I was born in Israel in 1958.  When I was nine in 1967, the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War broke out. So many people were killed on both sides that I swore to God and to myself that I would do anything and everything to help bring peace to the world. In 1976, I was living in a Yoga centre and was looking for a healer. One day a man at the centre told me of two wonderful healers: Dr Phyllis Carmel Schlemmer and her husband Israel Carmel . Phyllis was a gifted American healer and trance-medium who had moved to Israel . Their house became my second home. I would come to them twice a week to get healing treatments and enjoy their presence. I liked being there because of a mysterious aura that emanated from their place and their being. I wanted to be part of what was there, but I didn’t know its name.

     One spring day, Phyllis said, “A new Bible has been found in the States.” My thoughts started racing. A new Bible had been found?  I was so excited that I wondered if and when and how I would be able to see it. Many questions ran through my mind. Where had they found it? In Qumran , near the Dead Sea where the hidden scrolls were found? Had they found more scrolls in the Judean desert, the desert that I had loved so much in my childhood and that felt to me like a holy desert and like my true home…? I  wanted to know a lot more. I introduced Ami Shefman, my teacher in Yoga, to Phyllis Schlemmer. Ami then introduced Phyllis to Ruth and Avi Yasur . During her time as a teacher for the study of the concealed, Phyllis told them about A Course in Miracles.  Intrigued, they asked Phyllis to teach them the Course. Together Phyllis and 12 students learned from one set of paperback books, printing sections and copying lessons onto sheets until the three-volume sets of new books arrived six months later.

     Avi Yasur also started teaching the Course. He felt that it must be translated into Hebrew. Despite doubts about the importance of the translation in a small country like Israel , he insisted that the book would bring a great blessing to many people. He wrote to Judy Skutch Whitson who “co-incidentally” was coming to Israel for a short visit. Avi and Judy met on that trip in 1985 and it was decided that he should translate the Course.

     Five years would pass before I would meet Phyllis again in a flat in Tel Aviv. On the threshold of her door she said farewell to Avi Yasur and I entered. Four more years went by. In my life everything had become difficult and frustrating and painful. I didn’t know what I should do. I prayed. Night and day I prayed. And then a sharp, clear and loving answer appeared in my mind. “If you want to live, leave everything you have.”  I left my old life. Ami, my yoga teacher, invited me to stay in his flat in Tel Aviv for awhile.

     One Saturday night I entered Ami’s flat with a baby in my arms . It was very dark. When I turned on the light, I saw a matchbox on a table. Written by hand across the matchbox were the words, “I am spirit”. A shiver passed through my whole being. “What is this?” I asked Ami.

 “Ah,” he replied. “This is from A Course in Miracles. Gilad, my son, is studying it with Avi Yasur .”

   Avi Yasur ? I remembered meeting him at Phyllis’s. During the following weeks, I found sentences on pieces of paper that turned my world upside down. “I am at home. Fear is the stranger here”. “There is nothing to fear.” “God is the strength in which I trust.” Hesitating, I sneaked looks at translated pages of “Workbook for Students”. The pages felt so sacred to me that I no longer knew whether the lines were already in my mind or were freshly printed on the draft translations.

     In 1987 I started studying the Course with Avi. I was convinced that the lessons were written especially for me. Here was Phyllis’s new Bible. Everything was new and old, strangely familiar deep within me as if it had never left me, warming my heart. Yet I also sensed that my eyes were opening as though I had met a loved one for the first time. My life had changed.

     I began to teach the Course at the same time that Avi was translating the Course with Ruth Yasur. Ruth and I would go over the translation in Hebrew and compare it with the English. Over a number of years I read the translation in Hebrew and Ruth checked the English. It seemed as if we were divinely guided to find the right words. If we didn’t understand the content of a sentence we would go over it again and again, until everything became clear. To find such clarity, we had to let the Course into our lives. It was not like translating a book with which we had no connection. Here we really needed to understand how to implement Course principles in our relationships and in every event in our lives. Many times we worked on one section for hours, until the clouds shifted from our minds. Only then could we move forward. Over twelve years, this is how the Course was translated in sacred diligent work and with a great love. Working with Avi, Ruth and the Holy Spirit was the best school for me.

     Then I met Seffi Hanegbi in the year 2000. After we talked of God and the desert and peace work, we decided to create a centre for love and peace in the Judean desert in the spirit of “A Course in Miracles.” The name “Zman Midbar,” came immediately to our minds. Later, while Seffi worked on peace activities and journeys through the desert, I taught “A Course in Miracles” whose essence is peace, and I held resolution workshops between Arab and Jewish women. Both Seffi and I were committed to peace in the deepest sense.

     In prayers of peace, in spiritual journeys in the desert, in meetings of Bedouin and Jewish women, in conversations with Bedouins that gather there for resolution and forgiveness, in meetings of study, the spirit of the Course always accompanies us. We have returned the Course to the place where it belongs: the Judean desert. Sometimes in a cave or in a shaded creek, in an open tent in the middle of the desert, on a spiritual journey with students, when I read from the Book, I am so happy that the feeling of gratitude rises within me. I am grateful for an oath that was fulfilled and for a calling that was answered. In those moments I return to a time that is eternal and will never change.