Maggid ben Yoseif / Jerusalem Torah Voice in Exile
13 Iyar 5766 / May 11, 2006  

Fate of America may rest with way of 'Hopi'

The Hopi clans were divided and dispersed in all directions from the Four Corners region (Aztlan) into the extremities of Turtle Island.  The continent was named after the peaceable, slow-moving turtle, according to the Hopi legend, when the previous parts of the world were pushed underneath the water, pushing up this new land in the middle to become the backbone of the earth. The people displaced by the Earth changes found the land and climbed out of the water as if climbing on the back of a turtle. The Hopi state that their ancestors crossed a great salt sea and finally climbed aboard.

Ma'asau, the ruling spirit of this land, told the new arrivals that their path must be a path of hopi (peace) and a spiritual path that would eschew material gain.  They were told -- and all of America should take note of this -- that the very existence of this land hinged on the existence of the Hopi and their descendants eventually inheriting the land and their obedience to Ma'asau's charge.  

The current wave of immigration from the South may represent the massive final return of the descendants of the stranded clans. This mass exodus has been delayed for centuries by the European Americans' expansion to the West, but from a spiritual view, Ma'asau has protected the Hopi (peaceful) descendants from the war-like nature of the newcomers (the Gringo). This is evident from the conscientious objections to war by Hopi descendants who had returned and have been living in the American Southwest continually, for more than a millenium.

The Western expansion, the so-called "Indian Wars," killed Hopi descendants who also had returned. For whatever reasons, provoked or not, these had forgotten the command of Ma'asau to live in peace (Hopi). For whatever reasons, they chose to fight with weapons rather than the Ghost Dance.

Then came the Spanish-American War, and other clashes between newcomers and later newcomers and a civil war and two world wars and a Korea and a Vietnam and conflicts here and there and now every Iraqi who has died at American hands leaves behind a family that will grow up with a vow to revenge his ancestor.  That is the way of the people, which the Warlords of the West don't comprehend. If they do not avenge blood spilled for what is considered by them a righteous cause, then they are shamed.

How many more wars before we learn, unless we hammer swords into plowshares, we will die by our swords. And those swords are today yielded by al-Queida who see themselves as the angels of Allah's vengeance.

Skittles, my one-eyed philosophical cat who survived an attack of two pit-bulls, I think but can't prove, and is still the most at peace entity I know that lives, has something to say:  "Ma'asau promise land to those who purr. Bad Hopi no purr. They no here now. Good hopi. Always here. They purr. Now kittos of Old Hopi here. Maybe ... feed, kittos purr."

Maggid ben Yoseif & Skittles