New Horizons [(1) 11/21/2004]

So i was looking for something else (which i didn't find... it's probably on the tower slowly moldring in the living room) when i ran across this on the external hard drive. This is from a story idea i've been working on for... oh, at least half a decade now. Hell, that's nothing strange - i've got loads of ideas that've been kicking around up there for at least that long - but this was a storyverse i was particularly proud of. Apparently, way back when after WWII, there was this crazy idea to relocate the zionists in Baja California instead of Palestine, but the idea was eventually scrapped. I wanted to write a murder-mystery set in this universe in which the state of Israel was south of California, the protagonist living in San Diego made frequent trips to Tiajuana for street latkes, and global issues were more theological than economic in their concerns (the logical progression of the world i developed made sense at the time, and was mostly planted in the idea that without Isreal in the middle east we'd still want middle eastern oil, but would have probably taken a significantly less agressive approach to aquiring it - although i have since taken enough modern history courses to know better). Of course, i took so long writing this (read: starting), that eventually somebody else basically wrote this book. And it was really, really good. So i gave it up. In any case, this was going to be the prologue, or a chapter head or something. I'm not really sure anymore. And now i feel kind of silly because this explanatory note is significantly longer than the actual writing in question. Oh well. Fun fact: the story referenced is an actual Sikh legend.

"Among the Sikhs there is a legend that I shall paraphrase for you. In it their founder, Nanak, was visiting the city of Mecca and, that first night when he went to sleep, his wanton indifference to Muslim tradition got him into a bit of trouble. As he laid himself down to sleep, he failed to point his feet away from the Ka'ba, which prompted a Muslim priest to berate him for his negligence. "Tell me where God is not," he told the priest, "and I will turn my feet in that direction." So I say unto you, gentlemen: find me a land where the Lord is not, and I will refrain from holding synagogue there. You say that we must have Israel of old, because the temple of Jerusalem is the Lord's home, but I say to you that Jerusalem is nothing. You must forget your fears that the Lord will not follow us into this new land; when the Babylonians took the Hebrews slaves out of Canaan, when the Romans dispersed us, He didn't need to follow us because He was already waiting with open arms, and so he will be in this new land, in this Baja."

Rabbi Joseph Steiner, New Horizons: The Collected Baja Debates