On the way to Crater Lake Barry turns to me and says, "I wonder if we should have driven straight to Portland. We could have attended the Native American mask making demonstration tonight, taken a highway instead of these winding mountainous roads. What do you think, Goldie?"

My response -- swift and automatic - was from my repertoire of personal philosophy: "Once I take a fork in the road, I never look back on the road untaken."

Subject closed and I return to working on a story for my "Rebbe on the Road" manuscript.

"Her signature sound," murmurs my guide and friend David. The heat rolled off of dunes in its own rhythm and I foolishly wish for a desert wind. We are walking to a Bedouin camp and a woman he wants me to meet there. I see nothing but oceanic waves of sand.

"We should have brought more water, a return ticket for the bus, how do you know this is the direction, how will we find the road again?" Nattering reveals my growing concerns.

"Listen, it's her song. Goldie, I'm not crazy.....listen for the rhythm.....bonk, donk, bonk.....bonk, donk, donk, bonk......bonk, donk, bonk....."

"You're imagining thi............I hear it. Or I think I hear it....bonk, donk, bonk....bonk, donk, donk, bonk........they must be over there! What kind of instrument is it?"

"You'll see." he replies.

His strong profile set in the direction of the sound, my hatted shadow bobbing with the effort to keep up, together we stride deeper into the desert. Mirage puddles tease my horizon line only to be replaced by dots of movement, white wanderings against the golden sand. Sheep.

Still the strange sound.......Bonk, donk, bonk....bonk, donk, donk, bonk....bonk, donk, bonk.

Now the tents become visible as well as two brown shapes against the sky. I ask about

them. He laughs: "The camels. They are status symbols, expensive for them to keep and really useless now that they have jeeps."

"Let me tell you more about the woman I have brought you to meet. Her first husband died. Her second beat her so she left him. This is unheard of with the Bedouin. They say a Bedouin woman can never divorce her husband. She went on to form her own "shig", a traditional hospitality center focused around her campfire. She even has her own tent. You two will be a real pair of semitic feminists."

. Only ten years apart in age from me, she looks like she could be my grandmother. Darting eyes show above the elaborate face covering to which are attached beads, bullets, coins and charms. Later I will be gifted with one and discover it is very heavy, needing the whole head for support at different points.

Her name is Fadaeia. Out comes a rush of uniquely fluid guttural Arabic, I almost understand the intent from context and Hebrew cognates, though it is the curiosity in her eyes that speaks loudest. Translation: "She has asked how long it took you to get here."

"Twelve hours."

"Such a long walk!" she exclaims. I hasten to tell her about the airplane and distances to America and bring a tennis ball out of my pocket to serve as a globe.

His hand squeezes my arm in warning, arresting my intentions swiftly.

"Prime directive," whispers David who is doing research on the sedentarization of the Bedouin for his doctoral thesis in urban planning.

"This isn't Star Trek"," I responded defiantly and incredulously.

"We try not to wreck their innocence excessively," he responds. "O.K.?"

Settling in for the night. I marvel at the small revelations of the day. Children wandering barefooted among jagged tin can lids carelessly tossed by Bedouin unromantic about the environment. No diapers, an open air drip dry system is in use. Her grandchild of 3 months is being lulled in a burlap saddle bag draped over a donkey which wanders freely about the campsite. Squealing in delight, the little one watches events with big eyes, the burlap occasionally oozing an emission which dries spontaneously in the intense heat.

The cool, calm morning offers endless blue sky and we enjoy coffee to the sound of her "instrument." The pestle dancing against the mortar:

Bonk, donk, bonk......bonk, donk, donk, donk, bonk.....bonk, donk, bonk.

A breeze has begun and the tent seems to dance lightly with her tune. She's dropped her veil, we are accepted as more than guests, he has become a family friend.

"She has questions for you." For me? What could she possible want to know about me?

"O.K., sure."

"Do you have children from your first marriage? Why did you leave your husband? Who cares for your children while you are here?"

I respond by asking if she would answer the similar questions about herself, meanwhile pulling out a photo of my two beautiful sons, Adam and Mark.

Her eyes seem to wax compassionate and a woman-sharing grief shapes her face. "How sad, Allah has only blessed you with two children. The same for me. My husband never forgave me for it."

"Oh, how unfair! For me it was conscious, contraception, you know."

Again the warning hand on my arm, a translation of my comment is rendered as something like "this is grief women can surely share and know."

I turn to him, angry and annoyed hissing: "Why are you corrupting my response?"
"Shhhhh.......they don't know about that, it's against the Shariya (Muslim ethical code) to use contraceptives."

I begin a melancholic internal reflection on my two Caesaerian sections, in this nomadic culture I would surely have died of childbirth without recourse. "Ask her what happens if a pregnant woman comes due and the midwife can't get the baby to come out."

He asks, his body language giving away discomfort with being caught in women’s talk.

Her response: "Oh course, we get her to the main road and travel into Be’er Sheva, the nearby city, go to the hospital and have a C Section. What would you do?" She even audibly uses the word C-Section in her Arabic response. Mutely, I lift my shirt to show the C-section scars.

"Ahhhh." Her vowelish understanding is universal.

Repressing laughter at the absurdity of modern medicine allowed, but talk of air travel not, the conversation takes a serious turn as the Green Patrol becomes our topic.

Bedouin are no longer allowed to wander in the Middle East. Virtually every country is forcibly sedentarizing them.....oblivious to boundaries, following ancient routes ingrained by forebears, their flocks wreck havoc with modernity, trampling fences and fields, in some regions tripping land mines....some families are known for heavy trafficking in drugs.

Bedouin are in the way of regional economic development. Towns are being built for them, advanced education being offered, free immunizations. They will be "properly" cared for.

Fadaeia is a rebel who will not give up all her ancestral ways. The desert is huge and she is part of the tribes who are still on the run. Even when forced into the new towns, as soon as backs are turned, for some, out come the tents. She points to our tracks disappearing in the wind...."It is not so hard to disappear in a desert." I reflect internally on the powers of radar and aerial surveillance.

David tells me they are given two story houses but don’t use the second floor, "it is too uncomfortable and alien to them. They use the toilets as pots to grow herbs. The "shig" structure isn’t recognized by the housing set ups, their forms of socialization are completely disrupted. They feel set too close together and the youth fight, there’s no work because they can’t keep flocks or trade." I think of Indian reservations, will a casino to provide employment be next?

The children run among the sheep and donkey....they seem somewhat like herd animals, left to wander, getting responsibilities should they survive long enough to be of value.

Earlier at a tour of regional health facilities a doctor tells me he wants to shake the Bedouin men. "They won’t pay for fees for fresh water hook ups in the towns. The women carry the water so the men see no reason to pay for getting it. Dysentery kills many of the children." He asks if I could stay and work with the women, organize them to change their husbands’ minds.

We walk outside, Fadaeia and I. A distance away from the tents she digs up a root for me, it tastes like a form of seedless cucumber, succulent, sweet. Not so far away archaeologists and anthropologists are cataloguing civilizations past......."a people once dwelled here who worked with iron...copper, the stables were over there...." Serious funds are set aside to preserve King Solomon’s mines, horse stalls..."

Are there no rights for an anachronism? Just museumification? Before my very eyes another indigenous people is being terminated by modernity.

Over coffee and pita made fresh before our eyes over an open fire she tells of her plans to protest. She will pitch a tent in Jerusalem in front of the Prime Minister’s home. "Who better than Jews, she asks, "to understand the meaning of preserving one’s ancestral lands and ways of life?"

On the road home I ask David: "How can we help her?" No answer.

"You will use her life for a doctoral thesis and just document? These are real people, you have an obligation!"

He couldn’t see my point, he is just an observer.

And the sad thing is, looking back to that day ten years past, so was I.

Footnote: Went back to find her not long ago. No one knows where she went, a few remember her appearance in front of the Prime Minister’s house. Even among the Bedouin, no one seems to remember her name.

This story has continued to haunt me after all these years. The absurdity of not being allowed to taint the purity of their culture by talking about contraception and airplanes while the government is far more radically destroying their way of life.

The ethics remain very unclear to me.....lobby for her freedom to roam? What about the burgeoning kibbutzim nearby and danger to Fadeia and family of tripping over mines near the borders...borders they barely feel and don’t recognize? Teach her daughter about contraception?.....she probably quietly knows and isn’t it my obligation to respect the Shariya as their choice? Rally supporters to at least gather some more land so the Bedouin came move about somewhat? Is a "reservation" really a better life than accommodating fully to modernity? I still don’t know. I just don’t know.

But mainly I am bothered that I did nothing.

We are still driving. Ahead of us looms Mount Mazama, Oregon. Snow capped and magnificent. Returning to my laptop, I read this story to Barry, my trusty spiritual partner.

Barry: "So let’s look at the options available to you at that time. You had a choice. You could have stayed and worked pro-actively with the Bedouin, or returned home, finished your final semester of rabbinical school, rejoined your children, and completed the legal work on your divorce. Am I correct?"

Goldie: Y....es.

Barry: And you’ve thought about this for the past ten years?

Goldie: I guess you could say that.....a mitzvah undone seems to burn within the soul.

Barry: (Now smiling) And when you take a fork in the road, you never look back?

About an hour later, we found ourselves hiking the trail alongside the Rogue river with its 410,000 gallons per minute rushing through a narrow gorge. Coming to a fork in the path, Barry stops and says: "Imagine Fadeia is standing on the right hand fork. Speak to her. What do you want to say?"

I begin to ask what has happened in her life these ten years, to ask for forgiveness for my inaction...he gently tugs me down the other fork, she gets further away, the conversation disrupted by events.

He lets us move back toward her only to then be tugged back the other way....towards resolving the marriage, the children, work...studies....

My friend Louise Vanett always says "Don’t should all over yourself or anyone else." Barry says: "You try not to use the term "should," but in effect you "should" all over yourself on a regular basis. A person of God is more humble, more tolerant of being human, more forgiving of others and self.

Goldie, you did do a mitzvah that day. You were a compassionate listener. It’s time to let it go....graciously integrate your humanness with your rigorous mitzvah expectations."

The residual issue Barry has revealed is not so much forgiveness of self for miss-stepping (a form of teshuvah) as it is the need for greater shiflut (humility). "Shiflut" is the quality which Hassidic masters teach is the real source of spiritual integrity, the knowledge of how limited we really are. In an earlier post I criticized a colleague for excess zeal in pressing others to do mitzvot....how true it is, what some therapists say, that what troubles us most about others is often what remains to be transformed within own’s own self.

Barry places a small dead branch into my hand, attached to it are intricate lace lichens, the tip is curved like a finger. "This can be a ‘yad’ for our Torah." he says.