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.
Emigrated
Stamped on the envelope: "emigrated"
he receives the letter back
from Vienna
from the Red Cross
was it stamped in red too?
or black?
others realize they have been deported
for who emigrates in the middle of a war?
a world war
to where?
from Vienna to where?
yes, a euphemism for deportation.
no more letters
they too will be returned
with that dreaded stamp "emigrated"
But he was the emigre after all
under the nose of the Nazi
this kindertransport
of children of the Reich and the Anschluss
crossing by train the Europe soon to be torn to shreds
to London
But they after all stayed
in Vienna
Julius, Rachel and Litzy.
she too could have left but refused.
how ironic
that the emigre gets this letter with this stamp
"emigrated"
they knew where he was
in Australia, in Tatura
one of the ‘Dunera boys’
amongst 2000 Jews behind barbed wire
"Enemy Aliens" Class I or II
classified by the holie-than-thou British
who would later admit the error in Parliament
they knew where he was
he had told them in letters.
But now he would never know their whereabouts.
I ask
"when did you realize?"
"when the letters came back".
he replied
those purloined letters
returned by the Red Cross
as if
they had emigrated, like him
to a safe place
a safe haven
for is that not what they were in fact ‘told’?
the lie
that hid behind the Nazi murderous intent.
why does this bother me so
now after so long
those letters?
I saw them once
he had a pile of them.
sacred letters
returned
by the Red Cross.
this insane need to know the exact moment when he
realized?
was it 1942 or after the War? I persist
he says, "we hoped
possibly the Russians had interned them in a camp across
the border
so that they would be at least alive
but nothing"
post war silence
then a note from the Red Cross again
last seen Izhbitz transit camp
after that whereabouts unknown.
the worst to be believed.
how to live with this as a survivor.
how to hold the returned letters
with that stamp 'emigrated'
I too am an emigre
living the stranger's life in another country
in another land
strange soil
strange customs and beliefs.
never again to feel at home
even when I go back
it gets worse each time
a distant remnant of the past here and there
nostalgia filling in the gaps.
I too am condemned to repeat the story of the father and
grandfather.
In a far away land
at the end of the railroad
Tatura
in that desert
sand
the letter arrives
he had written weeks earlier
with that fateful word 'emigrated'
his heart jumps, sweat accumulates on his brow
what does this mean?
where have they gone?
it cannot be!
feeling so powerless over this whole mess
this war
too big for all of us
when the demonic is let loose.
that letter
returned
signified the end of his youth
and the end of an era
the glory of Vienna
and its Jews were deported
Vienna as the epicenter of the world was to be no more
would forever defend its reputation
and its war record
and its collaboration
and wallow in its denial.
'emigrated' would now apply to Vienna itself
not merely its Jews.
it would apply to the civilized world as we knew it
its Mozart and its Goethe and Proust
all sullied by that letter
returned with that stamp
and that word
'emigrated'.
Letting Go
Leave it behind
all this thinking
it led nowhere
worse
to doubt and despair
leave the analysis the depth psychology
the rationalizations and reasons for...
the science and the criticism
the theory and the mastery
Like the breakdown of a Bach fugue into some
mathematical equation
Lord where have we descended to!
like analyzing the Song of Songs for its grammatical
structure! missing its desire.
let go of it
let it slip away
let thinking itself
the monkey retire
allow the cloud of imperception and clarity descend
let Moses enter the fog
where the Lord is
let the is begin
being here
now
no-where else
and stop thinking.
sing a little
just a note
a single cord maybe
let the room vibrate and resonate
listen to the echo
is it you?
or who?
jostle the mind
play games on it
or it will catch up soon and overtake you once again
focus on nothing
just be nothing
now there’s a challenge/
stay with it
in your body
feel the buttocks on the chair
the ambient sound in the air
the sweetness of early dawn
and maybe, just maybe
you might hear the white radiance of eternity
and endure better
and for a moment be relieved by the weighty burden of
self and the shoulders will feel a little lighter.
maybe.
Purim 2009: Haman
We clap and stamp on mentioning Haman the Amalekite,
each time the reader chants his name...
As if, the mere mention triggers this explosion of chaos a
wild manic stomping and clapping using instruments of
noise....
As if, we need to eradicate more than merely the name the
evocation of its horror, memories of intended genocide,….
No, this hysterical communal memorializing of that, which
we wish to forget, signifies something even more
sinister…
More than even the command, so paradoxical, to annually
“remember: not to forget” to erase the memory of Amalek,
by consistently bringing it back to conscious memory, no,
more than even this….
This communal controlled chaos limited to ten seconds
following the mere mention of “his name” HAMAN-as the
scroll unfolds, as the text is chanted, even this is not
spontaneous for “we know” we are readers we have read
before we foreshadow his mention…
SO sinister because of one reason alone, he remains alive
and deadly. He persists despite the happy ending of the
narrative story the fairytale of Esther. Despite the rolling up
of the scroll for another year the sing song and the festive
meal his name, is mention, his evocation lingers, haunts
us so, despite the merriment and liquor….for he, my
friends, is non other than….
You fill in the gap-all I can tell you is he is and is within not
without.
He remains and persists after all the merriment drink and
attempts at drowning out his voice with joy on this special
day
He works his task, divinely charged, the spoiler, that little
voice ever crescendoing, that never rests, the voice, the
critic, the doubter, the cynic, the dissolver of simple faith
with complex questions and analytical doubts.
He, whose volume can only be drowned out once a year
with a clapping and a stamping and a drinking
This is the joy of PURIM for only once a year a legislated
socially sanctioned alcohol binge to drown out his voice for
just a moment of relief a relief from that voice within. How
could we ever forget him!
A tumbleweed (Salsola tragus) “Any of various densely branched annual plants, such as amaranth and Russian thistle, that break off from the roots at the end of the growing season and are rolled about by the wind.”
"Like vanishing dew, a passing apparition or the sudden flash of lightning -- already gone -- thus should one regard one's self." — Ikkyu
"I spur my horse past the ruined city; the ruined city, that wakes the traveler's thoughts: ancient battlements, high and low; old grave mounds, great and small. Where the shadow of a single tumbleweed trembles and the voice of the great trees clings forever, I sigh over all these common bones -- No roll of the immortals bears their names. "
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! — Han-shan