Rosh Chodesh Elul
It still sends shivers down my spine
“melech basodeh” “ponim sochakos”
We are told by the Altar Rebbe
He is smiling a shmeichl on His face (unlike Yom HaDin!)
The shofar is blown and its piercing shriek reminds me of the Zohar (Pinchas)
Where we are distracting the divine dinim (rage)…
A time for introspection, self-inventory, communal analysis,
personal housecleaning…
But how does an atheist continue such praxis?
Why does he feel the shiver down the spine
in the presence of an absent divine?
In an uncaring heaven,
Where the spiritual Kabbalistic wire diagrams maybe true,
The Kabbalistic framework might be convincing,
The Leshem speaking as he does, to my soul,
But the cold eternal quiet of the cosmos
stares back at us from ever more powerful telescopes
Reminding us of how insignificant we really are
in the cosmic scheme of things
Each day new discoveries of our impotence
in the threat of new meteors colliding or near misses
(“a moon and half distance away last week alone!”)
Each week a new atrocity
Man’s inhumanity to man..
Yet the heart is dead to the reality of past generations
To the past pieties and moralisms.
Yet, in this wasteland, this dark spiritual landscape
the spine still shivers!
The atheist feels the pinch!
The cold morning vapors of “selichos weather”
As I embrace the fall weather impending
(As the dew covers the windshield on our way to daven,
Dad pinching my big toe in the frosty London morning
Now uncovered from the warm sheet
The big toe reminds me of selichos.)
Only the head is alienated
But the legs drag me back to shul.
Maybe we got it all wrong?
This whole kiruv movement
We got infected by the sequence doctrine first-Halacha second
“Bring ‘em back to Judaism with rational argument”
Rabbi Weinberg’s revolution following Chabad.
A whole Artscroll generation infecting our minds
What if…
It’s the other way around
After all we teach our 2 years olds to recite the Sh’ma
Without any theology!
We teach Vayikra to first graders
and the sacrificial cult is their first taste of Torah!
No rhyme or reason for that!
Just the sacred words themselves, with honey on the letters as inducement.
So too our approach should be “NO THEOLOGY”
stop talking this God Talk-this Hashem speak, as if we’re Baalei T’shuvas
Shut up already!
Just do! Perform rituals! Mindfully without doctrine…
retire the “lesheim this or that”!
Let the shivers run down your spine!
With no ideology!
Feel them!
Feel Elul!
Feel Mitzvot
And perhaps
AFTER a lifetime of doing
Maybe
Just maybe
You will have an inkling of the Divine!
