2007-06-19
The Trip.
The Context of the trip.
(Trying to explain why we were there. A form of core dump as I work my way back to wiitwd. But no wiitwd in this post.)
For many years Mrs. Thorney and I have attended synagogue on Saturday and church on Sunday. (Mrs. Thorney is liberal Protestant, although she might be an Arian if that was possible in this century). I'm Jewish, traditional in belief and Orthodox when we met, but we attend a Reform Jewish Temple as she isn't much into Hebrew. Our kids were by earlier marriages so religion of kids wasn't a problem. )
I call myself a Zionist - I want a place for the Jews, where they can live in peace and safety and "where they can go, when they have to go someplace". I think Israel is the place where the world might let us do do that. That doesn't mean I have to agree with policies of the Israeli government any more that the fact that I'm a patriotic American means I have to agree with policies of the US government.
We've been distressed for some time with the alliance (as we see it) between Osama bin Laden and George Bush, promoting wars between Islam and the West. And we were upset at what we saw as a Jewish overreaction to Carter's recent book on Palestine. As comparative religion fanatics, we've found Islamic ideas helpful sometimes in our thinking. And we don't feel that the US can afford to treat out resident Muslims - most of whom are as inoffensive as our local Methodists - as some kind of exotic or hostile strangers. So a few months ago we started attending our neighborhood mosque on Fridays in addition to our synagogue and church, getting active in their social events, inviting people from one house of worship to visit another with us (yes, a few Muslims -have- come to synagogue with us.) And we've run parties where friends from one of these places can meet our friends from another.
And then Mrs. Thorney discovered that the American Friends Service Committee - a Quaker-founded group we have long been friends of - was acting jointly with a group called "Interfaith Peace Builders" (an offshoot of the pacifist group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation) to sponsor a group to visit pro-peace groups, mainly in Palestine (West Bank) but also in Israel, to explore chances for peace in the area. And Mrs. Thorney, commenting that at the age of 83, one can afford to take some risks, suggested we go. I agreed.
We traveled with the group May 25 - June 3. I'll tell a bit about that in another post later. On June 3 she was viciously mugged, not in the obviously dangerous areas we had been deliberately traveling in, but a few yards from our hotel in Jerusalem. That will be another post. And then comes the treatment and recovery, which is giving us opportunities to find new ways to relate to each other, and new ways to express our closeness in the absence of the most usual sexual outlets. And it is giving me, shall we say, great opportunities to try out a wide variety of submissive roles and fantasies, see how I like them, and to think about my own fantasies and motivations. So I do intend, within a few days and subject to the constraints of the children and grandchildren who will be coming to visit, to get back to interesting thoughts about wiitwd.
The Trip.
The Context of the trip.
(Trying to explain why we were there. A form of core dump as I work my way back to wiitwd. But no wiitwd in this post.)
For many years Mrs. Thorney and I have attended synagogue on Saturday and church on Sunday. (Mrs. Thorney is liberal Protestant, although she might be an Arian if that was possible in this century). I'm Jewish, traditional in belief and Orthodox when we met, but we attend a Reform Jewish Temple as she isn't much into Hebrew. Our kids were by earlier marriages so religion of kids wasn't a problem. )
I call myself a Zionist - I want a place for the Jews, where they can live in peace and safety and "where they can go, when they have to go someplace". I think Israel is the place where the world might let us do do that. That doesn't mean I have to agree with policies of the Israeli government any more that the fact that I'm a patriotic American means I have to agree with policies of the US government.
We've been distressed for some time with the alliance (as we see it) between Osama bin Laden and George Bush, promoting wars between Islam and the West. And we were upset at what we saw as a Jewish overreaction to Carter's recent book on Palestine. As comparative religion fanatics, we've found Islamic ideas helpful sometimes in our thinking. And we don't feel that the US can afford to treat out resident Muslims - most of whom are as inoffensive as our local Methodists - as some kind of exotic or hostile strangers. So a few months ago we started attending our neighborhood mosque on Fridays in addition to our synagogue and church, getting active in their social events, inviting people from one house of worship to visit another with us (yes, a few Muslims -have- come to synagogue with us.) And we've run parties where friends from one of these places can meet our friends from another.
And then Mrs. Thorney discovered that the American Friends Service Committee - a Quaker-founded group we have long been friends of - was acting jointly with a group called "Interfaith Peace Builders" (an offshoot of the pacifist group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation) to sponsor a group to visit pro-peace groups, mainly in Palestine (West Bank) but also in Israel, to explore chances for peace in the area. And Mrs. Thorney, commenting that at the age of 83, one can afford to take some risks, suggested we go. I agreed.
We traveled with the group May 25 - June 3. I'll tell a bit about that in another post later. On June 3 she was viciously mugged, not in the obviously dangerous areas we had been deliberately traveling in, but a few yards from our hotel in Jerusalem. That will be another post. And then comes the treatment and recovery, which is giving us opportunities to find new ways to relate to each other, and new ways to express our closeness in the absence of the most usual sexual outlets. And it is giving me, shall we say, great opportunities to try out a wide variety of submissive roles and fantasies, see how I like them, and to think about my own fantasies and motivations. So I do intend, within a few days and subject to the constraints of the children and grandchildren who will be coming to visit, to get back to interesting thoughts about wiitwd.
--
Thorney
Thorney
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