The Vurker Rebbe got it right.
Only in tears.
No words. Insufficient. Duplicitous, devious, cannot do it
justice.
Entrapment by words,
words that indict,
words that sentence,
Words that mean two things,
language that conceals more than it reveals,
texts that remain forever opaque to dissection.
Like two lovers embracing, on a city bench, hard wood,
overlooking the River seine, at dusk, the bridges lined with
Victorian lights that flicker, these lovers have no need for
words, just clasped in each other with tears that well up,
tears of yearning longing and desire.
No words needed at the beginning and end of life,
for joy there are tears:
for grief there are tears.
Words remain inadequate at the two ends of life.
So too with God, all the praying, supplication,
benedictions, petitions, Glorias, Sancta's, Hail Marias,
breast-beating confessionals, all these sacred words
remain inadequate, failing as they do, to describe or even
approach the grand Paradox of God.
God in history, God in nature, God in psyche, these
oxymoron, non-sequitors, those meaningless word games
philosophical jargon, betraying only the fraudulence of the
author.
Subject/object, transcendence/immanence, incarnation/
tzimtzum polarities of good and evil faith and Auschwitz
these binaries pale before the atrocity of logic and
decency in the mind of the ultimate software engineer.
Even love, as our two subjects on the hard wooden bench
seem to demonstrate, even love contains such paradox
that cannot encapsulate the sublime experienced by the
groping arms, feelings simultaneously lived in, such as
fear, hatred, powerlessness, attraction, joy and death.
So the Rebbe invites us to jettison words and embrace
tears.
For each drop that slowly wells up in the corner of the eye,
waiting to grow until it descends down the mountainside of
the cheek to leave a trail of white salty tracings lined
vertically and in parallel, etched in the landscape and
contours of the maxilla like the ski marks in snow, contains
within a myriad of feelings most mutually contradictory.
Most sufficient to do justice to the complexity of human
emotion, unlike words.
It is these tears that provide the refraction and prism by
which to look out into man and history, God and dying,
love and hatred, joy and slow painful decline, and see the
utter enigma and uncanniness of it all, in a way that feels
right.
Through the distortion of the pear-shaped teardrop lines
begin to bend, reality curves, that which appeared
symmetrical, aligned, in focus, logical, now appears to no
longer give certainty as to what is real, what truly
represents history and truth.
In such a teardrop all the safety of rules, theorems, laws of
mathematics softens and gives way.
In the lived experience of the tear, its distortion,
I see the only possible strategy to hold my own paradox,
of sanity and
insanity, competence and failures, lies deceits and
betrayals,
To hold on to history and man to have faith in life despite
the horrors of torture and death.
In the tears of the Vurker Rebbe, the deepest torah is
revealed.
