Rami Shapiro
Dveykus, A New Definition
When totally broken
When there is nothing to support self
The breaking the disintegration the utter failure.
Of all mechanisms to relieve the deep anguish
Of facing the self in collapse
In free fall with no “rock bottom” to even break it
The only option is surrender.
Of even the modicum of achievements
Accepting the failure of this life
The list of defects, unsurmountable
The harms done to others, incalculable.
The belief that restoration is possible, shattered.
Dragged down to one’s knees.
Giving in, giving up, surrender to its limit.
Drowning in the tears of self-loathing
Even this needs to be sacrificed.
Maybe this is a new definition of Dveykus.
Forget the pious definitions !
Maybe just maybe …
The only way to connect with this perfect higher power.
Is one of emptying the self.
The very removal of the bloated importance of the grieving self
The tragic the inevitable the total suffering package
Free falling into what was feared as oblivion.
The loss of identity
The loss of all that was struggled for.
The loss of all that mattered and loved.
In this very fall
Is the total surrender into?
Dveykus
Dad's Tombstone Setting And Siyum
You will notice on the cover of your booklet over the picture of Sabba Willy the words:
And well may you ask why it is placed there and its connection with Sabba Uncle Willy?
My beloved father has been gone from this world some 10 months ago but it feels like a dream. The pictures videos and plethora of images you will see tonight give us the false impression of his ongoing aliveness and only exacerbate the pain of his loss.
Eugene’s evocative words on the tombstone, paralleling Mum’s in brevity yet capturing in a few lines the essence of Dad was mirrored by his remarks tonight.
Thanks to all our wonderful speakers including the Siyum and divrei brochoh from Motty, The Dvar Torah from Reb Refoel Moshe, the poetic lines from Chaim, the superb analysis of Dad by Batya, The poignant message from Vienna from cousin Anthony and above all the presence and blessings from Uncle Eric’s viola in response to all of us chanting:
“when I grow up I want to be like Uncle Eric” in unison!
Indeed the biggest tribute to dad was you! All of you! Showing up tonight to honor his memory.
Each of the four tables representing the four branches that emanated from his vision, each so different in temperament character, approach to life and Torah, yet each emanating from the tapestry of dad’s personality and he would have approved of each one you tonight with love humor sarcasm and wit.
My hope is we stay together as a family unified in our love of Mum and Dad and in their unconditional love of each and every one of us, that their memory guide us when we meet the hard spots in life and their inspiration of “just get on with it” as expressed here by uncles Eric’s message:
Let me return to the original question:
Its first mention of the term seems to come from a midrash (sorry Dad!) on the very first verse of the Song of Songs:
The song of songs which is Shlomo’s. Our Rabbis taught, “Every Shlomo (because they were at a loss to explain why [Scripture] did not mention his father, as it did in Mishlei and Koheles) mentioned in Shir Hashirim is sacred [=refers to God], the King to Whom peace שָׁלוֹם belongs.
Maseches Shavuos 35b.
It is a song which transcends above all other songs, which was recited to the Holy One, Blessed Is He, by His assembly and His people, the congregation of Yisroel.
Sabba too was a man of peace. In shul at work in the family he was a peacemaker. As I watched him rise in the ranks of the Federation to become a Vice President it was this precise quality that made him appreciated by all. In his lay-chairmanship of the Federation Kashrus he commanded the respect of both the United Synagogue Beth Din as well as the Kedassia sister supervising bodies thereby giving credibility to this fledgling authority to the point that EL AL acquired the Federation kashrus for all their flights out of Heathrow. His respect for the Dayanim on issues of kashrus as well as his ability to interact with secular officials of the airline proved to be the winning combination.
In the tense standoffs in shul during the High Holidays it was sabba the peacemaker who smoothed over hurt feelings.
My second citation comes from our liturgy :
Every Friday night we welcome the angelic guests to the Shabbes table with the yehi ratson that also contains the following phrase:
And we too pray for peace….Oh Almighty King who peace is His, bless me with peace ….
Sabba was a happy man always optimistic and as Eliyahu recorded…always saw the cup half full. God blessed him with inner peace despite the world at war despite Hitler…despite his losses and near death experiences…always looked on the bright side of life ( BTW he hated Monty Python! always favouring the sardonic European sense of humor).
In the last reference I remember weekly when
Dayan Braceiner and later Rabbi Zvi Telzner had the custom to invite a layperson the honor to begin the pizmon for seuda shlishit and Dad always was honored with the following zemirah:
He would then proceed to sing it a la German oberland tune….he must have remembered from Vienna…
May the Possessor of peace grant us blessing and peace—from left (north) and from right (south), peace upon Israel. The merciful One, He will bless His people with peace, and they will merit to see children and grandchildren occupying themselves with Torah and with commandments, [bringing] peace upon Israel. Advisor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of peace (Isaiah 9:5).
His own spirituality was always one of humility…he hated show and imitation piety…
In researching the term the most poignant Torah that encapsulated Sabba Willy’s sense of shalom I turn (as always) to the deepest writings of
Rav kook in Orot Hakodesh.
There is one who sings the song of his own life, and in himself he finds everything, his full spiritual satisfaction.
There is another who sings the song of his people. He leaves the circle of his own individual self, because he finds it without sufficient breadth, without an idealistic basis. He aspires towards the heights, and he attaches himself with a gentle love to the whole community of Israel. Together with her he sings her song. He feels grieved in her afflictions and delights in her hopes. He contemplates noble and pure thoughts about her past and her future, and probes with love and wisdom her inner spiritual essence.
There is another who reaches toward more distant realms, and he goes beyond the boundary of Israel to sing the song of humanity. His spirit extends to the wider vistas of the majesty of humanity generally, its noble essence. He aspires toward humanity's general goal and looks forward toward its higher perfection. From this source of life he draws the subjects of his meditation and study, his aspirations and his visions.
Then there is one who rises toward wider horizons, until he links himself with all existence, with all God’s creatures, with all worlds, and he sings his song with all of them. It is of one such as this that tradition has said that whoever sings a portion of the song each day is assured of having a share in the world to come.
And then there is one who rises with all these songs in one ensemble, and they all join their voices. Together they sing their songs with beauty, each one lends vitality and life to the other. They are sounds of joy and gladness, sounds of jubilation and celebration, sounds of ecstasy and holiness.
The song of the self, the song of the people, the song of humanity, the song of the world all merge in him at all times, in every hour. And this full comprehensiveness rises to become the song of holiness, the song of God, the song of Israel, in its full strength and beauty, in it full authenticity and greatness.
The name “Israel” stand for shir el, the song of God.
It is the Song of Songs of Solomon, shlomo, which means peace or wholeness. It is the song of the King whom is wholeness.
Rav Kook, "Lights of Holiness", trans. by Ben Zion Bokser (New York: Paulist Press, 1978)
Dad sung his own tune…was merutze…lakol…beloved by all…
He arose beyond all the pettiness to see the bigger whole…
Blown by the winds of war and fate to foreign lands…powerless and at the mercy of others…nonetheless he survived to build anew a family a legacy that reflected his deepest spirit… that of peace.
Dad was a happy man..
She-hashalom shelo...
His peace was his…
He embodied peace…
May his memory be an inspiration to his children and yotzei chalotzov
And his example of peace to klal yisroel.
Tefillin used by father on the Dunera ship shared with 200 other prisoners
Tefillin
Wrapping the straps,
Binding,
Imprisoning the head and arm
(Never mind the boxes…
The parchment…
The creed…
The dogma inside…)
Now, only focus
On the violent binding
Of this arm,
Black leather straps,
On olive-skinned arm.
La nom-du-Pere
Father on the Dunera Ship
Confronted by Captain Smith
Tossing overboard these “inflammatory boxes”
With Hebrew destined for Nazi spies!
Into the Atlantic ocean,
As if,
These Hebrew inscribed parchment etched words
Were Coded messages to the Nazis:
But the very debris tossed over is picked up by a U boat captain
Ready to sink the Merchant Marine vessel
And, reading the German letters to parents and loved ones,
Thinking these stinking Jews are in fact German POW’s
“escorts” the vessel to Durban!
and “protects” it from enemy torpedoes.
A miracle my father exclaims.
“This…is your bible too!”
Dad courageously points to the parchment within
And Captain Smith is moved,
And allows him to retain his pair of T’fillin
Now sharing them with some 200 orthodox
“aliens” bound for Australia daily.
Back in London I watch him bind his straps with love
As he connects to this ritual as no other.
But for me,
This binding,
This black leather on daily skin,
This binding me to a crucifix
With black leather,
This ritual has become the litmus test
Of my faith.
As the years pass,
And my skepticism grows,
And the religion and fervor of my youth,
And my mid life turn to the rapture of Hassidut, wane
And my sober realization of my own decline,
And my preserving parents and in-laws in sickness,
And my disdain at the current culture of surface faith
Art-Scroll triteness,
Brain dead Orthodoxy,
This litmus test reveals the truth
The current “state of the union”
It, daily, alone, reveals the desolation within
As it mirrors my absent presence.
As it accuses me in absentia
As it alone “binds” me to my father’s faith
Sturdy at 94!
To this day!
Watching him bind it...in love.
How long?
You might ask
How long?
Before you relinquish
You surrender to the Litvak within
The skeptic,
The kritik,
The heretic?
Let it go!
Stop the hypocrisy!
Some voice shouts from within!
Inside is desolation
Inside is silence
Inside is the tzimtzum that is so deafening it crosses the universe!
I am alone
In my heretical insistence in binding these straps
For his sake.
Not Him.
Nature As A Sacred Text
I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shallwhat should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.
Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings, p. 1
© 2012 by NW Orchard, LLC
First published by Penguin Press 2012
Running away
5 hours north
My buddies and I
Finally reach this carpet of beauty
standing transfixed by nature’s luxurious annual gift
These fall colors.
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
seduce my eyes.
I’m drowning in jouissance.
The presence of the lake this morning ,calm
The glassy mirrored surface reflecting the regimental
yellow trees of the shoreline.
The lake, the trees
The water exclaims!
“Be quiet there’s work to be done.”
Bestowing their grace and rewarding the reverance
With my flowing heart…
There is a silence in the forest that is quieter than silence,
A stillness in the moist foliage under my boots.
The smell of the moist leaves is a unique scent.
That calms the memory from its wounds.
After the morning of mist and cloud , the sun
bursts forth through a thick grey cloud cover.
Shining a new light on the shimmering leaves
Gracing us above the forest line
There is a slight breeze making the perfection of the day complete.
In the red painted cabin in the woods
The wood-burning fire warms my chilly hands.
But the smoke makes me dizzy.
Also euphoric
Suddenly I awaken to the precious moment.
And gratitude for everything
Accepting finally the reality as is
The world as is.
Without ideology
Without hate
For a moment
Just love.
These trees are the letters of a sacred text.
The cloudy white atmosphere, the space between the letters
The water below, the vowels that give it meaning.
And I the reader in bowed posture
Attempting to decipher the message.
Stop in my tracks…
Listening to Her in the leaves
She is crying.
She is wounded.
Too much blood
Absorbed
In the moist ground below me
Where I am treading
Is sacred.
Indian voices
Native American cries
Are not extinguished.
“Who are you to have come here.
To drink in our sacred tapestry
Without our assent?”
Time has not assuaged the violence done to us.
Nor has the grassy bank silenced our presence for centuries.
And elsewhere she screams for nations steeped in violence.
Fighting as we speak in the Holy Land
The horror has returned.
The unspeakable is present.
The images too much to bear.
She is in pain.
And inflicts pain because we failed Her.
A pogrom here a massacre there
Gets our attention.
To the demonic.
In this silent place
A forest sanctuary
There is a sanity for a moment.
A clarity intuited but not understood.
Before we return home to the front line
Her Dying Breath
She lies supine.
Gasping
Every breath a supreme effort
Her chest heaves.
Struggling
Her neck muscles assist
In the united effort to draw in oxygen
Even so, the oximeter reveals the declining saturation.
All is failing.
These agonal breaths takes me back.
Imagining my own first breath
Most likely inverted.
My tiny ankles grasped by some stern
White-starched nurse in Florence Nightingale uniform
As they would have, circa London 1950.
When was my first cry?
had she smacked my tush already?
to awaken me to what would be a long litany of smacks.
(An appropriate welcome for this naughty child’s arrival)
gasping as I must have, inhaling the cold March air,
in response to the shock and pain
a harbinger of the trauma to follow.
My muscle memory surely fails me,
It might alternatively been an angelic hand.
Realizing I had emerged from the Edenic warm amniotic safe harbor
To the cold British air:
Having been tutored in kol hatorah.
Able to see misof olam ad sof olam.
With the help of the ner daluk al roshi
Maybe it was her known as Leylah
Who swiped me on my frenulum?
Or clouted me on the head (like my German nanny Crystal)
That angelic concussive blow
That forced my first breath.
And for-getting all I had learned.
On the inside.
In this steely ICU another ping from the ventilator
Awakens me to the stark reality.
After decades of unconscious breathing
Her ventilation now increasingly faltering
What was once taken for granted now demanding every ounce of her effort.
I have failed her.
She begged me to take her home.
From this ghastly inhuman sterile space.
I failed her.
Having promised her that once she was off the pressors, I would.
But that never happened.
I watch powerless over my broken promise.
And her diminishing breath sounds.
And when the Almighty breathed into Adam’s nostrils
His first breath,
From the depths of the Holy One…
Into the lifeless flesh already formed
Awaiting this vital humor,
Suddenly Adam becomes.
Separate from nature and God.
A sentential being.
Self-aware
Of not being God
Of a self as separate,
Pulsating with the rucach chayim, inhaling the breath of life
Ensouled.
Was God smiling at him?
Did Adam feel pain?
Did he imagine his dying breath already then?
And when God buried Moshe Rabeinu
And sucked out his dying breath with a kiss.
Did He too cry, as the midrash tells us,
The divine mourner receiving nechama.
For His beloved deceased
On this isolated mountain top?
Did Moshe Rabbeinu remember his earliest cries in the basket on the Nile River?
As he gave up his ghost for the last time?
We watch her final breath.
Whereupon Sarah shrieks “Ema Ema!”
Sobbing in agony “she’s not breathing.”
But now she is calm.
There is no further struggle.
Chest does not rise.
All is silent.
The machines are silent.
The silence is deafening.
After so much struggling
The final breath had left.
A lifetime of effortless breathing has ceased.
With a final divine kiss
Misas neshika
A life dedicated to learning.
And intellectual mastery
Her legacy aligned with her forebears.
How she readily accepted the mantle of the royalty of the Beis Harav
Instilled by her father.
Now she too is gathered to her ancestors.
Who will no doubt welcome her?
Approvingly
Of her life’s trajectory
Committed above all other priorities.
Instilling in her children and grandchildren this one singular task
To perpetuate the particular avodah in torah scholarship that characterized the Beis Harav
And the ethos of Volozhin
Her Lithuanian Camelot
Demanding no less that perfection, mastery, and dedication to this singular purpose
Ignoring all other demands of modernity
Or caring not of others criticisms.
Rest calm now Ema
Your struggle is over.
No more need to climb that mountain of inhalation.
No more need to struggle and toil in learning.
Your life’s work is finally complete.
Rest easy Ema
You succeeded.
Your father and forebears approve.
They are smiling and welcome you to the yeshiva shel maalah.
All your fears and anxieties are allayed.
Rest assured.
You have left descendents.
Who are following your example and charge.
Proof of your dedication
Each one a reflection of the light you imparted.
And they received a facet of the diamond of Volozhin.
You shone forth like a beacon from a lighthouse in the fog.
In your departing breath
The Divine kissed your life, your legacy.
Davening In The Key of C# Minor: נפילת אפים
There is in the morning services this moment
This physical postural change
Neither standing nor sitting
But a theatrical falling onto once’s face
It’s called tachanun.
After the conclusion of the Shacharit Amida, it is customary for men to “fall on their faces” and plead before God. By doing so, they fulfill the mitzva of prayer in all three of its positions – Birkhot Keri’at Shema while sitting, Shemoneh Esrei while standing, and Taĥanun (“Supplication”) while bending forward (“Nefilat Apayim”). We learn this from our teacher Moshe, who pleaded to God to forgive Israel following the sin of the Golden Calf.
Despite its great virtue, the Sages did not ordain Nefilat Apayim as an obligatory prayer or fix its wording. Anyone who wished would add prayers of supplication while lying prostrate after reciting the Amida. Perhaps specifically because of its superior value – its expression of total submission to the Creator – it is fitting that it comes from the heart, from one’s unguarded resolve.
I fall on my non-Tefillin arm by Tachanun
The penitential confession of symbolic prostration
Burying my head in my right arm
I utter the words of penitence,
וַיֹּֽאמֶר דָּוִד אֶל־גָּד צַר־לִי מְאֹד נִפְּ֒לָה־נָּא בְיַד־יְהֹוָה כִּי־רַבִּים רַחֲמָיו וּבְ֒יַד־אָדָם אַל־אֶפֹּֽלָה
But my fallen head feels a kind of petit morte.
(Like the holy Ari suggests),
The lowest point of the service (at least physically)
And with the lowered head, the broken heart follows,
Pierced by a thousand betrayals, lies and deceits.
Then we arise to complete the davening
עָלֵֽינוּ לְשַׁבֵּֽחַ לַאֲדוֹן הַכֹּל
Swaying to recover the broken soul.
This davening seems like a sacred symphony of sorts, (or maybe a requiem?)
Each Tachanun a preparation
Each נִפְּ֒לָה־נָּא
A request to become an expert in nefilah,
Each falling a prescient training for the final irreversible fall
Into the grave.
The daily falling a ritual sacred practice of mindful dying.
וְעַל־כֵּן כְּשֶׁאָדָם נוֹפֵל, חַס וְשָׁלוֹם, לִבְחִינַת מְקוֹמוֹת אֵלּוּ, דְּהַיְנוּ לִבְחִינַת מְקוֹמוֹת הַמְטֻנָּפִים, וְנוֹפֵל לִסְפֵקוֹת וְהִרְהוּרִים וּבִלְבּוּלִים גְּדוֹלִים, וַאֲזַי מַתְחִיל לְהִסְתַּכֵּל עַל עַצְמוֹ
“Therefore, when a person falls into places of this sort, God forbid—i.e., into the “filthy places,” falling into doubts, heresy and great confusion—if he then begins examining himself and sees that he is very far from God’s glory—and as a consequence of his seeing himself far from His glory, having fallen into such places,”
Likutei Mehoran 12
Davening as Requiem
If tachanun pulls me down, down, where are the highs of this daily symphony?
Start with the initial birchat hashachar as the prelude/introit.
It’s wakeup blessings reminding us to acknowledge the miracle of awakening, opening the yes, feet on the ground, belting up, then the ultimate existential question (so soon after brushing my teeth?)
אֱלֹהַי נְשָׁמָה שֶׁנָּתַֽתָּ בִּי טְהוֹרָה הִיא
Who is this בִּי this receptacle that houses the נְשָׁמָה ?
Next comes the Kyrie with Pesukei dezimra
and the Psalmists in praising the divine,
A mellifluous group of levitical songs imagined on the steps of the Temple..
Which brings us to the Gloria/Offertory of the doxological Shema surrounded by its blessings a fore and aft, maybe (this cry traditionally prior to martyrdom), is embedded in the mystical joy of this daily pilgrimage.
And immediately followed by the deafening silence of the Amidah
The pause in the oratorio where the deafening silence in a sea of fellow worshippers binds us all more than the cacophony of individual supplications. In this silence the logorrhea ceases for a while and lips continue to mouth words inaudibly.
In the silence I am present to the grief within my sternum, and giving it space, in the silence I can almost hear the little boy crying once again, the sensation of powerlessness in the face of unjust punishment, and the rage of adults venting uncontrollably.
In this space the silent presence of Shechina
is also felt as awe pervades the shul.
The reader now begins the public amidah followed by the Sanctus of Kaddish… the angelic chorus teaching us how they praise the divine…
Which brings us back to the Confiteor of tachanun and the falling falling, through death, through the grave, through the dark night of the soul into the arms of …
“Lose yourself,
Lose yourself in this love.
When you lose yourself in this love,
you will find everything.
Lose yourself,
Lose yourself.
Do not fear this loss,
For you will rise from the earth
and embrace the endless heavens.
(Rumi chides us….)
Finally, we arise to end with Aleinu Leshabeach עָלֵֽינוּ לְשַׁבֵּֽחַ לַאֲדוֹן.
Ite missa est…
I imagine the contours of this symphonic work, its cadences, rises and falls as an orchestral score, and each section a different color,
And on different days in different keys,
Although today I prefer C# minor, Bach’s sacerdotal key,
With its foreboding tones
The entire oratorio an act of surrender and submission,
an admission of man’s inability to have conquered the inner snake,
That the experiment of human history only produced
more and more technological innovations to mass murder and genocide.
A prayer for acceptance of these facts and a surrender
to the very setup that placed in the Garden…
The initial awakening, the profession of faith,
the highs of the silent prayer followed by the
inevitable fall (from grace) in Tachanun,
and resurrection in Aleinu forms the contours of this composition.
I rise and fall with the sections, like the music of the oratorio,
like my biography, a palimpsest of human brokenness before me.
I imagine davening on the organ of Kings College Cambridge,
with the puny altar boys in their white levitical uniforms, and falsetto voices,
positing the grandeur of the cathedral and vulnerable vocal cords
that will soon break in their testosterone rush.
Each day another matin, each day the cycle of surrender
needed to break the serpentine darkness within.
R. Bachayei.
Internalizing The Divine
Making the sovev connect to the p’nimi.
Wrapped in my tallis excluding the world outside,
Strapped by my tefillin in leather chains.
Standing in the space of the divine in this sanctuary/beis midrash
With other worshippers and the devout
Swaying at their stations, their shtenders,
Surrounded by the transcendent divine.
Surrounded by the sovev kol almin.
All the spiritual opportunities are present.
The only challenge right now
Is finding the divine within…
Buried beneath the past (deceits betrayals, lies and addictions)
Lost inside a deep abdominal imagined ball of grief,
The inner serpentine voice demanding its due
The chattering monkey.
The inner kritik,
(Even Moshe strikes the rock you know! An Asherah tree for some)
My challenge remains to connect the sovev out there to the p’nimi in here.
The flawed broken soul resists,
Trapped as it is in the vice-ridden body.
Decades of revolt
Resistance to
Bending to
Bowing to
Dark authorities that controlled me.
The lost Princess (the p’nimi) screams
Her arms outstretched.
Beseeching “rescue me.”
Forgive me
Give me penitence.
Give me solace.
What is demanded each time?
Is more surrender.
Of the familiar
The routine
The comfortable
The old self must die.
And lose itself in a free fall.
Into the abyss of uncertainty
So frightening.
What is demanded each time?
Is faith, even harder, more trust, reliance,
That free falling will not end in a thud of death.
A crushing of everything this ego has born.
This biography this struggle, this failure.
Rather the trapdoor will indeed open
The path is always down down, down, into these painful dreaded spaces,
where the tears lubricate the narrow spaces,
In the grip of fear
Despite the vertigo of resentments,
Powerless in the face of this inner monster
In the fall
In the blotte
The cry of Ayeh!
Help!
I surrender!
Nailed to the crucifix on my skeletal frame.
Finally, the bottom opens up.
And I fall into the sovev.
Kaddish for Dad
Each recital punctuating the service,
Yitgadal veyitkadash…
I join my brothers in mourning.
At times I recite alone
At times with a cacophony of mourners,
Each with different cadences, accents, fluencies,
We bow and move three steps backward
Taking leave of the King.
How do I do this?
The mechanics of repetition
The prosidy of ritual
The obsessiveness of halachahic process…
So different from Mum!
Where the pain of recitation tore my heart
A serrated knife in my heart being twisted by each oseh shalom..
And the challenge of even getting through to the end.
With Dad however,
It is more a deep gnawing sadness
More in the head,
His gaping absence
No longer sitting on his perch, receiving the world
Blessing me just two weeks before he left
Responding to my singing die Lorelai
Now,
The overpowering nature of his life, his legacy and his longevity.
The memories of my childhood and the times spent with him
during the summers, his picking me up from the airport monthly
and the chats, walking to shul and back in Rehavia,
these bubble up during the monotony of the kaddish.
The weekly zoom forces us to review the recent past,
deciding among the siblings regarding disposal of the bric a brac,
the books and the contents of an apartment once lived,
And, as yet his personal items to be determined who gets what
Delaying the last agonizing decisions of his most personal items.
I imagine each Kaddish as follows,
My lowering a shovel of holy earth onto the coffin
Each kaddish another shovel-load,
Each service another lowering of earth into the grave
Despite in reality there was no box, just his body in shrouds,
But it comforts me,
Each Kaddish
Another clod of earth leaves my shovel and falls onto the coffin,
It hits the wood with the sound only those having lost loved ones recognise.
It comforts me that it will take the full 11 months of daily services-
Three times each day
To fully fill the grave itself..
The earth inside rising bit by bit to meet the surface,
And as the months progress the sound will dull
once the coffin itself is covered,
I will only see earth then, no more the Ark of Dad’s remains,
And the completion will occur when the entire gravesite
meets the ground around it,
Leaving only the shape of fresh earth, an oblong of dirt
surrounded by green, green grass.
As the earth rises to the surface ever so slowly
My acceptance and surrender to the fact and the ending
and the closure becomes internalized,
And I turn to my own life
And the inevitability of my preparation for my own mortality.
The daily aches and pains, the loss of energy and earlier fatigue
as the day winds down, all markers of decline despite good health.
I am learning that each day, each kaddish is a spiritual opportunity
to not just mourn his loss but also prepare for my own.
The spiritual path might just be a daily meditation
on the analysis of one’s path, one’s character defects,
one’s surrender to the reality of life on life’s terms,
and the surrender to the higher will of the divine.
The digging and shoveling of chthonic psychic material
is a prerequisite for opening the higher self to the light.
From panic to depression to acceptance and serenity
Each clod of earthiness covers what was, the past, the dull thud
spilling onto onto the coffin of past betrayals, deceits,
harms done to others and self- destruction.
The earth falls as does the self-constructed ego
into the reality of realization of failure, a free fall
into the brutal awareness of the picture of Dorian grey
is no longer in the attic.
Hopefully I will have accomplished the inner work
of acceptance and surrender when it comes to my turn
to be at the bottom of this opening in the earth,
Meanwhile the daily kaddish is a gift reminding me
of the ongoing painful work of shoveling and digging
into memory and trauma and healing needs attention.
Hesped For My Father
My father was the shofar that kept on blowing
In times of grief and anger
We turn to our texts of comfort
For relief from the anguish And unbearable pain
Despite years of anticipatory grief
Never knowing whether this might be the last time
As I alighted the plane home
The fact of the ending… the end of this life.. makes it no less painful
Grief is grief.. however much, the anticipation of it.
Dad kept surprising us all!!!
Bouncing back from this or that setback!!!
He surprised us because he was a Prussian man, a disciplined man, a man of routine and moderation and undeterred by anything around him. I never saw him drunk., he always left something on his plate, he always rose early, in the british winters with no central heating all he had to do was to uncover the sheet from my big toe for shacharis…then he would see the condensation on the car window and claim “selichos weather”.. only once I saw him tucked ill in bed with the sheets over his head when I was 15…I was mortified…he never cried….he never emoted….
Not just 2 days ago he was still actively walking between his two stalwart soldiers Balu and Manjou
Rochelle ever sending us camera-ready instant videos documenting his ongoing life.
He surprised us waiting like the gentleman he always was allowing us to finish the shloshim ceremony for his mechutenes in NY Sunday
And surprising us by leaving this world on the exact yearzeit of his mechuten my father in law.
He surprised us because his life was that shofar that kept on blowing..
If I may paraphrase Batya who midrashically composed a shabbat zemir that tickled Dad ever since…yismach Shlomo bematnas.. Yismach shlomo bematnas, bematnas chelko…it captured his core…his deep satisfaction with life…his survival as testament to his victory over Hitler…the love of his life he adored ,the exotic beauty from India… his children’s accomplishments, the grandchildren and greatgrandchildren that visited him and mum on their perch…then him alone..
Despite his difficulty with verbal expression his facial gestures said it all…they never diminished…his sardonic sense of humor manifested itself with raised eyebrows, impish smile, and if he did not like something he pulled up his nose..showing us all he was all there until the end…looking down upon the world like a true Vienna schnitzel…
sometimes I would show him Mum’s picture and he looked at me forlornly..her absence tearing out his heart…other times Rochelle would show him a group black and white picture of mum becky and eric in Trafalgar square circa 1948 and he would point to Eric….and say ‘Erich” with a thick vienese german…Rochelle would refer him to that album of his life daily…page by page pricking his memory like a Megillah.. each chapter another unique historical fragment that made the mosaic of his amazing journey. That book was his sefer the sefer shel Shlomo.
He did not approve of my morbid fascination with the dark side of life and texts…why delve and kvetch …he was the survivor not me!!! He went through the war having been saved by an angel 3 times….not me!!
He always chided me after one of my dark toirahs….why do you read the pshat this way?
Why do you need to resort to midrashic fantasy…
Julian I am a happy man….no complexes …no reading into the text anything but Peshuto shel davar…in that he was a simple man…and the pashut…does not imply simplicity…it was a choice in everything he did….be straight..ramrod straight…be satisfied with what life gives…above all survive!
Shlomo yedaber Shlomo decided everything in his life
Work play communal service retirement Aliyah
Vehaelokim yaanenu bekol///////God was his partner
He survived the war…he survived a generation after the war..his life was a testament to his determination and vigor strength and vigor….
Born in a different distant epidemic
100 years ago
A survivor for a century
Surfing on the aphorisms of classical wisdom
As if we learned what he felt was necessary through his pithy wisdoms alone:
Si takuisis
Panta re
Those summers in europe in the Westminster overdrive…
Where I swear I learned in those 2 weeks from his nonstop commentary on history geography and life more than I did all year in the Hasmonean!!
Mum singing Oh the white cliffs of Dover when we returned on the ferry from Calais..
The song he composed in the Austrian tirol the zemering “baruch hashem Yisborach”
The top of the Jung Frau Yoch…he went outside alone in the thick clouds and suddenly the blue sky opened up and the brilliant sun shone down on him…he returned and told us that he had a religious experience…so uncharacteristic of him to indulge in such spiritual excesses!
Always with humor. Always looking on the bright side of life…
His humor was continental.. not British.. he could not fathom my love of Monty Python….
His friends were mainly survivors…Uncle Kay, his partner Ernest Strauss Max Landau..Mr Wolf…the Viennese gabbai who taught him to be a world class gabbai….people would come ot him with their problems…even his co-Gabbai Rozenthal would accompany him home despite living in Woodside Park,
His sense of right and morality earned him consistent promotions from gabbai to VP to President of the shul…to national prominence in governing the Federation on their board and running the kashrus branch that made the name KF respectable to all.
His courage in hiring the first ever Chabad Rabbi to a British synagogue pulpit in Rabbi Telzner for whom his love never faded..because he saw in him the erlichkeit…never mind the trappings of nusach…or even ideology…
His ability to handle the unruly and offended in shul,,,,and in the box during anim zemiros listening to the president tell him off color jokes with his thick cockney accent and Dad trying to hold back the giggles…
His work life and his adoring employees who he had earned their love by secretly paying for their debts, his honesty in business and where his competitors were getting cheaper plastics from Germany he resisted…
I would come in to England on my way to work in NY from Israel, he always picked me up from Heathrow never ever complained and took me back after the weekend with them…no matter what was on his plate..how can I ever repay that kindness….
His adoration and tolerance of Mum who was not an easy personality!!!!
And the two of the on their perch in trumpeldor….always hand in hand…he admired her violin fingers!! Worthy of a Michalangelo sculpture,
On this perch …Where all the world would come ot pay homage
Surrounded by mostly their artwork on the walls
Dad helping mum with her bookbinding, the leathers the quality the color the thickness calligraphy and whatever new craft she happened to choose…
Music saturated the home….Mum a virtuosi would listen to you-tubes of various performers
Critiquing them…and dad would look o dutifully…for he had his own choice pieces..
His favorite melodies he responded to even 2 weeks ago
Eric would play La Campanella …I sang… he nodded
Torselli!! Heinrich Heine…de Lorelai..these never left him
Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,
Dass ich so traurig bin;
Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten,
Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.
Having born witness to Hitler’s march into Vienna
Kindertransport
Internment
The love of his life
Starting a family
Communal work
Synagogue warden, President,
National prominence, VP federation of Synagogues
Aliyah
Scrabble with Rivkie
Calisthenics with Ganady
Hot chocolate with Rochelle
How to thank those who cared for him
Balu Manju
Devorah whose skill and sensitivity to his needs kept him alive
Dr Simon,,,whose clinical judgment and balanced understanding of medicine and halacha equals anything we have in the US..
Dr Djemal…a general practitioner who reflects the best of the NHS and whose care and love of her patients is legendary…
My brother who took care of the finances and weighed dad measured his body flluids and indeces on a spreadsheet that is worthy of publishing! Keeping us all up to date with variations in fluid intake output, weight HB HCT etc etc etc….
His Friday visits to Dad with the weekly foto of Dad emerging from the shower in his Harrods white robe looking regally into the camera …said it all…
Debs who would fly in and swoop down with her medical experience in helping those with cancer in Memorial Sloan Kettering would wake us up to complacency and usually correctly remind us of this or that medical change. It was easy for Debs and I to come in and then leave on our visits..it was a different story being there for the daily grind…
But beyond and beyond and beyond is my darling twin sister Rochelle…whose place in Gan Eden is assured….who loved Dad despite his stubbornness, his obstinancy…who pushged him to eat and get nourished,,,who knew every change in his condition before it happened…who worried incessantly about this or that…it was Rochelle we owe his longevity…insisting on taking him out for hot chocolate with a mountain of whipped cream 5pm every day…who knew his likes and dislikes…
I know not when he began to blow shofar
In Tatura British Internment camp? Autsralia
Prior in Vienna?
But at 101 he continued to blow
He loved to entertain his guests
(despite Mum calling it “showing off”)
Even when `cognitive articulations fail
As if his shofar blowing
Represents his will to breath
The serpentine shofar bending to his will
As if he finally tamed the inner snake of desire
And the outer monster of this century
The power of his sound
The power of his Prussian will
The power of his survival
Memories of his blowing in Finchley Central shul in the 60’s
Those last few kolos
We were on tenterhooks as kids
Carrying the shame of his failure
And the pride of his success
What began the century
Now ends it
The shofar heralding its onset and its end?
The jubilee of his life now bookended?
How he survived all of this,
This horrific century
Doggedly refusing to surrender
To the rules of others
His own iron will
Of moderation
Health, exercise
Care of the body and mind
No extremes mind you.
His Aliyah as a final arrival to the field of dreams
His delight in walking the streets unabashed of his yarmulke
“I never have to look over my shoulder again” he quipped
Impossible in Europe
A microscopic reflection of what has taken place in the miracle of Zionism.
But also, an inner protection, a survivor’s immune response to tragedy
Through walling off the emotions of loss
And the price one pays for that!
And the demands of discipline and results from children
No room for failure
No expression of emotion allowed
Especially crying….my earliest recollection was in Stamford Hill N16 around 1953 yom kippur?
I must have been crying during the kedusha
Will never forget that stern look…
As I watch him blowing
It is as if he is telling me
I may not express myself
I may not tell you my feelings
I may not divulge my inner thoughts, I never did,
But here is my legacy
Listen to the power
Listen to the cadence the pitch the perfection
Here
This is what I leave my children
The memory of this sound
The sound that grows stronger and stronger
The sound of the jubilee
In this land of Jubilees
The optimism of the survivor
This spiritual immunity I give to you
To survive.
This deep hole in the heart
The pit in the stomach The deep sadness
There is some comfort in these texts The ones that arise…
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Thanksgiving Sunrise Surfside FL 2022
Hester Panim/Eclipse of the Divine
“I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
T.S. Eliot
“Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God-such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is passing. But it is not a process which can be adequately accounted for by instancing the changes that have taken place in man’s spirit.
An eclipse of the sun is somethingthat occurs between the sun and our eyes, not in the sun itself….But when, as in this instance, something is taking place between heaven and earth, one misses everything when one insists on discovering within earthly thought the power that unveils the mystery.
He who refuses to submit himself to the effective reality of the transcendence as such—our vis-à-vis—contributes to the human responsibility for the eclipse.”
Martin Buber
The sun breaks above the razor sharp horizon
A tiny pink sliver at first
Peeking, sheepishly,
As if testing the landscape’s response
The clouds above and below open like a curtain
Welcoming the new day’s visitor
She cares not what we think or feel
She just gives of her radiance and warmth
And the world benefits
And nature bows to her majestic kindness
as life continues another day
Due to her largesse there are lush pastures of green
Open landscapes of rolling hills and vales
Carpets of forests and canopies
Her chlorophyll hides the true brilliant colors
Of the autumnal dying leaves.
The fauna in the lakes and rivers are warmed
As the mating season owes its loves to her
And nature is nourished once again.
Indeed she cares not
If she also burns and dehydrates
Causing fires and death
Heatwaves that kill millions
Parched deserts of drought
Oblivious to the poles or equator
We are the planets revolving around her after all
She is just there
Punctually
Daily
Showing up
Predictably
calculably
(even years ahead)
When she will make her entrances and when she will
take leave at sunset
Halachically we are guided by “neitz” and “shkiya”
Arguing incessantly as to the actual moment
She will enter the “vilon”
Or descend into the mikvah like ocean.
It is up to us
The receivers of her beneficence
To determine how to enjoy and survive with her life sustaining rays
And when to protect ourselves for fear of getting burned
Of not gazing at her directly
For fear of blindness
Of shading from her in the heat of the day
Her orange glow this morning seems so benign
The stuff painters will revel in, on their canvases
Trying to get the right hue of orange/redness.
People stand in reverent silence on the beach
and meditate ahead of the
Toil of the day
But soon she will ascend the Florida sky
And her brilliance will require protection once again
As we approach her zenith at midday
Until she makes her daily descent over the city landscape
Plunging me into and the world back into darkness.
It occurred to me that my metaphor of the divine has
been faulty, all along….
That my conception has been soiled by philosophy,
theodicy, history,
And my people’s victimhood
(after all just look at us mere decades ago)
That, for just a moment I might rather take a step into nature instead, and
Looking at our planet from out there in space
This singular azure blue globe with its wispy clouds
surrounding it and the deep blue oceans meandering across it
Could not have survived without her
That we as earth propel through the darkness of space along with our sisters
In an orbital dance around her
In exact proportionate spin
A precision in distance and nearness
to allow life and love.
Extending the comparison to our sacred texts
Like the warnings of Moses to the Israelites not to get too
close to the Divine rage
The fire that emerged suddenly and unpredictable when
those got too close to the Tabernacle
Or the Deuteronomic prediction that in the sinful future,
The face of the divine will be hidden (hester panim)
Allowing for all sorts of calamity.
In those hoary times there will be a total eclipse
And the earth will be plunged into spiritual darkness in
the midst of daylight sun
Her territory and domain encroached upon by the prince of darkness
Yet the phenomenon of eclipse remains,
built into the very fabric of our orbit
It’s bound predictably, calculably, to occur through no
“fault” of our own
Like the nature of human love
Whose eclipse of the heart follows the passionate love
And at times all is plunged into chaos and darkness
And only man’s heart of cruelty remains
To his fellow man, unspeakable crimes
Or to himself in destruction through his addictive
behavior, the amygdala of self-hatred.
Yet the sun remains hidden behind the eclipse
Patiently waiting to re-emerge
To formally take charge once again
Order shall now proceed
Chaos is forgotten
And the world returns to where it was
With the wasteland and the trauma
Burnished in the soul of recovery.
And once she reigns again
It is as if
Nothing had happened
All is returned to the ebb and flow of life once more
The day comes
The day goes
Sunrise and sunset resume
Is it possible that this sun reflects the very divine
Not only in nature but also in relation to earth to history
to us?
POSTSCRIPT
“The Present events are an affliction and that is an unbearable fact. We must contemplate this affliction in all its bitterness and without consolation while loving God as author of all things-including this same affliction-and as author solely of good”
Simone Weil “Attente de Dieu”
“The grand enigma of human life is not suffering, but affliction. It is not astonishing that innocents should be killed, tortured, flushed from their countries, reduced to misery or slavery, imprisoned in camps and cells—since we know there are criminals who commit these acts. Neither is it astonishing that sickness imposes long periods of suffering that paralyze life and make it an image of death—since nature is subject to the blind play of mechanical necessity. But it is astonishing that God has given affliction the power to take hold of the very souls of innocents and to seize them as their sovereign master. In the best case, the one marked by affliction only keeps half his soul. God himself cannot prevent what has happened from having happened. What better proof that the creation is an abdication? What greater abdication of God than is represented by time? We are abandoned in time. God is not in time. Creation and original sin are only two aspects, which are different from us, of a single act of abdication by God. And the Incarnation, the Passion, are also aspects of this act. God emptied himself of his divinity and filled us with a false divinity. Let us empty ourselves of it. This act is the purpose of the act by which we were created. At this very moment God, by his creative will, is maintaining me in existence, in order that I may renounce it. God waits patiently until at last I am willing to consent to love him. God waits like a beggar who stands motionless and silent before someone who will perhaps give him a piece of bread. Time is that waiting. Time is God's waiting as a beggar for our love. The stars, the mountains, the sea, and all the things that speak to us of time, convey God's supplication to us. By waiting humbly, we are made similar to God. God is only the good. That is why he is waiting there is silence. Anyone who comes forward and speaks is using a little force. The good which is nothing but good can only stand waiting. Beggars who are modest are images of Him. Humility is a certain relation of the soul to time. It is an acceptance of waiting. That is why, socially, it is the mark of inferiors that they are made to wait. "I nearly had to wait" is thetyrant's word. But in ceremony, whose poetry makes all men equal, everybody has to wait. Art is waiting. Inspiration is waiting. He shall bear fruit in patience. Humility partakes in God's patience. The perfected soul waits for the good in silence, immobility and humility like God's own. Christ nailed on the cross is the perfect image of the Father.”
Simone Weil "The Things of the World" The Simon Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (New York: David McKay, 1977) pp. 423-4.
In The Dying of The Leaves
In the dying of the leaves
All summer the warm wind rustles the golden leaves
Like a shimmering of tea lights at dusk
It seems this will last forever
But now as the sky goes gray with the brooding clouds
And the morning wind chills the air
Everything looks to the impending gloom of winter.
Those once golden leaves turn all colors
Some redden into brilliant hues
Others into fall colors that make New Hampshire into a Persian rug.
The wind conspires with the trees to allow the leaves to fall
Its force and ferocity at times justly earning the title
of its “Windy City” locale
And ironically only in the dying of the leaves do
their true colors become revealed.
Who would have guessed that the uniformity of chlorophyll had been masking
Each one’s genetic uniqueness.
Who would have predicted this veritable luscious intoxication of color
A painter’s paradise of acrylic.
Where she once glorified in rustling through her branches
Welcomed for spreading pollen and fertilizing the next generation of flora
She now participates in the death throes
that will leave the tree bereft and skeletal
In its winter survival mode.
That same wind blew the crematoria ashes for miles
Leaving a frosty powder of victims’ skeletal remains
Covering the green grass
Of the countryside with its secrets
Europe remains a vast graveyard
The culmination of kultur and technology
The end of the experiment of the Enlightenment.
That wind heralded a new winter
A nuclear wasteland of the soul
With its newer genocides and atrocities
And the red bloodlust increases each time
with the use of “neutral” technology.
In the dying of its victims
Their true colors are revealed
A Persian rug of pain and suffering
A multicolored pastiche of human misery
The torturer’s brush uses tears instead of acrylic.
La Nom du Pere
Of fathers and Sons
Born 5 years after,
Father a refugee
Haunted by betrayal
His stern eyes
The Prussian ritual
The moderation
The survival
The refusal to emote
The son
Too soft
Crying too much
Evoking his rage
Skin color too olive
(Unlike the Viennese pallor)
The German nanny
The abuse
The hours under the stairs in the darkness
The fear evermore of the dark
The son asks for a blessing
Father is 101 years old, now
He places his hand on the son’s head
He hears the first word of the blessing
יברכך
And breaks down
Fathers and sons:
All his life
Unconsciously bearing the father’s survivor guilt
Trying to make sense of this insanity
Rushing to this or that solution
Kook, Chabad, Carlebach, Breslov
Freud, Jung, Hillman,
SHATZ, Frank, Scholem,
BESHT Degel Nachman
Only to be dashed against the rocks of reality
Theology implodes
The addictions that promised momentary solace
Work, rage, ETOH, porn, validation in religion, hospital army
Nothing alleviates the impending sense
That all the struggles
All the rationales
All the texts and trajectories of theological understanding
Of the rational left hemisphere,
Leave this cosmic gap
This holy vacuum
A Chalal hapanui
Of the heart
As if
Everything that moved, motivated and pushed
This child
Who already at nine,
Sensed his impending demise
Fast forwarded 70 years
Seeing his image facing his death
Without meaning
Awaking in a panic in the night.
Now at the end of things
The end of his prime
Having solved nothing
Found nothing
Dis-covered only we are reflecting a gaping chasm
Between doctrine and reality
Theology and absence
Meaning and insanity
That all language and truth went up in the smoke of the crematoria
(Anything less would be a disservice to the memory of the victims.)
He throws up his hands
In defeat
Refusing to accept old orthodoxies
Unbelieving the new latter-day saints
Realizing its mimicry
A pantomime of sorts
Left alone
Facing the failure
Of nerve
Of daring
Or heresy
We have awoken from a 70-year-old coma
(like Choni)
But unlike his venture into the Beis Midrash
We
See the fragments of what once was..
The vibrant yeshivos now reconstructed
Like zombies
Like never before
Thousands sitting and learning
Shteiging away
And hassidic look-a-likes
Piously shockling in their designer shtreiml’s
What is our task?
The task I failed at?
To pick up the fragments,
To view what we can reconstruct,
To salvage whatever we can from the rubble
Of millenia-filled sacred texts,
To make sense of what makes sense
In this nightmarish post-Tremendum world
Where nothing has been learned
From those exhortations to be kind
But so much from the minutiae of halachic constructions.
Let’s see which texts were predictive
Which Masters understood the darkness within
Who foresaw the catastrophe?
Nothing has changed outside the texts
Man’s inhumanity-to-man persists unabated
The ferocity in the heart of man
The dark soul within
This demonic soul
Did we have a Nietzsche? A Kafka? A Simone Weil?
Who could hold both the weight of tradition and the insanity of genocide?
Would the Piacetzna have said and claimed what he wrote
before his deportation
About Divine Weeping
Had he known a million babies went up in smoke?
Awakening from this coma
We too failed,..al chet
For we too gave up on the Ribbono shel Olam
(As the Klausenberger Rebbe claimed that first Yom Kippur
In the DP camp.)
Facing failure
Refusing the old doctrines
We are left in this gap
Of Holy dis-belief
Of Holy atheism
Of Holy apikorsus
This, my father,
Is what I have to transmit to my sons
This will disappoint you no doubt
For you believed in simple Emunah
And hated my forays into Midrash and Chassidut
“he thinks too much”
Maybe you are right
maybe the only way forward
Is survival alone,
And transmitting the doctrine to the next generation
But you forgot once again this pesty kid
Born five years after
Condemned to struggle
Yearning for the Great father in heaven
Yet giving Him the finger
For what he did to His children
And still asking you to bless me.
Eric Sargon Sept 4th 2022, Salome Worch
Eric's Notes
He’s playing the slow movement of the Mendelssohn violin concerto
The Andante..
His arthritic fingers vibrato on the strings, to produce
A sound, mellifluous like an aged Pinot Noir
His wrist moves the bow of experience
His wrist fluid yet strong
Worshiping the Muses
Of 60 years of muscle memory
With the mastery that only comes with decades of passion
To this art.
As the music emerges from instrument and player
I see musical notes flying up heavenward
And my mother
Who played this very piece in the Royal College circa 1941
In her velvet black evening gown
With her long neck bent over the instrument
Listening now
From above intently,
for the correct intonation, pauses, technique and mastery
for she would tolerate nothing less from her young brother.
His face now identical to Dada’s
The austerity genetically marked forever.
The self-discipline and self-demands now internalized
The refusal to indulge in musical emotionality,
No, the feeling must emerge only from the technique
The complete understanding of the composer’s intent alone,
Old school.
So ironic, despite the youthful years of trauma, isolation from friends,
Sports, socializing, (for Dada would insist he needed to practice, practice,)
He became the most sensitive human beings
Caring only for others
Always kind and considerate
I still quip to my kids
“when I grow up I want to be like Uncle Eric!”
The last sibling to survive
His sisters’ absence is palpable.
Now the “gentleman of Jerusalem” in his 90’s
Barely able to walk
His legs giving out
His balance off,
But once seated on his perch
Immediately regains mastery of his life through his instrument,
It is the violin shaped luchot that carry him,
Its letters, the musical notes (and tears) that now flow.
Much like the Hebrew letters flying off the Luchos
In response to our communal idolatrous orgy
Slipping into our familiar addictions,
When this so-called savior doesn’t show up to rescue us,
There now develops a tug of war with the Divine,
wishing to retrieve the tablets
And Moses holding on to them for dear life…
Until the letters flew off in protest
Too holy for this people,
The tablets now became too heavy to carry and fall
Smashing to the ground.
Here too I see the notes flying off
His aged, wooded viola’s tones
Wafting up in a spiral smokey plume
Like incense,
The music dissolves into the black dots and crotchets flying
Bearing with them the soul of the player (or is it just the listener?)
Demanding answers to the question why?
In his music he reaches places his intellectual mind does not (dare?) enter.
In the andante he explores the very tragedy of our family
The genetic traits that allowed Dada
to both push him to his limits
as well as write his heresies,
And this sweetness from all this suffering
opens my broken soul to feel what it feels.
The Hebrew letters and the Mendelssohn’s notes are one and the same
Reflecting his grandfather’s attempt
to salvage the lost letters of his faith for modernity
And the musical cries of “Hear ye Israel” [1]
Now wafting in his sweetness
Drowning in the sound
The tears mix with the notes
And carry them up to Mum
These tears are full of rage and little acceptance
But Mum would surely approve
Of her virtuosi brother (so virtuous) and his broken listener
Hymns to the drowning,
Unable to swim in the ocean of grief
Rage rage in the dying of the night…
[1] Oratorio Elijah
Photo: Todd Rosenberg
Pangs During a Glorious Performance
Orchestra hall is hushed awaiting the entrance of the soloist
The anticipation in the air is palpable
It has been so covid-long
Since I sat in this hallowed sanctuary
Having brought my grandchildren here last
For the Italian concerto
I have returned
Albeit be-masked like the other worshippers
Bathed in the yellow warm light of this circular temple
Facing the majestic organ pipes at attention like soldiers.
Suddenly the door opens, and in she floats,
A low-cut gown, midnight blue, straight then flaring at the bottom
She glides across the stage like a mermaid
Slowly she removes her black mask
And places it (with disdain?) on the concert master Chen’s music stand (!)
I cannot describe her performance better than Johnson (below)
But found myself weeping in the Larghetto
Solti’s orchestra revealing the greatest string section in the world
The lush svelte sound so unique to Chicago
Was the perfect partner to the mastery of her 40-year-old career.
When music moves me it is like love-making,
At the center of the experience is this Rilke-like sense of the tragic
That death is the pure counterpoint to this sublime
That these few moments of exalted spiritual experience
In life, merely reflect its ironic and tragic at its core.
These precious moments lie in stark contrast
To both the mundane, the routine, the dulling of the senses of the ordinary
How we have anesthetized ourselves from the horrors of the outside world.
Later I am overwhelmed by a sense of impropriety..
(beyond the fact that only here-
among the intellectuals and music lovers of Chicago
Sitting between their dress ties and gowns
in the box section- am I acutely aware of my difference
My yarmulke screaming out
my embarrassed ethnicity to one and all)
No, what overcomes me are the memories of Ukraine,
the military hospital, the blast injuries,
the impending doom that awaits.
Here I am sitting in this rarefied temple of kultur and refinement
Listening to what arguably might be
the greatest performer and orchestra of this concerto alive,
In this perfection of sound and acoustics,
Among the gentile class of music lovers I share with,
While that horror is going on a plane ride away.
And my thoughts go back to Warsaw Ghetto and Mariupol
And a possibly similar scene during the war
when the Berlin Philharmonic played
And good upper class educated sophisticated German citizens
listened enrapt by the wizardry of Furtwengler,
In their evening gowns and tuxedos
While the crematoria burned.
In what moral universe does music and art get an ethical pass
No wonder after Auschwitz
the modern enlightenment project gets called into question
No wonder we have learned to split and detach
as if geography prevented leakage of the horrors
Into our hermetically sealed music halls and psyches.
Tonight I am complicit.
Matan Torah 2022
History,
Revelation,
Our myth of Sinai returns now for celebration
Ritual and community.
Special food for the palate and flowers for the sanctuary.
The long line from revelation to exile to redemption
Rosenzweig’s trinity of history,
Yet in our century all has been rehearsed
All has been encapsuled
The failed secular messianic movements
The failed dictatorships
The secular theologies of flag county and honor
One big experiment in social engineering that only led to ethnic cleansing.
From the European of learning to Auschwitz to Yom Yerushalayim
Giddying changes for our community.
Before our eyes within decades,
The desert blooms,
The county thrives,
Start-up nation attracts billions from investors globally
Women’s revolution in Torah bringing
the new gift of insight into our sacred texts
Technology and torah allowing us the dizzying mastery
of 2000 years with one click
(except on Shabbat when we return to our “am Haaretz status”)
But recently the tiny RNA virus that toppled our lifestyles
Recalibrating work and play where economies toppled
and nations blamed each other.
And the horrors of another war
of man’s inhumanity to man,
To remind us of the darkness within,
That is destined to boil over volcanically every century
Making that post WWII 70 year calm another aberration in Hegelian history
A blip in the centuries fighting over a piece of real estate…
Now we return to that normal,
Europe’s soil hungers for blood and must be satisfied with more.
Yet here we are
We dig once more into texts of Decalogue and Ruth and the Degel
Of self-understanding as a covenantal community
As well as on the individual trajectories
The personal miracles
The personal revelations
The renewal of commitment to recovery and healing
The openness to transcendence
The time to reflect and meditate on another year
Of learning
Of growth
Of optimism in the face of darkness.
Yizkor seems to mar the festivities
But that is our genius
For loss and trauma are never far from joy
Like the glass we break under the chuppah
We must remember those we lost
Moving from grief to an etching of love and memory
In the heart.
We have created this monotheistic ideal
Yet Schechina is down here with us
A matrix of love and
Suffering alongside us quietly
She wears at times a black bodice
And longs for her beloved
Trapped with us in an eternal exile.
We take all of this
On the macro level- as a community among others
As a nation state among others
And as individuals within communities
And struggle with seeing our tradition as once more relevant
Its ideals and mission
Its promises and utopian messianism
The myth of Matan Torah
Forgive Me
Forgive Me
Reb Melech
I know it was your Yahrzeit
All the chassidim flowed in
Krakow is a sea of black,
For those who came to participate in the new industry
(Charedi Kivrei Zadikkim tourism)
I was being driven to the border past Reyshe / Rzeszów/Lancut/Lizesk
On the highway racing past you…
Thinking how many times I prayed by your tziyon,
Wondered how all types of chassidus come together by you,
You somehow bring us/them under your unconditional love
Even broken souls like me.
REMAH
Forgive me too Rav Moshe (Isserless),
I used to stop by you on the way to Lizesk
A nod to my Oberlander father
Reassuring him that even the Satmer Rov
Omitted “veyatzmahk pirkunei”
The gravesite is quiet in the chilly brilliant spring sunshine
(The tree grows over your tziyon, just like in the photos
from the turn of the 19th century)
no cannon ball holes piercing your tziyon
(like the Chozeh!)
Stopping by the cradle of minhag Ashkenaz in deference to you,
Don’t worry Dad I used to say, the stylish move to chassidus
Does not supplant your minhagim…
It was theological not behavioral!
Then I look for the Megaleh Amukos
(on whose matzevah is inscribed: “he had gilui Eliyahu x3”) !!
But Rabbosai, you know there Is this war going on,
Next door, across the border
While you both rest peacefully,
Yet for an inexplicable reason
I felt the need to come here
To be here
Despite my wife’s exhortations
(the Ukrainian NAZI’s were the worst butchers in WWII)
Despite the AZOV fighters’ NAZI insignia
Despite the steely eyed soldiers guarding the fascist cross
By the lake where we do tashlich in Uman
And the assaults on chassidish kids on the streets of Pushkina
Despite history..
At the border
I see thousands of women and crying children
lined up by the border heading into Poland
Images of the forced lethal marches circa 1944
Each carrying a heavy heart and a wheely, leaving for safety
Leaving behind their loved men to fight
It’s an epic story of human misery and transmigration
I feel I am in a movie set
This long line in the no man’s land between war and safety.
Once again Europe drips with blood.
I am filled with pride as I see the Israeli flag on red medical volunteer suits
Literally hundreds of volunteers yelling in Hebrew
even units of Israeli medic soldiers help out
with their tents, food and equipment, truly a kiddush Hashem.
I walk in the opposite direction to the refugees,
so my path is clear, and I feel a loneliness
As I am walking into the fray.
An Israeli Major sees me stumbling carrying bags
of heavy donated equipment and insists on
helping me.
Four bubbly Israeli volunteers offer me fruit
from their supermarket cart they are taking to the
other side where thousands wait in line in silence.
I want to hug each one.
I volunteered in 1972 as a medical student during the Yom Kippur War
Now memories of those same whiney sirens surface
as we descend into the shelter.
For all the talk, writings on Post Holocaust this and that,
I need to be here…
“Never Again” applies to all human beings
So please forgive me Reb Melech and RAMO
I will come back on a better day.
Dad blowing shofar Jan 30, 2022, at age 101
