Of fathers and Sons
Born 5 years after,
Father a refugee
Haunted by betrayal
His stern eyes
The Prussian ritual
The moderation
The survival
The refusal to emote
The son
Too soft
Crying too much
Evoking his rage
Skin color too olive
(Unlike the Viennese pallor)
The German nanny
The abuse
The hours under the stairs in the darkness
The fear evermore of the dark
The son asks for a blessing
Father is 101 years old, now
He places his hand on the son’s head
He hears the first word of the blessing
יברכך
And breaks down
Fathers and sons:
All his life
Unconsciously bearing the father’s survivor guilt
Trying to make sense of this insanity
Rushing to this or that solution
Kook, Chabad, Carlebach, Breslov
Freud, Jung, Hillman,
SHATZ, Frank, Scholem,
BESHT Degel Nachman
Only to be dashed against the rocks of reality
Theology implodes
The addictions that promised momentary solace
Work, rage, ETOH, porn, validation in religion, hospital army
Nothing alleviates the impending sense
That all the struggles
All the rationales
All the texts and trajectories of theological understanding
Of the rational left hemisphere,
Leave this cosmic gap
This holy vacuum
A Chalal hapanui
Of the heart
As if
Everything that moved, motivated and pushed
This child
Who already at nine,
Sensed his impending demise
Fast forwarded 70 years
Seeing his image facing his death
Without meaning
Awaking in a panic in the night.
Now at the end of things
The end of his prime
Having solved nothing
Found nothing
Dis-covered only we are reflecting a gaping chasm
Between doctrine and reality
Theology and absence
Meaning and insanity
That all language and truth went up in the smoke of the crematoria
(Anything less would be a disservice to the memory of the victims.)
He throws up his hands
In defeat
Refusing to accept old orthodoxies
Unbelieving the new latter-day saints
Realizing its mimicry
A pantomime of sorts
Left alone
Facing the failure
Of nerve
Of daring
Or heresy
We have awoken from a 70-year-old coma
(like Choni)
But unlike his venture into the Beis Midrash
We
See the fragments of what once was..
The vibrant yeshivos now reconstructed
Like zombies
Like never before
Thousands sitting and learning
Shteiging away
And hassidic look-a-likes
Piously shockling in their designer shtreiml’s
What is our task?
The task I failed at?
To pick up the fragments,
To view what we can reconstruct,
To salvage whatever we can from the rubble
Of millenia-filled sacred texts,
To make sense of what makes sense
In this nightmarish post-Tremendum world
Where nothing has been learned
From those exhortations to be kind
But so much from the minutiae of halachic constructions.
Let’s see which texts were predictive
Which Masters understood the darkness within
Who foresaw the catastrophe?
Nothing has changed outside the texts
Man’s inhumanity-to-man persists unabated
The ferocity in the heart of man
The dark soul within
This demonic soul
Did we have a Nietzsche? A Kafka? A Simone Weil?
Who could hold both the weight of tradition and the insanity of genocide?
Would the Piacetzna have said and claimed what he wrote
before his deportation
About Divine Weeping
Had he known a million babies went up in smoke?
Awakening from this coma
We too failed,..al chet
For we too gave up on the Ribbono shel Olam
(As the Klausenberger Rebbe claimed that first Yom Kippur
In the DP camp.)
Facing failure
Refusing the old doctrines
We are left in this gap
Of Holy dis-belief
Of Holy atheism
Of Holy apikorsus
This, my father,
Is what I have to transmit to my sons
This will disappoint you no doubt
For you believed in simple Emunah
And hated my forays into Midrash and Chassidut
“he thinks too much”
Maybe you are right
maybe the only way forward
Is survival alone,
And transmitting the doctrine to the next generation
But you forgot once again this pesty kid
Born five years after
Condemned to struggle
Yearning for the Great father in heaven
Yet giving Him the finger
For what he did to His children
And still asking you to bless me.
