The Place of Grief
There is a place I visit
it turns out, now, almost weekly,
by Mussaf on Shabbes.
The kabbalists go to town about the קדושה
our “sanctus” if you like,
where the word kesser כתר implies a crowning of sorts
the King of Kings and we the Schechina embodied,
the matronisa, are united
albeit momentarily...
and the men of Bet El yeshivah do their yichudim
this sacred hierosgamos, the high point
of our liturgy.
A time for grace and exceeding קדושה
There is a place I visit
it turns out, now, almost weekly,
by Mussaf on Shabbes.
But for me
it is a time for grief-
I donʼt know when this began
I just note that each week
it is about this time my heart melts
then breaks open to reveal this deep well of grief.
Watching this repeatedly
I am intrigued by the triggers and the repetitive timing,
its precision and how uniform the evocation remains.
What surfaces?
in this indescribable pain?
It is as if raw grief itself needs no further expression
no other trigger
no cause nor reason
as if I have stumbled upon this subterranean cavern filled with sorrow.
I know this is not about me
I know that from decades of analysis those
fears resentments and hurts
are all well documented in the dairies and monthly billing statements!
No, this is different!
it is not about my life, my pain, my defects of character
my betrayals, those I have caused pain
those whose hearts I broke,
those lies deceits and betrayals.
This Place of Grief
No, in this place
I feel the pain of others
of Klal Yisroel,
of humanity and history.
A shrieking cry from the beyond
the sum of all the tears shed by all those suffering
rising up like a river to overflow its banks
and the very tragedy that is the hallmark of this creation.
Finally I feel the pain of of the divine
who for millennia has patiently watched His human experiment fail
in the hope that the laboratory specimens will one day
awaken to self-awareness
and stop the violence to our spouses children and others
the genocide the torture the inhumanity.
This pain surfaces in this unique place of grief.
And then something strange happens
for a few brief moments
I am relieved of the burden of existence
of Self, of my being in this world,
of that heaviness we carry
knowing despite our attempts to banish from consciousness
we cannot erase nor anesthetize those CNN images of
Mai Lai, Czhirvenitza, Rwanda,
relieved, and
this heaviness gets lighter
and the ever-present inner KRITIK
is silenced for a few precious moments
as I identify with the Divine בכי
This cosmic grief holds me
in its grip
as the holy words of sanctus sanctus sanctus
קדש קדש קדש
ring out in the screaming silence.
In these moments I am able to access the deepest parts of myself
and in this grief paradoxically everything makes sense
I feel an non ego empowerment
seeing the world from His perspective
as I participate in this subterranean stream of awareness.
This Place of Grief
Ironic that it is not joy or other powerful emotional triggers
that allow me access to higher states of consciousness of ,מחין
no, it is this deep well of grief that transcends and soaks all existence
that moves me.
And in a flash
I remember the overwhelming feeling some 35 years ago
when, as a man in love,
the same grief surfaced at the high point of making love
surprised by the fact
that at the very epicenter of the ecstasy
this familiar grief, not joy
made itself first present in my life.
and triggered my tears.
Imitation Piety
A sea of blackness
I see only hats
Giuseppe Borsalino is smiling from his grave
over 200 bucks each!
and the imitation piety
as the boys and men
shokl and sway in their self-righteousness
muttering the talmudic arguments and its Babylonian rhetoric
in demonstration of erudition but also
dancing on the head of a pin.
But soon revulsion gives way to jealousy,
as I acknowledge their serenity
of having arrived at the “truth”
with no apparent struggle
no disconnect between faith and piety.
I had always felt I could not afford
the “luxury” of such religious demonstration and academic fervor,
following my father, for example,
I never put the tallis over the head
(although lately I do catch him doing it for Mussaf!)
remember him telling me that in Vienna
“only the truly pious and learned” would
have the chutzpa to imitate the Rov in this angelic posture.
For in my spiritual landscape
all is not well.
Faith is constantly being tested
as I continue to surrender to the flesh
as it were (Diabetes notwithstanding!)
so my guilt and remorse conspire
with my old friend apikorsus
to make me feel even more worthless in this city
of black piety,
this “Fakewood”.
This uniquely American provinciality
home grown piety, feelig so comfortable in the new Malchus shel Chessed
with its surface glaze of Torah tidbits
intellectual lightweight scholarship
fear of innovation or chidushim
settling for imitation piety.
Dressed, of course, in designer frumkeit-
Borsalino hattery, now
an industry all of its own!
Even the bookstore here is polished
nothing under $18!
the book covers with their imitation leather
and the Artscroll-approved or
Feldheim-published
Rabbinically supervised thoughtsnothing
naughty gets in here.
apikorsus rein!
An inflation of halachic minutiae
a new Wall Street bubble this town
waiting to burst when parents and in-laws can no longer to afford
supporting scholars-in-residence with many children.
Why did the Litvishe world ignore the Gaonʼs nistar
his brilliant analysis of the hidden world behind the Torah?
why are we subject to the imitation of Torah?
the surface monocular monochromatic visual landscape.
At the same time and once again simultaneously overawed
by the sheer mastery of texts
a nephew having reviewed the Talmud 18 times
venerated for his encyclopedic knowledge
or maybe his sheer memory.
Toddlers fluent in Bible
8 year olds knowing Mishnah by heart
wow, what was the emotional cost?
what happened to imagination?
So my life as outsider this shabbat
comes back into focus
as usual when “on the road”
Dadʼs Vienna comes to mind...
his fatherʼs choice to live outside the Ghetto of the 2nd district
(die tzveite Bezirke)
his choice to live in Finchley, NOT Golders Green!
my choice to live in “modern Orthodox” neighborhoods
of Philadelphia, Boston and Jerusalem.
Raising children in the complexity of that schizofrumkeit!
Now watching my daughter raise her kids differently
as they attend cheder and learn in Yiddish,
I too yearn for authenticity even at the expense
of a life lived in existential tension
of thinking truth as primal;
putting away theology and philosophy
for connection with those living in naivete of faith
and free of inner conflict and turmoil
in dialogue with the divine
bathing in the divine
certain of the divinity of texts
(despite their mangled history)
with no doubts to plague them
no sense of impending damnation
no dread
no hint of the insanity of the social network
that is right wing frumkeit today,
just relief and refuge in communal joy and warmth hymns
to the drowning.
If only I could overcome this resistance
having seen the darker side of even Hassidus
where to go?
the struggle gives me no respite
and so I return once more to my city of sojourn
to the battlefield that is everyday my hallmark
starting out the morning freshness and dawning sky
with the unique combination of the Holy waters
of the baptismal mikvah
with the grind of the Daf Yomi
and then leaving my ghetto
(for yes now I live within)
plunging into the secular world that is
both free of the blackness
yet also lightened by the lack of transcendence.
To fight my demons
my powerlessness over emotions and rage
carbohydrates and the flesh.
This daily struggle to live up to ancient inherited ideals
the sheer weight of the rabbinic tradition
the page after page of black ink
and super commentaries on commentaries
the fathers and grandfathers who arose
in the frosty European winter mornings
to pray- look down on me like patriarchs framed
in old New England portraits
adjuring me live up to the failed resolutions of my own past.
The cyclical shape that my voyage takes
documented over decades
that peculiar sine wave of the spiritual highs and lows
the crests and troughs
of the oceans that toss and turn my soul at will
as I look on powerless.
I have returned to the familiar
my resentments and failures are old friends
as I face this sea of black perfection
standing before indicting prosecutors.
Holy Melody
“It is sweet to dance to violins
When love and life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!”
― Oscar Wilde
Rebbe Nachman says: “If you sing the right melody.. One
melody can bring peace to the whole world...”
Reb Shlomo Carlebach
In music there is connection,
in music there is hope,
in music there is refuge.
Let me in please!
into your secrets,
those harmonics that expose the divine,
let me taste the fruits of the keys
and the honey of the clefs.
In those dark notes are buried
secrets of the universe,
those strings of reverberation
upon which the planets move
and the same strings in which the heart
vibrates to, in sympathy.
Let me be moved
by your genius,
by those devotees and composers
who sacrificed all at the altar of your muse
worshipping at the feet of your cellos
in harmony and counterpoint.
Don’t let me surrender to my mother’s curse
who cannot listen for the pain of it.
She, who suffered to master the Beethoven and
Mendelssohn concertos
cannot hear the music for the trauma.
Open my broken heart to its healing waves.
Your craft reflects both the exalted shores of all
as well as the depths of despair,
for your instruments vibrate
a counterpoint of secret potions
where the world can be felt,
in a crucible of alchemical mixtures;
good and bad,
agony and ecstasy,
empathy and sorrow.
It is truly sweet to dance to violins
even when “life is unfair”!
for the only respite for me
in this bloody pain
is your holy melody.
Never will I forget the Verracini Largo
or the Halverson Passacaglia
as I lay in bedded agony
the moments I could drown out
the noisy pain
by the heavenly sound of the violin and cello
playing as if making love.
They kept my spirits floating
despite the monster in the depths below.
So homage will I pay
to the muse herself
and hand on this holy craft to those little fingers
in this 5 year old angel
who masters the do-re-me
and feels each session
as a triumph.
Sacred Texts
How uncanny, these sacred texts
black ink on sallow aging parchment
between the scrolls the heavy long atzei chayim
this Torah,
parallel lines on which the Soferʼs quill hangs his letters
etched into the calf skin
on these lines the black letters suspended
like laundry lines in the gardens of suburban estates,
forming words that speak of the mythic journey
and biography of the human/divine failure.
Put aside the doubts!
those lingering academic questions
hovering as they still do in your head,
from a previous centuryʼs scholarship,
as to the archeology of these texts
their provenance
their literary conventions-whether exilic, post exilic,
the strands and strata of authorship,
criss crossing the page
violently dissecting the body of even a verse
with no respect for the integrity of the final redaction.
Let go of the literal finally!
give up the addiction to the plain meaning as is...
surrender the belief system that accompanied the text,
forgive all prior readings,
let not the “anxiety of influence” paralyze you further
despite the weighted authority of La Nom du Pere
the overbearing presence of the black suited Father-in-Law!
Accept your own prejudice and now sustained inner baggage
your sense of the prosidy of the text,
its lyricism, its poetry, its tone,
as you begin to read once more.
Become conscious!
bring awareness of the enormity of the weight of tradition
on your shoulders,
of the combined millennia of rabbinic and church commentary
of the super-commentaries surrounding the text, like chatting housewives,
of the writings of those stern faced bearded men
peering down at you from glass enclosed frames
in the dark corridor of your father in lawʼs New York apartment.
Begin to feel the lightness of your own fresh reading!
as it confronts you with the recycled problems of plot and justice
each time the weekly portion greets you.
Feel the comfort in the Midrashic musings
as you see through their hermeneutic tricks
and literal triggers and semantic puns that opened their
one time fresh discourse.
Be excited by the cosmic implications and daring risks
the Zohar takes in its imaginative
misreadings as it opens up hidden worlds of desire and connections.
Follow the Hassidic masters as they read their own struggles
into the narrative of biblical personalities.
For your task maybe the most important most critical ever!
For the sake of the very survival of that same text.
Yes, your reading and your baggage, your prejudice and hauntings
may determine its future.
For having been born to that last generation of survivors,
in earshot of the screams,
only once removed from their cries and shrieks
and the deafening silence the mornings after
the theological absence the decades after
the divine remaining “in absentia”,
you now have the impossible task of bringing
meaning to this text once again.
Impossible you say!
to bring meaning to their lives and deaths
to their memory, their trace, here!
gazing at the columns of black letters?
Like the columns of smoke that arose from the crematoria,
etched in the space between the Holy letters
of the fractured covenant
the broke promises
the absent Messiah.
And, as you pass your white tallis over the black letters
donʼt forget this space in between...
the silent presence, before you make the blessing over the Torah,
in this silence, in this absence of meaning
your presence
your reading
your blessing despite,
your keriah
your interpretation is, once again called for.
Yes, you maybe asked to do violence to this sacred text
for the sake of its very survival
like no generation before you.
For the sake of the sacred text itself.
For Her sake.
Donʼt worry She can handle it
She, who needs rescuing, is in that sacred space,
in between the blackness.
(Was it not Glen Gould who taught us how to read and play Bach anew?
by paying close attention to the pauses and spaces between the notes
unlike his contemporaries who remained in the classical tradition
of technique. His new midrashic version of the Goldberg Variations
brought new life to the ossified traditions of the Baroque).
Pay attention to these spaces!
Play the music of Torah, with them in mind!
Attend to what was not written
what was not said
what could never be said
between the divine lover and Her sacred people.
Be that surgeon!
Sharpen the steel!
Here in this sea of blackness, the sharper the knife
you bring to the dissecting table
the keener the scalpel you apply in your
hermeneutic operating room technique,
the deeper the secrets She will reveal!
for she is ever open to new readings, however violent,
and our post-Holocaust generation has solace only in Her.
In the presence of the divine absence,
we must find refuge in Her sacred spaces,
we must find new keys to read our selves
our fractured lives
our broken souls
In Her alone
in Her sacred Torah text.
For the black letters on white parchment is Her love poem to us
despite the suffering
in spite of the torture
a love letter all the more.
We will be held accountable
by our children
were we to settle for those old readings
abdicate our truths for comfortable and familiar exegesis
for the sake of imitation piety.
Do not give up on the text!
She feels uncannily sacred despite scholarship
despite history
despite dissection!
despite Mengele
for She too is a survivor!
A rush of excitement flows over me
as the Baal Koreh chants the text,
those familiar black notes
bending to his received cantillation tradition
line after line,
the holiness is found between the etched lines
and She demands we continue to fill the gaps and lacunae
and once again bring fresh answers to the age old questions
posed to the text
the issues and plot lines
the structures and conflicts
the redundancies and questions of justice.
All this in light of the age of technological genocide we inhabit.
All this in the presence of our lack of faith
yet our being present to this very absence of the divine.
Only by such violent reading of our sacred texts
(a Post-Holocaust Midrash of sorts),
will we be able to maintain the integrity of this sacred space
and Torah herself,
for only by emptying ourselves into the space between its black letters
can we too infuse Her with our lived albeit broken lives
for this She needs too.
This is our response to Her loving.
Dad's Shofar
The service being over we prepare to leave the little house of worship
a converted basement
its founder a Mr. Weil from Germany
who had transplanted his “Yekkish” customs and centuries of memory
to the fashionable Rechavia neighborhood of Jerusalem in the 30ʼs.
Being across the street from my parents
it has become home for them
now that they prefer to walk less.
and my father in his 90ʼs,
attends regularly and punctually,
especially on this High Holy Day
of Rosh Hashana 2011
where the blowing of 100 blasts (Tekiyos) is the key element of the
morning service.
People gather to leave climbing the steps to the street level
but Dad saunters over to the Bima-the lectern where the young man
still holds the shofar,
and asks permission “to give a few blows”.
My sister and mother had already climbed the steps
when they heard more shofar blasts
and, wondering what the commotion was,
ran back down.
My father was blowing again
after all these years
floods of memories poured in...
to the days of Finchley Central Synagogue
in the 60ʼ and 70ʼs...
the annual pilgrimage to the long services
of the High Holidays...
but for our family, more than others,
the anxiety of Dadʼs Shofar.
His was not an easy one,
we never realized until many years later
how the short ones are so easy to blow.
No, his Shofar was shiny and long
with a narrow “mouthpiece”
that puckered his lips
then swelled them.
We watched him blow
year after year,
his face reddening for the needed pressure
and his facial discomfort increased as he fatigued.
Sometimes he would falter
usually towards the end of the hundred tekiyos
those last few...
we would sweat bullets
and we children, looking at each other
from the Ladies Gallery down and back up
sweated alongside.
I would sweat in sympathy
and out of embarrassment
as he tried and sometimes failed to emit a tone.
Those last few...
“come Dad, you can do it”
meeting the resistance of that Shofar
as if it alone determined the very social standing of our father
for the next year,
and the comments of the congregants as they would emerge
from the services.
Now fast forwarded to 2011
in his 91st year
he challenges the Shofar
once again,
but now
I worry about his blood pressure
and his anticoagulation
and bleeding from such exertion.
My sister arrives to watch him blow successfully
and we sigh as we see his face shine
in accomplishment.
Yes he was always a “Baal Tekeya” a master of the blowing
and probably felt more pleasure from that than his Gaboʼos
his being warden then president
then Life President for so many years.
No it was these moments of challenge
when the entire community was silent
and upstanding
as he performed
alone
on the sacred stage the Bima.
These few moments in the year at its religious high point
that marked his lifeʼs journey
his character
his challenges
and his standing in the community.
As for me?
I swore never to subject myself to such public challenges
the sweat of those moments
etched into my consciousness forever
even though I tried at home to master that recalcitrant shofar!
It seems she was special
and reserved herself
and submitted only to those she chose
like my father
who remained willing to the risk
of her petulance
annually.
That ability to risk
in public,
the humiliation as well as the glory
he carries to this day
I believe it is called character.
My Pot Belly
You know how it is!
this body in decay...
months without the needed stretching, exercising, “the workout”
merely a walk here and there
lip service to the obvious need for exercise
but now a chance
here in this gym
I book a trainer.
Yet here, in this gym
I report
be-sneekered and T-shirted up
looking a bit floppy
with my pot belly
eager for her advice.
All this makes the French trainer smile in condescension.
Around are the enthusiastic toned, buffed
gym designer-wearing treadmillers and bikers
weight lifters and ugh! crunchers.
All busy and looking so earnest
as they work so hard to burn burn burn calories
and tone tone tone muscles.
I come to her for advice and more for inspiration
as to how to overcome my absolute inertia
my abhorrence of this physical business
this boring mind-killing workout
hoping she might just work with me just this once
and that should do it for ever.
Maybe she holds the magic key to my insulin resistance
maybe she can manufacture daily time for a workout
for stretches weights and cardiac exercise
without any effort!
Or help me mourn the loss of this most precious morning time
reserved for reading and study
before the first patient.
I know I know...
it is necessary...
lord knows I preach it...
I preach to to my diabetics and heart patients
my obese and neuropathic patients.
But isnʼt that so much easier than practicing
the very lessons and results of statistics I state by rote
as to the benefits.
It is necessary, I admit, for it pushes off my fatigue
that sets in earlier and earlier in the day
as I age,
and it eases the nocturnal cramps and joint freezes
that awaken me at 2 am
both combining to indict me for my laziness
to which I readily admit.
I even admit to it lowering the daily morning sugars
to which my glucometer is the best prosecuting attorney.
Yet here I am at the gym
among the men with those swollen muscles and abs
pumping their iron and sweating beads of effort
And me, and my pot belly!
Mother used to gauge a man by his pot belly.
It seemed to tell her everything about his character
his addictions to fat,
his “lack of control” over his “baser desires”
for food -therefore for everything else as well!
inspiring in us children an automatic contempt for
other portly folk that crossed our path
with a Pavlovian instinctual response that lasts until even now.
In the mirror- I have become that man!
for comfort foods do indeed push away the need for a moral tune up
or the feeling of depression and anxiety,
they push away the need for the necessary blood work
that will inevitably reveal the moral decay of my metabolism.
So using this rare opportunity for an objective opinion
I stand before her as upright as I
can and pull in my pot belly in shame.
A slightly ridiculous posture which can only last a few minutes
as she outlines our program
and I lose my breath in disbelief.
She canʼt be serious!
Then off we go... machine after machine
(which sadist invented these torture devices)
each designed to test and tone a particular muscle
isolated, with no friends to help out
each joint localized and lonely
as I pant and attempt to reach her goal of 10 or 15 curls etc.
This French trainer, thick in accent
telegraphic speech, continuous commentary
like a medieval Rabbi writing on the bible,
clipboard in hand,
watching, watching,
what is she thinking!
Pushing pushing me to do another one or two
as my muscle burns with lactic acid.
As we proceed the greek god, this adonis ahead of me
has notched up each machine
to weights I cannot even imagine!
and each time French instructor pulls out the key
and plunges it into the notch in some low low weight
that she thinks I can manage,
(they do not make lower weights than that!)
I laugh at myself inside following this weight lifter ahead
on the next machine, then cry.
As the hour progresses I begin to hear my body responding
with noises I have not heard before,
crackles of joints and cracks in other places,
each complaining in its own way,
a muscle burning here,
a cramp there,
muscles I thought I had forgotten existed
from my human anatomy days!
All this slowly adds up to an aching body as the French torturer
(now I realize why she was French) pushes me in her horrid accent
and I get dizzier.
This body, this frame,
the muscles and fat,
the pendulent abdomen
the lack of upper body muscle
all betray
a life of sedentary work
the lack of tone
a life on the run
on coffee
running on nerves
too harried
too hurried
to give the body the sacred respect it deserves.
Yet today,
it has responded to me in ways I never thought possible.
It is telling me “there is still time”
“I have the wisdom you seek”
“if only you could invest time in me!”
But can I reorient my priorities to give it this precious time?
The pot belly looks smaller after her working me out this morning-
I look again in the mirror and see the possibilityit
indicts me nonetheless,
Could it represent once more my motherʼs ideal- flat bellied-
“self-controlled” man?
a man in control of his passions and his life?
and then I let out this hysterical laugh,
a guffaw, that gets me dirty looks for the other
serious men showering and pruning themselves before the same mirror
these greek gods do not take kindly to my laughter,
but I just cannot control myself
in this locker room of the gods
I just cannot take myself so seriously!
This body, in pain and in pleasure,
neglected mostly for the pursuits of the mind
pursuits of career
and plain need to work remains
my vehicle,
even in decline,
with its pot belly,
like a beloved old 1950 Austin Healey
that I just cannot ditch, despite the insane Lucas wiring.
And it alone carries the genetic secrets of my lineage and culture,
ethnicity and race.
So.... I will attempt in this season of resolutions,
to make a little more time,
suffer the boring passage of time,
time for the body without mind,
and look a little kinder ,
on my pot belly.
It's a Gray Day
Driving down Lakeshore Drive
a gray day beckons us downtown
we do this trek on our necessary commute
from our ghettoized middle class seclusion
to the bridge that re-connects us to work in the land beyond the bridge.
It is a gray day
and Lake Michigan reflects the dark clouds
lying low over the city and the lake.
It seems they are so low they kiss
in an unholy alliance
of heaven and earth
in the very grayness of color.
The radio drones on and on about this or that news trivia
as they must
and we listen addicted to the endless chatter
No news in the face of news
and pushy BBC anchors in their Holier-than Thou tones
merely add self-righteous British grayness to the mix.
The looming skyscrapers lose themselves
and their sense of importance
as the clouds envelop their upper floors
cut down to visual size now
they too are swallowed in grayness.
Is this to be my day?
grayness?
neither black nor white
nothing certain,
nothing absolute,
am I too resigned to a graying out of clarity?
in that in-between space that I seem to occupy
so much.
Do I find solace in the murky visual acuity
darting in between the fogginess
of things that appear to be
yet are not,
is there a comfort in this? a safety?
I am reminded of those pea soupers in London in the 50ʼs
where mother would make me walk in front of the car down Hendon Avenue
as visibility was down to almost zero.
Less a human shield, more a poor little scout
Itʼs a Gray Day"
she would drive behind my little legs
as if I could see anything more!
“There is no room for this” a voice wake me from my reverie
“these are the High Holidays approaching!”
“you are to be judged once again”
and, of course, found wanting!
the inner Kritik does overtime this season
as the same little boy stands before the black robed judge once more
for the infractions of the past.
Powerless over the same character defects
the same roster of sins are read out
by the same prosecutor.
I think of really old people
what are they asking for this Rosh Hashana?
forgiveness? atonement?
At age 90 what is my father thinking
as he looks back
like I do.
Does he feel
he can repent
at his age? Does he remember his sins?
This grayness invades my bones
it drags me down like wet wool
like swimming with clothes on
I feel I will not make it to the other side
for all this baggage.
For my mother and father weigh heavily on me
what was done
what was not done
now in their old age
in their second childhood.
Yet the raging clouds are alive
with vitality,
it cannot be a blue-sky every day
on the glorious lakefront,
with white whisped clouds gently moving to the
music of the wind.
The lake is still beautiful
even today
I decide
even touching the gray sky.
Itʼs a Gray Day"
We must suffer this graying
of the weather
of our lives
of our dreams.
Itʼs a Gray Day"
The Space Between the Twin Towers
The space between the Twin Towers
is that gaping chasm
where meaning melts into chaos.
Where men fall to their deaths knowingly, intentionally,
and the sound of the bodies hitting ground zero
deafens the soul forever, for it allowed this travesty and
remained silent leaving this space complicit
in permitting their free fall.
She did not change the rules of nature and become dense
to soften their landing she failed to ask gravity to suspend
its laws for those poor souls hurtling to their deaths
she stood silently by.
The space between the Twin Towers
allows for the absence of human and nature’ compassion
the pressure holding those twin towers of human greed
and capitalism apart, yet binding them in a partnership
becomes too unbearable for her
and, while signing on to a suicide pact with the devil in two
jets, she betrays the towers by staying, and surviving
while they crumble and melt.
She has signed a death pact with nature, the devil and
gravity unbeknownst to all of us.
The space between the Twin Towers
is the space that allows us to breathe
an airlock of concrete-free reality
in the tip of concrete lower Manhattan
a lebensraum, but destined to be filled with the Pompeii-
Like ash as they melted downwards to the earth.
The space between the Twin Towers
has remained after the towers have fallen
these ten years, bearing witness to what was once there
as if it has been released from its confinement forever.
And annually the blue lights that fill the footprints of the
towers leaving two eerie ghost-like columns in the sky
that space is exposed once again in its guilt.
The space between the Twin Towers
will be forgotten unlike the towers themselves,
yet it eerily presses on my consciousness
making itself felt in uncanny times.
When at a loss for words theologically, an inability to make
sense of a divine order where human life has become so
cheap my mind wanders to this space;
when the unfathomable horror of human cruelty
of man’s inhumanity to man
makes itself felt in the heart
I am drawn to this space;
and when my own heart of darkness reveals its
inexplicable presence
in my relationships, my little betrayals of self and others,
I find a paradoxical solace in this space.
For me it has become the metaphor
for the absence of meaning
for cruelty and torture
for the appropriation of 9/11 as an icon to make profit
and punditry and for all the trade center represented but
hid so well, the darker side, the underbelly of capitalism
and Wall street.
It also reflects my own failure to confront and act
to just sit on the sidelines of history and watch
(oh how I remember in my idealism of youth
questioning those in Germany and Europe
in the 30’s for their inaction and passiveness.)
Now guilty of the same I feel the presence of this space
bearing down on me.
These last 10 years,
the insane rebuilding to “show them”
the lockdown of our freedoms,
the lack of fundamental change in our society,
the inability to “learn from the tragedy”,
the absence of new vision,
the upsurge in world violence,
the ongoing internecine hatred...
all points to the presence of the absence
the ongoing effect of this space
the presence of its effects
continuing despite the loss of the twins it held together
in tension despite the release of their hubris
it is present the space between the Twin Towers.
Pine Forest
We walk hand in hand
The boy and I
On the soft sandy horse trail
The early morning mist
Now having moved slowly to reveal the tall pine trees
Greeting us in the distance with their perfume
A congregation of upright silent worshippers
The looming density of wooded trunks
Reflecting the hundred year old age of this forest.
Question after question pours out without interruption
From the little boy
Such an inquisitive mind
And I patiently answer as I remember my fatherʼs impatience
With my own questions as a child
The little boyʼs hand grasps mine
Unconscious as to how precious these moments are for me.
I see my childhood and his as a seamless continuum
And time contracts and makes me sad.
In the clearing
Surrounded by these huge pines
Like the Burgherʼs of Calais
So self-righteous
Yet so dignified
On their pondering silence.
In this clearing we sit in silence on tree stumps
And I ask him to be silent and listen to the forest
And tell me what he hears.
I want so badly to teach him to listen to the silence
This almost five year old boy
To hear the secrets of the pine forest
But I hear only his ongoing questions.
As we look for the pine cones, the sapling trees close by
He runs to measure his lanky height against theirs.
We see the older thicker ones and compare them
to his father then to his grandfathersʼ
In age and thickness.
The wind blows gently through the pines
The blue sky punctuated by the soft white puffs of clouds-
a perfect Shabbat morning.
I tell him that one day he will hold his own grandson in his hand
and walk with him to a similar forest of trees to teach him
the secret of the trees, their being born, growing up,
ageing and breaking off to lie in the ground.
He listens urgently. He is an intense spirit probing the world
to make sense of it as I had done as a youngster.
I look around at the silence of the forest and just this moment
I feel the joy of being so alive and being with this child.
I cannot describe how much comfort this little boy
has brought to my life as well as hope.
More than anyone he has brought me to a kind of acceptance
of my own mortality and a serenity in just knowing he will live on
after me and I will forever be his Dada and be in
his heart like my own Dada. And that is good enough!
After all those years of struggle in fear and dread,
in the dark nights of anticipation, as if my life accelerated to its
conclusion quicker than others, in that horror
I have emerged to this delightful being
who comforts me by his mere existence in my life.
Like this forest he has taught me serenity is the very silence-
the silence of acceptance of my mortal body as part of nature,
in its rhythm of life growth decay and death.
כִּי הָאָדָם עֵץ הַשָּׂדֶה
“for man is like the tree of the forest”
Has new meaning for me today
As with all life and with trees
We are powerless to step outside the facts and
the knowledge of what must come
What must happen
Powerless to step much beyond our genetic predilections
for health disease and decline.
Despite the sacred texts that speak of eternal life
The cemeteries known and the “land of the living”
Today I feel only the divine immanence of nature
Of nature as immortal and eternal
compared with our creatureliness and ever so brief
sojourn in this world.
My Dada used to hug me in his green cardigan
at the entrance to his Wembley home
welcoming me with a spoonful of castor oil!
But what lies buried in my heart was his
love. My memories of him, his smell, his love,
his presence are embedded in my heartand
today I try to be as present as I can to this little boy-who,
one day, will hold his
grandson closed to him while remembering me.
We walk back along the sandy horse trail and I am unsure
whether he will even remember this day-Pine Forest-
but I tell him, it was, for me, the best part of my
weekend.
Crumbling Buildings
I marvel at the marble stairwell in this 17 story hotel
as I descend in the hope of losing a few calories each
counts these days where
one wakes to the magic number on the glucometer
to review the sins of the previous dinner.
What it must have taken to hew and quarry all this marble
and the granite being placed all around the main downtown post office
as I walk to the lake this cloudy morning before Chicago awakens:
Was this TARP money being put to use?
I walk by a quarry near my hospital at times
and marvel at the depth to which man has gorged out of the earth
for his building projects, chosen for the granite and stone hardness
it is prime building material and mechanically crushed
to the size demanded by the
contractor who sends in lorry after lorry, winding their way down
the spiral dirt path to
the depths of the excoriated gray landscape
as if Mother Earth
gives of Her own body, now willingly
so that we can build huge skyscrapers to our egos.
Then I think of the hole in the earth across from my shul
where the Rabbi is building his new edifice
a gaping disgorgement of Chicago clay, soft and brown
a violation once more but just a few feet deep, enough for the foundation
where we will all stand above one day
in the artistʼs rendition sent out to fundraise
manicured pews of cherry wood
ladies gallery and all
just like a Lutheran chapel.
Which brings be to the collapsing building of my soul
as chunks of debris slowly come crashing down to earth
the attempt was made to build
but failed
the material was grade B
the engineer was incompetent
and the workers drunk.
Yet there is something right about this
a sort of hubris
that is appropriate
something that feels justified in a weird way
when something is dreamed of, executed and yet collapses.
when the earth will eventually claim all for itself
either naturally or through it cataclysmic paroxysms
in quakes and other “disasters”.
When she is unwilling to stand for all this human arrogance anymore.
I too was built on a foundation not of my own choosing
but then began the laborious work
of building structure upon structure
in my effort to reach out to the divine
heavenwards,
to this angry punishing sky God
who rages at us with a wagging index finger
in sacred scriptures.
Then having discovered Midrash
and its poetic beauty
its irony and hidden protest
its textuality and deconstruction of
the heavy revealed word
its playfulness with the Logos
then next story was built
towards Him.
Finally after crisis in life
when one dis-covers the darker side
of oneʼs soul
Hassidut and Kabbalah provided a narrative
that framed these impulses and feelings
about me and the divine
in a holographic image that provided comfort and validation
of the very struggle.
It turns out that He too has His issues
and this world was born out of His desire to expel His dark side.
Mother earth represents that dark desire in the cataclysmic chaos
that followed His birthing.
But now all is crumbling
the edifice is losing height
falling, falling
back down to the cthonic depths
in a free fall
and on the way down all is being stripped away
except the idea behind the words.
except the feeling and the once fresh desire.
The structure is broken
like the way my grandson impulsively tears down
his lego construction
suddenly without warning, on impulse.
Back on the ground
Mother Earth caresses all this with a knowing nod
Her daily rituals and cycles
light and dark,
sleep and wakefulness,
hunger and satiety,
the warm shower and the deep cool mikvah waters
the air breezing on my face in the green cornfields
the awakening of desire in the loins,
now and then
and the persistent seeking of beauty despite age.
These always-present
but newly dis-covered silent presences
give me comfort
and the realization
of the vitality of Her apparent passiveness.
She is the silent witness to all this
She bears the blood of our hubris
She accepts us after all is done and we lie without further breath.
Where the shul becomes erect in its move to become
a place of worship
I become bent over, like an old shaman
with the weight of my past, and others,
of my failure,
and yet my new found sense
of earthiness.
Contrary to what I was taught about “gashmius”-physicality
and the evil of desire,
I now wait for it and welcome the very feelings
of hunger and thirst, the aching limbs that need their daily
limbering up,
the morning misty moist air,
a beautiful girl passing by,
as if this is the very blessing of life and Mother Earth
“They” call it Malchut and Schechina in other texts
but for me
having crumbled
itʼs just what I have right now
and that is fine.
For 2000 years we in the synagogue and church have imaged the divine
in His masculinity.
Recently Meister Eckhardt, Baal Shem Tov and their disciples
think otherwise
but we get stuck in the wire diagrams
of this or that theosophical system
ignoring the explosive implication of this.
So I need to continue to just hold this paradox
hold the divine images
negotiate His/Her modus vivendi
inside me.
Allow Her to be present to the kiritik inside
to be present at Her desire
in the temporal seasons that characterizes Her cycles
be present to Her feminine rage
as different from His
and wait.
Eulogy for Reb Yudel
He carried so much suffering
he was so tormented
and with this weight
with this past
he lived
despite
he was such a presence
his drawn cachectic eyes
and his face reminded me of Chagall's Rabbiner
etched in those very eyes were all of European misery
and it never left his consciousness
yet at times there was space for playfullness and mirth
"ehr lacht!" he would say of me
and his questions always challenged me,
so tied in with pshat and medieval trivia...
as a midrashic man he drove me crazy!
it was so hard for him to accommodate to Amerika
to the softness and the food
to the time for leisure
he was so stuck in Europe.
his deference for scholars and rebbes
was transmitted to his children
and his love, typically european
in his inability to express verbally or physically.
so now we remember him, his life, his his-story
as he embodies everything in transition for there to here
from the trauma to the silence of the present
from that tradition steeped in shtetl piety
to the openness of New York.
he was an essentially tragic man
which attracted me so much to him
and I felt my purpose to humor him and make him laugh
a little
just a little
and in my home
he could possibly let go a little
from the bonds of the lived life of pain
the body of suffering that inhabited his consciousness
without even him being able see it.
In Memoriam
to Reb Yudel
whom I shall miss as he walked into my home with his
characteristic gait and folded arms
into my arms for a wonderful bear hug.
I will miss that hug, most of all.
Prayer for Jim Burstyn
“Who is at my door?
He said, 'Who is at my door?'
I said, 'Your humble servant.'
He said, 'What business do you have?'
I said, 'To greet you, Oh Lord.'
He said, 'How long will you journey on?'
I said, 'Until you stop me.'
He said, 'How long will you boil in the fire?'
I said, 'Until I am pure.
'This is my oath of love.
For the sake of love
I gave up wealth and position.'
He said, 'You have pleaded your case
but you have no witness.'
I said, 'My tears are my witness;
the pallor of my face is my proof.'
He said, 'Your witness has no credibility;
your eyes are too wet to see.'
I said, 'By the splendor of your justice
my eyes are clear and faultless.'
He said, 'What do you seek?'
I said, 'To have you as my constant friend.'
He said, 'What do you want from me?'
I said, 'Your abundant grace.'
He said, 'Who was your companion on the journey?
I said, 'The thought of you, 0 King.'
He said, 'What called you here?'
I said, 'The fragrance of your wine.'
He said, 'What brings you the most fulfillment?'
I said, 'The company of the Emperor.'
He said, 'What do you find there?'
I said, 'A hundred miracles.'
He said, 'Why is the palace deserted?'
I said, 'They all fear the thief.'
He said, 'Who is the thief?'
I said, 'The one who keeps me from -you.
He said, 'Where is there safety?'
I said, 'In service and renunciation.'
Prayer : for Jim Burstyn June 2011
He said, 'Who is the thief?'
I said, 'The one who keeps me from -you.
He said, 'Where is there safety?'
I said, 'In service and renunciation.'
He said, 'What is there to renounce?'
I said, 'The hope of salvation.'
He said, 'Where is there calamity?'
I said, 'In the presence of your love.'
He said, 'How do you benefit from this life?'
I said, 'By keeping true to myself
Now it is time for silence.
If I told you about His true essence
You would fly from your self and be gone,
and neither door nor roof could hold you back!”
Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
My constitutional walk amid the the green green fields of Indiana
the late rains have made the green so lush a magical morning this
air cool, a bit moist, a mist rises as
the early morning sun warms the sacred ground
the sky as blue as Techeles and the Throne of Glory
the breeze gently envelops me caressing my face.
Exhilarated by this perfection I think of the time to Daven to pray
this desire to reach out and beyond a perfect morning
beyond accepting it for what it is just this
my brain forces me to reify and situate and mythologize
to pray to a timeless eternity
as these aching limbs walk off the stiffness in the hips and shoulders
creeping age makes itself felt at the two ends of the day.
For now I revel in the immanence of Mother Earth/Schechinah of Being
ממלא כל עלמין
feeling spirit incarnate in my very bones,
in earth, in nature as I age towards earthiness
facing a return to earth.
But my religious-cultural heritage begins to weigh in
heavily on my shoulders and the faith of the father,
La Nom du Pere, the bearded portraits framed on the study
walls looking down sternly, the textual canon I inhabit and inhabits me,
its aphorisms, its quotations, those wisdoms that spring up in consciousness,
force my gaze upwards towards the sky the infinite blueness
and the Almighty One.
Until He invaded reality in Genesis 1:1 in our mythic memory,
our canonical sacred text,
all was quiet and serene just like this morning in Indiana
where only birds chirp away
and all are going about their natural business of survival,
until, that is, He crossed over that infinite chasm we call the tzimtzum
between the infinite and the finite, to experience
for Himself the glory that is this world of nature and Mother Earth.
Until then of course, there were no questions.
The day He breathed the נשמת חיים
into this anthropoid, there was no self, no consciousness of Other,
our canon insists, our myth tells us, there were no questions,
no obligations, no directives, no rules to disobey.
But with the Miltonian assertion of self through the agency of some
serpentine wisdom, the self refused to obey, the self-conscious self
became self as other, fulfilled in the very
act of disobedience by eating the fruit of what Mother Earth had produced,
a luscious delight to the eyes. Forbidden by the foreign Sky Deity for no
reason, but instilling an eternal guilt in mankind
genetically transmitted forever.
And this Transcendent Deity now imposes His will
down here of unconscious Mother Earthʼs children
who will be scarred forever and no more so than His chosen people
Israel. But this covenant is complicated as the vassal repeatedly fails and
incurs the wrath of the king. Betrayal and rage follow the history of this
complexity as the people struggle to relate to a divine Being. How to
understand the rage of a Being who allows Mengele to assume divine
proportions deciding on life and death with a flick of his arm?
The covenant has transformed into something sinister as
the Deity wishes to experience
such monstrosity at the hands of the human.
It occurs to me as I walk along the crunchy path of pebbles
between the cornfields of Indiana, to dissolve the contract
(as has been suggested before me by others such as
Rubinstein) to return to a pagan earth bound spirit
who does not allow genocide for its own sake.
Dissolve the Brit, no longer place our trust in this Transcendent Deity, and
relinquish His promise to protect, for what good did it do on the ramp?
Let each party go its own way, an amicable divorce of sorts.
Surely our people might then once more dissolve into non-chosenness,
merge back into humanity, not be singled out firther by
Church, Nazi or Jihad!
Of course the Holy One would have another rage attack,
set upon us the German Shepherds loose once more like on the poor
innocent whose only sin was to embrace modernity.
Left alone what would become of us? to whom would we pray to?
We have done it for so many millennia it is second nature! We believe in a
Higher Power who we daven to and beg for mercy to and ask for healing from,
could we even handle the orphan status? Yet this morning despite 6 months
of darkness, I feel like praying. And as I place the black straps on my arm
once more I buy into the blackness of Rabbinic tradition. The black notes on
white parchment, the black ink on the page of talmud, the black stripes on
the Tallis, the black yarmulke the black wide-brimmed hats.
And the words flow freely from the lips denuded of attention to meaning
just the texture of the sentence, its very materiality, its prosidy, its verbal
articulation. No meaning, no intent, no kavannah,
but that is sufficient today
like an actor on stage
playing the part, the role, this feels right
this black ritual from earthy materials, reaching from the spirit below to the male
transcendent Deity beyond.
I tap into this feeling-this religious snetiment
and after these 6 months of dehydration-it feels goodit
is sufficient this התעררות דלתתא
in this מוחין דקטנות
and Mother earth/Schechinah gently breezes past my cheek in assent
for She too weeps
over Her disconnection with Him
and it occurs at that moment
that this is what the kabbalists meant by the term יחודים
those unifications they incant prior to performing Mitzvot.
In this new approach, this new myth, the radical theological move
was that is was now up to man himself
to re-connect the divine with the divine
the Schechina/Malchut/earth spirit below weeping and wailing for Her
suffering children with the Deity beyond and transcendent.
That what I was feeling was exactly what I was meant to be feeling this
moment by just bringing attention to the infinite gap that separated spirit,
mythic, eternal world reality here and now on this glorious summer day
amidst the green cornfields of Indiana from
the Historical Deity of our Canon of history and texts
across the צמצום
So I hope and pray -not using the head-
with nothing but attention to my earthly time
bound aging presence here on the green carpet of Indiana
and that is sufficient.
Ezras Israel Dinner Honoring Holocaust Survivors
70 years after the Temple had been destroyed and the Shekhinah had gone into exile, all the angels went into mourning for Her, and they composed dirges and lamentations for her. So too did all the upper and lower realms weep for Her and go into mourning. Then God came down from heaven and looked upon His house that had been burned. He looked for His people, who had gone into exile. And He inquired about His bride,who had left Him. And just as she had suffered a change, so too did Her husband-His light no longer shone, and He was changed from what He had been. Indeed, by some accounts God was bound in chains.[1]
Psalm: Paul Celan
“No one moulds us again out of earth and clay, no one conjures our dust. No one. Praised be your name, no one. For your sake we shall flower. Towards you. A nothing we were, are, shall remain, flowering: the nothing-, the no one's rose. With our pistil soul-bright, with our stamen heaven-ravaged, our corolla red with the crimson word which we sang over, O over the thorn.[2]
She longs for Him,
she, through our collective self, keeps longing for the absent lover
in the dark night of this apparent exile
despite the yellow glowing lights on the Jerusalem walls,
the yellow badges haunt our dreams
despite the Profit Sharing Plans for retirement in Florida,
all contemporary luxury feels guilty,
all remains not well.
In our absent gazes,
She too is not present, in us
She too has gone, disgusted by the self-bloating
Holier-than-Thou’ness of current religious pretensions to piety
so we play games as if...
the rituals of daily life and learning had meaning inside
as if...
nothing had happened some 70 years ago
a lover’s spat some would say!
others would make even more outrageous theological claims
(harping to Nietzche)
yet others would put blame on us! on the very victims!!
as if...
Has He ever not been bound in chains? [3]
the king bound in the trestles. מלך אסור ברהטים
did the Song to end all Songs not tell us?
the king bound in his trestles
outside the garden of delight
watching and waiting for his beloved,
yet kabbalistically also bound
in the trauma of this very creation
in the only way the finite could trap the infinite in its grip.
Bound in the chains of the barbed wire trestles
He watches his beloved starved and tortured
played with and humiliated by German/Ukrainian/Polish soldiers
the women defiled in ways that left permanent etchings in the flesh,
a scarring, living corpses who could never again make love...
handsome smart uniforms smoking all the while with leather gloves
so as not to defile themselves.
Bound in the excremental deterioration of the self and humanity
as if...
the divine wished to experience such degradation
a pervert Greek experiment ordered by the Pantheon for the amusement of the gods.
Awakening from this traumatic nightmare
now 70 years later
like those Rabbis of old
looking at the Hurban
the broken Jerusalem walls,
the “fox running across the Temple Mount”[4]-
we have no Rabbi Akiva to laugh.
We languish amid the normalcy of daily life
as if... it never took place.
And we, the children of those who survived
whose parents’ silences
deafen the living rooms of London, NY, Tel Aviv
what are we to believe?
who are we to believe?
You who survived gave us nothing to believe!
despite your comings and goings to shul
and the lips chattering alongside the songs of the chazzan
we saw through that, even as children,
to the dark emptiness inside you all
and realized slowly, slowly
the legacy of Die Niemandsrose[5]
and the Psalm to No-Body.
Please help us
before you depart this world
please show us how to
believe!
show us how to hold on to our lost faith
even as you slowly drowned in your memories and lost ones.
In connecting to you
we at least have a physical representation
of your lives here
of your embodied trauma
of the blue etchings in your forearms
of your survival
we can hug and embrace your frail bodies
like a talisman
to ward off the evil curse that is our people.
But what will you leave us when you have gone?
what blessing will you bestow upon us
as you move away
into the memory of our loss?
Please don’t leave
please do not leave us alone
in this wilderness
in this new modern Hurban
please give us a hint
at some messianic dream you still hold on to
some secret you have withheld until now
some divine word you received over there
in the hell of enlightened Europe.
Hold us close
hold us to your hearts
squeeze us tight please
never let go.
For without you
we fear,
we fear
we will lose all faith
like the Klauzenberger Rebbe claimed
in the first al chet on Kol Nidre 1946
“our only אל חטא was that we own up to is our loss of faith on You Lord!”
without you
present
to hold us close
we fear
being alone in this nightmarish world
where people go about their normal lives
as if...
as if...
it never happened.
[1] Howard Schwartz, The Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 58 ,Pesikta De Rav Kahana 13:9, 15:3, Zohar I:182a
[2] Translated by Michael Hamburger
[3] Song of Songs 7:6 “Your head upon you is like Carmel, and the hair of your head like purple; a king is caught in its tresses.”
[4] Lamentations 5:18 “For the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, (even) foxes walk upon it.”
[5] Paul Celan: Die Niemandsrose (The Nomansrose / The No-One's-Rose, 1963)
Transgressions
As a child the single greatest blow to my developing spirituality
was the guilt from pegam habrit.
That masturbatory fantasy life that allowed a few minutes of escape
from the intolerable world of a British post war childhood
and its violence has become ingrained. But at what a price!
The days following I could not pray to the Almighty One above.
The guilt was palpable and my self-loathing a persistent sense of self.
The mother that whacked me for not practicing piano sufficiently or diligently
with her bamboo canes waiting for service in the flower pot
ever ready for immediate use,
forcing me to devise ruses for so-called practice
tinkering with the keys that almost sounded like music and scales
yet allowed me to daydream the hour away all the while
fool the authority of the raging mother not always successfully.
Even before my sense of spiritual self was layered
and self-conscious
a recurring and familiar feeling of inner dread overtook me.
This second being, rotten to the core,
was born from these violent encounters,
leaving me with an indescribable sense
of inner desolation already by age 10.
Over the years this sense of the transgressive
and the inability to escape the guilt of existence
has permeated my inner landscape
helped in large measure by the rabbinic tradition
of the divine judge on the annual day of judgement-
Rosh Hashanah where all pass before the heavenly tribunal-
the Grand Inquisitor and where
all oneʼs prior actions of the year are measured.
And the supplicatory prayers (tachanun) that invoked divine mercy for sins
each monday and thursday, then the selichot, and fast daysʼ penitent tefillot.
That Ancient One of the Old Testament had conspired with the
inner kritik to form an overwhelming alliance from without and within
and leaving me devastated continuously found
wanting and feeling the “guilty” verdict even before the crime.
When the outer world conspired as well
in the form of the DEA and the State of Massachusetts
the wound left an indelible mark of Cain in my soul.
No longer could I trust the self within
as a moral compass
no longer could I see myself as “innocent”.
Kafka came alive for me as I seemed to live out his parables
in real life. The second being was now the only voice.
Yet over the years I have found
a developing sense of inner peace
that came with acceptance of the darker soul
and the realization that the “I” that was me
was a composite of drives and ethnic codes
formed in a genetic prison not of my own making.
In this biological system insults and traumas affected neuronal circuits
and laid down indelible pathways of aberrant behaviors,
making the sense of “free-will” philosophically problematic
yet allowing some measure of relief
in the neurological world of cause and effect.
Ironically in the very transgression of this or that
I would sense the outer limits of my self
the borders of my inner territory and the edges
of what otherwise was unknown aspects of my moral code.
I would learn what I would be willing to do
and what I would be unwilling to engage in
which taught me much more about the inner world I inhabited
than any text or teacher.
Often my father would spring to mind in such conflicts
both as a guide and as an example
in re-membering what he had endured in similar circumstances.
Indelibly etched in my soul was the anxiety written on his face
as he returned home after being questioned
by the purchase tax inspectors circa 1960
which must have evoked memories
of black Maria cars in Vienna whisking away
Jews in the night. His mother sent him cycling daily and upon his return
he never knew whether they might be there or not.
For in his choice to escape the horror
on that fateful day in the Viennese banhof
on the platform he also had to betray those closest to him
in leaving them (albeit beyond his control) for safety...
Thus my very physical being is the result of this
conflicted choice of his, to betray in order to live.
Yet it was in my reading of tradition above all,
that differences between us father and son-
would explode onto the Shabbat table passionately
focused on our differing reading of sacred texts
and his insistence on literal readings of midrashic myth,
(ironically at the same time his accepting
a purely allegorical reading of Greek
mythology.)
His critical voice ringing in my ears when I begged to differ
holding me to his pre-war literary conventions,
all the while forcing my inner conviction to pass muster
and honing my rhetoric in treading my own path of reading.
The price for all of this has been steep
for I find no solace in the company of co-religionists,
having been branded an apikorus of sorts
which I have been slow to embrace.
Our post war community was small,
and following the Holocaust there was no room
for dissent. We were in theological “lock down” mode
like those facing the tornado in the Wizard of Oz.
All the shutters to the outside had been closed
all the liberal hatches have been pulled down tight
there being no room for dissent or resistance
to authoritarian traditional readings.
Yet it was precisely the Shoah
and the theological consequences thereof
which have haunted my spiritual life
and held all my textual readings up to its lens.
This indelible fact of history, begging the very covenantal relationship
and the accident of my birth so soon after,
as well as the very incarnation of my fatherʼs impossible choice,
have forced me to re-examine and constantly
refuse myself the luxury of pious readings,
literal Protestant readings
and self-serving orthodoxies.
To be sure the self-sabotaging self
has been well at work, the darker second me, all the while
doing its best to sabotage and leaving its physiological trail
of deep stomach pains and the familiar dread in the chest.
Never to forget that fainting spell
before the Harvard Professor as the junior faculty
instructor I was, being told the DEA had paid him a visit,
after two years of sacrifice for him and academic medical research.
Awaking to the reality of being examined and investigated
an 8 week trial of the very self and character
just like the 11 year old naughty boy
in the primary school,
being repeatedly whipped by my headmaster-
Mr Shapiro for being sent out of class
for not knowing the equations or for being
too dark skinned for a British schoolboy.
And the Maths Master in grammar school
who felt my only use in his class was not for my mathematical prowess
rather my anatomical susceptibility for fondling
with his thundering Germanic accent to prevent any protest.
Only here I had to learn to own my mistakes and flaws
openly paraded in the court room drama.
Aging has removed the sense of victimhood
that haunted me for years now that I have made peace with parents,
teachers and professors, but the ultimate authority
remains transcendent in power and opaque to access.
For Him alone and His Law transgression has become
a raison dʼêtre of a kind,
for only a transgressive reading of the self
and of received texts even of his Halacha,
will do in this post-Holocaust world
where all traditions must fail or else we will fail
those who died for tradition so unwillingly.
In the wilderness that is left after all certainty has perished
in the killing fields
we walk about numb and alone.
In the screaming silence of His absence
we refuse dialogue
despite a deep yearning to be heard by Him.
SYLVIA KLEIN 2011
Royal Tatoo and Hyperfascism
A 50 or so years old man lies on the examining table and removes his shirt for the
impending medical procedure, revealing tattoos across his back and arms. He bears the
usual biker tattoos with aggressive images of faces and signs, crosses and daggers.
Most of my younger patients sport tattoos. Little anklets or barbed wire wrist bands and
flowers in the lumbar lordotic sacro-iliac area, names of girlfriends or children roses,
flowers and mottos. One ex-con had a whole litany in gothic lettering on his back that
looked like an ancient manuscript telling the world what an evil place it was. He told me
he received it in jail over many months. In fact it is so common that the tattoo has
become a fashion statement and most of my patients sport them.
However on this patient’s outer right arm is a swastika-in reverse. When I ask him about
that image he responds:
“Yes, doc, I was much younger then, but have no fear, it is in reverse because I had
many friends who were black and Jewish!”
How kind of him! How manipulative! His biker friends and the gang would not notice the
phase reversal of the swastika all the while his ethnic friends would not be offended
because it was not a real swastika! He had solved the problem of loyalty to his gang
and not offending his friends. So he thinks.
My electro-diagnostic technician Dennis, seeing me stare at the swastika, nods with that
knowing look, having been with me so many years now-he knows of the struggle I have
as a physician. I am responsible for my patient unconditionally, yet the meaning behind
that symbol, that image etched in his flesh, represents a hatred that destroyed my
father’s family and a world. This tattoo threatens the very rapport between doctor and
patient, it is so fraught! I hold back my raging emotions and continue the study. I ignore
the flesh for the nerves buried deep beneath the surface. I prod and electrocute to
determine the integrity of the peripheral nerves exiting the spinal cord.
It is so ironic that those with the fewest teeth have the largest density of tattoos, they
are the same who fear my spinal needle the most! Those who demand sedation on
pondering the flashy steele of the surgeon’s knife “resolving the enigma of the fever
chart”. I who stand with the needle over the prone patient who trusts the doctor to inject
accurately, innocently waiting for the treatment and the relief.
In Synagogue my old friend Farkash, sits behind me, aged around 88, a Holocaust
survivor and a legend in Chicago. He is a pious talmudic scholar as well as a pious but
creative thinker with tomes of novellae unpublished. Honored for his charity as well as
erudition he too sports a tattoo on his left arm. Being an observant Jew he did not
voluntarily agree to this branding (tattoos are prohibited in Jewish Law) but received itA 50 or so years old man lies on the examining table and removes his shirt for the
impending medical procedure, revealing tattoos across his back and arms. He bears the
usual biker tattoos with aggressive images of faces and signs, crosses and daggers.
Most of my younger patients sport tattoos. Little anklets or barbed wire wrist bands and
flowers in the lumbar lordotic sacro-iliac area, names of girlfriends or children roses,
flowers and mottos. One ex-con had a whole litany in gothic lettering on his back that
looked like an ancient manuscript telling the world what an evil place it was. He told me
he received it in jail over many months. In fact it is so common that the tattoo has
become a fashion statement and most of my patients sport them.
However on this patient’s outer right arm is a swastika-in reverse. When I ask him about
that image he responds:
“Yes, doc, I was much younger then, but have no fear, it is in reverse because I had
many friends who were black and Jewish!”
How kind of him! How manipulative! His biker friends and the gang would not notice the
phase reversal of the swastika all the while his ethnic friends would not be offended
because it was not a real swastika! He had solved the problem of loyalty to his gang
and not offending his friends. So he thinks.
My electro-diagnostic technician Dennis, seeing me stare at the swastika, nods with that
knowing look, having been with me so many years now-he knows of the struggle I have
as a physician. I am responsible for my patient unconditionally, yet the meaning behind
that symbol, that image etched in his flesh, represents a hatred that destroyed my
father’s family and a world. This tattoo threatens the very rapport between doctor and
patient, it is so fraught! I hold back my raging emotions and continue the study. I ignore
the flesh for the nerves buried deep beneath the surface. I prod and electrocute to
determine the integrity of the peripheral nerves exiting the spinal cord.
It is so ironic that those with the fewest teeth have the largest density of tattoos, they
are the same who fear my spinal needle the most! Those who demand sedation on
pondering the flashy steele of the surgeon’s knife “resolving the enigma of the fever
chart”. I who stand with the needle over the prone patient who trusts the doctor to inject
accurately, innocently waiting for the treatment and the relief.
In Synagogue my old friend Farkash, sits behind me, aged around 88, a Holocaust
survivor and a legend in Chicago. He is a pious talmudic scholar as well as a pious but
creative thinker with tomes of novellae unpublished. Honored for his charity as well as
erudition he too sports a tattoo on his left arm. Being an observant Jew he did not
voluntarily agree to this branding (tattoos are prohibited in Jewish Law) but received it
free of charge courtesy of the Nazi party circa 1941-2. It needs no further explanation.
When they took away his name and identity they substituted it with a number to as to
easily identify him on roll calls. He was no longer a person. “Vermin” they used to call
Jews. Now after memory fades these numbers etched into his skin some 70 years after the
Nazis were destroyed, remain as a stark indelible sign. They mark him forever as a
survivor, a Holocaust survivor, even after death. So I turned to him and asked “how do
you pray?” pointing to the tattoo in shul one year, during penitential prayers begging
God to save us. He gives me a pious answer that only a saint could respond “we were
trained in cheder as children to be ready to die Al Kiddush Hashem (to be martyrs for
the sake of the Holy Name) so it came naturally.”
What connects me to these two tattoos? My patients’ fashion Nazi adornment and my
friends concentration camp numbers? I ask myself as I stare at the photo montage of
the “hyper fascist” website www.nork.ru. What is the Schechina doing in the SS helmet
and the reverse swastika? Lighting the emblem of the State of Israel like a Greek
Goddess. What is the Lucifer reference below it? and its reference to the Luftwaffe?
I asked my cousin Sylvia Klein, an artist from Ottawa Canada to imagine a world in
which fascism continues to linger in the psyche ready to inflame the heart at a moment’s
notice, once ignited by some trigger, a world where the hyperliteral readings of texts of
terror inflame the religious heart in a wave of fundamentalism that crosses all cultures
and faiths.
Tattoos for life
Tattoos for death
Tattoos for the military
inscriptions on the surface of the body
unlike clothing
adorning the outer limits of the selfthat
defined border between self and non-self.
The body as landscape
like the desert dunes reflecting in the yellow
valley between the breasts (remember the English Patient?)
The body as a canvas for the tattoo artist to reflect the current
whim of the client, usually inebriated, (though my patients tell me
that alcohol is forbidden during the procedure).
The Schechina inhabits all, for God is immanent
in good and evil
she is forced into this exile
by the Father the King
to be incarnated in this world
without regard to perpetrator nor victim.
At one time She both is present to the selectsia
She is Mengele,
then again she lights the Temple Menorah of
Israel’s re-birth
still wearing her Nazi helmet and swastika.
Like Rebbe Nachman’s Lost Princess
she wanders the wasteland that is now earth
crying for Her children who have given up on Her.
She too is etched in our bodies
like in the White Crucifix of Chagall [1]
with the etched out swastika on the Jew’s left arm
to escape the gaze of the Gestapo
prescient of another tattoo to come in numerical form.
Royal Tattoo and hyper Fascism
Tattoos in the flesh as a branding of animals for identification
and a sign of ownership, now used to express an indelible commitment
to an ideal or person, once in the ancient Near East
a form of worship then proscribed by the Bible as idolatry
as a ritual behavior to placate or imitate the gods.
Now in our Nazi times a similar kind of pagan branding
now as a form of dehumanizing of a race and
a tagging of ownership by the state.
Were not black slaves tattooed and branded?
Across the Atlantic the
Royal Tattoo doe den tap toe (old-Dutch for "turn off the tap")
represented a military return to barracks and turning off the beer taps
royal parades that we love to watch
the pomp and circumstance the pageant
the red Guards uniforms
the golden helmets
O how we tear up with the Elgar and Blakeʼs Jerusalem.
And in our flesh we betray on the surface our innermost desires
hidden beneath the clothing or not
permanently and indelibly etched
even in death
the images will accompany us.
Permanent etching in the flesh Farkash’s numbers
and the ex-con whose back looked like an ancient scroll
the typology in Gothic script
and the patient lying before me prone, a swastika in reverse on his arm.
Symbols of the SS and the swastika shock me into a reality
beyond the clinical sanity of the examining room
like the photo montage www.nork.ru
a shocking of the visual association cortex
by the very juxtaposition of Schechina and Nazi symbol.
But then does this not beg the very underpinnings of an Immanent divine
for surely there were those who believed the divine must be present even in
the hell hole of Auschwitz as did Farkash my friend.
So even though the montage is meant to shock
this hyper fascist web siteit
does teach me the need to push forward
with the unresolved ultimate questions facing us
as we awaken from the 70 year old theological slumber
to a nightmarish world apparently without the divine
and our need to reconfigure and reconstruct a world
with a sense of the divine once more.
[1] After Chagall returned to New York in 1943 current events began to take on importance for him, and this was reflected in his art, where he painted subjects including the Crucifixion and scenes of war. In White Crucifix currently at the Art Institute of Chicago. Apparently in order to avoid offending the Gestapo he scratched the swastika on the armband of the soldier burning the synagogue.
The Walls of the old city of Jerusalem
