Hello, Milady. I hope you are well. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for some time, though for much of this time I have maintained the notion that such a thing would never happen, nor did it need to. My thoughts of you have always been within the realm of ideals, dreams, and principles, and I have generally thought that such things really have no place in practical reality. Lately, though, for the last few months, I have thought more and more about actually communicating with you and taking measures that could result in that actually happening. These efforts have been stymied by a variety of events and forces that I can only call supernatural. So, obviously, I have not spoken to you, but writing this to you might suffice for now, choosing to tell you one more step of the journey of how I got to where I am today. So I’ll pick up where I left off, at the turn of the new year, having just thrown my Tzitzit into the trashcan of my new apartment in Limassol here in Cyprus after reading from the Israeli Ministry of the Interior that my immigration application to Israel had been denied because I never associated with any Jews and that my conversion to Judaism must have been fake because I made the statement that Jesus could be a valid candidate for the Messiah.
If December was a depressing time, January was a month of anxiety. I assume this was because I had ridden my bicyle six thousand miles across Europe and parts of the United States twice trying to complete my immigration application in what would be my second intercontinental bicycle trip to the Holy Land. The first was undertaken in 2022 and 2023 from Lisbon to Jordan and ultimately ended up a failure. I was turned away at the border by the Israeli Border Authority despite having a court opinion from an Israeli judge in my hand that said I could apply to enter the country with the Israeli Border Authority. Now, yet again, I was stuck a stone’s throw from my destination, and was facing the fact that I might yet again have to finish this journey on Mount Nebo.
I knew no one in Cyprus except these Christians that I had started to associate with since I had been having so many problems meeting with Jews in the area. During those times, even a cup of coffee would drive me over the edge of the boundaries of sanity off into the abyss of strange synchronistic events that were more than I had the capacity to comprehend. I went to the emergency room twice under the influence of panic attacks. The strangeness of Cyprus was everywhere. All the cats in this country were the same type of tuxedo cat as my favorite cat of my youth.
Smiley faces, the symbol of the Watchmen, turned up at the strangest times and places.
It would turn out that getting a visa to Cyprus is something like a four- or five-month process, and I would find out that I had less than two weeks to be in the country, as I had been on the Island since October. My preliminary research had informed me that in order to get a visa to Cyprus, you need an address. I had just obtained that. I would learn that there would be a lot more that I would need to do as well. And not only that, but when I first went to the Alien and Immigration Unit on the east edge of Limassol, the told me that I was in the country illegally!
When I first came down to Limassol from Kyrenia on the Turkish north coast, the Turks in Nicosia checked me out of their area, and I marched my bike a hundred meters to Greek checkpoint where they took my passport and, I thought, checked me in to the country. However, I would learn that this was not a border checkpoint from the entry authorities. It was just a crossing station from the Turkish area to the Greek area. No one stamped my passport. I was technically not in Cyprus as far as the Greeks were concerned.
I had just yet again been denied entry into Israel after months and thousands of miles of travel trying to put together an immigration packet, and now I would have to jump through a billion bureaucratic hoops to get a visa to stay in Cyprus. Can you say “triggered”? That’s how this old PTSD vet felt during the month of January 2026. The first thing I did was contact a lawyer. Doing all of this again was more stress than I could take, and I just had to have someone take care of this for me, no matter what the cost. However, when I got with the legal firm, I basically got a list of things to do that was actually quite similar to the list of things that I had to obtain in order to immigrate to Israel. The nightmare was repeating itself like the gears of an Antikythera device expressing a Mandelbrot set in the shape of Satan’s face.
The lawyer’s services ended up being invaluable, despite my feeling saddled with a traumatizing workload. After you get an apartment, you have to have your first utility bills in order to apply for a visa. However, you don’t get those utility bills until you’ve had your apartment for about four months. Remember, you can only stay in the country for ninety days without a visa, and I entered the country without an intention for staying longer than ninety days. My ninety days were close to up when I had to make the decision about going home in failure yet again or finding out something else to do with my life or staying where I was in order to continue to complete the trip to Jerusalem or find some alternate ending of the journey. I was completely lost in the sauce and absolutely stressed out. Under these circumstances, the lawyer ends up negotiating with immigration authorities, enabling you to stay beyond your ninety days, allowing you to apply for a visa late, etc. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to do a lot of footwork. I ended up having to get yet another background check just like the background check I needed for Israel that had me running all over Germany for a month. I had to find fingerprints. I ended up taking my own. I ended up having to have an apostille. Luckily, I already knew the background check guy in California, and I was able to complete all of these processes with the help of my mother and stepfather in the USA.
Underneath all of these stresses was the idea that becoming an Israeli Jew would be all but impossible, and the Christians were being great friends, though I would find myself distanced from them in a lot of ways. My doctrines and habits were strange. I thought about just returning to normative Christianity at several points. I gave up keeping kosher and shabbat during this period. I would find myself frustrated here and there with how the church operated. I had been a lone wolf for quite a while. I’d lived a rather self-absorbed life for quite some time on the trip and became accustomed to just saying what was on my mind and telling the truth about everything, not particularly worrying about diplomacy or convention. I’d always been this way to some degree, but I’ve gotten to the level of a kind of autistic person or someone with Aspergers Syndrome or someone that just has no social acumen whatsoever. It really is shocking to find yourself as someone who just says what’s on your mind and who tells the truth as best as possible. You’ll find that you are completely different from just about everyone around you.
I had to clear up my entry status somehow. There needed to be a stamp in my passport. I went around to the airport in Larnaca and to the port authorities in Limassol to try to get a stamp, but nobody would give me one. Everyone said I needed to leave the country to get a stamp. Frantic and clueless as to how to charter a boat from Greek Cyprus, I was confronted with the fact that I was going to have to fly to another country and fly back in. I don’t like to fly. When I get nervous on a plane, something goes wrong. I would have liked to take a flight to Ben Gurion, but being banned from the country, I picked the shortest flight I could: Beirut.
I had just ridden through Türkiye and been treated like a friend and a king by everyone there. Lebanon was another story. No one treated me poorly, but the trip was an Alice in Wonderland excursion into the insanity of war. First, just as the flight was about to land, and I had only been in the air twenty minutes, there was a strange metallic cyclic groaning sound not entirely unlike the hyperdrive failing on the Millenium Falcon. I raised my eyes to heaven with the look of a child who had just been handed a bar of soap to eat by a mother running short on empathy: “now come on, Big Guy! Really?” I thought to myself…well…to God. Luckily the plane was on the ground before it had the opportunity to burst into flame and barrel roll into the depths of the Mediterranean Sea.
Moving through customs was a quick and painless affair. I just handed my passport to the entry authority and was on my way. Not wanting to deal with the hassle of navigation, I found a cab and asked to be taken to my hotel. The driver asked me about where I was staying and about the price. He was shocked that it was so cheap, telling me that it must have been a seasonal break from the norm because any other time it would have cost five times as much.
The place was a luxurious compound south of the airport completely walled off from the city outside. I didn’t get a picture of the sign that said only western swimwear was allowed at the pool. Burkinis were forbidden. I did listen to the couple in the room next to me having loud and passionate sex, though I didn’t mind at all. At least someone was enjoying life.
The next morning I was relaxed and happy to head back to the airport. My joy showed itself in the world around me.
Heading through customs on the way to my plane, however, things took a turn southward. I handed my passport to the clerk in the booth, he flipped through it, and that’s when he saw the canceled student visa from Israel that I had from back in 2019. He noted several other Israeli stamps in my passport, though I doubt he knew that most of them were just episodes of being deported from the country. He picked up the phone, and I was whisked into the office of the Federal Investigative Service of Lebanon. They were running around chattering in Arabic, making photocopies of my passport, and otherwise just had me sit there wondering what was going on. I would learn later that I never should have been allowed in the country. Right then, though, I asked what the problem was, and the officer responded that they have to take the passport of anyone with an Israeli stamp. I asked why, and he said, “because they are our enemies.” Some minutes later he handed me my passport and told me with great friendliness that I was free to go. No signatures. No forms to fill out. Nothing. I think they just wanted to get me the heck out of there because they never should have let me in there in the first place.
My being able to go to Lebanon for a sum total of about $150 was a kind of miracle from God. I was just too stressed out to have to pay tons of money to get denied entry or whatever would have happened to a normal person who tried such a thing. I thank God for his kindness in getting me my stamp with so little trouble. The short flight back to Larnaca was absolutely smooth. This was the first time in two years I got on a plane that didn’t have some kind of mechanical failure or some other form of near catastrophe.
Going through the airport however, my passport stamp was backdated to my original entry in Kyrenia: 14 October. So I was still without time to get that visa. Luckily the lawyer, though he provided me with a rather labor intensive path to victory, was able to get everything taken care of. One thing that he did have all lined up for me, though, was my medical exam. He told me exactly where to go and what to do to easily and cheaply get bloodwork and a chest x-ray as part of my application. Of course, though, the universe would cast a dark spell on his efforts. When I got the results of the chest x-ray, the report came back that I had a lung lesion that prevented me from getting a clean bill of health.
Yes, just to make the process an exemplar of ultimate peace and joy, I would now have to determine if I had cancer or not. A lesion can be anything from a cyst to an embolism to a benign growth to a non-aggressive malignant tumor that can be treated with some simple action to an aggressive, malignant death warrant. This is what I told myself. But when I told my relatives in the US about the issue, everyone’s first reaction was to tell me that I was going to die if I didn’t come home to the USA to get radiation. I noted from that point not to look around me for hope and comfort.
I did find comfort in a place that I hadn’t looked for a long time, however. I went to a men’s breakfast at that church at a local restaurant.
I was the first person to show up in the morning. The second person was somebody I hadn’t seen before. I asked him if he was from the church, and he said that he was from another one. I had heard that the other church he mentioned was a charismatic type church. Those are the churches that believe that miracles like healing still occur. When I asked him if he was charismatic, he looked at me like he didn’t know what I was talking about. I got the impression that I was talking to yet another Christian that didn’t know anything about Christianity or doctrines. That actually does happen to be a trait of charismatics. They are all about feeling, but they don’t have much of the intellectual knowledge that a lot of the other churches have. On their extremes, they tend to have a lot of strange practices like snake handling, and they do things like babbling nonsense and calling it speaking in the language of angels. I hadn’t been to that other church, so I didn’t know any specifics about what that church did, but this guy seemed to fit the bill. He had a kind of Mr. Miagi type of aura about him as he stood there looking at me in bewilderment.
When he asked me how I was doing, I broke right into a few sentences about how I had just gotten an x-ray that said I had a lesion on my lung. Right then and there, in the middle of the restaurant, he said, “let me pray for you,” with a look of joyful confidence in his eye. I’d been in a world surrounded by people who had absolutely no idea what was going on but who were absolutely confident that I needed to follow them down their roads to nowhere for a year, but in this case, in that instant, I knew this guy knew of a way I was looking to go, and with that, my doubts washed away and I bowed my head in compliance. He prayed loudly that the lung lesion would disappear. That was it. He emphasized that it would not simply shrink or be taken care of, but that the problem would vanish. In a state of calm, I knew what would happen. Then everyone else showed up and we had our breakfast.
Afterward I commenced an agonizing hunt for a doctor who would give me a second opinion. I was shocked at how difficult it was. I knew nothing about the medical system in the country, and asking around, I had an extremely difficult time just getting someone to give me the number of a doctor who could take a look. Finally, after spending days wandering through clinics and being given either no information or being referred to the wrong type of doctor, I finally found one Dr. Juliana Pesheva. Yes. Like the Slovakian girl I had been enchanted by with the Marine, I had just run into another Drop of Jupiter, my second Juliana. I knew practically nobody in town, only the few Christians I had been hanging around with, all men. It’s not like I was associating with a thousand women and a few of them were named Juliana. I really did run into two of them in a row. I asked her about her personal life a bit because I had so every few friends and got her Instagram.
Gotta love them smiley faces. She took a look at my x-rays, gave me another set, and sure enough, lo and behold, there was nothing there. No lesion.
She gave me a clean bill of health, and I went on with my visa application which would finally be completed in March after I had been in Cyprus for five months. I guess you can’t discount those Christians. Christianity for the win, one might say. However, things are never so simple.
Christians aren’t the only ones who claim miracles. The Technodemons seemed to have removed the YouTube video I am looking for not only from the net search, but from my playlists as well. However, there is still a written transcript of Filmmaker Danny Finkelman’s account of being cured of blindness by the Lubavitcher Rebbe on the Chabad website.
https://www.chabad.org/therebbe/article_cdo/aid/3863854/jewish/The-Filmmakers-Vision.htm
Now, in my case you might think that there was no actual miracle in play, but rather that the doctor’s preparing my initial report made some kind of error. That is actually what I think happened. I didn’t see the x-rays before this Christian prayed for me, so it’s likely the lesion was never there in the first place. They likely read someone else’s x-ray and attributed it to me. However, the way everything rolled out, I got told I had a lesion, this Christian prayed that there would be nothing on the x-ray, and oops! The x-ray was fine, problem solved. That prayer came at just the right time, right after that mistake, just as if God was organizing the spacetime continuum. To me that still counts as a miracle.
There are other types of miracles that have come up in my life that I didn’t see happen, but that I know they happened because of their effects. I grew up with a grandmother with poor vision in her elder years. During my teens she got to the point of wearing those glasses with telescopes on them. She was a charismatic type like this Christian who prayed for me. One day I went to visit and she had 20/20 vision. I asked what happened, and she went to one of those wild and crazy faith healing revivals with all kinds of dancing and shouts of “hallelujah!” and came back with perfect vision. Her vision was rather good when she died over a decade later of completely unrelated illnesses in old age.
This guy Danny Finkelman is still alive. He can show you pictures of himself being blind in his early life, and you can actually talk to him, looking straight into his eyes as of today. His mom and his friends can tell you about his blindness in his childhood.
A really interesting thing to me is that this guy claimed a miracle through an agent, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who was not a Charismatic Christian. I would like to ask Christians what they think about this. Would they say it was a fake? Would they say that these Jews who don’t believe in Jesus are getting healed by the power of Satan? That line has been used before.
And if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. Matthew 12:27
Matthew 12:27
Christians will know this is part of the “a house divided against itself cannot stand” speech. Jesus pretty much says that things like healing and casting out demons are from God as a refutation to the accusation that he must be from the devil because he was doing these miracles although he was outside the established tradition and not getting along with the religious culture of his day. So, if Jesus said this, what can Christians say about people curing blindness and performing miracles with no connection to their tradition?
As some food for thought about this issue, let’s talk a bit about the Lubavitcher Rebbe and Jesus. I’ve tried to find out what he said about Jesus. I’ve only come up with two things. First, there were some evangelical Christians who asked him about Jesus, and he said to them, “show me a Jewish Messiah.” This quote of his is just something I found online, so I am not sure if it is true. The other thing I found was that when someone else asked him about Jesus, he simply answered: “someone who has been killed cannot be the Messiah.”
There is something to note here. The Rebbe’s mission involved primarily returning the Jews to Torah and then turning the Jews outward. As such, he operated completely within the framework of the totality of Jewish tradition. He couldn’t have anyone anywhere, no haredi or anyone else, saying that his people didn’t fulfil every aspect of the tradition. This being the case, he did not say, “Jesus is not the Messiah.” He spoke from the Book of King’s in Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, the seminal work of Judaism about the qualifications of the Messiah. That’s where Maimonides says that someone who has been killed cannot be the Messiah. This is a no-brainer. If you’re dead, you can’t do much.
According to the Gospels, however, Jesus was last spotted alive. Maimonides doesn’t say anything about someone who was killed and then was brought back to life. So the question was left open for people to think. It becomes a matter of what the person he was talking to believes about Jesus. If he was just some guy who was killed, and his followers made up a story that he was somehow resurrected, well, he wasn’t the Messiah, he was just a guy with some shifty followers with psychological problems. But if he was resurrected and is still around, well, one supposes that he could be the Messiah because although he was killed, he isn’t dead. Looking at the bigger picture, Maimonides ultimately says in that book that one can’t be absolutely certain who the Messiah is until the Messiah is basically done doing his job, but until then, anybody who teaches Torah and isn’t dead could potentially be a sort of preliminary Messiah candidate.
So what is important here is that the Lubaticher Rebbe had no connection to Jesus and may well not have thought much of him, I really don’t know, but he didn’t absolutely discount him, only that he stuck to the confines of the Jewish tradition that he operated within. I note, though, the Lubavitcher Rebbe never said anything against Jesus. I find that interesting. It sounds a bit like a house that isn’t completely divided. Like these two guys who cure blindness and work miracles of basically the same type may just have been on the same team, just operating in different worlds.
I’m sure in all of your time in Hollywood you’ve seen miracles that would shock us all, Milady. Penniless buskers who win Grammy Awards and all of these sorts of things. I remember seeing a video of you back from your early days; a red-carpet appearance. You were in a black dress wearing heavy eyeliner of the type that is popular among Arab women. Legions of photographers were violently pushing each other out of the way, desperate to get in between each other and under each other and over each other to get a shot of you on that red carpet. There had to be over a hundred of them. Maybe two hundred of them. Just the sight of them shocked me. The lights of their flashes lit like a thousand supernovas in a fourth of July fireworks finale. I could barely see the journalists behind the brilliant strobes of camera flashes as I watched the video. And there you stood, motionless, looking at them. To describe the look in your eyes truly challenges my ability as a writer. To conceptualize it might just be more than I can do as a philosopher. If I had to, I would say you looked like a general standing on a hill surveying a battle between unicorns and elves and space aliens from another planet. What could have been going through your mind I don’t know, It seemed like you were looking at the final digit of Pi. Your expression said, “I do not believe what I am seeing, but I am in charge of it.”
Miracles come in many flavors and happen to many types of people for many reasons.
For my part, I learned a little about faith. I had no doubt in what that Christian said, and I don’t think he did either. Right after that, another guy came in complaining of leg pain, and this Christian prayed for him as well. After the prayer, the guy said, “I think…maybe…I feel a little better…I don’t know…” and then we had our breakfast.
I would go on to live the next couple of months without much thought about how to continue the last trip. I was a stranger in a strange land. Nobody had any comprehension about what I had been through or was going through. I was just getting put into everyone’s respective boxes. Boxes that they didn’t have much time to look at. My hope was dwindling and I was being tempted to concentrate on other things and redefine my life according to what was surrounding me. I was still just a rolling stone, more or less alone, with no direction home, looking to make my home where I was. That was, until I found a suitcase. But I’ll have to tell you about that later.