Purim
For millenia,
“She” has watched and suffered alongside us
having had no part of the very “set up”
at the dawn of Genesis, by the Divine Creator,
in that Lurianic myth,
In fact on day 4, (wednesday), I believe
She…was demoted to the size of the moon
(for an innocent question about balance in the order of things no less!)
and since then has languished,
alongside us…kissing the walls of the flaming Temple goodbye ten times-
the long exile begins and
Mother Rachel, buried alone, cries for us too,
Schechina accompanies us into Galut
aeons of pain without end…
and now unacknowledged, Auschwitz sees Her in flames too.
Ah but the secrets of Torah hid this very mystery,
Malchut-Schechina…
Apart and banished from Her beloved (Zohar)
the Divine is split and gendered
longing like the “spring and the mountain”
of Rabbi Nachman’s tale…
to be rescued like the “Lost Princess”
wounded by the 10 poisoned arrows
to be healed by the ten melodies of the “beggar without hands”.
And, as the ARI z’l astonishingly claimed,
it must be by our part,
yes we mere humans,
are the very instrument
to reunite Her once more
agonizingly slowly,
over time,
through our rituals and behavior
our studiousness and even our suffering (Leshem).
But what of now?
even now?
some 70 years or more later
after the Tremendum
She is spoken of less and less
Her silence is deafening.
Can this myth still work?
Where She suffered the worst agonies
alongside our parents…
we don’t think of Her do we…
(As the Degel had wished)
In the greyed landscape of agnosticism
and self-centeredness,
where our halachic practice has become commodified and branded,
where even the pious motives
of Talmidei Chachamim and the sea of Black hats completing shas
reveal more the obsessional need for textual mastery or,
worse, a reward with a ticket into the ultimate (Madison Square) Garden,
A Heavenly Paradiso.
Where the divine bean counter is envisioned as computing
the balance sheet of a life.
Hoping for a black rather than red ink stamp of approval.
No, She is ever abandoned, worse now
having watched her sisters incinerated
in the ovens of Europe and Japan
and the killing and violence persists
the rape and the torture
the powerlessness and abuse behind the front doors
of the so called safe homes across Amerika.
Abused at work, the abuse of even girls…
Incarnated in the symptoms of my patients years later.
OK! Enough of theology and myth Julian
no narrative, no myth, no “feminist renewal”
could even do justice to Her abuse and ours.
The ongoing inhumanity of man to man and man to woman
affects Her nonetheless.
Relinquish your theologies in the smoke of Birkenau
chimneys and radioactive clouds over Hiroshima,
and incendiary bombs over populations centers of Europe
and drone attacks on wedding parties.
Then what of me? What of my own ethical imperatives?
Without theology I am left in front of the distorted mirror
bereft of neat theories and self serving justifications;
bereft of grand totalizing schemes that make sense except
for the victims of water boarding and torture;
carrying all this and owning it as a member of my generation of indifference.
Horrified by my own persistent defects of soul and character
Might we then examine the inner landscape of my memory and dysfunction?
What led me here to this moment of awareness, if not the very wound of
my own obsessions and the poverty of the texts to address them?
She has beckoned me all along,
in dreams and compulsions,
the images were so uniform,
coming so close to Her consciousness
through the very wound,
the deep split in my soul,
of my own lies, deceits, betrayals and hurting of others?
my putting the theory before my raising of children
sacrificing them on the altar of other people’s expectations.
She has beckoned me
more so, in my wounded view of the feminine,
sealed by a disciplinarian mother whose love was ever conditional
whose love I could never earn sufficiently?
resulting in a vision split between
the virgin goddess and the whore of Babylon?
Having been exposed to this dark side of the feminine
the mother, the anima, I spent years in search
of the inappropriate object of desire.
Now,
A slow dawning on the horizon of my soul
that all along this deep yearning for the archetypal
“woman of my dreams” was none other than the Great Mother, Her.
Enveloped time and again by Her unconscious presence in all women
driving me towards her/Her for the appropriate and the other,
the fascination, the infatuation, the obsession,
(maybe this one will heal my deep split-
maybe now I might feel both love and passion together?)
Coming to view this in a different key
this wound as not pathology alone
coming to finally own all of it,
in fact, leading me to this sacred moment
in time-this dawn of liberation-
where theology and psychology met finally
and my worship changed forever.
Seeing all of it
the light and the dark
as Her manifesting in me and through my experience
and yearning and searching for Her ultimate image
through the appropriate and inappropriate
was in reality merely a search for Her.
She too has a dark side
This was the single greatest relief.
(Maybe this is what the kabbalists meant by Yichud?)
For now I worship at a different altar
the “god of my understanding” is none other
than a goddess…
and my access to the ultimate unknowable Maimonidean Divine
must go through Her.
(all entrance to the king must go via the Matronita…Zohar).
Ironic isn't it how He needs Her more than ever.
So… without changing any rituals, Mitzvot or religious demands,
without a change in texts, studying, meditation or pilgrimages
Yet a profound change in the inner landscape, in the desire,
where this newly dis-covered conjured image,
has changed the dynamics for me, albeit in a new key,
which of course changes the entire symphonic sound,
despite ostensibly reading the same notes on the parchment.
In worshipping Her and, through her, all women,
I have moved downtown from the Temple of Apollo
to the Temple of Dionysius,
I sacrifice myself at the altar of eros
and in the seduction and obsession
of love I find solace in her/Her…
for every woman is now a gift from Her
a spiritual opportunity,
to connect with the Great Mother
to drown in Her…
and be reborn.
So forgive me my dear for flirting
it is not only my Viennese genes
(where it is after all an art form!)
No. it is really a process of slow seduction
as deep in my soul as a subterranean well
nourishing me and enlivening me,
making me whole and gendered
in my representation of zeir anpin
in my admittedly poor and aging attempt
to recreate, time and again
that initial adolescent thrill,
that sent shivers of delight though my whole body
(in complete opposition to the more typical experience of
focused male cycle of genital need followed by relief)
at the conquest of her/Her,
and the sacred realization
that She too needs to be adorned by my devotions (kishutim)
seduced slowly and carefully
an art form that requires practice and perfecting.
And in the core of this seduction lies the surrender
to the possibility over and over again
(and of increasing frequency with age)
of rejection, that most painful and wounding of responses
going to the very heart of this sacred enterprise
and de-validating it,
yet ( I now realize) necessary and humbling,
for the soul to be refined once again in the crucible of compassion.
Now in the rare conquest lies a newfound humility,
at the very magic of this alchemical process,
(like in Jung’s dream of Tiferet and Malchut)
and the gift of acceptance,
and validation by the innocent child deep inside me
before the abuse corrupted my neural networks,
but even more so, a message from Her…
a silent “yes” can be heard…from off the biographical stage
“you have vanquished ME!”
and the deep desolation inside
is momentarily relieved.
And there is no further need to “act out”.
And that is the litmus test of this whole exercise/devotion.
Nothing has changed in time (nor over generations)
in this neurological hard wiring, the amygdala is stable,
nothing has changed in that glorious feeling deep down
since my adolescence,
only the dawning of awareness that this very eros of desire
is Divine.
So forgive me
if this looks and sounds impious
as if I am justifying a behavior that seems inappropriate
a gadfly, womanizer, flirt,
for I am finally pursuing the woman/Woman of my dreams
without shame
and it takes a lifetime…
after which I will be reunited with the Great Mother
once more, and drown happily in Her again.
Maybe what is needed for Her rescue
is a new ritual in the key of G minor
that validates Her and Her plight
that brings consciousness of Her into the
daily rituals and study halls.
Having demythologized Judaism in the Lithuanian
yeshiva halls of Volozhyn and Lakewood
we also banished Her
having appropriated and absorbed the European
psychic double standards regarding eros
we sanitized our praxis into a scholarly-analytic
Halacha-obsessed matrix.
We valorized the intellect and the performative alone.
She is excluded from the study halls
as are women who wish to participate.
Her rescue will require a re-tooling, a new software,
a softening,
and opening to vulnerability,
and the imaginative,
a sensitivity to Her incarnated women down here
a relinquishing of the mastery of texts,
for an intuitive understanding,
a reinvestment of the teaching of myth/kabbalah/chassidut
without the misogeny.
Maybe maybe,
We can then give appropriate tribute to the millions of women
who also perished, there,
who are abused here,
who have no voice anywhere,
who work in silence everywhere,
who continue to suffer:
it is only after this is fixed will She be honored.
