In the Final Generation

“In the final generation…there are zaddikim who can recognize transgressors and heretics who are connected to their soul root.

Therefore, they (the zaddikim) have to deal with them (the heretics) in wondrous manners in ways impossible to comprehend from an exoteric perspective.”

Rav Kook: Shemoneh Kavazim: #326

“A heretic can be found who has strong illuminating faith which flows from the source of supernal holiness than thousands of ‘believers’ of little faith.”

Rav Kook: Orot Ha-­‐Emunah 21

I know not of roots and souls “shoresh veneshama”

Technical terms that are disconnected from our experiential vocabulary

(despite being bandied about by kabbalists as if understood by them!)

I know I am disconnected,

from tradition, belief, authority, praxis and worst of all, Self.

For I feel its anguish.

I sense its forlornness

I hear its cry.

I hear words like root and soul and could scream!

The latest fallen idol…you may ask?

The realization that I was strung between

the Soloveitchik/Netziv/Volozhyn textual mastery axis

And the Kook/Carlebach/Izhbitz/Breslov prophetic intuitions.

And now…decades later,

The shattered remnants on the ground look up at me

With a sense of betrayal and chronicles of wasted time.

The new agnosticism, informed by “Rabbi” Nietzsche,

the passage of time watching the religious fads come and go

Each group (Hassidic or otherwise) reaching its height

then fracturing into warring parties

The cross cultural nature of believing communities, authorities, doctrinal wars

The real dark side of ideologies and collectives.

In the hollowness of the absence of ideology and hope

In the grey landscape of memory for the comfort of ritual and community

In the solitude of no chevraya

Das Niemandsrose

Takes center stage.

In the silence, in the night, in the study of my father

I feel his pain, and his lessening interest in anything outside.

He watches me for approval of his 94-­‐year-­‐old lips

Blowing the shofar, it gives him pleasure, not many things do.

And my accompanying him to shul once more

For selichos…

Like in London 50 years ago in the cold fog

Wiping the chilly mist off the windscreen

To don his precious t’fillin

That survived the war, now over 70 years ago.

He called it “selichos weather” as the cold wet autumn chilled the bones.

I see too much.

The contrived nature of Halachic praxis

The endless upmanship of those imitating Brisk’s

Obsessive focus on Halachic minutiae

The clear historicity of its development

The mistakes and errors of the scribes affecting

the most ancient sacred texts

The holy piety masking the fear of nonconformity

The outrageous Kiruv claims for happiness and fulfillment

The absent acknowledgment of the dark forces beneath the surface

Of community,

The violence subtending all collectives and ideologies.

The unacknowledged problems of sex abuse and pedophiles in our community

The hushed victims by spiritual authority, bribes, threats.

The heroin crisis in our midst and loss of fine young people.

The neo-­‐Hassidic fervency and naiveté

The petty in fighting between gedolim and Rebbes

And in my loneliness

With no one to lend ear

I scream in the wilderness of this silent study…

Of the failure within and without

This creeping awareness of my part, my culpability and inertia

in this generation’s error.

And my timidity and absent courage to fight

Preferring the nihilism of my couch and the endless ways

To escape the pain, I seek.

And, of course, this aging thing

The nightly discomfort wakens me to stumble towards the relief station

Maybe even twice!

The memory of objects, keys cel phones forgotten on planes and offices

The missed appointments (because I failed to write it down)

A slow awakening to the dementia that awaits

The inertia preventing me from exercising

with all sorts of excuses, primarily the utter boredom of it all.

“Crustaceous” came to mind when describing other’s slow insistence

on the old ways Behaviors, habits, jokes, immediate responses,

food choices and divrei Torah. Admonitions, opinions, politics,

all become ossified in this web of calcification, tangles,

And amyloid. I used to call others this term.

Watching it in the mirror actually happening to me now,

And the echoes of mortality

Sounding louder and louder

Having watched parents and in laws decline

I now submit to the same process

The inevitability of time’s course

And its seeming acceleration

Towards this end

Of self

Of being

Of life

How did I ever feel so immortal when young?

Reading medical articles one by one

About my sins of omission and commission

Of diet and exercise and diabetic control

Of early brain rot due to all three

And persistent avoidance of periodic insertion of scopes into every orifice

To avoid this or that cancer

It’s like watching the play of my life, fast forwarded

So that I cannot escape the anxiety of its inevitability.

As a child I always feared the passage of time

Dreamed of facing death as an old man

with a pot belly out of a Dickens novel,

It would awaken me in a sweat from my sleep.

Now,

Without the promises afforded by religious claims

(never believed them anyway)

not even the spiritual claims of mysticism,

I am left with the psycho dynamic wish fulfillment theories

Of my 20th century “Rebbes” Freud Jung and Fromm, Hillman et al.

I must prepare myself, finally, having avoided doing this work,

for the ongoing struggle to take back all the projections

And own this failed life

Own the past

The people I have hurt

Admit the past,

Live in the reality,

And silence the inner Kritik.

I must come to acceptance

Of this life as it is

With its failures and upsets

The essentially moral failure

To live one’s essence

This false self

Born in the violence of being educated by survivors

(and abused)

exposed to irrational rage

and power by fiat, tyranny no less

with no protection.

The wounded boy had to survive.

But this is no excuse for the individuated man

Who should have done the inner work of healing right?

Having examined his core beliefs and resentments on the couch

Of self awareness

And by this age have made peace with the past

Not continue to be driven by it

Triggered by authority and criticism

Into rage

And powerlessness.

And destructive behaviors.

Yet I do still find my voice in strange places

(Leaving more global issues to my children)

I prefer the quiet spaces where my heretical readings of sacred texts

Fill my heart in my search for meaning.

These “friends” have been with me for decades

during my struggles with orthodoxy

Refusing to merely give up on them, now,

Merely because of their human authorship.

I am choosy however, restricting my archive to

Aggadah from Talmud, Midrash, Parshanut and Hassidut,

Post Holocaust writings on faith and covenant…

I prefer to return to them once again

Seeking hidden mysteries as yet undisclosed

In the archeological textual digging of the multi-­‐layered opaque

Black letters on white landscape or parchment

I love the first editions, smelling of old times on fragile cheap paper,

With the editions framed in the front with ornate baroque designs.

Trained with much patience and in gratitude,

to use the tools of analysis of Talmud, by my revered father in law,

Reb Hershy, Professors Brettler, Fox, Fishbane,

and my beloved George of course,

Who taught me how to be committed to one text for decades (the Leshem).

And reading Rav Kook in a new key,

with the new uncensored versions of letters and essays

As well as the traditional Hassidic masters,

Plumbing them all for Jungian undertones:

Searching for that text that quickens the pulse and makes me gasp

(they still do!) that ahaah! moment

having discovered something new that reflects the engine of my self.

Mirroring the soul’s desire,

Finding dark spaces

The space between the lines

Uncovering what was not said

What needed to be said

What was left unsaid

And the author’s unconscious desires,

That mirror my soul’s.

In these readings I find solace

In the company of other like minded souls

And a purpose in leaving a slight trace

Of my self, my struggles, my search, my path,

In such writing,

I find comfort that others journeyed this path

With the same tightrope balancing act,

Struggling with tradition readings against the grain,

At times exposing the past textual immoral assumptions

Without regret or piety,

For the ongoing battle for moral sense

The authority and sheer weight of rabbinic tradition vs. the moral equity

Of our times and struggles

Like a good judge/reader should.

Unlike the academic, the Wissenschaft schools

I read and study for pleasure and for purpose

This study is my lifeline, my oxygen,

in the constant refining of the ultimate questions

That have plagued me since childhood

But also I am in love with the sacred text

Albeit like Celan, denuded of philosophical and theological claims,

More like a love poem that will not let me rest.

And in the space between doctor and patient

I will find ongoing solace

As we both traverse life’s decay

Ostensibly my documenting decline

Yet also providing solace for wounded souls

Who I firmly believe express their woundedness in the various symptoms

Presented on arrival into the examining room.

In that sacred space a magical force

Operates, of trust, mutuality of suffering, and wisdom.

This mystical bond keeps growing deeper as I age

And empathize more and more

And objectify less and less

For medicine as an art has become that intuitive sense

Of what is unique to this or that particular patient

Not what they have in common with every other sufferer of that malady

And in the interaction with children and grandchildren

Where the transmission of culture, memory and my very being

Is the currency worth more than gold,

But just watching them chat away among themselves also

fills my heart with comfort, as do

their constantly inquiring minds with incessant questions

It fills me with pure joy.

In study work and family, I must find meaning

In this path

Where death alone defines just how precious

My remaining time is.

Framing my life as I would a literary work

Allows me to focus on the unfinished business…

As a coda,

The dreams as yet to fulfil

of travel…

The sweet air of Snowdonia, the rolling Cotswolds,

Other places I need to visit

To feel the wind in the sail on the Pacific

And feel the awe before the blue ice glaciers of Alaska

The Aurora Borialis…

A pilgrimage to Sobibor concentration camp where my grandparents perished.

And once again to stand barefoot in the Paradeisi Synagogue in Cochin

Where I felt an alteric connection to my ancestors.

Of study…

To finally to complete with George the Leshem,

and thereby understand the Lurianic project.

Of music

To complete the Bach prelude and fugues

And understand Chopin.

Of family…

To see my kids settled and independent

Each making his and her contribution.

So much left to do…