Prisoner Without Bars

LIKE A PRISONER WITHOUT BARS

I stand fixed in my cell,

They tell me there is a way out

An exit strategy,

If only,

I would recover,

Keep this Halacha or that

Learn this Masechta or that

Have more faith,

Those old familiar voices (the kitik inside my head)

Here in the Holy City,

It is quiet.

The street observes the Sabbath too you know!

The calm and sensory relief from the noise of bustling traffic

Envelopes her stoned houses and communal buildings.

This of course, only exacerbates my guilt!

This brick of basic observance…the Shabbat!

As a human construction,

The brilliant mind of ancient prophets and scribes

Foreseeing the need for this sacred day

Brought to fruition,

Today!

Acts as a further indictment of my doubting faith.

I could just walk away

Go other places

Blunt this feeling

Understand the social trajectory of human creative thought

Realize the common historical

cross-cultural patterns of religion and myth

As I have done,

But why does it still hold me then?

Why do I love the silent streets?

Knowing the system that produced this, needs

People who believe

Who practice

Obsessively

Who will throw stones if it is violated,

A medieval trade.

In jail,

Those I learn with I cannot talk to,

Those I pray with I cannot learn with,

And the others do not even understand the problem!

Like the couple last night who are Baalei Teshuva from WACO Texas

(!)

Their certainty was stifling,

Their belief, professed of course, in public without shame,

was insufferable,

And their deafness to my subtle view of the divine was frustrating.

I am a prisoner

Of my own making

A community of one

The bars remain in my illusion

Holding me in

Restraining me from further growth

Knowing there is an outside

Yet mistrusting what they are selling

Afraid of losing my partner in the process

And those whose naive approval I still need.

How painful the double life is

As if

The Rabbi does not know

As if

He does not get “complaints”

But more painful is my mediocrity

Not to have carved out a system of thought

Knowing full well how I mistrust such systems

Of having nothing but grief to offer…

Of my inability to get past the fact of God’s inaction

In the face of a million and a half babies who went up in smoke filled

crematoria, the stench of THAT does not escape me for a moment

And infects every thought of a benevolent deity.

The Shul as a jail

Where the other prisoners shockle with wide brimmed black hats

Tallis over their heads

Tsitzis dangling out and longer than the black jackets

Like a white stream of faith pouring from their certainty.

Proudly demonstrating their commitment to Halachic minutiae.

Shouting the credo aloud!

“lesakein olam bemalchut shaddai”

(as if God is hard of hearing)

or… “yehei shmei rabba”

fulfilling the rabbinic dictum,

that he who screams this, will be rewarded…

All this profession of outer faith

All this God talk..

All this inner emptiness..

Now nauseates me.

I feel literally claustrophobic

And must run away

But my shthender protests!

How can you leave me!

What will people think?

You know your wife will ask Morty where you are!

And there will be consequences!

Even worse the jail of the past!

I am forced to drive my mother in-law and wife to listen

to Tova Lichtenstein last week,

along with 200 adoring women.

Her erudition and delivery is flawless

Her derision of Hassidim fervent,

Her love of learning as the Rav’s daughter, expected

Her devotion to her husband’s use of secular poetry, refreshing,

But her defense of him, curious, as she carved out his truth:

Between the Haredi world of scholarship

and her put down of pop culture

“He only meant hi-brow…Nothing after the 17th century interested him.”

As if this gave him some kind of hechsher validation.

The next day I am feeling nostalgia for those years spent in Boston with

the Rav, I owe him so much, what a transference!

What an authority figure for me!

As he validated the schizofrumkeit of Torah and Madaa

Of secular knowledge alongside Torah

Of the divided soul of Adam

Of the Lonely Man of Faith.

How many years I was spellbound until I realized the untenable

Quicksand this really was, for my soul.

Hassidut was my therapy..

It spoke to the soul not the mind

And was a real barrier to the Brahman Boston intellectual elite.

It also provided an real intellectual path

even though it professed the mystical.

The nostalgia quickly turned to guilt,

and a sense of betrayal

For after all,

This Sunday evening room filled with sane, normal people in Skokie

Was such a light relief to the black Rogers Park Haredi orthodoxy!

Yet even here I was a prisoner of the post…

Postmodern and Post rational, post centrist orthodoxy

Post all these doctrinal differences.

The sense of middle ground as she admitted and well-articulated,

The path of her father and husband was the “Brisker”,

proudly announced,

Yet she failed to acknowledge the rejection of the real Brisker dynasty,

The other side of the family who had expelled them of course,

For their straying from the extreme Brisker path

and their approaches to secular learning, and their avowed Zionism.

This centrism could not hold even in Artscroll/Lakewood America,

And so, the elegiac tone was not merely for her mourning

the recent loss of her husband,

it also encompassed her father’s legacy.

In this deep frame of depression

I faced the week

But the universe was kind!

There was a key to the door of the jail the next morning in an email.

Theology of Absence- Interview with Yishai Mevorach, an editor

of Rav Shagar’s writings.

by Alan Brill

Brill writes:

“The students and colleagues of Rav Shagar each developed different aspects of his thought. Rav Yair Dreyful, his co-founder of Yeshivat Siach Yitzhak emphasizes the emotive and personal existential value of Torah and mizvot. Some of his students, emphasize the need to re-integrate mysticism and meditation, of Rebbe Nachman, Chabad, Zohar, Rav Zadok, and Rebbe Kalonymus Kalman Shapira. Others prefer intellectual discussions of post-modernity, language games, paradox, and Israeli society. Some of his students learned from him a need to be open and found paths in psychotherapy, poetry writing, filmmaking, and scholarship. Yishai Mevorach, one of the editors of the Rav Shagar’s writings, looked where he was pointing and went forward into the chaos. The universe is kind!” [1]

As if I was being given a message

Despite your jail!

There are no bars!

This trajectory of yours is shared with others,

Who struggle with the same writers and Rebbes,

Who see chaos and a post-Holocaust nightmarish world without God

Yet do not wish to give up on our tradition!

But remain in the space between tradition and modernity.

Soloveitchik and Lichtenstein lived in a pre-postmodern era

Where history meant fact

And philosophy meant certainty

Where science meant optimism in the future of mankind,

But now?

After Auschwitz

After all went up in flames.

Including certainty and faith.

How could you continue as if

It had never happened?

In this new Jail, I now reside

The bars may not be there

But emotionally I feel them

Constraining my flight from this overwhelming task

Not to leave this world without making sense of the desolation.

I run from it every day

I fill the day with everything BUT this duty.

Except for moments like these

In the Holy City

Which beckons even me

To respond

With a new hallucination.

Here there is clarity.

Our task?

To see the vertical only in the horizontal

We can no longer afford the luxuries of religious fervor

Our hands upward in prayer to the Silent One above

No

We need a moratorium on the god word

A cessation of hyper religious expression in public

As long as those horrors out there,

The genocide and mass murder,

The child slavery and global exploitation of the poor continues,

The collusion of global corporations with international banks and

politicians in an unholy alliance that make the rich even richer,

And of course, the destruction of climate and mother earth,

Stop all the piety!

Stop the self-indulgence

The feel-good sanctity

The frumkeit

Please!

Because in fact we are all in this jail without bars, together.

[1] Mevorach recently published a book called Theology of Absence: On Faith after Chaos (Resling Publishing, 2016) 171 pp, [Hebrew] where he is developing a postsecular, post-modern theology from Rav Shagar. (Resling publishes translations of works of literary and philosophic theory.)