Sunday, April 17, 2005

In my dream, I learnt of an atrocity, which was kept silent for many years. During the war, a respected Jerusalem magistrate used emergency powers to execute five people, arrested for vagabond and homelessness. The men were previously held without trial at the Old City barracks. The magistrate - an old Israeli woman in my dream - later became a leading State attorney, and a supporter for the racist right wing. When asked about the executions, she did not flinch: she reiterated that this was in accordance with the Law, and that society is better off without these elements. She spoke of them with thin contempt; in my mind I could see them as five nameless, defenseless human bodies.
In a second version of the same dream, the magistrate was my Yoga teacher from London, a seventy year old English man. The story was identical - five men executed in secrecy - and this time I discovered that the executions were administered by hanging and lethal injections. Again, my teacher did not deny the facts when I confronted him in the yoga class. I started shouting at him, murderer. Some people in the class joined me. I knew then that the first of the five men was me, and that the poison was still working its way through my veins.

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