Uman 2004
Chilled tonight
No street lights in this poverty-stricken village
So the heavens light up instead
A myriad stars interrupted rudely by
An arrogant Milky Way streaking across its belly
Like a paintbrush dripping with white color.
It has to be this way, dark below, the lack, of power
sanitation
Food clean water, warmth, here in the belly of the Ukraine
Well known for inflicting suffering on its peasants and in
turn they on its Jews
A few incandescent lights flicker insufficiently
The mirror image of the myriad lights of Las Vegas whose
night is day.
Dark below and deathly silent above.
It occurs to me that it is only because of the absence
below that
Those heavens do light up
I cannot see this in say Chicago or London
They burn too light
But here
In the dark village night
The sky radiates its own specter of myriads of white dots
And it is precisely the absence of sun
Only in its total lack of presence
Do these millions and billions of stars reveal themselves?
Only against a total blackness below and above
Only in the absence of any light
Can one appreciate what is really out there?
As if in my life too
Only in the paradoxical absence of light, of that which we
are used to depending on
Here in this village totally incapable of housing or even
feeding thousands of pilgrims
Here as I suffer hunger, jet-lag, insomnia, fatigue and
sanitary facility
Here alone, can I see reality as it is
Its silence
Its loneliness
Its magnitude
Its seeming eternity
Only in the degradation and filth
Only in my own broken life
Here in the Ukraine
It becomes apparent.
Is there hope of seeing it in its truth?
In the absence.
Next morning the sun shines brightly
A few clouds whisp by
The blue azure sky reveals nothing of what transpired
Nothing but an open expanse of seeming emptiness
All might be in order
This maybe all there is
The golden globe traversing its daily course
We bowing to its times for our prayer rituals
Timing everything by its rise and setting
Who would have guessed the secret up there?
In this cruel place
Other secrets emerge
The whole quarter is a burial ground
Thousands martyred here by Gonta
Then the Zaddik desires to remind us too
Demanding we never forget him or the souls he came to
rescue here
Secrets in 1941 more Jews drowned under the suffocating
ice
Mostly local complicity
The Nazis needed few men here
Secrets buried and drowned
Occasionally body parts emerge splintered
After a torrential rain
On the side of the mountain.
Cruelty etched into the very landscape
In the high Slavic cheekbones of the paratroopers
Doing light duty
Protecting us from them or them from us we wonder?
Snickering at the Hassidic kids prancing around them
In another time it would be different
If the Jews were not bringing dollars like today.
Europe drips with Jewish blood and secrets like these
If not for the Zaddik this too would escape the gaze.
Their rage is tightly contained under their uniforms but
their expressions
Betray everything. Nothing has changed,
Why should we dignify this place of hell, massacre,
torture, the way we do each year?
For the Zaddik demands we hold this very paradox
To come specifically here to dance
In the middle of this horror
Under the cruel sky above
Mirroring the apparent calm and absence
Like the sun during the day
But if you come out like he demands at night
To meditate
His secret to us will be revealed
The other side of midnight
Reveals the opposite
The heavens split open only here
Silent
Majestic
Beyond the petty hatred below
Eternal
To dance and rectify the souls
And ourselves
Here in this cruel landscape specifically and nowhere else.
The paradoxical Zaddik makes those kinds of demands of
us.
