If creation was the expulsion of DINIM
From within the pleroma of the infinite
An infinite desire to rid itself of itself,
Of its GEVUROT, once and for all,
Then the world as is, the cosmos, ourselves
Represent this divine refuse
(remember Jung’s first dream, a turd falls from sky onto his father’s altar!)
Then its culmination, terminus ad quo, its nadir
When time, space and people coalesced all at once
(the reverse of the High Priest in the holiest place at the Holiest time
Pronouncing the Ineffable Name)
Which allowed for the supreme manifestation of
GEVUROT/DINIM/the demonic
To come to a crashing climax
When history stopped being history
And the divine expulsion of Lucifer was complete
In the ovens of Auschwitz.
For surely,
As Kabbalah teaches,
The very mystery of the universe
The single claim above all others
Is that “what s below is mirrored above” and vice versa
This mirroring of the divine,
The verisimilitude,
Manifests both its good and dark side (kelippa/sitra achra)
And in this paradoxical unity of upper and lower worlds
(Where Rabbi Akiva warns his students embarking on a trip to
the upper worlds
“do not split between the upper and lower waters!”)
The illusion of reality, the world, history and time
Must be pierced by the visionary adept,
As part of his worship,
Who must see beyond geography, even the laws of physics
and the needs of self,
And suffer the evil from the above
Since he “knows” the divine disconnected self (Schechina)
is suffering down here too.
He is a knight of the Matronita. The Lost Princess
And where She goes he follows
In Her suffering
He too feels the pain and longs for her reunification with Her consort.
For the exile of the human spirit below
Is mirrored above in an infinite fractured divine,
And this infinite divine pain is felt below
So the bloodletting and burst of genocidal fury
Against the chosen people
In the most refined kultur of Beethoven and Goethe,
Must be seen as an unleashing of a demonic force
That defies sociopolitical and historical analysis
Leaving a gap of understanding after all the historical facts
have been rationally analyzed and hypothesized.
This gap expressed only as the demonic,
Reflecting rather a Divine self-wounding of infinite proportion.
Resisting ideologies of theodicy and theoria that might justify, explain,
rationalize or even accept guilt (a very Rabbinic trope),
Resisting doctrines of good/evil, reward/punishment, vicarious suffering of
the righteous servant etc etc,
(Which held the faithful for a millennia
Who until hitherto were
Accepting of responsibility for each pogrom
Encoded in the liturgy, piyyutim and chronicles,
But no longer of use)
In the face of a million babies in the smoke filled chimneys
Of the crematoria.
So where to turn to?
In the infinite silence of the transcendent?
To make any sense of it, (forget Hester Panim)
Or jettison all theologies and theodicies once and for all?
The Kabbalist turns to midrashic and zoharic tropes
Of the feminine divine- Schechina,
Weeping as she left the Temple court, Jerusalem circa 70CE
The weeping city alone,
Or the hypostatic Rachel crying from her tomb in Bethlehem.
Watching her children chained into exile.
He turns to that Schechina, lost and disconnected from Her consort
Trapped down here in a world of demons/kelippot
Unable to reunite or bring the Messiah,
The weeping black widow by the Kotel,
And sits on the ground weeping on her behalf reciting Tikkun Rachel and
Leah at midnight.
In these tears he inhabits a new silent landscape, the wasteland.
In a black and white movie where all is grey,
He no longer sees his suffering in theological categories
Having spent centuries following the Lurianic kavvanot, tikkunim and zivugim,
Rituals and ascetic practices designed to get noticed upstairs,
To fix things upstairs,
Rolling in the snow, Tikkunei shelleg-mortifications and fasting.
He must now find a new path in a genocidal era
With no hope for deus ex machina
Or Messianic figure,
(for if Elijah should arrive now-he would turn him away
Having ignored the screams of a million babies and their mothers)
No, he returns to the paradigms of protest and pathos
Of the parables of a king weeping in his inner chamber
Lamenting the loss of his people
Unable to be consoled
And finds deep compassion within
Despite a resentment the size of Munich
And a gaping wound in the heart as deep as Hades.
For, as the hassidic masters claimed
The only path now is one of mittuk hadin,
The holographic Din within him, the demonic side of him,
By comforting the Lost Princess as she lies swooned in the Water Castle
And feeling her pain as she sees the infinite loss
(Like the night Reb Zisha awoke to the screams of a million babies
Running away from that little shtetl Ushpetzin
200 years before they fired up the ovens).
Or carry the weight of the Divine בכי
Like the Piacetzna instructed us before his deportation to Treblinka
To not focus on one’s own pain,
Rather be a merkava for Her pain
As She dies alongside the victims
An infinite weight to bear.
From that first tzimtzum of infinite contraction
A sea of infinite pain produced by this huge self-inflicted
Intra-divine vacuum/wound,
Down to the long history of man’s inhumanity to man,
Culminating in the horrors of the “years of Fury”,
And the current technology of the killing fields.
The adept collapses all time into the mirror of his own soul
Seeing across the infinity of space
With his third eye,
Seeing this demonic dark side of the divine
In himself too,
And realizing he alone can hold this paradox.
All he can utter
Despite this travesty
Is
יתגדל ויתקדש שמי רבא
Magnified and Sanctified be Thy Holy Name
We are born into this world
We die in this world
The Holy Name was there before us
The Holy Name remains after we are no longer here
We are forced to focus on the eternal Thou
Not our mortal selves
Not even our beloved losses
We focus on the mystery behind the Holy Name
The unfathomable grief and tragedy of life
And death all subsumed in the mystery of the Holy Name.
And develop compassion for His infinite, eternal pain.
This was never about us
Our biography
Neither our narrative
Nor our ending
We are merely the latest station in a long historical/mythical journey
Who tragically, were witness to
Or survivors of,
The culmination of a series of down-chaining
demonic forces that landed on our timeline
And in our backyard,
Of pure Wotan will, force, desire and bloodletting,
Unleashing a new age of genocidal fury.
What can he do
This adept?
But weep..,
And carry this dark side of the divine.
