Midas Hadin

ברא -אהלים :לוא אמר ברא ה', שבתחלה עלה במחשבה לבראתו במדת הדין, ראה שאין העלום מתקיים, הקדים דמת

Rashi to Genesis 1:1

Imagine

In the place of NOT-God

Where history and suffering cohabit

Where blind hatred and genocide flirt

And the angel of death moves with impunity

And my mother knows what is happening to her and is mortally afraid

In this space, the harms I have caused others accumulate

Bearing down weightily, confronting me with “j’accuse!”

It is precisely here

Where the NOT-God/Schechina dwells,

In the heart of darkness,

Forced, wrenched and torn from the Divine pleroma

Without her consent, banished from the father’s table

In the beginning….before time.

Imagine

How she must to suffer alongside us

Eternally yearning to be reunited with her GOD

But prevented by the same divine decree

That divine self-indulgence, pique and experiment (kivyachol)

In humankind (Midas HaDin)

Like a mad scientist in a laboratory who just cannot give up

And the rats on their treadmills are going crazy.

If only He’d begun with Midas HaRachamim

What would it have looked like today

Orgies and fun? (God forbid!)

Too much loving?

Unconditional praise?

Certainly, the need to avoid so much destruction?

(The verse ״These are the generations of the heaven

and the earth when they were created״ (Gen. 2:4)

suggested to the rabbis the creation of prior worlds,

while the verse ״You carry them away as with a flood״ (Ps. 90:5)

was also interpreted to refer to the destruction of these prior worlds.

The Zohar (1:262b) suggests that God did not actually build these

prior worlds, but only thought about building them.

That this world was not the first that God created

was believed to be indicated by Isaiah 65:17: “For,

behold, I create new heavens and a new earth and the

former shall not be remembered nor come to mind.”

Zohar Hadash identifies the prior worlds as totaling 1,000,

as does Or ha-Hayim 1:12, which states that before God created this world,

He created a thousand hidden worlds. These hidden worlds were

created through the first letter, aleph. That is why the Torah,

in the report of the Creation of this world, commences with the second

letter, bet. The existence of the 1,000 worlds is linked to the verse

You may have the thousand, O Solomon (S. of S. 8:12).

Weren’t those worlds enough to show him

the devastating effects of Midas Ha-Din?

Now condemned to a history of divine gevurot

Infecting down below every interaction burdened with these kelippot

Splitting our hearts into chambers of good and evil.

Imagine

Moments of grace

Where She glimpses of the divine, transcending time and space

And one can feel the presence of His absence

Where a wormhole allows Her to gaze

And fill with desire

Taking me along for the ride.

The weight of being is lifted

By a delicate unbearable lightness

As if the anchor that chains me to the inexorable sense

of progress of time

Time passing,

Time wasted,

Time running out,

Is lifted momentarily.

This Midas Ha-Din

That took her from me

Producing an utter grief

This overwhelming Kaddish

Transforming the grief into memory

A spiritual cardio-conversion,

As this year of mourning comes to a close

I wonder whether the recitation was for her, the Schechina or myself.

Is it not possible…

This brilliant psychodrama of Kaddish

The obsessive repetitiveness of it,

The public display of it,

Its tone and cadences,

The swaying and the steps back and forward

The body in motion with the heart

Is, in fact a Kaddish for myself?

That as the year winds up

The cessation of its recitation looming

A new anxiety

Having been baptized a couple of thousand times

I must face the silence

The no-recitation when the service calls for those members

of this exclusive club to stand and be counted

Those whose entrance fee has been paid with tears

I must stand down

The sheer terror of no mourning no response no expression.

Can I not continue to say Kaddish forever?

Why am I stopping in two weeks?

If I feel I must

If only for my own demise?

(this is not a Halachic question!)

Imagine

In the place of NOT-God

There is a silence too

A not saying of Kaddish

For the worlds He destroyed

For the laboratory rats sacrificed for His eternal experiment

The silence that screams in the Sahara Desert

The silence representing the failure to adequately mourn the loss

The enormity of the bereavement

The silence after every life breathed no longer

For the permanent absence

For His allowing the angel of death free reign

For the Midas Ha-Din.