Where I Feel Most Comfortable

Where I feel most Comfortable

In those in between spaces

Between the neurological hemispheres of certainty

Where nothing is proven

Where doubt is validated

Where black and white are refused.

In the twilight more is revealed

Things happen there

New life-forms bubble up

New insights and imaginations

Hidden from the sunlight of day

It is those in-between characters that

Teach me

Not the holier-than-thou types.

Nor the criminals…

But those who have struggled

To make sense of the absurd

And reflect the self-honesty

(So difficult and courageous)

Which I lack.

For as I age,

Everything becomes less clear

All certainty has faded

And belief lies shattered on the rocks

Like an old shipwreck.

My comfort lies in the space between

I am drawn to the ocean-side

Between land and sea,

Knowing full well the carnage it caused not long ago

Its rage and murderous intent

Although calm now.

I am drawn to those figures in history who never figured it out

Whose radical doubt about humanity

Fueled their ethical intent

(refusing some divine code from above.)

I am moved by their spirituality in the face of nihilism

(The cancer that eats me alive, slowly.)

And yet,

I remain moved by the warmth of ritual life

The smells of Erev Shabbat

The slow circular hassidic dance after kabbalat Shabbat

The excitement of learning through Friday night-the secrets of Torah

The sense of the divine in the sacred words and texts,

In the space between the black letters…

The sounds of zemirot in harmony

The feel of my grandchildren’s growing small heads

As I bless them weekly,

The daily gratitude to the universe/cosmos/divine

For being alive

For the blue blue sky and azure ocean

For the sounds of a Schubert impromptu,

(Pollini’s interpretation of the drie klavierstucke [1] that still brings tears)

For the beauty of a girl in a Keats ode,

For my children’s accomplishments out there in the real world

For my patient’s gratitude and acknowledgement.

It has become these small things

Not the theological issues and crises I used to be absorbed in

That now form the matrix of my thought.

I have been humbled by the mystery

Brought to my knees by the impossibility of my making sense of any of it,

Diminished by my own intellectual mediocrity,

Forced to face the immense scholarship so much better than my own

On the very subjects of theodicy and the texts of terror in my own tradition.

Facing again and again my failure to prevent the four nails

in my spiritual coffin

(That of evolutionary biology, astrophysics,

neuro-biology and the archeology of texts)

From sealing my fate precisely because I lack the intellectual tools to refute.

(The school of rhetoric and Epicurus won,

the schools of Apollo and Socrates lost).

I now reside in the space between my two hemispheres…

Fully accepting the Dawkins’ and Hawking’s and Hitchens’

arguments in the left hemisphere,

The rational mind fully attuned to the

Tyson DeGrasse formulation

(pre-digested for small minds like myself)

Fully accepting textual criticism and archeological refutations

of the claims of religious faith,

Fully accepting the biology of spirituality and the

predetermined genetic predictability of 99%

of our behaviors and the violence committed in the name of…

God/religion/church/mosque.

Yet also realizing the human spirit and

spiritual-psychic projections that history,

violently at times, provided

in the wonderful sacred texts of humanity as having value…

Yet also openly moved to tears

by the right hemisphere’s sensitivity to music, love, beauty and grace.

The little things that connect people,

the giving and receiving and social transaction of breaking

bread and drinking good wine with friends and colleagues.

The moments of intimacy in a long surviving marriage.

Between these two hemispheres that are so out of tune with each other

(The bicameral mind if you will)

The schizofrumkeit of living in both worlds

AND ACCEPTING BOTH the secular and sacred

Albeit never having been able to intellectually reconcile them

(An unacknowledged Soloveitchik paradox)

Knowing how young the human mind really is

on the evolutionary scale, how little we really

know of ourselves, looking into the mirror daily and seeing

less and less that makes sense,

Of my behavior, my foreboding, my rage,

my triggered responses, my inner spirit.

The knowledge of the darkness within the genocidal rage without,

that has failed to be explained by 100 years of psychology

and even kabbalah…The simple projection onto the divine

of all our traumas and hopes

The inner child wishing for certainty, hope and relief….

Embedded and prisoner of neurological pathways and neuronal circuitry

Of childhood traumas and epigenetic inherited grief

Unable to manage the software I wish to recalibrate

All this

Strung between

Spun between

No escape

Holding all this

Living through all this

The insanity of the belief system

With no respite

With no real alternative

I sing a song to tomorrow.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86CNMb6J7Iw