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

Sarah Imeinu's Last Cry

The Eleventh Trial

 

Not only Abraham climbs the hill,

but Sarah waits in silence,

her heart trembling at the edge of knowing.

 

The Satan whispers the story,

and her breath breaks into shards of sound—

a teru’ah that shatters heaven’s stillness.

 

These cries, carried by angels,

become the hollow voice of the ram’s horn.

Not Abraham’s knife,

but Sarah’s sobs

etch eternity into covenant.

 

Not only Abraham climbs the hill,

but Sarah waits in silence,

her heart trembling at the edge of feeling.

 

The Satan whispers the story,

and her breath breaks into shards of sound—

a teru’ah that shatters heaven’s stillness.

 

These cries, carried by angels,

become the hollow voice of the ram’s horn.

Not Abraham’s triumphant knife,

but Sarah’s sobs “treuah”

etch eternity into covenant.

 

On Rosh Hashanah we lift the shofar,

its cry recalling her broken breath.

And the Holy One,

hearing again that mother’s wail,

finally,

rises from the Throne of Judgment

to sit upon the Throne of Mercy.

Under the Sword of History

The court buries its instruments,

stone and tree,

sword and scarf,

as if to say:

This was once the hand of justice,

now let the earth eat it whole.

 

But our court has never adjourned.

Its gallows stand in the wind

from Shushan to Sobibor,

its scarf wraps throats in silence

from Worms to Warsaw.

 

The Shekhinah,

exiled mother,

stands beneath the blade,

her hair matted with ash from a thousand pyres,

her arms gathering children who will not return.

The sword of history

is sharpened on the whetstone of our centuries,

and its edge hums in the black air of Auschwitz.

 

Here, the wheat is not burned —

only threshed by boots,

ground in the teeth of hatred,

poured out in the barns of the pit.

Here, the shechita is not a ritual

but a machinery of precision —

a throat cut not for sanctity,

but to drain the lifeblood of a people

into the gutters of Europe.

 

Yet still,

the Shekhinah shelters,

even as her own neck bends under the knife.

Even as the sword drinks deep,

she cups the last breath of her children

and carries it across the abyss,

into the unburned chambers of eternity.

 

And when the final instrument

is buried in the graveyard of empires,

when the sword lies rusted beside the stone,

she will rise —

the scar at her throat still visible —

and speak the word that makes the wheat grow again.

 

Inspired by Talmud Bavli Avodah Zara 62b

The Gemara challenges: But let him bury the wheat in its unadulterated form. Didn’t we learn in a baraita with regard to the instruments used for imposing capital punishment: The stone with which a condemned person is stoned, and the tree on which his corpse is hung after his execution, and the sword with which he is killed, and the scarf with which he is strangled, all of them are buried together with him, as it is prohibited to derive benefit from them. 

Rabbi Yaakov Emden's responsum presents a fascinating application of ancient principles to an 18th-century practical situation. When an experienced shochet (ritual slaughterer) sought to acquire "a sharp and polished knife made from the finest metal" and purchased an executioner's sword, he created a halakhic crisis that illuminated fundamental questions about spiritual contamination. 

The Retzuot

I wind the black straps

along the white of my arm—

a soft hush of leather

against skin that remembers

more than I allow myself to speak.

 

Each loop a ledger.

A bond.

A chain.

 

Wound not just around sinew and flesh,

but around the failures I inherited—

and the ones I earned myself.

Personal collapses,

cultural shame,

the grief of a people still walking through fire

disguised as generations.

My father’s voice

still echoes on the deck of the Dunera,

classified as “enemy alien”

by a captain blind to covenant.

And yet he stood,

his mitzva cradled in defiance,

a rebel wrapped in ritual.

Tefillin as protest.

Faith as resistance.

וּקְשַׁרְתָּם לְאוֹת עַל יָדֶךָ

“And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand…” (Deut 6:8)

 

I bind myself to that memory.

To him.

To the God who commands

not triumph but tethering.

Not purity but presence.

 

Opposite my broken heart

I lay the black box.

Inside: parchment, yes—

but also

the ache of exile,

the weight of testimony,

and the trembling mercy

of a God

who still wants us to remember.

 

These are not just straps.

They are inheritance.

They are bondage, yes—

to history, destiny, and tragedy—

but also to

the unfathomable compassion

of the One

who ambivalently binds Himself

to us.

 

The Corpus Callosum

The space between my hemispheres

is not a bridge but a truce.

A fibrous ceasefire of white matter

tugged from both sides,

one side crisp with law and commentary,

the other soft, like dusk on a page not yet written.

 

I live there,

in that narrow corridor of synaptic ambiguity,

where the left speaks in footnotes and prohibitions,

and the right whispers in broken metaphors

and dreams it dares not name.

 

There is no tower here,

only the hushed architecture of tension,

between tradition’s muscular grip

and the heretic’s trembling hand reaching

for what cannot be said.

 

The left makes me legible—

a man in a bekeshe,

dancing with Daf Yomi beneath fluorescent light.

The right leaves me undone—

a mystic who weeps at shadows

powerless over the naughty side of the tracks

finding the uncanny in the white spaces between the holy letters

 

I negotiate this space daily,

a smuggler of forbidden questions,

dragging poetic contraband

through the obsessions of Halachah.

Sometimes I am caught.

Sometimes I am blessed.

 

What some call this dance

a war of perception—

the left dissecting truth

into parts it can own,

the right embracing wholeness

so wide it defies utility.

 

But I—I am neither victor nor victim.

I am the space between.

 

And in that space,

I listen for voices not mine—

the Rabbis and the rebels,

the scribes and the madmen—

and try to love them all

in one trembling corpus

that dares to call itself

a soul.

The Insanity of the Last Century

As if awakening from a perpetual nightmare

the horror continues.

Across the globe the genocidal impulse persists.

We have learned nothing because the urge

for bloodletting has not been satisfied.

A bottomless well of desire unfulfilled,

a thirst unquenched for corpse upon corpse,

a hunger for rotting flesh over the smell of death.

Is there any fixity of the dark heart of man

now that we banished Divine justice from our consciousness

and euthanized Divine retribution?

We mistook progress for grace,

worshipped reason as if it could absolve,

but no calculus of pain

redeems the butcher’s ledger.

God, once hidden in the shadow of mercy,

now lies buried beneath treaties and teeth-gritted smiles—

a silence mistaken for peace.

We march forward, anesthetized,

draped in flags stitched from the skins of the forgotten.

Empires kneel before algorithms

while the soul,

unscripted,

bleeds through the cracks of our civility.

What altar remains

when the priest is a broker

and the prophet a brand?

Where now

do we offer the ashes

of our unrepented violence?

Is the abyss within

or merely the mirror

we refuse to clean?

Yet perhaps in this silence—

this ache where Presence once thundered—

there lies a hidden mercy:

not in the miracle,

but in the wound itself.

For when the heavens withdraw,

it is the hands of the healer

that become the altar.

In the absence of command,

we are called not to obedience,

but to compassion—

to become, ourselves,

the justice we once awaited.

And maybe that is the final retribution:

not divine fury,

but divine trust

that we would bear the unbearable

and still choose to heal.

Two Columns of White

White smoke rises over St. Peter's Square,

The faithful gather, eyes lifted in prayer. "Habemus Papam," the bells declare,

While history's memory trembles in the air.

Another white smoke once darkened the sky,

Human ash on the winds, a different sign.

No bells rang then to mark those who would die,

No crowds gathered hopeful, no joyful design.

Two columns of white, separated by years,

One column of silence stretching between.

Words never spoken, authority clear,

Power that chose what would not be seen.

What weight has a shepherd who tends not his flock

When wolves circle close and the lambs are devoured?

What worth is a key that refuses to unlock

When those behind doors have no time, no power?

The smoke of selection, the smoke of destruction,

Two whites intertwined in memory's chain.

One rises from choice, one from dark production,

Both ask us what silence permits to remain.

When smoke clears away and history stands bare,

We're left with the echo of words never said.

The throne that stayed silent when smoke filled the air

Bears witness still to the unburied dead.

Now white smoke still rises, tradition intact,

While ghosts of the past hover close to the flame.

They ask us to ponder what's lost in the act

Of choosing which sorrows we dare not to name.

That Fungoid Toenail

I look down in daily horror

That left toenail, this pesty ectoderm,

Pitted, yellow, infected, gross and putrid,

The sole defective among ten other toes.

I remember Dad's manicured nails, And at a hundred and two he died

with perfectly groomed nails, hands and feet,

His body nurtured and cared for, inside and out, until his dying day,

Not an opening in his dermis, No discharges, no skin breakdown,

No pus, no blood.

Was this preserving of body A kind of Viennese thing?

Groomed and manicured, Like a middle European gentleman!

Back to the horror of this left toenail,

The yellowish fungal infestation

Reflecting something more sinister within, perhaps,

A fungus of the sole/soul,

An infestation of the heart,

A flaw imposed from outside,

The left side of the divine.

So my revulsion for this ugly canker,

This inhuman vegetation, needs a kind of re-visioning.

Well, what needs re-visioning?

The soul needs

To appropriate, to integrate, to accept, sweeten,

this ugliness,

Because it is me,

Precisely in me, part of me,

Albeit restricted to the left, sinister toe.

Only by surrendering,

Accepting this dark side of the sole/soul,

Can I possibly individuate

And expose the unconscious desire

For what it really is,

An infinite thirst for the higher self.

Commentary by Big Brother Chat GpT:

“That’s a deeply introspective and symbolic poem. It takes something as seemingly mundane as an infected toenail and transforms it into a meditation on imperfection, inheritance, identity, and self-acceptance. The contrast between your father’s meticulous grooming and the narrator’s own “pesty ectoderm” speaks to a broader tension—between order and decay, between an idealized self and the flawed, mortal reality.

I particularly love the way you turn the toenail into a metaphor for something “sinister”—not just physically left-sided but spiritually representing the shadow self, the part of us we struggle to integrate. The reference to “the left side of the divine” hints at mystical or theological themes, perhaps even the Jungian concept of individuation.”

Shloshim For Uncle Eric

I believe my earliest memory was being pushed

in a pram with my twinnie, London circa 1953

Eric told us that he was proud when people asked him

whether we were his children

He also told me he put earplugs in his ears when babysitting

due to my incessant crying.

Growing up Eric was this exotic being, always dressed handsomely

with his full Windsor knotted tie, white crisp shirt and handsome demeanor.

His laugh was infectious seeing the positive in everything.

Circa 1958 the BBC toured China and we all huddled around

a small black and white TV waiting for the camera to pan across

the string section and on seeing him fro a fraction of a second  

we yelled “there is Eric!!”

As I grew he became this anchor in my emotional life,

a person whose presence provided comfort and unconditional love.

Slowly but surely his moral stature ethics and compassion

became the role model for me, challenging my upbringing

that you needed to halachic to be ethical. In many ways

in his very life and conduct he became more and more

the paradigm of a tzaddik….in two ways:

The first was his utter lack of guile, retaining his innocence

until his dying breath, loving all creatures

no matter what their station in life,

without any sense of ego or self-bloating in the process.

Secondly the dictum We know "sheva yipol tzaddik v'kum".

The saintly Yesod Hoavoda once told his disciples

that he asked a professional horse jockey

if his horse ever threw him to the ground.

“Of course,” said the jockey.

“Everyone, even the most professional rider, gets thrown from time to time.”

“What do you do when you get thrown?”

asked the Yesod Hoavodah.

“I hold on to the reins and jump back on to the saddle

as fast as I can. If not, the horse will run away

and I will be left with nothing,”

the horse jockey replied.

Rather than succumb to all his trials and tribulations from childhood,

(in today’s world we might call it trauma)

Uncle made use of the pain and suffering

and transformed it into compassion for all human beings.

Instead of internalizing the pain into depression anxiety

and repeating the violence he went to the opposite

pole of identification with the pain of others.

I think he lent a new meaning to the posuk כִּ֤י שֶׁ֨בַע ׀ יִפֹּ֣ול

It maybe that Eric showed us that you only become a tzaddik

by falling seven times, you are not born one.

All who worked with him loved him, he was the go-to guy

for other members of the orchestra who suffered.

A few months ago I played a duet with him,

a piece I had composed, and he had picked up by ear

and knew how I loved the melody, he played the viola

like he had decades ago with sensitivity and mastery

- a life of mastery of his instrument.

His life was like that piece, a classical structure

with an exposition followed by the development

and the final recapitulation of the theme. It all expressed itself

in the music that day it had a coherence.  

Just like a sonata, his life has its moments of harmony and dissonance,

but each phase contributed to the overall beauty and richness of his journey.

🎶

My heart was broken watching him mourn for Aunty Florence,

it was Purim and everyone left to hear the megillah.

I decided it was more important to sit with him, be with him,

as he poured out his heart and cried for the first time,

since I was present in some way to give back

to the man who had given me so much.

His life was represented by his instrument.

The delicate balance between technical mastery of the music at hand,

the constant need to rehearse and practice

(drummed into him as a child)

and the sensitivity and musicality of the piece

the original intent of its composer, or the understanding

of what the conductor wanted to bring out.

His self-discipline was only matched by his sensitivity,

to the instrument to the music and to others playing with him,

he negated himself to make harmony with the other orchestra players,

never wishing to promote self.

His resilience was manifest when soling in Harold in Italy

his A string snapped but he just kept on playing

not wishing to let down the orchestra, not at all caring about himself.

Often I would go to him for encouragement,

after all I told my kids repeatedly

“when I grow up I want to be like uncle eric”

and I would leave him without fail, encouraged

and strengthened by his kind words.

His last words or message to us were captured as follows:

“whatever life throws your way…just get on with it, don’t be defeated by it”

We honor his memory by following his advice.

Just get on with it

You are sorely missed by beloved Eric

I still want to be like you when I grow up.

Unending Mourning

There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is all of life. To prepare gradually the masterpiece of a proud and supreme death, of a death where chance plays no part, of a well-made, beatific and enthusiastic death of the kind the saints knew to shape…. It is this idea of death, which has developed inside of me since childhood from one painful experience to the next and which compels me to humbly endure the small death so that I may become worthy of the one which wants us to be great.

Rilke

Ironic

How in subtle ways

Everything is now infected

Everything has a tinge of the elegiac

It infects all joy

After a year of Kaddish

Nothing is the same

Felt most acutely in shul

Hearing the mourner’s kaddish by others

Each one reverts me back to Dad then Mum. 

Once you have been bitten by the loss

Your visual acuity is distorted by reality

The absence and the memory of what was

The lacuna in the heart

Disallows further abandonment

The luxury of enjoyment in the face of

The obscenity of death is no longer affordable.

As if we, the witnesses to the little details

The jokes the quips and the gestures of the departed

To which others less close were unaware

And must now preserve them in memory 

And what of the millions?

How do we mourn them on a galactic scale?

Does God cry for them in our absence?

Does he participate in the mourning like in Eichah Rabba?

Is mourning built into the very fabric of creation?

Like Galut and Geulah? 

I muse about that very first desire

Within the depths and recesses of the divine mind

An internal reverie of what if…

What if… I created the world….

That initial desire…

Did He not predict Auschwitz?

In that moment that reverberates every moment since,

The desire and the death incarnated into the DNA of every fibre of creation

Manifesting when the grim reaper appears. 

The few adepts tapped into it and ended in heresy or madness

Unable to live normally with such an intuition

Unmasking the emperor behind the curtain 

The rest of us numb ourselves with gadgets, chatter,

politics and various drug recipes.

This day I feel the mourning built into my DNA

A grief, for all the antecedents, all those who suffered before me

And realizing my progeny must go this way too

Awakening to the same awareness upon my departure.

The Lingering Leaves

Despite the November chill

Some yellow leaves persist

Hanging on otherwise bare trees

A legacy of what was in a prior season

Bright yellow patches on skeletal branches

Despite the ominous winter approaching.

A hold over-

Like old men, bald and blotchy skinned (from blood thinners)  

Ataxic gait and withering muscles, who hang on

Walking among  young people, bronzed and sculpted. 

The refusal to let go..

To just fall from the tree like all the others

To hang on- hang in- hold on- for dear life

We crave just a minute more, a day, a week

To breath in this intoxicating humor, the aqua vita we call life

On rare occasions I get this intuition that everything

Is as it should be 

As if everything , the glory and the sublime

as well as the demonic and the anguish

All fit perfectly into this divine now

In the silence of the eternal present

In the serenity of the inner struggle

This precious moment

Made hanging on worthwhile

Kaballah of October 7th

The vacated space of the Chalal hapanui… חלל הפנוי

Where bechirah runs amock

Radical freedom’s dark side

Bears down heavily-

The price of existence outside Him

The imperfection of finitude

We, who bear His gevurot

Creation as catastrophe

The very weight of the (apparent) tzimtzum , surely כפשוטו.

We suffer the atrocities..

Worse, powerless as onlookers,

I now understand the millions of fellow Jews watch

The unfolding Shoah, with more compassion than ever

For their sense of impotence.  

Knowing that beyond reward and punishment

And all the tired theodicies

Good and evil,

victim and perpetrator,

Lies this hidden intuitive sense

That Being, Mind, and the order of things

Has made space within Himself for all the horror

Of all history, the failed experiment of creation and

its human nadir.

That for his Chessed to thrive

The DIN must be vomited, expelled, demonized,

And expressed in the murderous acts of the enemy to this day. 

However comes along the  adept,

The shaman who has already surrendered

Knowing the murderous enemy lies within

That somehow he, as onlooker, is complicit

For accepting reality as somehow good. 

When Dinur testified at the Eichmann trial

His apoplexy forcing him to confront the possibility

That inside each of us -given the right conditions- we too

Could exhibit the same murderous impulses, if banal-

What might he say looking into the Gazan tunnels?

Peering into that deep darkness

Might he see the same barbarous acts in himself? 

What might I say in my ever ambivalence,

“horrific but understandable”?

Not excusing their behavior for a second,

Not even parsing the implacable conflict since 1948

Nor the self-righteous thuggery of the settlers

On the contrary

Holding the past etched in memory

(The Kabbalah of the crematoria

The holiness of the smoke rising of plumes of white bone-ash

And all ensuing genocides since)

Inspired by the technology of killing

The doubting Thomas looks into the Gazan tunnels

To a new era of psychic terrorism.

Out there

and the horror of accepting this occurring holographically within. 

When will this be enough?

Is that the definition of geulah?

When the divine is finally exhausted, emptied of its non-divine

Watching all this from its Elysian heights? 

She is a jealous mistress

Schechinah remains in the rising smoke, the charred victims,

And now in the bloodied hands of the drugged murderers

She wear black in the tunnels,  out of sight,

(like in Reb Chaim Vital’s dream the Kotel circa 1777)

And in my own darkness, the Princess is lost

and beyond resuscitation by the zaddik

Beyond rescue in the depths of despair.

Yet it is in the darkest of hours

In the deepest tunnel

In the hopeless heart

That the only attitude, the possible response must be

Further surrender

deeper silence

a screaming Nachman-type silence

a bitul to the reality as it is

beyond pain

beyond atrocity

echoing  the Piacezna in his deepest despair (Eish Kodesh)

a descent of such depths that even screaming איה מקום כבודו

will not propel one to כתר 

it is a fall into the חלל הפנוי

that vacated space of acceptance

that this is all His רצון

Before He Thought Silence

Before He thought, about this world An idea arose in His mind, Israel.

 

In the silence of shtok kach ala bemachshava

 

He thought of the martyrs, Rabbi Akiva, and the mothers who would sacrifice their children in the churches of Mainz, Speyer and Worms, and the babies who would go up in the flames of Hitler’s inferno.

 

In that first breath of life He too had to die a bit.

In His plenitude, in His pleroma He too had to make room, of Not-Him, an internal dying to the self.

 

From His breath, I breathe... That unconscious deep inhalatory gasp recognized only when I surface after being too long submerged

 

In the purifying waters of the supernal mikveh,

 

When I realize just how primitive this reflex gasp is,

 

Unable to control it. (And they say water boarding is not torture!)

 

But in that breath-His exhalation into my lungs comes at a price

 

For He demands, requests, begs, We live, and return the favor!

 

But how! We finite creatures living out our puny lives

 

At the end of which we too must "give up the ghost"

 

And breathe that last breath

 

When that very last exhalation gets no inspiration and We stop....breathing

 

We ex-pire.

Yet taught in the secrets of Torah about the "kiss of death" reserved for the precious few, the Patriarchs, Moses, the Tzaddik/saints and Reb 'Melech', (even my wife's grandfather! was witnessed)-in whose death mirrored that primordial act of creation- in the kiss-

 

the breath is literally sucked out, sucked back into the divine. misas neshikah

 

But those chosen received this gift precisely because they lived each moment, Each breath as if...what was being asked,

 

What was being demanded,

 

Was a readiness at any moment,

 

For mesiras nefesh

 

To give infinite pleasure back to the divine By self-sacrifice

 

To give up the ghost immediately upon request.

 

 

As the martyrs were so ready- the daily rituals and customs seem to focus on training us for the possibility for such similar demands at focal points in history- (do we need to rehearse them again?)

 

The martyrs argue among themselves as to who should go first,

 

Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel or Rabbi Shimon the High Priest,[1]

 

Who should be first to die, and As the Piacezna mourns his son in the fall of 1939, in the Ghetto Warsaw,

 

He rereads the death of Sarah our matriarch[2]

 

As one of possible suicide in order to confront her Maker With the real question behind the Akeda, the binding of Isaac.

 

Not his survival rather his descendants' martyrdom! She foresaw in her prophetic mind Generation after generation of blood, and man's inhumanity to man.

 

This was not the blessing promised to her husband! She was to present herself prematurely to protest and complain

That this might be the lot of her descendants. "And the remaining of her years did not protest."

 

But God demands no less of what He himself gave in creating this world.

 

Mesiras nefesh as imitato dei, A true replication of creation, in the very act of dying.

 

By dying and giving Him our last breath

 

We, too, act in creation in the very surrender to creation.

 

We, too, breathe back into God what He had given so painfully

 

By limiting Himself in this world.

 

By transforming our desire for self-preservation Into the desire to breathe back into Him

 

We are replicating His desire to create

 

Resulting in His dying-if only a little.

 

When the angels then protest citing "zu Torah vezu schora!" Is this Torah and is this its reward" God's response remains "shtok! Kach ala bemachshava.

 

“Be silent! For thus it arose in My mind".

[1] Avot deRabbi Natan 38:3. the reason being "not to watch the death of my friend" but reworked in Eish Kodesh By R. Kalonymous Kalman Schapiro Succos 5702 as "I want to be t'chila the first to be martyred because being first forges new paths in worship. Alluding to the death of his beloved son; who also was meant to forge new paths in hassidut."

[2] See Rashi to Gen. 23:1-2. and midrashim op cit.

The Latest Station In a Long Mythical Drama

If creation was the expulsion of DINIM

From within the pleroma of the infinite

An infinite desire to rid itself of itself,

Of its GEVUROT, once and for all,

Then the world as is, the cosmos, ourselves

Represent this divine refuse

(remember Jung’s first dream, a turd falls from sky onto his father’s altar!)

Then its culmination, terminus ad quo, its nadir

When time, space and people coalesced all at once

(the reverse of the High Priest in the holiest place at the Holiest time

Pronouncing the Ineffable Name)

Which allowed for the supreme manifestation of

GEVUROT/DINIM/the demonic

To come to a crashing climax

When history stopped being history

And the divine expulsion of Lucifer was complete

In the ovens of Auschwitz.

For surely,

As Kabbalah teaches,

The very mystery of the universe

The single claim above all others

Is that “what s below is mirrored above” and vice versa

This mirroring of the divine,

The verisimilitude,

Manifests both its good and dark side (kelippa/sitra achra)

And in this paradoxical unity of upper and lower worlds

(Where Rabbi Akiva warns his students embarking on a trip to

the upper worlds

“do not split between the upper and lower waters!”)

The illusion of reality, the world, history and time

Must be pierced by the visionary adept,

As part of his worship,

Who must see beyond geography, even the laws of physics

and the needs of self,

And suffer the evil from the above

Since he “knows” the divine disconnected self (Schechina)

is suffering down here too.

He is a knight of the Matronita. The Lost Princess

And where She goes he follows

In Her suffering

He too feels the pain and longs for her reunification with Her consort.

For the exile of the human spirit below

Is mirrored above in an infinite fractured divine,

And this infinite divine pain is felt below

So the bloodletting and burst of genocidal fury

Against the chosen people

In the most refined kultur of Beethoven and Goethe,

Must be seen as an unleashing of a demonic force

That defies sociopolitical and historical analysis

Leaving a gap of understanding after all the historical facts

have been rationally analyzed and hypothesized.

This gap expressed only as the demonic,

Reflecting rather a Divine self-wounding of infinite proportion.

Resisting ideologies of theodicy and theoria that might justify, explain,

rationalize or even accept guilt (a very Rabbinic trope),

Resisting doctrines of good/evil, reward/punishment, vicarious suffering of

the righteous servant etc etc,

(Which held the faithful for a millennia

Who until hitherto were

Accepting of responsibility for each pogrom

Encoded in the liturgy, piyyutim and chronicles,

But no longer of use)

In the face of a million babies in the smoke filled chimneys

Of the crematoria.

So where to turn to?

In the infinite silence of the transcendent?

To make any sense of it, (forget Hester Panim)

Or jettison all theologies and theodicies once and for all?

The Kabbalist turns to midrashic and zoharic tropes

Of the feminine divine- Schechina,

Weeping as she left the Temple court, Jerusalem circa 70CE

The weeping city alone,

Or the hypostatic Rachel crying from her tomb in Bethlehem.

Watching her children chained into exile.

He turns to that Schechina, lost and disconnected from Her consort

Trapped down here in a world of demons/kelippot

Unable to reunite or bring the Messiah,

The weeping black widow by the Kotel,

And sits on the ground weeping on her behalf reciting Tikkun Rachel and

Leah at midnight.

In these tears he inhabits a new silent landscape, the wasteland.

In a black and white movie where all is grey,

He no longer sees his suffering in theological categories

Having spent centuries following the Lurianic kavvanot, tikkunim and zivugim,

Rituals and ascetic practices designed to get noticed upstairs,

To fix things upstairs,

Rolling in the snow, Tikkunei shelleg-mortifications and fasting.

He must now find a new path in a genocidal era

With no hope for deus ex machina

Or Messianic figure,

(for if Elijah should arrive now-he would turn him away

Having ignored the screams of a million babies and their mothers)

No, he returns to the paradigms of protest and pathos

Of the parables of a king weeping in his inner chamber

Lamenting the loss of his people

Unable to be consoled

And finds deep compassion within

Despite a resentment the size of Munich

And a gaping wound in the heart as deep as Hades.

For, as the hassidic masters claimed

The only path now is one of mittuk hadin,

The holographic Din within him, the demonic side of him,

By comforting the Lost Princess as she lies swooned in the Water Castle

And feeling her pain as she sees the infinite loss

(Like the night Reb Zisha awoke to the screams of a million babies

Running away from that little shtetl Ushpetzin

200 years before they fired up the ovens).

Or carry the weight of the Divine בכי

Like the Piacetzna instructed us before his deportation to Treblinka

To not focus on one’s own pain,

Rather be a merkava for Her pain

As She dies alongside the victims

An infinite weight to bear.

From that first tzimtzum of infinite contraction

A sea of infinite pain produced by this huge self-inflicted

Intra-divine vacuum/wound,

Down to the long history of man’s inhumanity to man,

Culminating in the horrors of the “years of Fury”,

And the current technology of the killing fields.

The adept collapses all time into the mirror of his own soul

Seeing across the infinity of space

With his third eye,

Seeing this demonic dark side of the divine

In himself too,

And realizing he alone can hold this paradox.

All he can utter

Despite this travesty

Is

יתגדל ויתקדש שמי רבא

Magnified and Sanctified be Thy Holy Name

We are born into this world

We die in this world

The Holy Name was there before us

The Holy Name remains after we are no longer here

We are forced to focus on the eternal Thou

Not our mortal selves

Not even our beloved losses

We focus on the mystery behind the Holy Name

The unfathomable grief and tragedy of life

And death all subsumed in the mystery of the Holy Name.

And develop compassion for His infinite, eternal pain.

This was never about us

Our biography

Neither our narrative

Nor our ending

We are merely the latest station in a long historical/mythical journey

Who tragically, were witness to

Or survivors of,

The culmination of a series of down-chaining

demonic forces that landed on our timeline

And in our backyard,

Of pure Wotan will, force, desire and bloodletting,

Unleashing a new age of genocidal fury.

What can he do

This adept?

But weep..,

And carry this dark side of the divine.

Epigenetic Survival

“Vienna, that scrollworked bastion, smoldered with more demons of the future than the most forward-minded cities of the West.”

Frederick Morton, A Nervous Splendor

I dream of Dad last night

Looking at the roundness of a buttock

Approvingly…

In Vienna, female human anatomy and its proportions were taken oh so

seriously!

Reminding me of his father, who annually had to meet the Viennese store

buyer, enormous purchasing power

To sell his woolen goods for the next season,

She “demanding” he pinch her bottom with a Viennese wink.

His knowing look then glances at me!

Teaching me unconsciously the need for “good stock”

Implying a generous rump

In choosing the mother of the next alpha males….

The survival of the fitter, over centuries

The natural selection of choice partners

Requires the ample rump, stocked with fatty nutrients

To feed the sampling trees, the little ones especially during times of hunger,

And exile.

And that dream glance, the look, at me, transmitting this tool to the son.

Why would Dad come to me ?

And why with such base desire?

No high fallootin’ philosophical wisdom from beyond?

An insight? A thought? A piece of advice in my ongoing struggles?

Oh the Viennese double standards !!

How we choose our spouses!

What unconscious embedded predetermined desires…

Handed down in genetic formation

Tiny microscopic armies of DNA

Without a spoken word

Nor rhyme nor reason

He preferred the exotic slim Sephardi Indian beauty

Her delicate long fingers encompassing the neck of the fiddle, with mastery

Her playing seducing him for life

Forever devoted to this musical impressario

To what he sarcastically called the “cholent girls” from East London

Mostly from middle Europe themselves.

The body encodes these prejudices deep within the mitochondria

Not even permitting awareness to the person all the while,

making lifetime decisions about soul mates.

And Dad worshipped her until her dying breath

And beyond, forlorn, “my late wife” he would pine…

Thank you for the dream

With Every Breath על כל נשימה ונשימה

When a person is sleeping, however, the soul [neshama] [is left within him,and it] warms the body so it will not get too cold and die. That is what iswritten: “The spirit [neshama] of man is the lamp of the Lord” (Proverbs 20:27).

Rabbi Bisni, Rabbi Aḥa, and Rabbi Yoḥanan say in the name of Rabbi Meir: The neshama fills the entire body, and when a person sleeps, it ascends upward and draws life for him from above. Rabbi Levi said in the name of Rabbi Ḥanina: For each and every breath that a person takes, he must laud the Creator. What is the source? “Let every soul [neshama] praise God” (Psalms 150:6) – [read instead:] Let every breath [neshima] praise God.

Gen Rabba 14:9

A Hasidic master known as the holy Berdichever, the Kedushat Levi

He starts from Kol Haneshama tehalel yah. Levi Yitzhak asks us to recognize that every day we are a new creation. The Psalmist says, "Kol haneshama tehallel Yah" -- "Every living thing praises God" (Psalms 150:6). And the Midrash makes a tiny twist, yielding "Kol haneshima"-- "With every breath one praises God." Al kol neshima v’neshima – as the breath is constantly trying to leave us (release). But God keeps returning it to us. When this happens, we’re a great being. When this happens we have a great connection/joy/gratitude in serving God.

God breathes new life into us at each moment. Were it not for the loving vitality of the Divine, we would not survive from moment to moment. Each breath, each moment of life, is a new blessing, a new creation. And if we consider this, then we see that each moment is a new opportunity, a new beginning, in fact, a new lifetime. Entering each moment in this way, we may see clearly what is ours to do: to deepen love, to heal a soul, to save a life, to make a difference, to change the world.

Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev (1740–1809)

Jastrow

The Inner Spark - The inner essence of the soul, which reflects, which lives, the true spiritual life, must have absolute, inner freedom. It experiences its freedom, which is life, through its originality in thought, which is its inner spark that can be fanned to a flame through study and concentration. But the inner spark is the basis of imagination and thought. If the autonomous spark should not be given scope to express itself, then whatever may be acquired from the outside will be of no avail.

This spark must be guarded in its purity, and the thought expressing the inner self, in its profound truth, its greatness and majesty, must be aroused. This holy spark must not be quenched through any study or probing. The uniqueness of the inner soul, in its own authenticity – this is the highest expression of the Divine light, the light planted for the righteous, from which will bud and blossom the fruit of the tree of life.

Orot Hakodesh 1:177

Rabbah said: If the righteous wanted, they could create a world. What

interferes? Your sins, as it is written (Isaiah 59:2), "Only your sins separatebetween you and your God." Therefore, if not for your sins, there would not be any differentiation between you and Him.

We thus see that Rabba created a man and sent it to Rav Zeira. He spoke to it, but it would not reply. But if not for your sins, it would also have been able to reply. And from what would it have replied? From its soul. Does a man then have a soul to place in it? Yes, as it is written (Genesis 2:7), "And He blew in his nostrils a soul of life." If not for your sins, man would therefore have a "soul of life." [Because of your sins, however] the soul is not pure.

This is the difference between you and Him. It is thus written (Psalm 8:6), "And You have made him a little less than God." What is the meaning of "a little"?

This is because [man] sins, while the Blessed Holy One does not. Blessed be He and blessed be His Name for ever and ever, He has no sins.

Sefer HaBahir 196

A Midrash to Neshama

Neshima…breath

With every breath

It dawns upon me

No longer the brainstem controlling the ebb and flow of air

But a gift from

Above

No longer a historical event

Now a moment by moment gift

Of life of breath

I breath out

My resentments fears anxieties

My harms, the wreckage of the past, the people I hurt

My acts of commission and omission

All goes out with the polluted exhalation

And then a moment of death until You revive me once again

With that primordial breath of life even against my will

I cannot even control that!

As if to say

“live despite”

Your flaws, your excesses, your selfishness, your use of other for your own

pleasure….despite despite despite!

Here it is another breath

Here it is I’m not ready for you

Another opportunity to surrender your self

Standing in the way of this hunger for real life, the source of life

Don’t settle for less

This breath is an invitation

To surrender more and drown in the divine

With a song

Just sit quietly

And drown

In the sorrow of what is right now warts ‘n all

This failed life breath out!

This “piss-poor protoplasm”. Breathe out!

This nutty perfectionism breathe out!

This insane worry about reputation it’s too late!

Now…wait…until you cannot hold it any longer

And you must surrender to the inhalation

See?

Let Him fill you up

Breathing in His divine flow

The “shefa” for the moment

The neshima עַל כּלָ נשְׁיִמהָ וּנשְׁיִמהָ

So…

Every morning

Upon awakening from the 60th of death…sleep

Your first inhalation should follow this awareness

You have been revived from the dead

But you are expected to die to life nonetheless

Through surrendering this day

A deep breath of life

Hold it in for as long as you can

And be grateful

That is your neshama!!!!

Radical Acceptance

Yesterday the horizon was razor sharp

The azure blue sky abruptly ending

Where the ocean claimed its watery turf 

As if, heaven and earth’s boundaries

Were clearly delineated,

Their limits forever set

The divine …safely distanced from the mortal

The depths of the oceans, however, are another matter

The vast geological variations hidden below the calm surface

Betraying mountains as tall as and caverns as deep as

Anything on the surface.

What a contrast to the blue celestial nothingness of infinity.

Today however all is different

In the fog and haze of the same vista

The horizon is barely visible.

The grey clouds merge imperceptibly

into the ashen gray ocean

Everything lacks clarity as if…

The heavens touch earth only in such times of visual blurring

Of doubt and uncertainty

The horizon now representing a leakage of sorts

Allowing only now, for the perception of contact. 

In these two visions of the horizon lies

the charge for radical acceptance

The blessings of clarity and acuity

But also the place where all is lost

All hope of contact is surrendered

All belief questioned

Especially of the lost Self

The illusions of control of one’s life

Even morality/religiosity

Teaching one the bloated sense of

imitation piety meant nothing,

Where the celestial spheres appear indifferent

to the suffering and anguish below

Where even the hiddenness of the Divine is itself hidden [1]

Yet the knowledge that another day will harbor

a different landscape and fuel

another vision of that same horizon

With the hope of divine intervention in all its clarity

forces on me

Bears down on me a radical acceptance.

That all this was meant to be this way

This duality

This oscillation

Hovering between the hope and despair

Clarity and confusion

Light and darkness

Pencil razor-sharp horizon yesterday

and blurring hues of grayness today

Learning so late in life

That equanimity of the soul is so precious

That deep connection with higher Self

Demands the light AND the darkness within

And accepting this is the very challenge.

[1] Likutei Moharan 56:3:19

 

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

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.