The vacated space of the Chalal hapanui… חלל הפנוי
Where bechirah runs amock
Radical freedom’s dark side
Bears down heavily-
The price of existence outside Him
The imperfection of finitude
We, who bear His gevurot
Creation as catastrophe
The very weight of the (apparent) tzimtzum , surely כפשוטו.
We suffer the atrocities..
Worse, powerless as onlookers,
I now understand the millions of fellow Jews watch
The unfolding Shoah, with more compassion than ever
For their sense of impotence.
Knowing that beyond reward and punishment
And all the tired theodicies
Good and evil,
victim and perpetrator,
Lies this hidden intuitive sense
That Being, Mind, and the order of things
Has made space within Himself for all the horror
Of all history, the failed experiment of creation and
its human nadir.
That for his Chessed to thrive
The DIN must be vomited, expelled, demonized,
And expressed in the murderous acts of the enemy to this day.
However comes along the adept,
The shaman who has already surrendered
Knowing the murderous enemy lies within
That somehow he, as onlooker, is complicit
For accepting reality as somehow good.
When Dinur testified at the Eichmann trial
His apoplexy forcing him to confront the possibility
That inside each of us -given the right conditions- we too
Could exhibit the same murderous impulses, if banal-
What might he say looking into the Gazan tunnels?
Peering into that deep darkness
Might he see the same barbarous acts in himself?
What might I say in my ever ambivalence,
“horrific but understandable”?
Not excusing their behavior for a second,
Not even parsing the implacable conflict since 1948
Nor the self-righteous thuggery of the settlers
On the contrary
Holding the past etched in memory
(The Kabbalah of the crematoria
The holiness of the smoke rising of plumes of white bone-ash
And all ensuing genocides since)
Inspired by the technology of killing
The doubting Thomas looks into the Gazan tunnels
To a new era of psychic terrorism.
Out there
and the horror of accepting this occurring holographically within.
When will this be enough?
Is that the definition of geulah?
When the divine is finally exhausted, emptied of its non-divine
Watching all this from its Elysian heights?
She is a jealous mistress
Schechinah remains in the rising smoke, the charred victims,
And now in the bloodied hands of the drugged murderers
She wear black in the tunnels, out of sight,
(like in Reb Chaim Vital’s dream the Kotel circa 1777)
And in my own darkness, the Princess is lost
and beyond resuscitation by the zaddik
Beyond rescue in the depths of despair.
Yet it is in the darkest of hours
In the deepest tunnel
In the hopeless heart
That the only attitude, the possible response must be
Further surrender
deeper silence
a screaming Nachman-type silence
a bitul to the reality as it is
beyond pain
beyond atrocity
echoing the Piacezna in his deepest despair (Eish Kodesh)
a descent of such depths that even screaming איה מקום כבודו
will not propel one to כתר
it is a fall into the חלל הפנוי
that vacated space of acceptance
that this is all His רצון
