15, Elul, 2300
So Avner,
They call it an 'experimental event.' I have no azazel'ing idea what that means, but it's ten days long, it takes place every year, and the papyrus says it's focused on 'community, self-expression, and self-reliance.' I don't know if the whole thing will be as great as Reshep says it will; getting through the kid burning is going to be brutal, but all told it's pretty awesome so far. People burn these amazing sculptures they all made themselves, all kinds of priests come here to do performance art. You're supposed to leave your weapons at the edge of the campsite, and I guess some bouncers look after them, but if there were really no weapons you couldn't do half the things people do in this place.
But everybody says this festival has gotten all 'corporate.' It used to be for frum people: you know, the real free spirits. Now it's become a meeting point for all these tribal elders from around the country to meet each other and make business contacts and stay, of course, in luxury campsites separate from the rest of us low degree... Some promoter I talked to yesterday told me about all sorts of bureaucracy involved: bans on transportation on the grounds, any animal sacrifice has to have a permit and many activities are only zoned for specific parts of the campsite.
They do the whole thing in a different place every year: all around the Negev where nobody not involved would ever bother them, maybe even never notice them: though you'd think fires that big would attract attention 20,000 cubits away. There's a lot of jargon in this place: like everywhere these days. All kinds of dogmas about 'radical inclusion, radical self-expression, radical decommodification, radical gifting', is there really anything radical about this pagan worship festival compared to the other 300 pagan worship festivals going on around the Middle East?
There's a lot of exchanges here, they call it gift-giving but the reality's pretty different. Whatever food people make they share with each other. If somebody's cold, they share tunics and cloaks. Some lady I zayin'd last night whose name I didn't learn gave me a shawl and we ended up snuggling under it: it was really nice. But if you don't have food, you're expected to perform sexual favors in exchange for a meal, which isn't. Whenever there's a couple fornicating outdoors in the daytime, there's an unspoken rule that if a third person joins them, that person's expected to cook the couple dinner afterward out of their own food supply. But however unkosher all that can sometimes be, some of these gifts aren't even exchanges. Some people come to the festival with literally hundreds of pre-made gifts that they hand out to whomever is around, and some of them are extraordinarily generous. Some old lady heard I was Jewish and gave me an idol of Ba'al that must have taken her two months to carve. It was beautiful! Hopefully it won't break before I get home so I can show it to you. This is exactly how they must get converts. It's not the sex. People are so nice to you at these things.
People have been complaining about the priestesses. Apparently they used to sell their own merchandise--mostly tapestries--and charge people for drinks and drugs and transportation, apparently they were even considering charging the congregants for coitus: you can imagine how that would go over. But people put up such a m'huma about it all that they stopped charging for everything. The priestesses are all really nice: young, old, it doesn't matter, but greed is something all religions have in common.
But even if this is no commune, the people out here are so progressive that they don't even bury their shit. We're encouraged to pick it up and give it to the nearest priestess, who puts it in a series of giant tubs around the camp grounds that apparently fertilizes their grounds every year and make the crops that a lot of these people subsist on year round.
Obviously it goes without saying that public nudity is entirely encouraged. In this way, the Canaanite pagans are not quite as free as their reputation. The vast majority keeps their clothes on, even when it's beytzim hot out. Most of them are nearly as concerned as we are about sunburn, and they prefer going around in combo outfits of linen and wool. Some people cosplay as animals and have these incredibly ornate designs. I will never understand cosplay as long as I live, and here as everywhere else, cosplayers are so much weirder than nudists.
Obviously the art is amazing: I've mentioned the sculptures, but the tapestries are amazing, so are the murals, metal masonry, ivory carvings, all kinds of intricate outfits people wear (not just the cosplayers), the vast majority of it will be burned in offerings to Ba'al and Asherah, and sometimes Ashtarot, whom half these pagans don't even realize is a different goddess than Asherah. There are incredible amateur musicians who pull out their instruments every night and jam out with each other on every campsite. There's even some guerilla theater: though, of course, some of it was a little anti-Israel.
But then you get the mainstage acts, and they are extraordinary. Just the most incredible music you've ever heard, with ten thousand people dancing their asses off to the most intricate African-influenced drum beats this side of Carthage. None of this old fashioned Jewish fiddling crap our parents forced us to learn.
But now for the thing you really want to know: the 'Sex Dome.' Yes, the priestesses fuck everyone in there. Many of the priestesses are very attractive, but you'll either be disappointed or relieved to know that this Eden of pleasures you'd imagined is so far from what's going on there. It's the most normal sex worship you'll ever encounter. Everything is calibrated so that the priestesses can do missionary work. There's no carpeting on the tent's ground so everything is sandy, and god knows how the priestesses deal with that... You have no idea whom you're osehing next to until you're next to them, and nearly all the priestesses are age appropriate for the worshipper, so however beautiful the priestess you often have to do it in front of a couple of copulating senior citizens. You also need your partner there to watch you, ostensibly it's either part of the consummation or maybe they just think it's sexy, but it's really to make sure that you behave yourself around the priestesses, and even so there are some unfortunately toxic pagans who pull the rough stuff. Try likshaving the business while some guy is screaming his head off as he gets thrown out for trying to mess up a woman.
On the other hand... the drugs man... the drugs: Lavanese hash, Berberian cannabis, Anatolian opium (apparently the rich guys import it all the way from Aryana), mandrakes and wine from all around the Mediterranean, and the stuff people really come there for: Henbane, that Phonecian plant that gets you so high you'll think you saw Yahweh. I'm not kidding on that one dude, my friend Elkanah says Yahweh literally talked to him. I told him don't dare tell anybody at the festival.
It's not the greatest thing I've ever seen, but it's a pretty awesome way to pass a week and a half. When you get old enough, you should go to festivals like this. It doesn't mean that you'll become a pagan if you go, but you owe it to yourself to see everything that's out there. We just can't compete with all this shit. They've got all these gods and beauty and music and sex, and we've got... a book? What are we supposed to do next to all this, fuck a torah?
Mom and Dad of course hate that I'm going to this festival, and I see why. If the elders knew what was going on here in Re'im they'd send an army to mow us down. Elkanah literally talked to Yahweh, but he still says he's going to start keeping idols in his room. If his parents find them, he'll get the rod-striking of the century. The point I've always been making to Mom and Dad is just that you can't take everything you hear so seriously: whether it's Joshua talking to God or some cute priestess outside a Canaanite welcome center. Everybody's got something to sell, and it's up to us to figure out what it is. When this is over, I'll keep going on my gap year, then I'll come home and go back to making tents, but after your Bar Mitzvah bonds appreciate you should go to a festival like this too and make up your own mind.
Love and see you soon,
Avshalom
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15, Elul, 2305
So Avshalom,
I know it's been a long time but I really want to tell you about everything I've seen.
I've been thinking so much about that letter you sent at the festival during your own gap year. I know you meant to pour some ice over my tshuka to get out, but it made me that much more anxious to get out and see the world. Now that I'm seeing it, I'm not sure I can go back.
Mom and Dad will say it's because I don't want to, but the truth is I can't. Something is calling me out here, and I have to stay.
Everything you saw at that festival, everything we talked about, I'm experiencing every day here. I can't leave at the end of the year, and I have no idea how to tell Mom and Dad. They'll feel destroyed, they'll disown me, and the worst part is that I'm not sure I care. We shouldn't be living like them, they should be living like me!
We live on an abandoned Sumerian training camp. The camp had everything: clean wells, clean paths, designated places for waste. Obviously, they left after the Abraham War, but you can still see everything they built here. And we all stay in the ruins of the mudbrick houses. If you perform especially good services for the community, you get to stay for a week in the stone house, whose plaster roof is mostly intact (made of mud of course). As a rule, we don't repair houses, but when's the last time it rained near Arad?
I have no idea what you would call this place if you saw it, but we call it a city. Everybody who's been here a while calls it the 'last free place in Israel.' The population goes up and down: just a hundred or two in the summer but usually becoming thousands in the winter. If only I'd found this place last winter, but I have to stay at least that long.
You won't be thrilled to learn that most of the people here are unemployed and either living on savings or living on handouts from nearby towns. For dinner every night everybody eats dehydrated meat that they salted months ago the last time they were around wood. It's an interesting process. They cut all the fat off so it doesn't spoil, then they put it in an oven for half a day. The smoke gives it this unbelievable flavor, but the salt is so strong that in order to eat it you have to keep hydrating all day before and after. We also don't clean our wells by the way. I know you think it's ridiculous but everybody wants their water natural without any of those artificial preservatives that poison everybody's wells in Israel, and I've started agreeing with them.
Everybody has a musical instrument, everybody has parchment to make drawings, and whatever stones we find aren't used to build, they're sculpted: we use them to make art.
Right at the entrance to the city is a hill, really just a giant slab of rock, we call it 'Y'shwa Mountain', and it's been sculpted into every love symbol in Canaan. Everything from men copulating with women to copulating with other men to copulating with livestock to copulating with gods, and all of them doing it in every position you can think of. Everybody who comes to the city leaves a trinket there: sometimes an amulet, sometimes a cylinder seal, sometimes cuneiform. There are literally thousands of them at the bottom of the hill, and sometimes you have to brush them away in order to see the sculptures.
The city also has a sculpture garden for whatever stone art the residents make. Part of what's great about this place is that long as the sculpture is bigger than a certain measurement, people can keep sculpting it. The pieces are always unfinished, and community is considered their only author. At any point any sculpture can be anything from a cow to a god to a couple copulating. Every night, people put on performances in the sculpture garden: everything from music to theater to performance art in which they interact with the sculptures. I'll refrain from telling you how, but people can sign up to perform and have to perform in clothes provided by the city that were donated by former residents. It's specified that every performer has to change in front of the audience...
The year rounders live in their own part of the city: the West of it. They mostly keep to themselves, but they're the ones I want to be most like. Some of them have been very helpful to me, and they're not helpful to everybody. A lot of them don't care for the migrants who come here in the winter, and would like to keep their town quiet and self-sufficient. There was a plague that hit our city a few years ago, and a lot of the year round residences are sure that the plague wouldn't have come without the migrants. But they know they need the migrants to come down because that's the only way they get new supplies.
The biggest problem here, the thing I've gotta watch out for, is drugs. A lot of the people here, year rounds and migrants, are clearly addicted to opium and walk around the city in a daze. They're the residents I absolutely don't want to be like at all. Part of me wishes we could just throw them out.
For the first time in my life, I feel like I'm in a place I belong. Mom and Dad wanted to expose us to everything, and they did a pretty good job of it, but they forgot to expose us to places where we fit in. We never fit in around Jerusalem. Face it Avshalom, we don't fit in in those places where Jews aren't allowed to worship any graven images, we know better. Once you learn things you can never unlearn them. We learned to never take that shit too seriously, and you were never even sure Mom and Dad did.
Do I believe in Ba'al now? No, not really. But I believe in his ethics, I believe in communal living, I believe in living at one with the land, I believe in limiting your environmental footprint. I think marriage and monogamy are social constructs just like monotheism. So is money, and our background always demanded we believe in things we can't see. We can't see them, and still we're supposed to believe they exist. I just can't buy it anymore.
I know Mom and Dad are going to be destroyed by the news that I'm not coming back, and I know I'm putting you in a terrible position with this news. Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is probably going to be gahennim for you. I'm so sorry about that, really I am. The last thing I want to do is put you in that position, but I heard the call out here. Whether it was Yahweh or Ba'al, this is the land He showed me, and this is where I have to be.
I promise, when Mom and Dad cool down, I'll visit. And even if they don't, I'll come visit, but you should come see me out here. If you saw what we're doing here, you might start rethinking things too.
Love,
Avner
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