The Horror of the ICU: A Mediation on LOGOS and APOLLO

The aim of this study was to illuminate the meanings of being critically

ill in a sound-intensive ICU patient room, as disclosed through

patients’ narratives. Patient rooms in ICUs are filled with loud activity

and studies have revealed sound levels comparable to those of a

busy road above the patient’s head. There is a risk that the sound or

noise is disturbing and at worst a major problem for the patient, but

there is a lack of knowledge concerning the patients’ own

experiences. Thirteen patients were asked to narrate their

experiences of the sound environment in ICU patient rooms. The

interviews were analyzed using a phenomenological- hermeneutical

method inspired by the philosophy of Ricoeur. Six themes emerged

from the analysis.

Conclusion: The meanings of being a patient in a sound- intensive

environment were interpreted as never knowing what to expect next

regarding noise, but also of being situated in the middle of an

uncontrollable barrage of noise, unable to take cover or disappear.

This condition is not to be seen as static; for some patients there is

movement and change over time. The meanings indicate that the

unpredictable shifts between silence and disturbing sounds stress the

critically ill patient and impede sleep and recovery. Our findings

indicate the need to reduce disturbing and unexpected sounds and

noise around critically ill patients in high-tech environments in order to

facilitate wellbeing, sleep and recovery. Nurses have a vital role in

developing such an environment.

Meanings of Being Critically Ill in a Sound-Intensive ICU Patient Room - A

Phenomenological Hermeneutical Study Lotta Johansson, Ingegerd Bergbom, and Berit Lindahl. [1]

I WORRY about the horror of the ICU

despite all good intentions

and the dizzying scientific advances

and gains in fighting disease and death

acute heart and lung disorders

stroke and arrhythmias

But the price,

the price

we pay,

in terms of our loss of dignity and humanity.

Watching my father in-law

after massive stroke

connected to ventilator

a silent vigil

in the presence of technological noise…

The price,

in human suffering

was not calculated

he was not consulted

yet he survived through this very Apollinic miracle

of the intellect, the mastery of science and technology.

so...

we have disconnected the tubes

and survival is now assured

with such a deficit

and knowing

how he had felt about these things

and watching his stoicism

and dogged faith

in the face of all of this

the very indignity of his exposure

the absence of privacy

every index of bodily function displayed

on monitors

to see and hear the beeps

and the sounds of breathing, pulse,

alarms bells and whistles going off

all around.

Suddenly this rhythm is disturbed by the loudspeaker blaring

sudden codes Blue, Red, or Green,

over loudspeaker for all to hear

medical staff and patients…

sudden rushing of personnel to one room

and then silence.

Not knowing what happened.

Except for those initiates in white

To whom the gnosis was handed down.

The terror and horror

is evident all around

humanity is not important

only physicality

in this temple to the body, survival

no, not even the body...(skin gets ignored)

rather, survival of vital organs the heart and lungs

a temple to the pulse and blood pressure

a church to the oxygen content of blood and the culture of

body fluids.

What happened to us?

the Apollonic analytic impulse gone awry

for the sake of mere body survival?

We sacrifice the soul

we trample over the heart

we trod over the psyche in pain.

Depression, anxiety, terror, paranoia

have no place here,

like the trenches of WWI

in the trenches of medical warfare

those feint of heart must go home

but here, to die peacefully?

it's either or…

For if you enter these rooms

you must surrender soul at the front door

and live the indignity of exposed documentation of every body index

the numbers game,

the spreads,

the cultures of bacteria,

the analysis of blood until anemic.

Then to submit to the insertion of tubes into every orifice

that force in or retract body fluids

that invade the inner spaces of bladder

lungs, gastro-intestinal tract or veins.

They measure what goes in and what goes out

they analyze and form spreadsheets and x-cel files

and then alter the program accordingly.

If, and only if, you release your body to them

might you withdraw to the mind

withdraw to the only space left you have control

the imagined body of pain:

the mind's eye, the imagination, the inner turmoil.

That is if you are not turned prodded poked or injected

Trached, intubated, pegged x rayed, scanned ultrasounded, or merely EKG’d.

Then they make rounds on you,

Those boys in white

as if you as an independent thinking person

do not exist

for what you have to say has no relevance

they have you pegged already

there is nothing you could offer

no information of any use to them.

They huddle and decide

without your consent

(you left that at the front door remember?)

as to the next course of action

in their war against the angel of death.

Of course their motive is pure

Of course they studied hard to get here

Of course they claim victory in their battles

Of course they do so with courage

They are on the hero’s quest after all.

They are on a mission

they have rules of engagement

there are commanders and generals and privates

there is rank.

There is competence and incompetence

And behind all of this is another industry of malpractice lawyers

Just waiting to pounce on them.

In this tyranny of the soul

how does one survive?

really?

What must one sacrifice

to survive?

what scars are left from just this grotesque omission?

this failure of vision,

tied down

on the altar of Apollo?

The mastery of Logos?

I think I know...it came to me….

EROS!

she is left to wither

never to re-cover,

never to rise.

She is the sacrifice to the men in white

the high priests of Apollo and Logos.

Her softness and intuition

Her mildness and round corners

Defies the hard edges of the machines

gathered around the bed of the Patriarch

With her, chasms of separation and alienation are bridged.

The Goddess is absent.

Woman’s psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos. The concept of Eros could be expressed in modern terms as psychic relatedness, and that of Logos as objective interest.

(Jung, Aspects of the Feminine, 1982, Princeton, p65).

Logos is a certain peculiar quality in a man's being which leads him to discriminate, to reason, to judge, to divide, to understand in a particular way. And one cannot understand all this without also thinking of its antithesis, the equally intuitive concept of Eros, which would be then a principle of relatedness, seeing things together, gathering things together, establishing relations between things, not judging things, not looking at them properly, but rather attracting or repelling them. Maybe we need a medicine based on EROS not LOGOS so that we can choose, the question is what would it look like? The ancient Greek word psyche means “butterfly,” a creature that undergoes a long period of metamorphosis in the chrysalis state before awakening is possible. The maturation of the soul unfolds through the lure of Eros. The myth teaches us that without the prick of Eros, the containment of the imaginal realm he creates and experiences of erotic destruction, the psyche remains virginal and infantile. An example of a virginal psyche can often be seen in someone who is fascinated with dreams and visions but is caught in constant reflecting. Transformation begins in imagination and reflection but requires a move forward into the possibilities that have been imagined. Reflection is not enough. Psyche needs embodiment. Eros provides the impetus for this movement by bringing a passion and desire for a fuller and richer life. According to Plato, Eros doesn’t just have to do with our relationships to people, but with all interactions, both inner and outer, to nature and to spirit. Eros has to do with intentions of the Self. As individuals, we need to be willing to suffer the bitterness as well as the sweetness that Eros brings. The god’s wondrous beauty needs to be seen and known, which can only occur through our own personal suffering and sacrifice. This is not neurotic suffering, but suffering in service to the Self. Our awakening begins with our yearning to “be in touch” with each other and with our sense of how “out of touch” we are with our archetypal roots. Eros gives the soul this yearning Apollo and Daphne.

The myth of Daphne is an illustration of fate and revenge of the gods. She was part of cruel power play between two archers, Apollo and Eros. The proud Apollo bullied Eros who shot two arrows, one tipped in gold and the other in lead to find revenge. Eros, the son of Aphrodite enchanted his arrows to cause total lust and desire in the golden arrow victim, and total hatred in the recipient of the lead tipped arrow. Apollo was hit with the golden arrow, and the object of his desire, Daphne, was struck by the lead one. The struggle between lust and chastity is ended when Daphne turns into a laurel tree. She begged her father to transform her body forever in order to escape Apollo’s desire for her. Eros is a superhuman power which, like nature herself, allows itself to be conquered and exploited as though it were impotent. But triumph over nature is dearly paid for. Nature requires no explanations of principle, but asks only for tolerance and wise measure. "Eros is a mighty daemon," as the wise Diotima said to Socrates. We shall never get the better of him, or only to our own hurt. He is not the whole of our inward nature, though he is at least one of its essential aspects.

(Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957. "On the Psychology of the Unconscious” P.32f)

Eros is the god of sexual desire. He marries Psyche, a goddess/human representing the human soul. They have one daughter Hedone. Hedone is the quest for pleasure with only good consequences. The English word hedonism is derived from this word, but has a meaning far from the original. Eros is also known in Rome as Cupid. Might we begin with medicine and the trenches of the ICU with an experiment in EROS? Might this expose the Apollonic torture around us in the name of love?

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3439833/

The Loving Man

Sochi Olympics 2014

The 2014 Winter Olympics, officially known as the XXII Olympic Winter Games, will be the next Winter Olympics held from February 7 to February 23, 2014 in Sochi, Krasnodar Krai, Russia. The city was elected on July 4, 2007, during the 119th International Olympic Committee (IOC) Session in Guatemala City, Guatemala. This will be the first time that the Russian Federation will host the Winter Olympics; the Soviet Union hosted the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow.

Sochi

The Conquest of the Caucasus by the Russian Empire in the 19th century during the Russian-Circassian War, led to the destruction and killing of many Adygs -Towards the end of the conflict, the Russian General Yevdokimov was tasked with driving the remaining Circassian inhabitants out of the region, primarily into the Ottoman Empire. This policy was enforced by mobile columns of Russian riflemen and Cossack cavalry. "In a series of sweeping military campaigns lasting from 1860 to 1864 . . . the northwest Caucasus and the Black Sea coast were virtually emptied of Muslim villagers. Columns of the displaced were marched either to the Kuban River plains or toward the coast for transport to the Ottoman Empire . . . One after another, entire Circassian tribal groups were dispersed, resettled, or killed en masse" This expulsion, along with the actions of the Russian military in acquiring Circassian land, has given rise to a movement among descendants of the expelled ethnicities for international recognition that genocide was perpetrated. In 1840, Karl Friedrich Neumann estimated the Circassian casualties to be around one and a half million. Some sources state that hundreds of thousands of others died during the exodus. Several historians use the term 'Circassian massacres' for the consequences of Russian actions in the region.

(Wikipedia)

In the end of one hundred years of war period, Circassia region of the Caucasus was invaded and colonized by Russian Empire in 1864. During that period of time the inhabitants of the West Caucasus, more than one million five hundred thousand Circassians (Adige, Abkhaz and Wubikh people), were forced to leave their land in famine after all their villages and fields were burned and destroyed. They were exiled from their land to Ottoman Empire under inhumane conditions. Sochi region, where the 2014 Winter Olympics will be held, was the center that the parliament of independent and free Circassia was gathering until 1864. After the Russian invasion it was not only the Circassians removed from their land but also all their cultural heritage and even their graves were completely destroyed brutally. Today in the state museums of Sochi there is nothing displayed related to Circassians, the autochthonous people of that land for thousands of years.The real ancient history of Sochi extends to Anatolian Hattis, famous Troy, Meot and Sind Empires is almost forgotten. The Russian written history of Sochi begins in 1830 with the victories bombardment of Russian Tsar Navy landing soldiers to the Socha village which was destroyed and renamed by Russians as Navagiski fortified territory. In the museums of Sochi you can only see the pictures of poor Russian mujicks who were brought from inner Russia then forced to settle to Circassia after the Circassian Exile and also the Cossacks who even appropriating the national clothes of the exiled inhabitants shamelessly. The grandchildren of the massacred and exiled native people of the 2014 winter Olympics city Sochi and the Krasnodar Kray still live in the countries they were exiled to but their faces turned towards to their homeland. There are millions of Circassians who live in the other side of Black Sea in Turkey, are longing and waiting to repatriate to their motherland. Now in destroyed Circassian villages, on the lost graves of Circassians, in Circassia, there are true strangers living there. As a result of a hundred years of iron curtain they probably don’t even have any idea about the real owners of those lands. Today Circassia became Russian Riviera where the first and the foremost Mr. Putin having rest, swimming and skiing. The Russian Federation governments are still completely blind and deaf to develop any empathy or to understand the feelings and the longings of the people of the Caucasus. Moreover the real history is distorted by the Russian state purposely. To conceal the massacre and the exile of the ninety percent of Circassians, the reality of the Circassian legendary resistance to colonial powers for more than one hundred years is obviously ignored. For that purpose producing the factitious history thesis of 450-th years voluntary joining together of Circassia’s to Marx’s so called prison of nations Tsarist Russia is very tragicomic and flippantly far away from the seriousness of a statehood. Today Russian Federation government appropriates funds of millions of rubles for spreading that propaganda to all over the Circassian federal republics (Adigeya, Karachai, Cherkes and Kabardino Balkaria) by official campaigns and imposing anniversary ceremonies instead of using that money to improve the conditions in those underdeveloped republics. Even more, regardless of the fact that all the criticism and the protest of the Circassian intellectuals and organizations both in the Caucasus and in the Diaspora, hasty preparations for 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics is still pursuing heartily. The geography and the ecological structure of that beautiful and sacred part of our land are destroyed by commands of the inconsiderate Russian politicians in Moscow atrociously. After Circassian exile in 1864 Sochi was emptied from Circassians and the Kbaada Valley was renamed as Krasnaya Polyana where the heavy construction equipments are excavating the mountains for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics now. On the contrary of Russian culture, Circassians are very respectful even to the death bodies of their enemies. Now the skulls and the bones of our honorable ancestors are thrown away all over the place by Russians barbarously. The planned grotesque destroying process of that one of the most beautiful parts’ of the Caucasus is very meaningful for Circassians. By all means we, the people of Caucasus, we are not surprised from the Russian behaviour. All the process is running by the commands of the new tsar of Russia, Mr. Vladimir Putin who has the blood of the thousands of children of Caucasus on his hands, from Chechenya, Daghestan, Beslan... etc. May Mr. Putin as an inheritor of General Yermalov, General Vorontzov, General Baryatinski, is not able to understand how his smart decisions cause pain for Circassians and confronting them. But the time will manifest. After the glasnost the governors of the Circassian republics in Caucasus were forced by public to take action to built Circassian Exile monuments. Although it has been long years, there are still not any government funds received to finish that project. At that point the supreme government shows the highest effort indeed. Nobody but only them can build such an expensive and meaningful genocide monument to our land other than 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics which must have been the symbol of the friendship and the brotherhood of people. Despite Sochi is the place where the “Drujba Derevo” (the tree of friendship) belongs to, there is no any native people left in that land, there is no any native people is allowed to settle there. As the Circassians both in Caucasus and the Diaspora announced before by sending lots of protesting letters to Olympics Committee, even the idea of holding Olympics in Sochi on the soil of genocide where the hundreds of thousands of Circassian tears, moans and curse are bleeding, can not be acceptable.2014 Sochi Winter Olympics will always be remembered only as “2014 Circassian Genocide Olympics”. Unfortunately 2014 Circassian Genocide Olympics is not only making the Olympics a tool of inane politics but it is also renewing the sorrow of Circassians in exile. Besides it also intensifies the deep and legitimate distrust on Russia for hundreds of years. It causes hate. As the inheritor of one of the most humanist culture in the world, we, the people of the Caucasus, inspite of the past and the present, we don’t want to have any kind of abhorrence towards other people including the Russians. Still, we can not be unresponsive to the provocative actions of declining and distorting the thousands of years old real history of our people and our land. As Circassians, as grandchildren of our ancestors we have enough pride and honor to not to bear this denial. Again, we want to urge all the Russian Federation governments and right minded intellectuals of Russia. Please stop those provocative actions. Stop Imperialist and Great Russian (Velikorus) chauvinist behaviour. As a criminal you can not pretend to be fair, you can not to powerful forever! You are losing the Caucasus, you are losing all the people of the Caucasus!

(Sefer BERZEG)

On this day, Feb. 14th 2014 the insanity of the Olympic ideal,

the Apollonic virtue of mastery over nature,

the loving man opens his heart and feels the blood

shrieking from the earth and snow upon

which the young heroes ski and snowboard.

The loving man is moved by beauty.

By Eros

He bleeds easily for the world and the dead

He is moved by other’s pain

And is broken by his own soul

And his unrequited love.

Schechinah beckons him

In all her manifestations of beauty

And vulnerability.

His broken heart

Allows all to enter and wound him

Especially the virginal goddess

And those who reflected her virtue.

He stands at the foot of the castle

Waiting for Her

Bathing in her memories

In her longing

Hoping she will reveal herself

If only for a fleeting moment

A gaze

A look

Is sufficient

To allow him to live another day.

This longing

Can only emerge from the broken heart

Which opens itself to repeated wounding.

A repetition of the initial wound of creation

As God Himself allowed this pain to enter Himself

And reflect it in Her, in exile, in the very woundedness of the world

Where she lives

Now exiled.

This wounding must repeat itself

In the loving man.

Who worships at Her altar.

But the loving man

Knows this,

Knows Her,

Her pain,

Her aloofness,

Her splendid isolation

As she waits patiently

Over aeons.

He must rescue Her

On the Hero’s quest

In every woman

In every gaze

He sees the longing

It cannot be him alone

It must be Her too

Waiting for him to long

And gaze and seek.

In loving her

In loving them all

He loves Her

In his pain

And brokenness

He sees Her

Finally gazing at him through the window

In the castle

For a brief moment

And the loving man

Is restored

And relieved of the burden

Of his existence

Of his self

Ever so briefly.

In the earth She conceals the blood

Of those who loved her.

The victory and the history

Will be written by others

But the loving man

Knows

In his heart is concealed

This gnosis

Of truth

A different narrative

And the pain cries out

From the earth

His heart

And She knows too

And here they meet

In this pain and sorrow

Listening to the cries of all

Whose blood soaked in Her earthiness

Silenced by the living

And the victorious.

Time Heals...Or Does It?

Over time

The experience of this flux

Of my selfhood through these decades

From earliest re-­‐collections

Through the struggles of identity

Relationships

Loves

Failures

Betrayals

Deceits

Fooling others

Fooling oneself

Exposed

Denatured

Traumatized

ICU bed unable to move

Loyalties

Rituals

Studying

Writing

Teaching

Relationships

Self-­‐destruction

Self –sacrifice for others

Compassion

History

Survival

Sense of other

Drowning in love

Experiencing the sunlight

The sacred lake

The needle plunging into human tissue

The precision

The diagnosis

The thrill of healing

The hurt done to others

Through incompetence

The life given to others

Through intuition

The rejection

The wounding

The inner boy alive

The divine

The feminine divine

The wounded divine

The music of the divine

The art

The Bach and Chopin preludes

The children

Their pain

The grandchildren

The utter joy and unawareness

The sense of time and its passing

The sense that nothing has changed

The pain in the heart that remains

Of loves and hurts

Where time has no bearing

No dulling

No calming

No soothing

For these points in the biography

That emerge from the canvas two-­‐dimensionally

And prod me the viewer

Gazing at it, as if in an art gallery

Reminding me of unfinished business

And the real bullet points of my life

That withstand, and resist the passing of time

In these moments of anguish

They all coalesce

To form an indicting finger

In the court of self analysis

The good times seem a dream

Only these nodes of anguish

Seem real

The loves and betrayals

The moments of bliss-­‐in-­‐pain

These seem now

As a privilege

A glimpse into another world

Through the heart not the brain

Why Torture Me Thus?

Lamenatzeach Ayelet HaShachar, Mizmor leDavid (Ps. 22:6)

“For when the face of the east shines and the darkness of night withdraws There is a purveyor (memanne) for the east side And he draws forth a single thread of light from the south side. Until the sun comes and emerges and breaks through the windows of heaven And illuminates the world. And that thread of light causes the darkness of night to withdraw.”

“Then the doe of dawn (Ayelet HaShachar) comes out. And a black light emerges in the darkness to join with the day. And the day is illuminated. And the light of day subsumes and draws that doe into itself.”

“It was about this doe, when she withdraws from the daylight that subsumed her, that David sang his song. As it is written: ‘Lamenatzeach Ayelet HaShachar’, and what did he say “My God, my God, why have You abandoned me.” For the Ayelet HaShachar has withdrawn from the light of day”

Zohar to Exodus 1

“So  as  the  natural  phenomenon  of  sunrise  is  understood  to  reflect  a  supernal  dynamic within the divine self, the process of the two inner-­‐divine lovers, uniting as one light. But as the lovers separate, following the climactic moment of union, they immediately yearn for each other; they lament the sorrow of their parting. The cry over  divine  absence  in  Psalm  22:2  is  understood  to  be  a  response  to  …the  doe  returning to her hiding place. The Schechina who has been united in love with Tiferet has now withdrawn from the fully risen sun, and her lover Tiferet, cries out in anguished yearning “My God, my God, why have You abandoned me?”

Eitan Fishbane [1]

For the withdrawal of Her

Is really absorption within Him

(The divine androgyny),

He appears and full and integrated,

Feminine absorbed within masculine.

But He can no longer sees Her as distinct

So eros is destroyed,

And so is the sense of I-­‐thou.

And the tension that excites,

And in His plentitude

He mourns for Her,

Despite her absorption within Him.

So each dawn,

This drama re-­‐enacts

This cycle of night/day

Repeats the torture,

Of presence and loss.

From the sundrenched 8th floor room overlooking Manhattan

This quiet Sunday morning

Three weeks post neurological event,

The sagely white bearded patriarch moves his lips in prayer

Under the oxygen mask,

To a background hissing of humidifier.

The sun is gracious

Warming the hospital room with its glow

as only a frigid winter January morning can do.

While he prayed

I reflected,

While he praised

I felt pain,

Deep inside the heart

As the sun brought clarity after a weekend of darkness.

If “she” reflects Shechinah,

And if my pain is really Hers (Degel Machane Efraim)

Then all my acute wounding needs inner work right?

This yearning for connection and intimacy,

In the face of her/Her emotional unavailability,

Is precisely the wooing required on Erev Shabbat with Shir HaShirim

To re-­‐unite Tiferet and Malchut

For during the week sis in exile…

A curse for the wounded boy,

Exacerbated by her/Her own Freudian issues

and unresolved complexes with the father/Patriarch, Father/Tiferet.

she sits by his bedside singing zemirot, her voice halting

as it breaks with tears. Does the Schechina woo like this too?

Yet the wounded boy only worries about his lonely pain

After three weeks of indifference and unavailability,

Not a word of emotion, not a word other than relating

To the business of the ICU, the devotion only a single daughter

Can provide a father.

The connection so deep

No husband could ever sever the bond

The wounded boy rages with anger and grief

The conquest failed after all

Wife never severed the umbilical cord of approval

From the white haired patriarch

Rages with powerlessness

Having fallen for the same archetypal personality as mother

Who demanded love only conditionally?

The boy, whose soul was now forever split,

Torn between the mother, virgin, Madonna, goddess,

And the whore,

Who is subjected now to the rage of the daughter,

For bringing apikorsus to read during my night time vigils

To this hospital ward, this room, this place of sanctity,

“How could you?” she yells,

“Defiling the purity of this saintly holy room

By this pornographic image on the cover of a Sacred Prostitute!”

(An archetypal monograph into the image of the dark side of Schechina!)

Jung is alive and well!

In this triangle of father, daughter and me

I surely feel only shame and disgrace

The sailor who fell from grace from the sea

For how could I possibly fill the shoes as a substitute?

Condemned from the start,

The set up is complete.

(Despite years of study and scholarship.)

The sun still brings warmth and clarity

As I dig deeper into my well of compassion

As I realize, now, after a night of resentment,

In its glow,

That she too, is so wounded.

Can I find more space in my heart?

I want to…

I so need her approval even now

But it feels empty today…

After a weekend of pain…

I struggle with this Degel

He has helped me save my spirituality in the past…

I try to internalize his message with such effort.

Like a mantra:

“Your pain is really Her pain, so focus on Her, and you will be fixed”

This Sunday I realize I must surrender to it

My pain is really Hers

She is crying for Her consort

Through me

Through my pain

She cries for der eibishte! Tiferet,

“Why have You forsaken me?”

Like I cry in silence to her,

Yet I must hold this too.

So her wound is Hers

Her abuse is Hers

And my task is to cry for her/Her

Pray for her/Her, despite myself

Despite the howling young boy

Craving attention, and validation,

resist this feeling too.

And in writing this I force myself to face the white sheet

Like an analyst and,

As if the act of writing

“Escribe”

Etching in ink on this white paper

Is therapeutic,

This violence to the white virgin page

A rape of sorts,

Language as the means of seduction

Writing as the means of rape

Lying on the analyst’s couch

Of bonded cloth

Alkaline Japanese rice paper

The Geisha bows to me as my pen

Pierces her robe

Screaming my woes

On the silent page

Receiving my ink, like semen

Without protest.

I, the little boy

Acting out on this page,

Wounded, despite years of carrying this

I the little boy

Triggered, by the indifferent icy snow queen’s criticisms

I the little boy

Demanding unconditional love, serenity, validation, intimacy

And acceptance.

I the little boy

Still suffering despite all the analysis

And intellectual understanding,

Of the psychodynamic drama going on!

Now realizing that, at times,

she/She is inhabited by her dark side

(Allowing pogroms after all!)

Despite all the davening and learning

She needs this too,

Our blood,

Our pain,

Our being nailed to the cross (Tzlav)

Like R. Akiva…

And now despite our psychic pain,

She requires this too.

 Unio Coniunctio

“Union of opposites”

Holding the paradox,

No resolution,

No obvious solution,

No third Hegelian synthesis,

No either/or

Man/woman

Husband/wife

God/Goddess

Rather …

Are you prepared for this?

Man/boy

Adult / wounded child

And the work?

My task this sunny Tiferet morning?

The inner work?

To hold the paradox,

Let the pain percolate up

Like a chemistry experiment

In a Beaker on a Bunsen burner

An alchemical production

Without the philosopher’s stone

Or the gold in sight

Only the niger, the inclusion of the dark charcoal

The “Dark Night of the Soul’

To hold the wounded boy in tension with the adult

To accept the darker side of divinity

Her darker side,

Her need for my pain for Her wholeness

And accept this,

Surrender to this,

Even Her cruelty, wounding, smothering, suffocating Presence

To accept Her rage …mirrored in wife.

Not to run away,

Escape into the mirage of substituted purveyors of momentary bliss

Other sources of contentment

For here,

Right now,

Right in this pain,

Is the very source of healing

(Thus sayeth Herr Rabbiner Dr. C. G. Jung!)

In this pain,

Nailed to the cross of R. Akiva

One must wait (thus sayeth Madonna Simone Weil)

And wait

For Schechina takes Her time,

To envelope me. (Tomer Devorah).

Facing the boy

Holding his hand,

Calming his rage,

(Despite his oath never again to surrender

To the authority

To the power that raped him of his innocence)

Calming his fear of death by suffocation by the Great Mother

His abandonment,

His fear of ending his life alone,

Facing decline alone,

Facing his degeneration alone,

Without the ecstasy of intimacy,

Of holding the woman all night in his arms,

Without touching her,

Of drowning in her sweet scent

Her stroking his nape,

Her whispering sweet nothings

Her unconditional acceptance of his flaws

Despite everything.

And in accepting even this

Come to rescue her/Her

The moon giving way to the bright warm sun

Holding the sense of betrayal of the Psalmist,

“Why have You forsaken me?”

This Sunday morning

In Manhattan,

In this hospital room,

With the Patriarch,

White haired,

Eyes closed

Moving his lips in prayer,

And his daughter

Reverentially by his side.

On this Sunday morning

In this sun soaked hospital room

The Ayelet HaShachar has withdrawn

Leaving Tiferet alone,

The little boy (Jesus) abandoned

Crying “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”

Just as the divine son cries out to the divine father (Matthew 27)

Just as Tiferet cries for malchut,

Just as I cry for her/Her.

I to surrender to the facts on the ground

Reality as it is,

And hold the paradox

Of man/boy

Holding for a while the young boy

From exploding.

[1] The Zohar, Masterpiece of Jewish Mysticism in Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah, ed. Frederick E. Greenspahn, NYU University Press 2001. P62

Schechinah

May I invite you in?

May I trust you?

Will you accept me?

Will you trash me?

I’m a bit fragile these days

Knocked down too many times Indicted and Judged

Condemned too many times

The inner Kritik and significant Women

I was born to or chose to

Relinquish my ego

On a platter

On an altar for a moment’s validation

A broken soul

Will you accept me? Unconditionally

Despite my lies deceits and betrayals?

Despite my unfaithfulness?

My insistence on freedom of spirit?

My naughtiness

My individual biography

Will you accept even that?

May I bathe in You?

Your balmy waters

Your colors and music

Your C# minor Fugue?

May I touch your image? Feel Your softness

Hear your humming

Smell the fragrance

Of your perfumed love?

Feel the moist grass in my toes

In the music of service

My lips open in Worship

After so long

So much silence

Despite myself

I feel the lips open

And tears flowing

And the deep gnawing ache in the chest

As I realize the beauty and the tragedy

The horror and the ecstasy

I know

I really do

You have other motives

You are betrothed to Him

You need Him

And once again

I am the rejected

I am unworthy

I am left alone

But for these few moments

I do feel You

Present to me

Even me

In this place of worship

In this Temple

Bathing in the harmonies

The slow melody

The singing quietly

The silence of 500 others

I feel the glory

In these tears.

Thank you

Tikkun Olam-Misgivings

“Saul  Naumann  (Richard  Gere)  is  a  somewhat  controlling  Jewish husband and father. A Religious Studies professor at UC Berkeley, Saul wrote his graduate thesis on the Kabbalah. Because  he  was  a  devout  Jew,  his  wife  Miriam  (Juliette  Binoche) converted to Judaism when they married, and he nurtured  his  son  Aaron  (Max  Minghella)  into  a  traditional  studious Jew like himself.”

“Miriam  lives  a  secret  life  throughout  her  entire  marriage  to  Saul, trying to fulfill the religious idea she learned from him, tikkun  olam,  or  "repairing  the  world"  and  "reuniting  its  shards." She takes this meaning literally and slowly collects trinkets she finds beautiful (sometimes breaking into people's houses and stealing them) and storing them in a warehouse, trying to hold the light of God in them.”

Filmography, Spelling Bee

Maybe this talk is enough

Maybe we need another moratorium

Like I had suggested for the “God” word

Maybe it is too old already, too lame

After all those who appropriate the

Lurianic Myth As a Metaphor for Renewal

and social justice

Worn out and tired

Suffering from chronic fatigue.

Really? Tikkun Olam… after the Tremendum?

Where the Olam was destroyed

And we are merely awaking from a spiritual coma

(Where was Tikkun in Auschwitz?)

Who was the sacrificial lamb?

Who needs it now?

Accepting out own inner demons…

And from there accepting the “broken shards”

As the Holy Ari called the pre-­‐historic catastrophe

Where too much Divine Light was a cosmic error

That reverberates holo-­‐graphically in time and space

To our own time

To our broken selves.

But here we must leave 16th century Safed

In its cute setting in the green hills of Judea

And the Ari’s wonderful program of “Tikkun Olam”

In which an could influence the divine

That somehow the adept could in fact change the cosmic One

And bring down blessing and “fix” the catastrophic error The cosmic flaw,

Through human effort, magically.

Here we must depart

Unfortunately

After 300 years of madness

Industry

Capitalism

And the technology of mass killing

Whereby human greed and power

Has grown like a heroin addiction

And the value of human life has diminished to almost nothing.

So where to now?

Where do we turn?

As we face this dark demonic side of the divine?

In this post-­‐Holocaust, post-­‐Hiroshima

Nightmarish landscape of grayness?

It came to me today…

Shards of broken glass

(Once “quelippot”)

Reflect light differently

The sunlight in its purity becomes diffused

And each ray is reflected by a different shard

A different color of the spectrum

To produce a kaleidoscope of colors.

Maybe what is needed now is

…the opposite of conformity

And frumkeit

And a sea of men in black… shockeling in unison

Maybe the only reversal to this madness

Is pure individual shattered lights

Each different

Each reflecting a different color of the spectrum

Each dancing to its own niggun

For in the multiplicity of color

New rainbow from the shards of old glass

Old ideas, myths and metaphors

A new Torah

A new Song

the beauty of the light on the shards

the beauty of brokenness

the beauty of failure and fragmentation

this is en-­‐soulment in a new key

C# minor.

The Song of The Sea

"And all the people saw the sounds, etc." This should be understood in accordance with a parable that I heard from my grandfather. There was once a person who played a musical instrument very beautifully, with great sweetness and pleasantness. Those who heard him [play] were unable to control themselves because of the great sweetness and delight, to the point that they would dance almost to the ceiling because of the great delight, pleasantness, and sweetness. Whoever was closer and could draw himself nearer to hear the instrument would have even greater delight and would dance even more. In the meantime, a deaf person came, who was totally unable to hear the pleasant sounds of the pleasant musical instrument. He only saw the people dancing, and they appeared in his eyes as if they were crazed. He asked himself what is the joy here. In truth, were he wise and had he understood that it is because of the great delight and pleasantness of the sound of the musical instrument, he too would have danced. The moral is obvious. This explains, "And all the people saw the sounds." That is, God, blessed be He, appeared to all of them at once with His Divine light, which they all perceived when they saw the great joy, the angels of hosts dancing (Shabbat 88b). They understood that it was because of the sweetness and pleasantness of the light of the holy Torah, and they pressed themselves to hear the sound of the Torah. Even though they had previously been a little deaf, for they had not heard the sounds, they all began to hear. And they had sharp eyes, for they saw the great joy and happiness and they understood that it was certainly the sounds, that is the pleasant sound of the Torah. Even though they did not apprehend the pleasantness of the Torah, they understood by way of the joy that surely it was because of the great pleasantness of the Torah. And therefore they pushed themselves to hear the sound itself, for perhaps they would apprehend and understand the pleasantness of the light of the Torah. And the wise one will understand.”

Degel Machane Ephraim, Yitro

“From the day that God created the world until this moment, no one had sung praises to God – not Adam after having been created, not Abraham after being delivered from the fiery furnace, not Isaac when he was spared the knife, or Jacob when he escaped from wrestling with an angel and from Esau. But when Israel came to the sea and it parted for them, then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord. And God said, for this I have been waiting.”

Exodus Rabbah 23:4

“There are two traditions about exactly when Moses, Miriam and the children of Israel sang at the Sea of Reeds. One tradition teaches they sang when they arrived safe and sound at the other shore. The other tradition teaches they sang as they were crossing. They sang in the midst of crossing, even though they did not have the certainty that they would reach the other side. It is our fervent belief that the power of song resides in its capacity to give us strength and hope during our deepest distress and to express our utmost gratitude. It is at Pesah that we experience both of these extremes. During Pesah we focus most intensely on the constricted places in our being, in our communities, in our world to seek a more open expansive vision of ourselves and of our world. It is also at Pesah that we are humbled by the privilege of our freedom. Halaila Hazeh (This night) is a night of song and praise when all the gates of goodness and light are opened.”

Sefer Toda’ah, Rabbi Avraham Eliyahu Ki Tov (1912-1976)

The commentators ask “what did the song of the sea sound like?”

We have the lyrics,

but the tune?

The melody?

The song?

Why was it not transmitted?

Why the slavish service to the logos? The word?

And the music?

What happened to the music?

Why forget the song?

So long waited for?

What is the word without the song?

A relic.

Then we are told

There will be a new song

One day

Messianic

Visions.

But for now

In the long exile

We are condemned

To live without

No song

No music

No timbre

Just black ink

On white parchment

Page after page

Running into each other

In a sea of ink

What about the spaces in between

Have they no meaning

No music?

No song?

We must be content

For now

In an unredeemed world

With the silence of these spaces

Between the words and the letters

A screaming silence.

In the tremendum there was no song

Only Beethoven sounded at the gates to hell

Music belonged to the victors

In an effort to assuage conscience

Marching military bands

Royal tattoos

Under red Nazi banners

In torch lit stadiums

And Munich Platz

Music to march to

In formation

Military music

To march to.

I listen to the Bach C# minor fugue

And cannot comprehend

The disconnect between aesthetics and the ethical

Our failed modernity

Our placing concepts before life

Our allowing the end to justify the means

The texts that terrorize us

The beliefs that torment us

The fundamentals we hold so dear

In the fugue I hear him

Warning us

That mathematical perfection

Comes with a price

And only in the absence

The failure

Do we remain humble.

We have lost the song

The sound of music

And are bereft with the text alone

In its fundaments

The accompanying maiden

Is missing

We yearn for that “new Song”

In That Delicate Space of Suffering

In that delicate space…

Of suffering

Between you and I

Between doctor and patient

Between us

In that delicate space of suffering

We meet

And connect

You, with your expectations

Of my ability to heal:

To change your condition

To cure…

And I, knowing full well

My limitations

My craft’s limitations

My own intellectual limitations.

In this delicate space of suffering

Between you and I

Something sacred takes place

As we both come to realize

Our utter powerlessness

In the face of fate, illness, decline, and death.

In this sacred space

We share

A bond of mutual perspective

And in this space healing takes place

As we come to the dawning

Of acceptance

You of your dis-­‐ease

And I of my mere facilitation.

I remain humbled by all this

As I age

And experience my own body’s decline

Those bloody sugars that remain silent accusers

Of my addiction to comfort foods

And that spine who supported me for so long

Now revolting in painful spasm

Joints in jubilant revolt

Ligaments in litigation

Tendons in terror

A Chassidus For The Blotta (Blotte?) The Mud

This chassidus…

That chassidus…

It is all about style these days

White socks or black sock,

Spoddek or shtreiml

Trousers inside the socks or outside the socks,

Peyos under yarlmelke or sideburns curled, uncurled,

Peyos how long? To cheekbone, beyond ears, rolled up behind ears

Long to neck or short ?

In a second you can tell the dynasty from the look…

Ger, Belz, Vishnitz, Breslov, Chabad-­‐

It’s all about style, not substance.

Yet what we need is less style

We already had that in orthodoxy!

Chassidus has become mainstreamed

And suffers the fate thereof.

When did revolution die? with the rise from poverty

to middle class bourgeois Judaism?

And with that wealthy chassidim bid on first editions, like the

Noam Elimelech, in the hundreds of thousands,

Artifacts of Rebbes like the pocket watch of Reb Nossen

or the Torah scroll once belonging to the Apta Rov

(people stop in Chicago to touch it) :

will we start searching for other relics?

(Like the head of St. Thomas Aquinas,

removed by the monks at the Cistercian abbey

at Fossanova, chas vechalom!)

No, what is needed now is a Chassidus for the Blotta! The mud!

A chassidus for the lost soul

For the rational mind

For the addiction to mastery

For the unshakeable faith in the left hemisphere

For the spiritually impoverished

For the faithless

For the apikorsus within

For the inner Kritik

For the doubting Thomas

Poking his index finger in the wound to prove his belief

(Now Thomas the Believer?)

A Chassidus for the recovering but chronic relapser

For the addicted drowning in the free fall to “rock bottom”

When My Holy Sister Danced

From the revelation to the messiah

There was never a dance so sincere

As she raised her hands heavenwards

And danced towards the bright Jerusalem sunlit window

She exclaimed “Thank You Hashem…Thank You Hashem!”

Those words echoed across the universe

And broke the barriers

The Masach HaBarzel

The “iron curtain”

Separating us from the Schechina.

Those words penetrated the Ohel of “True Gratitude”

Thanking Hashem for what?

I’m not sure,

Pure joy…

Unadulterated joy.

The likes of which I never before experienced

A gift ftom the Otzer Matnas Chimam

The “Treasury of Unearned Gifts”

For only a holy woman like Rochelle

Whose whole life is devoted to others

Whose suffering matches only the Shechinah’s

A true Lost Princess,

Whose gift of love for others

For parents and children is worthy only of the “Sargon Women”

Only Rochelle would see this as a gift

As unearned, undeserved, despite her life of service.

Here was pure ego-­‐less gratitude for moments of happiness with family.

Who knows what prompted her moment of exhilaration

All I know is

That it was so genuine

That I could not but join in with her

As if her dance forced me into her circle

Against my will

To follow her in paltry manner

Behind her majestic lead

My heart melting by her warmth

Her spontaneity

Her utter joy,

My holy twin sister.

These Bloody Resentments

These resentments will be the death of me

I never learned how to cope

They eat me up like an infection

And I never seem to escape their toxicity.

Wounds of old

Seem not to let go…

The little boy is frozen in time

Staring at the authority figures

Traumatized by unfairness and injustices

Capriciousness and meanness

Of those mythical figures long lost

Of childhood.

Now triggers get easier to ignite

These festering wounds

And the notion of serenity or happiness seem further than ever

The resentments

impair all relationships

Especially with the divine

Whose silence is deafening

And the sense of aloneness is acutely felt

As a desolation descends like a grey curtain.

In the depressive mornings of ritualized activity.

These times are so different from those of tears

When I feel I have the audacity to confront the divine

As if only then, in the breaking of the heart,

Do I have audience with ultimate meaning.

Only in the tears may I confront the challenge

That is our generation’s failure

Its lack of courage and my own

To rage against the darkness.

This sorrow has its own juissance

For in the debate the inner confrontation there is a kind of joy

That for these few moments life does have meaning

That I am part of some cosmic debate with the divine

That my voice adds meaning

My past, my hurt, my haunting

Adds force to the side of humanity

Charles River Bridge-Prague 2013

My Rabbi reads nothing to do with Holocaust, he does not read or visit

concentration camps, citing the Tiferes Shlomo

where Moshe Rabbeinu averts his gaze from the burning bush

realizing he was being shown in the fire that was not consumed

the future divine judgement in history,

including the four exiles, the last being Edom-Christianity.

He did not want to harbor resentment to the Almighty

and question His justice,

while being on shlichut, His mission.

EXODUS 3

ב וַיֵּרָא מַלְאַ יְהוָה אֵלָיו, בְּלַבַּת-אֵשׁ--מִתּוֹ הַסְּנֶה; וַיַּרְא, וְהִנֵּה הַסְּנֶה בֹּעֵר בָּאֵשׁ, וְהַסְּנֶה, אֵינֶנּוּ אֻכָּל.

2 And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.

ג וַיֹּאמֶר מֹשֶׁה--אָסֻרָה-נָּא וְאֶרְאֶה, אֶת-הַמַּרְאֶה הַגָּדֹל הַזֶּה: מַדּוּעַ, לֹא-יִבְעַר הַסְּנֶה.

3 And Moses said: 'I will turn aside now, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.'

ד וַיַּרְא יְהוָה, כִּי סָר לִרְאוֹת; וַיִּקְרָא אֵלָיו אֱלֹהִים מִתּוֹ הַסְּנֶה, וַיֹּאמֶר מֹשֶׁה מֹשֶׁה--וַיֹּאמֶר הִנֵּנִי.

4 And when the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said: 'Moses, Moses.' And he said: 'Here am I.'

ה וַיֹּאמֶר, אַל-תִּקְרַב הֲלֹם; שַׁל-נְעָלֶי ,ָ מֵעַל רַגְלֶי -ָ-כִּי הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר אַתָּה עוֹמֵד עָלָיו,

אַדְמַת-קֹדֶשׁ הוּא.

5 And He said: 'Draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.'

ו וַיֹּאמֶר, אָנֹכִי אֱלֹהֵי אָבִי ,ָ אֱלֹהֵי אַבְרָהָם אֱלֹהֵי יִצְחָק, וֵאלֹהֵי יַעֲקֹב; וַיַּסְתֵּר מֹשֶׁה, פָּנָיו, כִּי יָרֵא, מֵהַבִּיט אֶל-הָאֱלֹהִים.

6 Moreover He said: 'I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.

In this flame Moses sees the crematoria flames rising

being fed and not being quenched

now he understands why the fire is not being consumed

it is being fed with millions of Jewish bodies

Jewish children.

So he turns from what was earlier his intellectual curiosity

a scientific puzzle, away

in horror.

Cobblestones,

everywhere in the old City across the Charles River bridge

Nazi hobnailed boots must have worn well here,

I hear them clicking their heels in obedience,

the sounds must have instilled fear,

O how they hated “white Jews” the intelligenstia

cultured, assimilated, cafe-haus

coffee-klatch-drinking Jews,

holding those newspapers with the wooden rod through the spine,

Prague Jews, (Kafka, Brod et al) who changed the way we looked at the 20th century

in art, kultur and science.

Only,

drowning as I am,

in tears,

do I have

the Chutzpah

the nerve!

to state:

“Do not go gently into the dark,

rage, rage against the darkness of the night

rage rage...”

like Dylan Thomas, in “In Country Sleep”.

the Chutzpah!

which country? Wales? or Prague.

In tears alone

I find the courage

or is it the wine?

In theses tears

I find the words

to express

what cannot be expressed in words.

For I cannot take my gaze away

I remain transfixed

in horror

at the smoldering bush of Prague

by their absence in the bustling streets

and the Jewish Quarter.

The Silence,

the words written in silence

on a parchment made of human skin

the Blasphemy...

written in German

in Holiness...

felt in the belly only of the girl with green eyes,

the question that remains some 70 years

later....

“Where were You?”

in tears,

drowning the rage

melting,

the heart of stone that can no longer feel

a sea of salt,

from eyes that can no longer see with clarity

what Chutzpah!

After 2000 years of piety

and non-questioning...

“mesiras nefesh”

in the halls of the academy

in Volozhyn and Mir-

Where do I get off

even asking this question?

Was I there?

Did I suffer?

The body writhing in pain,

they knew how to administer pain

slowly with the whip

the hands tied behind the back

suspended in air

weightless

dislocated shoulders

horror after horror

all planned,

As I read Arnost Lustig,

the “The Girl with Lovely Green Eyes”

her body,

her belly,

the Jewish Body,

the body of Christ finally atoned for,

raped by the Waffen SS.

the landscape of Jewish flesh

trodden and emasculated by Nazi Herr Prof. Doktor

or “Wartime Lies” by Louis Begley

the screenplay for “Rabbi” Kubrik’s

masterpiece...Aryan Papiern,

never finished,

due to Schindler’s List- Spielberg

and Hollywood, the new power broker

for the money-making Holocaust industry.

like the local Prague Jewish community

screwing the tourists for every euro.

Reading these two novels intensifies in me, the horror.

The grotesque yet ongoing fascination I have with the

Charles River Bridge Crucifix

adorned with kadosh, kadosh, kadosh,

adds to the theatre of the absurd

as Christians pass by for photo ops.

Her body as locus of betrayal in order to survive

in both novels

the landscape of memory is the belly

the key to survival is located there.

Yet Here I am...

today...

in Prague...

where 250,000 yidden

were transported...

to their respiratory distress

using Zyklon B...

into vapor...via Terezin the perfect

model camp for the outside world press,

the smoke and soot

from crematoria,

of Jewish bones,

raining down for days after...

inhaling Jewish souls...

yet life goes on...

tourists flock...

Israelis wonder...

what took Place?

empty synagogues...

full cemeteries...

the Maharal!

the Golem!

the cyber space Golem

the first cyborg!

the first bionic man!

“Kroner! we will accept Euro!”

money! any denomination!

540 Kroner. either way.

For all cemeteries and museums

“sorry one visit to this or that saint is not sufficient”.

A local bouncer comes close, threateningly near,

“you must buy for all or nothing”.

the fascist/communist clerk bellows,

enriching the coffers of the new Mafia,

what a scam!

To see the Maharal, the Node Bi’Yehedu the Kli Yakar

even Franz Kafka!

costs you money!

the dead demand!

or at least the living parasites

to fill the coffers of these new elites.

Scamming tourists, the new industry.

In this sea of tears I find my voice.

Ribbono Shel Olam!

Gevalt!

what happened?

where were You?

why were You silent?

I cannot,

I will not give up

on You!!!

Reb Shlomo

I need you so badly right now!

yet I also need to know!

what cannot be known!

what cannot be expressed!

what cannot be told!

I am drowning!

Help me Lord!

make sense of 900 years of master and slave,

the intimate relationship between the Christian and Jew

powerful and powerless

Bohemian Prince and Jew merchant funding his wars,

surely they are all Your children too?

both Saint and Zaddik claiming the Truth!

both dying for Your truth?

and these NAZIS!

What are we going to do with them in history?

where is history?

they are not even on the radar screen today

in Prague circa 2013!

nowhere to be seen,

yet their haunting memory,

paves the streets,

the cobblestones

the memory of hobnailed jackboots

Nazi officers,

obersturmfuhrers,

Wehrmacht,

Waffen SS,

haunting nonetheless

the tourist shops,

selling cut-glass crystal.

Here,

In Prague,

where Your prophet

Kafka,

predicted this horrific world

ahead of his time

We come to venerate him

Rabbi Kafka?- no, a post-modern Rebbe

like Reb Shlomo

and his predictions.

in Krakow 1968.

Yet even here I see Dora

his last beloved

and am intrigued by her purity

her simplicity and commitment,

to the death.

like “skinny” with the lovely green eyes

Lustig’s muse...

After all Reb Kafka died in her arms.

Her belly warmed him to the end

as he was consumed by his own flesh.

Dora!

cries out to me from her grave in a London cemetery

East Ham is it?

The United Synagogue cemetry?

post bellum 1953.

she, who cradled Kafka

she, whose father

a Hassid from Belz,

had asked the Rebbe (the Sar-Shalom, no-one less!) permission

refused forthwith,

for the match,

yet Dora refused even the Rebbe,

knowing in her belly, like skinny,

the god even he had no access to,

the Nazi beckoning the girl with the lovely green eyes

even then, in her belly,

she feels

some truth her lover had revealed,

a cabbalistic code for the 20th century,

where god becomes irrelevant,

cradling Kafka two years later on his deathbed.

Between the Node BiYehuda

the Maharal

and Kafka,

the Nazi boot,

the girl with the lovely green eyes,

I am strung,,,

like a roasted BBQ, like Maciek,

not knowing which way to turn,

but realizing that the skewer will turn on its own accord.

Torn between Nazi worlds and modern consumer gods.

There is a conference on David Ganz (1541-1613) secretary to Rabbi Loew

as if by coincidence, when we arrive,

as if,

as if the world depended upon Jewish

academic scholars who will debate,

as to the reception of Copernicus,Tycho Brahe and Kepler

in the Rabbinic world of modernity

and others like the doctor Tuvia (ha-Rofeh)

the Gra,

the Haskallah.

as if...such debates will influence the cultural

wars of the charedim and Christian

fundamentalists.

Yet here in the heart

in Prague

which feels the streets

and cobblestones

jackboots

hobnailed boots

cobbles

flowing red

Jewish blood once again...

Unconscious Jewish blood,

flowing

in numbers never even thought of by the church!

where now?

who now?

by the Vltava river, die Moldau

(Smetana rings in my ears with the Hatikvah!)

who even needs their gods?

who even needs to pray?

to recite Tehillim? Psalms-Das Neimandsrose.

Help!

help me in this hopeless

hapless stupor

the gaze is hypnotic,

Lord help me Not look

not stare

not behold this burning bush

the chutzpah

shah! Julian!

be silent!

It’s time to daven minchah.

 

This Life

This life

This body

This time

This moment

These limbs

this diabetes

this blood sugar

this unforgiving meter

This town

this neighborhood

these foreigners

this shtetl

these neighbors

this ethnicity

This spring

these trees

this pollen

these allergies

these blossoms

this perfumed garden

This wife

this rage

these triggers

this relationship

this forgiveness

This religion

this hypocrisy

this ehrlichkeit

these Baalei T’shuva

these religious claims

their enthusiasm

These grandchildren

these angels

these busy little people

these questions

this joy

This driving

this traffic

this impatience

this BBC radio

these self gloating reporters

these damn interruptions

this open highway

this occasional sense of freedom

This work

these patients

this suffering

this poverty

these spousal abuses

this CT scan

this cancer

this dying.

These parents

this generation

this ending

this transition

this sense of the impending

this inability to deal

this powerlessness unfolding

This music

this heaven

this pounding heart

these tears

this sunday

this Bach

This wine

this palate

this aroma

this slow release

this bouquet

this wonder

This lake

this immensity

this silent presence

this depth

This dark night-sky

these myriad stars

this moon

these memories

this stella luna

this sense of the infinite

This Presence

this melting of the heart

this crying

this solitude

This life

this betrayal

these lies

these deceits

this failure.

The Shtender

My first lectern,

I had thought it too presumptuous

Until now that is,

When we moved from the shteibl to the new shul across the street

And the announcement for those who wished

A small medium or large standing lectern,

Something inside me agreed,

And a month later,

In my new place,

There it was,

unexpected

Mahogany-cherry

New

Dignified

Erect

Beautiful.

Since then

Something has changed in me

I want to go to shul

I need to be there

For my lectern/shthender

I cannot let it down

I cannot shame it.

It is making demands on me!

What anthropomorphism!

Yet there you have it

I awaken Shabbat early for it beckons me

I arrive in shul

And feel its surface

Placing my seforim on it and in it

For it has a secret vault

Where I keep my “stuff”

(Even a book of Leonard Cohen poems!)

My “quota” of learning for the day

And even a miniature scotch (for emergencies only!)

Only single malt will do for this quality shtender!

As a child we sat in pews

London in the 60’s

Made by kibbutz Lavi

Finchley Central Synagogue

The very notion of an individual shtender

Was so foreign

Untouched by the “yeshivishe velt”

Where from the Lithuanian Yeshivot (especially Slbodka)

Each Talmid becomes his own unique Torah personality

So each receives a shtender.

This leakage into the everyday world of shuls

And community study Batei Midrashim

Is late:

After the Fruchthandler/Reichmann revolution

That transformed American Jewry

From modern orthodox

Into a neo-charedi Artscroll world

Where every Tom Dick or Moishe

Now studies in a community kolel

The daf yomi

Using his own shtender.

Having watched Rabbi Soloveitchik

In his decline

I lived in a world of mourning

For what might have been

Had he had a successor

To continue balanced centrist orthodoxy

Which is of course now ridiculed

As “lukewarm”, embracing modernity and secularism

As a tool for spirituality.

So I too resisted the trappings of yeshivishe

Externalities.

As if it was a betrayal of what I held dear and true.

That was until now.

This shtender

Its dark grained wood

Beckons me

To stand or sit by it

Like the Giving Tree

(was it taken from it?)

Shel Silverstein’s iconic work

That makes me cry each time

I read it to my grandchildren,

It gives me much more than I could ever wish.

It stands in a place in the spiritual geographic landscape

Of the shul.

Two rows behind the Bima

Where it has a commanding view of all that takes place

Both in the service, and afterwards,

And in site of any newcomers or strays that wonder in to daven.

When we all moved across the street from the intimacy of the shteibl

We were slightly disoriented by the immensity of this sacred space.

Where to sit?

To establish one’s identity and relationship to the geographical

Is no easy task.

Does one choose to sit near older friends

Far from holier than thou congregants

Or begin afresh?

I allowed my body to move me

And initially I went to the same location as in the shteibl

But then something moved me backwards

And centered behind the bima

And there I rested

Until now

When the shtender arrived unexpectedly

In the very place I had designated

With my name on it.

As if it validated the choice of location

Between the sacred the open.

It’s as if this is my place

My spiritual location

Among other worshippers

My station in life

My location in spiritual space

In relation to the Rebbe

And the Bima

And the Schechina.

And it has grabbed me

Emotionally

Irrationally

For the first time in my life

I feel obligated

Not to let it down

To show up

To be present

For its sake

As if it represents a stake in a homestead

Out there in the far west

And I a pioneer

I must claim it

Daily.

I remember my father loving the “box”

That enclosed seating for the lay leaders

Of his synagogue in Finchley

Not because of its power or prestige

But I now believe because it had some power over him too

It was a place structured and designated

Where people

Would, on arrival, look to the box,

To see if “Willy had arrived”

It was his place beyond a mere pew.

And as I age

This shtender will hold my arms as I sway

And lean on it

As I attempt

To connect to the divine

In an age old service

That resists change

But must be infused with vitality.

And as I bend in slowly progressive loss of spinal

Stature

Maybe it will support me

In the crustification

And decaying spirit

As I face the inevitable

And the failures of my spiritual life.

Kina (Lamentation) for Krakow

Landing in Poland is to leave behind the future

walking the cobblestones of Krakow is to take each step

back in time and conjure huddled poor peasants, traders,

scholars and merchants

plying the streets of Kazimierz.

Hard to imagine the buildings in 1558 and the worshippers

in the REMOH Shul,

dusty tomes of old printed editions,

few volumes of the Talmud committed to memory.

Darker shadows then force themselves on this idyllic scene

the sound of Nazi boots marching in perfect unison

on the cobbles reverberating to a sinister rhythm.

Now terrified Jews are being hurried to the Umschatzplatz

the elderly and weak, the children and screaming babies,

disposed of early on by Nazi guns, blood flows

between the cobbles, then silence.

80 years later

that silence lingers

death lingers here

the past never lets go

the silence is deafening

there is a pollution in memory that cannot be atoned for or purified.

How can we walk these streets without them

1943, after some 400 years of Jewish creativity

silence, no more.

Excised from the body of Krakow

as if the Christians of the Old City

could continue without its Jewish Quarter

the Ecclesia without the Synagogue

who do the priests vilify on christmas eve now?

The blindfolded woman of disgrace, the synagogue

is no longer standing next to the eclesia, who will take her place?

So Poles come to the old city Jewish Quarter

to hear hassidic music

taste blintzes, czulent and challah

and stare at hassidic dancers in cheap wall paintings

in order to appropriate some cultural memory

of “the other” the non-christian

in their desperate search for a pre-communist identity.

Then a group of Israeli student pass by being indoctrinated by their

teachers as to the powerlessness of diaspora Jews

and Krakow on their way to Auschwitz some 60 km away

as proof of the need for Zionism.

“Never again” is their doctrine

“Muscular Judaism” in their F 16ʼs and physical prowess.

Kina (Lamentation) for Krakow

Next a group of boisterous Hassidic students from New Monroe NY

davening by the tombs of the REMAH, the BACH, Tosafos Yom Tov,

and the Megale Amukos, hurriedly reciting Psalms

before being rushed to the bus for the next town,

a lightning trip around Europe to visit

Rabbinic grave sites, as if the Tremendum never occurred.

or that the only response to the Holocaust is to recreate

the shtetl of Eastern Europe

in New Square or Monroe (albeit with i-phones).

The groups walk the cobblestones with ease and comfort

oblivious to the red stains and silent walls.

The nightmare is complete

a surreal movie set

where memory is erased or appropriated

local cultural museums integrating Jewish memory

into a celebration Polish historical mosaic of cultural diversity.

The heart mourns their absence

manʼs inhumanity, indifference, callousness, to man

I hear the jackboots marching to my pulse

“eli eli lama azavtani?”

a paradoxical cry from both the psalmist as well as Jesus!

In this movie set the actors will never arrive, the director withdrew to heaven

and the lights donʼt work.

In the darkness of the old and new cemeteries, the dead look onthey

did not go up in flames and smoke-their blood congealed slowly

in the cold Polish soil and their names fade slowly

with time as the tombstones

face the cold silent winter nights.

Cry for the departed

the absent actors

the absent director

despite the cameras and movie directors

present to sell these stories

to a new generation of moviegoers.

Cry for the city

the quarter that hosted the holy rabbis

who studied through the Polish winter nights

Cry for the children deported and torn form their parents

by the Nazi horde.

Cry Cry.

Lizensk 2013

Leaving sick in laws

I bring with me the prayers of others,

A burden that relieves me of the guilt of my own faithlessness.

Kvitlech, little chits of names

People's hopes and dreams for a better outcome

Illness poverty suffering

I am the bearer of these chits

And pidyonos

Those dollar bills for the zaddik

For the poor.

Another pilgrimage

Another decade

So many failed attempts at overcoming the ego

The serpentine drives

The needs to leave a mark and trace

Once again

We arrive penniless morally

Bankrupt spiritually

With nothing to show.

Yet this is precisely what draws me to the Zaddik

So far beyond my own moral compass...

Maybe, just maybe, it takes a Zaddik of this calibre

To rescue one like me...

As Rabbeinu stated , this Zaddik, Reb 'Meilech

Was figured in the beggar's tale

Bringing bread to the lost children in the forest.

Only such a Zaddik worries about filling the bellies of children

Before lofty spiritual states,

Maybe he might listen to mug broken life

Like the strings of a broken violin

And hear a melody I cannot

In this failure

This brokenness

I bring him.

via Krakow of course

To pay deference to the Ramoh

Reb Moshe Isserless

And my father

A "Ramoh Yid"

And my beloved grave of the Megale Amukos

(Pi shalosh from the Ari hakadosh)

Who had written "Giuliani Eliyahu" on his tombstone.

this journey

This trip

In the middle of all the tumult,

Medicare, Obama, EMR, etc...

The lived life

In the middle of it all.....

Paradoxically this seems appropriate

A counter balance to the false pursuits

That plague me...

Reorienting me

To the reality

Of life and aging

Of simplicity

And connection to all those

Who suffer the awareness

Of how precious this all is...

And how fragile and fleeting.

Here I see and feel the truth

And the, lived presence of life

The good and the bad

The glory and the darkness

The light and the inner snake.

The Zaddik and the Nazi officer

Who in 1941 insisted on opening his grave

Looking for gold.

I am coming closer to his living presence

To rescue my failed life.

And bring him the chits of others who entrusted me with

Their woes and hopes.

The Aryan Papers and Queen Esther

Walking through LACMA with my son

Explaining to me in detail

The filmography of Kubrick's genius,

We finally arrive at his last unmade film

And discuss why...

Why it never was completed,

Was it Schindler's List that put him off

Or was the project too big

Too heavy,

Too close to the non divine,

Too impossible to deal with.

Was his word, his midrash to be

The last word in Holocaust literature?

Here were the clippings, the files

Even an interview with the proposed star.

We were drowning in memorabilia

And awed by his present absence,

Like the very divine he did not believe in.

I am reading the Megillah and the plot line

Queen Esther, you know,

Her entering the king's bedroom

Like Kubrick's heroine and the Nazi officer

Protecting her child...

How many Esthers were there?

How many protected their own by these choices?

midrashically she knew she would never be able to return to her husband

"Halachically" she was forever forbidden

Intimacy was sacrificed for her people

And Kubrick's starlets

Heroines among the Nazis.

I think of Moses' plea "blot me out from Your book" as he engages the divine

Threatening the divine using this metaphor of the book...

And Esther ironically pleads with the Beis Din the court that

Will arbitrate whether her book, her miracle, her sacrifice,

Will enter the canon..."kitvunee ledorot" she pleads

Moses wants out

If the divine will not forgive, forget the sin of the golden calf,

better blot him out too...

He will not lead a people into oblivion because of divine rage.

Forget the Book, it is not worth the sacrifice...

But Esther pleads for admission INTO the very book, the canon,

For posterity, for history,

To show her daughters in the future

How to suffer

How to deal with male dominance through subterfuge

How to seduce the Nazi and save the children.

So this year I mourn Rabbi Kubrick and the film that was never made

His midrash on the Holocaust

His validation of Esther

Of the insistence that the divine be held accountable

Not at some trial

Not at a Wiesel hearing with witnesses for and against the divine,

But in the bedroom of the Nazi.

beguiling the king

Seducing his male potency

The black boots, and belt,

And the self bloated male importance

Deconstructing in his vulnerable parts

The very uncircumcised maleness

That marked the Jew.

Torah As Musical Score

What if,

beneath all the rhetoric,

the mastery,

the midrashic,

the talmudic dialectic

the esoteric readings

the mysticism

even the Bible codes,

What if,

the Biblical text

these letters,

these sacred words,

and sentences,

the spaces between the letters

the paragraph spaces

(the petucha and sʼtuma)

the scribal conventions,

the columns,

the very “black fire on white fire”

hanging from the etched lines of the soferʼs quill

what if,

all this

was not merely a language sign,

a Hebraic convention

an ancient un-deciphered sacred text

conveying semantic and literary meaning

theological underpinnings

mythical yearnings

ethnic history

and narratives of a people

encountering the Divine?

Sacred Texts, the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud

burnt in Paris 1242,

Rovigo 1550,

Warsaw 1941,

Timbuktu 2013,

a bonfire of letters flying away from the crisp charred parchment.

Now pored over once again in the study halls of Lakewood and Mir

as if the Holocaust had never happened,

with an intensity like never before,

the sheer numbers, a historical record

beyond even the academies of Europe and Volozhyn,

such single mindedness and devotion

such selfless commitment.

60,000 non academics working folk attend the Siyum Hashas

a sea of black hats poring over the black lettered text.

What if,

all this scholarship

the analysis of the Biblical text

in the 63 tractates containing some 62000 pages

(taking over 7 years at the rate of one page per day)

focused on the meaning of the text

yet all the while

ignoring

the possibility

that these letters and words

might also represent

the black notes on a musical stave

the pitch recorded over time,

the score of a cacophony of sounda

symphonic score?

And for two thousand years we have been studying

in our yeshivas and seminaries

the notes of a sacred musical text

its harmony and counterpoint

its prosidy and cords

analyzing and probing

even dissecting the archeology of the text

its sources

its numerical values and gematria

its intellectual provence

without ever having played the score?

as if all the professors of musicology gathered annually

to discuss and further the science with learned novellae

as to this masterʼs use of key and pitch

melodies and harmonies,

and that composerʼs interpretation of a musical sequence.

Yet no one had ever played or sung the score!

After two thousand years of learned scholarship

employing the best minds on the order of Leibnitz and Einstein:

A Reb Chaim, The Rogechover, A Rebbe Akiva Eiger, The Avnei Nezer,

does one get more clarity than this?

razor sharp pilpul,

brilliant mind-blowing analysis

no one could disagree of course,

these were our greats!

Yet after all this brilliance,

no one ever sung

no one ever played

no one appreciated the very music of these black notes

all the while thinking they were letters that made words and meanings a

legal system, a Halachah, based on the Biblical text.

Playing the Torah text as a divine musical score

might play to our souls

or even bring the Messiah!

or cause world peace!

like no other musical score previously.

Is this what God has been waiting for so long,

allowing so much suffering all the while?

Did he give us the Torah

and has been waiting patiently for someone to actually play the piece?

Would playing it stop the pain?

Yes King David intimated all this

in his Psalter

and the Levite sang on the Temple steps

and the Apollon Musegetes played in Athens

but who ever played the Hebrew letters

and who would conduct such a Missa Solemnis?

Who would conduct?

Why Reb Shlomo of course!

then who would be the principal? the maestro?

would people attend?

or would they shrug it off

preferring the safety of the silent scroll,

or even chanting the words in the Synagogue,

to avoid the actual experience

feeling the hidden divine in the text

hearing the music of the spheres

fearing the right hemisphere

the consequences of non logical thought

that anything might be possible,

everything might be alive,

that all are connected in the music

all incarnated with the divine

all leveled,

by the delight

facing the joy of the song

penetrating the secret of the universe.

No I fear we wonʼt be hearing that song soon

Shlomo will have to meet King David the Psalmist in the next world

and play for the sweet singer of Israel there not here.

Apollo will play Hermesʼ lyre without the muses.

We are mired in self promotion

and aggrandizement

and false claims

to care for this.

So I trudge daily

to the Daf Yomi

for the next dose,

a page of Talmud

black letters dissecting the Law and the Bible

searching for a way to behave

a ritual to appease the divine

a method to suffer well

the long Exile.

But I know that the texts we analyze

still hide more than they conceal

beyond even the mystical readings

that forced another Lurianic world onto the text

into a Baroque dualism.

Beyond the cute moralistic pietistic renditions of ArtScroll

and the revisionist academic reductionism.

No, I hear a song

a melody

as yet un-played

unchartered

waiting for the brilliant young musician

(Messiah?)

who will one day

open the Torah

and begin to play

naturally and effortlessly

and the world will weep and melt.

And God will say “finally, someone is reading my love letter!”

Nothing

NOTHING

“out there”...

but a lonely silence

a universe of power, brute force,

colliding bodies in motion

Einsteinʼs nightmare

middas haDin without sweetening.

Yet as a 13 year old

I would sit on that familiar wooden park bench

Finchley common, by the brook,

where the city lights could not obscure

the brilliant night sky...

myriads of silent lights

in the dark firmament.

and wonder about my life

...and death,

and inconsequential being

in the face of eternity.

And recently once again I am fascinated by the science programs

describing the origin and death of our galaxy

the 7 billion planets

the other galaxies

the time when our sun will become a white star

and explode,

or a meteor might just hit us,

or the sun might send a magnetic radiating arc

that might penetrate out protective atmosphere

and once again nothing.

Nothing.

inside in this microcosm I call myself

feeling nothing this last year.

The kabbalists call it “mochin dekatnus”

but in its wake lie all the fears obsessions hurt and resentments

with no tools to sweep clean

no spiritual dialysis to the rescue

for all has lost meaning.

In this space of nothing

one must find the reshimu

they say

some residue of all that work

all those texts

all that inner work of the past

all those experiences

to latch onto, to carry one...

no?

Surely in this wasteland of empty claims and promises

I can find SOME-THING?

And slowly it emerges

not in the texts

not in the rituals

the sacraments

the claims

the fathers

even the Rebbes

but in the space of no-thing

an intimation

a ray

a movement

a tear welling up from the broken soul deep inside.

Of course the mind immediately goes to work,

the inner Litvak dissects,

the left hemisphere works overtime

and the doubting Thomas pokes his finger

in the fleshy painful wound in the chest.

Yet despite that

in the mild morning freshness

the unseasonably moist air

reminding me of a London wet mist

on the Heath,

I am moved once again

to immerse

in the waters

of the mikveh

that silent friendly baptismal pool of acceptance

whose waters wash away all inner dirt

and lose myself in the nothingness surrounding me.

And in this washing of the soul

I emerge once again

as if this is the only ritual left

that sustained me through all of these ups and downs

under attack

under the fears

the self-doubt

the panic

In these warm waters

there is comfort

not yet hope mind you

no fooling of the self,

just reality as it is...

Surrounded by nothing

emerging from nothing

ending with nothing

is this what they meant by ayin?

Holy Nothingness?

the darkness must always come first?

“and it was evening, and it was morning”

a paradigm for all beginnings

the universe out there

in its silent darkness

and the ani, the sacred I-ness within.

A semantic rearrangements of the letters

but a universe of difference.

In the space between Ayin and Ani

I hover

powerless and motionless

waiting.

The Killing Fields of America

The killing fields of America

Weeping as I watch the fotos of the beautiful children on CNN

They trot them out to kvetch the last drop of our emotions,

A voyeuristic ploy, as if their names were insufficient

To get maximal cardiac effect,

Newtown CT,

One by one

Each a gem,

Each an angel,

Weeping.

This killing field contrasts to the rhetoric of our "beautiful land" myth

Millions in campaign contributions to convince us we are unique

That America has something to offer the world

That we can even export civilization!

Yeah, we own 50% of all the world’s guns and munitions.

We spew violence in the name of democracy and “Nation Building”

Do we really believe they buy our euphemisms?

Are the children killed by a drone attack during a wedding in Pakistan

Any less than these angels we weep over?

Why are we not outraged by that too? Is it distance?

Is it in the name of finding terrorists? Does that justify it?

CNN lives by our double standards

It magnifies our deepest fears and needs

We cannot blame the media...

But we do buy into the commercializing of death

And oh how we profit from the death machines:

This military-industrial complex must continue to churn out machines

that spit rounds from supersized magazines

for the members of the NRA

to exercise their “right to bear arms”

and protect wife and kin. (surely the founders of our

constitution had this in mind!)

We are a republic not a democracy

The elites of Europe and the Aristocracy

Have merely been replaced by corporate jets and boardrooms

Where the future is decided-

Just like we replaced the clergy and church power,

by politicians and parties.

Only the actors have changed.

The dark side of mankind remains

And the angels on CNN

Are the sacrificial lambs we offer

In return for profit.