Between Jerusalem I'm Sorry: Real Inner Time, Real Community Guidelines, #2

By Donny Lee Duke

From Safed, Israel, the book's primary setting, I tell the story of my life, in terms of inner and spiritual experiences, and also of my shadow, in both prose and poetry, doing that with an almost constant eye on racism, from the perspective of a White boy growing up in the 60s and 70s in the South of the U. S. and of a non-Jewish adventure traveler in Israel in the mid 90s, the former where I am the racist, the latter where I'm discriminated against. In light of all that, I examine the scope of reality, inner exploration, the human soul, enlightenment, religious orthodoxy, the heavens and the hells, the demonic and the divine, how we became distinct from other animals, the development of the ego in humanity as a whole and in every child born, Jewish Identity, Israel, The Green Berets, tactical nuclear weapons, the Holocaust, the healing of human evil, LSD, human unity, the International Township of Auroville, taking back the world from government overreach, the coming evolutionary change in humanity, the inspiration of poetry, and the purpose of dog.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Donny Lee Duke
• Release date: May 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223700241

Book preview

Introduction

I am the non-Jewish traveler in Israel, that one,[1] that did a three-week hunger strike for peace in Jerusalem and afterwards taped poems of mine on holy sites in the old city, on the top of Mt. Sinai and inside and around the Great Pyramid in Egypt. This is the story of after Jerusalem and before the mountain and pyramid postings, a five month period in 1995 when I was in-between actions, when I was a vagabond sleeping outdoors more than in, when the Internet was yet too young to be the world wall or whatnot I posted my poems on. Those actions are told in a series of stories entitled, "A Journey of a Thousand Tongues", posted on the world wide web, a stand in for honest to God face me reality, where we are yet but stand ins for human beings and not actual living and breathing people a world unto ourselves, or at least that’s how we act with one another on the net, where value is not put in terms of quality but in how great a diversion something gives. Nonetheless, it’s where I’m publishing this book, because of the absence of the usual censors, who most likely wouldn’t let this book pass. I doubt you’ll find a book that’s that hits us in the quick of our social selves more. Netizen, you’re in for a wild ride of a read.

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You know about memory? Number one, no two people will remember the same event the same way, and even the same person will give slightly different accounts of it as time goes on, because memory gets things mixed up over time, puts this after that when this came first, forgets what a location was wearing, can’t remember this name but remembers that one (oftentimes more the name that did you wrong than did you good), adds things that weren’t there (usually things that make you look better), gets rid of things that were there (things that make you look bad), and it exaggerates events to make them more interesting or you more the hero or victim. Yet the mind is sure the story’s true when told. Dialogue is especially difficult, impossible really, since you basically just have to make it up when relating what was said (why I use it sparingly), trying as best you can to capture the gist of the conversation, if, that is, you are trying your best to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and many of us aren’t. It isn’t only Hollywood that embellishes stories to make them sellable. We all do that a certain extent, even when we don’t want to.

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That’s just the way memory works, unless you’re under hypnosis or something, or the whole thing was filmed, the conversation taped, and even then there’ll be debate. It makes narrative nonfiction part fiction no matter how you slice it, why I imagine the genre autofiction has come about in the first place: just to admit at the get go you’re not letting the facts get in the way of the story, to quote partly Farley Mowat, author of The Dog Who Wouldn’t be and Never Cry Wolf. You might wonder if he’s not doing that with his attitude to the truth. Getting the facts as accurate as possible gives the story more reality, and that’s what I’m doing, showing you, as best I can, as much of reality as I can. If you haven’t seen sides of it I’m going to show, then I’m doing my job. My muse however, which gives the inner perspective on the happenings of the outer world, has been insistent on adding the following: I don’t think facts life earth. Since it’s basically also the inner that remembers events, it seems the deck’s stacked against a 100% factual narrative of any event in the whole history of us.

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It’s all so normal, so everyday, but, when you look at it, it’s out of this world. I’m talking about the fact that we are only here for some seconds before here becomes a there you cannot go to again save by a faulty, elusive memory. It’s a little scary too. Did that really happen, I mean, anything that we’ve experienced? Past experience has a will-o-wisp feel about it, can make you doubt the reality of reality itself. When you top that off with the fact that you only hear your inner life and not that of anyone else’s, as if you’re the only real one around, even though you know you aren’t, know with the same sense you know you’re real, you get the strangest world, impossible to capture with so many words.

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Now let’s just get down to business. What’s at the bottom of racism and bigotry? I explore that, with an eye on how to heal it, but I’m not looking at it through the usual lens, the Black and White card of racism, although I do look through that lens quite often in this book, as a way to see more clearly the main focus here, which is something that is not officially allowed to even be named, much less examined, without you yourself being charged with racism. It’s a no name situation. This book exams the bigotry I experienced being a non-Jew in Israel, not only by religious Jews but also by Jewish American university students and graduates, and it was so ‘don’t sit at the table with us’ it felt like the lines weren’t being drawn on religious lines but on racial ones, like there was a fundamental difference between us in our very humanity, and I was the inferior type among them. Many Jews will tell me I’m being anti-Semantic just by saying this, but I’ll tell you what I felt: I was the nigger. You know, maybe it’s here, in this unwieldy, unmentionable thing, the bigotry of Jewish people, not all Jews by any means, but enough it was the main course on the table, humble pie, when I was a gentile in the land of Israel, and I seriously doubt I’m the only person that’s ever experienced this, that we just might find the heart itself of Western racism, and in so doing, have an eye yet to heal the world’s.

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Yet this book isn’t about racism, and it doesn't put Jews low on the rank card in terms of being human (if you're not Jewish you might be offended where I do place them on the totem pole). That’s the tool I use, the jumping off place, in order to get at world origin and human meaning. Can you think of a better one? And if those two inscrutable, cabalistic things aren’t enough, I will take this book all the way to spiritual enlightenment and beyond, all the way to God, mentioning even devils in-between, and I’ll do that with my very hands and feet, not just my mind and mouth, and, believe me, you’ve never read anything like it in your life.

You’re sitting right there a you. The complexities of the relationship between us preclude any real knowledge of me, I mean that you taste me as substantial as you taste yourself, and, like me, you taste yourself bigger than you appear, much bigger of course than me at this moment. That’s just human nature. But read this book, and another person will become real to you in taste, become a taste of your very self. That person is this author. You game?

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Because curd rice

is a healthy alternative to chicken.

Center for where things go alone.

Are you anti-Semitic?

I think you see the healthy alternative:

examine racism in all its forms.

That's the hero of the day.

We get rid of racism that way.

Now let's go.

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You’ve added onto barley.

This smells the world.

Tell me about it,

a feature of muse.

Come on let’s go ride the mountain,

a lonely seer’s voice in time,

the exclamation of the book.

I’m modal thinking.

I’m reachin’ for everything

that will knock your socks off.

You’ve got the book.

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[1] The writing of this book resulted from the efforts I made over a period of months to get Ari Mahler to speak to me after he accepted my friend request on Facebook. He never did, although finally a personal friend of his did and told me basically to be quiet, that he was a public figure and to leave him alone, and I did but began this book, which has been some three years in the writing, put down, picked up again, and now picked up to finish and significantly edit all I wrote before. Ari wrote the famous Facebook post: "I am The Jewish Nurse. Yes, that Jewish Nurse. The same one that..."

Iraeli paratrooperes.jpg

SIX DAY WAR. ISRAELI PARATROOPERS IN FRONT OF THE WESTERN WALL by David Rubinger (public domain)

Chapter 1

Where White Puts Supremacy Last

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On a bright day in Jerusalem in 1995, a young woman approached our little hunger strike camp like a Buddhist goddess, with her flowing orange robes, crew cut, and a face made out of sunshine, or so it seemed, and I was immediately enchanted. Walking straight up to Lars and I, my partner in the hunger strike, she deferred to us like we were kings, calling us hunger strikers like it was a title that meant we were God’s gift to the world, and we just ate it up, since we both secretly considered ourselves such a gift, and we gave her our complete attention, fell over ourselves to seat her there in the center of the world with us, fooled like everyone is by where our senses place us in the scheme of things, dead center. Hen-ya was a master at this disguise and was not aware she was wearing any, had lost herself completely in the part she played, a young Jewish woman defying the powers that be, embracing another religion, and daring to love everyone, but I could not see her self-ruse at the time so lost was I in mine.

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I’d have followed her anywhere, and when she urged us to go to Safed after the strike, it was there I would go, Lars going back to Denmark for some soul searching, having his individual world somewhat altered by the intense clash with the world itself. He had, alone unto himself, considered himself the Mahdi of Islam, having converted in Iran and been treated special because he was a Caucasian convert, the only one around. Not understanding why he was the honored guest at every household he went to, all that special treatment went to his head, but the Golden Gate did not open to him when he touched it, when we were taping poems of mine on it one midnight standing on our tippy toes on Muslim gravestones, and it was supposed to open for the Mahdi according to some prophecies, and that had sort of rocked his secret ‘I am the one’ world, not to mention someone else in his face constantly reminding him others saw themselves at the center of the world too. That person was me.

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Returning to the present of this story, it happened that after the strike, which wasn’t a real hunger strike because we drank milk and vegetable pure, although we technically didn’t eat anything, everyone went their separate ways except Zeke and I, who went with Hen-ya to Safed. Although Lars and I were the only ones not eating, by the time we finished, Easter and Passover of that year, 1995, a small band of people had joined us at our camp. Most were backpackers who wanted to be part of something interesting, but two were perpetual pilgrims who had made careers vagabonding the Holy Land: Zeke, a Russian Jew, Torah scholar, and Kabbalist in his 5o’s, and Andre, a self-proclaimed Catholic monk from French speaking Belgium just turning 30, who figures in the story from TonguesWithout a Miracle a Few Fools Salvaged Hope. It was Zeke who had persuaded us to stay in our camp early on when a group of young Palestinian men had threatened to kill us if we didn’t leave, our test of fire during our action. It’s not an absolute rule of world action, but it happens often enough to be a guideline: when you draw a definite line in this world, stand up for anything with enough force, your resolve will be tested. Watch what happens with anyone that proclaims they love the world: someone will come along that shows them to be a hypocrite. Sorry Ari.

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Safed, in the north of Israel in the Galilee district, is the highest city in Israel and is considered a center of Kabbalistic learning, or became so after 1492 when Jews were expelled from Spain, but my search there for mystical practice yielded no results, only what seemed to me a confusion between that and being ultra-orthodox, although my search was admittedly limited by language and culture. I slept in the old cemetery and in the bushes of a small park in the artist’s quarter, spending only three or four nights inside in my month or so there. I was used to that since I’d been sleeping outside during the three weeks of the strike, but of course I wanted to be indoors. Zeke, being Jewish, easily found houses to sleep at. My dream life was quite enhanced in Safed, and not only was there a lot of lucidity but also very deep dreaming, and it was apparent to me that the location was quite conducive to inner exploration, either because it had been used for such over a long period of time or because it was just naturally situated to be such, like an unusual mountaintop in a region or a strange and special place in a natural area, but it’s probable it’s for both reasons.

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It was in Safed that I came to terms with my inexplicable Jewish identity that had been coming up in dream for years. I reasoned that maybe it was because I was circumcised, but that wasn’t sufficient to explain it to myself. It felt more substantial than just having a conditioned penis. While there I explored the possibility of converting, after having a powerful lucid dream about what Jewish identity meant. It was set in some European city sometime before WWII, judging from the 1930’s style clothes. I walked into a city square, a plain one surrounded by brick buildings without any grass. There was a large pile of kippahs about a meter high in the center where the fountain usually is in a square. After a moment of deliberation, I took one off the pile and put it on. As I did, a young, married Jewish couple walked by arm in arm, and the man saw I’d put on the kippah, and he said, You know what that means don’t you, putting on a kippah? It means you’re a Jew, and that means being part of a people. The sense was not any kippah would fulfill that for me, only one from that pile. That I was lucid added a lot more weight to my decision, as though my waking self had made it, not only my dreambody.

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Of course that I was surrounded by young Jewish Americans exploring their Jewish identity aided my feeling to convert, not to mention where I was, but I ultimately decided against it because I didn’t want to become an orthodox Jew, which was at that moment in Israel the only way to become Jewish, and there were two kibbutzes that specialized in that, where I’d go if I converted. Besides, it wasn’t the religion I identified with, not in the least; it was the people part of it that I identified with, but that’s what makes one’s Jewish identity so difficult to explore: can you be a Jew and not practice Judaism? Or put differently: can you separate Judaism from being Jewish? That’s a question that probably has as many answers as there are Jews, but all I knew was that if you want to convert you have to go through the religious side, and I didn’t want to do that nor had that calling. The real reason I didn’t convert, unbeknownst to me at the time, however, was I was being called to another path. To this day, my Jewish identity still comes up in dream, but I know now where it’s coming from, but you won’t easily believe it unless you hear how it fits into my life story.

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I was born in 1961 into a White Protestant lower class family that became middle class during my early adolescence, after a divorce and split. The identifiers, i.e., what group identities were most stressed while my ego was being formed, were being a Duke, White, American, Texan, southern, and male. I should mention that the southern identification was with the South of the Civil War, as the Confederate flag, heroes, and symbols of the South peppered my childhood world. My father regularly schooled me on the inferiority of both non-Whites and women, and it was his attitude in regards to the latter that made my mom ultimately divorce him when I was six. Although a racist and bigot, he was not anti-Semitic, and I never heard him belittle Jews. He greatly admired Israel, and it was a country regularly put before me as deserving of respect, mainly because it was able to defend itself so well against what seemed overwhelming odds.

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I remember once he was driving the family down the road, right before the divorce and right after the Six-Day War, and he was turning his head back and talking to me in the backseat, as he did often while driving, as though my mom and sister weren’t even there, and he was telling me about Israel, how it had been surrounded on every side since its birth, by nations that wanted to wipe it out, and it had just beat them all again. That, he told me, was a nation to admire.

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He didn’t, however respect Black people. He taught me often that African Americans were an inferior race, were little more than monkeys. He called them niggers. So did, inceidentally, every other White person I knew except my teachers at school and the clergy of our church. One day, when I was four or five, and we were getting out of the car to go to the house, I saw the only Black family on our street standing in front of their house, a couple of houses down from ours, just the mom and dad, and I went up to them and told them my daddy said you were monkeys, said it loudly and proudly. They looked a bit stricken but didn’t say anything. I’ll never forget them standing there silently looking at me the way they did. They weren’t mad and didn’t even seem offended. They looked very sad and looked at me like you’d look at a small child that didn’t know what he was saying. It did not match with the behavior of monkeys, and even then I could sense a discrepancy, and I teetered a moment looking at what I now know was their humanity, what it was they were showing to me, but then I marched back to my family, thinking my dad would be proud of me. He was embarrassed, as was my mom. I didn’t understand why he was. Afterall, he’d taught me that so confidently and righteously. He didn’t scold me, but he did tell me that I wasn’t to do that to Black people. Our neighborhood of Southpark was in the preceding years to experience what was called back thenWhite flight, and in time the racial demographics changed completely from a predominantly White neighborhood to a predominantly Black one.

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It would bear mentioning that among the kids that I played with on my street, Southmund, and I lived at 5918, we all identified with the Rebels and not the Yankees, as the Civil War was a common theme of our kid talk, like it’d just happened a few years back. I do not know, nor can remember, why, except to say that the Confederacy was such a part of our culture. Once I told my older sister Gwen that I liked the Yankees, and I always secretly identified with them, since I liked the blue uniforms better and the fact they were Americans, and I really identified with being an American. Gwen said she’d tell Pepal, my father’s father, who owned and worked a small farm in East Texas, one I’d live on as an older child. I remember how serious she was—you know how kids are—and how afraid I was that she’d tell Pepal, as if it would’ve gotten me in big trouble. I immediately took it back and said I liked the Rebels.

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When I’d return to Houston after living on the farm, I’d be an avid reader, and I liked to read war stories mostly, and on the war shelf in my school, George A. Thompson Intermediate, there were biographies of all the Confederate heroes, and I read every one of them. There weren’t many biographies of Union heroes that I remember. There was, however, a book I kept passing over, because it was about a young Union soldier, and I actually felt guilty to even leaf through its pages, like someone would see me and tell someone, the historical novel Rifles For Watie. It turned out to be the best book I read about war while in that school. With such an obvious effort to keep the Confederacy’s memory alive in a school library, you would not wonder over the fact that the city of Pasadena, Texas, whose school district I attended, had a sign at each of its city limits well into the 60’s that read, Nigger don’t get caught here when the sun goes down. It also had a KKK bookstore that stayed open until the end of the 70’s. More than one kid in my high school went there to get material for book reports. I visited it when I was 17, and, although I was of the cowboy crowd, called Kikkers in my high school because of the country and western radio station KIKK that the cowboy crowd listened to, I felt as though I was in enemy territory and looked at the guy behind the counter as a goon. I went there with my two best friends at the time, both kickers, and they felt the same way. The book reports, too, were not pro KKK. There’s a hard thing to get across here, and that is, although people of my immediate culture were racist and still identified with the Confederacy, and even the popular country radio station’s call sign sounds a lot like KKK, most anyone I was ever around growing up didn’t like the KKK itself, did not take their ill will towards Blacks that far, not even my racist father.

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Although racism against Blacks was a common feature growing up, and I went to school with many Black children, who, however, made up a small minority of the schools I went to in and around Houston, I didn’t encounter much anti-Semitism, other than I’d hear someone being called a Jew if they were stingy with money, which is of course still anti-Sematic, and there was only one Jewish person that I remember in elementary school, Kelso Elementary (a part of H.I.S.D.), a girl who sat beside in second grade, but I never saw her harassed by the other kids or singled out by the teacher for being Jewish, and I knew that she was Jewish because she talked about it often, as it was such a part of her identity. I didn’t look at her any differently than if she were Presbyterian or something, as my family were Baptists. I remember that she was quite headstrong for a girl, vocal and not hesitant to stand up for herself, and we clashed along gender lines, as per dad’s indoctrination. I actually had a crush on her that I never could quite admit to myself, and I was a romantic lad, had had girlfriends since kindergarten.

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In high school I had a Jewish girlfriend with those attributes, Rachael, but she had converted to Christianity, something strongly opposed by her family, and I faced off with her older brother a couple of times over it (she and I were 15 and freshmen), but I just thought he and his family were ignorant of the truth, since at that time I was a ‘Jesus person’, (Jesus freak to my classmates), that is, fanatically devout and evangelical, and so in my mind Christianity was the only true religion. But I did begin to understand that being Jewish meant more than being simply a Presbyterian or such, and that there was something stronger about being Jewish than at that time I could put my finger on.

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I don’t remember when I first heard about the Holocaust, or realized what I’d been seeing in the media and whatnot all my life in regards to it was an event called the Holocaust, but I do remember, once that realization came, that I was baffled as to why Jews would be singled out. Hitler and his henchmen were in my mind the face of evil itself, and it was the same for my society, as this was only the 60’s, and WWII was yet fresh in the Western collective mind. When my reason was sufficiently developed, I attributed it to Hitler’s madness and the insane evil of the Nazis, but of course my reason was informed by my society. As I got older I began to understand the need in human society for scapegoats, and the more authoritarian a society the more violent would be the singling out of scapegoats, and, as I saw it, Jews in Germany at the time were the most convenient target.

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That is certainly true, but could the willingness to accept them as the scapegoat have anything to do with the behavior and/or attitude of Jews themselves? What we have lost in the Western time spirit’s adamant directive against blaming the victim is the whole picture behind any occurrence of people harming other people, and I must say the issue here isn’t just harm but attempted genocide, which is all the more reason to be open to seeing the whole of the matter: so it doesn’t happen again, to any people, and that it has and continues to this day may have something to do with the fact that we hold the victim aboslute in their innocence of becoming and being the victim, will not admit any ‘fault’ on their part that might’ve made them targets in the first place. Wearing kid gloves, with an attitude of respect, I aim to question Jewish bigotry in the light of the persecution Jews have faced. Don’t count me wrong. I’m of the opinion there is no justification for persecuting anybody. Just listen.

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In college I worked for three years as a doorman, valet, and concierge for a high-rise condo complex in Houston, Four Leaf Towers, and many of the residents were Jewish. I was an employee popular with the residents, and I was well taken care of, although I had to pay the price of my privacy, as I’ll explain later. Working graveyard, I was an ear for some who had no one else to talk to about things, and one of the residents who came regularly to talk was a concentration camp survivor. He never talked directly about his experiences in the camp, but he showed me his tattoo, as did others there. They were, in my mind, people to care for and listen to. As an undergrad minoring in History, I’d come across many firsthand accounts of the Holocaust in my studies, as part of my class work and what I pursued on my own, that event in history standing out to me as holding some key to our evil that, if we could find it, could possibly show us how to heal human evil itself.

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It’s pertinent to the story to mention here that during those three years of employment there I was a post-baccalaureatestudying Classical Greek at the University of Houston. I had no major but did have a focus, once, that is, I dropped my plans to do graduate work in the History of Science. I wanted to learn, which was a project of self-study, the process of both individual ego transcription and how we became human beings apart from other animals in the first place, where human identity came from and how it’s continued with each child we have. Greek was a doorway into the ancient world as well as a means whereby I learned to think, as learning that language broadened and deepened my ability to think, and think creatively, as much of ancient Greek writing of significance is poetry. It also helped keep me, along with my job, grounded in the outer world.

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It was during that time I had a spiritual experience that rearranged the identifiers in my ego, or a series of experiences I should say (and include in that metaphysical experiences) that showed me we not only share a field of consciousness, are connected to one another in our inner lives, and communicate with each other therein, but that we also share identity, and my racial, familial, national, religious, regional and gender identities became flimsy things only skin deep, not who or what I was, although I am still influenced by them. Focused on the inmost feelings of another human being around the world is how I might put what it’s like to identify with humanity as whole, and it’s not a decision I made that I try and live up to; it’s who I feel I am, a human being first and foremost, here in the flesh among human groupings that is, however much I fail to treat everyone with the same importance I give myself, as my ego has not been surpassed, just rearranged, where humanity has become the group I identify with as opposed to some grouping within humanity.

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It’s this identity I took to Israel, one human-wide despite my failings, and I was very surprised to be discriminated against by Jews because I wasn’t Jewish, just about every time I turned around, as I’d naively thought that Jews, because they had been discriminated against so harshly and for so long, would not be prejudiced against anyone. Chalk it up to not understanding human nature, how