I am left bereft since I banished You from my discourse
looking at the sunrise without You
alone with the lake,
and only listening to the prayers and rituals.
I cannot say anything anymore
Too many empty prayers
Too much shockling
Too much to profess
Only silence is the order of the day.
But this only makes things worse,
the three year old locked in the broom closet in the dark
feels only anguish
and lying next to a woman who really believes in You
makes me feel even more isolated.
What was it like to be me before the me just wanted to
please her and then You?
To do anything to gain her approval and seek credential
after credential only to impress her
that I am not the grade B child, as predicted…
and feel inadequate before her, then You forever?
What might it feel like to accept the broken self I am now
without the inner kritik?
When will the next Authority come knocking?
When will Hades be warmed up for me?
When will someone just love me for my broken self and
nothing else?
For no credentials and no morals?
Without You I have no judge but also no hope of savior.
I have abandoned You, but how ridiculous-the ant rejects
the elephant hoof bearing down slowly on it,
the shadow enlarging and the little mite shaking his fist
angrily at the inevitable
thunderous doom! Kafka's priest slams the door shut.
In this place of grief, the little dark-skinned boy
crying too much-knows in his fearthe
lack of milk would be paradigmatic,
wasting away
they call in nana
so he knows of Nana’s chicken soup-and her love that has
been crowded out by the screaming demanding mother.
My work is to re-envision You as Nana/Schechina
An unconditionally loving/projection of my desire.
Is this the ratzon of the Sfas Emes when, in 1902 on
Parshas Pekudei,
he suggested the sacral union of Moses and the
Schechina as the very implantation of such desire?
I doubt it!
Is this the ratzon of the Ishbitzer? Maybe.
It is my ratzon, my desire to seek and find this particular
comfort so that I can even continue.
Only in this grief do I paradoxically feel so present.
What powerful experience could have allowed me to feel
only real here and now?
to feel myself in this space and interior anxiety
Not to experience pleasure as alien and uncomfortable
and to take pleasure only when crying?
Can I not get behind this?
Is it only psycho-logical?
Could not the constant obsessive seeking texts of
catastrophe that mirror my experience
reflect a genetic/ethnic sensibility? or must it be merely the
inner child seeking validation once more?
Is this all merely a projection?
or does the psyche-Self have a need to incarnate in my
issues precisely this way
for its needs to experience its unconscious, selfconsciously?
Or is all of this learning for nothing?
All of this work,
all of these years,
all of this wisdom for naught?
A child of the earth I too wish to be deserving of
unconditional love without texts, Gods, authorities, her
parents, in-laws to withhold it;
conditional upon my behavior,
my ritual practice,
my study,
my performance,
my outcomes.
This desire is the very ratzon I believe the Izhbitzer meant
when discussing Abraham’s looking
at the world in conflagration and asks the ultimate
question, Bira Doleket-the village is in flames who is the master?
Who is the author of all of this suffering?
Who is responsible for this catastrophe?
And the holy Zaddik answers
not with any philosophical clever response,
not with any mystical experience,
but rather the mirroring of the question “who placed in You
the very questioning?”
I believe He pointed to that ratzon that very questioning;
that very desire to be accepted as the Divine incarnated
spark.
