The Secret of Schechina Be-Galuta

The Divine feminine,

Lost in the world of reality

Drowning in the mathematical precision of Halacha

And the black and white world of (teva) nature.

The Lost Princess remains swooned in the water castle [1]

Awaiting the Zaddik who knows the healing powers of the ten pulses.

And those addictions that pull me down,

For work, the use of time, the obsessions of the heart, the rage;

The Degel tells me, are happening to her too,

Mirrored in my soul.

Does this raise the stakes?...or comfort me?

How to live life with this gnosis?

As if, my troubled life, in fact all tragedy

Is but her screaming for attention.

The doubting Thomas, this familiar Kritik in the head

Pulls me further down into the blotte

The rational mind used to be so certain

But not so lately.

Who is She after all?

I know of her as mother but beyond?

In Her absence only is the gaping hole in my heart

And indicator of her lasting power.

Has she joined Her?

What does that mean for me?

Mother is no more

And Her absence points me to the eternal Mother

She incarnated,

And the pain is unbearable.

Surprised by my level of grief,

I turn to the texts of comfort

And the rituals of mourning

Hoping for an insight

Even if non logical

A hint a feeling, a Wordsworthian intuition

Embedded in a millennium of wisdom

The twists and turns of minhag

Envelop me in discussions of behavior

The expression of grief socially,

All the while allowing me the inner freedom to grieve

And await insight as I pass through the rites of separation and loss.

My mother,

Larger than life

Who nurtured me inside her body

Bore me,

Trained me,

Prepared the life path for me

Albeit kicking and screaming, but in the end

I had no other choice,

No other path anyway like familiar

To the difficult sometimes impossible road

She set me on.

She was harder on herself

But that was little solace

For the little brown-skinned whiny kid

Whose romantic fantasies controlled

His waking life.

In this vale of tears

Things become clearer slowly

Understanding deepens

And death looms larger

As it takes more and more of my beloved.

Is it because death is inevitable?

In the face of such finality

Where all is levelled

No matter who

No matter what has been accomplished

No matter how pious

How beloved?

A new perspective evolves

Molded from the pain.

The remains of the day,

What is left in the gaping loss?

In the vacuum she left behind

Unwillingly taken from this world

Is her life’s motivation,

Her drive,

Her uncompromising demands,

Her self-critique,

Of all those who connected to her

She held me to the greatest standard

Demanded most from me

But was most loyal to me.

I tried not to disappoint

But she would never let on

Always demanding more.

If Yosef Karo has his muse, it was his mother

Who drove him in Maggid Mesharim

If Reb Chayim Shumlevits ran to Kever Rachel

It was crying “mama, mama Chaikel is du”

If the Lelover Rebbe’s eyes rolled up

By his Shabbes tish, he could be heard mumbling “mamale mamale”

Now I must take my place

With those who have lost the living presence of the great mother

And settle for the memories reflections and loss.

In this haze I must divine what she might want

How she would react

What she would ask of me.

It comes easily now

But for how long?

In memory we will now meet again

In the heart of pain, we will converse

In the sorrow of loss, I will continue to love

She who bore me

Nurtured me

Demanded so much.

With mum now part of Her,

The stakes are raised

Possibly too high for me

For now all pain is her’s too

And my task in rescuing the Schechina

Becomes more urgent.

There is no time to waste

All she demanded becomes more urgent

I’m not getting younger

There is so much to accomplish

In these tears

In the unbearable pain

I am being summoned

By her, by Her.

The secret

Those ten pulses

The healing

Of the Lost Princess.

[1] Rebbe Nachman’s Water Castle, Sippurei Maasiyot