.

One of the building custodians showed me how to pick the stomach free of k’ah, the fat that clumped like wet cotton on its surface. I ran the organ through my hands, feeling the inner wall, rough like a cat’s tongue against my fingers. It would be filled with blood, like the intestines, to bake as sausage.

The stomach was as slick as a fish’s skin, hard to pinch, but this was the slippery world I had known. I tried not to think about Mom’s talk about moving us from the Rez to work in some border town hospital. Maybe Farmington, maybe Page, or Inscription House. Perhaps even Phoenix. There would be better pay there, and a chance for Darren and me to compete for college scholarships that were practically nonexistent for Anglo students on the Reservation.

I picked the fat and tried not to think about it.

The next week would be the section exam for Algebra I, and Mr. Bahe would yell at his students to study like always. The Ganado Hornets would play the Window Rock Scouts on their way to the state championship that year. And they would spill the blood of their rivals from over the mountain summit on the court and in the parking lot afterward, pending the game’s score.

I left that day with mutton and frybread wrapped in paper towels to deliver to Mom, Carmen, and Lorinda Benally during their shift at the hospital. Mom was eating for two now, after all.

When I got home, I picked up Yanabah from day care, bundled her into her blanket, and we began our after-school stroller ride through Ganado. I tried not to think of leaving Ganado. It was like contemplating the death of a relative or a friend, something dreaded yet certain. I knew Mom was preparing applications and that she had even talked about working at the Navajo Generating Station, a coal-burning power plant just outside Page, Arizona. But I pushed the thoughts away and turned Yanabah’s stroller toward the horse corrals and the wash.

We eventually found ourselves along the barbed-wire fence perimeter of the campus, where the wash ran in a quiet, sparkling trickle below where Ferlin and I had outrun our skinwalker, where we’d built stick-dams, tracked the prints of deer and bears that followed the water south from the Defiance plateau summit, where we’d woven a quiet respect for the life of Diné Bikéyah, The People’s Land. A land that I felt had somehow become a part of and didn’t want to leave. Yanabah and I watched the wash sparkle and wind along its sandy bed.

- Kristofic, Jim, Navajos Wear Nikes: A Reservation Life. University of New Mexico Press. Kindle Edition.

Beit Haverim and Listening to My Soul

At least twice, I've written here about the importance of listening to intuition.

Last year, after a bout of insomnia, I made reservations to visit Oregon for the High Holy Days. For years, even before I sold my house, I'd had the feeling that I needed to go there.

After I'd made the reservations and gotten some sleep, I thought I'd made a crazy decision. However, moments after I arrived at shul on erev Rosh HaShanah, I knew it had been a good choice. I wrote, "Best thing I've done for myself in 22 years!"

There were many meaningful moments during that week, but what was most notable was how it felt to be there. I felt like I had during my "ten good years." It crossed my mind that I should cancel the reservation for my aliyah flight and move to Oregon instead of Israel. What I want most is community and Torah study.

Since I've made aliyah, I've longed for Jewish community, but been unable to make any connections. And, just about everything I've tried to do since I've been here has failed. It turns out that all the reasons I didn't make aliyah five years ago were sound.

Most people consider obstacles challenges to be overcome, but I've learned to think of them as signs that I'm heading in the wrong direction. Is that defeatism or realism?

This morning, after a rare full night of sleep, I made plane reservations to leave Israel. Was I responding to intuition or did I mistake some other feeling for intuition?

I'd rather live in Israel than in the United States, but the fact is, I can't live here. Just acquiring the basics is impossible for me. I haven't found a place to live, people to practice speaking Hebrew with, or friends to spend time with. In Oregon, I think I could have community and Torah study as well as a place to live and a job.

I need that elusive something that upheld me and propelled me forward during my ten good years and I might get it at Beit Haverim.

Then again... Israel is home. I missed it so much and it was such a struggle to get back. The political situation in America is frightening. Food and medical care are certainly superior in Israel. The potential for a better future is greater here than in the States, but I need help to achieve that potential. I do not manage well alone and I'm very alone.

Whenever I've had a good night's sleep  (presumably a good time to make a decision), I wake up with the certainty that I should return to the States. And every tarot reading I do, confirms that moving to Oregon would work out well for me.

Since I don't want my aliyah to be a waste, I made airline reservations to fly back to the States in five months, just before the High Holy Days, which will give me more time to learn Hebrew. (My appointment at Misrad HaKlita to request a second ulpan voucher is on April 30. I've also written to the Reform seminary, asking if I could hire a student to study the "new" Reform siddur with me.)

Round trip tickets were cheaper than a one-way ticket, so the option of returning to Israel will still be available to me, but I think a shul with a congregation that makes me feel strong and included, is the right place for me. Even though I will also be alone in (cold, rainy) Oregon, I will be in a country that I know how to navigate and I will speak the language, and I can be part of a Jewish community that uplifts me.

My first doubt came when I caught myself planning a seder for "next year in Portland," and realized that's just weird. I'm having many doubts. I will try to listen to my soul for guidance. (It's just so hard to hear my soul when I live in a place that is mostly pavement, garbage, and loud traffic.)