Shh..do not let on!
The secret of incarnation was once ours alone.
Let them talk incessantly of incarnation
of “God in the flesh”-
“the wine and the wafer”-
that Nicean controversy
the theological and doctrinal splitting of their church into
multiple splinters.
Shh...Don’t let on!
That this secret doctrine was once ours.
Before time began before
Julian’s calendar before
the time before time.
Sure we called it something else
some other esoteric theological doctrine
and once they stole the secret
it went underground
only to surface a thousand years later.
A thousand year secret
Shhh...now’s not the time to reveal the secret!
Too many battles still to fight
on the ground and in the texts
between the texts and between the letters
the white space between the Twin Towers
the white fire etched in the sky
the children of Rebecca still engage in late night TV battles
fighting for the hearts and minds of the drunken
insomniacs
still cleaving to old cultural cliches
and yesterday’s easy-tounged sound bites.
We still have to work out the texts of terror and misogyny
we still have learn how to read
how to see our pitiful selves mirrored in the text
the cultural wars must continue
we are not yet exhasuted
not yet willing to hear the secret.
Only then in the hoary future
it will be revealed and all will see
how our secret was stolen
brazenly appropriated
and our wound so deep
we ourselves refuted it as “not Jewish”
this Incarnation business.
Reb Nachman tells us that there is a secret
so secret we ourselves are unaware of it
when God is so hidden even He (incarnated in us) cannot
recognize Himself.
So we live out the darkness oblivious to the secret and call
it exile/history.
Only then in the hoary future will the purified version
unfold only then will we finally experience the incarnation..
in ourselves
only then will we reaize a la Izhbitser
that our stories and biographies
our suffering and martyrdom
from the daily petty hurts to the ultimate sacrifces
the gnawing gaping pain of humanity under tyrrany
the hunger and cold
the torture and isolation
all this was His desire
His secret
to experience even this
to expel the darkness within the infinite
to experience even this
the tortured cry of babies helpless
and the anguish of a prisoner’s lost hope.
That Monsieur Chagall really understood this
with the scrawny yidl on the cross in his prayer shawl
and the swastika etched on his arm
this “White Crucifix” was more than the burning shtetls
flying around Euorpe’s wasteland suspended above in the
sky with goats and torah scrolls,
more than the local Nazi horror
it represented the very incarnation they so trusted
the Jew-on-the-cross
God on the cross
humanity crucified on the altar of European culture.
the age old incarnation of God’s desire to experience even
this.
Simone Weil called it affliction
beyond mere suffering
nailed to the cross without hope or escape
the dark night of the soul
a Merton moment
nowhere to go
the addict’s nightmare of bottoming out.
Forget the sublime
the European pseudo experience of the divine
the 19th century British poets of Hampstead Heath
the sublime has been moved a few hundred miles east
to a little shteltl once called usphpetzin-Auschwitz to youthe
night terror of Reb Zusia
who awakens his brother Reb ‘Melech
with screams of visions of burning babies
the brothers who must run away in the cold night from this
horrific village
150 years before Himmler’s wet dream took effect.
In the hell of this post-Himmler landscape
where horror meets beauty
in the nightclubs of Berlin
in the burlesque of politicans caught red-handed
the uncanny Freudian sense of otherness and alterity
remains despite.
Every moment it is present in the bleeding scars of the raw
pressure sores and ulcers of the dying culture.
So, never mind the Nicean controversy of the third century
forget the scholars of the school of Alexandrian Allegory or
Antioch’s literality.
This machlokes went underground 100 years before
and was pre-figured in our own very interpretation of the
logos.
In the deep mysteries of the esoteric doctrine
the kabalistic wisdom went underground in the face of the
literalists
only to surface a thousand years later.
Surfacing in the argument as to the reading of the
tzimtzum, literal or figurative; yes this tzimtzum business is
the same old argument over the incarnation-Nicean
councils redux.
Who would have thought the holy machlokes between the
Vilna Gaon and the Baal Hatanya over the tzimtzum was
rehearsing a controversy going back a millenia!
Until, that is, Rebbe Nachman’s quantum theology...
until he showed us how to see the paradoxical truth of the
tzimtzum/incarnation
as holding both the literal and the figurative at once
a Heisenberg of theology
both truths as equally true.
For Rabbeinu showed us how to see through the facts
not get stuck on mere facts
not fight holy wars over words
but to see throught the facts to the truth.
Shh..don’t let on,
they stole the deepest secret and appropriated it for their
cetnral core theology about which they would argue about
the facts (of incarnation)
ignoring or forgetting the truth (of incarnation)
that the divine was here all along
deep within
experiencing every detail of our lives and loves
our pain and suffering
our good times and bad.
Until they and we exchange this truth the redemption will
not arrive.
