Sunrise Longbranch Labor Day 2026
Hester Panim/Eclipse of the Divine II
“I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
T.S. Eliot
The sun breaks above the razor horizon, a pink sliver at first, peeking, sheepishly, as if testing the landscape's response.
The clouds part like a curtain for the day's visitor.
She cares not what we think or feel. She gives her radiance and the world benefits — the pastures, the canopies, the fauna warmed in lakes and rivers, the mating season owing its loves to her.
And she cares not if she also burns, parches the deserts, kills millions in a heatwave.
Oblivious to pole or equator she is just there, punctually, daily, predictably, calculably, years ahead, her entrances and her exits fixed — while we argue incessantly over the exact moment she enters the vilon.
It is up to us, the receivers, to enjoy her and to shade from her, never to gaze directly for fear of blindness.
It occurred to me this morning that my metaphor of the divine has been faulty all along, soiled by philosophy, theodicy, history, and my people's victimhood (look at us, mere decades ago) — that for a moment I might step into nature instead and look back at this azure globe from out there, propelled through the dark with its sisters in an orbital dance around her, a precision of distance and nearness just sufficient for life and love.
Moses warned the people not to come too close. Fire leapt from the Tabernacle at those who did. And in the sinful future, he said, the face would hide — hester panim — and every calamity would follow.
But the eclipse is built into the very fabric of the orbit. It is bound to occur, calculably, through no fault of our own, the sun hidden, patiently waiting to re-emerge and take charge once again.
Order proceeds.
Chaos is forgotten.
The world returns to where it was — the wasteland, the trauma, burnished in the soul of the he who recovers — and once she reigns it is as if nothing had happened.
The day comes.
The day goes.
Sunrise and sunset resume.
Is it possible this sun reflects the divine not only in nature but in her relation to history — to us?
“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 something that 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
By The Grave
Sometimes the dead do not wait for us beneath the earth.
They wait within the letters that still bear their names.
I remember
almost nothing
of the walk
through the abandoned cemetery.
Only the shock.
One tall granite stone.
Standing.
Alone.
Every other monument
had yielded
to weather,
neglect,
and time.
Broken.
Fallen.
Swallowed
by grass
and silence.
Yet this one
still stood.
Unbowed.
As though
it had refused
the verdict
of history.
I did not yet know
whose grave
it marked.
Only that
it had survived.
Only later
would I understand
that perhaps
my great-grandfather,
dead since 1918,
had left me
one final lesson.
Even here,
survive.
I came
thinking
I was searching
for the dead.
Instead,
the dead
were waiting
for me.
My father grew up
an orphan
of a civilization.
He inherited memories
without hands
to hold them,
photographs
without anyone
left to name the faces,
a family tree
whose trunk
had been cut
close to the earth.
So I, too,
learned to live
among fragments.
Names.
Stories.
A city
spoken with longing.
A language
half remembered.
A silence
that occupied
more space
than words.
For years
my ancestors
lived only
inside
my imagination.
Then
I stepped
toward the stone.
Cold
beneath my fingertips.
Weathered
by rains
that had fallen
for more than a century.
I bent down
and brushed away
grass,
reeds,
and years.
Slowly,
the letters
began
to emerge.
A name.
Then another.
His mother's name.
Letters
waiting patiently
beneath weeds,
beneath seasons,
beneath history,
for someone
of their own blood
to read them again.
Perhaps
I was the first
since they were carved.
The miracle
was not merely
that the stone
remained standing.
The miracle
was that
the words
remained.
I stood there
unable
to calculate
the improbability
of it all.
An abandoned cemetery.
One surviving monument.
One chance discovery.
One family.
One name.
Some moments
refuse
statistics.
They ask instead
for gratitude.
For decades
I had searched
for meaning
inside words.
Sacred texts.
The arguments
of sages.
The hidden worlds
of Scripture.
The stories
of patients,
whose lives
often revealed
their deepest truths
between sentences.
I had spent
a lifetime
looking beneath
the text,
certain
that meaning
always lay
hidden.
But standing there,
with one hand
upon the granite
and the other
clearing away
the last blades
of grass,
I felt
something
I cannot prove—
only receive.
Whether it came
from him,
or from
the One
who had quietly
guided
my wandering steps,
I cannot know.
But it seemed
to whisper:
Return
to the letters.
Before
there is mystery,
there is speech.
Before
there is interpretation,
there is listening.
Read
what is written.
Honor
what is plain.
Do not hurry
past the words
in search
of something
greater.
Sometimes
the deepest meaning
is simply
waiting
to be read.
And then,
one final whisper—
one I felt
more than heard:
Do not merely
read
the text.
Allow
the text
to read
you.
Only then
will you discover
that these weathered letters
have waited
through wars,
through silence,
through a century
of absence,
not simply
to preserve
the name
of your ancestors,
but to reveal
your own.
Here lay
my great-grandparents.
Not legends.
Not victims.
Not numbers.
A husband.
A wife.
Souls
who hurried
through streets,
lit Sabbath candles,
laughed
with children,
dreamed
of futures
they believed
would come.
Standing there,
something inside me,
long unnamed,
recognized itself.
It was not
grief alone.
It was
recognition.
The strange relief
of discovering
that my own story
did not begin
with catastrophe.
I had roots.
Deep ones.
Hidden beneath
the ash
of history,
still alive.
I realized
that I was perhaps
the first
of our family
to return
since the world
came apart.
The first
to speak
their names
into the open air.
The first
to answer
their long silence.
The graves
did not give me
a past.
They gave me
a place
within it.
Standing there,
I felt
my father's orphanhood
rest,
if only
for a moment.
The child
who had lost
everyone
was no longer
alone.
His son
had come home
to find them.
And then
I understood
why that one
granite stone
had mattered
so much.
It was never
only
the stone.
Stone
can endure.
Stone
can survive.
But stone
cannot speak.
It was
the letters.
Weathered.
Patient.
Still waiting.
I had crossed
an ocean
thinking
I had come
to read
an inscription.
Instead,
the inscription
had been waiting
to read
me.
I arrived
the grandson
of an orphan.
I departed
the great-grandson
of a family.
And between
those two truths,
held in silence
beside one
impossible
granite stone,
I found
the oldest part
of myself.
Vienna, City of Betrayal
My father spoke of Vienna
city of his birth
as though civilization had an address.
Vienna—
city of civil servants and universities,
of professors, ministries, concert halls,
of art and Kultur,
of music disciplined into architecture,
of architecture disciplined into stone.
Here, he taught us,
was the cultivated world.
He carried that Vienna with him
long after Vienna had ceased
to carry him.
And so, when my sister and I were young,
he insisted that we learn the roots of Kultur:
music, history, painting, books—
the inheritance of Europe
presented to children,
an annual road trip from London
(In his Westminster overdrive(!))
as though beauty might make us safe.
I inherited his pilgrimage.
I took my own children through Europe—
Paris, Florence, Rome, Zurich,
the old squares and cathedrals,
palaces and monuments,
the inevitable bronze general
still mounted above the pigeons,
sword raised toward some forgotten victory.
And always -the Jewish quarter.
A synagogue.
A cemetery.
A plaque on a wall.
Here they lived.
Here they prayed.
Here they disappeared.
I walked those streets with interest,
sometimes sadness,
but mostly the composure of history.
Europe was Europe.
Its stones were old.
Its crimes were old.
Its dead were dead.
Until Vienna.
Here something changes.
Vienna is so clean.
So quiet.
So exquisitely polite.
The trams arrive.
The windows shine.
Young people fill the sidewalks,
drinking wine beneath awnings,
laughing over coffee and cake
Sacher torte
Apfel strudel
Kaiser schmarren
Even sweetness here
has been perfected.
And the memorials are perfect too.
The Jewish sites are marked,
preserved,
manicured.
My grandfather’s name carefully engraved.
Cemetery granite gravestones carefully restored.
Flowers placed where flowers belong.
Everything is civilized.
And yet—
I cannot escape the word:
betrayal.
Not hatred.
Betrayal.
Because hatred would have been easier.
Had Vienna been barbarous,
had it been crude and filthy,
a city of mobs and drunken peasants,
perhaps history could be filed away
under savagery.
But this was the city of Kultur.
The city that knew Mozart.
The city that knew Beethoven,
Mahler, Freud.
The city of universities,
physicians, jurists,
prided civil servants who knew precisely
which form belonged in which file.
A city that understood
the proper fork for dessert
and the proper key for a symphony.
And still—
my father's world vanished.
That is the betrayal.
Not that civilization failed to prevent barbarism.
That civilization itself
opened the door.
Perhaps that is why
the other cities never wounded me this way.
I could walk their Jewish quarters
and remain a visitor.
In Vienna
I am not visiting history.
I am walking through
my father's sentences.
A street name suddenly familiar-Marchettigasse 1, apt 10
A district der zweite bezirk, der sechste bezirk
A synagogue-der Schiffschul der Stumper gasse schul
A cemetery- zentral friedhof
Fragments of stories
I heard before I understood
that they were stories of exile.
And everywhere the unbearable beauty.
The Ringstrasse gleams.
Church bells sound on this quiet Sunday breeze
All else is quiet such perfection in the sun filled deck
A waiter places a coffee, mélange,
upon a silver tray.
Young men and women laugh
where other young men and women
once watched their neighbors disappear.
They did not do it, I tell myself.
Of course they did not.
They were not born.
The waiter was not born.
The lovers drinking beer
beneath the linden trees- graben
were not born.
I know this.
History demands such distinctions.
Justice demands them.
And still the body
does not practice historiography.
Something in me recoils.
From the elegance.
From the pastries.
From the gleaming polished stone.
From the astonishing good manners.
Even from the word Kultur
my father taught me to revere.
And then an ugly thought comes:
Have I committed
a reverse Rassenschande?
Have I allowed memory
to contaminate beauty?
Have I made Viennese-ness itself
unclean—
the coffee,
the music,
the language,
the architecture,
the young faces on the sidewalks—
as though guilt could pass
through generations
like blood?
No.
The word is wrong.
It belongs to them,
to the obscene fantasy
that blood can be pure
and human beings polluted.
I will not inherit
their categories.
But neither will I pretend
that beauty is innocent.
Perhaps what I feel
is something harder:
not racial shame,
but civilizational betrayal.
The knowledge that the highest culture
does not necessarily deepen the soul.
That one may adore Mozart
and despise one's neighbor.
That a university can illuminate the mind
without enlarging the heart.
That bureaucracy can serve civilization
in the morning
and catalogue its victims
in the afternoon.
That a city can be beautiful
and betray everything
its beauty seemed to promise.
My father knew that.
Perhaps that was why
he insisted we learn Kultur anyway.
Not because Vienna had proved
that culture saves us,
but because Vienna had proved
that it does not.
So, I walk.
Past the cafés.
Past the monuments.
Past the immaculate memorials.
I listen to the Oestereicher Deutsch (Wiener Dialekt) around me.
I hear my father's Vienna
beneath this Vienna—
the city he loved,
the city that formed him,
the city that expelled him,
the city he somehow
continued to carry inside him.
And now I carry it too.
Not hatred.
Not forgiveness.
Something more difficult.
I stand before this beautiful clean city
and refuse both
to desecrate its beauty
and to be consoled by it.
Vienna remains beautiful.
That is precisely the wound.
For the deepest betrayal
is not when darkness behaves like darkness.
It is when the lights are burning,
the orchestra is playing Mahler,
the bureaucracy is functioning,
the pastries are perfect,
and civilization,
dressed for the evening opera
betrays its children.
Discomfort
What moved my father, I think,
was discomfort.
In 1961
he broke down hard
Outside his father’s home on Marchettigasse
when he had to learn Vienna again.
Having left his parents at the Bahnhof 1939
Never to see them or his sister again
Haunting him to that day.
Painful, he said.
Or perhaps he did not say it.
Perhaps I only learned
to hear the word
inside his silence.
Vienna remained behind—
the streets, the language, the Kultur,
the rooms whose doors
had closed.
But something else remained:
the Ostjuden- (פֿאַרכנאָקט),
After the First World War
they had poured into Vienna
from Galicia, Bukovina,
places farther east—
men in black coats,
beards, payot,
strange vowels,
stranger gestures,
carrying into elegant Vienna
the shtetl
Vienna wished to forget.
Maybe more subtle, his parents, der Oberlander yid
A need to blend without compromising values
Inside the home not on the streets of Europe.
Hitler proved
we were all Jews.
It did not matter
how carefully one spoke Oesterreicher German,
how well one knew Goethe, Lessing or Schiller,
how straight the tie,
how polished the shoes.
Still—
my father had learned
the distinctions.
Them.
Us.
The embarrassing (פֿאַרכנאָקט),
from the East.
The Jew who was
too Jewish.
I came to America
and forgot these distinctions
Its multiculturalism was too tolerant too soft on me,
Baseball cap.
Soft shirt.
The anonymous uniform
of belonging.
And now
I have come back.
Vienna again.
And again
there is discomfort.
Only now it is mine.
On these same streets
I see them:
black hats,
black coats,
beards,
payot,
children moving beside them,
families carrying
some stubborn fragment
of Galicia
through the twenty-first century.
And something in me recoils.
Something inherited.
A reflex whose origin
I know too well.
My father’s discomfort
has survived my father.
It crossed the Atlantic.
Changed clothes.
And waited.
Until Vienna
called it home.
I look at them
and suddenly wonder:
Who is the Ostjude now?
The man in the black coat?
My father
trying desperately
not to be him?
Or me—
standing on a Viennese street,
a generation later,
still deciding
which Jew
I am willing
to recognize
as myself.
Did He Know?
Did He Know?
My second cousin, a dealer in violins,
who bought his instruments in Communist East Germany,
once appeared at my door carrying a cello.
“Hold it for me for a while,” he said.
He placed its dark, curved body in my keeping—
a stranger from behind the Iron Curtain,
wood seasoned by winters I had never known,
its varnish holding the dim light
of another country, another time.
Then he left.
And never came back.
For years the cello waited,
quiet in its case,
keeping its own counsel.
Perhaps silence is not emptiness
but music gathering itself—
a song not yet composed,
a resonance older than words.
For there is a song within all creation,
a vibration travelling through matter,
through wood and air,
through the hidden chambers of the heart.
Perhaps the world itself began in hunger for music,
each living thing carrying some fragment
of the first great harmony,
each soul waiting for the note
that will make it tremble awake.
The cello waited through the crowded years
when there was always something more urgent:
work, family, duty,
the bright and passing noise of days.
Still, beneath them,
it kept the current of its harmonies.
It asked nothing.
It merely stood nearby,
a dark tree dreaming of its forest,
its strings stretched between silence and song.
Sometimes we must grow quiet
before we can hear what has been given to us.
Sometimes a gift arrives long before
we have become the person
who can receive it.
Now, in my semi-retirement,
with time loosening its grip,
I opened the case again.
I drew the cello toward me,
held it between my knees,
felt its weight lean into my body.
At first the bow scratched and stumbled,
an uncertain traveller searching for the road.
Then something changed.
The bow and string began a conversation.
A deep, mellow voice emerged
and moved across the living room—
not merely sound,
but presence.
The instrument resonated against my chest,
through my hands,
into chambers of myself
I had not known were waiting.
It sang in answer to the bow,
and I listened in answer to its singing.
No longer was I simply playing it.
The cello was playing me—
drawing breath from hidden depths,
joining body and spirit,
memory and longing,
silence and expression.
In that space between listening and performing,
I found stillness,
focus,
clarity.
I found the song
that had waited all those years
without impatience.
And I was delighted—astonished—
by its majesty,
by the warmth and fullness of its tone,
by the great voice sleeping
inside that old East German wood.
My second cousin had said only,
“Hold it for me for a while,”
then vanished into the years.
But now, as the room fills
with a music older than either of us,
I wonder whether he heard it first—
whether he knew what he was leaving,
whether he knew what I would one day find,
whether he knew the cello
was not waiting for him at all.
Did my second cousin know?
Blessing on the Magnolia(not)
The law says:
Not here.
Not on these pink flames
that rise each April like a forgotten promise
at my daughter’s door.
The Halacha points down the street
to the sanctioned tree,
the one bearing fruit,
obedient, categorized, fit for blessing.
Its branches have pedigree.
Its petals pass inspection.
But my soul—
my unruly, suspect soul—
stops before the magnolia.
Four of them
bathing my daughter’s home in pink fire,
as though dawn had descended
and taken root in wood.
Four sudden revelations
burning against the cold grammar of winter,
opening only briefly,
as if beauty itself feared arrest.
And I want—God, how I want—
to whisper the words there, the beracha
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה׳ אֱלֹקֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם
שֶׁלֹּא חִסַּר בְּעוֹלָמוֹ כְּלוּם
וּבָרָא בוֹ בְּרִיּוֹת טוֹבוֹת וְאִילָנוֹת טוֹבוֹת
לֵיהָנוֹת בָּהֶם בְּנֵי אָדָם
to place the ancient blessing
not where the code permits
but where astonishment erupts.
What is this ache
if not the old quarrel?
Lithuania against Mezhibuzh.
Vilna against Berditchev.
The measured line of law
against the story that spills over its edge.
The Litvak counts species.
The Hasid hears the tree sing.
One asks: Is it permitted?
The other: Is it alive?
And beneath both
something older stirs—
Jacob wrestling the angel,
Korach murmuring in the camp,
the Ishbitzer bending rules
to rescue a spark.
For what is antinomian longing
if not the intuition
that sometimes the living God
appears precisely where the border says no?
where law draws a fence
and longing leans against it
like a prisoner listening for music.
For perhaps the boundary
is not always where holiness ends,
but where it grows dangerous.
And perhaps my desire
to bless the magnolia
is not rebellion against Torah
but a grief
that beauty has overflowed its category.
For what if the Holy One hides
not only in what law can name
but in what exceeds naming?
What if the no
is sometimes the veil,
not the final word?
What if the border itself
is where God waits—
as at the edge of Eden,
as at the mouth of the abyss,
as in the broken places
where Rebbe sent his seekers
to find the song inside silence?
These magnolias know nothing of tractates.
They do not cite precedent.
They bloom in holy disobedience.
Their pink is argument.
Their fragrance, a heresy.
And my unsaid berachah
Is a transgression born—
not of contempt,
nor appetite,
but love—
where the code cannot follow.
For two weeks
they make a midrash of excess,
then vanish—
leaving only the wound of having seen.
And I wonder
whether the forbidden blessing
already exists
in the silence before speech.
Whether my desire to bless them
is itself a bracha.
Whether transgression,
is sometimes the only fidelity
to a deeper command.
Because I confess:
I have always trusted
the living thing over the rule,
the pulse over the code,
the burning bush over the taxonomy of shrubs.
I have always suspected
that God hides
not only in the permitted fruit tree
but in the unsanctioned blossom
that breaks your heart.
So I stand before the magnolias
with the blessing caught in my throat,
obedient lips, rebellious spirit,
and perhaps that tension itself
is my religion:
to obey the law
while aching toward its subversion,
to remain inside the covenant
while leaning toward the wild edge,
to know the words are forbidden
and still hear them flowering—
where one spends a lifetime
before the gate,
asking permission to enter,
while the gatekeeper says:
not yet.
What if one can die
so faithful to the threshold
that one never touches
the living fire beyond it?
Then the magnolia troubles me
like a Kafkan summons.
Because the law says:
Bless the fruit tree.
But the pink blaze at my daughter’s house
stands there like a door
opened only once a year.
And I fear
that walking past it
to find the sanctioned tree down the street
may be, in some secret court,
a failure of attention.
Blessed are You…
…for making beauty
too brief
to be contained by law.
Running Out of Time
I have begun to hear time differently.
Not the ordinary ticking
of clocks on the wall
or the quiet calendar turning
in bureaucratic months.
But time in the body.
A more ancient metronome.
The incision beneath my ribs
still whispers its ache.
A reminder that the flesh is temporary architecture,
a house whose beams
have begun to creak.
Only weeks ago
I lay beneath surgical lights,
my body opened
like a question.
Organs removed,
stones taken away,
the fragile machinery of digestion
rearranged by careful hands.
I woke with the strange awareness
that something essential
had been subtracted.
The body does not age all at once.
It erodes.
First a small organ disappears.
Then a function dims.
The memory of strength
becomes a story we tell ourselves.
The future shortens
in ways that no calendar admits.
I walk more slowly now
not only because of the incision
but because time itself
feels narrower.
The horizon approaches.
Yet the strange thing about time
is that it did not begin
when we think it did.
Genesis says
“In the beginning…” בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃
But the mystics whisper
that even this is not the beginning.
Before Bereshit
before the first syllable of creation
before the separation of light from darkness
there was the Infinite—
Ein Sof.
An endless fullness
without before or after.
And then—
the unimaginable moment.
A fracture within infinity.
A cosmic unbearable pain of contraction.
Tzimtzum.
The Infinite withdrew from itself
just enough
to allow something that was not infinite
to appear.
A moment before time.
A silence
in which chronology itself
had not yet learned how to count.
The first wound of existence.
Creation began
not with expansion
but with absence.
And so every life
repeats that original contraction.
We begin with the illusion
of endless horizons.
Childhood feels like infinity.
But gradually
space withdraws.
Time folds inward.
Possibilities contract
the way the Infinite once contracted
to make room for the world.
What begins as boundless
becomes measured.
Years become seasons.
Seasons become moments.
Moments become breath.
The present itself
is a fragile illusion.
The future does not exist
except as that which will soon
become the past.
We stand on a narrow ridge: כָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻּלוֹ גֶשֶׁר צַר מְּאֹד
between two infinities—
what has vanished
and what has not yet appeared.
A brief luminous edge
we call now.
The Greeks understood something of this.
For them time had two faces.
One was Chronos—
the devourer.
A god who swallowed his children
because he feared being replaced.
Every second consumed
the moment before it.
Time eating its own offspring.
The relentless march
toward disappearance.
But there was another time.
A deeper rhythm.
Cycles.
Return.
The wisdom of Metis,
whose intelligence dissolves into the cosmos itself—
the idea that what disappears
is never entirely gone.
That time is not merely a line
but a turning.
Seasons return.
Stars repeat their paths.
Life folds back into the same mysteries
from which it emerged.
And still
the body reminds me
that my own time moves forward.
Not in circles.
But in a narrowing corridor.
I feel the subtraction of strength.
The quiet loss of functions
once taken for granted.
The body speaks now
in the language of limits.
Every scar
is a clock.
Every recovery
a negotiation with mortality.
Yet Jewish prayer ends
with a strange vision of the future.
In Adon Olam we say:
וְאַחֲרֵי כִּכְ֒לוֹת הַכֹּל
לְבַדּוֹ יִמְלֹךְ נוֹרָא
After everything has ended
He alone will reign.
A future beyond history.
Beyond cycles.
Beyond Chronos.
A moment when time itself
exhausts its purpose.
When the cosmos folds back
into the same solitude
from which it emerged.
The Infinite alone again.
As if the universe were
a temporary conversation
spoken inside eternity.
And perhaps that is why
running out of time
is not only tragedy.
It is also participation
in the oldest story.
The body contracts.
The future narrows.
Life becomes more precise.
Until finally
everything we are
is concentrated
into a single point of presence.
The way the Infinite once
concentrated itself
to make room for the world.
Tonight I sit quietly
aware of the incision beneath my ribs
and the slower rhythm of my steps.
Time is running out.
But perhaps
it always was.
And perhaps that is the secret.
That life is not measured
by how much time remains
but by how intensely
we inhabit the narrowing space
between infinity
and its return.
After The Gallbladder
In the small dark chamber
beneath the ribs
there once hung a modest organ,
pear-shaped, patient—
a vessel of bitterness.
The ancients knew it well.
They called its shadow melancholia,
the slow black tide of the body—
μέλαινα χολή,
מָרָה שְׁחוֹרָה—
the humor of sorrow,
the ink from which certain thoughts are written.
It worked quietly for decades,
distilling the sharp green river of bile,
a chemist of digestion,
but also—if the old physicians were right—
a steward of moods,
keeper of that dim corner
where resentment ferments.
Then came the stones.
Not smooth, obedient crystals
but rough little fossils,
armored like sea creatures
dredged from some interior ocean.
Crustaceans of memory.
Each one a sediment
of unsurrendered grievance—
small angers
calcified by time.
They had grown in the dark,
layer upon layer
like barnacles on a forgotten hull,
the slow architecture
of what I would not release.
The surgeons found them
and named them pathology.
But I recognized them.
I had carried those stones
long before they appeared on ultrasound.
Now the chamber is gone.
Excised.
The surgeons removed the vessel
that once stored my bitterness
and sent it away in a plastic jar
to the quiet bureaucracy of pathology.
What remains
is an empty geography beneath the liver,
a small unoccupied province
in the republic of my body.
And I wonder:
Where will the bile of the spirit go now?
Where do we store
our unfinished angers
when the body refuses
to house them?
If the gallbladder
was once the cupboard of bitterness,
have the surgeons performed
a reluctant moral surgery?
Or will resentment simply migrate—
as grief does—
to some other organ
that has not yet learned its name?
There was another moment
more terrible than the stones.
The invasion.
Cold lights above me,
voices speaking the grammar of procedure.
The anesthesiologist—
a calm emissary of oblivion—
standing at the border of consciousness
with a syringe.
I remember resisting
the way a child resists sleep
when night feels like a small death.
“Count backwards,” he said.
But numbers were already dissolving.
A slow chemical dusk
entered my bloodstream.
I protested—
not loudly,
but with the primitive panic
of a creature that knows
something sacred is being surrendered.
Consciousness itself.
The last thing I recall
is the strange intimacy of it all—
how medicine must sometimes conquer the patient
in order to heal him.
A quiet coup
in the republic of the body.
And then—
nothing.
A white interval
where time collapsed.
When I woke
the stones were gone,
the vessel gone,
the bitterness unmoored.
The body had been edited.
Now I walk again in daylight
with one less chamber of sorrow.
Bile still flows—
the liver finds its own paths—
but the ancient storehouse is absent.
Perhaps that is the final lesson
of this small surgery:
that bitterness was never meant
to be kept.
The body tolerated it
for a while—
even crystallized it
into beautiful little fossils—
but in the end
it expelled the archive.
And so I move forward
lighter by a handful of stones
and an organ of darkness,
wondering
whether forgiveness
is simply the physiology
of a body
that refuses
to store bile any longer.
Morning with My Defects
Each morning the mountain waits for me.
Not Sinai—
no thunder, no tablets—
just the accumulated shale of my habits,
the scree of old reflexes,
anger rehearsed until it knows my voice better than prayer,
fear that dresses itself as caution,
desire that insists it is hunger for the good.
I stand before the mirror
as before a range I did not choose
but have learned by heart.
Every ridge has my name on it.
Every shadow knows where I trip.
They taught me to call these defects,
as if they were errors in manufacture,
as if a better craftsman
would have filed me smoother.
But the mirror is honest, not cruel.
It does not accuse.
It only reflects the altitude.
What surprises me still
is not the sight of the mountain,
but the thought that Someone stands
on the other side of the glass,
seeing me see myself.
Not judging.
Not fixing.
Withholding.
A God who knows how to be absent
without abandoning.
Who practices a discipline I cannot:
self-restriction without resentment,
power folded back into patience,
permitting a world where my flaws are possible,
where my failures are not foreclosed by perfection.
I look at my defects
and feel the familiar tightening—
the old urge to conquer,
to dynamite the peaks,
to turn growth into violence.
And then, quieter, another thought:
What if the compassion I am learning
is first being shown to me?
What if this mountain exists
because He chose not to flatten it—
because freedom requires terrain,
because love does not erase difficulty
but makes room for it?
So I stand.
I do not climb today.
I do not repent theatrically.
I simply meet my own gaze
and allow myself to be seen—
flawed, unredeemed, still held.
If He can restrain Himself
enough to let me be unfinished,
perhaps I can restrain myself
enough to be gentle with the one
who wakes up here each morning,
staring at the mountain,
learning—slowly—
how to live in a world
that God Himself chose not to perfect.
Poem Via Purgativa
I was constipated
the way a man is constipated
when he mistakes accumulation for worth.
Days of holding—
not food,
but judgments,
half-read arguments,
moral cautions sharpened into weapons
I never had the courage to use.
I told myself I was careful.
I was hoarding.
I told myself I was deep.
I was afraid of waste.
My mind became a colon of citations:
everything retained,
nothing digested,
ideas fossilized before they could nourish.
Even my virtues hardened—
ethics as impaction,
principle as obstruction.
I walked around like this for years
calling it scholarship,
calling it seriousness,
calling it faith.
Meanwhile the body kept score.
It always does.
It said: you cannot think your way
out of rot.
When it came, it was not catharsis.
No music.
No metaphor gentle enough to save me.
Just pain,
sweat,
the obscene knowledge
that what I had guarded
was shit.
And when it left me—
heavy, sour, undeniable—
I did not feel clean.
I felt exposed.
Because the relief revealed the lie:
I had believed retention was holiness,
that nothing passing through me
meant nothing could accuse me.
But what remains when nothing moves
is not purity.
It is decay with good posture.
I sit now in the aftermath,
emptier,
less impressive,
no longer armored by my own blockage.
My life is not fixed.
My mind is not redeemed.
My morals are still compromised—
but at least
they are moving again.
And maybe this is what repentance is:
not elevation,
not insight,
but the humiliating willingness
to let what is dead
leave you
before it poisons
everything else.
Nova : Nothing New
I.
The road south does not warn you. Eucalyptus, winter wheat, the ordinary grammar of arrival— then the field opens its throat.
Faces rise from soil like a congregation that forgot to leave, each portrait a midrash mounted on silence: Here stood breath. Here, rhythm. Here, the body before it learned its own fragility.
Kalaniyot gather at their feet, red anemones spreading the way blood does not spread— slowly, with intention, a second spring that knows its season has been renamed.
I cannot rush. Each step a trespass, each glance a debt unpaid.
This is not absence. This is over-presence— the place where tzimtzum failed, where God did not contract enough to let the human survive the density of what is real.
Music opened bodies here. Now silence does the same.
II.
מגרש הרכבים השרופים / קיר המכוניות
Near Moshav Tekuma
The vehicles remember.
Stacked metal, oxidized grief, each chassis a sentence stopped mid-syllable. Doors torn, frames perforated— the punctuation of bullets writing nothing anyone wanted to read. 1,560 in number-unfathomable assault.
Two black Toyotas sit unburned, gun turrets welded to their backs, placed in the circle like an answer no one asked for.
My physician's eye catalogues: heat deformation, blast pattern, penetration depth. But something older intrudes— something that does not measure.
In the Talmud, stones cry out when blood is spilled. Here, steel learns to weep.
A white pickup from Nir Oz stands apart, doors flung wide, as though the driver might return, as though leaving were still possible.
III.
At Be'eri, the homes do not explain themselves. They are already fed up with gapers
Only peeking from the road allowed.
No front line was drawn here. The front came through the kitchen, through the children's room, through the ordinary architecture of morning.
What do you call a threshold that no longer divides? What bracha for a doorway that held nothing back?
The mezuzah may still hang— I did not look. Some things should not be checked.
IV.
In Sderot, the murals try. Painted flags, blue sky, the grammar of endurance. But bullet holes interrupt the art, the real puncturing representation as it always does.
A mirage police station stands between order and exhaustion, vigilance and the slow fatigue of being the margin that never moves inward.
No triumph here. Only the repetition of getting up.
V.
I came looking for nothing. I found obligation.
The God who survives this place is not the God of rescue, not the Shomer Yisrael who guards with outstretched arm. That God did not show.
What remained was the other Presence— the one who stays without fixing, who witnesses without redeeming too quickly, who sits shiva in the ash long after the comforters have left.
The vav is broken here. וְהוּא—and He— cracked at the center, the letter that joins learning what it means to hold two fragments that will not fuse.
VI.
Do not rush toward meaning. Sacrifice, heroism, rebirth— the old words circle like relatives who do not know what to say.
This ground will not be narrated. It demands a slower faith: unresolved grief, moral ambiguity, the scandal of survival that offers no absolution to the one who walked away.
VII.
The road north bends gently. The sky remains indifferent. I carry nothing I can name.
Only this:
The earth, burned and planted, danced upon and violated, has written something on the body.
It will take years to read. It may take longer to refuse the false translations.
For now, I do not interpret. I only remain a little less whole, a little more present, a fractured letter in a sentence still being written.
For the faces in the field, for the steel that remembered, for the doors that did not hold.
Brought to My Knees
The physician in me catalogued the pain— inferior wall, appendix, stone, or spleen— while something older, wiser, more arcane knelt beside me on the kitchen floor between the differential and the unseen.
Six hours writhing, Jacob at the ford, the fish stew burning twice, a spicy jest, but what was wrestling me was not the Lord of easy answers. Pressed against my chest, the question: Julian, what remains undigressed?
You preach the body as a sacred text, hermeneutic medicine, the flesh that speaks— so read yourself, physician. What comes next when your own soma writhes and creaks? The Shekhinah weeps through us. She seeks.
Perhaps She used me as Her instrument, a vessel for some grief I cannot name, or maybe this was simply what was meant: the mystic and the clinician, both the same, brought low, reminded neither runs the game.
Six months of abstinence approach their end, January first, the body's referendum— to continue or release, to break or bend, this discipline of holding back the venom, or blessing, of desire's memorandum.
And here's the sweetness hidden in the gall: the floor that met my knees was not a grave but altar. Every patriarch must fall to learn what cannot diagnosis save— the broken vav still spells the word forgave.
So let the ambulance arrive too late, the pain resolve to mystery and spice. The body prays in tongues we mistranslate, and sometimes kneeling is the best advice the Shekhinah can give. She asks it twice:
What are you holding that demands release? What threshold waits that only pain can show?
I have no answer yet. But on my knees, I felt Her presence in the vertigo— not punishment, but invitation: grow.
The stomach settles. The question doesn't. January approaches like a guest. The body spoke. The mind, for once, wasn't the one who knew the answer best.
The Yechida as Higher Power
They told me to look up—
to surrender to something greater,
external, transcendent,
the God of ladders and heavens,
of confession aimed skyward.
But when I prayed—truly prayed,
not the rote mechanics of petition
but the wordless reaching
that begins when language fails—
I found no upward.
Only inward.
Only down,
beneath the chattering nefesh,
past the storming ruach,
deeper than neshama’s knowing,
to the place where asking stops
because the asker dissolves.
יחידה
The singular one.
Not a power above me
but the innermost point—
the spark that was never not divine,
the knot the mystics say
was tied before separation
and never untied.
They spoke of absolutes—
honesty, purity, unselfishness, love.
Noble ascents.
But the yechida knows no ascent;
it was never elsewhere.
At the limit,
when all structures thin,
I did not find rescue waiting
like an answer descending from above.
I found the veils worn transparent,
the light already present
finally able to appear.
Not salvation from outside
but recognition from within.
They ask: Who do you pray to?
And I cannot say Ein Sof,
cannot rehearse the metaphysics of tzimtzum,
the dialectic of yesh and ayin
that fills essays with footnotes
and quenches no thirst.
I pray to the self that is not a self.
To the watcher behind the watcher.
To what remains
when identities exhaust themselves
and something still breathes.
Call it yechida.
Call it chelek Eloka mi-ma’al mamash—
a literal portion of God above.
Call it the still, small voice
that sounds like thought
yet knows what was never learned.
Maps describe movement outward—
belief, surrender, confession, repair, seeking.
Necessary paths.
But my movement spirals inward:
strip, descend, loosen, dissolve—
until even the one who descends
is forgotten
and only ground remains,
wearing a human face.
This is not inflation,
the ego masquerading as holiness.
This is annihilation—
the recognition that what falls away
was never the Self to begin with.
Bittul—
self-nullification,
the Hasidic art of stepping aside.
Not submission to an alien God
but dissolution of the alien self,
the one assembled from fear and grasping,
the one that required masks
to feel real.
When that one loosens—
again and again,
in prayer, in silence,
in the refusal to cling—
what remains is not absence.
What remains is yechida:
the self that was divine all along,
hidden beneath garments,
waiting to be recognized.
So when they say higher power
I hear deeper power.
When they say outside
I hear inside-out.
When they say surrender
I hear return.
The topology inverts,
yet the practice holds.
And in unlikely places
people rediscover
what mystics always knew:
that the God we seek
has been seeking us
from within.
Not higher.
Deeper.
Not outside.
Inside-out.
Not surrender to another.
Return to Self.
I practice recognizing
what was never lost,
clearing the debris
from a sanctuary
that was always holy.
Not becoming spiritual.
Uncovering what is.
Not finding God.
Allowing God
to find itself
in this vessel
that somehow still
carries fire.
Ambush
Without warning, mid-sentence, mid-sip of morning coffee, the grief ambushes— a hand at the throat from behind.
Not the slow tide of Kaddish months, the regulated mourning, the prescribed descent, but this: feral, ungoverned, as if the נשמה יתירה of Shabbat had an inverse twin— a grief יתירה that enters uninvited through a crack in the Tuesday afternoon.
Dad
The word itself a wound that never quite scabbed over, just thinned to translucence so the slightest pressure— a phrase in his cadence, a man in a hat on Hendon Avenue, the way light falls on my own aging hands— ruptures the membrane.
And suddenly I am weeping in the car, in the corridor between patients, in the strange privacy of a crowded room where no one notices the grown man drowning in broad daylight.
The Zohar speaks of הארה— sudden illumination, light breaking through the shells. But this is its shadow: sudden darkening, the kelipah of absence cracking open to swallow me whole.
I thought grief softened. They said it would gentle. But this is not gentle— this is your hand on my shoulder that isn't there, your voice answering in the room where no one speaks, your presence precisely calibrated to the shape of its missing.
At 102 you died with fingernails trimmed, skin unbroken, that Viennese discipline holding the body together until the soul released.
But my grief has no such grooming. It erupts— an infected thing, a fungoid outgrowth of love that refuses excision.
And maybe this is what they meant by עולם הבא containing עולם הזה— that you persist not as memory alone but as sudden presence-in-absence, this gripping, this ambush of the ordinary that proves you were never merely historical, never only past tense.
You continue to father me in the very shape of my shattering.
And I— I am still your son, still the crying baby on the Dunera, still being held by hands that dissolved into the Infinite but somehow, somehow, still grip.
Avir Ha-Mizbeach
My heart is the altar,
a rough stone in a quiet room,
where I lay down the things I’ve carried
too tightly,
too long—
old vows,
unspoken wants,
the stiff weight of my own expectations.
I gather them like wood,
trembling and dry,
and place them one by one
on the altar of my chest.
There is no priest here,
no knife,
only the courage to release the shape
of the life I thought I needed.
The fire comes softly—
a breath,
a letting go,
a whispered yes to what is.
It flickers first at the edges
then burns through the tangled heap
of what I once demanded from the world
and from myself.
As it burns,
the smoke rises—
thin strands of prayer
ascending into the air above me.
And the air, that ancient air,
the avir ha-mizbeach,
grows holy.
For sanctity is not in the offering
but in the space it frees;
not in the flames
but in the trembling air that receives them.
And so I watch my expectations
turn to breath,
to heat,
to nothing—
yet not to nothing,
for they rise
and rise
and rise
to a place I cannot see
but can feel—
a widening,
a clearing,
a sacredness overhead
that was waiting for me all along.
May the air above this heart
remember what I surrendered,
and return to me
only what is true,
only what is needed,
only what can live.
For the altar is mine,
but the rising—
the rising belongs to God.
Painting by Daniel von Weinberger
For the Wreckage and the Remaining Light
I am seventy-five
and the world I tried to conquer
lies behind me like a broken map—
creases where I folded it too hard,
tears where I dragged others with me,
ink smeared by the storms I refused to name.
I chased kingdoms that dissolved at my touch,
chased honor like a frightened soldier,
chased love with the blunt weapons
of a man afraid of softness.
And in the chase
I left scars on the ones I meant to protect.
Time has turned my victories to dust,
and the dust into questions.
Now the nights are long enough
that ghosts rise
not to accuse,
but to remind.
They say:
You lived like a man marching,
but those you loved
needed a man listening.
There is grief in this age—
a grief without enemy or battlefield—
the grief of memory,
of sudden tenderness for people I hurt
while believing I was building a future.
We are told
men in their final chapters want peace,
respect,
freedom,
companionship,
and trust.
But I would add a sixth:
absolution—
not from heaven,
but from ourselves.
At seventy-five I find myself in solitude,
not the isolation of defeat,
but the solitude that feels like
a small room God left unlocked
so I could finally sit with my own soul
and not flee.
In this solitude,
time becomes sacred again,
as I once wrote—
a kind of tzimtzum in reverse—
God expanding into the cracks
I spent a lifetime ignoring.
Here I can finally feel the wreckage
without drowning in it,
touch the scars without reopening them.
If there is redemption for men like me,
it lives not in what we conquered,
but in what we now choose to release.
The sons and daughters of my striving
carry marks I never intended,
but perhaps the final kindness of age
is the chance to say:
I see it now.
I see you now.
I am seventy-five,
and though the world I built leans crooked,
something in me
leans toward mercy.
Maybe this is what it means to grow old—
to stop asking for victory
and start asking for forgiveness.
And maybe,
if the heart is willing,
even the wreckage can glow.
Flobbadob!
A Neurologist's Reflection on Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6zNwBTLSWU&t
I was three years old, sitting cross-legged on a threadbare carpet in London, my nose practically pressed against a ten-inch black-and-white television screen—that miraculous portal that flickered with all the gravitas of a campfire in the corner of our modest flat. The year was somewhere in the early 1950s, and I was about to meet two flowerpot men who would shape my understanding of language, absurdity, and ultimately, the medicine I would practice half a century later.
Still from original BBC series, with Little Weed
The Garden at the Bottom of Consciousness
Bill and Ben lived at the bottom of a garden. Not a grand garden, mind you—no Hampton Court topiary or Versailles formality—just an ordinary English garden with a slightly negligent gardener who had the good sense to leave regularly, allowing the magic to happen. When he departed, these two little chaps emerged from their flowerpots like thoughts rising from the unconscious, speaking in that glorious nonsense language they called "Oddle Poddle."
Flobbadob! It meant everything and nothing. Hello, goodbye, perhaps "I say, old chap, this is rather extraordinary, isn't it?" All compressed into three syllables of pure semantic rebellion. As a three-year-old, I found this deeply satisfying. As a seventy-five-year-old neurologist, I find it profoundly satisfying. Because Bill and Ben understood something that took me decades of medical practice to fully appreciate: sometimes the best communication transcends conventional language entirely.
String Puppets and the Theater of Pain
They were string puppets, these flowerpot philosophers, jerking about the garden with all the mechanical grace of a patient recovering from a stroke. Maria Bird voiced both of them, which means that Bill and Ben were essentially having conversations with themselves—a neat trick that every chronic pain patient knows intimately. The internal dialogue between the part that hurts and the part that observes the hurting, between hope and despair, between "I can manage this" and "I absolutely cannot manage this."
Weed, their companion, was a sunflower who spoke by having air blown through a reed. Think about that for a moment. A puppet plant whose voice was literally just wind through a tube, and yet we children understood perfectly what Weed was communicating. We didn't need a translation app or a medical interpreter. We just knew. This is precisely what I try to teach medical students about pain assessment: sometimes a wince communicates more than a ten-point numerical scale. Sometimes "flobbadob" contains more diagnostic information than a detailed pain history.
The Fifteen-Minute Consultation
Each episode lasted about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! In that time, Bill and Ben would have an adventure, solve a problem, probably misunderstand something, reconcile, and return to their pots before the gardener came back. Fifteen minutes of complete narrative arc, character development, conflict resolution, and moral instruction.
Now, I don't know if you've looked at the state of modern healthcare recently, but fifteen minutes is precisely what we get with most patients. Fifteen minutes to understand decades of accumulated suffering, to distinguish between nociceptive and neuropathic pain, to account for psychological overlay, to prescribe, to reassure, to heal. Bill and Ben managed entire existential adventures in that time. Perhaps we neurologists should take notes.
The secret, I think, was their economy of expression. When you can only say "flobbadob," "flobbalob," and "weeeeed," you become remarkably efficient. You get to the point. This is what I tell my chronic pain patients: Be a flowerpot man. Tell me the essential thing. Not the entire encyclopedia of your suffering, just the flobbadob of it.
The Gibberish Cure
Let me confess something that might get me drummed out of the American Academy of Neurology: sometimes, when I'm explaining complex pain pathways to patients—the difference between A-delta fibers and C fibers, the role of the dorsal horn, the descending inhibitory pathways—I see their eyes glaze over in exactly the way mine must have glazed over during undergraduate organic chemistry. And I think: What they're hearing is Oddle Poddle.
Not because they're unintelligent, but because pain is fundamentally ineffable. It resists precise language. McGill Pain Questionnaire be damned—when you're in the grip of it, it's all just "ow ow ow" in different registers. So sometimes I abandon the neuroscience lecture and I simply say: "It hurts like blazes, doesn't it?" And they nod vigorously, gratefully, because I've spoken their language. Flobbadob. Message received.
Bill and Ben taught me that humor doesn't trivialize suffering—it contextualizes it. Those two little men lived in a world where nothing was quite right (they were flowerpots, for heaven's sake, achieving consciousness and mobility for reasons never explained), yet they approached each day with curiosity and delight. Their adventures were humble: investigating a mysterious object (usually something mundane like a glove or a trowel), being startled by Weed, resolving some tiny conflict, and going home satisfied.
The Lost Episodes and Lost Patients
Here's a melancholy fact: many of the original episodes were lost. Wiped, taped over, or simply deteriorated beyond recognition. The BBC didn't think anyone would care about string puppets speaking gibberish decades later. They were wrong, of course. In 2019, the BBC Archives painstakingly restored some of these lost episodes, digitizing what remained of Bill and Ben's small adventures.
As someone who's practiced neurology and pain management for over fifty years, I think often about my "lost episodes"—the patients I couldn't help, the diagnoses I missed, the chronic pain cases that defeated me. You can't restore those. There's no archive that will bring back the patients who suffered needlessly because I didn't know what I didn't know. But what Bill and Ben taught me—on that scratchy black-and-white screen in 1952—was that you show up anyway. You emerge from your flowerpot. You say flobbadob with conviction. You have your small adventure. And then you go back to your pot and wait for tomorrow.
The Postwar Gentleness
Bill and Ben embodied what the history books call "the gentleness and optimism of postwar British culture." This always makes me laugh, because the Britain I remember from the early 1950s was still rationing butter and dealing with bombsite rubble. "Gentleness and optimism" is rather generous language for "we're all traumatized but trying to pretend we're not."
But perhaps that's precisely why Bill and Ben mattered. They offered fifteen minutes of gentle absurdity in a world that had recently been rather harshly sensible. They said: Look, none of this makes sense anyway. You might as well be a flowerpot man. At least you'll have adventures.
I think about this with my chronic pain patients, many of whom are living through their own postwar periods—post-surgery, post-accident, post-diagnosis. They're dealing with their own rubble. And sometimes what they need isn't another medication adjustment or nerve block. Sometimes they need permission to speak Oddle Poddle for a while. To be bewildered. To not have to make sense. To just say flobbadob and have someone understand.
The 2001 Revival and the Problem of Nostalgia
In 2001, the BBC revived Bill and Ben as a stop-motion animation for CBeebies. They added new characters—Thistle and Boo (names that sound like either garden companions or prescription medications, I'm never quite sure which). The animation was smooth, colorful, high-definition. Very professional.
And yet... something was lost. The jerky string puppets had a quality that the smooth stop-motion couldn't replicate. They looked like they might hurt—stiff, awkward, struggling against their strings. Which is, of course, what embodied existence feels like for most of us, particularly as we age, particularly when we're in pain. We're all string puppets giving it our best flobbadob.
The revival was nice. But it was too nice. The original Bill and Ben existed in that productive space between functioning and struggling, between control and chaos, between sense and nonsense. They were liminal creatures. The new ones just looked like they were having a nice time in a garden. Which is fine, but it's not the same as living at the bottom of a garden, waiting for the gardener to leave so you can finally be.
Medical Education and the Flute and Xylophone Method
The original show was accompanied by flute and xylophone music. Simple, repetitive, almost hypnotic. No grand orchestral sweeps, no emotional manipulation through strings and timpani. Just: flute, xylophone, message.
This is how I wish medical education worked. Instead of the grand orchestral complexity of cellular biology, pharmacodynamics, and evidence-based guidelines, sometimes I want to just play two notes and say: Pain bad. Less pain good. Here's how.
Obviously, this is insufficient for board certification. But it might be sufficient for compassion. Bill and Ben didn't have access to advanced therapeutics. They had each other, they had Weed, and they had their capacity for wonder. Yet they managed to turn simple garden encounters into meaningful experiences.
Some of my most successful therapeutic relationships have operated on the Bill and Ben model: we don't understand everything, we're working with limited resources, we're going to encounter confusing situations, but we'll face them together and we'll try to maintain some humor about it. Flobbadob, let's see what we can do.
The Cultural Icon Problem
The history tells us that "Bill and Ben became cultural icons of British children's television." This is both true and absurd. They were flowerpots. Speaking nonsense. For fifteen minutes at a time. Yet they entered popular speech, were referenced in British comedy, and became symbolic of "a simpler era."
There's a tendency in medicine to romanticize "simpler" approaches to care—the country doctor with his black bag, making house calls, knowing everyone in the village. We forget that "simpler" often meant "people died of treatable conditions." But there was something in that model worth preserving: the sense that the healer and the patient were in the same garden together, speaking a common language, even if that language was occasionally gibberish.
Bill and Ben became icons not because they were sophisticated or grand, but because they were recognizable. Every child understood what it was like to be small in a big world, to not quite grasp what was happening, to need a friend, to speak in a private language. That's universal. That's why they endured.
In pain medicine, our icons are different—Melzack and Wall's gate control theory, the WHO pain ladder, the biopsychosocial model. These are important. But sometimes I think we could use a few more flowerpot men in our iconography. Figures who remind us that being bewildered is normal, that not having all the answers is the human condition, that flobbadob is a perfectly reasonable response to suffering.
The Weed Principle
Let's talk about Weed. Weed was a sunflower who couldn't speak English, only communicate through that reed-blown wheeze. Weed was neither Bill nor Ben—Weed was the garden itself, somehow sentient, somehow involved, but definitively other.
In every clinical encounter, there's a Weed. It's the chronic pain itself—this third presence in the room that neither patient nor physician fully controls or understands, but which definitely has opinions and makes itself heard. You can't have a conversation about pain without pain being part of the conversation. It wheezes and interrupts and sometimes helps and sometimes hinders.
Bill and Ben never tried to eliminate Weed. They didn't uproot the sunflower or spray it with herbicide (although, let's be honest, their botanical gardening practices were questionable at best). They simply accommodated Weed. They worked around it. They included it in their adventures. Weed was part of the ecosystem.
This is closer to good pain management than our war metaphors—"fighting pain," "battling chronic conditions," "defeating symptoms." Sometimes you just need to say, "Right, there's Weed. Weed's here. Let's have our adventure anyway." Flobbadob, Weed. We see you.
The Ten-Inch Screen and the Vast World
That television was ten inches diagonal. Black and white. The reception was probably terrible. And yet through that tiny, flickering portal, I encountered a universe. Bill and Ben's garden was small—smaller, probably, than our actual garden—but it was limitless in possibility.
This is the paradox I've observed in chronic pain patients: their world often shrinks to the dimensions of their suffering—this joint, this nerve, this daily routine. Yet within that tiny space, there can be immense complexity, tragedy, heroism, humor, despair, and hope. A fifteen-minute consultation is a ten-inch screen. But if we're paying attention, if we speak each other's language, if we're willing to encounter some nonsense along the way, it can contain multitudes.
The Real Flowerpots
Here's a detail that delights me: the original puppets were made from real flowerpots. Not fancy theatrical materials designed to look like flowerpots. Just actual terracotta pots from a garden center, probably costing a few shillings, with faces painted on and some cloth for little bodies.
There's something profound here about working with what you have, about finding the sacred in the ordinary, about transformation that doesn't require transcendence—just imagination and commitment. The flowerpots didn't become Bill and Ben. They always were Bill and Ben. They just needed someone to see it and give them voice.
My patients aren't broken people who need to be fixed. They're people—complete, complex, inherently valuable—who happen to be experiencing pain. The therapeutic task isn't to transform them into something other than what they are. It's to help them see that even in their flowerpot existence, even in their limited garden, even speaking Oddle Poddle, they have adventures available to them. They have agency. They have story.
Conclusion: A Lifetime Later
When I think about what has most informed my practice—what has helped me sit with suffering, maintain hope, and occasionally achieve healing—I keep coming back to two flowerpot men on a ten-inch black-and-white screen, speaking a language that made no sense and perfect sense simultaneously.
Flobbadob, indeed.
If I could rewrite the medical school curriculum, I'd include a module on Bill and Ben. Not as nostalgia or comic relief, but as serious clinical instruction:
· Sometimes the best communication transcends conventional language
· Economy of expression is a clinical virtue
· Humor doesn't minimize suffering—it makes suffering bearable
· Gentleness in the face of chaos is revolutionary
· Working with limited resources requires creativity, not despair
· The bewildered can still have adventures
· Not everything needs to make sense to be meaningful
· Accommodation beats elimination
· Small screens can contain vast worlds
· Real flowerpots are sufficient
When I'm with a patient who's been through the medical mill—seen twelve specialists, tried forty medications, undergone procedures that promised everything and delivered nothing, who sits in my office radiating exhaustion and fading hope—I sometimes think: We're both flowerpot men here. We're speaking Oddle Poddle. But we're speaking it together.
And occasionally, just occasionally, that's enough. The gardener leaves. We emerge from our pots. We have a small adventure. We return, somehow slightly changed. We wait for tomorrow.
Flobbadob, my friends. Flobbadob.
When I lecture to medical students about pain management, I usually end with this: You're going to encounter suffering that doesn't respond to your interventions. You're going to face patients whose pain is immune to your best pharmacology, your most skilled procedures, your most compassionate presence. You will feel helpless. You will doubt your competence. You will wonder if you're doing any good at all.
In those moments, remember that showing up is itself therapeutic. Witnessing is itself healing. Speaking the patient's language—even if that language is "it hurts" in fifty different ways—is itself medicine.
Be a flowerpot man. Live at the bottom of the garden. Wait for the gardener to leave. Emerge. Have your small adventure. Speak your gibberish with conviction. Include Weed. And then go back to your pot, knowing you've done what flowerpot men do.
It won't feel like enough. But Bill and Ben taught me: enough is not the point. Showing up is the point.
And maybe, just maybe, flobbadob is the prayer we've been looking for all along.
https://x.com/Radiojottings/status/1604503000776572932?cxt=HHwWiICwpc2-q8QsAAAA
Addendum
Etrog Men
This year on Succot I placed two etrog survivors in my silver case with googly eyes.
Bill and Ben the Etrog men filled me with nostalgia for flobbadob
— Dr. Julian Ungar-Sargon, MD, PhD
November 2025
Etrog
Rounded at the top,
a crown of perfection —
gleaming yellow-gold,
polished by the trembling of my hands.
Here I see the dream I was meant to bear:
my ideals,
my people’s yearning made flesh in fruit,
smooth with impossible completion.
Then, the narrowing —
the gartel cinched around its waist,
a belt of humility,
separating breath from breath,
the sacred air above
from the profane murmur below.
It is the line I draw each morning
between prayer and practice,
between the soul’s reach
and the hunger of the body.
Beneath, the lower half —
rough, pocked, scarred with human failure.
Here is the residue of my unlearned holiness,
the instincts that root me
in the soil of longing.
Here I am most myself,
half-formed, half-fallen,
still bound to the upper light
by that thin, indented gartel
which whispers,
even separation is a kind of connection.
My esrog is me
And I am it
And it is in my dreams
