"In the Torah everything is written, isn't it? and then why I do not like onions?" I asked her suddenly on the stairs climbing from the Kotel, challenging her certitudes. But she did not laugh on me and on my certitudes and concentrated on what she read, she replied to me seriously :"In one verse of the Torah it is said explicitly about onions and our people...when we left Egypt escaping from the Pharaoh who took us as slaves, leaded by Moses to the Land where we would live free, five kind of foods it is said we would miss and one of them was the good onion of the Land of the Nile, the onion is a sign of the nostalgia toward a state of the soul which fills the stomach, but not the spirit".

And suddenly I understood the meaning of years of mockeries, ironic stares, diabolic subterfuges I regularly discovered, when relatives tried to make me believe that those in my plate were not onions but cream puffs, years in which my friends obbliged me in exchange of lost bets to swallow those vegetables with the awful taste, everything dissolved in the serene awareness that when searching our own truth with obstinacy and pure soul, when you less wait for it, you discover that your truth has solid foundations and roots inside the History of the world.

Penang - Malaysia, August 1999

I had four snakes around my neck and someone was taking a picture, they were the guardians of the buddist temple of Penang, in which all the faiths have reserved a corner and the snake is considered carrier of the good luck, even if the malaysian manufacturers who accompanied me there did not agree so much on the friendship which those reptiles extended to me, before signing the business contracts. They explained me that the snake, according to eastern traditions, bites only if you crush his tail and one of them looked like Kah, the friend of Mowgli in the Book of the Jungle, while he was staring with curious eyes the human being belonging to the tribe of the ones who, time and time ago, an ancestor of his tribe convinced to eat the forbidden fruit, causing the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Jerusalem - October 1999

Far appeared to be those times in which men did not recognize in women the skill to study the Holy Books in the Yeshivot, the religious schools which created the rabbis, in the ghettos of Eastern Europe. In the modern Israel it was Eti who questioned that a man could follow her reasonings based on the daily studies and it appeared to me that she even never listenened to me when I answered correctly to the teologic questions which every place of that city recalled to the mind and she was passionately describing to Osem the characteristics of the Temple, taking them from a book she brought with her for the occasion.

"Really do you know what is this?" Every now and then unbelieving she turned toward me when I nodded looking the design of the wooden and golden Ark which at the times of the Temple contained the Book. At our table in the small restaurant surrounded by the stones of the path of the ancient city, the question exciting for us had the origin from that photo of mine depicting me among the snakes and which I showed so proudly to the two girls, Eti was almost angry with me, while the amazement of Osem, caused by the continuous surprises appearing from the two souls she was accompaning, did not allow her to give herself up to the exhaustion, even if every now and then her smile was veined by the shiver of the thought that never she would be able to convince her students the next day about the reason she did not prepare the lesson of psychology.

"This photo is dreadful...don't you know that according to our tradition the snake represents the absolute evil?" she said to me with twinkling eyes deflating my pride as a balloon. But we were in Jerusalem and I had to show her that even the mind of men developed since women took their place. "Apart from the fact that it were you who made us to eat the forbidden fruit..." I recovered..."then the meaning of the snake is purely representative, the human being has the faculty to accept or reject the evil, the snake is not guilty, it was enough to tell him : no, thank you". She stared at me as one stares someone that for the first time appears really to have the skill to think to something slightly more noble than the onion soup and for the rest of the evening I had the honour to discuss about life and world with a woman scholar of the Torah.

...to be continued...