My first week in Limassol was a curious cocktail of splendor, weird, and misery, though the strongest impression of that week was the meaning of it all. As I mentioned at the close of the previous chapter, I landed at a hostel called Lima Sol. Emboldened by the willingness of the Kash crew from Türkiye to allow me to photograph them, I did end up getting some good photos of people from that week, so it looks like this chapter won’t disappoint with respect to visuals. I’ll start with my impressions of the city.
One of the first places I would stop would be a bicycle shop, of course. I had been riding for some time without the little covering for my Domane’s ISO Speed adjustment screw, so I dropped in for a replacement. Limassol has a branch of the BikeHub chain, which is the distribution partner for Trek bicycles in the country. I was pleased to see that they had 24-hour service turnarounds. I ordered the part and went on my way.
For better or for worse, once initial details were taken care of, I did quite a bit of walking around town, not really spending all that much time on the bike. Limassol has a splendid boardwalk, and the weather was amazing for October, so I did get a few local rides in to check out the city.
The beaches here aren’t exactly the cocaine powder pure sands of the Florida coast, but they certainly aren’t crowded with tourists
The urban landscape of the city was also quite pleasant and diverse.
Not only does Limassol have a Trek store, it also has a Chabad.
Yes, in addition to a quarter of a million Turkish Muslims in the north, the entire island is crawling with Israelis. There are quite a number of reasons for this. First, the two countries are very close neighbors, and a flight from Ben Gurion to Larnaca will cost less than a hundred dollars and take less than a half an hour. Additionally, however, Cyprus is a safe place for Israelis to flee to when things get tough. There are tons of Russians here as well, and it seems that there are a number of Jewish Russians among them. I suspect that a number of Russians fleeing the war between Ukraine and Russia to Israel may have then come over to Cyprus when things got really bad between Israel and Gaza and Iran. Cyprus is known to take in a lot of refugees, and I have no doubt that a great many Russians in this city have fled the war between Russia and Ukraine. Finally, Cyprus has good taxes and is a corporate shelter for many businesses from all over the world. This, however, makes Cyprus a center for laundering cash, and there is apparently something of a Russian and Israeli criminal element in the country, though not of the violent or street crime sort. Mostly money laundering and tax evasion, and perhaps some other forms of white-collar crime. I hadn’t been too focused on this sort of thing, but over time I have heard about things. I didn’t really see any crime. I only heard that it’s there.
There are no Reform synagogues here, however. I do have to confess that I was a bit dismayed by that. I had really grown a lot and learned a lot about Jews and Judaism from my time with the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. That synagogue accepted my conversion from Rabbi Rubenstein, and I never really had any idea that anyone ever had any problem with me being Jewish. This isn’t to say there were no bumps in the road at Wilshire Boulevard. I think the main thing that just blew me away about that community was that I was one of the few people I met at that synagogue who believed that the Torah was accurate and divinely inspired. From my Protestant and evangelical heritage, I, to this day, maintain that the scriptures are historically and theologically accurate. In this respect, actually, I resemble the Orthodox Jews more than most Reform. Reform Judaism’s fundamental premise is that the individual decides on his own the validity of matters of his faith and practice. However, one of the most common community standards that you find in the Reform movement, and for many a primary point of distinction between the Orthodox and the Reform movements, is that the Orthodox maintain that “the Torah is from heaven,” that is to say that it is divinely inspired and accurate. The Reform tend to think that the Torah is from earth, a document of minimal historical reliability, probably more akin to ancient mythic texts such as Homer’s Odyssey or the Mahabharata.
There are other distinctions between the Orthodox and the Reform, however, such as the definition of the Torah and role of tradition. The Orthodox consider the written Torah, the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, to be the center of the revelation, and the remaining portions of the Bible, the prophets such as the books of Samuel, or the literary writings such as the book of Psalms, to be somewhat less divinely inspired. Then along with that they have collected the traditional rulings of the Rabbis in the Talmud and the legal codices of the Shulchan Aruch and Mishneh Torah and then later responsa, all of which they claim to be divinely inspired, creating a kind of a holy tradition not all that different from the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. The Reform Jews tend to look at all of this as simply the historical and literary legacy of the Jewish past, though there are exceptions here and there because underneath all of this lies the fundamental principle that a Reform Jew ultimately decides for himself what he believes and what he does. So you will occasionally find a Reform Jew who believes every word of the written Torah is verbally accurate and divinely inspired in much the same way a Baptist fundamentalist Christian would accept every comma of the King James Bible as divinely inspired, but these types are very, very rare.
In all my time with the Reform Jews of Los Angeles, I never got any grief about the Messiah or Jesus. We studied weekly lessons from the Torah of Moses, and the general pattern was that I would end up defending the Torah as literally true and of high ethical value against those who considered it to be false, racist, sexist, and genocidal. I do remember there was one Jewish lady who would show up to some online studies who hollered “Jesus is Lord!” on a number of occasions who then went silent. I assume someone gave her a talking to, though I might have done this myself, as she was indeed fairly disruptive, and I don’t think she was really doing Jesus or anybody else much service with her bellowing. There was also another lady who had done some studies with some Christians or some Messianic Jews or something who dropped this or that reference to the New Testament. But for my part, I was purely focused on these guys as a community and their relationship of politics to religion and their opinions about the validity of the Torah of Judaism.
I am an author, and on my blog anyone can see that I used to operate within the framework of Christianity, and that I quote the Bible, Kabbalah, Carl Jung, a splash of the Quran and the Vedas, and a whole lot of New Testament, which I consider a Jewish document that is a gateway to general religion. Jews, Hindus, and Muslims will talk about “faith that moves mountains.” Jewish, Buddhist, and atheist husbands gripe at their wives: “Jesus Christ! Would you hurry up?!??!” As for my own beliefs, I rarely talk about those. I’d like to consider myself like Jordan Peterson. Nobody can figure out if that guy is a Christian or not. At a number of points people ask me about why I converted to Judaism, and I tell them that it was a result of disappointment with the derived doctrines of the Christian Churches and disappointment with the behavior of Christians in those churches as well as my own personal connection to Israel. In a nutshell, in all of my time interacting with Rabbis and the Wilshire Temple, Jesus was never a problem in my world. I was dealing with my own demons concerning women while I was in California, a very feminist area. I was dealing with issues of being a conservative-leaning moderate in a staunchly progressive, liberal community. I was dealing with a lot. But Jesus was never a problem.
In the end, I really had hoped that with all of these Jews in Cyprus, I would have found a Reform synagogue where I could have handed them my conversion and not had to worry about whether or not I was a Jew. However, there are Chabad synagogues in every city. The Lubavitcher Rebbe did his job. I was glad about that.
On with the tour of the city. The nightlife was electric.
While seeing the new city was amazing, the truly fascinating part of this week was the new crew at the hostel. As mentioned above, emboldened by the brotherly love of the Kash kids and Ahmet in Türkiye, I made like a Japanese tourist and took photographs of everything and everyone I could. This hostel was a smaller and more intimate one, with only three volunteers to look after the place. There was a guy there who I’ll call Mister Methazine. He had, wait for it, bleach blonde hair just like Slim Shady from Kash. A British kid. There was another girl there named Shareen. But the one that struck me most was a young German girl whose real name I can’t remember. The reason I was struck was that on account of her German accent and golden hair, she reminded me very much of Noah van Ouwerkerk. Perhaps that’s why I can’t remember her name. It’s rare for me to forget something like that. In my head I just compared her to Noah van Ouwerkerk, so for me, she was the New Noah.
There she is above on the right next to Shareen. Mister Methazine is below chilling on the couch.
Above we have Mister Methazine and the New Noah on the couch with an older guy, my age, Adam. A biker from Australia. This guy was a charmer.
However, the guy there on the left, you don’t see his face, walking out the back door from the kitchen, that was the Greek Ebionite. At least that’s what I’m calling him. The Ebionites were actually a sect of Hebrew-loving Jesus followers who rejected most Christian doctrines about Jesus and rejected most of the New Testament. We don’t really know all that much about the Ebionites, and there are people running around today calling themselves Ebionites with all sorts of varying beliefs and practices that they have put together. The Ebionites, like the Nazarenes, are thought to have built their ideas around the Gospel of Matthew and the Hebrew Bible, and they rejected the writings of the Apostle Paul, who of course is a central figure to historic Christianity. They were considered heretics by the early Christians even though they thought Jesus was the Messiah.
This guy was not an Ebionite, however. He was a sort of a Greek opposite of that. While Ebionites are all about Hebrew and Judaism, although their own flavor of it, the Greek Ebionite had rejected the Hebrew scriptures and most of the New Testament, including Paul. He only accepted the ancient Greek translation of the written Torah, the five books of Moses, the book of Joshua, and the four Gospels as scripture. Ten books, all in Greek. That struck me as odd and fascinating.
I was initially pretty excited to meet this guy. I too am considered a heretic by pretty much every religious group out there. I was also excited to be talking about religion with someone at a youth hostel in front of a bunch of kids who knew next to nothing about any of it. I had hoped to impress everyone with our knowledge of ancient languages, philosophy, doctrines, and the love of God. The citizens of the modern world tend to think of religious people as having no clue about history, science, psychology, or philosophy. I have not found this to be the case, of course. And for me, Cyprus has a certain spiritual character. By some reckonings, Cyprus can be considered the first Christian nation considering that the Apostle Paul converted the Roman Proconsul who governed the province. Armenia can also claim to be the first Christian nation by some reckonings. But coming to Cyprus, with a quarter of a million Muslim Turks in the north, the most ancient Greek Orthodox Christians in the south, and tens of thousands of Jews running around all over place, I was interested in what sort of religious cultures I would find here, and I was delighted to get hit in the face with it during my first days at my first hostel in the country.
However, things went south pretty quick with the Greek Ebionite. I learned a bit about him. His grandfather was a staunch Roman Catholic, and his father rejected his grandfather’s religion to become a hyperdispensationalist Baptist type who basically rejected most of the Bible except the Apostle Paul. Well, it would seem that as a rejection of his father’s religion, the Greek Ebionite developed a kind of religion that that rejected the Apostle Paul who his dad made the center of his faith. The Greek Ebionite tried his best to follow the Torah commandments that Moses gave to the Jews, but not in accordance with the norms of any community. That’s what I did as a Reform Jew wandering the earth without a community to be a part of. Following the Law of Moses was a big-time priority for Joshua, I would come to find out, because he had fallen into drugs and pornography and really went toward the Law as a kind of self-rescue. Little did this guy know that I had more drug and pornography stories in the white spot on my little fingernail than most people would have in their entire lives.
There were so many things I had in common with this guy. So many of the details were utterly opposites, however. I’ve been drawn to Hebrew and Kabbalah. He was all about everything Greek. But we were both heretics extraordinaire and on very individual paths. There were two things that really broke my trust in this guy, though. First, he didn’t see any grace in the scriptures. For him, religion was just about keeping commandments. Now I see grace all over the Torah. Yes, there are commandments to follow, but I could write for days and days about the grace and personal friendship with God from Abraham to Moses to Jonah to David and all the rest. Of course, in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, who Joshua did not like at all, preached the whole “salvation by grace alone through faith alone” that is often stated so extremely that it becomes the primary point of contention between Christianity and the rest of the religious world. Again, though, the Greek Ebionite didn’t even include Paul in his religion. But what got me the most, however, was that he told me in so many words: “Jesus didn’t preach grace.” That blew my mind. I may have to come back to this chapter later and put in some verses from the New Testament about all this stuff. For right now, I’ll just say that Jesus said things about obeying commandments and about grace and forgiveness that many are not aware of. It’s a fascinating theological subject. And I just could not believe that he made that statement.
The next thing that bugged me about him was that as I was starting to develop some mistrust of him, and as our dialogue became less harmonious, he also got really upset about my taking pictures. He refused to let me take any of him. Further, he refused to give me his WhatsApp information. At one point we were talking about something, and I mentioned I had written a post about the issue on my blog and would send it to him on WhatsApp. It seemed like the guy was just refusing to connect. I have encountered some truly bizarre instances of people just refusing to talk to me, refusing to pass me their contact information, etc. I’m thinking this is going to be a theme that I am going to run with as I finish this book up. It’s really been that bizarre. You know my daughter refused to talk to me for a year. Even to this day, I can’t get her to call me on the phone. You know I have this problem with “technodemons,” which is my weird hateful relationship with technology in general, but specifically with being able to communicate with people who are not in front of my face. I send e-mails; they don’t get answered. I send texts; they don’t get answered. So many people just get instantly busy when I try to keep contact with them. And I’ll say that a lot of this seems to be related to their spiritual relationship with me. That is, if we are vibing well, the messages go through; they respond. But if there is some sort of disconnect about world views and God, the technology just seems to fail. And this guy just flat out refused to let me send a link to my blog while I was sitting next to him on the couch. I have the impression that this fallen universe just hates my blog. Well, once it became apparent that this guy and I had some pretty serious differences of opinion about God and Jesus, he just couldn’t allow me to send him a link to my blog. And no pictures. Once again, I had to ask myself if I was still living on the same planet I was born on, or if I died and was wandering around the Bardo Thodol in some Alice in Wonderland realm. It seems to me like demons are real, they live in all of us, and they have an order from the Prince of Hell to make sure nobody looks at my blog or talks to me.
Then we arrived at a crisis point. I was drinking a pretty good bit of alcohol at that time. I had developed a pattern of waking up and having caffeine, riding huge distances on the bike, and then finishing the night off with some alcohol. When in great shape and spending all of my time on the bike, this habit really doesn’t hurt much. But I was off the bike now, wandering around Limassol, eating at a lot of restaurants, and boozing too much. I’ve mentioned this before that my caffeine/booze habit had gotten me into some trouble during periods of the trip where I wasn’t on the bike, such as at my family reunion, or in Paris, or in Budapest at the pub crawl. Hawkman was always sure to tell me to stay straight every time I would talk to him on this trip.
Well, one evening I came back to the hostel after saucing it at some restaurants in the city, and there I saw the New Noah laying on the couch in her pajamas. You just wouldn’t believe how amazingly beautiful she was just chilling out there, and you wouldn’t believe how powerful of an experience it was for me as a lone middle-aged man with daughter issues to be able to come back to the hostel and find the most splendid of all of God’s creatures just racked out on the couch in her PJs. I just needed to take a picture of that utterly magical moment. However, she was in her pajamas. I thought I should ask for permission to take such an intimate photo, so I did. She was taken aback and asked sheepishly, “why do you want to take my picture?” This, of course, is a perfectly rational question, and her reservations were utterly and absolutely understood. It was also a great opportunity to pay the young lady a compliment, and to allay anyone’s fears about why I take all the pictures. I could explain the book. I could explain that I avoided using pictures without permission and use aliases where appropriate. We could get to know each other. But fueled with the fire of liquid courage, I really did want to start off with that compliment. So, I responded, “because you’re just so beautiful lying there on the couch.”
The gorgeous young clone of my Electrochemical Girl did not have a chance to respond positively or negatively. I didn’t get the chance to explain myself at all. The Greek Ebionite was sitting outside on the balcony, and upon hearing what I said, he burst into the room screaming at the top of his lungs: “YOU’RE SICK! YOU PERVERT!” and continued to rant at the top of his lungs. Am I going to need to tell you that this triggered me? At that moment, then and there, if I my hand had found itself in possession of a hammer, that guy would not have had a skull. It took everything I had not to drop kick him out of the balcony onto the street below. I started screaming back at him, I don’t know what.
At that moment, the owner of the hostel, who lived on te floor above, burst in to diffuse the confrontation. He exclaimed that he had too much going on to deal with this, and I instantly calmed to a penitent lamb, saying that we really shouldn’t be causing the owner this kind of stress. I then looked at Shareen, wondering what to do next. She calmly looked back and stated with gentle intention, “I think you should go to bed.” Without a word, I instantly went to my bunk and went to sleep. Just like the Melting Blue Delicious telling me to keep my hands to myself, her soft desire struck me like a divine command.
I would say the rest of the week was rather ruined. From then on, I was just a dirty old man afraid to hang out with the kids. Shareen did a lot to calm me. I saw a speaker at one point, but because of the tehnodemons I was unable to pair it to my phone to play music. She figured it out and invited me to a jam. Her songs were the same sorts of songs that one would expect to find on a Noah van Ouwerkerk playlist. And of course, every last one of them seemed to describe in perfect detail everything that was going on in the hostel. They also seemed to say with their lyrics that we should all be cool, friendly, and loving. I added a few songs of my own, fully intending to explain the thoughts of my mind.
I wouldn’t be able to be comfortable around those girls for the rest of my time there. I did try to get along as best I could with the Greek Ebionite, but at one point he said, “sometimes I think the things you say are interesting, but then I just have to ask myself why I’m listening to some random old guy.” This shocked me and sent me further into the spiral of alienation that pervaded my stay at the place. Some old guy? Don’t religious people have more respect for the aged than agist California college kids?
Now I want you to be aware of two things. What happened here with this Greek Ebionite guy was exactly what happened with Noah van Ouwerkerk and her dad Harold. There were some different details. I asked Noah about studying Hebrew. I did not comment on her beauty. He slandered me and blocked me. However, the accusation of moral turpitude in reaction to innocent but perhaps a bit unusual behavior was directly repeated here. And further, his accusation that I was old and too uncool to listen to was a repeat of the misery of Venice Beach.
What would Carl Jung make of this? A synchronistic event of this character can be interpreted in a couple of ways, as can Carl Jung. It should be noted that Jungian synchronicity and Jungian archetypes have fostered a great number of forms of spirituality. You will often hear occultists talk of “the collective,” referring to Jung’s collective unconscious. His ideas are found quite frequently among practitioners of witchcraft and sorcery. In Hinduism, particularly the advatia vishnavaist sort, there is the idea that the soul of the individual is a direct mirror of the soul of the universe. Along with this, the lion’s share of hermetic sorcery hails from Kabbalah. If you look up Kabbalah online, in fact, you are likely to run into “Hermetic Kabbalah” before you run into anything the Jews ever came up with in the Kabbalistic movement. All of these schools would be likely to say that I was just manifesting my own unconscious perception of reality into the world around me. I was seeing myself in the universe.
Jung himself, however, consistently referred to seeing divine activity within the patterns that he observed. I would wager he might have said that God was showing me something about myself with this strange pattern of events. As a theist myself, I would be inclined to say that God was showing me something. He was pointing me at this event in order to cause me to reflect about what had happened before. I was living Venice Beach and the Electrochemical Girl all over again. I was being given a chance to learn. I don’t think I did very well. I can look back on it and see that it was a lesson that I did not see at the time. I only noticed it later. I should have taken the opportunity to understand the Greek Ebionite and sluff off the pain of past events. Ultimately, I can only say that I was exposed to triggers, and I learned that I was still under their sway. That’s why God subjected me to an event that was an exact repeat of something that had wrecked my soul six years earlier.
Another interesting event took place before I left. A woman showed up at the hostel who was much older than the others at the hostel. She was comfortable with everyone. I ended up telling her my tribulations, and her response was to question me about whether I would be able to become comfortable in that situation. I responded that I was not. Just like in Venice Beach, where I spent half a year not feeling comfortable around those who had triggered me, so here for the rest of this week there was a permanent wedge placed between me and everyone else there.
Then she spoke about her own trials of the soul. She was getting divorced. She told me that her husband had developed some idea that she was not pretty enough to be his wife. I myself had been asking myself if this older and more mature lady would be suitable for me, given that I had been surrounded by such lovely young ladies all over Europe for the entirety of the year. She also told me that he started developing mental problems such as paranoia. I had been wondering if all of the strange events that had been happening to me were the products of insanity. Again, coincidences started stacking up, and I felt like I was seeing my own mind everywhere. And again, many would say that I was just seeing my own unconscious in the universe. I wouldn’t exactly disagree with this, though I think this was all the product of design by a supreme intelligence.
Now I don’t hear as well as I used to, and in addition to making languages harder to learn, my poor hearing has had the effect that I am a rather loud individual to listen to. I’m sure most of the hostel was listening to the conversation, but I know the Greek Ebionite was. He screamed from his bunk in the next room, “WOULD YOU BE QUIET ABOUT ALL THE PSYCHOLOGY? I”M TRYING TO SLEEP!”
I had really had enough of this guy. I fired back, “PUT SOME EARPLUGS IN, RODENT! QUIET TIME IS AT TEN! IT’S ONLY NINE!” So much for the brotherly love of the servants of God. I would be leaving soon, and I didn’t have much patience for diplomacy.
The night before I left, I remember sitting outside on the balcony in the dark on my last night in that hostel looking inside at everyone else enjoying fellowship jovially, talking and listening to music, feeling like a dog chained to a fence behind a house looking into the window at his owners carving thanksgiving turkey while drinking wine and singing songs in the warmly lit interior. I really needed a change of venue. I needed to leave. The camaraderie of Ahmet and the Kash crew in Turkey had been undone, and I was once again a guy afraid to ask anyone for their phone number in a world of people who refused to give out their phone numbers. I only have the contact info of Adam. I hoped I would see these guys again when I came back to Limassol. But that night, my favorite of Shareen’s songs came to mind. I wasn’t gone yet, but I already missed them. Hopefully things would be different when I came back and saw them again.
The next morning, I would ride to Paphos on the west coast. I was still waiting on the approval of my immigration packet by the Israeli ministry of the interior. I needed something to do, and I really wanted to get out of that hostel. So I decided to see some more of the island.
