The Space Between the Twin Towers
The space between the Twin Towers
is that gaping chasm
where meaning melts into chaos.
Where men fall to their deaths knowingly, intentionally,
and the sound of the bodies hitting ground zero
deafens the soul forever, for it allowed this travesty and
remained silent leaving this space complicit
in permitting their free fall.
She did not change the rules of nature and become dense
to soften their landing she failed to ask gravity to suspend
its laws for those poor souls hurtling to their deaths
she stood silently by.
The space between the Twin Towers
allows for the absence of human and nature’ compassion
the pressure holding those twin towers of human greed
and capitalism apart, yet binding them in a partnership
becomes too unbearable for her
and, while signing on to a suicide pact with the devil in two
jets, she betrays the towers by staying, and surviving
while they crumble and melt.
She has signed a death pact with nature, the devil and
gravity unbeknownst to all of us.
The space between the Twin Towers
is the space that allows us to breathe
an airlock of concrete-free reality
in the tip of concrete lower Manhattan
a lebensraum, but destined to be filled with the Pompeii-
Like ash as they melted downwards to the earth.
The space between the Twin Towers
has remained after the towers have fallen
these ten years, bearing witness to what was once there
as if it has been released from its confinement forever.
And annually the blue lights that fill the footprints of the
towers leaving two eerie ghost-like columns in the sky
that space is exposed once again in its guilt.
The space between the Twin Towers
will be forgotten unlike the towers themselves,
yet it eerily presses on my consciousness
making itself felt in uncanny times.
When at a loss for words theologically, an inability to make
sense of a divine order where human life has become so
cheap my mind wanders to this space;
when the unfathomable horror of human cruelty
of man’s inhumanity to man
makes itself felt in the heart
I am drawn to this space;
and when my own heart of darkness reveals its
inexplicable presence
in my relationships, my little betrayals of self and others,
I find a paradoxical solace in this space.
For me it has become the metaphor
for the absence of meaning
for cruelty and torture
for the appropriation of 9/11 as an icon to make profit
and punditry and for all the trade center represented but
hid so well, the darker side, the underbelly of capitalism
and Wall street.
It also reflects my own failure to confront and act
to just sit on the sidelines of history and watch
(oh how I remember in my idealism of youth
questioning those in Germany and Europe
in the 30’s for their inaction and passiveness.)
Now guilty of the same I feel the presence of this space
bearing down on me.
These last 10 years,
the insane rebuilding to “show them”
the lockdown of our freedoms,
the lack of fundamental change in our society,
the inability to “learn from the tragedy”,
the absence of new vision,
the upsurge in world violence,
the ongoing internecine hatred...
all points to the presence of the absence
the ongoing effect of this space
the presence of its effects
continuing despite the loss of the twins it held together
in tension despite the release of their hubris
it is present the space between the Twin Towers.
Pine Forest
We walk hand in hand
The boy and I
On the soft sandy horse trail
The early morning mist
Now having moved slowly to reveal the tall pine trees
Greeting us in the distance with their perfume
A congregation of upright silent worshippers
The looming density of wooded trunks
Reflecting the hundred year old age of this forest.
Question after question pours out without interruption
From the little boy
Such an inquisitive mind
And I patiently answer as I remember my fatherʼs impatience
With my own questions as a child
The little boyʼs hand grasps mine
Unconscious as to how precious these moments are for me.
I see my childhood and his as a seamless continuum
And time contracts and makes me sad.
In the clearing
Surrounded by these huge pines
Like the Burgherʼs of Calais
So self-righteous
Yet so dignified
On their pondering silence.
In this clearing we sit in silence on tree stumps
And I ask him to be silent and listen to the forest
And tell me what he hears.
I want so badly to teach him to listen to the silence
This almost five year old boy
To hear the secrets of the pine forest
But I hear only his ongoing questions.
As we look for the pine cones, the sapling trees close by
He runs to measure his lanky height against theirs.
We see the older thicker ones and compare them
to his father then to his grandfathersʼ
In age and thickness.
The wind blows gently through the pines
The blue sky punctuated by the soft white puffs of clouds-
a perfect Shabbat morning.
I tell him that one day he will hold his own grandson in his hand
and walk with him to a similar forest of trees to teach him
the secret of the trees, their being born, growing up,
ageing and breaking off to lie in the ground.
He listens urgently. He is an intense spirit probing the world
to make sense of it as I had done as a youngster.
I look around at the silence of the forest and just this moment
I feel the joy of being so alive and being with this child.
I cannot describe how much comfort this little boy
has brought to my life as well as hope.
More than anyone he has brought me to a kind of acceptance
of my own mortality and a serenity in just knowing he will live on
after me and I will forever be his Dada and be in
his heart like my own Dada. And that is good enough!
After all those years of struggle in fear and dread,
in the dark nights of anticipation, as if my life accelerated to its
conclusion quicker than others, in that horror
I have emerged to this delightful being
who comforts me by his mere existence in my life.
Like this forest he has taught me serenity is the very silence-
the silence of acceptance of my mortal body as part of nature,
in its rhythm of life growth decay and death.
כִּי הָאָדָם עֵץ הַשָּׂדֶה
“for man is like the tree of the forest”
Has new meaning for me today
As with all life and with trees
We are powerless to step outside the facts and
the knowledge of what must come
What must happen
Powerless to step much beyond our genetic predilections
for health disease and decline.
Despite the sacred texts that speak of eternal life
The cemeteries known and the “land of the living”
Today I feel only the divine immanence of nature
Of nature as immortal and eternal
compared with our creatureliness and ever so brief
sojourn in this world.
My Dada used to hug me in his green cardigan
at the entrance to his Wembley home
welcoming me with a spoonful of castor oil!
But what lies buried in my heart was his
love. My memories of him, his smell, his love,
his presence are embedded in my heartand
today I try to be as present as I can to this little boy-who,
one day, will hold his
grandson closed to him while remembering me.
We walk back along the sandy horse trail and I am unsure
whether he will even remember this day-Pine Forest-
but I tell him, it was, for me, the best part of my
weekend.
Crumbling Buildings
I marvel at the marble stairwell in this 17 story hotel
as I descend in the hope of losing a few calories each
counts these days where
one wakes to the magic number on the glucometer
to review the sins of the previous dinner.
What it must have taken to hew and quarry all this marble
and the granite being placed all around the main downtown post office
as I walk to the lake this cloudy morning before Chicago awakens:
Was this TARP money being put to use?
I walk by a quarry near my hospital at times
and marvel at the depth to which man has gorged out of the earth
for his building projects, chosen for the granite and stone hardness
it is prime building material and mechanically crushed
to the size demanded by the
contractor who sends in lorry after lorry, winding their way down
the spiral dirt path to
the depths of the excoriated gray landscape
as if Mother Earth
gives of Her own body, now willingly
so that we can build huge skyscrapers to our egos.
Then I think of the hole in the earth across from my shul
where the Rabbi is building his new edifice
a gaping disgorgement of Chicago clay, soft and brown
a violation once more but just a few feet deep, enough for the foundation
where we will all stand above one day
in the artistʼs rendition sent out to fundraise
manicured pews of cherry wood
ladies gallery and all
just like a Lutheran chapel.
Which brings be to the collapsing building of my soul
as chunks of debris slowly come crashing down to earth
the attempt was made to build
but failed
the material was grade B
the engineer was incompetent
and the workers drunk.
Yet there is something right about this
a sort of hubris
that is appropriate
something that feels justified in a weird way
when something is dreamed of, executed and yet collapses.
when the earth will eventually claim all for itself
either naturally or through it cataclysmic paroxysms
in quakes and other “disasters”.
When she is unwilling to stand for all this human arrogance anymore.
I too was built on a foundation not of my own choosing
but then began the laborious work
of building structure upon structure
in my effort to reach out to the divine
heavenwards,
to this angry punishing sky God
who rages at us with a wagging index finger
in sacred scriptures.
Then having discovered Midrash
and its poetic beauty
its irony and hidden protest
its textuality and deconstruction of
the heavy revealed word
its playfulness with the Logos
then next story was built
towards Him.
Finally after crisis in life
when one dis-covers the darker side
of oneʼs soul
Hassidut and Kabbalah provided a narrative
that framed these impulses and feelings
about me and the divine
in a holographic image that provided comfort and validation
of the very struggle.
It turns out that He too has His issues
and this world was born out of His desire to expel His dark side.
Mother earth represents that dark desire in the cataclysmic chaos
that followed His birthing.
But now all is crumbling
the edifice is losing height
falling, falling
back down to the cthonic depths
in a free fall
and on the way down all is being stripped away
except the idea behind the words.
except the feeling and the once fresh desire.
The structure is broken
like the way my grandson impulsively tears down
his lego construction
suddenly without warning, on impulse.
Back on the ground
Mother Earth caresses all this with a knowing nod
Her daily rituals and cycles
light and dark,
sleep and wakefulness,
hunger and satiety,
the warm shower and the deep cool mikvah waters
the air breezing on my face in the green cornfields
the awakening of desire in the loins,
now and then
and the persistent seeking of beauty despite age.
These always-present
but newly dis-covered silent presences
give me comfort
and the realization
of the vitality of Her apparent passiveness.
She is the silent witness to all this
She bears the blood of our hubris
She accepts us after all is done and we lie without further breath.
Where the shul becomes erect in its move to become
a place of worship
I become bent over, like an old shaman
with the weight of my past, and others,
of my failure,
and yet my new found sense
of earthiness.
Contrary to what I was taught about “gashmius”-physicality
and the evil of desire,
I now wait for it and welcome the very feelings
of hunger and thirst, the aching limbs that need their daily
limbering up,
the morning misty moist air,
a beautiful girl passing by,
as if this is the very blessing of life and Mother Earth
“They” call it Malchut and Schechina in other texts
but for me
having crumbled
itʼs just what I have right now
and that is fine.
For 2000 years we in the synagogue and church have imaged the divine
in His masculinity.
Recently Meister Eckhardt, Baal Shem Tov and their disciples
think otherwise
but we get stuck in the wire diagrams
of this or that theosophical system
ignoring the explosive implication of this.
So I need to continue to just hold this paradox
hold the divine images
negotiate His/Her modus vivendi
inside me.
Allow Her to be present to the kiritik inside
to be present at Her desire
in the temporal seasons that characterizes Her cycles
be present to Her feminine rage
as different from His
and wait.
Eulogy for Reb Yudel
He carried so much suffering
he was so tormented
and with this weight
with this past
he lived
despite
he was such a presence
his drawn cachectic eyes
and his face reminded me of Chagall's Rabbiner
etched in those very eyes were all of European misery
and it never left his consciousness
yet at times there was space for playfullness and mirth
"ehr lacht!" he would say of me
and his questions always challenged me,
so tied in with pshat and medieval trivia...
as a midrashic man he drove me crazy!
it was so hard for him to accommodate to Amerika
to the softness and the food
to the time for leisure
he was so stuck in Europe.
his deference for scholars and rebbes
was transmitted to his children
and his love, typically european
in his inability to express verbally or physically.
so now we remember him, his life, his his-story
as he embodies everything in transition for there to here
from the trauma to the silence of the present
from that tradition steeped in shtetl piety
to the openness of New York.
he was an essentially tragic man
which attracted me so much to him
and I felt my purpose to humor him and make him laugh
a little
just a little
and in my home
he could possibly let go a little
from the bonds of the lived life of pain
the body of suffering that inhabited his consciousness
without even him being able see it.
In Memoriam
to Reb Yudel
whom I shall miss as he walked into my home with his
characteristic gait and folded arms
into my arms for a wonderful bear hug.
I will miss that hug, most of all.
Prayer for Jim Burstyn
“Who is at my door?
He said, 'Who is at my door?'
I said, 'Your humble servant.'
He said, 'What business do you have?'
I said, 'To greet you, Oh Lord.'
He said, 'How long will you journey on?'
I said, 'Until you stop me.'
He said, 'How long will you boil in the fire?'
I said, 'Until I am pure.
'This is my oath of love.
For the sake of love
I gave up wealth and position.'
He said, 'You have pleaded your case
but you have no witness.'
I said, 'My tears are my witness;
the pallor of my face is my proof.'
He said, 'Your witness has no credibility;
your eyes are too wet to see.'
I said, 'By the splendor of your justice
my eyes are clear and faultless.'
He said, 'What do you seek?'
I said, 'To have you as my constant friend.'
He said, 'What do you want from me?'
I said, 'Your abundant grace.'
He said, 'Who was your companion on the journey?
I said, 'The thought of you, 0 King.'
He said, 'What called you here?'
I said, 'The fragrance of your wine.'
He said, 'What brings you the most fulfillment?'
I said, 'The company of the Emperor.'
He said, 'What do you find there?'
I said, 'A hundred miracles.'
He said, 'Why is the palace deserted?'
I said, 'They all fear the thief.'
He said, 'Who is the thief?'
I said, 'The one who keeps me from -you.
He said, 'Where is there safety?'
I said, 'In service and renunciation.'
Prayer : for Jim Burstyn June 2011
He said, 'Who is the thief?'
I said, 'The one who keeps me from -you.
He said, 'Where is there safety?'
I said, 'In service and renunciation.'
He said, 'What is there to renounce?'
I said, 'The hope of salvation.'
He said, 'Where is there calamity?'
I said, 'In the presence of your love.'
He said, 'How do you benefit from this life?'
I said, 'By keeping true to myself
Now it is time for silence.
If I told you about His true essence
You would fly from your self and be gone,
and neither door nor roof could hold you back!”
Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
My constitutional walk amid the the green green fields of Indiana
the late rains have made the green so lush a magical morning this
air cool, a bit moist, a mist rises as
the early morning sun warms the sacred ground
the sky as blue as Techeles and the Throne of Glory
the breeze gently envelops me caressing my face.
Exhilarated by this perfection I think of the time to Daven to pray
this desire to reach out and beyond a perfect morning
beyond accepting it for what it is just this
my brain forces me to reify and situate and mythologize
to pray to a timeless eternity
as these aching limbs walk off the stiffness in the hips and shoulders
creeping age makes itself felt at the two ends of the day.
For now I revel in the immanence of Mother Earth/Schechinah of Being
ממלא כל עלמין
feeling spirit incarnate in my very bones,
in earth, in nature as I age towards earthiness
facing a return to earth.
But my religious-cultural heritage begins to weigh in
heavily on my shoulders and the faith of the father,
La Nom du Pere, the bearded portraits framed on the study
walls looking down sternly, the textual canon I inhabit and inhabits me,
its aphorisms, its quotations, those wisdoms that spring up in consciousness,
force my gaze upwards towards the sky the infinite blueness
and the Almighty One.
Until He invaded reality in Genesis 1:1 in our mythic memory,
our canonical sacred text,
all was quiet and serene just like this morning in Indiana
where only birds chirp away
and all are going about their natural business of survival,
until, that is, He crossed over that infinite chasm we call the tzimtzum
between the infinite and the finite, to experience
for Himself the glory that is this world of nature and Mother Earth.
Until then of course, there were no questions.
The day He breathed the נשמת חיים
into this anthropoid, there was no self, no consciousness of Other,
our canon insists, our myth tells us, there were no questions,
no obligations, no directives, no rules to disobey.
But with the Miltonian assertion of self through the agency of some
serpentine wisdom, the self refused to obey, the self-conscious self
became self as other, fulfilled in the very
act of disobedience by eating the fruit of what Mother Earth had produced,
a luscious delight to the eyes. Forbidden by the foreign Sky Deity for no
reason, but instilling an eternal guilt in mankind
genetically transmitted forever.
And this Transcendent Deity now imposes His will
down here of unconscious Mother Earthʼs children
who will be scarred forever and no more so than His chosen people
Israel. But this covenant is complicated as the vassal repeatedly fails and
incurs the wrath of the king. Betrayal and rage follow the history of this
complexity as the people struggle to relate to a divine Being. How to
understand the rage of a Being who allows Mengele to assume divine
proportions deciding on life and death with a flick of his arm?
The covenant has transformed into something sinister as
the Deity wishes to experience
such monstrosity at the hands of the human.
It occurs to me as I walk along the crunchy path of pebbles
between the cornfields of Indiana, to dissolve the contract
(as has been suggested before me by others such as
Rubinstein) to return to a pagan earth bound spirit
who does not allow genocide for its own sake.
Dissolve the Brit, no longer place our trust in this Transcendent Deity, and
relinquish His promise to protect, for what good did it do on the ramp?
Let each party go its own way, an amicable divorce of sorts.
Surely our people might then once more dissolve into non-chosenness,
merge back into humanity, not be singled out firther by
Church, Nazi or Jihad!
Of course the Holy One would have another rage attack,
set upon us the German Shepherds loose once more like on the poor
innocent whose only sin was to embrace modernity.
Left alone what would become of us? to whom would we pray to?
We have done it for so many millennia it is second nature! We believe in a
Higher Power who we daven to and beg for mercy to and ask for healing from,
could we even handle the orphan status? Yet this morning despite 6 months
of darkness, I feel like praying. And as I place the black straps on my arm
once more I buy into the blackness of Rabbinic tradition. The black notes on
white parchment, the black ink on the page of talmud, the black stripes on
the Tallis, the black yarmulke the black wide-brimmed hats.
And the words flow freely from the lips denuded of attention to meaning
just the texture of the sentence, its very materiality, its prosidy, its verbal
articulation. No meaning, no intent, no kavannah,
but that is sufficient today
like an actor on stage
playing the part, the role, this feels right
this black ritual from earthy materials, reaching from the spirit below to the male
transcendent Deity beyond.
I tap into this feeling-this religious snetiment
and after these 6 months of dehydration-it feels goodit
is sufficient this התעררות דלתתא
in this מוחין דקטנות
and Mother earth/Schechinah gently breezes past my cheek in assent
for She too weeps
over Her disconnection with Him
and it occurs at that moment
that this is what the kabbalists meant by the term יחודים
those unifications they incant prior to performing Mitzvot.
In this new approach, this new myth, the radical theological move
was that is was now up to man himself
to re-connect the divine with the divine
the Schechina/Malchut/earth spirit below weeping and wailing for Her
suffering children with the Deity beyond and transcendent.
That what I was feeling was exactly what I was meant to be feeling this
moment by just bringing attention to the infinite gap that separated spirit,
mythic, eternal world reality here and now on this glorious summer day
amidst the green cornfields of Indiana from
the Historical Deity of our Canon of history and texts
across the צמצום
So I hope and pray -not using the head-
with nothing but attention to my earthly time
bound aging presence here on the green carpet of Indiana
and that is sufficient.
Ezras Israel Dinner Honoring Holocaust Survivors
70 years after the Temple had been destroyed and the Shekhinah had gone into exile, all the angels went into mourning for Her, and they composed dirges and lamentations for her. So too did all the upper and lower realms weep for Her and go into mourning. Then God came down from heaven and looked upon His house that had been burned. He looked for His people, who had gone into exile. And He inquired about His bride,who had left Him. And just as she had suffered a change, so too did Her husband-His light no longer shone, and He was changed from what He had been. Indeed, by some accounts God was bound in chains.[1]
Psalm: Paul Celan
“No one moulds us again out of earth and clay, no one conjures our dust. No one. Praised be your name, no one. For your sake we shall flower. Towards you. A nothing we were, are, shall remain, flowering: the nothing-, the no one's rose. With our pistil soul-bright, with our stamen heaven-ravaged, our corolla red with the crimson word which we sang over, O over the thorn.[2]
She longs for Him,
she, through our collective self, keeps longing for the absent lover
in the dark night of this apparent exile
despite the yellow glowing lights on the Jerusalem walls,
the yellow badges haunt our dreams
despite the Profit Sharing Plans for retirement in Florida,
all contemporary luxury feels guilty,
all remains not well.
In our absent gazes,
She too is not present, in us
She too has gone, disgusted by the self-bloating
Holier-than-Thou’ness of current religious pretensions to piety
so we play games as if...
the rituals of daily life and learning had meaning inside
as if...
nothing had happened some 70 years ago
a lover’s spat some would say!
others would make even more outrageous theological claims
(harping to Nietzche)
yet others would put blame on us! on the very victims!!
as if...
Has He ever not been bound in chains? [3]
the king bound in the trestles. מלך אסור ברהטים
did the Song to end all Songs not tell us?
the king bound in his trestles
outside the garden of delight
watching and waiting for his beloved,
yet kabbalistically also bound
in the trauma of this very creation
in the only way the finite could trap the infinite in its grip.
Bound in the chains of the barbed wire trestles
He watches his beloved starved and tortured
played with and humiliated by German/Ukrainian/Polish soldiers
the women defiled in ways that left permanent etchings in the flesh,
a scarring, living corpses who could never again make love...
handsome smart uniforms smoking all the while with leather gloves
so as not to defile themselves.
Bound in the excremental deterioration of the self and humanity
as if...
the divine wished to experience such degradation
a pervert Greek experiment ordered by the Pantheon for the amusement of the gods.
Awakening from this traumatic nightmare
now 70 years later
like those Rabbis of old
looking at the Hurban
the broken Jerusalem walls,
the “fox running across the Temple Mount”[4]-
we have no Rabbi Akiva to laugh.
We languish amid the normalcy of daily life
as if... it never took place.
And we, the children of those who survived
whose parents’ silences
deafen the living rooms of London, NY, Tel Aviv
what are we to believe?
who are we to believe?
You who survived gave us nothing to believe!
despite your comings and goings to shul
and the lips chattering alongside the songs of the chazzan
we saw through that, even as children,
to the dark emptiness inside you all
and realized slowly, slowly
the legacy of Die Niemandsrose[5]
and the Psalm to No-Body.
Please help us
before you depart this world
please show us how to
believe!
show us how to hold on to our lost faith
even as you slowly drowned in your memories and lost ones.
In connecting to you
we at least have a physical representation
of your lives here
of your embodied trauma
of the blue etchings in your forearms
of your survival
we can hug and embrace your frail bodies
like a talisman
to ward off the evil curse that is our people.
But what will you leave us when you have gone?
what blessing will you bestow upon us
as you move away
into the memory of our loss?
Please don’t leave
please do not leave us alone
in this wilderness
in this new modern Hurban
please give us a hint
at some messianic dream you still hold on to
some secret you have withheld until now
some divine word you received over there
in the hell of enlightened Europe.
Hold us close
hold us to your hearts
squeeze us tight please
never let go.
For without you
we fear,
we fear
we will lose all faith
like the Klauzenberger Rebbe claimed
in the first al chet on Kol Nidre 1946
“our only אל חטא was that we own up to is our loss of faith on You Lord!”
without you
present
to hold us close
we fear
being alone in this nightmarish world
where people go about their normal lives
as if...
as if...
it never happened.
[1] Howard Schwartz, The Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 58 ,Pesikta De Rav Kahana 13:9, 15:3, Zohar I:182a
[2] Translated by Michael Hamburger
[3] Song of Songs 7:6 “Your head upon you is like Carmel, and the hair of your head like purple; a king is caught in its tresses.”
[4] Lamentations 5:18 “For the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, (even) foxes walk upon it.”
[5] Paul Celan: Die Niemandsrose (The Nomansrose / The No-One's-Rose, 1963)
Transgressions
As a child the single greatest blow to my developing spirituality
was the guilt from pegam habrit.
That masturbatory fantasy life that allowed a few minutes of escape
from the intolerable world of a British post war childhood
and its violence has become ingrained. But at what a price!
The days following I could not pray to the Almighty One above.
The guilt was palpable and my self-loathing a persistent sense of self.
The mother that whacked me for not practicing piano sufficiently or diligently
with her bamboo canes waiting for service in the flower pot
ever ready for immediate use,
forcing me to devise ruses for so-called practice
tinkering with the keys that almost sounded like music and scales
yet allowed me to daydream the hour away all the while
fool the authority of the raging mother not always successfully.
Even before my sense of spiritual self was layered
and self-conscious
a recurring and familiar feeling of inner dread overtook me.
This second being, rotten to the core,
was born from these violent encounters,
leaving me with an indescribable sense
of inner desolation already by age 10.
Over the years this sense of the transgressive
and the inability to escape the guilt of existence
has permeated my inner landscape
helped in large measure by the rabbinic tradition
of the divine judge on the annual day of judgement-
Rosh Hashanah where all pass before the heavenly tribunal-
the Grand Inquisitor and where
all oneʼs prior actions of the year are measured.
And the supplicatory prayers (tachanun) that invoked divine mercy for sins
each monday and thursday, then the selichot, and fast daysʼ penitent tefillot.
That Ancient One of the Old Testament had conspired with the
inner kritik to form an overwhelming alliance from without and within
and leaving me devastated continuously found
wanting and feeling the “guilty” verdict even before the crime.
When the outer world conspired as well
in the form of the DEA and the State of Massachusetts
the wound left an indelible mark of Cain in my soul.
No longer could I trust the self within
as a moral compass
no longer could I see myself as “innocent”.
Kafka came alive for me as I seemed to live out his parables
in real life. The second being was now the only voice.
Yet over the years I have found
a developing sense of inner peace
that came with acceptance of the darker soul
and the realization that the “I” that was me
was a composite of drives and ethnic codes
formed in a genetic prison not of my own making.
In this biological system insults and traumas affected neuronal circuits
and laid down indelible pathways of aberrant behaviors,
making the sense of “free-will” philosophically problematic
yet allowing some measure of relief
in the neurological world of cause and effect.
Ironically in the very transgression of this or that
I would sense the outer limits of my self
the borders of my inner territory and the edges
of what otherwise was unknown aspects of my moral code.
I would learn what I would be willing to do
and what I would be unwilling to engage in
which taught me much more about the inner world I inhabited
than any text or teacher.
Often my father would spring to mind in such conflicts
both as a guide and as an example
in re-membering what he had endured in similar circumstances.
Indelibly etched in my soul was the anxiety written on his face
as he returned home after being questioned
by the purchase tax inspectors circa 1960
which must have evoked memories
of black Maria cars in Vienna whisking away
Jews in the night. His mother sent him cycling daily and upon his return
he never knew whether they might be there or not.
For in his choice to escape the horror
on that fateful day in the Viennese banhof
on the platform he also had to betray those closest to him
in leaving them (albeit beyond his control) for safety...
Thus my very physical being is the result of this
conflicted choice of his, to betray in order to live.
Yet it was in my reading of tradition above all,
that differences between us father and son-
would explode onto the Shabbat table passionately
focused on our differing reading of sacred texts
and his insistence on literal readings of midrashic myth,
(ironically at the same time his accepting
a purely allegorical reading of Greek
mythology.)
His critical voice ringing in my ears when I begged to differ
holding me to his pre-war literary conventions,
all the while forcing my inner conviction to pass muster
and honing my rhetoric in treading my own path of reading.
The price for all of this has been steep
for I find no solace in the company of co-religionists,
having been branded an apikorus of sorts
which I have been slow to embrace.
Our post war community was small,
and following the Holocaust there was no room
for dissent. We were in theological “lock down” mode
like those facing the tornado in the Wizard of Oz.
All the shutters to the outside had been closed
all the liberal hatches have been pulled down tight
there being no room for dissent or resistance
to authoritarian traditional readings.
Yet it was precisely the Shoah
and the theological consequences thereof
which have haunted my spiritual life
and held all my textual readings up to its lens.
This indelible fact of history, begging the very covenantal relationship
and the accident of my birth so soon after,
as well as the very incarnation of my fatherʼs impossible choice,
have forced me to re-examine and constantly
refuse myself the luxury of pious readings,
literal Protestant readings
and self-serving orthodoxies.
To be sure the self-sabotaging self
has been well at work, the darker second me, all the while
doing its best to sabotage and leaving its physiological trail
of deep stomach pains and the familiar dread in the chest.
Never to forget that fainting spell
before the Harvard Professor as the junior faculty
instructor I was, being told the DEA had paid him a visit,
after two years of sacrifice for him and academic medical research.
Awaking to the reality of being examined and investigated
an 8 week trial of the very self and character
just like the 11 year old naughty boy
in the primary school,
being repeatedly whipped by my headmaster-
Mr Shapiro for being sent out of class
for not knowing the equations or for being
too dark skinned for a British schoolboy.
And the Maths Master in grammar school
who felt my only use in his class was not for my mathematical prowess
rather my anatomical susceptibility for fondling
with his thundering Germanic accent to prevent any protest.
Only here I had to learn to own my mistakes and flaws
openly paraded in the court room drama.
Aging has removed the sense of victimhood
that haunted me for years now that I have made peace with parents,
teachers and professors, but the ultimate authority
remains transcendent in power and opaque to access.
For Him alone and His Law transgression has become
a raison dʼêtre of a kind,
for only a transgressive reading of the self
and of received texts even of his Halacha,
will do in this post-Holocaust world
where all traditions must fail or else we will fail
those who died for tradition so unwillingly.
In the wilderness that is left after all certainty has perished
in the killing fields
we walk about numb and alone.
In the screaming silence of His absence
we refuse dialogue
despite a deep yearning to be heard by Him.
SYLVIA KLEIN 2011
Royal Tatoo and Hyperfascism
A 50 or so years old man lies on the examining table and removes his shirt for the
impending medical procedure, revealing tattoos across his back and arms. He bears the
usual biker tattoos with aggressive images of faces and signs, crosses and daggers.
Most of my younger patients sport tattoos. Little anklets or barbed wire wrist bands and
flowers in the lumbar lordotic sacro-iliac area, names of girlfriends or children roses,
flowers and mottos. One ex-con had a whole litany in gothic lettering on his back that
looked like an ancient manuscript telling the world what an evil place it was. He told me
he received it in jail over many months. In fact it is so common that the tattoo has
become a fashion statement and most of my patients sport them.
However on this patient’s outer right arm is a swastika-in reverse. When I ask him about
that image he responds:
“Yes, doc, I was much younger then, but have no fear, it is in reverse because I had
many friends who were black and Jewish!”
How kind of him! How manipulative! His biker friends and the gang would not notice the
phase reversal of the swastika all the while his ethnic friends would not be offended
because it was not a real swastika! He had solved the problem of loyalty to his gang
and not offending his friends. So he thinks.
My electro-diagnostic technician Dennis, seeing me stare at the swastika, nods with that
knowing look, having been with me so many years now-he knows of the struggle I have
as a physician. I am responsible for my patient unconditionally, yet the meaning behind
that symbol, that image etched in his flesh, represents a hatred that destroyed my
father’s family and a world. This tattoo threatens the very rapport between doctor and
patient, it is so fraught! I hold back my raging emotions and continue the study. I ignore
the flesh for the nerves buried deep beneath the surface. I prod and electrocute to
determine the integrity of the peripheral nerves exiting the spinal cord.
It is so ironic that those with the fewest teeth have the largest density of tattoos, they
are the same who fear my spinal needle the most! Those who demand sedation on
pondering the flashy steele of the surgeon’s knife “resolving the enigma of the fever
chart”. I who stand with the needle over the prone patient who trusts the doctor to inject
accurately, innocently waiting for the treatment and the relief.
In Synagogue my old friend Farkash, sits behind me, aged around 88, a Holocaust
survivor and a legend in Chicago. He is a pious talmudic scholar as well as a pious but
creative thinker with tomes of novellae unpublished. Honored for his charity as well as
erudition he too sports a tattoo on his left arm. Being an observant Jew he did not
voluntarily agree to this branding (tattoos are prohibited in Jewish Law) but received itA 50 or so years old man lies on the examining table and removes his shirt for the
impending medical procedure, revealing tattoos across his back and arms. He bears the
usual biker tattoos with aggressive images of faces and signs, crosses and daggers.
Most of my younger patients sport tattoos. Little anklets or barbed wire wrist bands and
flowers in the lumbar lordotic sacro-iliac area, names of girlfriends or children roses,
flowers and mottos. One ex-con had a whole litany in gothic lettering on his back that
looked like an ancient manuscript telling the world what an evil place it was. He told me
he received it in jail over many months. In fact it is so common that the tattoo has
become a fashion statement and most of my patients sport them.
However on this patient’s outer right arm is a swastika-in reverse. When I ask him about
that image he responds:
“Yes, doc, I was much younger then, but have no fear, it is in reverse because I had
many friends who were black and Jewish!”
How kind of him! How manipulative! His biker friends and the gang would not notice the
phase reversal of the swastika all the while his ethnic friends would not be offended
because it was not a real swastika! He had solved the problem of loyalty to his gang
and not offending his friends. So he thinks.
My electro-diagnostic technician Dennis, seeing me stare at the swastika, nods with that
knowing look, having been with me so many years now-he knows of the struggle I have
as a physician. I am responsible for my patient unconditionally, yet the meaning behind
that symbol, that image etched in his flesh, represents a hatred that destroyed my
father’s family and a world. This tattoo threatens the very rapport between doctor and
patient, it is so fraught! I hold back my raging emotions and continue the study. I ignore
the flesh for the nerves buried deep beneath the surface. I prod and electrocute to
determine the integrity of the peripheral nerves exiting the spinal cord.
It is so ironic that those with the fewest teeth have the largest density of tattoos, they
are the same who fear my spinal needle the most! Those who demand sedation on
pondering the flashy steele of the surgeon’s knife “resolving the enigma of the fever
chart”. I who stand with the needle over the prone patient who trusts the doctor to inject
accurately, innocently waiting for the treatment and the relief.
In Synagogue my old friend Farkash, sits behind me, aged around 88, a Holocaust
survivor and a legend in Chicago. He is a pious talmudic scholar as well as a pious but
creative thinker with tomes of novellae unpublished. Honored for his charity as well as
erudition he too sports a tattoo on his left arm. Being an observant Jew he did not
voluntarily agree to this branding (tattoos are prohibited in Jewish Law) but received it
free of charge courtesy of the Nazi party circa 1941-2. It needs no further explanation.
When they took away his name and identity they substituted it with a number to as to
easily identify him on roll calls. He was no longer a person. “Vermin” they used to call
Jews. Now after memory fades these numbers etched into his skin some 70 years after the
Nazis were destroyed, remain as a stark indelible sign. They mark him forever as a
survivor, a Holocaust survivor, even after death. So I turned to him and asked “how do
you pray?” pointing to the tattoo in shul one year, during penitential prayers begging
God to save us. He gives me a pious answer that only a saint could respond “we were
trained in cheder as children to be ready to die Al Kiddush Hashem (to be martyrs for
the sake of the Holy Name) so it came naturally.”
What connects me to these two tattoos? My patients’ fashion Nazi adornment and my
friends concentration camp numbers? I ask myself as I stare at the photo montage of
the “hyper fascist” website www.nork.ru. What is the Schechina doing in the SS helmet
and the reverse swastika? Lighting the emblem of the State of Israel like a Greek
Goddess. What is the Lucifer reference below it? and its reference to the Luftwaffe?
I asked my cousin Sylvia Klein, an artist from Ottawa Canada to imagine a world in
which fascism continues to linger in the psyche ready to inflame the heart at a moment’s
notice, once ignited by some trigger, a world where the hyperliteral readings of texts of
terror inflame the religious heart in a wave of fundamentalism that crosses all cultures
and faiths.
Tattoos for life
Tattoos for death
Tattoos for the military
inscriptions on the surface of the body
unlike clothing
adorning the outer limits of the selfthat
defined border between self and non-self.
The body as landscape
like the desert dunes reflecting in the yellow
valley between the breasts (remember the English Patient?)
The body as a canvas for the tattoo artist to reflect the current
whim of the client, usually inebriated, (though my patients tell me
that alcohol is forbidden during the procedure).
The Schechina inhabits all, for God is immanent
in good and evil
she is forced into this exile
by the Father the King
to be incarnated in this world
without regard to perpetrator nor victim.
At one time She both is present to the selectsia
She is Mengele,
then again she lights the Temple Menorah of
Israel’s re-birth
still wearing her Nazi helmet and swastika.
Like Rebbe Nachman’s Lost Princess
she wanders the wasteland that is now earth
crying for Her children who have given up on Her.
She too is etched in our bodies
like in the White Crucifix of Chagall [1]
with the etched out swastika on the Jew’s left arm
to escape the gaze of the Gestapo
prescient of another tattoo to come in numerical form.
Royal Tattoo and hyper Fascism
Tattoos in the flesh as a branding of animals for identification
and a sign of ownership, now used to express an indelible commitment
to an ideal or person, once in the ancient Near East
a form of worship then proscribed by the Bible as idolatry
as a ritual behavior to placate or imitate the gods.
Now in our Nazi times a similar kind of pagan branding
now as a form of dehumanizing of a race and
a tagging of ownership by the state.
Were not black slaves tattooed and branded?
Across the Atlantic the
Royal Tattoo doe den tap toe (old-Dutch for "turn off the tap")
represented a military return to barracks and turning off the beer taps
royal parades that we love to watch
the pomp and circumstance the pageant
the red Guards uniforms
the golden helmets
O how we tear up with the Elgar and Blakeʼs Jerusalem.
And in our flesh we betray on the surface our innermost desires
hidden beneath the clothing or not
permanently and indelibly etched
even in death
the images will accompany us.
Permanent etching in the flesh Farkash’s numbers
and the ex-con whose back looked like an ancient scroll
the typology in Gothic script
and the patient lying before me prone, a swastika in reverse on his arm.
Symbols of the SS and the swastika shock me into a reality
beyond the clinical sanity of the examining room
like the photo montage www.nork.ru
a shocking of the visual association cortex
by the very juxtaposition of Schechina and Nazi symbol.
But then does this not beg the very underpinnings of an Immanent divine
for surely there were those who believed the divine must be present even in
the hell hole of Auschwitz as did Farkash my friend.
So even though the montage is meant to shock
this hyper fascist web siteit
does teach me the need to push forward
with the unresolved ultimate questions facing us
as we awaken from the 70 year old theological slumber
to a nightmarish world apparently without the divine
and our need to reconfigure and reconstruct a world
with a sense of the divine once more.
[1] After Chagall returned to New York in 1943 current events began to take on importance for him, and this was reflected in his art, where he painted subjects including the Crucifixion and scenes of war. In White Crucifix currently at the Art Institute of Chicago. Apparently in order to avoid offending the Gestapo he scratched the swastika on the armband of the soldier burning the synagogue.
The Walls of the old city of Jerusalem
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.
Henryk Halkowski: Picture(Left) by Ruth Ellen Gruber Picture (Right) by Yale Storm
