Dying Into Creation

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".

A silence that is so deafening it can shatter a universe.

But the shtok refers to the silence of withholding, waiting,

holding back...

"Be silent" meaning "it is not yet time to breathe it back

into Me!"...

"I am waiting for my martyrs!"

Creating the world dying and breathing,

The inspiration and exhalation

The pulse of life itself

Includes the dying

For all is mirrored in the divine in that original thought.

[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.