All Natural

Jay returned from his two-week journey in Amsterdam, as a teacher at a queer Shabbaton there, and then hiking through Norway. I can't wait to see his pictures of the fjords and their ubiquitous waterfalls.

It's so nice to have company, again, in an intimate, day-to-day way.

Tonight, we decided to go out, so travelled to Yad Kennedy, a memorial built by rich Jewish Americans to commemorate JFK. It's located in the middle of an enormous and dense JNF forest that covers the dozens of mountains that surround the memorial, and is actually designed to look like a tree that's had it's top cut off.

We sat on top of the mountain that the memorial rests on, hand in hand, and, as the sun set, talked about whether or not the JNF forests are "natural". Apparently every country that was at one time under Roman rule was deforested by the Romans for fuel, and just about everything else.

In fact, many ancient texts (written before Roman rule) describe Israel as a green land. So, although each tree in the JNF forest is donated by a person or organization, and may not be the most likely species of pine to sprout atop some of the mountains we saw last night, in some way, planting them is returning the land to its original state.

As we spoke, I felt the cool high air that lives in the mountains dancing around me, heard the sweet sound of crickets and coyotes, and noticed the beautiful pines whisper and gesture to one another in the breeze. Though I only spent a little while there, I was amazed at how much I loved the person I had become on that ridge. I wasn't ragged, distracted, nor tense in the least, and my face naturally relaxed into a smile when I felt my heart break into wide grins.

Jay reminded me that there is so much value in looking at the full body of Jewish religion, and realizing that it was never simply a legalistic religion of the elite. It is also a religion that grows out of nature, based on moon cycles, the life of trees, a sky god that probably evolved from the legendary winter clouds here (YHWH, originally a sky god), and rituals that the rest of world Jewry found meaningful and created out of awe for these phenomena. This isn't essentially a religion that defines itself against other people in politics and halakha (religious law), as some people might believe, but identifies with the soul of the world in nature's inherent grace and fury.