Theology of Dementia

In anticipation of loss

This sense of the impending,

Inextricable bound to memory,

Ultimately caught up in the past,

The way we interpret reality,

The way we are creative about our biographies

Our wished historiographies,

Through the prism of our resentments,

And delusions.

From our wounds and our experience

Finally, facing the brutal facts

Of age and infirmity, of decay and demise

We stare at it daily,

Or monthly if we visit parents

This starkness,

The facts on the ground

The diagnoses we bear,

The truth of our mortality,

The ending.

We face this,

Deferring the truth of the facts

By all sorts of distractions

The nitty gritty minutiae,

The specifics of actions,

The discussions of trivia,

The visits to the doctors,

Incessant TV noise, too loud,

The movies and Facebook pages,

Anything and everything to avoid the real questions…

How to make sense of the absurdity,

How to face the mediocrity of the self,

The Kritik and his pointing finger!

When we face those who say “j’accuse”

In all honesty,

How our character defects,

Staring at us in the mirror,

The toxic shame rising up

Envelops the soul,

And we see how little we have added,

How poverty stricken our contribution,

How accurate was the headmaster to prophetically

Declare “you are a B student” you will always be!

And all those voices who gathered collectively

At the summer home of the Kritik

To voice the final verdict. Guilty.

Living with,

The anticipation,

Anticipatory grief,

Facing this,

Facing aging parents,

In the presence of memory loss

Knowing that each statement will be forgotten immediately

That the next fall could be the coups-de-grace

That lands mum or dad back in the hospital

For the last fracture and sepsis

Knowing this yet persisting in the normality,

“as if” everything remains normal,

goes on as normal

continues as normal.

Facing my own slow foibles

The loss of keys,

Leaving stuff everywhere,

The shoulder and hip pain,

The slow reduction in ambition

The absent libido.

Issues with memory slowly creeping into consciousness.

I fully accept the decay,

And marvel at how modernity has been so successful in preserving the body

At the expense of the mind and soul.

(The indignity of the ICU still fresh.)

How does one conduct oneself?

In the presence of such an awareness?

In the face of such knowledge?

How does one accept the reality?

What is the myth to hold on to here?

What is the Midrashic interpretation useful to deal with this?

What is the theology of dementia?

Are there myths to hold this new reality?

Does God suffer from memory loss?

Which religion allows for such heresy?

How does one perform rituals to celebrate such decline?

What are their shape?

Is there blood?

“do not go gently into the night”

Thomas tells his father:

But mine is so at peace!

So wondrous he has survived!

Hitler, the Anschluss, -kindertransport- England

The HMS Dunera, U boats, Australia, Tatura

London, The Blitz,

Now 95 he boasts of his isometrics!

His abs firmer than mine!

His shofar blowing as vigorous as ever.

Yet I cannot accept the way he can, so blithely

At least not yet,

I cannot go so gently into the night,

Not yet…

It all stems from that trajectory

Of protest

At the way things are, ever since childhood,

The way things are supposed to be

The way our teachers and authority figures

Projected the Rabbinic God into our childhood psyches

The “Mashal of the King” coming to me only later,

A tyrant with such power,

He can gouge the eyes of his violinist [1]

In the Beshtian parable

In order to hear his favorite piece

Repeatedly, with such passion

He tortures for his pleasure.

I refuse our projections of power,

Our genuflections and rituals to this tyrant,

My heresy is complete in the flames of the crematoria [2]

There is no other path now.

It is so lonely however,

Without my father’s naïve faith

Borne of centuries of Oberlander frumkeit

No community of non-believers

No rituals of heresy,

No ark of post-modern morality to worship,

Only the nightmarish landscape of darkness

Terrorism and

A winter of discontent.

Facing worst of all,

My own character deficits

They indict me consistently,

Disallowing me the authority to speak this way

To think the heresy,

After all

Centuries of Rabbinic authority

The ‘ecclesia’, the Mesorah, the men I still respect for their scholarship

Believers all of them!

(Rav Soloveitchik, A.J.Heschel, R. Auerbach, R. Kook, The Leshem, R. Eliyashiv,

Reb Nachman’s quantum Hassidut)

Men of greater intellect for sure,

Greater spiritual stature,

I even believed their rhetoric-so masterful

Covering up for the divine with powerful Lurianic myths

Of intra-divine fracture…

Even the Kritik laughs at me!

Even at this you are a failure!

A failure of belief-Emunah.

The slow decline also affects courage

The courage to not believe

In the hidebound theologies

The outmoded beliefs in a good God

In the refusal to accept Auschwitz for what it is

And the peer pressure, the community

And its beloved Rabbi, who, at times of weakness,

Makes me feel God is possible,

Degeneration of all biological life

Physical and mental

Slowly mostly

Punctuated by crises

Of the flesh

Emergency rooms ICU rehabilitation,

Then return,

Slightly lessened,

Slightly diminished and so the cycle repeats.

Facing the ultimate

Demise,

Slowly,

What do we think or say on the way down?

The slow drowning

What? I’ll tell you!

A Hymn to no-body

Paul Celan my Rebbe.

[1] There was a king who loved music but his real passion was the violin. A fiddler was brought to him to play and one particular melody captivated him. He instructed the musician to play this melody several times a day. After a time the musician grew weary of the tune and found it hard to play it with the same passion as before. To rekindle the fiddler's love for his favorite melody, the king was advised to summons a new audience every day. Strangers were brought into his palace who had never heard the melody. This arrangement seemed to work. A new audience stirred the fiddler to play with enthusiasm again until there was no one left to invite. What to do? It was decided to blind the musician so that he never see a human form again(Another kinder, more Besht-like version is that he became blind) He then sat before the king and whenever the king sought to hear his favorite tune he would simply say "Here comes someone new, one who has never heard you play before!" And musician would play his tune with the greatest joy.

[2] The story of the Beis Yisroel comes to mind...He once asked Rabbi Lau's older brother who had nurtured him during their internment in a concentration camp the following questions..."were you there?" yes replied Lau "were you by the crematoria?" yes replied Lau "did you see the smoke?" yes replied Lau "did you see the heilige Bashefer go up in the smoke?" Lau was silent.