Teshuva Games

So fickle are my promises

Writhing in the sleepless nights

That right leg

That disc herniation -The mere knowledge of

the MRI does not help- The disc is stuck in the right L4

neural foramen ʻOh so this is how my patients writhe at night!ʼ

So fickle... Sensing His presence In the darkness... I

promise Like a scared adolescent If only... He Could

remove this 4 week old nightmare

Of disability

And pain.

So mythic, as it started Rosh Chodesh Tammuz

That ancient Sumerian- borrowed and demythologized- pagan!

Now haunts me at- nights worst. Must I have to survive the

“Nine Days” as well? “Please take it away!” I pray. I wonʼt

sin again! And I mean it! Back then. Nailed to the pain

The cross of aching hip and numbness

The inability to find a comfortable position

The tossing and turning for hours

And the morningʼs arrival of dawn without sleep.

Yet miraculously the day after Tisha Baʼv it eases

Just when I go to the surgeon!

Having refused to see him before

this sacred time of darkness and national mourning is over.

I would have done whatever he had said, prior

Just to be rid of the pain Surgery and all.

But now it eases

Although the nights continue, That nagging discomfort

That just prevents you from slipping into sleep.

And that hated vicodin

That loopy feeling followed by a soul disconnection

And days of constipation.

Never again!

Rather hold onto the pain

Watch it move

And rise in crescendo like the Halverson Passacaglia

Or the Pugnani-Kreisler-Preludium and Allegro

Which I listened to over and over in tears

Then calm slowly diminuendo Into a mere ache.

The slow agonizing improvement measured in weeks

Stripped me of personal dignity

Work, and above all the

concentration to study my sacred texts.

Obsessed as I was to meeting goals and finishing set goals and tractates

The pain refused my concentration

And disconnected me from the world.

But slowly it dawned on me

That my feelings about incarnation

of the divine “Hitlabshut” in the chasssidic parlance

And my insistence that this was in fact,

An originally Hebrew idea...Was now playing out in my body.

That not only the bright light side of the divine (chesed) is

incarnate

But also the darker strict justice the “Din” Is one I

had to learn endure and “carry” in my flesh

As a Merkava a vehicle

And suffer though this period of “Din” strict justice

Not only in time

But in the flesh In this body of pain I was

mirroring some divine trauma

And in suffering it I was somehow “sweetening”

The strict judgement.

Now, however

Weeks later

The promises

And the resolutions of the midnight darkness

Pleading with God

And the confessions

Sound hollow.

But this fickle nature I must surrender too.

For it is only by drowning in the divine grace

That I even have a chance of

sanity.

Ramanuja and my Masters tell me as much

Yet the inner Kritik

Never slumbers

Even now.

So I pray once again In my infidelity to You Lord

In my brokenness

In my surrender now

To the One who is willing

And desires only me.

The very word Teshuva In the mystical texts means

returning the “heh”

As in “tashuv Heh” תשוב –ה ʼ ה

Returning the Lost Princess

The Schechina, the Divine incarnate.

But for me it means returning the Heh

That soul I

lost In my pain In those horrific nights

Back to me... So I ask for it back

And in doing so

Ask to restore Her as well.

Age-ing

Now 60

do I have experience?

Authority?

to speak about ageing?

Watching the goings on at my Seder table

the oldest one present

I remain observing,

tired and jet lagged,

more souninterested

in the background jibber jabber

but also the Holy words of smart Torah

of the young ones.

No I am tired

even of the expected inspiration

which comes now

so rarely

and yearn for the quiet of the night

with George, coffee and a good cigar

speaking of aging and suffering and the Schechinah

and baffled why God would still wish this.

Only those who awake to cry and mourn for Her

Interest me now

For I too have joined the ranks of the weary and begin to

understand how She could possibly remain sane

After so many centuries of bloodshed and torture

And still believe in man.

Will I too wilt and lose memory like Dad?

and watch the slow decline with horror?

Oh the tragedy of it all

and I am part of the medical pharmaceutical industrial

machine that keeps them alive

participating in the grieving children of the stricken

with words of neurological wisdom.

So many ageing patients this trip

ill and stroked out

children looking for a sign a signal of possible return to

former glory

looking to me for what miracle?

I am so broken already by the sheer moral weight of

patient after patient

on ventilators in Herzog Hospital’s ward

a manifest desire

to fulfill some social and theological dictum called ‘sanctity

of life values’

But these comatose poor souls hang on

one by one

clinging to life

despite loss of

despite absence of

despite possible hope for return of…

But there is light…

the walks in the forest with my grandchildren

the talk and the infant banter

this wakes me up from the depression

and the sweet Jerusalem air

perfumed by the pine conespine

cones they pick up to paint for mother

as they ask me why trees bend down

and I tell them of young sapling trees like them

then taller parent trees- bending grandparent trees and

finally trees bent over with age which break and fall.

He stares at the tree stumps trying to figure out why?

“They break and are absorbed into the ground.”

I tell him

“Why are you not in the ground Dada?” he asks

I must look ancient to this 3 year old!

But the question allows me a space to see my aging

without terror

without a sense of loss

without a feeling of fatigue over the annual rituals.

The perfumed air at night as we go looking for the bright

desert moon

And dance on the street when we do

Gives me hope

That I will live on

In these tender lights

Dancing with me in a circle of three.

As I leave to return home

I do not know if and when

I do not know as I ask for a blessing from the patriarch

father

Whose tree is further bent over

and weep silently over the past

and the end of things

and the sheer tragedy of the forest’s secret

aged and knotted

before the soft pink skinned children

The Schechinah has such patience!

Sunset

Do not gaze at the sunset too long...

do not linger more than you have to,

knowing how hypnotic she can be,

for you must face what will happen shortly

so just marvel at the dying of another day.

You will grieve as the last sliver of gold gives way to a

hazy golden glow.. then nothing.

the sharp horizon is so unforgiving!

and we were taught it was only an iluusion!

that horizon of doubt

bein hashmashos

that halachic grey area

that vexed my father in law for decades

and self loss

leaving me now alone without the comfort of her presence,

alone in the twighlight.

Granted she leaves gracefully

almost imperceptibly,

dipping into the mikveh of the ocean

this gift of daylight

is now once again withdrawn

as if she has been dragged down by some unseen force

a hidden hand, a pharoah behind the mythical horizon.

Divine she remains, but now hidden, no longer powerful

her majesty has been compromised by another more

powerful force and in her wake is her demand

that I believe she will rise again tomorrow.

Her consort, the moon however is in full swing

blazing his own path across the darkening sky

yet we know well how dependent he remains upon the sun

despite her apparent absence.

Nevertheless he is capricious and no longer consistent

but dependent upon her monthly whims

waxing and waning like my own disbelief.

Its size reflecting its own heresy

its monthly crisis of faith

like a women's "friend" at times promising fertility

and joy at others, blood and rejection.

In this now almost darkness I must await her return

and find the belief in her willingness to light tomorrow’s

day so my only challenge is to survive the night

and rely aupon the wistful of the moon

So do not linger for too long

gazing at the dying of the sun

break the hypnotic illusion

for your tears will break your faith.

Learn to need the darkness

as the earth spins

and gives all their fare share.

Do not cry for her too long

for this is the very stuff of reality

as is your own dying

your own mortality

as you too will slowly sink behind the illusive horizon of

infinity into the mikveh of the ocean. 

Horizons

“And the earth shall be filled with the knowledge (of the

Lord) like the water covers the seas ”

Isa. 11.9

This is the explanation of the verse, for the sea represents

sof (the end point) [1] of all the spiritual levels (the lowest

point) which is malchut (the lowest divine sefirah of the 10

sefiros)... And this is also the archetypal middah of strict justice (din)

as cited in Talmud Gittin 10a “dina demalchuta dina” the

law of the land is (also) our law. [2]

And through using the middah of daas (holy intuition) one

can raise the spiritual manifestation of the divine in this

world from its lowest level of malchut (= sof = sea) to the

level of Bina its source above.

This changes the letter yam (malchut) to may (Binah

which is mem yud) which then makes the letters meimei

(construct of mey) or “waters of” chesed or lovingkindness.

All this transformation takes place through daas or holy

intuition. so that yam becomes mayim (yud mem becomes

mem yud mem) water.

Degel Machaneh Efraim Parshas Emor

This wonderful Torah of the grandson of the Baal Shem

Tov came to mind as I sailed this cruise ship into the

Atlantic with ocean surrounding me for 360 degrees.

His Torah equated the notion of the sea with the doctrine

of din or the archetype of strict justice, as if the sea has no

mercy, for it acts as a force of nature without regard to the

object of its “wrath”. Sometimes calm sometimes raging it

continues to respond to weather, wind and atmospheric

pressure ever since creation.

Against this fact of the natural order Rebbe comes to

teach us a spiritual lesson. That the word for the sea the

Israelites crossed as they left Egypt was Yam Suf the

Reed Sea, but suf also can be read as sof or the end, the

last one, the lowest point. In spiritual terms everything

down here on earth is a poor representation of what is

going on up there in the spiritual worlds. Suf or Sof then

represents the lowest of the sefirot the spiritual archetypes

called malchut.

Using a known pun of sof and suf with the classical

themein the Zohar equating the lowest rung on the

spiritual archetypal ladder of sefirot as malchut with din or

strict justice, he has connected the following themes:

sea=suf=sof madreigot=malchut=din

Through the inner work of the zaddik who makes use of

the hidden archetype called daas or “holy intuition”, an

experiential state rather than cognitive discursive

examination of reality, this lowest rung of spirituality

represented by pure blind justice can be elevated to its

source above, in the sefirah called Bina, represented by

the letters mem and yud or “mi”.3 The lowest rung of strict

blind justice can be elevated to the ascend to its source or

higher rung in the spiritual ladder called bina, which is

called “sweetening” by chesed that archetype that allows

for love and harmony and peace. Notice the letters mem

yud “mi” if inverted become yud mem or yam i.e sea.

Chesed is known by the character of water as in “meimei

chesed” or the waters of compassion. By transforming the

yam to mei the strict justice is tempered by the waters of

compassion in this letter mysticism.

3 I am reminded of the difference between mi meaning

who? versus mah meaning what? This is the Buberian IThou

vs I-it model of interpersonal relations. Ma

represents the discursive examination of reality typified by

the Soloveitchik’s Adam I who masters the world by

dominating it with objective science, industry and power. It

is based on the constant question mah=what? the very

basis of scientific inquiry. His Adam type II represents mi

or who? meaning the realtional-experiential form of

knowledge which is subjective rather than objective in

observation. This can only be accomplished by the

archetype of daas, intuition.

The Degel now goes back to that original verse in Isaiah:

“And the earth shall be filled with the knowledge (of the

Lord) like the water covers the seas”

How will this futuristic transformation of the world occur?

The prophet does not inform us. We are not told the

details. But Rebbe claims how this will take place. By

sweetening strict justice with kindness through that

mysterious element of daas, holy intuition. I interpret this

to mean when the world moves from the objective

experience of reality to the subjective intuitive experiential

form, then only will the strict justice and merciless “sea “ of

nature will be transformed into the mercy of a

compassionate world.

The verse he rereads now encodes this process as

follows: “umallah haaretz deah (and the earth will be filled

with knowledge) kamayim layam mechasim” (like the

water covers the sea)

umallah is an acronym for Elohim or God as working in the

world through His natural providence within nature not

beyond it. This Elohim form of the divine represents strict

jusice....like the laws of nature which appear immutable.

umallah=elohim=din=strict justice that is on the haaretzthe

earth until now, will -(through daas =) deah i.e. intimate

knowledge meaning holy intuition

kamayim layam mechasim: from

yam==sof=suf=malchut=din=strict justice be transformed

into mayim=chessed=binah=loving kindness.

Dad was right... on his way to Australia in the hold of the

Dunera.. a British merchant Navy vessel a POW ship used

to transport 2000 Jews in 1941 10 minutes a day exercise

on deck, he too saw the horizon of the Atlantic, once a

day, for 10 minutes running on deck with seamen prodding

the ragged Jews with their bayonets, in the back of the

thighs to move quicker, he too saw where heaven meets

earth 360 degrees: nothing but the blue ocean.

And now 70 years later on a luxury cruise liner I watch the

ocean around me nothing but blue the waves melt into

each other the surface undulating with dignity the cresting

surf white freshness and the pencil sharp horizon for 360

degrees once again. heaven meets earth in a visual circle

around this boat.

Those waves hypnotically force me to stare the undulation

and the wind swept surfaces that constantly move waves

and tides, currents and rivulets, swells and surf, white

caps and troughs, mountains and valleys of water never

ending in motion. Even the small effects of wind cause the

tiny ripples between the waves catch the eye in a

wondrous awe.

He told me to watch for the static electrical effects

between the surface of the water and the edge of the

metal ship at dawn and dusk he remembered those playful

lights: a son et lumiere show as he sailed towards

uncertainty leaving his loved ones behind at Hitler’s mercy.

As yet I have not seen them play for me. I am surely

unworthy of this natural display of divine humor.

This is literally the first time I have experienced the globe

the completely roundness of infinity

the border zone between the roundness of the earth the

absolute limits of my gaze as a circle

with no interruption of man’s building or even sight of land,

there are no other vessels in my sight and I am in awe of

mother earth once again in her boldness her finite

roundness facing the infinite sky

and the sheer massiveness of the great sea.

Do ships fall off the edge? or will science win out the day

in my head? I tell the steward i still belive in the flat earth

that he should warn the captain so we will not fall off the

edge. Remember those pictures of medieval sailboats

almost tipping off the map until one day a heretic taught us

otherwise and was burnt at the stake for it.

Remember the biblical water and the tehom, the deep

were already there when the Almighty lent His hand in

creating the world, so Genesis tells us, and I see how

primordial this body of water seems even now. The light

and the sun play off it with differing colors through the day

now it is pure silver other times grays of every shade. Blue

then green by the coast Mercurial in nature and hiding

another world beneath it represents the very nature of my

soul. But more than anything it teaches me abut the

horizon for we are told one can never reach the horizon

and this ancient mariner will not try the beliefs of man and

science! Yet there is it all around me so precise and

defined so razor edge thin and sharp where heaven and

earth meet 360 degrees around me on this ship.

Yet it remains forever unattainable and an image of

unreality placed within creation as an illusion but God

does not play games with us so what is its message? This

grand visual hallucination?

The infinite is beyond and for me must remain

transcendent. My work is with the finite and real but my

heart keeps pulling me there to that horizon and I know

that over there in unreality I will find peace of mind and

resolution and the place we call Eden.

It is as if I must learn to yearn without demanding

fulfillment I must learn even at this age to unlearn and

once again delay and defray look and gaze without

holding and owning without grasping and clutching to gaze

and let go repeatedly at this circle of unrealized an

unattainable infinity that surrounds me the ultimate truth.

For the Truth is like that horizon out there and a mirage

that will always escape me. Truth “out there” has always

escaped me and in my dis-belief, in my heresy

I remain sceptical of any truth. Truth went up in the flames

of Europe and in the ongoing genocides since no, I long

gave up on that doctrine.

Here I am at the center point of this mathematical mirage

in its center of the world alone for another impending

birthday looming large chronicles of wasted time and

failure appear in this ocean of life in the silence of the seas

holding their own secrets beneath.

Yet here I must remain in this center surrounded by this

infinity and accept my place and my inability to ever taste

it and somehow accept all that has happened the same

way my father sailed that fateful ship on the same ocean

with Nazi U-boats lurking beneath never knowing whether

he would ever reach shore alive.

And I must somehow transmit this secret to my children

and grandchildren the secret of this tension this paradox of

infinity and its mirage for ecstasy remains not within our

reach and we have no license to experience it in our ever

further struggling for mastery.

I must tell them that I was able to finally surrender for a

moment in time and accept my mortality my point in the

center unable to move one way or another in that giant

circle towards the infinite horizon but gaze lovingly at this

marvelous creation of paradox and learn to be for as long

as I am given and that is OK too.

Today the captain on this small catamaran allows me the

helm unexpectedly as the engine loses a cable requiring

him below I take the wheel and suddenly after three days

at sea I came alive!

Now responsible for the vacationing people on this 65 foot

vessel unaware that he has handed me the helm I feel the

wind in the sails and the blue waves flowing in from the

Atlantic around the Island of St. John.

I feel the Rebbe’s Torah reverberate “like the waters

covering the sea” and here the wind and water two of the

basic elements in this world combined to propel this boat

and myself flexing its resistant muscle in a trio so smooth

it was heaven a moment of excitement as I felt my old self

once again.

It was a cool thrill as I felt in the center of this archetypal

triangle of wind water and earth and the sun’s warmth as

chessed a divine gift the Schechina smiling for a while.

It is at these rare moments that I understand the yichud

understand the meaning of daas-intuition; the

Hierosgamos, the Holy unification above when in the

Garden of the Caribbean Eden

the warm waters and explosion of tropical life where

people are at ease and the gentle green hills meet the

water with grace here I feel the Schechina is at peace with

Her consort. here in place an time there is a sense of

eternity. Here daas informs me and sweetens the mighty

waters of the sea and din the strict cause and effect of my

life and my failure for a moment of relief.

[1] I think he means a pun on yam suf the reed sea and the word suf can be read asof, the end.

[2] This the play on the word law as din and malchuta not as literally meant meaning local legal authority rather malchut the lowest spiritual archetype of the divine. The Paradox of the Horizon.

Cry For The Decade

Open the tear ducts!

Let the briny water flow,

For the decade of hope that never was.

Huddled round an open fire on the frozen lake at St. Moritz

midnight Jan 1st 2000.

Surrounded by family-

Three generations of our kin.

Sky lit up by fireworks, the frosty clear heavens open at

6000 feet,

Horse drawn carriages crossing the frozen ice as the

villagers pour out

To celebrate the millennium.

It was a defining and mythic moment for me

Where history, landscape and personal biography

intersected.

I felt both rooted in my genetic history; a link between my

parents and children (with siblings)

as well as exhilarated that we were literally on top of

Europe, in these Alps.

What would the next decade bring?

the century about to start

new beginnings in my 50th year.

It looked promising.

Now a decade later I look back with sadness

a decade older but not wiser;

Cry for the decade! I say

Cry for the Twin Towers that altered our self perception of

insular peace-at-home.

Cry for the children who never recovered or never made it

to adulthood.

Cry for the ongoing genocides and homicidal bombings of

the innocent

Cry for the extremism and literal readings of sacred texts

that pour out venom

in the name of Allah or God.

Cry for the mis-understanding of the love in all religion and

the projections of hate onto these systems of belief

Cry for the holy martyrs who destroy themselves in the

process.

Cry for the broken self who thought that I had finally the

tools to close in on “the truth”

only to dis-cover ever deeper recesses of darkness lurking

below the conscious surface.

Cry for the failing body and inability to change habits of the

flesh, despite “knowing” the facts of aging and diabetes.

Cry for the parents in anticipatory grief over fragility and

crustaciousness.

Cry for my children and my inability to make things easier

for them as they suffer.

Cry for the community that never fails to splinter and bask

in the holier-than-thou rhetoric.

Cry for the body politic that sinks to the lowest common

denominator of fear and hatred.

Cry for those who seem so close to the truth yet were

never so far away

Cry for absence of Zaddikim and the religious leaders who

mock them. å

Pray for the brokenness of humanity and its failure to learn

from the blood, still dripping into our century from the last,

the cries of the dead still moving the European soil.

Pray for those who cannot put resentment aside and

refuse compromise and healing over “the truth”.

Pray for the change of heart needed in all of us to see

each other as entangled and not separate.

Pray for the ability to see the define spark incarnate in all

sentient beings including the animal and mineral- for the

sake of our planet.

Pray for abundance in our lives and healing of body and

flesh.

Pray for vision to be able to see into the body itself its own

particular wisdom despite the oppressiveness of our

intellect.

Pray for our recovery from addiction to consumerism and

commoditization of all human values.

Pray for those in incarcerated in physical and mental jails

with no hope for escape.

Pray for those powerless over dominating and abusive

parents and spouses.

Pray for the Messiah to emerge from within us all. 

As If

As If

this text alone

this Talmudic text

its mastery

its intricacy

its often hair-splitting pettiness

As if

this was the essence

the meaning

the true standard by which we measure

you, Julian,

as

a

scholar.

As if

all those years,

toiling to impress

her

him

them

were for naught.

As if

showing up

daily at 5:30 am

frosty dark mornings of mid western winters

with coffee steaming

would somehow deliver the intellectual goods.

As if

I would finally be accepted

Into this club

Whose members judge you only by one standard

As if she would finally acquiesce

And nod her head in approval

after all those years of resentment...

go on admit it

you never deserved her daughter anyway

B student

B protoplasm

B intelligence.

Daily the pages roll on

now in my last cycle

before completing the voluminous tomes

their burgundy fake leather covers

and the ubiquitous Artscroll-smug gold lettering

the entire corpus

over 7 years of this daily burden

to prove

after all

I could master it

I could complete

the page count

the folio cycle

the bean counting

page after page

leaf after leaf

over 7 years

a veritable shmittah cycle

What did Reb Meir’l have in mind for the masses?

in the cold Lublin winters of the 20’s

he even visited Chicago to fund raise!

Had I applied to Chachmei Lublin

they would have laughed!

for 200 blatt by heart was the minimum demanded for

admission

to this Harvard of a non-Lithuanian institution.

Each year I grow older

the more the Daf remains the same

black ink on white velum

the Vilna edition is so austere

so unforgiving

so uninviting

yet the relief of completion daily

like having taken one’s medicine

is viscerally palpable,

"now the day can really begin"

the burden removed for another 23 hours.

And another obsession to deal with.

What will I do after completion you ask?

will I turn to the beginning again

Massechet Berachot 2a?

as if

nothing had happened

as if

naturally one does it again

for in reality

we had only skimmed it the first time

like milk that forms a skin on the surface of the tea

for in truth what can you really garner in an hour?

one blatt an hour-ridiculous!

the Litvaks cry

decry

snickering;

so start again of course!

maybe this time round more will osmose

more will sink in

the skin will float less

you will grasp a little more.

Or will I politely let go

shut the study hall

close the tomes

place them like soldiers on my shelf

and desist.

Get up the next morning at 5 am

and NOT go there

where my colleagues labor

and do what?

sit still?

think?

just intend the day?

As if

I had the courage to do that

face my real self

face the real day alone

without crutches and coffee

daf yomi and the tools of daily ritual and quotas of

learning!

As if

I could do no-thing

no learning

no inspiration

just BE alive

and grateful

intend to receive the blessings from the universe

through me this day

to give to others on their journey

and suffering.

what has this morning ritual ever given me but

the feeling of having fulfilled someone else’s notion of truth

and mastery and sanctity.

Why not begin the day

with a morning ritual

a learning of a poem say

or the deep meditation on the entanglement of everything

interlocked in quantum space

to feel the body in this space

in the silence of reality

as the sun dawns-

Resist the idea of the disconnected brain facing the black

Aramaic words

the coffee soaked mind listening to the arguments

over third century patristicsrather

listen to a Bach prelude in its symmetry and glory

or read a Celan poem

or a Sonnet?

But that is not sanctioned;

no bearded Rabbi came to Chicago from Poland

preaching music

Lakewood is not filled with students vying for mastery over

Liszt preludeseven

the poems of Rav Kook would raise eyebrows.

As if

I would have the courage to face that day

another way

As if

the little boy inside has ceased yearning the approval of

others. 

The Secret of Incarnation

Shh..do not let on!

The secret of incarnation was once ours alone.

Let them talk incessantly of incarnation

of “God in the flesh”-

“the wine and the wafer”-

that Nicean controversy

the theological and doctrinal splitting of their church into

multiple splinters.

Shh...Don’t let on!

That this secret doctrine was once ours.

Before time began before

Julian’s calendar before

the time before time.

Sure we called it something else

some other esoteric theological doctrine

and once they stole the secret

it went underground

only to surface a thousand years later.

A thousand year secret

Shhh...now’s not the time to reveal the secret!

Too many battles still to fight

on the ground and in the texts

between the texts and between the letters

the white space between the Twin Towers

the white fire etched in the sky

the children of Rebecca still engage in late night TV battles

fighting for the hearts and minds of the drunken

insomniacs

still cleaving to old cultural cliches

and yesterday’s easy-tounged sound bites.

We still have to work out the texts of terror and misogyny

we still have learn how to read

how to see our pitiful selves mirrored in the text

the cultural wars must continue

we are not yet exhasuted

not yet willing to hear the secret.

Only then in the hoary future

it will be revealed and all will see

how our secret was stolen

brazenly appropriated

and our wound so deep

we ourselves refuted it as “not Jewish”

this Incarnation business.

Reb Nachman tells us that there is a secret

so secret we ourselves are unaware of it

when God is so hidden even He (incarnated in us) cannot

recognize Himself.

So we live out the darkness oblivious to the secret and call

it exile/history.

Only then in the hoary future will the purified version

unfold only then will we finally experience the incarnation..

in ourselves

only then will we reaize a la Izhbitser

that our stories and biographies

our suffering and martyrdom

from the daily petty hurts to the ultimate sacrifces

the gnawing gaping pain of humanity under tyrrany

the hunger and cold

the torture and isolation

all this was His desire

His secret

to experience even this

to expel the darkness within the infinite

to experience even this

the tortured cry of babies helpless

and the anguish of a prisoner’s lost hope.

That Monsieur Chagall really understood this

with the scrawny yidl on the cross in his prayer shawl

and the swastika etched on his arm

this “White Crucifix” was more than the burning shtetls

flying around Euorpe’s wasteland suspended above in the

sky with goats and torah scrolls,

more than the local Nazi horror

it represented the very incarnation they so trusted

the Jew-on-the-cross

God on the cross

humanity crucified on the altar of European culture.

the age old incarnation of God’s desire to experience even

this.

Simone Weil called it affliction

beyond mere suffering

nailed to the cross without hope or escape

the dark night of the soul

a Merton moment

nowhere to go

the addict’s nightmare of bottoming out.

Forget the sublime

the European pseudo experience of the divine

the 19th century British poets of Hampstead Heath

the sublime has been moved a few hundred miles east

to a little shteltl once called usphpetzin-Auschwitz to youthe

night terror of Reb Zusia

who awakens his brother Reb ‘Melech

with screams of visions of burning babies

the brothers who must run away in the cold night from this

horrific village

150 years before Himmler’s wet dream took effect.

In the hell of this post-Himmler landscape

where horror meets beauty

in the nightclubs of Berlin

in the burlesque of politicans caught red-handed

the uncanny Freudian sense of otherness and alterity

remains despite.

Every moment it is present in the bleeding scars of the raw

pressure sores and ulcers of the dying culture.

So, never mind the Nicean controversy of the third century

forget the scholars of the school of Alexandrian Allegory or

Antioch’s literality.

This machlokes went underground 100 years before

and was pre-figured in our own very interpretation of the

logos.

In the deep mysteries of the esoteric doctrine

the kabalistic wisdom went underground in the face of the

literalists

only to surface a thousand years later.

Surfacing in the argument as to the reading of the

tzimtzum, literal or figurative; yes this tzimtzum business is

the same old argument over the incarnation-Nicean

councils redux.

Who would have thought the holy machlokes between the

Vilna Gaon and the Baal Hatanya over the tzimtzum was

rehearsing a controversy going back a millenia!

Until, that is, Rebbe Nachman’s quantum theology...

until he showed us how to see the paradoxical truth of the

tzimtzum/incarnation

as holding both the literal and the figurative at once

a Heisenberg of theology

both truths as equally true.

For Rabbeinu showed us how to see through the facts

not get stuck on mere facts

not fight holy wars over words

but to see throught the facts to the truth.

Shh..don’t let on,

they stole the deepest secret and appropriated it for their

cetnral core theology about which they would argue about

the facts (of incarnation)

ignoring or forgetting the truth (of incarnation)

that the divine was here all along

deep within

experiencing every detail of our lives and loves

our pain and suffering

our good times and bad.

Until they and we exchange this truth the redemption will

not arrive.

December 2009

The Moment of Love

when I finally let go

of all expectations

and let the waves of passion wash over me

and carry you

for a moment of relief

from the burden of existence

and the terror of the night

where for a glorious moment, I am not responsible

for everything that has happened

and all the deceits betrayals and lies fade.

In that moment I felt my Self in your soul

and communicate in ways I never could for 30 years over

coffee but then I was no longer only I

and you were no longer only YOU

For in that moment

I became all men and you became all women

I became manhood

and you became womanhood

I became the masculine archetype

as if I was carrying this age-old ritual

alone and you too were singular

in your femininity.

Then I slowly dissolved further

only now loving all the women I ever have

and in this moment their images combined

to break the heart into a thousand fragments

an ocean of tears now bearing me like a bier to a funeral

so fleeting was this moment

yet long enough to see one’s whole life in a flash

And finally in that moment

you became primordial Eve herself

and I of course Adamic cursed man

and we together re-enacted

the age-old primordial myth

to be cursed in our love-making forever

with the inside knowledge of each other

forever condemned to a secret knowledge

that God Himself is not privy to.

This moment of relief soon fades into

the dawning realization of reality returning

and the weight of my lived life

and the burden of self.

And consciousness returns too soon

and the warm afterglow with fatigue

as the body knows its familiar landscape

and the forgetting is forgotten in the awareness

of our separated biographies

and past lives

and minds.

Upsheren 2009

This piece of heaven

this godlen-haired boy

now three years of age

having arrived at that moment

having been prepared for the haircut

the upsheren the shearing

the first haircut

of his precious life.

The long hair is golden and soft like fleece

it curls naturally and jumps when he does

although slower coming down to rest on his shoulders a

second later

like a mythic young greek god

he prances around in wild abandon.

How we invest our hopes and dreams on our little ones

and the women look on

as the men do their rituals of rites of passage

a mythic journeying of pain and transformation

like the Bris not so long ago.

Somehow this was more painful

as we cut and cut

snipped away as he looked on

knowing this was his moment

as the father and grandfathers blessed him.

But we leave the peyos to signify

this hassidic custom that has leaked into our world

an identification that this child, this boy

has his hair removed to reveal his peyos

his sideburns; an identification of ethnic belonging

to his people at this tender age.

His long flowing golden peyos were the very comfort

not all was shorn

not all was lost

the very cutting and esthetic of removal

the loss of his infancy and the grief of that loss

the entering into the age of education and collective

impressioning

the cultural molding and ritual training

was somehow mitigated by the wildness of these golden

locks

as if it signified his resistance to the power of the collective

the violence of the collective.

The next day it dawns of me as I visit that they too have

been cut

the long flowing golden peyos

a secondary loss

much worse

I say nothing

do nothing

after all

I am to be a doting grandparent

but in the car to work

the next day

I weep uncontrollably.

What is this about?

you may ask.

Where does this grief come from

what have you invested in this wunder kind?

that has evoked so much pain?

And as the week progresses it slowly unfolds

the hopes for this child

the projections

the dreams and aspirations

and the powerlessness to be other than the doting Dada.

And I must learn

this too

as I reflect back on my own Dada

in Kingsbury London

each sunday as we visited

his bear hug of my small frame as I buried myself in his

loving arms

surely he had his own desires for me

vastly different from the hidebound orthodoxy of my

father’s oberland

flavor of Ashkenazi rite

far from his natural mysticism (he liked Whitehead).

Now in the next generation I am only his Dada

and I must learn this again and again.

I must accept what is not in my power

I must love despite

and be available despite.

But what of this pain?

the floods of tears must have meant more than my petty

selfishness

and self-centeredness

of wishing yet another child in my own image

Surely I have learned that bitter lesson over and over

again

Beaten into submission and admission of my failures.

Having sacrificed my sons on the altar of my/their culture’s

expectations

I have learned and have no wish to perpetuate this

violence on anyone again.

I am truly satisfied to leave alone and let grow

the flower has its own seed

and we are here only to water it

but surely that is the point with what kind of nutrient?

And there is the pain

the cutting a second time

to conform with the local

yeshivish notion of propriety

watching this happen

as an indication

of what is to come

and what he is to be

and what will be done to him

cut me as well, deeply.

The insanity of conformation

the violence of the collective

the refusal to listen to other voices

the insistence on local petty custom as reality

in the face of my experience of truth as broad and tolerant

cutting across party lines and ritual behaviorism

all this pressed in hard this week.

But in the warm waters of the mikveh

we wash away all resentments and fears

we bathe in Her calming uterine humors

and we realize that this too is part of life

and passage and transformation.

My job is only to bless and bless again

to wish this holy child will find the secrets

and remember me as I do my beloved Dada

and see his guiding hand so many decades later.

Fathers and Sons

Mostly I avoid the pain

buried in work and self

but now and then it surfaces

this violence we perpetrated

on our children

in the name of religion

and education

and morals

Mostly unacknowledged transmission of what we received

ourselves mostly stuff we got from our parents

the rage and anger all in the name of parenting of course.

So now when we meet

the sins of the fathers are evident in the lives of the sons

having sacrificed them on the altar of our expectations

hoping they might, no will not, mess up like we did

if only we push harder just a little

more piano practice, more talmud

"just finish shas and I will give you this or that"

any coercive gift

any seduction to achieve the goal

of mastery, of some status in another world long lost

or impress some bearded scholar.

Thinking-like my parents- that this will guarantee success

and survival hoping this will end up with a better outcome

like some statistical FDA study moving the variables a little

here and there to affect the outcome

and prove to the committee of its significance

and survive the financial drought with another grant.

In these moments

the guilt surfaces too

and the powerlessness of it all

now that all this has come to consciousness

as if we are so predetermined by our culture and parenthood

our archetypal roles as fathers

participating in some kind of mythic epic role as Abraham

and our sons as Isaac

a theatre that has played for thousands of years.

but the deed has been done

and they are off somewhere in some place working

through their pain and abuse in some far away city alone.

the deed always carries the burden of its residue despite

the pleading of the perpetrator and begging for forgiveness

it must work itself through the machinery of cause and effect

the neurons are damaged

the end plates fractured

the synapses forever distorted.

Only time will move things

jiggle those synapses

and eventual parenting.

As parents they will finally see themselves as I did

and realize the trap we are all in.

Only then

like with me

will they forgive and open the heart to compassion.

Until then I must live with this

and carry this burden

and watch them from afar

in grief for what I have done

in holy pursuit of God texts and piety.

Teardrop

You can see when it is about to happen:

the eye gets a little reddish

then a tiny ooze forms in the inner corner

swelling slowly into a teardrop

as the emotions wash over the heart

and the pain creeps up like a soft blanket.

The tear forms, pear shaped

then gravity exerts its voice

drawing it downwards across the cheek’s terrain

the sandy golden landscape like the Sahara

leaving a trail of moisture in its wake

until it reached the cliff’s edge

and then drops precipitously.

This tear is but a drop

but a drop in the ocean of human tears

that endlessly accumulates.

Mankind does not learn

each inflicts pain on another, weaker

a food chain of suffering

long debated and agreed upon

as to its taboo

nevertheless the deep instinct within to inflict it goes on

unchecked.

But do animals cry?

do tears well up in the cat?

do they inflict pain for the pleasure of it?

do massacres occur in the chimpanzee population?

we think not!

My tears form easily now just like hers

as she recounts her story

the story behind the story

the story behind her history

her chief complaint.

The pear-shaped tear

contains all her pain

the world’s suffering

the family anguish

someone must bear this of course

just like someone must laugh it all away.

The drop is discrete and isolated

soon to be wiped away by the controlling mind

the socialized soul

the embarassment of revealing the heart;

but for that moment, that instant

beyond her control

that salty drop told me everything.

A drop in the ocean of tears

we are each that teardrop

each so discreet

yet part of the sea

and affected by its saltiness, its pollutants

its pH and temperature

pushed and pulled by its currents.

That teardrop coursed its trajectory like the path we each

must follow

from its birth in pain to its pear-shaped formation

then leaving the mother eye

as it descends along the cheek, leaving home and leaving

its salty outlined trace until

it falls off the precipice into the void.

But we are told not one is lost

as the Rebbe of Vurke stood motionless before the ocean

of tears

transfixed

bent over his cane like a shaman

pointing to the ocean of tears

refusing to enter the Garden of Eden

until

until what?

the good Lord would dry up the ocean of tears.

to put an end to all tears everywhere for good.

But what the of the past?

can we ignore what happened?

can we forget?

can we imagine it never happened in this frenzied

Messianic dance?

Who will cry for the memory?

who will shed a tear for each martyr?

unjustly tortured or raped

murdered and pillaged?

will the Rebbe just pack his cane and enter the pearly

gates?

She wipes her cheek and continues the narrative

focusing on the symptom

and the technical aspects of her illness and the moment

has passed

but in that space

in that instant

all was revealed to me

her past

its impact on her present

and the diagnosis magically appeared.

Shofar: Uman 2009

Amidst the silence of 15,000 men breathing in expectation,

the Halachic anxiety reigns- until now.

The central core of Rush Hashanah- this year only one

day on Sunday- will shortly be fulfilled,

the obligation to blow and hear the shofar and it’s shrill

sounds.

The text reads: lishmoah kol shofar

to listen to the Kol of the shofar- the sound of the shofar

it is not music; it is a sound, a piercing note that cuts to the

soul of the listener.

But wait! It is more complex than that.

The voice or sound is broken, punctuated by the very

rests-the absence of sound- into rhythms; a syncopation.

So sound and rhythm but no music?

No sequence of varying tones? No.

It is not a trumpet, it is not a musical instrument,

it can only convey the product of one of pitch.

So what is the message of this strange hybrid of sound,

syncopation, rhythm but no variation in pitch?

The midrash teaches us this is designed to awaken the

divine. In one poignant text we are told He gets up from

His seat of justice and moves over to the seat of mercy.

The question however remains who is doing the blowing?

Of course literally it is the Baal Tekiyah-our representative

down here among us in the congregation.

and who is doing the listening?

the midrash would have us think of the Almighty!

And who is meant to hear Israel’s sounds?

The penitent doing his Teshuva, yes again at the literal

level. On the plane level the mitzvah-the commandments

to blow,

and for us who must listen, for this is the hallmark unique

to Rosh Hashanah rituals

to hear the hundred sounds of the shofar but,

clearly it is not only us.

Rather than the moralistic-pietistic version of “awaken ye

slumberers”

the shofar of this clarion call to awaken from spiritual

slumber to activity

it is that but much more;

maybe we are also being exposed,

allowed to listen in on the divine.

And not just the mechanics of His moving from one

cathedra to the other, from justice to mercy

although that too.

The Piacetzne Rebbe told us during the destruction of the

Warsaw ghettothat

if we are sufficiently empathetic,

if we suffer along side the divine sufficiently,

for Her pain and exilethen

we too can somehow be admitted into God’s private

chamber of weeping and participate in the divine Bechi.

So it dawned on me standing in the silence before the

shrill

among these men

in this Ukranian village

on this clear cool autumn day

in the 60th year of my life

that the sound of the shofar

is the cry itself

the Schechinah Herself

weeping for us

for mankind

for the brokenness of our lives

for her separation and exile from the divine her consort.

If so, our task is clearnot

only to be moved by Her sound

but to be present to her pain as well

as we gather here in the year 5770

in the ongoing long persistent exile of the Galut

literally and mythically we too participate in the divine

weeping

for mankind who remains alienated from man, from family

and from self.

At this moment I feel the unique fellowship of these 15,000

pilgrims

men from all backgrounds gathered here in emunah

to listen together and be by the Rebbe

who taught us how to listen,

to the Schechina weeping.

These men have taken leave of family, children, wives,

friends and congregation to gather here for this moment of

eerie silence before the blowing of the shofar,

the ram’s horn echoing Isaac's and all son’s perennial

question to their fathers “where is the ram?”

Where is the very sacrifice we continually make one

generation after the next, the repetitive cyclic or akeda

through history, for the sake of the fathers and the sake of

the Father the mythic repetition of suffering and affliction

our Rebbe demands we continually ask "ayeh haseh

laola"

Here some 15,000 sons ask where”?”

"Where are you Lord; in my life?"

"why are you so concealed?"

"How can i see You in my suffering?"

I need to fly 16 hours to a tiny Ukrainian village to feel

Your presence for a few moments,

a few cherished fleeting moments through the agency of

this shofar and my Rebbe.

At that moment-in the silence before the blowing

I feel Her Presence

Then She weeps piercing shrill notes of one pitch, no

variation, no melody, no counterpoint,

just one pitch that shatters the silent Ukrainian

countryside.

And for a moment

We are privy to a piercing of the iron curtain that separates

us from the divine.

A Sense of the Tragic

To have to bear the unbearable

how do I do this?

let alone teach my patients?

the tragedy that is of this world alone

this suffering life

this particular patient in extremis;

facing the pain of others

the failure of self

the pain of mere existence

of harms done to others

to even those I have loved

especially to my children

to the Self

a gnawing aching pain like the second one reels in one's

toe from a too hot bath

there follows a deeper slower agonizing pain- that oneknowing

this without worry of sentimentality

like when listening to Bach and suddenly the tears flow

uncontrollably without explanation as if he had unlocked

the mystery of the suffering world in one chord sequence.

and I know how true it is despite the distance over time the

secret remains alive...

but no one taught me how to bear it.

Why me?

Why my shoulders?

Nana had always said "he carries the world on his

shoulders" when I was three

A cry baby to my Dad who often was triggered by this little

sissy boy

who cried too easily for everything and anything

triggering his rage as to what this so-called son was

turning in to.

Yet I still cry when making love, unable to hold back the

pain

as if in the climax there is a secret being released into the

world from a mysterious place through the lovers

and we are powerless to resist this like the very act of love

itself

and are forced to transmit this crie-du-chat

despite ourselves

we are as mere porters.

and this sense pervades all my experience

nothing is free of its taint...

especially the sunsets over the lake

and landscapes in changing seasons

as if nothing is eternal

all must die and rebirth

all must leave and dissolve

and I cannot bear it nor hold back the tears.

But for me the joy was always intimately bound to not only

love but also death and the tragic poisoned all happiness

with the perilous concoction of ecstasy and torment.

And discovering the sacred was no refuge, for here too I

found the hierosgamos-that sacred union of good and bad,

light and dark sides, angels and demons, overseen by the

Almight Oneness the Presence where all is made clearmade

plain in one glance (skira) the whole of history, of

human suffering, of nature and survival, of violence and

animal behavior, human striving throught the lens of this

tragic focus.

This consciessness we called God once, forced me into

an even more unbearable awareness of the cosmic

suffering and divine pain which only raised the stakes

even higher seeing things from his perspective lightened

nothing comforted no one. And of sacred texts the longing

and yearning heightened the feeling that there were a few

prophets with the same sense.

The relief comes only in fleeting moments, a Scotch, the

climax, the music, the needle in the spine which demands

my total focus and concentration, aware of nothing but the

technique and watching that X-ray screen for my nonbiological

steel needle penetrating the vulnerable flesh as

it passes skin, fascia, muscle and dura to deliver the

sacred remedy.

And in most unexpected places it surfaces; triggered by

haunting memories a sequence of music, a word spoken

soflty in a movie, a patient's knowing look of anguish, my

sibling abused, ageing relatives after a time gap,

Above all-no one taught me how to carry all this.

Nana and Dada Revisited

I walk towards their tomb

sunny skies,

glorious London

June day,

rolling meadows,

puffy white clouds,

warm breeze,

London's green belt at its best.

The grave needs a cleaning,

I see two stones- someone has been to visit them and left

his or her trace in the stone on the grave,

a symbolic re-internment annually.

In the month of Tamuz I am but a few weeks away from

Nana's yahrzheit-appropriate to pay the annual homage to

the angel who saved me as an infant.

Funny how chicken soup substituted so well for infant

formula

funnier still how she knew what I needed.

I bend down and kneel by the grave's cold marble.

I am overcome with a wave-like grief that sweeps me

along its path.

In reverence for these two beings who were so old to me

when I was young

but now feel so close to me in age.

Dada was my current age when I was born, (not so farfetched

anymore)

as the decades pile up age recedes cleverly.

These were the only grandparents I knew (thank you Herr

Hitler)

and I am suddenly overcome with grief.

Despite the years (1980 for Dada and 1984 for Nana) I

conjure up their faces easily and smell dada's green

sweater and his special odor, a mixture of camphor, castor

oil and cologne.

His big arms welcome me at his doorstep with the usual

spoonful of this or that and a big hug.

His being larger-than-life for me and his sagacity lent an

aura of the patriarch and I honored him as just that.

Nana's hug was more intimate, she was so small and

fragile so I was the one who held her and my memories

are mixed with that year she spent looking after my twins

in Philadelphia.

I felt so connected to her organically and sensed in her a

knowing through the body and sensations, bound up with

her unconditional love for me and my twin.

Her hug,

her warmth,

her love,

I always felt undeserving of it.. The initial grief yields to a

torrent of tears as I come to realize my failed life, and my

having failed them. Nothing much to show for all these

years

despite having left these British shores with their blessing

some 35 years ago.They must have felt full of promise for

me and my career.

What can I say now,

how do I explain

how life meets out its particular brand of suffering to each

how there always seemed to be something tripping me up

destined to sabotage all efforts to the contrary.

But I am and continue to come here

to their resting place

In this one thing I have succeeded.

In loving them,

in my undying connection and unapologetic devotion to

them despite their dreams for me and my letting them

down.

So what remains for me is to say "All I can give you now is

my heart, as large as the world,

here, right now, as I lie on your gravesite" giving them

what is most precious, the very me-ness of I am.

And to say I love them eternally .

Slowly moving away from the overwhelming grief that

comes so rarely

in these numbing years

I find solace in their very presence

their absolute being here and reciprocity of love

a feel in the presence of their love tangibly

in the stillness of the moment

a knowing of the love they have for me in the silent breeze

of this warm afternoon

and I am comforted.

I say the memorial prayer for the sefardi rite and walk

away, comforted.

Prisoner of the Text

For Batya

Of course the last joke is on the reader!

Bible or Milton it matters not

having accepted it as a sacred text

we are now prisoners of the word, the logos

and despite awareness and "reader reception theory"

we are its victims.

we soak in its literariness

working out this or that meaning

that forever remains elusive

and bask in the tricks we find and gaps in the text

as if we have dis-covered a new layer of hidden meaning

hitherto unearthed

like amateur archeologists of the soul we dig and we dig.

Two trees

diplopia

double vision

two eyes

the text as mirror of our poverty

splitting

never got it right

always missed the point

for there were two points

isn't that the message

knowing and experiencing

guilt and forbidden pleasure

carrying the weight

forever

for a moment's indiscretion.

And we

Children of the readers

Prisoners of a different type

Housed in a maximum security cell block

Called Torah She Be al Peh

Where the outer limits of discourse

Frame and constrict us

Preventing escape into a dangerous field

Like the waters surrounding Alcatraz

Weighted down by generations of prior readers

With long beards and authority

What shall we say?

How do we read anew?

How can we interpret truth after the end of truth?

And we can no longer be silent

Like good English polite schoolboys

In their maroon uniforms

And skullcaps

And long socks

And short pants

To the master who fondles

Or the rabbi who decides the true interpretation

We survivors

Children of survivors

Our diplopia is hard-wired

A new generation of genetic mutants

We cannot see but double

We cannot make love in the singular

We have a new declension and a new grammar to fit

We make love in the plural to a double visual ghost.

So Adam may have been correct after all

From his perspective there were two trees

In the midst of the Garden

In that mid-point where there can only be one

For he described a new geometry

And put Aristotle to sleep

And we are forever condemned

To love and seek both.

A Lone Voice

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog

from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with

muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the

sky the message He Is Dead, Put crepe bows round the

white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen

wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my

East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My

noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love

would last for ever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted

now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle

the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W. H. Auden

If a person who has risen to the holiness of silence should

lower himself to a particular form of divine service, in

prayer, study, the limited problems of morality, he will

suffer and feel oppressed. He will feel that his soul , which

embraces all existence, is being pressed as though with

prongs, to surrender her to the lowland where everything

exists within a prescribed measure, to the narrowness of a

particular path, when all paths are open to him, all

abounding in light, all abounding in lifeʼs treasures.

OROT HAKODESH VOL II P 307, Rav Kook

The Holy Izhbetzer comments on “I am earth and ash”,

that to grow spiritually, you need both. Some of our Jewish

leaders have made a complete religion out of the ashes of

the Holy Six Million. But ashes alone are just not enough

to nurture the neshama. You need the earth also to build

strong roots.

On the one hand I cannot forget what happened in

Europe. On the other I know that I have to help rebuild a

new world. What’s a holocaust memorial? Is it the last will

and testament of the six million to have a memorial? Their

last will is that we yidden should be yidden. Unfortunately,

many yidden give two million dollars to a holocaust

memorial while their own kids don’t care about being

Jewish. Inconsistency in one’s emotions or thinking is a

human quality and a very honest expression of one’s

humanity. A deceitful person attempts to reconcile

contradiction through conniving reasoning and by

stretching the truth.

My goal is to turn people on to Yiddishkeit or whatever

other religion or spiritual path they were born into. And to

make frum (religious). Jews conscious of our world

mission. Orthodox Jews keep G-d’s commandments but

have trouble accepting their responsibility to help make

this a better world for all of humanity. On the other hand,

the enlightened Jews who came out of the ghetto sought

to achieve social responsibility but completely neglected

the commandments.

Rav Kook taught that the so called secular Jews by

settling in and building the Holy Land, were guarding the

body of the Jewish people, while the religious Jews were

watching its soul. Today the body of the Torah, the laws,

are being guarded by the religious Jews, while the soul of

the Torah, the fire of its teachings are being watched by

the so-called secular Jews. We orthodox Jews have to

deliver G-d’s message to the entire world and that’s why I

travel to a place where there aren’t that many Jewish

people now. That’s why I came to Poland. It’s a place that

has especially bad memories for our people. But that’s the

very reason that it makes Poland a prime choice for

change. In the Bible we find that Shechem is the city

where Dina was raped. Years later it was the city where

the brothers sold Joseph and the split of the twelve tribes

began. But it’s also the headquarters for the tribe of

Joseph who symbolizes the start of the redemption. So the

greatest tribute we can offer to the Six Million is to return

to the place of their eternal rest and swear to them that we

shall dedicate ourselves to spreading their values and

their dreams to the entire world. Holocaust memorials

have been turned into a business by people who haven’t

the slightest idea of who the pre-holocaust Jews were and

what they stood for. We cannot allow assimilated Jews

who speak in an alien tongue be our spokespeople to the

world. We must address the world in our own Divine

language. If I let out tztzis and payus everywhere, then

when I return to Germany, I let them out even longer. I was

in Hamburg once and a Jewish lady told me that I wasn’t

in Jerusalem where I could let my religion hang out this

way. I told her that in all the times I’ve been back to

Germany, no German ever made such remarks to me. Her

comments are, cholila, Nazi-like. The Nazis wanted to

wipe out our people and she wants to wipe out our

religion. Another time, in Hamburg, I walked into a

restaurant with a German TV reporter. He saw me eat

some fruit and told me, thank G-d you eat kosher, that he

had interviewed a famous Israeli pianist the week before,

who ordered ham and cheese. I felt a sigh of relief, he told

me. Thank G-d, the Fuehrer didn’t succeed and there are

still Jews who are proud to be Jews. We frummer Yidden

can make such a Kiddush haShem with our behavior, that

we can inspire the whole world. But first we have to clean

up our own act. A little Israeli boy once told me that the

reason he doesn’t go to a Jewish school is that he lives

near a yeshiva and he hears the children crying whenever

they get beaten by the teachers.

Any parent or teacher who hits children is, G-d forbid,

keeping Der Fuehrer’s way alive! G-d’s words can be

taught to our children and spread throughout the world

only in a loving way that is completely free of all anger and

hatred.

The Shoah: The Holocaust and helping to rebuild a new

world By Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach on April 29, 1989 - כ"ד

ניסן תשמ"ט

Majdaneck, Poland 5749 Originally transcribed for

Connections Magazine by Rabbi Sam Intrator

I fear we have forgotten. I fear we have betrayed your

memory. I fear we too are lost.

Where our President speaks of the Koran and ignores

history where inside we are empty where even our

theologies fail us your voice seems so far away.

What yiddishkeit? What kind of healing did you mean? That

nostalgia for the shtetl? Surely not! The high moral ground?

You were way beyond that pietism!

In Spertus today I watched lazily as third generation old

ladies volunteered and wandered around busily with that

patronizing Mona Lisa smile doing their chesed work

disconnected from ritual and myth in their do gooded-ness

but there is no mezuza on any door in this multi million

dollar edifice to perpetuate Judaism.

And I think of myself lost in this world. drowning in the

twitter and chatter of the day worried about his speech in

Cairo and Buchenwald “to the victims that died here” as

if...Poor fellow...Prisoner of his own rhetoric!

What did Hitler teach us? A lot, I fear. These bastards of

history are our only teachers. and the history of violence

and war seems to be the real lesson with moments of

peace interspersed. Look at Napoleon before him the

world was never the same. The horror of the State invades

our consciousness.

But Shloime! You still believed in the message didnʼt you?

the “light unto the nations” gag appropriated by secular

zionists so conveniently and the myth of superiority! What

now? After 60 years of colonial rule? How is our moral

compass reading? Just look into the prisons and hospitals

and schools for the violence. Nothing has changed! We

appropriated the state apparatus as well.

No, my teacher, I fear the change must come within.

Today 60 years ago Albert Schweitzer visited University of

Chicago and 5000 people came out to visit him! he too

was a hero. Nobel Prize laureate Bach musicologist,

pianist, organist physician and theologian. Yet 40 years

ago today was the massacre at Tiananmen Square and

during WWII today many US soldiers died in a bloody

Midway naval battle in the Pacific. Today the evacuation at

Dunkirk ended. Today today today going back remains

bloodied.

Today today each day each day assimilated Jews get

further away and we the faithful? Where are we going?

Further into the Talmud? Our legal texts, our rhetoric of the

past? Into Halachic minutiae? Anything to avoid the deep

chasm within?

Stop waging yesterdayʼs battle my friend! The war is

over...Out there let the inner battle begin. Start worrying

about our own inner betrayals deceits and lies. Fix the

inner world first. Close the blogs shut down the libraries

seal the Beis Midrash.

And in the silence let the deafening screams penetrate let

the pain ooze up from the bloody ground the centuriesʼ

martyrs of all races have their say let the memories bubble

into the landscape the horrors percolate into the bloodstream.

Let a new consciousness arise where the only command

shall be “let the other live” no matter what the

consequences.

You Speak of God

The Denial and Acknowledgment of Faith

There is such a thing as denial of faith that is like

acknowledgment of faith.

And there is also such a thing as acknowledgment of faith

that is like denial.

A person may acknowledge that the Torah is from heaven.

But his picture of heaven is so distorted that it contains not

even a trace of true faith.

On the other hand, a person may deny that the Torah is

from heaven. But his denial is based only on what he has

learned from believers whose minds are filled with empty

and confused thoughts. As a result, he decides that the

Torah must have a higher source than that. And so he

seeks its source in the greatness of the spirit of humanity,

in the depth of ethics and in the Torah's spirit of wisdom.

Although this has not yet brought him to the heart of truth,

such a denial is considered acknowledgment. And it

steadily comes ever closer to faith.

A confused generation of such people must certainly

improve.

This question as to whether or not the Torah is from

heaven is merely one example that illustrates all questions

of faith, general and particular: the relationship between

how they are perceived and their core being, the latter

being the goal of faith.

"There are many apikorsim who are deniers, in

accordance with the standards of Halacha. However,

when we examine their soul we will discover in them a

connection to the Divine content, in a hidden form. And

that is why in our generation there is a tendency toward

merit and kindness even toward absolute deniers.

- Orot Ha'Emunah, Rav Kook

How dare you!

Repeated offender you!

Addicted to taking His name!

Continually adding His authority, to your discourse.

You know better of course!

And I’m not talking of swearing!

I might have forgiven the heart of holy expletives

In the heat of passion. No.

No. I mean all this God-speak-

As if . . . you understand His will, His desire, His

personality!

As if . . . your texts, your theology, your logos

admits you to some secret gnosis

about Him.

As if… He backs your petty imitation piety

Giving you the authority you so desperately seek,

Or is it comfort?

Can't you see?

Havent you heard of Herr Dr Freud?

Hasn’t he finally cleansed you of your petty projections

of God "up there"?

Some CEO or spiritual accountant,

trafficking in good deeds.

Didn't you listen to Herr Rabbiner Wittgenstein?

(remember that foto of him and Hitler in kindergarten

together!)

Didn't he finally expose your holy discourse as mere

language games.

Hasn't Auschwitz made you reel?

And forced you to pull back those false projections of Him

La Nom-du-Pere and Rabbi Derrida

Did he not teach you to

Jettison those moralistic-pietistic glib responses

Dump the pseudo-frumkeit once and for all?

Are you still locked in to the pre-modern apologia?

Have you not raged against the darkness of the night?

Or is the anxiety of the past, the Text, the prior authority

figures-

Essentially your father's God, too weighty?

When will you stop abusing His Name?

It's forbidden, you know.

To even articulate the Tetragrammaton

Let alone write it!

Why do you think that even its translations like Gott or

God are any different?

The pious even remind us with a dash (G-tt and G-d)!

Yet you talk of Him constantly

In and out of speech, in your effort to connect and convert

Those from one addiction to yours.

At least admit you are powerless over organized frumkeit,

orthodoxy, denomination of your choosing, pastor rabbi or

whatever!

You say to yourself "if only" he would convert, become

frum, change his position to mine, "do" the rituals, walk the

talk, "believe" in God . . .

Then he will be saved, and my days work is done

In the name of the Lord.

And the others?

The so-called atheists?

What of them?

Are they damned? Like we are told on late night cable TV.

You know some of God's children don't believe in Him

In your conception of Him

What of them?

Are they truly damned? After all Hitler made no distinction

between communist or Rabbi

Trotskyite disciple or Hassid

Homosexual or pietist.

Will you be more exacting than the demon?

These do not practice the faith–of-the-fathers.

Don't genuflect on command

Bend the knees on page 22 of the Artscroll Siddur

Are not "upstanding" when told and "be seated" when told

by the pulpit Rabbi.

Some God's children lost their faith.

What of them?

They (unlike you) never took His name in vain!

They never even mention His name!

His name never crosses their lips.

They never even write His name on paper with a dash!

He never enters their discourse.

For them, there is only no-thing. Indescribable. Period.

Man needs to get on with the rest of it. Period.

These holy atheists.

Your Holier-than-thou piety

Seems closer to the Senate Missouri Lutherans than the

tradition of our fathers!

As if . . . on arrival in America you appropriated the worst

of local piety

And the easiest way to avoid the real question of the day.

As if . . . we can ignore the central issue that begs our very

relationship to the divine

As if . . . we can put Auschwitz behind us as in a family

spat.

Instead we wallow in self-pity, mea culpa, communal selfanalysis,

and cheap anti-secular shots to rationalize the

crime that fits this punishment-

As if . . . this will somehow allow us to move on with the

communal self intact and restored in the center of the

circle once more.

Where is God you might ask?

And in the Artscolification of Judaism

Some awaken to its bourgeois pettiness

Its middle class morality

Its Victorian residua

And see it at odds with tradition

Awakening as if from a coma of 70 years

Blurry-eyed, blinking and squinting from too much light

Slightly disoriented but awake enough to realize

Something is seriously wrong.

And in the search for meaning

A reflection of the state of play

A meta-analysis

We find that at the very heart of the matter

The core of this blindness

The cause for such a prolonged stupor

Was the mis-quoting

The mis-reading

The mis-identification

Of that GOD word-concept-idea.

This too needs purification

It too needs rehabilitation

From the years of atrophy and neglect

Worse the years of abuse and isolation

Like the hull or keel of a boat

Needs cleaning of its barnacles

Those crustaceous shells from the deep.

And we go silent on the GOD word.

We resist and refrain from its usage.

Taking it in vain, and with it

all its fake baggage.

For a while.

Allowing the old dust to settle

The old theologies to mummify, ossify,

Condemn them to Oxbridge, to a museum

Where the academics and intellectuals can discourse

In their common rooms over port.

Let time intervene in this period of word bans

Let a new post-denomination, post-orthodox, postgenocide

Description emerge.

Let God back into the center stage without controlling the

discourse

With no attribution

No naming

Just remain silent.

Let Him, the no-named One back into the center and

become Present

Just show up and sit on the sidelines

Admit defeat

Admit we know no-thing

Admit there is no discourse left

To describe the indescribable.

No literature or art that might do it justice

Admit our brain death our spiritual demise

That the whole modern enlightenment enterprise went

terribly wrong

That we are becoming half computers, half monsters.

To do that you will need to shut up.

Close the academies seal the folios, stop consulting legal

texts for your next move.

Stop in fact TALKING GOD.

LEARN FROM THE Holy Atheists!

Time

(A MEDITATION ON REB NACHMAN'S TORAH 33)

April 2009

Let it wash over you, like the surf on a lazy beach dayyour

hands clinging to the sand

Let it brush over your face like a gentle zephyr as you

climb over the green hilltop

Let it lighten the room like the sun finally revealing itself

with the passing cloud filling your dark book-lined study

through the window, in a beam of dusty particles.

Stop managing it!

Stop fitting your schedule into it all

those chores and errands, the appointments and

deadlines, the very day's work-if not,

the guilt of time's passage will not have been lifted once

again, and the Adamic curse leak into the night.

The inner kritik must justify today's existence to the court

above, or else there maybe no reason for tomorrow.

So you run and run from daybreak and the daf yomi 'til

nightfall when you drop

letting the fatigue and increasing inability to do what you

used to be able to "accomplish" in a day, relieve you of the

kritik for a while.

Stop trying to manipulate time-to cut corners to save time

to cheat and steal a few minutes (stealing maybe a felony

upstairs!)

Finally finally surrender

to time

realize it as a gift and participate only as an observer.

Stand on the sidelines and let sacred Time begin to affect

you slowly.

You well know the seasons and the months the equinox

and the passage of holy days

the cycle of tempers you resisted for so long for fear of

"pagan influence" into the pristine mono-theistic Biblical

faith of the Father. La nom du Pere!

Weren't you taught to ignore those astrological signs on

the side of the Machzor on Succos?

Finally open up to the crab and the fish and the goat and

those symbols reflecting a rhythm a metre and key and

tone that changes monthly.

Become open to the week of the sefirah (didn't Rabeinu

tell us it would affect us daily)!

Lord knows you suffered during "gevurah"!

Let the Shabbos finally invade your body

in its preparation without the usual panic and bad tempers

once thought by you as obligatory as the laws themselves!

let it already be savored in the Friday afternoon mikveh,

stay a while longer, feel Her Presence the Song of Songs,

chant slowly, feel the passion for Her

Psalm 107 and feel the Baal Shem Tov's teaching, ships

long out to sea finally coming home to port like your week.

Welcome the Bride with others and dance!

Let this holy time invade your senses with the light of the

Sabbath candles, the spices each sacred meal and the

red dry wine on the palatemarkers

in time like buoys in the channel pointing and

protecting small craft until they reach open waters again.

Agreed it is scary.

brought up to waste not a minute of time.

each fragment precious, a minute...even seconds wasted

to be accounted for in some future court.

Did not the Vilna Gaon keep a little black book of all the

wasted minutes he owed annually?

As if time was a commodity that had value like the billable

hours my lawyer clocks up on me monthly!

each minute measured and "clocked'

More like a magazine of bullets as it passes through an

old machine gun in a black and white movie.

Spitting out bullets from the front end while the magazine

passes through the rear to emerge empty, having

delivered its aliquot of death over time, yet broken down to

a single unit of one bullet a time.

And at the end of time itself we are to be judged as to how

we spent it like we spend money or bullets.

Did we "fill" it with appropriate activities, Torah and

Mitzvot? pious activities and charity or did we "waste" it

like water might be wasted or money.

In a market economy where spending is vital to the

capitalist system I found it hard to see time in any other

way.

Mother used to say in India during the hot lazy summers

you might ask somebody what he was doing and he would

reply "killing time and watching it die"

As if it were alive and might be subject to murder.

As if it were dependent upon us to maintain its life and

protect it from those who would kill it!

In suspending time during those pilgrimages

whether to Uman Lizensk or Mezhibuz,

I purposefully remove myself from the dimension of timeas-

I-feel-it

from its dominion and tyrrany

and, in the presence of the Zaddik

I am relieved of its burden for a few hours

(at great cost to health and fatigue)

to continue to do the work of recovery and Return.

I now surrender by giving up any hope of managing it.

I surrender the hope of keeping it alive.

Let it die and continue despite me.

I cannot carry such a responsibility anymore.

Time is a modern notion

history is an enlightenment concept (Hegel)

modernity ended in the gas chambers

let time be buried there too.

Let us open to the possibility of time as an independent

force of its own

a Divine force that splits into good days and bad days

through no fault of our own

born into a mystical cyclical story

fixing what previous generations failed

I now surrender and stand on the periphery of this Divine

drama.

As such I become open to new possibilities and allow time

to wash over me

brush over my face

its good and not so good parts

remember that sunlight pouring into the study also reveals

the dust-laden shelves!

but in surrender I can breath and savor the scent of

different days

and welcome time into me like never before.

Nana's Yarhzeit 2009

Mostly, I remember her voice...

A mix of british indian, with baghdadi intonation and

nasality

"wey julian ...you will go blind!" rings evermore in my ears

As she admonished me (out of pure love) for my

confession

In the mount aishel hotel bournemouth!

Her absolute unconditional love yet strict adherence to her

own (at times prudish) standards of right and wrong.

I could never master that balance with my own kids.

As the years pass

As the annual pilgrimage to her resting place clocks its

own memories

(this year with charles so sick, bless him)

Clocking its own biography

Nestled in the rolling meadows and grazing cattle of

london's green belt

I age too.

Yet in this, my 60th year I feel closer to her than ever.

Back in my life

In the web of professional and personal matrix

Each patient I lose is Nana

Each loss I experience is framed archetypically by her loss

In pain and grief she is my compass.

If I ever need to retrieve tears

To evoke grief

I merely think of her

Her tiny frame her intense eyes

Her frailty, her energy, her commitment and above all

unconditional love of her family.

As a teenager I remember hugging her small frame

Enveloped in my arms so easily

Then some 20 years later,

Watching her hold my own twins in the white rocking chair,

philadelphia

and feeling such pride

For having my own grandmother come from across the

ocean and spend a year with us.

Only now do I acknowledge my parents' faith in me.

That year the pride spilled over into humble recognition of

the larger picture.

I had "produced twins in 1981 the way my own mother had

twins in 1950 and here Nana was again;

Nana coming to the rescue!

How mythical!

Nothing else produces the flow of tears like the memory of

Nana

Nothing else such grief

As if at age 1, inscribed into my very flesh and mind was

her salvific grace-her showing up after weeks at sea

bombay to portsmotuh was it?

Dada in tow, to save the little julian growing pale and

losing weight with her dose of chicken soup.

She evokes for me the shechina, mama rachel, mother

dear, matronisa, maternity, the great mother archetype,

But all the positive features of the feminine archetype with

none of the darker threatening aspects.

In Nana I find refuge

In Nana I find comfort

In Nana I find solace and peace despite my own unending

torment

In Nana I find hope in her eternal energy and fierce

devotion to her progeny

Her utter faith in heaven and her optimism for the better

day to come.

Her belief that one day she would win the pools and would

distribute the cash to her children and grandchildren

It happened on more than one occasion in pounds here

and there

But what abides is her pride in winning.

I pray she has finally found peace knowing her

grandchildren and great grandchildren and descendants

Remember her and adore her for her love and devotion to

us.

And as we enter the month of her yahrzeit her hillula

The auspicious day of gateway to elul and "ani ledodi

vedodi li"

I had a dream of her

Coming to me

And as I reach out to her

She has come to me as a gift

And in the tears between us I cry out

"we will never forget you Nana you are inscribed in my

bones

your love is written in my heart your care is flowing

through my veins

and written in my flesh and Nana echoing my breath"

And as I age

No memories fade

No images disappear

On the contrary the stark releif of my own biography

focuses sharply and better when seen with Nana as my

background.

God bless you Nana in gan eden.

Burning Up Inside (Bira Doleket)

God spoke to Avraham: “Go you from your land ....” R.

Yitzchak began... This may be compared to one who was

traveling from place to place, and he saw a burning

mansion. He said: Is it possible that this mansion is

without someone responsible? The owner of the mansion

looked out at him and said: I am the master of the

mansion.

So, was our father Avraham saying: Is it possible that the

world is without someone responsible? God looked out at

him and said: I am the master of the world.

(Midrash Genesis Rabba 39,1)

In This World, only intensive labor propels a person from

one level to the next. This is the meaning of what is written

(Bereishit Rabba 39), “burning courtyard (bira doleket)”:

Avraham learned that everything must be in its resting

place and at its root. However, the blessed God replied

that His blessed will is that in This World there will be only

effort and no rest.

Absolutely baffled by its power Worse, my powerlessness

Year after year, month after month Holding out as long as I can

Then the fall. A pattern in time A pattern of the body itself

The mansion has its own rhythm

A cycle of powerlessness.

What is this bira doleket within? This towering inferno of

desire? Overcoming the entire field?

Abraham asks the same question when looking out into

the world And seeing its conflagration Questioning an

intelligent design Until God responds

Ani hu baal habira

“I am the owner of the village” I am the master of this

house! But how does this help the old patriarch’s

theological question Of theodicy? Who could possibly

allow this to go on?

God does not reply with a reason for the inferno Merely

establishing his authorship and ownership

So what is the perennial answer for the fire itself Why the

world continues to rage in flames? Apparently that is left

for us, Abraham’s descendents To dis-cover.

The reason for the fire? You want me to answer? After

such a long exile! And crematoria!

An answer? Are you Crazy! Any answer is an affront to

their memory. Let us rather concentrate on my

inflammation, character defects That way we have a

playing field A field of discourse that is more manageable.

Burning mansions in my body

(Sefat Emet, Lekh Lekha, 634)

Sucking me into the fire Carnage of the soul in the

aftermath The blackened timbered shell Next day In the

cold light of day Where the insanity is made plain for all to

see The wreckage of the rage The splattered fragments of

the self Charred splinters of wood, blackened timber

Strewn across the street Where visual acuity is 20/20 In

contrast to the blindness of the previous night.

Is the meaning of this mansion on fire inside That God is

its master too? Master of His domain That even I

In this lowly state In this body Must surrender even this

The very obsession itself, the insanity, The defects of

character, the lies, deceits and betrayals All of this

baggage to Him! Could it be that buried in this Midrash is

the reflection back onto His watch Of all my life even the

bad?

“Ani hu baal habira”

He exclaims! “I am master of the house, the mansion, the

village, your body-self All of it! The good and the ugly.”

And if the gaze was the trigger The lit match cast

inadvertently into the dry brush The inappropriate stare

The lingering look A spiritual visual dysfunction-mainly

taking place in the darkness; Then maybe the rectification

the fixing and refining of this defect Must also emerge from

the visual, an imaginative restoration. The fixing must take

place in the very images-but within rather out there. What

does She look like? How do I relate to Her? To beauty,

music, passion, to the very flames?

What immortal image did I behold as a fetus? Alongside

my sister. The fateful vision that would transfix my

imagination forever? Who did I recognize as “ze eli” Why

do I continuously search the planet for that image that will

finally give me rest? Peace of mind? That image so etched

in my soul I search for it even in inappropriate places?

I feel the answer to Abraham’s question lies right here In

its midst In the flames In the carnage

An image of Him/Her The master the baal habira.

And the answer lies beyond sacred texts Rather in the

very image of that burning conflagration- But resist the

golden calf that Has emerged until now One generation

after another The false images and temporary relief.

The image behind the texts The Torah behind the Torah

Which can only be accessed by those fallen souls Who

know the other side Who felt the rage and fire within Who

saw the dark side the dark night How else?

It is only by crowing Him master of even the flames of

Auschwitz that we can Access the totality of Him His Unity

And our own.

Only this way can I inhabit this body and own this dark

soul Only by owning His mastery can I own my own

inflammation. You want to quote me philosophy?

Theology? Theodicy? We will leave that for the scholars

and Litvaks.

We who have known inside The nightmares and dead

souls who call in the night The souls wafting above us like

a Chagall painting Europe’s earth screaming from the

blood still dripping within The children’s cries do not

diminish In that furnace He still yells Ani hu baal habirah

And I still need to acknowledge Him there and within.