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.

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.

Jerusalem Stone Wall Heart

“My voice proclaims

How exquisitely the individual Mind

(And the progressive powers perhaps no less

Of the whole species) to the external World

Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too,

Theme this but little heard of among Men,

The external World is fitted to the Mind.”

The Recluse, William Wordsworth

“If I should be, where I no more can hear

Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams

Of past existence, wilt thou then forget

That on the banks of this delightful stream

We stood together; and that I, so long

A worshipper of Nature, hither came,

Unwearied in that service: rather say

With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal

Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,

That after many wanderings, many years

Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,

And this green pastoral landscape, were to me

More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.”

LINES WRITTEN A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR, July 13, 1798.

William Wordsworth

slowly slowly

Intimations of the Other

in the cool Jerusalem air

facing those ancient stone walls

I feel the presence of the Mystery

on this bleak sunday morning

church bells clanking in competition

(clouds do not fit well the landscape)

but here

now

I feel an overwhelming sense

of the passage of time

my fatherʼs decline

my own creeping aching age

yet- being present in this moment

to the ageless Presence

despite everything changing

even the stones.

Maybe this stone heart

can melt a bit?

Is the Thou then possible?

I feel like praying now

but how?

and to Whom?

and what?

In the stillness of the early morning Jerusalem air

as yet fresh before that burning orb rises in the East,

I find comfort

a sense that, for this instant

all is as it should be

despite the raging sea back home

and the anxiety of the foreboding of the ending.

Mistakes, Mistakes

“I'm a new soul

I came to this strange world

Hoping I could learn a bit 'bout how to give and take

But since I came here, felt the joy and the fear

Finding myself making every possible mistake

La, la, la, la (21x)

La, la, la, la (21x)

See I'm a young soul in this very strange world

Hoping I could learn a bit 'bout what is true and fake

But why all this hate? try to communicate

Finding trust and love is not always easy to make

La, la, la, la (21x)

La, la, la, la (21x)

This is a happy end

Cause you don't understand

Everything you have done

Why's everything so wrong

This is a happy end

Come and give me your hand

I'll take you far away

I'm a new soul

I came to this strange world

Hoping I could learn a bit 'bout how to give and take

But since I came here, felt the joy and the fear

Finding myself making every possible mistake

New soul... (la, la, la, la,...)

In this very strange world...

Every possible mistake

Possible mistake

Every possible mistake

Mistakes, mistakes, mistakes...”

Yael Naim

errors...

cutting corners...

getting away with this and that...

poor judgement,

only by the mistakes

only by failing

have I ever learned.

The pain continues

stuck as I am

in relationships

where I so desperately seek understanding

and validation,

but merely meet the brick wall

of indifference, an ice wall

or worse,

blinding criticism.

Where is the light?

where is there respite?

(lying in my disc pain my relief was not vicodinrather)

Perlman’s Pugnani-Kreisler Allegro

and Handel/Halvorsen’s Passacaglia [1]

in which I was momentarily spared

from the burden from this isolation

and bathed in some ephemeral light.

It is as if the music turns off the inner kritik

mirroring the failure out there

and allowing my sacred right hemisphere

a few moments of relief.

As a child I remember listening to the Eroica and the Marche Funebre at the

Munich Olympics after the massacre of the athletes in 1961

over and over again

transported to a real world

where tragedy was centerfold.

I lay on the carpet of the living room

flying high on Beethoven.

And visiting Madame Lunzer, an Italian contessa

as she lay dying on her satin sheets

on Saturday afternoons in 1965

and hearing the Fifth Brandendurg concerto [2] for the first time.

Bach was the perfection in my imperfect world.

Now, in this darkness

I must once again,

try to see the wounded boy

who never got heard

and heal him first

but how?

tell him what?

in the face of his real knowledge and pain

etched into the flesh for so many decades

fueling, deep inside

the resentments and rage

of what was done

to him,

in the name of educare.

In this place

I just hold the pain.

I cannot regenerate into a “new soul”

like this fresh Israeli singer.

I refuse “to let go” of the past

as uncle Eric admonishes me to

for the very sake of the past

and the memory of the past

and the victim inside

to rename or refurbish.

It has taken too long just to get those images to mind

having blocked them for so long.

Effortlessly my pain merges with others

ethnic identity slips into consciousness

Why do I allow this personal pain to dissolve

in theirs? There is no comparison of course!

Cousins aunts and lost grandparents

I sense their absent counsel more and more

for I have been denied half my family

their lacuna screams in silence

their having been left in Europe

as Dad escaped for his life, and mine.

I will not “learn” from their suffering

I will not yield to any mythical archetypal or religious meaning

I cannot,

the smoke is too fresh

the burning fat still stings the eyes

and I was not even there!

Merely born 5 years after the tremendum.

Why then does my soul connect my pain to theirs?

why do I gravitate to no other texts

read theirs into all my own

and harshly refuse

any that do not take them into account

in claims to truth?

Yael Naim flirts with reincarnation

I cannot afford the luxuries of new age kabbalah.

I cannot even afford the theologies of comfort

that so many drink from.

No wonder Steve Jobs chose this song!

Macintosh is the new kabbalah

the greatest access codes to the Da Vinci di-vine internet.

In their memory I must allow nothing

it is too fresh

this wound

and somehow

infiltrates my own petty

vision of the past.

Should I separate the wounds?

the absent memory of their lived lives

my youth embedded in their non-being?

would things have been different with a counterbalancing

an aunt and uncle to protect me?

a grandparent to step

against the rage of the survivor-father

and the wounded-mother?

Mistakes, mistakes

I cannot seem to separate.

I cannot split between

the accident of my birth

and the survival of the father.

The accident of his meeting the mother.

the post war poverty

the desire to determine the outcome

the condition for economic survival

the age old diaspora response

to the moving tribe

country to country

pogrom to pogrom.

all the while sacrificing our souls

in the desire to succeed.

So I am condemned to make the mistakes

mistakes

choices

wrong turns

watching this life turn

slowly

ever closer to the end

of things,

the end

the end.

Turn off the singer

close the Mac

I am a gilgul.

[1] The last movement of George Frideric Handel's Harpsichord Suite in G minor (HWV 432) is a passacaglia which has become well known as a duo for violin and viola, arranged by the Norwegian violinist Johan Halvorsen.

[2] Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major, BWV 1050 J.S.Bach Concerto Traversiere, une Violino principale, une Violino è una Viola in ripieno, Violoncello, Violone è Cembalo .

Dreaming Dreaming

“...All acting begins with an 'as if'...

now take that 'as if' and set it as a plank, a bridge between what you

think you know and what you are really capable of

... It is time to stop being dreamed and start dreaming... time to let

go of the rock of identity that is accompanying our gravity-bound

descent from birth to death, time to abandon

belief and surrender to faith, to fly rather than fall

The shift in consciousness is from fear to faith... an unclenching of

the contraction of self, that myth of identity so insidiously woven,

thread by thread, day by day, the neural networks wiring into patterns

of self-relation, the well-trod path mistaken for the ground upon

which it was furrowed, this must be 'me', these fears, these

inadequacies, these thoughts, these images these stories... these

repetitive intimations of selfhood... the carefully maintained

scaffolding of who... Time to relax the tightened pattern of the

known... It is time to shed the past like a serpent sheds its skin...

No more victimization, no more passivity, no more being written upon,

seize the pen. Feed the fire with the conceits of the known, the delphic

hubris of self-knowledge, unmoor your presence from the anchors of your

habituated self-images,

Any time you find yourself feeling inadequate, guilty, self-pitying,

hopeless, victimized, blaming --become aware, watch how your mind has

become parasitic, feeding off the established negativities, watch from

the utter present (you are larger than your mind, back up into the

full energy of your being in this given moment, relax into your

totality and watch how your mind, your self-regulated self-portrait,

is working to keep you in these patterns). You are responsible for how

you feel. Wake up, start watching, awareness of this 'pain-body', this

limited parasitic version of you, will expose it for what it is...

time to regain the power that is always deferred and distributed

elsewhere. Approval, love, affirmation all come from within.

Truth = subjectivity = truth.

You are only as limited as you have come to believe.

"Reality" is merely tora shebichtav. Your inheritance (genetic,

historical, cultural, habitual) are mere alphabets, hieroglyphs of

energy... Now take the techniques you inspired me with and radicalize

the text you call yourself. This does not occur by remaining in the

head, in the intellect while the fundamental parameters of who and

what remain untouched ... it is a bodily-energetic process of

dilation, to access the power of transformation, to realize the power

of nature/world/spirit/whatever within you, as the totality of you

(rather than 'you') is not distinct from everything else

no more bemoaning the patterns, no more masturbatory "confessions"

of the self, suffering is boring, and easy.

Universal currency, it is the epitome of conformity

Dare to be happy/free/whatever

Dare to take full responsibility for everything that happens... everything

there is nothing that is not you

Your life is a dream, it is time to become lucid.”

Naftali Ungar-Sargon 2011

My grandfather had a recurring dream and told it twice to my cousin Anthony

who said he cried each time he recounted it. He found himself in the Paradeisi

synagogue (Cochin) with his grandfather from Jerusalem dressed in his

golden frock. He asked him who the three men on the front bench (Mizrach)

were. he replied “Abraham Isaac and Jacob”. He then asked what the light on

the bima was (a column of light projecting up and down) and he said “that is

God”. He cried as he told over this dream. Cousin Anthony remembers the

tears of Dada. I too had an experience in that same synagogue in 2008.

Visiting the graves of my ancestors in Cochin. The Sargons of India. On

arriving in the synagogue the beadle told me to remove my shoes because

the famous Chinese 400 year old tiles. They had been manufactured before

the invention of glazing so the tiles had to be protected. Having removed my

shoes and place on my tefillin I realized that this was the first time

in my life I was davening barefoot (usually proscribed because a sign of

mourning).I then had a vision of the roots of some ancient tree arising from

under those tiles engulfing my legs slowly creeping up until my waist line

then stopping. I felt so grounded in this place where my ancestors had prayed

and so rooted to the earth. So present to that moment in time that I actually

felt comfortable just being. For a glorious moment being alive felt appropriate

and without conscience. My father had a dream. Having escaped Hitler in

1949 from Vienna on the kindertransport, my father forgot his

father’s Sabbath zemira “yismach moshe” sung each week at the Sabbath

table. Some 40 years later he dreamed himself at that very table, and the

song came back to him. Now 90 years old he has sung that song each

Sabbath since the dream.

So,

Dreams, dreams

dreaming, dreaming

this wellspring of the soul.

I dream of a blue sky filled with what appears to be the wings of birds

but on closer inspection

turn out to be hands open in a prayerful posture

millions of them filling the sky

a darkish blue with a persistent light of a setting sun

just before dark.

In this in between space the blue turns from royal to dark ink blue

in this firmament I remember as a child going to this place in Finchley near

“the brook” where we lived

and sitting on a park bench with the night sky filled with a myriad stars

feeling my total insignificance at age 14

my life as insignificant

and time collapsing to where I might be at the end of my life

and the terror of that fact

removed for a moment in the face of this awe inspiring vision of the sky.

I resist the search for meaning

just basking in the gift of the very image itself

a sky full of caring hands

the very logo of my medical school comes to mind

an upright stick figure helping one crouching

with the “helping hand”

that logo representing everything I hold sacred

in a post genocide world

where one individual helping another

statistically is meaningless

in the face of mechanized technologically assisted slaughter.

In the in-between space of dreaming

just before we awaken to the terror filled day ahead

the endless traffic

and loneliness

where the reigns of consciousness are loosened somewhat

and the ego not yet awake enough to summon the inner kritik

this image comes to soften the night

to provide a wish that the unloving natural word

might be loving

in the face of reality, history and geography

genocide and natural disaster

In the face of all of this

there might be a caring

out there

a pair of hands

a sky-filled pairs of hands

filling the sky

with caring

in the bleak firmament above.

Was this all about caring? or its absence?

was all this yearning for the lost mother?

all these years seeking the potion to quench the pain?

is the inner child so wounded

he will stop at nothing out there

pay no heed

respect nothing

in pursuit of her?

Can it all be reduced to some psycho-babble

analyzable

DSM III label?

Is there nothing left to be soul?

ensouled?

The Gene Pool

Having avoided London for so long

the un-civility of it,

from the moment you arrive

until the security personnel barking at you when you leave

the change in the neighborhood

Chareidi Golders Green,

unrecognizable Finchley

rude tourists

rude cab drivers

rude weather hiding the glorious sun for weeks on end

rude everything

this was not my old London.

Having avoided even transiting through Heathrow

the long lines in everything

the long walk to get anywhere

the implied racial profiling

transit anywhere in Europe, but avoid London!

yet now

because of family affairs

I have come back twice in 3 months.

And here

where the business of family affairs is conducted

around the ritual affairs,

the birthdays

the weddings

the sheva bʼrachot

and the shul going...

it is sunny for a change

the mild spring air makes me breathless

the puffy clouds as in a picture postcard.

Here, beyond the formal invitations and locations

this is where family business takes place.

After all the pleasantries and catch ups

after you find out which school this child is attending

and what college this one got into,

somehow the past begins to seep in.

Family business then gets conducted and is all about memory

about reconstructing deep unconscious lost images

it is memory reconstruction boot camp

and its purpose for me,

is to find peace of mind at last

to dis-cover

the truth of the past

and why we are condemned to repeat it as we do.

For there is comfort in in such gnosis

hidden knowledge that can only surface

by the slip of the tongue

a comment here or there

and a reference that evokes an image in the mind.

There is healing in uncovering the ghosts

in seeing patterns in other family members

especially of previous generations

come seeping into my DNA

even though when younger I would mock it

calling it my “genetic prison-with no chance for parole”

In London, this must take place

I now realize

for all the places

the buildings,

the streets

the route to Edgeware, Uncle Eric

or the cemetery; to see Nana and Dada

Finchley Road,

the Underground stations

the various lines

the black Northern Line

miserable

ancient and sooty.

In this physical landscape of grayness and blackness

lies memory.

The landscape of NW suburbia is necessary like props for a stage set.

My brother Eugene

who seems stronger than ever before

holds my hand firmly as we dance together

in the black circle of yeshiva guys

not interested in the pecking order of priority

but satisfied to be on the outer ring

unobserved, waiting for Michael

in the center to find him and drag him and I

into the center.

And for maybe the first time ever

I feel brotherly love in a physical way

just swaying to the singing with him

in this deep bond of blood.

there is little we need say

there is little to be said

we have gone through so much of life

and our memories are so entwined.

Here I meet Peter after so many years

we are so alike...

we look alike...

(people meet him all over thinking he is me.)

Here over lunch I discover we also think alike

feel the same way about love and life

authority and orthodoxy.

We both went west

settled with families

embedded in similar communities

and worry about our childrenʼs education first and foremost.

I get the first inkling that there is healing in this luncheon.

It feels good to talk with him deeply.

Genetics has thrown its dice as I realize

how first cousins emerged with similar

tastes and thought patterns in most things important.

Tony, another cousin whose gift of the gab expresses

those feelings I would have had

had I really known Dada

expressing all I should have known about him but did not

because of my parents wish to live in a more upscale neighborhood.

Tony teases me for wishing to unearth the Sargonʼs in India past

rightfully pointing out that his memory of Dad

is more sacrosanct than any historical

facts that might emerge.

He forces me to engage the question as to why I wish so

to have this book of history written.

Is it sweet revenge on the Litvaks

who paraded their yichus to my family

some 33 years ago?

Or some desire to find greatness

at least in my genes

in my otherwise self-admitted medicority?

Cousin Michael, whose “erhlichkeit”

exposes us all for our lack of faith

and our dark sides

for he does not seem to exhibit any guile

as we watch his family grow

in our inability to swallow

the myths and stories of his chareidi Rabbis

bellowing to the newly weds

extracting the last ounce of joy from the celebration.

Uncle Eric, whose second Bar mitzvah

prompts the most asked question this weekend

as to why he had no first ceremony in the first place

in an otherwise traditional Bombay neighborhood

where his other cousins like David underwent such initiation,

and many possible theories that amuse him

as we present them for his speculation, one after the other

(although he might really not know!

having blocked all memories of childhood trauma)

Aunty Becky, who still arouses my deep resentment

despite the hugs and kisses

for her duplicitous telling of stories of mother

that push the knife in deeper all the while

saying “bless her”, “bless her”

as well as her passivity in protecting me from the sadistic headmaster.

Yet we are drawn to her

for her memories come pouring out despite the repeated disclaimers

that “its best to leave the past alone”!

Here is the gold mine of information

mixed with speculation of course.

Yet here, in this family cocoon,

Becky still speaks of reverence

of Shapiro the headmaster

that sadistic bastard who delighted in whacking me in front of my twin

and her transparent whitewashing of her silent part in all of this

her very silence in the face of this violence. Her fear of authority

that infects me too.

“I once told Shapiro that the boy he just bashed never did anything wrong”

as if, as if this would somehow alleviate her from the guilt of silence,

for surely she knows.

Eric speaks for the first time

to me of “lacking confidence” until age 40

unable to perform all the symphonies he knew

and could rattle off

prior to arriving in London

when he “lost all confidence-his musical voice”

Then slowly opening up to hear his own voice

in the music so late in life

after marriage

but-”never looking back”

”-only looking to the future as bright-”

this motto allowed him to survive

by blocking those memories of “no self-confidence”

so successfully he has now “forgotten” the negative.

Yet he is the very mirror image of all that trauma

having re-invented himself as the perfect gentleman

known for his kindness by children and colleagues alike.

I cannot follow this zaddikʼs path however,

I cannot let go of this violence

and abuse

I must confront they who abused me

and caused such a wasteland

in my soul. At least mentally.

I must finally have my psychological pound of flesh.

Ericʼs children and sons-in-law

speak glowingly of his being one of the 36 hidden righteous

and I fully endorse that.

But it is hard to speak to a zaddik a lamed vavnik

who has lost all resentment of the past.

My cousins Sharon and Michelle

remain silent

but their love is expressed in the mountains of food

over shabbat

soul food from India as taught at home.

Their silence and loving presence over shabbat

betrays Ericʼs loving fatherhood

his unconditional devoted loving of his daughters

and now his grandchildren

who know deep down that here is a well

of deep compassion that will always be there for them.

Never would he perpetrate what was done to him

never.

Uncle David, the successful physician

who is known for fixing all family problems

but frustratedly cannot fix his own daughter

who suffers for his archetypal physician/manager/ father image

yet who is so hospitable to my children...

I owe such a debt to him

for providing safe haven for them

from my critical family

as a resource who never criticized nor judged them.

In this matrix my family business is conducted

looking for scraps of genetic material

like strands of spiritual DNA scattered across that familiar landscape

only London can provide

being the final destination

as one by one the family moved its center of gravity

from Bombay.

My mother was the first

on a troop ship 1941

U-boat infested waters of the Atlantic

she was NOT going to give up on this scholarship

to the Royal College

and for the war years and few after

she struggled alone

in this gray of gray London

with the anxiety of Hitlerʼs “doodlebugs”

whistling above in the night

hoping and praying for the whistle to continue.

My mother really was the courageous sibling

the scout, the trailblazer

and in her absence here

I feel the family dynamic as not complete.

In all of this Mumʼs absence is felt

her voice not present

she is reluctantly back home

unable to attend the festivities

having tried every ruse

knowing what she might be missing in this family business thing

which is good for me at least this once,

as I learn to see the clan in a different key minus

the matriarchshe-

who motivated me to be who I am

and is lodged in my brain now,

as the inner kritik,

but also left scars in me.

I am so alert for a comment two generations later

a fact

a scrap

anything

that will connect me to this past

the correct DNA sequence

that will unlock

why I am so addicted to this or that

why my character defects chose this or that

or why I feel so drawn or repelled to this or that.

I am sure those answers lie right here though.

In this matrix

in London of all places

in this cloudy foggy twilight

I find the meanings and motivations

that sound familiar.

Around a table of Sargons at the wedding

the conversation naturally veers towards

Dada the patriarch. He was such a towering figure (for good and bad)

so Eric naturally compares what he is hearing from the rabbis on the dais

to Dadʼs critique of the rabbinism and legalism

of the Iraqi Jews of Bombay

his flirtation with the Pauline revolution

that I have been drawn to for so many years

the real reason for Ericʼs non Bar mitzvah

because of Dada being ridiculed by Nana

to her family.

(one of the possible explanations floating around this weekend!)

Dada thought everything through

from basic first principles

uncaring for ridicule and heresy

wherever it might take him

Old Testament and New if need be.

This is what I have been looking for

a truth beyond the historical facts!

I get an inkling as to what he must have written in his lost book.

I find in my cousins and uncles and aunts,

such resonances as if the DNA strands dance

to a distantly recognizable tune

Ericʼs latest work,

a tune I hardly recognize

yet sounds so familiar

I am drawn closer and closer

because I know

really know

in my body

this is real

this is a song

that my life dances to.

In his and my motherʼs body posture

one the viola the other the violin,

the flexed neck crouching over their fiddles

their gaze is always down

away from the listener

for they are transmitting holy sounds

for those who might understand the

years of toil and violence

of the “practice practice.”

Here too I find some peace as I see the

previous generation having suffered too

at the hand of an invisible guiding muse

that mistakenly believed that the only ticket to survival

had to be the stick and the cane.

It is who I was

it is what must be

it is the genetic prison as I had always expressed

but the jailor has allowed me out for a while

to see the court documents and the testimony

that condemned me to this life

even thought the judges

the Fates, have sentenced me long ago.

Old faces emerge from grammar school

passing me at the wedding

with a curious look

as if I do remind them of a little boy

so long ago

that naughty boy

with the olive skin-too dark for British Jews who

played the piano

who was not immune from the usual hazing or bashing up.

Funny how after 48 years I see no changes in their personalities.

In this place of memories

things come to life

dreams appear

and fantasies materialize

here one can act out

without fear

since one has regressed to childhood.

which of course,

takes all the juissance out of it

so one becomes sober

for fear of missing another snippet of truth.

Family business is serious stuff

it has implications for dreams and soul

it is like a sacred kabbalistic text

for once studied,

alters your life forever

either way.

Most importantly I can return

to my life

afterwards

with some healing

some meaning

making my inner space a little larger

to hold this stuff

this past

making a little more sense of all of it

because of the resonances with other DNA bearers

who speak of this and that

snippets of this and that

which ring deep in the psyche,

And finally to feel

that I make a difference

by just being

part of this family

with my own stuff

despite my own stuff

despite Becky and Ericʼs admonitions

to “forget the past”

(which they too constantly refer to)

in order to survive

and stay sane.

Last of all

I idolize my twin who radiates light when she enters the room

and attracts the “Sargon women” around her

with her funny tales.

These very “Sargon women”

who represent the goddess image in my soul

who cannot become sullied no matter

how they pollute themselves ever.

They surround her

listening to her every word

as if she expresses the very incarnation

of their souls, not some funny anecdote!

As if she plays the genetic code in their souls like a viola.

As if Rochelle has inherited this quality of Mumʼs

to lead and be trailblazer.

But I only feel their love

of this pearl this flower

who gets more beautiful as time progresses

in contrast to my decay.

This is what I am leaving to come “home”

some 3000 miles

back to my life

as it is lived now.

The family has dispersed

the wedding and birthday party is over

and the business meeting has been adjourned.

But richer for the evocation

of memories

and the family talk conducted

here in London

not so hated as before

having yielded so much this time around.

Eric blesses me on friday night with

“peace, Julian, only peace”

from his heart that melts mine

as when he blessed his two girls

“may you continue to be just as you are”

such words from the family zaddik

shake mountains of pain

and threaten the heavens with their truth and healing.

So I might come back soon

to drink at this golden fountain

that yields so much nectar

an injection of peaceof

peace of mind

for my broken soul.

Absence and Silence For Henryk

“In 1997 I took a picture of Henryk, a wry grin on his face,

as he posed a trifle awkwardly at a Krakow souvenir stall selling

T-shirts and carved wooden figures of Jews”.

Ruth Ellen Gruber

Wherever one walked in Kaczimiercz, regardless of the time of day or night (and Tsvi particularly liked to walk the streets at night), you couldn't help but run into him, then have a drink, then have a meal. I endearingly called him "The Mayor of Kaczimiercz". Tsvi's last project was editing Khasidic stories of the Bratslaver Rebe and we talked about this over latkes at the Klezmer-Hois. His intellect was eclipsed only by his gentle sweetness. His ghost, like so many others, will hover over Krakow.

Yale Storm

Jewish history is about absence and silence,

European capitals have Jewish Quarters filled with museum shops

housing ritual objects and scrolls.

Mostly Japanese and Germans visit these tourist places.

How ironic that Hitlerʼs plans for a Jewish Museum

in Pragueʼs Jewish Quarter have been fulfilled.

In the absence of Jews I walked around the old quarter in Krakow

so eerie with all the hassidic melodies wafting out of the restaurants and bars

and the ham sandwiches with vodka being consumed within.

Little figurines of hassidic Jews with beards, side locks and hooked noses

being sold for the tourists, itʼs like a nightmare in a horror movie.

The silence of those murdered a few streets away is deafening

the entire quarter emptied out and taken to the local cemetery

not the famous one near the Rema Shul, mind you

just the new cemetery that housed the recent and mostly alienated

from Judaism are buried.

My friend [1] Henryk is buried there

sudden death Marta said,

he was the heart of post war Krakow Jews

translated Rabbi Nachmanʼs stories into Polish

he haunted the streets of Kazimierz

bumping into American tourists

Oh how I miss his gentle voice.

In truth my visit was preceded some 40 years

when at age 11 my father took me to Vienna

his first visit since leaving in 1939,

I never saw my father cry before

and in so many ways I am a weird kind of “child of a survivor”

For he survived alright

But not through the hell of Hitlerʼs inferno

Rather by escaping

And living with that fateful decision.

Henryk was full of history, opinions and stories.

Among his projects at the time of his death is a volume of translation and

commentary of Rabbi Nachman's Stories.

I met him the three times I visited Krakow over the course of ten years.

I am the son, the physical presence, and reminder

of my fatherʼs fateful choice in 1939

to leave and abandon his family

at 17 for freedom and survival.

His sister refused

and paid for the choice with her life.

As such,

I reflect that genetic choice

that betrayal,

and as such

it is etched into my soul.

It infects all my choices too.

So when I made my move to the States in 1974

for my medical internship and residency

my father was heartbroken

and accused me of handing Hitler a second victory. [2]

“Hitler took my first family from me, now you are breaking up

my family once more” he exclaimed.

It is this I carry for him.

It is this guilt I bear because of him.

It is this nightmare that haunts us both.

I must learn to own this too since

my life owes its very existence to his fateful choice,

it is suffused by that choice,

and marks my choices genetically with the same stamp.

My life is incarnated with its implication of his betrayal.

This dark unacknowledged mystery

this un-admitted secret

seems to motivate so many of my bad choices.

That choice between survival and freedom and honor,

family and sacrifice,

moral ambivalence and expedience.

How can I come to see this inherited genetic double-edged sword

that both wounds and heals simultaneously as a source of blessing?

for the very betrayal means living

the cutting of corners means getting to the finish line

and the flight to a new country means a fresh start.

Can I not see the character defects as measured by the perfection scale?

Can I rather accept the genetic trait that allowed him and I to live and

to survive-above all to see the blessing of children and grandchildren?

So his choice back then and my choice now

of just what is, the soulʼs code

Even this I must love too.

My history is also about absences and silences.

I never met my grandparents and would love to see and touch my aunt Alice

whose devotion to her parents

represented the light side to the fatherʼs dark choice

in her accompanying her parents to Izhbitz transit camp

then on to Sobibor or Belize to their deaths.

In that silence of their screaming presence we inhabit

this nightmare.

In the absence of Henryk and the silence of the old city

Where I walk alone now

Is the secret of the Jewish soul

[1] Henryk Halkowski, the heart and soul of Jewish Krakow, died suddenly of a heart attack in Krakow the night January 1-2.

[2] To borrow Fakenheimʼs expression.

Axial Skeleton

As in death, during sleep this skeletal frame is fairly

useless; this aging frame that holds me ramrod straight

back in grammar school, Circa 1962, Head Master

screaming, “shoulders back, chest forward!” now bends

under the fatigue of the day.

As in death, lying prone is a foretaste where the frame is

off duty, allowing other anatomical parts, like joints, to

ache and creak their way into awareness.

And lying supine as I did today, treating my knotted spine

to a massage, this frame is ignored as softer tissues

surface to consciousness as they are plied under the deft

compassionate hands.

In this posture my eyes are closed and I have asked the

muzik to be turned off, leaving only the sense of touch to

remain acutely aware and fearful of the next locust of pain.

Without visual cues reality takes on a different hue and I

lapse into a reverie, “when I’m not being kneaded, like a

lump of dough” and a little conscience about this selfpampering.

Above all I realize how rarely do I treat this body, care for

it, listen to its aches and pains, and venerate the 60 year old frame.

Mostly I am running, sitting for too long on airplanes and in

cars, and falling half conscious into bed when the day is

done. Even my exercise on the treadmill is frantic and

frenetic despite its aching hip in a close to abusive use of

this frame in the vane hope it will help lose those extra

pounds and thus reduce my blood sugar, despite my

powerlessness over those evening cravings.

Most of all I marvel at this unique mammalian axial frame

and the price we humans must pay for being homo erectus

as we slowly decline.

It even inspired kabbalists to use the frame as the sacred

metaphor to represent the divine /human image that we all

aspire to.

Illness as Incarnation

In illness the “evil” the negative, the infective becomes

incarnate in the flesh in the body finding its fulfillment in

the fever and suppuration.

In aging too the decrepit and arthritic the gnarled joints

and deformities reflect the inevitable movement towards

decay and death atrophy and defilement.

Satanic forces chthonic forces slowly occupy the territory

once proud of its youthful vigor as the singular expression

common to myriad diseases and ailments.

As one feels this process going through the body daily one

must learn to accept the infirmity bit by bit accepting the

divine decree that man shall live that immortal Adam shall

be spared immediacy of sentence but also die, slowly.

The divine contains both light and dark an antinomy of

sefirotic incompatibilities uncanny and exasperating and

we are the bearers of this divine dark side mostly in our

suffering and broken lives

and in the aging body in illness.

A spiritual opportunity arises then in dis-ease to come a

little closer to this divine incarnation sheltered as we are

normally from satanic mills for we are able to manifest the

divineʼs need in our bodies in our degeneration to express

itself in the minor key.

In accepting this dark side of spirituality and in the deep

gnawing pain in the refusal to be anesthetized for a

moment longer we find rest from the pious and the

pompous theologies and Holier-than-Thou sermons from

the naive emotional betrayal of wholeness for the naive

Good God.

Finally God will find a bit of rest from the projections of

perfection we have hoisted on Him for centuries and thank

us kindly for sharing in this deep secret the wounding of

His beloved the petty hurts He and we share as we dig the

knife ever so deeper into our loved ones then awaken to

see the damage.

Finally He will share what has been so long on His mind

about that fateful historical decision to let Satan loose in a

dangerous game that cost so many so much.

Let the pain linger a little longer so that we can all come a

little closer to this divine opening of the secret chest where

all will be made understandable in fantasy and all will be

justified in humor even though both parties will be weeping

tears that will cause a tsunami in the oceans.

Without You

I am left bereft since I banished You from my discourse

looking at the sunrise without You

alone with the lake,

and only listening to the prayers and rituals.

I cannot say anything anymore

Too many empty prayers

Too much shockling

Too much to profess

Only silence is the order of the day.

But this only makes things worse,

the three year old locked in the broom closet in the dark

feels only anguish

and lying next to a woman who really believes in You

makes me feel even more isolated.

What was it like to be me before the me just wanted to

please her and then You?

To do anything to gain her approval and seek credential

after credential only to impress her

that I am not the grade B child, as predicted…

and feel inadequate before her, then You forever?

What might it feel like to accept the broken self I am now

without the inner kritik?

When will the next Authority come knocking?

When will Hades be warmed up for me?

When will someone just love me for my broken self and

nothing else?

For no credentials and no morals?

Without You I have no judge but also no hope of savior.

I have abandoned You, but how ridiculous-the ant rejects

the elephant hoof bearing down slowly on it,

the shadow enlarging and the little mite shaking his fist

angrily at the inevitable

thunderous doom! Kafka's priest slams the door shut.

In this place of grief, the little dark-skinned boy

crying too much-knows in his fearthe

lack of milk would be paradigmatic,

wasting away

they call in nana

so he knows of Nana’s chicken soup-and her love that has

been crowded out by the screaming demanding mother.

My work is to re-envision You as Nana/Schechina

An unconditionally loving/projection of my desire.

Is this the ratzon of the Sfas Emes when, in 1902 on

Parshas Pekudei,

he suggested the sacral union of Moses and the

Schechina as the very implantation of such desire?

I doubt it!

Is this the ratzon of the Ishbitzer? Maybe.

It is my ratzon, my desire to seek and find this particular

comfort so that I can even continue.

Only in this grief do I paradoxically feel so present.

What powerful experience could have allowed me to feel

only real here and now?

to feel myself in this space and interior anxiety

Not to experience pleasure as alien and uncomfortable

and to take pleasure only when crying?

Can I not get behind this?

Is it only psycho-logical?

Could not the constant obsessive seeking texts of

catastrophe that mirror my experience

reflect a genetic/ethnic sensibility? or must it be merely the

inner child seeking validation once more?

Is this all merely a projection?

or does the psyche-Self have a need to incarnate in my

issues precisely this way

for its needs to experience its unconscious, selfconsciously?

Or is all of this learning for nothing?

All of this work,

all of these years,

all of this wisdom for naught?

A child of the earth I too wish to be deserving of

unconditional love without texts, Gods, authorities, her

parents, in-laws to withhold it;

conditional upon my behavior,

my ritual practice,

my study,

my performance,

my outcomes.

This desire is the very ratzon I believe the Izhbitzer meant

when discussing Abraham’s looking

at the world in conflagration and asks the ultimate

question, Bira Doleket-the village is in flames who is the master?

Who is the author of all of this suffering?

Who is responsible for this catastrophe?

And the holy Zaddik answers

not with any philosophical clever response,

not with any mystical experience,

but rather the mirroring of the question “who placed in You

the very questioning?”

I believe He pointed to that ratzon that very questioning;

that very desire to be accepted as the Divine incarnated

spark.

Gravitas for Kafka

Gravity falling falling the weight of self contributes to the

speed and impact in the same direction each time why

donʼt I learn? Gravitas the weight of self a self-imposition

of importance but directed only downward since age

keeps dragging the self the weighty seriousness of the

sage holier-than-thou mind you maybe even the divine

without humor a deadly sin for levity is not frum

אז ימלא שחוק פינו ולשוננו רנה

only then in messianic times not now at the sabbath table!

The weight of credentials necessary tickets to this and that

club but meaningless “roshei taivos” that crowd out any

real sense of self to the other, a barrier of illusions.

and in the office the clinic the hospital these letters that

mean so much to clueless victims of the medical myth

come to the white-coated sage and listening to the patient

recount their symptoms mostly predictable rarely

interesting with the appropriate heaviness the clinic

gravitas expected attempting to take their pettiness

seriously for in my field for in the unforgiving brain

symptoms are either trivial or devastating there seems no

in-between illness!

Like the politician on the screen in interviews served up for

dinner time, prime time like a pundit waiter

offering this or that solution for the hungry palate (as if he

knows the taste of the port), always sure to disappoint with

his serious but flawed unconscious seduction seeing

himself rather than his ideas for which he has none.

mostly the gravitas of sure slow inevitable aging with silver

hair receding hairline and white beard in the mirror no

longer the urgent spirit now the achy morning joints and

creaky spine that makes new noises in the dawn.

Is this what we can expect? at the pearly gates only this?

Maybe this is hell?

I will ask, for I expected humor and grace and acceptance!

In the Silence

In the silence

And the emptiness

Where the religious fear to enter

Where words no longer carry meaning

Where meaning and absurdity merge

In this space

Of double entendres

Incarnation is just a theologically loaded term

And finally the divine and human within are

indistinguishable

And whether the tzimstum is to be read as real or not

And whether it ever made any difference

Over two centuries of internecine battle

As if allegory, metaphor or metymony made any

Bloody difference to the world outside the ivory tower

Of Talmudics.

In this post post space

Of emptiness

I wait for something

To bubble up

Something real and felt

In the gut.

I stop everything

Dead in the tracks

No more ritual without inner feeling

No more blabbering

To the power above

Genuflecting words of praise

As the mind chatters on simultaneously

And the monkey and the kritik battle away in the head.

This moratorium of heresy

This absence of the frantic daily quota of texts

The blackout of words of cleverness and exegesis

Leaves me dizzy.

So I wait

For the first experience of the belly emptied

Of cultural-religious stuff.

London Fog

In the fine drizzle that is peculiar to the British Isles

one can walk in it and be refreshed,

without getting drenched

and memories sift through the mist

as I walk down Golders Green Road.

So many moons ago

a young teenager

walking in the morning of Shavuot

back to Finchley

from a night of learning in Munk's Shul

then, the only show in town,

the fatigue wearing me down the 3 mile hike.

So many years-

I recognize nobody now

only the buildings

are my lost friends

my bearings

the North Circular Road, then the Quadrant, then The

Great North Way

each a milestone

from the past.

I do not like it here now

I feel like on a movie set with the same buildings but a

cast of Haredi black-hatted characters replacing the old

familiar stars.

So, London went the way of other cities!

in its inevitable move to the right.

But the drizzle warms me

it remains so gentle

as if to beckon me

to those places where Jeremy and Eve and I

climbed in North Wales in similar mist,

or when I took the kids on the Penine Way

in our anaraks, crossing fords and streams as a team.

And facing Nana and Dada yet again

their tombstone weathered by such constant moisture

I bring my life to them

as always,

a moment of deep reflection

and self-judgment

as to what they might be thinking

a yardstick of measuring my worth in their eyes.

Here I too want to be buried

near them overlooking the green belt of London

among the Sefardim who remain innocent and pure.

My father (now 90) recites the kaddish

for his surrogate parents (Dad would be 120 now)

and I (now 60) realize what attracted him to the purity

of the Sargons...

that ability to remain unspoiled despite

everything...

that exotic other-worldly purity in the eyes...

that innocence of being.

And as I gaze at the table of Sargon women

at the birthday party

lined up like in old days...

that special innocence

melts me too, like my father,

and I am comforted that that unique spiritual gene is seen

in my daughters.

In the misty drizzle we walk back from the party

to the hotel where Mum and Dad look at his album

90 years of a life

celebrated tonight

with 65 family members from the four corners of the globe

flown in,

in the drizzle,

to be with him,

a patriarch now,

doing homage,

like members of a tribe.

Family is a matrix, a web we usually live without or ignore

in our heady lives

but here, tonight

we all feel its density

its hierarchy

based solely on seniority,

of having lived a life

with no judgments,

no qualifications other than

the desire to participate in this matrix

to saturate oneself in it and become absorbed

before we all return to our

other lives wherever.

Yes the drizzle and rain and moisture

that decayed the tombstones

reflect well how we are engulfed

by the moisture of love

that so rarely manifests itself

in our lives and through us.

In the drizzle

I am comforted

knowing my sons and daughters (now around 30)

and grandchildren (now around 3)

are part of this family

and this matrix

that I adore.

Dancing is All That's Left to Do

“I’ve been thinking about David, King David, dancing before

his God, before the ark as they carried it through the

streets. Can you imagine the scene? The body released in

ecstatic worship, letting go all restraint, all inhibition lost,

the wild abandon of pure homage. What poetry of

movement, what mane-flinging audacities, what rapturous

expressions were born in that moment of boundless

prostration– that divine dance whose erotic surrender was

so palpable that his wife, watching from a distance, grew

jealous.”

Naftali Ungar-Sargon

Translated literally, the parsha's initial phrase is: "If you will

walk with my decrees" -- an unusual turn of phrase. Below

I cite Rabbi Leiffʼs commentary on the Sfas Emes:

The Sfas Emes [1] cites the first Medrash Rabba on the

parsha, which tells us one way (out of several) with which

Chazal reacted to the unusual turn of phrase: "If you will

walk ... ". The Midrash handles this problem by referring

us to another pasuk in the Torah in which "walking" is

involved. That pasuk is: Tehilim, (119, 59).

The pasuk there says: "Chishavti dera'chai, ve'ahshiva

raglai el eidoseh'cha". "Chishaviti -- I thought long and

hard -- dera'chai -- my ways, in the sense of which way to

go -- and I returned my feet to Your testimonies".

Midrash: "Amar David. Ribono shel olam! Bechol yohm

vayohm, hah'yisi mechashev ve'omeir: le'makohm peloni

ul'bais dira pelonis ahni ho'laych. Ve'hayu rag'lai

moh'lichos osi le'batei ke'neisiyos u'lebatei medrashos."

Dovid Hamelech said: "Master of the Universe! Every day,

I would think things over, and decide to go to such and

such place ... But my feet led me to synagogues and to

Houses of Study (Batei Midrash)."

Sfas Emes presents his reading of Dovid Hamelech's

experience. He sees Dovid saying the following.

HaShem's chiyus (life-giving power) is present in every

thing and in every place. The chiyus is there in different

ways and in different forms; but the inner reality is the

same all over. Thus Dovid Hamelech could say: Wherever

I go, I encounter HaShem's Presence. For in fact, the

world's inner reality is identical everywhere.

Sfas Emes is reading the Midrash in a radically innovative

way. Most people would understand this Midrash as

saying: "I decided I was going to Wall Street. But my feet

took me to Lakewood instead". By contrast, the Sfas Emes

is reading the Midrash as saying: "I decided to go to Wall

Street, and I went to Wall Street. And there I encountered

the exact same Presence of HaShem -- albeit in different

guise -- that I would experience in Lakewood!"

Sfas Emes then comments on the pasuk quoted earlier

from Tehilim (119, 59). "Chishavti derachai" ("I considered

my ways ... ") The Sfas Emes uses the perspective gained

from this pasuk to comment on Chazal's dictum that

danger lurks on the roads. He notes that the pasuk tells us

how to avoid such danger. How? By thinking things

through (i.e., "Chishavti") beforehand.

Thus the Sfas Emes is telling us that to travel safely along

life's highways requires intellectual activity. By thinking

ahead and anticipating the problems he/she is likely to

encounter, a person can indeed find HaShem's Presence

everywhere and in every thing.

The Sfas Emes concludes this paragraph of his notes by

presenting his perspective on Learning. The Sfas Emes's

view here is complex. On the one hand, he feels very

strongly that we should subordinate our intelligence and

knowledge totally to the service of HaShem; that is, to His

will. On the other hand, the Sfas Emes recognizes that to

reach that state, one must start with intellectual activity.

Thus, the pasuk in Tehilim begins with "Chishavti".

The Sfas Emes attempts to resolve this inconsistency by

saying that, at any rate, the goal of our cogitation should

be non-intellectual, but rather to subordinate our

intelligence to HaShem. But true to his intellect, the Sfas

Emes recognizes that reaching that objective requires

"da'as ve'cheshbon" (knowledge and analysis); i.e.,

intellectual activity.

In meditating on King Davidʼs mind/heart versus his feet

I thought as follows:

Dancing is all thatʼs left with the feet, I mean as far as

possible from the head, the mind, the left hemisphere

Like those Polish rebbes emerging from the cattle cars

Menegele signals them to dance in a hassidic circle and

when they get too carried away he becomes enraged and

sends them immediately to the crematorium.

As if rebbe Nachman knew that davening was insufficient

that the “shefa” needed descent into the legs that even

torah needed mythic tales and fables sippurim “once upon

a time...” “in a faraway land...” about kings and daughters

and cruelty.

And what of today where we swim in a bath of lies and

deceipts and a sea of self-deception?

We inhabit these texts like old ruins, where the moss

makes movement treacherous and see stone masonry

rising from unexpected locations with wild bushes covering

delicate ancient inscriptions and we pretend

as if the cathedral is still with its virginal choir and the

organ plays at full volume. As if we could reconstruct Vilna

and Volozhyn in Lakewood and Bnei Brak.

Mouthing off the Daf Hayomi like soldiers in a roll call 5:30

each morning.

No, all we have left today is our feet... those fungoid

infected toes a putrid inventory.

And we run hither and thither searching for momentary

relief from the agony of self-loathing a moment without the

inner kritik in designer sneekers of course.

Why must I suffer further the shockling and pious swaying

for a few minutes of dancing like crumbs they throw my

way like a pidgeon in Hyde park.

Why must I pretend to like Carlebach davening the kids

singing just for a moment of bliss?

in this post-Hassidic post attempt-at-authenticity what is

left? after all has been stripped away?

Only to focus on the feet! for david...they took him to the

Beit Hamidrash for me.......I fear they will shlepp me to

le'makohm peloni ul'bais dira pelonis.

[1] Sfas Emes, Parshas Bechukosai, 5632

The Erotics of Kaballah Or How To Read Naughty Texts

Remember those chapters the bible school teacher missed out?

Or the Rebbe in cheder, suddenly skipping “inappropriate” bits of the Talmud?

Well here we are again in the Zohar

And my earliest recollections were my father’s admonition NOT to read it!

That Zohar…“full of erotica!” he claimed,

that man from Vienna,

the very city of sin!

The city of Freud and the invention of innuendo! That man, my father!

How do we read the notion of yichudim? Those couplings or copulations, [1]

Shall we sanitize it like Chabad “a unification of supernal elements in

(and by) one's mystical devotions in prayer”?

For yichudim literally means unification as in coupling as engaged in

marital bonding between the

male and female…

So by what audacious slight of pen does kabbalah

project such unifications onto the divine?

We are told (Rabbi Akiva none the less!) that

the book of Song of Songs is a metaphor for the

holiest aspects of the divine-human relationship.

An erotic poem is the only text that seems to

come close to express such a love.

Yet is fully described and incarnated in the fleshiness of the

description of lovemaking. Despite its fleshiness it is called the

“Holy of Holies” and we are repeatedly instructed to not take this literally,

for how can something so holy be taken literally.

So we are trained to read allegorically.

The anthropomorphic statements about God were the first

to be allegorized away by our embarrassed medievalists

and we are told to midrashically

“misread” the texts that depict in real time

the lovemaking or yichudim described with such graphic detail.

In a postmodern reading the text once again comes to life,

stripped of the theological lens we have been genetically prescribed

to wear before reading.

Loaded with a thousand years of rabbinic inhibition

we read it afresh as young lovers might

and attempt to see the divine in a new light. [2]

The divine seems to be wholly experienced these days

within our lives and within our bodies.

In a post-Holocaust world it is also seen in the horrors

of man’s inhumanity to man.

And with technology it is seen in the brutality of technological

mass murder down to technological

prolongation of life in agony.

We need a theology that might express this horror

and our sacred canonical texts must therefore

be mined for these deeper truths.

I always wondered, watching National Geographic

and other Nature shows on TV, how cruel “mother nature” was.

But now I see it differently. Maybe “she” merely represents the divine down

here in this world as it wishes to be.

Natural selection and the fight for survival of the fittest

reflect not only biology’s dicta but also theology.

For if we have learned nothing else, it is that mankind

when left to its own devices will use force with all the

technology at his disposal to destroy the “other”.

The Hassidic Masters have always read man well

and “that which is down below is mirrored above”

Rabbi Allen Goldberg said to Reb Hershy once

“Thinking of God as Other is pagan…”

Yichudim is the very inner work of resisting the notion

of splitting the divine from human.

Yichudim go beyond the split of divine and human

and point to the internalization of all, the All.

When the Berditchever is talking to the Aybishte

who is he talking to???????

If not his Higher Self?

That was his yichud, that was his constant attempt

to make yichudim, form all human experience.

I am so afraid that my notion of the divine is heretical.

So afraid of the label of apikorsus

(labeled too often by my dear wife!).

But what else can I give my children but the truth as I see it and feel it.

When I was sixteen I ventured into Keats house on Hampstead Heath

and read his “Ode to Nightingale” in the original manuscript.

Something resonated within my heart, it quickened

and I felt what I now believe to be the divine coming through.

Back then (and of course even now in my lucid moments)

the voice immediately thundered through

“Heresy! You have been told the truth in Rabbi Cooper’s class.”

Yichudim are couplings of the divine within each of us.

They are murmurings from the deep that point us to an identification

with the “cheleik elokei mimaal mamash” that spirit within all of us

that on occasion sings.

So the naughty bits we were told to skip are actually open now.

At this age

In this place the text presents itself to us.

We know it

After years of literal and even midrashic reading we come back to it

Its terror and its naughtiness

Its utter disregard for Protestant Orthodoxy and Artscroll Judaism!

And we allow ourselves a deeper reading

The reading of yichudim

The reading identification

And penetration.

The metaphor is both literal and non-literal

And we live in that paradoxical space

Hoping for a moment of truth

A moment of reflection

And a feeling of the divine within.



[1] "Yichudim" are a form of kabalistic meditation based on different permutations and combinations of the divine names and attributes

of G-d. Rabbi Isaac Luria made use of these meditations as part of his liturgy.

[2] Frances Landy has done a superb job in his Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs. Almond Press: Sheffield, 1983

Resist the Allegory

resist the literal

resist the interpretations!

despite the Gra, the Gaon

despite Rabbeinu, Reb Nachman

after all they were plugged into another dimension of

reality.

Do not fall into the trap of interpretation

our civilization's thirst from Hellenic times until now,

or else you will not escape the trivialization of our sacred

trust our heritage, our Torah.

Those tall tales of Rabbi Abba bar bar Channa

read in Bava Basra plainly

mine the images of snakes and giant fish and ocean

fantasms,

let them percolate up from within,

what comes up for you?

a nightmare?

a dream perhaps?

so stay with it!

better than the Artscroll!

"Once, while on a ship, we came to a gigantic fish at rest,

which we supposed to be an island, since there was sand

on its back, in which grass was growing. We therefore

landed, made a fire, and cooked our meal. But when the

fish felt the heat he rolled over, and we would have

drowned had not the ship been near". (Bava Basra 73b)

What can you do with that?

Let the books like "Juggler and the King" remain on the

shelf!

they allegorize to death!

they interpret what cannot be deciphered,

Does he think understands the Gaon?

And what of Rabbeinu?

After all it is part of Likutei Mehoran...

however as is characteristic the secret remains safe,

even after his eloquent exposition.

Resist the nimshal, the exposition, the unfolding of the

riddle and the exempla

for they too are derivative

and lose the mighty punch

the mashal delivers

below the belt,

unnerving our attitudes as it does

toward the Divine!

Stay with the inner workings of the fictional narrative

the mashal, the story

for in there lies the secret

of your narrative

your desire

your unfolding!

We are struck blind by this illness

we call interpretation

as if we could really decipher this world

make sense of the irrational,

understand these texts of terror.

In truth we must take courage to inhabit our

dark narratives;

and these sacred texts allow us this entrance

if only we might open ourselves to them

their mythic darkness.

Reb Zadok makes this outrageous claim (in Machshavot

Charutz):

Quoting his master the Holy Izhbitser Rebbe he states,

"And so have I received, that the world in its entirety is a

book that God, blessed be He, made and the Torah is a

commentary on that book" (44a)

For Reb Zadok the world is a cosmic text, which means

you and I and every human being is also a text, discreet

and unique.

The Torah, then becomes a commentary on the world

(reminding us of the midrash that the Torah was a

blueprint for the creation of the world)

meaning the world is inaccessible and does not make

sense unless it is deciphered by the Torah.

You and I remain a closed text a hieroglyph that needs a

commentary to decipher.

The Torah, he claims, is that very commentary.

In reading the Rebbe

do you think for a minute that the complexity of the human

soul can be interpreted away logically?

like the fantastic voyages in Bava Basra?

or the mashal of the king with rage attacks under the

chupah? (Midrash Eicha Rabba)

Can logic really do justice to these narratives

if the Torah is a "mashal Hakadmoni"

a primordial parable, a mythic telling of the structure of our

souls the hierarchical architecture of what makes us tick?

So please resist the easy narratives

the rational explanations of mythic tales and fantastic

creatures, rather stay with the images

and let them do their work for you.

Let the terror reveal to you what it is like

to be nailed to your reality

without escape from your personality

your character defects

time and again.

Let the text be a commentary on the world and on you- the

book-God created along with the world.

Let the logos, the memra, instruct you only so far as the

entrance to the cellar the darkness, for you must go there

alone and experience the dark side of the divine to

emerge whole.

Teshuva Games

So fickle are my promises

Writhing in the sleepless nights

That right leg

That disc herniation -The mere knowledge of

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

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

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

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

remove this 4 week old nightmare

Of disability

And pain.

So mythic, as it started Rosh Chodesh Tammuz

That ancient Sumerian- borrowed and demythologized- pagan!

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

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

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

The cross of aching hip and numbness

The inability to find a comfortable position

The tossing and turning for hours

And the morningʼs arrival of dawn without sleep.

Yet miraculously the day after Tisha Baʼv it eases

Just when I go to the surgeon!

Having refused to see him before

this sacred time of darkness and national mourning is over.

I would have done whatever he had said, prior

Just to be rid of the pain Surgery and all.

But now it eases

Although the nights continue, That nagging discomfort

That just prevents you from slipping into sleep.

And that hated vicodin

That loopy feeling followed by a soul disconnection

And days of constipation.

Never again!

Rather hold onto the pain

Watch it move

And rise in crescendo like the Halverson Passacaglia

Or the Pugnani-Kreisler-Preludium and Allegro

Which I listened to over and over in tears

Then calm slowly diminuendo Into a mere ache.

The slow agonizing improvement measured in weeks

Stripped me of personal dignity

Work, and above all the

concentration to study my sacred texts.

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

The pain refused my concentration

And disconnected me from the world.

But slowly it dawned on me

That my feelings about incarnation

of the divine “Hitlabshut” in the chasssidic parlance

And my insistence that this was in fact,

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

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

incarnate

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

had to learn endure and “carry” in my flesh

As a Merkava a vehicle

And suffer though this period of “Din” strict justice

Not only in time

But in the flesh In this body of pain I was

mirroring some divine trauma

And in suffering it I was somehow “sweetening”

The strict judgement.

Now, however

Weeks later

The promises

And the resolutions of the midnight darkness

Pleading with God

And the confessions

Sound hollow.

But this fickle nature I must surrender too.

For it is only by drowning in the divine grace

That I even have a chance of

sanity.

Ramanuja and my Masters tell me as much

Yet the inner Kritik

Never slumbers

Even now.

So I pray once again In my infidelity to You Lord

In my brokenness

In my surrender now

To the One who is willing

And desires only me.

The very word Teshuva In the mystical texts means

returning the “heh”

As in “tashuv Heh” תשוב –ה ʼ ה

Returning the Lost Princess

The Schechina, the Divine incarnate.

But for me it means returning the Heh

That soul I

lost In my pain In those horrific nights

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

And in doing so

Ask to restore Her as well.

Age-ing

Now 60

do I have experience?

Authority?

to speak about ageing?

Watching the goings on at my Seder table

the oldest one present

I remain observing,

tired and jet lagged,

more souninterested

in the background jibber jabber

but also the Holy words of smart Torah

of the young ones.

No I am tired

even of the expected inspiration

which comes now

so rarely

and yearn for the quiet of the night

with George, coffee and a good cigar

speaking of aging and suffering and the Schechinah

and baffled why God would still wish this.

Only those who awake to cry and mourn for Her

Interest me now

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

understand how She could possibly remain sane

After so many centuries of bloodshed and torture

And still believe in man.

Will I too wilt and lose memory like Dad?

and watch the slow decline with horror?

Oh the tragedy of it all

and I am part of the medical pharmaceutical industrial

machine that keeps them alive

participating in the grieving children of the stricken

with words of neurological wisdom.

So many ageing patients this trip

ill and stroked out

children looking for a sign a signal of possible return to

former glory

looking to me for what miracle?

I am so broken already by the sheer moral weight of

patient after patient

on ventilators in Herzog Hospital’s ward

a manifest desire

to fulfill some social and theological dictum called ‘sanctity

of life values’

But these comatose poor souls hang on

one by one

clinging to life

despite loss of

despite absence of

despite possible hope for return of…

But there is light…

the walks in the forest with my grandchildren

the talk and the infant banter

this wakes me up from the depression

and the sweet Jerusalem air

perfumed by the pine conespine

cones they pick up to paint for mother

as they ask me why trees bend down

and I tell them of young sapling trees like them

then taller parent trees- bending grandparent trees and

finally trees bent over with age which break and fall.

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

“They break and are absorbed into the ground.”

I tell him

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

I must look ancient to this 3 year old!

But the question allows me a space to see my aging

without terror

without a sense of loss

without a feeling of fatigue over the annual rituals.

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

desert moon

And dance on the street when we do

Gives me hope

That I will live on

In these tender lights

Dancing with me in a circle of three.

As I leave to return home

I do not know if and when

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

father

Whose tree is further bent over

and weep silently over the past

and the end of things

and the sheer tragedy of the forest’s secret

aged and knotted

before the soft pink skinned children

The Schechinah has such patience!

Sunset

Do not gaze at the sunset too long...

do not linger more than you have to,

knowing how hypnotic she can be,

for you must face what will happen shortly

so just marvel at the dying of another day.

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

hazy golden glow.. then nothing.

the sharp horizon is so unforgiving!

and we were taught it was only an iluusion!

that horizon of doubt

bein hashmashos

that halachic grey area

that vexed my father in law for decades

and self loss

leaving me now alone without the comfort of her presence,

alone in the twighlight.

Granted she leaves gracefully

almost imperceptibly,

dipping into the mikveh of the ocean

this gift of daylight

is now once again withdrawn

as if she has been dragged down by some unseen force

a hidden hand, a pharoah behind the mythical horizon.

Divine she remains, but now hidden, no longer powerful

her majesty has been compromised by another more

powerful force and in her wake is her demand

that I believe she will rise again tomorrow.

Her consort, the moon however is in full swing

blazing his own path across the darkening sky

yet we know well how dependent he remains upon the sun

despite her apparent absence.

Nevertheless he is capricious and no longer consistent

but dependent upon her monthly whims

waxing and waning like my own disbelief.

Its size reflecting its own heresy

its monthly crisis of faith

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

and joy at others, blood and rejection.

In this now almost darkness I must await her return

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

day so my only challenge is to survive the night

and rely aupon the wistful of the moon

So do not linger for too long

gazing at the dying of the sun

break the hypnotic illusion

for your tears will break your faith.

Learn to need the darkness

as the earth spins

and gives all their fare share.

Do not cry for her too long

for this is the very stuff of reality

as is your own dying

your own mortality

as you too will slowly sink behind the illusive horizon of

infinity into the mikveh of the ocean. 

Horizons

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

Lord) like the water covers the seas ”

Isa. 11.9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

can raise the spiritual manifestation of the divine in this

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

level of Bina its source above.

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

which is mem yud) which then makes the letters meimei

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

All this transformation takes place through daas or holy

intuition. so that yam becomes mayim (yud mem becomes

mem yud mem) water.

Degel Machaneh Efraim Parshas Emor

This wonderful Torah of the grandson of the Baal Shem

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

Atlantic with ocean surrounding me for 360 degrees.

His Torah equated the notion of the sea with the doctrine

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

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

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

continues to respond to weather, wind and atmospheric

pressure ever since creation.

Against this fact of the natural order Rebbe comes to

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

Israelites crossed as they left Egypt was Yam Suf the

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

last one, the lowest point. In spiritual terms everything

down here on earth is a poor representation of what is

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

represents the lowest of the sefirot the spiritual archetypes

called malchut.

Using a known pun of sof and suf with the classical

themein the Zohar equating the lowest rung on the

spiritual archetypal ladder of sefirot as malchut with din or

strict justice, he has connected the following themes:

sea=suf=sof madreigot=malchut=din

Through the inner work of the zaddik who makes use of

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

experiential state rather than cognitive discursive

examination of reality, this lowest rung of spirituality

represented by pure blind justice can be elevated to its

source above, in the sefirah called Bina, represented by

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

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

higher rung in the spiritual ladder called bina, which is

called “sweetening” by chesed that archetype that allows

for love and harmony and peace. Notice the letters mem

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

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

chesed” or the waters of compassion. By transforming the

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

compassion in this letter mysticism.

3 I am reminded of the difference between mi meaning

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

vs I-it model of interpersonal relations. Ma

represents the discursive examination of reality typified by

the Soloveitchik’s Adam I who masters the world by

dominating it with objective science, industry and power. It

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

basis of scientific inquiry. His Adam type II represents mi

or who? meaning the realtional-experiential form of

knowledge which is subjective rather than objective in

observation. This can only be accomplished by the

archetype of daas, intuition.

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

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

Lord) like the water covers the seas”

How will this futuristic transformation of the world occur?

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

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

sweetening strict justice with kindness through that

mysterious element of daas, holy intuition. I interpret this

to mean when the world moves from the objective

experience of reality to the subjective intuitive experiential

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

nature will be transformed into the mercy of a

compassionate world.

The verse he rereads now encodes this process as

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

with knowledge) kamayim layam mechasim” (like the

water covers the sea)

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

world through His natural providence within nature not

beyond it. This Elohim form of the divine represents strict

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

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

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

knowledge meaning holy intuition

kamayim layam mechasim: from

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

into mayim=chessed=binah=loving kindness.

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

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

to transport 2000 Jews in 1941 10 minutes a day exercise

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

day, for 10 minutes running on deck with seamen prodding

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

thighs to move quicker, he too saw where heaven meets

earth 360 degrees: nothing but the blue ocean.

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

ocean around me nothing but blue the waves melt into

each other the surface undulating with dignity the cresting

surf white freshness and the pencil sharp horizon for 360

degrees once again. heaven meets earth in a visual circle

around this boat.

Those waves hypnotically force me to stare the undulation

and the wind swept surfaces that constantly move waves

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

caps and troughs, mountains and valleys of water never

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

tiny ripples between the waves catch the eye in a

wondrous awe.

He told me to watch for the static electrical effects

between the surface of the water and the edge of the

metal ship at dawn and dusk he remembered those playful

lights: a son et lumiere show as he sailed towards

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

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

unworthy of this natural display of divine humor.

This is literally the first time I have experienced the globe

the completely roundness of infinity

the border zone between the roundness of the earth the

absolute limits of my gaze as a circle

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

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

mother earth once again in her boldness her finite

roundness facing the infinite sky

and the sheer massiveness of the great sea.

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

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

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

edge. Remember those pictures of medieval sailboats

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

otherwise and was burnt at the stake for it.

Remember the biblical water and the tehom, the deep

were already there when the Almighty lent His hand in

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

primordial this body of water seems even now. The light

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

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

then green by the coast Mercurial in nature and hiding

another world beneath it represents the very nature of my

soul. But more than anything it teaches me abut the

horizon for we are told one can never reach the horizon

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

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

defined so razor edge thin and sharp where heaven and

earth meet 360 degrees around me on this ship.

Yet it remains forever unattainable and an image of

unreality placed within creation as an illusion but God

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

grand visual hallucination?

The infinite is beyond and for me must remain

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

heart keeps pulling me there to that horizon and I know

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

resolution and the place we call Eden.

It is as if I must learn to yearn without demanding

fulfillment I must learn even at this age to unlearn and

once again delay and defray look and gaze without

holding and owning without grasping and clutching to gaze

and let go repeatedly at this circle of unrealized an

unattainable infinity that surrounds me the ultimate truth.

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

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

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

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

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

gave up on that doctrine.

Here I am at the center point of this mathematical mirage

in its center of the world alone for another impending

birthday looming large chronicles of wasted time and

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

holding their own secrets beneath.

Yet here I must remain in this center surrounded by this

infinity and accept my place and my inability to ever taste

it and somehow accept all that has happened the same

way my father sailed that fateful ship on the same ocean

with Nazi U-boats lurking beneath never knowing whether

he would ever reach shore alive.

And I must somehow transmit this secret to my children

and grandchildren the secret of this tension this paradox of

infinity and its mirage for ecstasy remains not within our

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

further struggling for mastery.

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

moment in time and accept my mortality my point in the

center unable to move one way or another in that giant

circle towards the infinite horizon but gaze lovingly at this

marvelous creation of paradox and learn to be for as long

as I am given and that is OK too.

Today the captain on this small catamaran allows me the

helm unexpectedly as the engine loses a cable requiring

him below I take the wheel and suddenly after three days

at sea I came alive!

Now responsible for the vacationing people on this 65 foot

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

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

Atlantic around the Island of St. John.

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

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

basic elements in this world combined to propel this boat

and myself flexing its resistant muscle in a trio so smooth

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

once again.

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

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

chessed a divine gift the Schechina smiling for a while.

It is at these rare moments that I understand the yichud

understand the meaning of daas-intuition; the

Hierosgamos, the Holy unification above when in the

Garden of the Caribbean Eden

the warm waters and explosion of tropical life where

people are at ease and the gentle green hills meet the

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

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

eternity. Here daas informs me and sweetens the mighty

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

life and my failure for a moment of relief.

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

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