The Sibyl of Cumae. 3730: Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, 1751-1829: Sibylle von Cumae, um 1805. Landesmuseum Oldenburg, Das Schloß.
Sils Maria: Maloja snake in the Engadine (Graubünden, eastern Switzerland), “a cloud bank that winds its way through the Alpine pass like a river”.
Sils Maria
From the broken shards of the self,
Lying around me like a shattered pane of glass
Dorian Gray’s mirror having been unable to sustain my image
Anymore,
The clouds of Sils Maria having filled the valley like a snake
Meandering as if to engulf everything in its path
With no curtains left to hide behind,
How many more lows remain to endure?
The failure of self-is evident
The lack of courage to be-is obvious
The pure inertia to write and think-is stark
We have no need to confess this yet again.
But here we are nevertheless,
And the tear wells up in grief,
As the accelerating years pile on,
And the deliverance remains elusive..
Deus ex machina long forgotten,
We have banished the meaningless rituals,
Forsaken the sacred texts that speak to a lost soul
After years of mining that archive for those midrashim
that “spoke” to my broken soul,
And, waiting for godot, we hunger now in silence.
Despite the cabin in the forest
“Walden Pond” in the key of G minor,
nothing bubbles up from the deep
the brook rushes below,
its healing sound gives peace
the crackling fireplace makes the wood glow
but the inner demons remain
gnawing at the corners of the mind
just below the surface of seeming calm water.
The mature mind does have some advantages
No longer rushing in to disastrous amours
The deeper sense of compassion seems to now
Hold the impulsiveness at bay
(remember how Sean Connery lies next to Catherine Zeta Jones
and refrains in a marvelous moment, realizing his age!) [1]
The release of the field of dreams, of work and career
Allows for reverie in places hitherto unknown.
Yet the sadness of what might have been
Does not let go.
The tragedy of decades of belief…
To the inner conviction…
That my intuition about love, life, and god
Was really true
Pervades my heart.
All that effort to come to this place of self-destruction?
Releasing these notions of truth, right, morality, theology,
To the snake-mist curling though the valley
Swallowing my dreams
Now lying in shattered shards
Around me below.
The Divine? It is beyond me. There is no access.
Love? I know less than ever what that means other than pain and torture.
The tricks of language and interpretation seem banal now…
The theology behind them lies in post-modern tatters,
Worse, the certainty is forever gone,
The comfort knowing the sacred text was always there for millennia
And I might add to that tradition of learned scholars
Might continue its tradition of exegesis
Is no longer,
And, as I listen to others, however brilliant, interpret,
I no longer have patience.
The liturgy has me mute
Unable to produce the sounds from my lead lips.
The words glare at me from the pages of the siddur like angry angels.
My father turns 95
A figure of middle European kultur
A Viennese Holocaust escapee, a kindertransport child,
then a British alien internee,
Quotes his Homer and Talmud effortlessly even now,
Swimming effortlessly between cultures of Athens and Jerusalem
He recounts his life and delights in his progeny
Describing it as one of survival, gratitude and pride.
Proudly asserting his Zionism without abashment,
I listen and marvel and his produced narrative, ever aware of his audience,
He speaks of the near death experiences during the war,
The U-boats, the fear, the near starvation,
the absence of the sight of a woman for close to three years,
The discovery on return of the loss of his entire family
The guilt of his survival
I sense his unspoken sense of betrayal of parents
on leaving the train station in Wien,
And my very existence the product of his unconscious betrayal
He makes no mention of my childhood years
the intervening years of poverty and struggle
The humiliation of self when faced with a spouse who lacked his Austrian
Frugality, whose demands were beyond his capability.
As a child I suffered his humiliation
I swore never to allow this to happen to me.
All this is omitted from the narrative
Or maybe his generosity of spirit disallows its expression.
His life
Its parts
Its ending
Its symmetry
His narrative description
All makes sense to him
And gives him pride and satisfaction
Seeing great grandchildren
And adoring grandchildren surrounding him.
My life however, seems the mirror image
It makes no sense
It has no overarching narrative
It feels the lack and bereft of meaning
It mourns the decades search which proved fruitless.
I feel like an orphan
Having combed the planet for master teachers-those of inspiration
I find no one out there who might help me anymore
And going inside
Deep inside
There is only the pain of childhood
Torment, abuse, the secret moves of survival, the lies deceits and betrayals
For self-preservation,
And the character defects that point at me in accusation
Proving my failures
In this inner court of law.
Yet in this snake of mist
Lies wisdom
For this very dark serpentine cloud formation
Signifies the fallen angel of Milton
Whose wisdom forced me out of the garden…
And in order to return I must relinquish that very discerning
Of good and evil
And self judgment
And bring compassion even to this dark space
To allow a new consciousness to arise
Percolate up from the depths of despair
Until the sun burns the Sils Maria
And the beautiful valley emerges from the disappearing snake
As if it has gifted its dying to me.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137494/
The Meaning of Meaning
“There is a heresy that amounts to an affirmation of faith, and an affirmation of faith that amounts to heresy. How so? A person may affirm that the Torah is from “heaven,” but the picture of “heaven” that he envisions is so weird that nothing of true faith remains. And how might heresy amount to affirmation of faith? [When] a person denies [belief in] Torah from heaven, but his denial is based merely on what he has absorbed of the picture of heaven construed by minds filled with ludicrous and nonsensical thoughts. Such a person says: “The Torah must stem from a source higher than this!” and he begins to find its basis in the grandeur of the spirit of man, in the depth of his morality and in the height of his wisdom. Although such a person may not yet have reached the center point of truth, nonetheless this heresy is akin to affirmation of faith and it progresses towards affirmation of belief at its root… and Torah from Heaven is but an example for all the generalities and particulars of religious doctrine, regarding the relationship between their linguistic expression and their inner essence, [the latter being] the true object of faith.”
A.I. Kook, Orot ha-Emunah, 25
To ascribe meaning
Has become for me
An abomination.
As if the words and phrases
The rationalizations and theodicies
The language of suffering
The prosidy of pain,
The construction of a system of meaning
Might have made sense? At one time
Might have made the suffering meaning”ful”
And then what?
Once having ascribed meaning
We go home eased
Close the theology books
Sip our lattes with ease?
Is the pain any less?
Is the sorrow lightened?
Is the anguish diminished?
After years of searching
(since having watched my first movie ever in 1966
“Trial at Nurenberg”.. too young)
tormented by those skeletal images…
stories my father told me…
obsessed during adolescence…
The scholarly articles, read in adulthood
The seminars…Wyschograd, Berkowitz, Rubinstein,
Greenberg, Soloveitchik,
My library brimming with their attempts to make sense
Cohen’s “After the Tremendum”
Elie Wiesel’s polished BU seminars attended,
Read and re read even Hassidic authors’ vain attempts at theodicy,
In a vain effort to make sense of “my life” as well
Child of a “survivor”
These “post-Holocaust” studies…
Filling so many faculty chairs In so many universities
A virtual endowed industry of words
Of teachers instructing their students “Never Forget!”
And “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it”
slogans, images, artifacts, relics from the camps,
then…
A new genocidal mania breaks out in the far east Pol Pot,
Eastern Europe, Serbia, Rawanda,
Endless lists of small atrocities.
And Wiesel warns us like an ancient prophet, and the Pope
And Lord Jonathan Sacks claiming a unique Hebrew contribution
to the history of ethics
That projects its voice today,
Despite the petty injustices the Jewish state ignores
On its own minorities.
This is post modernity.
We have stripped the ancient pagan gods of their mythic power
Then God of the Bible,
Then the Church, the Monarchs, Dukes and kings
Now we are free to kill in ways they never even dreamed of:
Post-modernity: a Descartian demythologized world of rational thinking
Where only the measurable is true.
Of meanings…
I hereby give up!
Not because I am not haunted
Not because it doesn’t still consume me
And drives me to find that very stuff of comfort,
The discourse that somehow finds a web of certainty.
However, I have come to see the quest
As fraudulent,
A false comfort
Since it is founded upon
The optimistic positivist goal
Of eventually finding that very meaning
In other peoples’ tragedy.
It has become ethically problematic for me.
I now see this entire enterprise
Based on the western philosophical
Logical system of thought,
The binary thinking of either /or
as false.
In which our language sets us up for such logical
Argumentation, the rules of syntax grammar and discourse
Represent a game of sorts (thank you ‘Rabbi’ Wittgenstein)
And the rules of that game are arbitrary.
Where we begin with a quest, a question, a proposition
Followed by an inquiry, an exposition, a debate
Testing of theory, the experiment, the poll, the fieldwork
Then examining results:
And proving a new fact.
The use of scientific method in the field of philosophy, theology
and human suffering and anguish.
Meaning is assigned to precisely those facts
we can string together, observe, measure
To form a coherence,
The rhetoric adds to the force for the argument
and we leave with a new theorem.
A new fact, a new truth.
But we forgot in the meantime, that the very rules of the game we entered
decided the very outcome in many ways.
We were seduced by the game not the content!
But what use are these meanings?
What is meant by these new truths?
How do they help?
The victim lies buried,
Tortured or lost,
“Missing in action”
unaccounted for, and
Those of us who have survived
Are left bereft, with a vacuum that emotionally needs to be filled,
With the need to seek answers
To find meaning in the profound loss,
To make sense of the dark heart of man
And his infinite capacity for causing harm
And inflicting Inhumanity on his fellow men
This desire is surely understandable
But futile and ethically problematic, for it serves only the bereaved.
Decades following the Holocaust we are no closer
To solving the darker side of human nature
No fewer genocides have resulted
And the appeal of technology to kill ever more swiftly
And efficiently,
Leave us horrified by the ever greater torture machines.
Our noble religions provide little succor
In their invoking the divine…
We are only digging ourselves ever deeper
By including a silent divinity into this holy debate
A divine that stands by..
As we kill and torture each other
The apologetics of theodicy leave us cold
And the idea of the God remaining silent
(which has plagued the Torah commentators from Genesis on,
albeit unsuccessfully)
Only worsens the argument.
The problem of theodicy remains insoluble
Despite the protestations of wise theologians.
There is no meaning
In the sense of a rationale
A reason, a cause, an explanation,
There is only paradox…
A paradox so deep it remains the essential flaw in creation
And the dualistic faceoff between good and evil
Ever present and locked in battle like Jacob and his dark night angel
Is as true today as in the sacred text.
I know, this is heresy (it doesn’t come cheap)
Of the silent divine…
(granted he may even be suffering impotently alongside us
out of His own choice)
as the only comfort…He is so inscrutable
He defies our ethical system of right or wrong
in His omnipotence and apparent absence
signifying
the absence of meaning
the absent divine
the absent self.
We are thus left alone to work it out
Figure out that which cannot be
Using the bicameral rational mind.
In a post Holocaust world of genocide and killing fields
Of mass casualties, of blowing up planes in the skies
“making sense” philosophically, theologically, spiritually is an anathema
to those who died senselessly,
(let the CNN and Fox pundits argue incessantly their drivel)
we see a senseless theology
a capricious god
who stands by idly laughing at mankind
that is the only sense here.
(This is the holy heresy Reb Nachman speaks of in Torah 64)1
In these dark moments
When the true reality and implication of an unredeemed world looms large
When the full impact of my patients’ deep suffering hits home
And my impotence in providing meaning in the face of their despair, poverty
And hopelessness, stares me in the face…
I take comfort in the resistance to find easy meaning
Trite truisms and theological justifications
So as not to do injustice to the memory of all those who did
and still suffer and cry. For any intellectual meaning falls short
of the direct brutality of the experience
And allows for a rationale which betrays their memory and sanctity.
I must find a path that doesn’t allow me
to so easily slide back into the rational mind
And avoid the addictive desire to seek meaning
But rather confront the pain and suffering head on
Allowing it to percolate through me
Like a shaman
Listening to the pain of others
Bearing their suffering alongside them
Reading the story of their suffering and feeling the pain
Without the neat theological categories that dehumanize them into statistics.
Offering no easy answers to my suffering patients, no supernatural ideologies
(How could one tell a patient locked in their motor neuron diseased body
Or a Parkinsonian shaking like a leaf
There is meaning? How cruel, how perverse!)
All I can do is be present
Be fully present
Listen intently
Frame the narrative and mirror their pain
And validating their anguish.
And as I begin to refuse these easy solutions
Preferring the brutality of the real
The acceptance of human nature to do evil
The acceptance of the Darwinian natural order of violence
The evolutionary necessity of the survival of the fittest
The Tsunami’s quakes, floods, tornados and lightning strikes
As inherent in the world order of things…
I can safely put away the kabbalistic appropriation
Of “Tikkun Olam” and the new age theologically melted down
Notion that we can make the world a “better place”
That Disneyesque ride that now looks so arcane,
Modernity’s lie that through technology and industry,
We will “progress” as humanity
Whereas in fact under this guise we have almost destroyed the planet
In the name of Protestant values and capitalism.
The world did just fine without us for millennia
Animals killed each other for food
Killing is built in to the very fabric of nature
However disturbing the NatGEO documentaries
of the natural animal world seem!
Then along came technical industrial production,
Of goods materials medicines and warfare.
And accompanying this new industrial age
came our tailor made theology and philosophy
Alongside this evolution in brain complexity
To justify and rationalize our dark behaviors
Projecting onto the divine some plan for it all.
In my heresy I reject all this
The Aristotelian set of rules
If A caused B etc.
A and non A cannot coexist etc.
And in the non rational appeal of some natural mysticism
I once again surrender to a pagan order of things
Allowing the darker side of nature, its divine and the self
To participate equally at the board meeting.
Release from the tyranny of meaning
I am able to embody reality as is
And begin from the beginning
Face the darkness without the layers of cultural lens
Without the supernatural explanations
And expose human/divine behavior/cruelty (mine included)
Without justification.
And having jettisoned meaning
We have the Herculean task of confronting ethics
Looking back our texts of terror
Our cultures of violence
Our system of statehood and jingoism
Our petty politicians who pander to xenophobia
Our media who are complicit
The medical- industrial- military complex and its pollution
Of good governance in the halls of power, Washington Brussels etc
That really pander to the capitalists of Wall St.
the hedge managing system that serves only self…
These cruel institutions
And the cruelty of poverty it evokes and causes
All the while the rich getting richer…
The ethics needs to be directed right here.
Now, if we look at all this
Stripped of self-justification
Of political justification
Of theological structures that rationalize the status quo
Of the incessant preachers/pastors asked to say a prayer and invocation
Prior to business as usual
The “Heavenly Father”
beginning the halls of violence with a prayer
To the sky god
If we expose the human cruelty in this
Avoiding “meaning”
We might have taken one small step towards
And evolutionary move away from annihilation.
[1] See my essay Quantum Chassidut: Hitbodedut in a Quantum Key: Contending with the Silence of the Vacated Space & the Holocaust http://www.tzaddikmag.com/guest-features.html (LKS Tsfat Development Corporation Ltd) editor Sharon Marson
Woman saying Tashlich, Uman 2015
She Is Woman
She is woman
She is Schechinah,
She is my beloved,
She makes me cry,
Her tender kiss is etched in my memory
Her eyes bewitched me in their innocence
She is perfection,
The mother’s eyes drowning my thoughts
Anything resembling those eyes triggers floods of tears
If I could just kiss her eyes before I die
It would be worth it
She loves unconditionally
Despite everything I have done.
So much suffering
So much death
So many in pain
I can’t take the brutality of it,
This beautiful life
Surrounded by such cruelty,
This awesome natural world
The forests and streams
The gentle breezes and misty drizzle
Fructifying the ground
The green ferns fecund
A silent lake with pools of rings from fish
Each initiated by a bubble
A craving for breath
From the hidden below
I yearn…
In the tears is truth
Through these tears the broken heart sees
The truth
The kernel within reality
The tragedy that is this life.
As the years accelerate
Filtering out the dross
The inessential
As the decades indict the chronicles of wasted desires What is left?
The detritus?
The residue?
I am facing the brutal truth
The failures from the beginning
Jude the obscure
Outside the walls of…Oxford
Rejected as a grade B product
The indictments appear as a document from ancient times
A pre-‐determined black inked text etched in parchment
And this life has followed me according to this uncontrolled Scripted text,
As if I could not change anything not predetermined prescribed in ink
As if I had to follow the trajectory coded in these genes.
Everything seems to be seen through these dark lens
As if there is no escape
Save the image of her
She could rescue me once more
Drowning in her eyes I might once more come to life
And decide and own my future.
It all seems to come together
Triggered by her
This Lost Princess
She knows me
She knows my wound
She is my wound.
In this space
Is authenticity
The inner truth
The architecture of
The wire diagram of
The road map that has been
My soul’s desire.
She was there!
In the circle surrounding
The Rebbe,
Swaying to his niggun
He/She dances within this magol lezaddikim
Tallis covering his eyes he dances
White socked graceful ankles
Dancing slowly
Marking out Her name on the oak floor
His authenticity melts my heart
His naiveté infuriates me
His youth angers me
His unconditional love for others inspires me
Maybe he feels Her like I do?
He holds his new Sefer, (a Rebbishe one, small) embraced with deveykus
Then looks for me and hands it to me!
I hold it and him -‐they are one-‐ for this eternal moment And we dance,
Eyes closed.
For a few seconds
To be joined by the others.
This validation
Her Presence in the silent hidden spaces,
Flying in the face of my personal moral and spiritual failure Even here in
The outward social trappings of a kehilla
A standing in the community, my shtender…
The years of learning finally responding to others questions
Quickly, like the Talmud predicted
“im sh’gura be-‐piv”
people come to ask,
the answers emerge with fluidity,
they inquire and feel me out for advice
young men follow me on
our Sabbath “walkabout”
an adventure in the crisis of faith
a French menu of different approaches and texts studied.
She is present in this intercourse.
How paradoxical
For all the years
The grey hair
The assumption of wisdom
Yet the inner Kritik remains alive and well
Ever discounting
Ever judging my failure
My compromises
My ongoing betrayals.
So this is the life
My life
Facing the future
Facing the slow dying
Cells and organs
Memory loss
Bathroom visits during the night
The absent new insights
The repetitive texts
The familiar explanations and rationalizations The old excuses
Yet a wisdom grows
From where I know not
An intuition
A deeper knowledge
No books
But a certainty
Of what is
Of the nature of things
Of the divine.
Of Her.
Uman 2015
Confusion like in a mist,
Absent clarity, like the dark airfield in Kiev,
Rational mind seems the only operating system
Mistrust of the irrational, this past year,
Wasteland of spirituality, in the brain dead orthodoxy
saturating my community,
Cynicism,
Agnosticism,
Disbelief,
Anger,
A heart of stone,
Arrival.
Noise…Pushkena…bustling with suitcase pushing pilgrims,
Blaring speakers spewing
techno-‐pseudo-‐hassidic musak.
Thongs of black hatted Haredim,
Low life Israelis, in T shirts and tattoos,
Many boys running in between, peyos flying,
Cigarette city, smoke clouds,
Trash everywhere,
Stench of slops and sewage,
Smoke infested lungs, where
Rows of asthmatic sufferers sit in the clinic
hooked up to oxygen and inhalers, Stalls selling kitsch,
Toy guns everywhere,
Hands waving in circles of dancing pilgrims shouting “Rebbe Nachman!”
A cross-‐section of Israeli society,
A spattering of westerners,
Pretty boys from Brooklyn sporting Breitling watches,
And tight jeans,
Dazed kipah sruga-‐sporting intellectuals from the Gush
looking so out of place Peyos flying everywhere,
Uman is as usual.
Though this year without the na nachs…
And absent the Berland groupies…
And Reb Itche Meir who flew in and then left just before Yom Tov
(“Rabbeinu is in Jerusalem not here”)
I am doubtful
That this year
Anything can happen to me
After all, look at the last decade
Resolutions followed by the inevitable self-‐betrayals
Despite the spiritual experience
The flesh is too predictable
The addictions are too ingrained
The work too overpowering
The resentments too familiar to let go.
I am, after all, too far gone,
I have already given up on myself.
Sunk too low..
Floating-‐no, more like drowning
In the “vacated space” the challul hapanaui
No rope to lower down to me this time, to grasp on to
I have been in free fall now for a year or so
Victim of my head games
The incessant reading of scholarship
(Albeit secondary literature)
The critique of naïve Hassidut
The full acceptance of scientific scholarship
Dissecting texts like a surgeon,
The surrender of faith,
The realization of the construction and evolution of Halachic praxis
The insight that all collectives
However wellbeing,
End up trashing individual liberty
End up violent…
Sooner or later it was bound to catch up with me
I’d cut everything else into pieces
Only the quiet agnosticism remained,
Peppered by the guilt and remorse of losing my beloved father in law,
A relationship spanning decades,
Strung between his strong -‐at times overpowering-‐ personality
And the debt owed to his guidance, instruction and moral role modelling.
Now bereft of him,
With whom do I spar with in my mind?
Who do I measure up to?
In the aloneness of the alone
I feel only the absent divine,
Back here once more,
Against my better judgment
I walk the Pushkena street
Towards the Rebbe.
Entering the back way into the tomb’s hall to avoid pan handlers
Book sellers,
Screaming pilgrims,
The pushing and shoving that inevitably accompanies
any other gifts this hallowed place might offer
focused on the tomb itself the tzion
where, 10 men deep…each reciting the 10 Psalms… the Tikkun Klali
I am unable to get close to the tomb.
This is a palace of mirrors…it brings out the best and worst in men,
each bringing his own troubled life to the Rebbe
there is weeping going on here in this crucible of soul making,
(broken souls are especially attracted here).
The familiarity of faces,
Ones I recognize over the years
One’s who recognize me and nod
Others I want to shake hands and receive a blessing from
The sons of Reb Shmuel Shapira known as
The angel, and the zaddik,
Rabbi Elazar Koenig, Reb Itzche Mayer,
The anonymous familiar faces from Breslov yeshiva,
Old City, Jerusalem
My apartment colleagues,
Every year a little grayer
Their boys, now men with their own kids;
Then beloved Reb Chaim Kramer whose obstinate commitment to Rabbeinu
Is reflected in the ever greater library of English translations
He churns out heroically
And the ever enlarging complex
(he calls it affectionately the Ritz Carton!)
housing the western English speaking perplexed who wander in.
And Motta Frank whose new wooden complex
Overlooking the lake,
And facing those three large weeping willows
Is the perfect setting for broken young souls
he has gathered and rehabilitated,
Whose davening comes closest to Carlebach I’ve ever heard
Men whose pure affection for one another
Melts my heart, for it’s pure horizontal spirituality.
At dinner, Reb Chaim asks me to speak without warning
And I confess to one and all
my disconnection with the core beliefs
With my soul
With my ongoing sellout to expedience
At so many levels.
I just don’t want to fool myself here of all places.
I call Rabbeinu the dry cleaner, the washer of souls,
Afterwards people come up to me to thank me
for resonating with their own doubts
Am I some dark hero?
Even here?
In the “heretical” bastion of Hassidut Breslev
Spreading my paradoxical heretical Breslov thought
As I walk Pushkena Street
where young men remind me of a talk two or three years ago
that left an impression
Or some poem on my blog.
I am welcomed by my wonderful dedicated physician colleagues in the clinic
Who consult me on this or that neurological issue.
It is so easy to pick up where one left off a year or two earlier,
Even Uman becomes routinized…
The same apartments, same pre-‐packaged food, davening, mikveh,
It has lost its revolutionary spirit-‐ of course, it had to-‐ from the early years.
Now even the cameras from local TV stations seem old hat
The reporter asks me the same questions,
I respond with evasive responses,
Always moving the conversation away from the exotic Hassidic dress
to the endemic virulent national anti Semitism
Behind the recent gang assaults, vandalism etc.
I remain incensed by their voyeurism
And the photographer’s nerve to actually enter the prayer hall of the kloiz
As if they’d be allowed into a Cathedral to film a Mass in Kiev!
The sounds are the same, in the kloiz, from the 15000 strong kehilla
Singing in unison, the silence before the shofar,
the clapping on crowning the divine (hamelech hakadosh)
Unique to this place alone.
These sights and sounds really do still move me,
As does the throng of white kittel-‐coated men around the lake
For the Tashlikh ceremony,
Where the recently constructed evangelical cross
reminds us we are not in Jerusalem.
Sights and sounds, now familiar, that I can predict,
that I know will move me
In a sea of discomfort and irritation
A sea of insanity.
This a year a woman prays by the lakeshore, alone,
her head bowed in piety,
Fully covered, she shocks me with her bold assertiveness,
that women too can be here
And demand the Rebbe’s attention,
the first woman I have seen since arrival,
My heart is moved as I remember how desensitized we are
outside this men-‐only enclave.
How artificial this place is in segregating off women
I am reminded of my father’s time in internment camp Tatura where he said
not a woman was seen for two and a half years, men literally went crazy.
I still love to walk in the silent “new cemetery”
where elders of the Breslov community are buried
and a memorial to a pogrom some hundred years ago
was recently erected for some three thousand Jewish victims,
The bare field overgrown with weeds hiding the few headstones left,
(in contrast to the Christian cemetery next field over,
festooned with flowers and well maintained memorial stones,)
in this space of loneliness and silence
the breeze comforts me from the now late afternoon hot sun.
I find solitude and comfort here.
The communal recitation of the Tikkun Klali, the 10 Psalms
blaring from loudspeakers along Pushkena street,
Yet after all is done, men stand still, as all
In unison shout the thundering doxology :
“Shema” and “Hashem hu Ha-‐elokim”
In this precious moment I feel the unity of the “ecclesia”
of Israel, Knesset Yisroel
And the petty resentments melt
In a sea of hope that the power of prayer
might be able to breach the gates of Kafka’s heaven
that are normally sealed shut.
The middle class stand-‐offish snootiness
I cannot normally shed recedes if only for a few moments.
I join in the cry.
This year I hold out little hope
This year I will not melt
This year I have all but given up hope
On myself.
After all the attempts
After so many years of coming
Trying,
Resolutions
Failures
Moral failures
I can almost predict the future,
The neural pathways set over decades.
No one moves me intellectually here,
(Besides a conversation with Dovid Sears who gets it)
No one seems to appreciate Rabbeinu’s paradoxical and radical Torah,
his message. The Breslov homespun wisdom,
produced for the mildly perplexed, espoused here,
is either puerile, simplistic, self-‐help styled.
The Mea Shearim /Charedi/ kannaim types
(looking for acceptance in the world of Hungarian style Jerusalem)
try to impose their approach on the rest.
(They booed Chazan Bienenstock during Mussaf last year,
because he used a non-‐Breslov tune, so he resigned.
-‐this man has a voice of a nightingale!!
His plaintive “hineni” before Mussaf
made me cry each year, it broke my stone heart,
I could almost rely on him!
Now silenced, now gone because of these
authoritarian purist thugs who dominate the kloiz.)
Uman isn’t valium nor opium for the masses, but it sure seems that way,
People desire certainty and seemed to have found it here.
Coming to the tzion is more like looking into a mirror
A place to come and see your real self,
With no filters, the pure plain truth is made available
If you can stand it
If you are willing to face it.
This year standing before the Rebbe
I easily confess,
My character faults are ever present and in the din of the study hall
They stand in line readily as might witnesses in a trial.
I have no where else to go, is a thought that recurs
On this season of self-‐judgment .
The myth of Rebbe as defense attorney before the heavenly tribunal
Comes as very appealing to me.
(One must confess all the crimes to one’s attorney
lest he might not prepare adequately for the trial!)
So the list came to mind easily.
There is, as always, relief in confession
And here, one of the few places in Judaism,
where it is tolerated.
I ask for no forgiveness
The inner Kritik allows no mercy
I just pray for a melting of the stone heart
And leave the rest to some alchemical process to begin work
On this philosopher’s heart of stone.
Sleep is critical here in Uman, what with the jet lag,
long hours in prayer and sensory overload.
Yet sleep is a precious commodity, vital for restoration and recovery.
If the window should open to the bedroom,
The noise from the street at all times of day or night awakens one.
I have found that rising around 3am is good for inner work
And walk back to the Rebbe a bit dazed in the chilled, poorly lit street night
At this time the study hall adjacent to the tomb,
is fairly quiet with some asleep in the rows of benches,
others quietly reciting the 10 Psalms.
Some weep by the tomb, heads resting on the slanting marble top.
Here at 3 am one can wait a little for it is only about 6 men deep
After about 15 minutes I can struggle to reach the cool marble
In supplication and tears.
Now the heart begins to melt.
As the events of the year fly by in a kind of video reel
(like the old Pathe news)
And the people in one’s life one cares,
about come to the forefront of the mind
To make mention of for blessing in the coming year
I feel a weight of responsibility in making mention without omission
Of those near and dear
The sick and feeble
The children and grandchildren
The parents uncles and aunts
My siblings and their families
Those of have left this world the last year like Abba and Arthur
Those who are about to undergo critical life threatening surgery like Jeff
Those in need of comfort from loss
My patients in needs of healing
The list goes on for an hour
Making mention of the people in my life I love,
Situates me at the center
And magically centers the meaning of my life away from the ego
And more towards my role and relationships
In other people’s lives.
Bringing their needs to the Rebbe allows this sacred space
to be filled with “the other” Which always was my self image as a healer.
I also reflect on the people I have hurt and injured
The acts of commission and omission
My character flaws in full relief
that seem to inflate by the year
The crustaceous nature that increasingly resists change
The Rebbe accepts all, even me
That is of comfort.
I ask for myself of course,
I ask only for his attention
Nothing more
My coming here
My being present among the thongs
Is sufficient for me. It is humbling.
If there is this world of spirit
And his presence has meaning in this Breslov myth
If the claims are correct in a world of rational analysis
(Knowing such claims are cross cultural
Pilgrimages are common to other world faiths
Each claiming truth)
Then in my heresy
In my post modern reading of Breslov lore
This needs to be sufficient.
Penitence? T’shuvah? I’m not there.
I return home a little lighter as the morning dawn lights up the sky.
Next morning the rain has made the streets slushy
And my black pants are spitted with mud.
The drizzle lightens up but the day remains gray.
Fewer gather on the street to give the Breslov sigh
A deep shout from the belly that a dozen or so shake the background noise
that rises above the usual din.
(Reminding me curiously of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s analysis
of the two types of prayer)
I seem to see many more children than usual
People must be able to afford the tickets to bring kids these days.
And the few women that stay off the main street
yet are seen in sidewalks and gardens furtively here and there.
The steel blue eyed police, paramilitary and military police
line the street corners with their presence
Ready for any trouble
Smoking like chimneys
Gathering in small groups in a circle chatting away aimlessly.
This year they stood by motionlessly as a bunch of neo-‐Nazi hoodlums
Destroyed the welcome tent, this is the ultra-‐nationalist movement
That we in the west are supporting against the Russians
They are now in power.
Skin heads beat up a man thinking he had money
Tearing all his pockets
Not realizing it was Yom Tov
Brought to the clinic with black eyes and a cracked rib
An ever present reminder we are in someone else’s back yard.
That this place remains dangerous.
Yet we trash the environment
It is so sad to see the debris, the detritus everywhere
Especially in the lake
Cartons with Hebrew lettering
floating flotsam
point accusingly at we the culprits.
The second night I am feeling something moving inside
A relief of the burden of self
A lessening of the Kritik’s voice
And a compassion of self and others
Evoked by the very unconditional loving Rebbe
Present in this sacred shrine.
This night a hundred or so men are singing softer more harmonic tunes
outside in the larger hall In a circle of slower dancing I am drawn to it and
join the singing for some time
I feel the inner joy of participating in this
older mature group of men who have made this trip
To honor the Rebbe
To be with him for the New Year
(As he predicted in his book,
the mere drawing in of one in a depression
Into a circle of dancers almost against his will
Will change his mood by the sheer force of the group)
And so it happened to me.
I noticed tears well up as I danced this slow dance
Arms locked in arms
Able to return now with a calm I had not felt in a long time
To my room.
My sleep was calmer too
I felt as if “things were being taken care of”
Like when I can rest easy, since I hired a good lawyer
And slept and dreamed of events that validated me.
The second day I went on a “walk about”
with my two beloved companions
Crossed a small stream with green plants
being wafted by the current ever so gently
As if they had accepted the fact of the current
and instead of resisting
Allowed the current to bring them food and nutrients.
It mirrored how I was allowing this whole experience to waft over me
Allowing Rebbe to work on my heart
Allowing the good parts of Uman that I knew well
To filter in and ignore the klippos
(it is so easy to let those negative aspects
destroy the experience, believe me)
and I felt joy in the walking
in the now glorious sunshine
in the companionship of good friends
to whom one can be totally honest with
and in the body’s longing for exercise
(so long denied of late for all sorts of excuses)
Along the way people stop to say hello
Ask questions
In my white hair
Flanked by my companions, arm in arm
Walking in the center of Pushkena
People stop and chat
Ask advice
In a thousand faces
One recognizes old faces
From earlier years
That is sufficient to stop to wish the new year should be sweet
Brochos flow easily here
It is the currency by which brotherly love is transacted
And at times I give advice as if an elder!
A man overhears my reading of a lesson from Rebbe
Then asks me for advice
(His father had been a Breslover for years
and it pains him that recently
Father had “left the fold” to join Chabad!
I told him we are all drinking from the same fountain
To let it go, the truth would emerge,
It calmed him.)
Another told me of his evil desires when women entered his shop!
Despite white knuckling the urges he felt powerless over this issue.
He knew how Rebbe warred against the sexual urges
and felt broken by his failure. I chuckled inside!
He was coming to ME for advice on this issue!!
Maybe I needed to go to him!
(I told him that these challenges were precisely meant for him
That the Nesivos Sholom writes that
the whole purpose a man is placed in this world
Is to fix some flaw in his soul root.
But how to know what his purpose is?
What is the flaw?
He claims the very urge that drives one time and again
Into failure, that is the sign, the litmus test,
that one’s soul’s root needs fixing in that particular area.)
So I advised not to give up! Keep on trucking!
And try to develop the mirror image of those desires within the divine,
Develop a relationship to the feminine divine the Shechina!
Learn Tikkunei Zohar, learn about HER,
it might help you in this area.
He went away satisfied.
Another (Brit) asked me about Rebbe’s claim
that different organs carried different emotions
like the spleen liver and kidneys.
How did I as a physician feel about modern scientific approaches
to the organs of the body and Rebbe’s claims.
Despite my inviting him into the idea of allegory and metaphor
he remained resistant to anything but the literal truth
so I quietly disengaged for this theoretical discussion and politely let go.
As I returned to the tomb for the last time
I knew the journey had not been in vain
The Rebbe had done his magic
I had been open to it
In desperation
And I was not disappointed.
And I was grateful.
This time I return home with humble resolutions
To be compassionate in my relationships
To commit to exercise and diet,
To engage in recovery process on my work and other addictions
To find time to write and study,
And to try once again at an honest engagement in Halachic praxis.
I return having raised a significant contribution
to the Breslov Research Institute;
(And a commitment to help Motta Frank in his holy work
of rescuing young men;
Finally, an interesting conversation with Ozer Bergman
on the possibility of a collaboration
On a new book on managing addiction
in light of Rabbeinu’s teachings,
In light of the new heroin epidemic
that is killing young men in our community.)
In the Final Generation
“In the final generation…there are zaddikim who can recognize transgressors and heretics who are connected to their soul root.
Therefore, they (the zaddikim) have to deal with them (the heretics) in wondrous manners in ways impossible to comprehend from an exoteric perspective.”
Rav Kook: Shemoneh Kavazim: #326
“A heretic can be found who has strong illuminating faith which flows from the source of supernal holiness than thousands of ‘believers’ of little faith.”
Rav Kook: Orot Ha-‐Emunah 21
I know not of roots and souls “shoresh veneshama”
Technical terms that are disconnected from our experiential vocabulary
(despite being bandied about by kabbalists as if understood by them!)
I know I am disconnected,
from tradition, belief, authority, praxis and worst of all, Self.
For I feel its anguish.
I sense its forlornness
I hear its cry.
I hear words like root and soul and could scream!
The latest fallen idol…you may ask?
The realization that I was strung between
the Soloveitchik/Netziv/Volozhyn textual mastery axis
And the Kook/Carlebach/Izhbitz/Breslov prophetic intuitions.
And now…decades later,
The shattered remnants on the ground look up at me
With a sense of betrayal and chronicles of wasted time.
The new agnosticism, informed by “Rabbi” Nietzsche,
the passage of time watching the religious fads come and go
Each group (Hassidic or otherwise) reaching its height
then fracturing into warring parties
The cross cultural nature of believing communities, authorities, doctrinal wars
The real dark side of ideologies and collectives.
In the hollowness of the absence of ideology and hope
In the grey landscape of memory for the comfort of ritual and community
In the solitude of no chevraya
Das Niemandsrose
Takes center stage.
In the silence, in the night, in the study of my father
I feel his pain, and his lessening interest in anything outside.
He watches me for approval of his 94-‐year-‐old lips
Blowing the shofar, it gives him pleasure, not many things do.
And my accompanying him to shul once more
For selichos…
Like in London 50 years ago in the cold fog
Wiping the chilly mist off the windscreen
To don his precious t’fillin
That survived the war, now over 70 years ago.
He called it “selichos weather” as the cold wet autumn chilled the bones.
I see too much.
The contrived nature of Halachic praxis
The endless upmanship of those imitating Brisk’s
Obsessive focus on Halachic minutiae
The clear historicity of its development
The mistakes and errors of the scribes affecting
the most ancient sacred texts
The holy piety masking the fear of nonconformity
The outrageous Kiruv claims for happiness and fulfillment
The absent acknowledgment of the dark forces beneath the surface
Of community,
The violence subtending all collectives and ideologies.
The unacknowledged problems of sex abuse and pedophiles in our community
The hushed victims by spiritual authority, bribes, threats.
The heroin crisis in our midst and loss of fine young people.
The neo-‐Hassidic fervency and naiveté
The petty in fighting between gedolim and Rebbes
And in my loneliness
With no one to lend ear
I scream in the wilderness of this silent study…
Of the failure within and without
This creeping awareness of my part, my culpability and inertia
in this generation’s error.
And my timidity and absent courage to fight
Preferring the nihilism of my couch and the endless ways
To escape the pain, I seek.
And, of course, this aging thing
The nightly discomfort wakens me to stumble towards the relief station
Maybe even twice!
The memory of objects, keys cel phones forgotten on planes and offices
The missed appointments (because I failed to write it down)
A slow awakening to the dementia that awaits
The inertia preventing me from exercising
with all sorts of excuses, primarily the utter boredom of it all.
“Crustaceous” came to mind when describing other’s slow insistence
on the old ways Behaviors, habits, jokes, immediate responses,
food choices and divrei Torah. Admonitions, opinions, politics,
all become ossified in this web of calcification, tangles,
And amyloid. I used to call others this term.
Watching it in the mirror actually happening to me now,
And the echoes of mortality
Sounding louder and louder
Having watched parents and in laws decline
I now submit to the same process
The inevitability of time’s course
And its seeming acceleration
Towards this end
Of self
Of being
Of life
How did I ever feel so immortal when young?
Reading medical articles one by one
About my sins of omission and commission
Of diet and exercise and diabetic control
Of early brain rot due to all three
And persistent avoidance of periodic insertion of scopes into every orifice
To avoid this or that cancer
It’s like watching the play of my life, fast forwarded
So that I cannot escape the anxiety of its inevitability.
As a child I always feared the passage of time
Dreamed of facing death as an old man
with a pot belly out of a Dickens novel,
It would awaken me in a sweat from my sleep.
Now,
Without the promises afforded by religious claims
(never believed them anyway)
not even the spiritual claims of mysticism,
I am left with the psycho dynamic wish fulfillment theories
Of my 20th century “Rebbes” Freud Jung and Fromm, Hillman et al.
I must prepare myself, finally, having avoided doing this work,
for the ongoing struggle to take back all the projections
And own this failed life
Own the past
The people I have hurt
Admit the past,
Live in the reality,
And silence the inner Kritik.
I must come to acceptance
Of this life as it is
With its failures and upsets
The essentially moral failure
To live one’s essence
This false self
Born in the violence of being educated by survivors
(and abused)
exposed to irrational rage
and power by fiat, tyranny no less
with no protection.
The wounded boy had to survive.
But this is no excuse for the individuated man
Who should have done the inner work of healing right?
Having examined his core beliefs and resentments on the couch
Of self awareness
And by this age have made peace with the past
Not continue to be driven by it
Triggered by authority and criticism
Into rage
And powerlessness.
And destructive behaviors.
Yet I do still find my voice in strange places
(Leaving more global issues to my children)
I prefer the quiet spaces where my heretical readings of sacred texts
Fill my heart in my search for meaning.
These “friends” have been with me for decades
during my struggles with orthodoxy
Refusing to merely give up on them, now,
Merely because of their human authorship.
I am choosy however, restricting my archive to
Aggadah from Talmud, Midrash, Parshanut and Hassidut,
Post Holocaust writings on faith and covenant…
I prefer to return to them once again
Seeking hidden mysteries as yet undisclosed
In the archeological textual digging of the multi-‐layered opaque
Black letters on white landscape or parchment
I love the first editions, smelling of old times on fragile cheap paper,
With the editions framed in the front with ornate baroque designs.
Trained with much patience and in gratitude,
to use the tools of analysis of Talmud, by my revered father in law,
Reb Hershy, Professors Brettler, Fox, Fishbane,
and my beloved George of course,
Who taught me how to be committed to one text for decades (the Leshem).
And reading Rav Kook in a new key,
with the new uncensored versions of letters and essays
As well as the traditional Hassidic masters,
Plumbing them all for Jungian undertones:
Searching for that text that quickens the pulse and makes me gasp
(they still do!) that ahaah! moment
having discovered something new that reflects the engine of my self.
Mirroring the soul’s desire,
Finding dark spaces
The space between the lines
Uncovering what was not said
What needed to be said
What was left unsaid
And the author’s unconscious desires,
That mirror my soul’s.
In these readings I find solace
In the company of other like minded souls
And a purpose in leaving a slight trace
Of my self, my struggles, my search, my path,
In such writing,
I find comfort that others journeyed this path
With the same tightrope balancing act,
Struggling with tradition readings against the grain,
At times exposing the past textual immoral assumptions
Without regret or piety,
For the ongoing battle for moral sense
The authority and sheer weight of rabbinic tradition vs. the moral equity
Of our times and struggles
Like a good judge/reader should.
Unlike the academic, the Wissenschaft schools
I read and study for pleasure and for purpose
This study is my lifeline, my oxygen,
in the constant refining of the ultimate questions
That have plagued me since childhood
But also I am in love with the sacred text
Albeit like Celan, denuded of philosophical and theological claims,
More like a love poem that will not let me rest.
And in the space between doctor and patient
I will find ongoing solace
As we both traverse life’s decay
Ostensibly my documenting decline
Yet also providing solace for wounded souls
Who I firmly believe express their woundedness in the various symptoms
Presented on arrival into the examining room.
In that sacred space a magical force
Operates, of trust, mutuality of suffering, and wisdom.
This mystical bond keeps growing deeper as I age
And empathize more and more
And objectify less and less
For medicine as an art has become that intuitive sense
Of what is unique to this or that particular patient
Not what they have in common with every other sufferer of that malady
And in the interaction with children and grandchildren
Where the transmission of culture, memory and my very being
Is the currency worth more than gold,
But just watching them chat away among themselves also
fills my heart with comfort, as do
their constantly inquiring minds with incessant questions
It fills me with pure joy.
In study work and family, I must find meaning
In this path
Where death alone defines just how precious
My remaining time is.
Framing my life as I would a literary work
Allows me to focus on the unfinished business…
As a coda,
The dreams as yet to fulfil
of travel…
The sweet air of Snowdonia, the rolling Cotswolds,
Other places I need to visit
To feel the wind in the sail on the Pacific
And feel the awe before the blue ice glaciers of Alaska
The Aurora Borialis…
A pilgrimage to Sobibor concentration camp where my grandparents perished.
And once again to stand barefoot in the Paradeisi Synagogue in Cochin
Where I felt an alteric connection to my ancestors.
Of study…
To finally to complete with George the Leshem,
and thereby understand the Lurianic project.
Of music
To complete the Bach prelude and fugues
And understand Chopin.
Of family…
To see my kids settled and independent
Each making his and her contribution.
So much left to do…
This Study
This study…
This study is empty
Only the books line its wall now
standing like soldiers
Just like Sarah likes them
Neat and tidy,
Like the rare book section of a library
Many are leather-‐bound
Representing those with special meaning
Chosen carefully for bookbinding
Representing the special choices
Their dark burgundy (with gold leaf) color contrasts
with the light oak wood The round table with flowers in the center
Uncluttered.
A potted green plant survives the ending of his life
Slowly awakening to this spring
Growing in the large framed window
Facing the sun approvingly with its leaves.
But I feel uncomfortable sitting here
With his large picture portrait
Looking down benignly
Eliyahu’s brilliant portrait
Classical posture and ever so present
It fills the room
As if he had never left
As if this room remains
His…
The room is too tidy
It lacks my clutter
Having evacuated it a year or so ago
Willingly and with love
As he moved in,
Silent and suffering in silence
Until the last breath.
So we covered the books
And removed all the clutter
That represents my stuff
The trinkets and little man toys
(That give us pleasure more for their familiarity
Signposts of where we have been in the past
Places and people)
The ink pens, old passports, worry balls
Pictures of the past,
Bags and briefcases,
The electronic bric a brac accompanying I-‐phones I-‐pads
Chargers, receipts, all the insignificant stuff I hold dear And drives her crazy.
Now uncomfortably neat, bare of all but seforim
All the apikorsus missing
This library is sanitized
Merely the canon of rabbinic literature, commentaries and superglosses.
And before this idealized burgundy library
As if at its helm,
this large and singular picture
His presence,
Bearing down,
As in life,
A presence too transparent,
Overpowering to those who venerated him
However benign looking now,
For me he remains a judging of self
And exposure of my failures
Of demanding self praxis
Goals yet to be met
Textual volumes
Marginalia upon marginalia
The hair-‐splitting subtleties of tort law
Exposing my continuing ignorance
And Discomfort.
Self-‐acceptance is clearly not present now
The portrait and the burgundy leather bound volumes
Have conspired to press upon my soul
To become this alien space
Once so intimate
A place of meeting friends colleagues and meshulachim
A space that mirrored my real self
My space.
Now, only foreign.
I’m not sure the clutter returned would change this…
Ever since he inhabited this space
In his utter suffering silence
His holiness filled the small study
And the reshimu-‐the residue remains
Long after the body gave up the ghost.
In this space Seemingly sterile now
No longer holding the shot glasses comfortably
Where secrets over scotch are shared
Where people bare their souls to me
Where marriages are clarified
And incurable diagnoses confirmed
Where young men make critical decisions
Where my thoughts fill the space on quiet Shabbat nights
As the dawn approaches
And self-‐understanding slowly bubbles up
In this unique sacred time
Pouring over obscure Hassidic texts
Or a Yeats poem.
His presence here is enigmatic
As his presence in my life
As I come to frame his influence in my life
His lasting reshimu
The light as well as the darker spaces
Overwhelming presences
My decades of resistance yet influence
The sheer power of his personality
And quiet unsaid judgments
Reflecting my wounds
And focusing on my transference
Surely this is not a place of comfort
And quiet
Not after him
Not after his quiet suffering in this space
Not after the divine visitation and kiss of death here In this space
Now sanctified
No, this study has become a sort of shrine
The large unframed portrait
His face against a black background
His bright pleasant but serious expression
His pale skin color against the irrational darkness of space
Reflecting his intuition that the rational mind can somehow grasp
Everything
If only sufficient effort is applied
So different from my gnostic pessimism
My suspicion that in this quantum world
Only irrational numbers
And irrational forces in the psyche
Have ruled the last century And my soul.
In the end his rational mind
Overcame his Hassidic mystical background
And my non-‐rational mysticism
Overcame my father’s middle European enlightened rationalism
My nihilism and pessimism suffuses my heart
And my tragic sense (so Greek!)
Makes more sense of the world
Supporting further my discomfort here.
I am not sure I can return here
To this shrine
To this sacred space
Too sacred for my soul
That needs freedom to think
And observe,
Freedom to explore the heretical
In order to frame the orthodox
Freedom to write the unacceptable
In order to move the conversation deeper.
So I take my leave now
I leave this study
Albeit with reverence
His presence
His overwhelming influence
Like chains
I must get free
Free to think once more.
And make sense of him, with time.
Dad Walk
וילכו שניהם יחדו
Walking arm in arm
father and son
in silence
the cool Jerusalem spring air
Dad comments repeatedly on the quiet
the absent traffic
on this Shabbat morning.
“Magic” he described the feeling walking with me, later
“not like father and son”
Our task from his home to the hospital
was to visit his beloved partner
forlorn without her
at times disoriented
focused only on her visitation
worried about her pneumonia
as was I
we slowly make our way to the Bokur Cholim
internal medicine floor.
In her ward are 4 other women.
The one behind her, disallowing the curtain to be drawn for Mum’s privacy
screaming if we in any way tamper with it
born in Kovno , Lithuania
and sings early zionist songs during the night
keeping all awake.
She has no visitors despite many children
have they given up on her?
Opposite mum is an Arab woman
covered from head to toe at all times
with many many visitors streaming in and out during the day
seven daughters her husband boasts to me
the youngest in Bethlehem University studying business.
each daughter prettier than the next but the youngest unmarried scholar
is stunningly beautiful.
I kibbitz with him about dressing more like the patriarch he is
what with 37 grandchildren at 57 years!
All this banter takes place in the cultural divide
that separates citizens of this so called secular
society but hovers like a pall over all interactions.
Lastly the “Schvester”
a single spinster in her 90’s
no family survived the Holocaust but her
frail and fragile
in long gown
and tiechel
she has a steady flow of visitors all planned by the neighborhood
so only one at a time,
they daven with her
and speak little.
She came to Jerusalem after the Shoah
from Germany
sole survivor
now the mascot for her local Geulah neighborhood
all the young and not so you women are happy to visit “Shvester”
no men come by.
And the fourth is my mother
unwilling to be here
out of place in such company
ignoring the others as much as possible
despite my holy sister’s constant visitations to their needs too.
This pneumonia this petty cough
the shadow on the X ray that convinced the ER physician
of the need for the admission
the antibiotic infusions, the periodic inhalants that irritate
her reluctant walks up and down the ancient corridors
of this building once a hospice
in the old city.
I hold my father’s arm as we ascend the worn stone steps to the second floor
I wonder how many decades it takes to wear down the central third of the step
how many people trod these steps on their way to beloved relatives
how many walked these stones in the hope of recovery.
The stones steps can tell stories we long forgot
bearing the weight of humanity
they groan and slowly wear down
under the sheer mass of suffering.
We don’t know
we never know
we can only endure
these moments of uncertainty
but during these times
the arms interlocked
father and son
in silent movement
there is no-thing to say
the obvious lies before us
illness decay and mortus,
so the moment is treasured like no other
in the anxiety of what may be
we tread the steps humbly
following the countless before us.
All differences fall away before the tremendum
all opinions and treasured beliefs seem trivial here
I ask my father about a recent spat,
based on what I believe is the very conflict surrounding the soul of the family
“does one ignore religious differences in the children for the sake of the unity
of the family?”
he thinks for a few minutes
relying: “it’s not worth making a stand”
and for a minute all my resentment falls away
and his judgement makes so much sense
when seen from his perspective.
Father and mother take on different meaning
this late in life
they are the gift that endures
and each month I visit
I am given another gift
another lease
albeit tenuously
albeit seeing the slow decline
so I treasure this
and even more so when this gift is threatened by possible mortal illness.
I am truly gifted
the very privilege of walking with my father
this Shabbat
in the quiet streets of Jerusalem
in the cool spring air
the blue sky meeting the yellow stoned buildings
all is right
even here and now
in the anxiety of the moment.
In the Absent Sublime
“And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all. “
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T. S. Eliot, 1888 – 1965
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
William Wordsworth 1770-1850
Nah, im Aortenbogen
im Hellblut:
das Hellwort.
Mutter Rachel
weint nicht mehr. Rübergetragen
alles Geweinte.
Still, in den Kranzarterien, unumschnürt
Ziw, jenes Licht.
Paul Celan GesammelteWerke 2: 202 1986
“Spirituality and sexuality are not your qualities, not things which ye possess and contain. But they possess and contain you; or they are powerful deamons, manifestations of the gods, and are, therefore, things which reach beyond you, existing in themselves. No man hath a spirituality unto himself, or sexuality unto himself. But he standeth under the law of spirituality and of sexuality.”
C.G.Jung: “Septem Sermones ad Mortuos”
The certainty of others…
Their impoverished beliefs…
Insufferable and overbearing,
The Halachic minutiae of observances
The infractions and focused obsessions of…
The need for…
Absolute control of behaviorisms,
The intolerable self-righteous enthusiasm,
The utter Holier-than‐thou‐ness.
The absent voice of Whom?
Paul Celan’s hymns to no‐body?
In the silence of no‐response,
In the stillness of the cosmic no‐thingness,
I lie motionless.
Bereft of my Friend and receiver of thoughts
He who once might have listened to my soliloquies
My prior fullness of being
Intimations of immortality
Wordsworth’s sense of the sublime
In nature and music
Now laying fragmented in the satanic mills of the soul.
Left with only the nostalgia, regret, guilt
Of what might‐have‐been‐feelings
Bereft of certainty‐
of that sense of the sublime.
After Maa’riv Kabbalat Shabbat the tansel
In the customary solemn circle,
Unexpectedly the Rabbi grabs my hand and squeezes it
When singing
“sanctify me with Thy Mitzvot… Purify our hearts”
קדשנו לבינו וטהר מצותכב
An electric shock of regret fires through my body from his hand,
as a sense of insufficiency and fraudulence
Fills my soul.
My heart cries in jealousy for his simple faith.
Then again at the Shabbat table
The candles lend a golden glow
To the beautiful silver laden white clothed altar.
As the silent guests await my benediction קידוש
This moment in time feels so holy‐
It catches my breath‐as I hesitate to utter
Words meant to fulfill their Halachic obligation
By one who can no longer represent as a שליח
(For heresy disqualifies.)
I live in that space of desire
For authentic words
That reflect truth
Knowing full well
I can no longer
Open my lips to produce the words,
Oh for a doxology I could die for!
Or just believe in!
A salvific higher authority!
Not a mere projected wish for a return
To a father figure I might have respected.
A fulfillment of the little Julian’s urgent plea for
Help from the cruel matriarch.
(left unanswered)
Herr Freud put paid to that idea!
Reducing my once cherished beliefs to rot.
Facing now my shame
And the faith‐less‐ness
Of the landscape‐that is my terrain
The absence of certainty
That is the barren wasteland of my visual field
It offends me to see it in others
As if I have become intolerant to the very
Presence of faith in others
As if their Emunah, בטחוו and הלכה mirrors
And exacerbates
My own lack, digging the knife even further in.
In an adolescent rage of dis‐ownment,
I am repulsed. It is too fresh
This wound
For salting by others.
Paralyzed by my inability to take a stand to act,
To say no! despite authority’s ongoing hold
Simultaneously by my resentment
and my old friendly character defects
The wounding of others
The cruelty within me…
Now with no religious impulse to confront me
The ודוי the חרטה the process of T’shuvah
No Higher Authority peering down from heaven
No allegiance to Rebbe or halachic edicts
The Four Ells עמות דלד have dissolved
Leaving an open minefield of explosive rage
Ordinance left to cause amputations of the heart
In vitriolic self denigration
No medicaments in my medical tool kit left to heal
These wounds of the soul
Caught between reverence for the tradition
And a deep heresy and suspicion
I am nailed to the cross of powerlessness.
Now, only the daily‐mirrored self‐image
The Dorian Grayed picture of decay
The inventory of pain inflicted on those near and dear
Keep me from sleep.
Dreams of crumbled building basements
Old authority figures from the past
Pointing accusatory index fingers
At the naughty boy once more
Outside the classroom for some misdemeanor
Yet emerging from this rubble
The simultaneous realization
Slowly, slowly
An “intimation”
That this rational mind does not do justice
To the complexity of the psyche
Cannot reduce it to mere conscious understanding
Of self or text.
That hidden beneath the surface calm
lies layers and grottos
Of unearthed truth
That I am still open to the very core
Of what bubbles up
Humbly accepting this as revelation
Must suffice for now.
The mystery of existence lies within this darkness
Is born here in the recesses
And I do accept its very deep and “holy” birthings.
That I live on the edge of this precipice
Of life and knowledge
And the looming end of things
Accepting my ignorance
My pain
My flaws
And remain humbled by the incalcitrance
of the truth
Of history, text and the self.
This is my lasting belief.
Intimations From Beyond: Shloshim for Abba
The Vurke Rebbe’s son complains to the Kotzker “My father has not come to me in a dream”[1]
“And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquish'd one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet; The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are
won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
William Wordsworth. 1770–1850
There is an interesting Zohar [2] that says that everyday a Bas Kol cries out from heaven: “Oh, Return (My) wayward sons.” The Slonimer Rebbe comments on this passage in the Zohar, citing the Baal Shem Tov who asks the following difficulty: Who cares? We don’t hear this voice everyday in our lives so the Bas Kol surely isn’t affecting us on an experiential level. What good does it do for us to know that such a phenomenon exists? However, the Baal Shem Tov answers this question with another question. When a person wakes up in the morning and out of the blue decides to do t’shuva, where does that inspiration come from? When a person suddenly decides to completely change his life and dedicate himself to Torah learning, how does such an idea even come into the person’s head? Even when a person finds the inspiration to improve himself even a little bit, how does that happen? This is the Bas Kol.
Intimations from no-dreams
No one comes to me
No Bas Kol
Despite my wish
For Abba to contact me
And tell me what?
He forgives
The decisions
The invasion
The horror of the last year
He forgives my indiscretions
He forgives my impiousness
My behavioral imperfections
My past.
I was there for his last breath
Holding his arm
Refusing resuscitation demands
Knowing the last breath was at hand
The last breath was his decision.
Attendant in reverent expectation
Unsurprised by the kiss of death
Fully appropriate, and desired.
Enough! your eyes said to me (albeit inferred)
Tired of this frame
The body never held out much for you
A barrier to the intellectual pursuit of scholarship
A nuisance at times
And the last two years of total ascetic life
No taste of food or drink
Just being and thinking
A prisoner of the body
Locked in to the earthly
A transition of sorts
But agonizing nonetheless
A tragedy
Watching you suffer in silence.
A dream…
You…
So maddening
So overpowering in my consciousness
“Do not go gentle into the night”
you did not leave passively
you fought three times the angel of death
but he came after Purim
and this time you threw no fire bolts at him
no divine name carved on your Mosaic staff
this time, you allowed this
you were always in control
even of this.
The ending
The completion of this life
Led uncompromisingly by rules
The final moment
Privileged to be present
(unlike the death of Dada and Nana
which was cruelly withheld from me
for which I never forgave the circumstances of my distance
which still causes me pain so many decades after
the inability to be present
to say goodbye
to hold the hand and kiss the lips
of those who nourished my childhood)
Living in the absent dream
The no Bas Kol
You have not come to me Abbele!
In the Vurke Rebbe’s 30 days
I have no Kotzke to go to
No one to complain to
No one to storm the heavens in search of you
Where are you now?
I knew you were right
“amito shel torah”
Alone you stood your ground
Despite the odds
Against the mighty Gra
Are you in his Heichal?
Are you excitedly proving him wrong finally?
Did he nod? His approval?
Privileged to have had you reside here
Your daughter’s love bathing you
The last breath taken here surrounded
by the library of Torah you toiled so long in
The beloved seforim accompanying you on this last voyage
Paying you homage as humble servants
taking their leave
Knowing you have been received in the eternal library
The Beis Midrash on High
And you will argue your theories eternally there
In the good company of your colleagues.
The study is back to “normalcy” still, without my clutter,
I will have you know,
The holy books line its walls without the modesty curtain
Gazing at the emptiness of your presence
Just a candle is lit…
A trace of your soul remains,
This sanctuary to your memory.
And my ferns!
My ferns!
Have returned
And with them
The seeds, their children
Having survived this bitter winter
Against all odds
You would want to know that.
You sat out there on the deck
In the privacy of the fern-lined deck
In the warm sunshine
Holding your daughter’s hand often.
You seemed to find peace among those tropical ferns
Little ferns
So fragile
You would be comforted.
They are back on the ledges now
Awaiting the warm sunshine once more
To grow
In your memory.
Please send me a Bas Kol
At the very least.
Please
I need to know this was what you wanted
In your holy silence.
You cannot leave this way.
A dream perhaps?
[1] Shlomo Carlebach story of the “Vurcke Rebbe and the ocean of tears” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIBBJo0Op0k
[2] Every day a bas kol calls "shuvu banim shovavim, return to me o' wayward sons." (Chagigah 15)
Jerusalem Stones
Jerusalem stones
Walking, walking…
The lonely streets
So quiet in the shabbat-deserted landscape
Few cars, little noise finally,
After a week of traffic and throat-acidic-air pollution.
The stones bear witness
Slippery in the rain
Treacherous at times
So irritating
Yet they seem unconcerned
For the petty lives and loves of today’s broken souls
This city of paradox
So many faiths crowded together
People isolated or trapped in their respective mythologies:
The sounds of the muezzin mixes unharmoniously
With the church bells,
The steeples and the minarets dot the skyline
In competition for the soul of Jerusalem.
So many faiths
Each claiming its own truth
Each disowning the other
Each sending its children here for instruction
From the diaspora
For inspiration and intensity of study
From its spiritual teachers,
Yet the “other” seems not to exist
However fatefully forced to live in close proximity
In the wet stone buildings of this eternal city.
The paradox of the old and the new
The East and the West
The shtreimel and the burkah
The bekeshe and the nun’s habit
The density of pure piety per square foot
Competes with heaven itself
For the “truth” about the divine.
Does god in fact smile down on all this from heaven?
I am drawn here
Despite myself
I don’t like this intensity
I don’t like the heat
I don’t like the downpours
I prefer the quiet cool rolling cotswolds…
Where it rains so finely the drizzle doesn’t bother me
I like to be left alone from prying eyes
Who size me up by my yarmulke or clothing
Analyzing my shade of orthodoxy and praxis
By the implication of leather or felt, length of jacket,
It is almost too much, this noise and chatter,
The cottage industry of talmudic erudition
This pressure cooker
Waiting any moment to burst.
Too much to bear at times,
The blood stained sidewalks and café houses
Of Dr. Applebaum and his daughter,
Of children of all ethnic backgrounds
Sacrificed on the altar of parental
And societal and ethnic expectations;
These stones have witnessed the pain and suffering
Of those willing to surrender to this eternal city
Of those willing to die for myth and text and ideology
Of those unwilling to be scapegoats again in history
“Jerusalem of Gold”
The inspiration of poets and midrash
Shemer and Amichai
Broke their teeth on these stones and soil
The old city and new
The bustling the Christian tourists
Confirming the archeology of their saviour
With pseudo-science willingly provided by “certified” tour guides
In German tour buses with A.C. and cushion comfort.
This part of earth where the jewish faithful come to be buried
Hurriedly, flown in, heavy zinc lined coffins
Now only covered in white cloth, coffinless,
Followed by men in beards,
An industry for the mafia/black coated chevra kadisha
Who control food and graves in this secular country.
I walk by an abandoned muslim cemetery opposite the luxurious
Waldorf Astoria, the silent graves
bespeaking a different era of Turkish rule
And obvious graves of classy and wealthy patricians buried just
Outside the old city.
A city drowning in a millenia of tears, an old foto,
Circa 1917, general Allenby dismounts out of deep respect
At the Jaffa gate…the Turks have left finally after hundreds of
Years of Ottoman rule…
And the Christian conquerer proclaims
a free city for all faiths (sic)
The mullahs and the priests and rabbis lined in a row,
Bowed in deference,
The only commonality is obeisance to the new colonizers
The Turks and Marmadukes the British and the Zionists
Those who loved this city of gold
More than life
Those who would never leave its gates once having arrived
(not even for Uman!)
The study of halls of learning
Piety and punctilious observance of minutiae
(i watch them examine the aravot
With microscopic precision
Or push wildly to get closer to the rebbe in his succah
Or the funerary bier of the zaddik)
Those men who comb their payot before the mikveh
Unaware of their effeminate trimmings
The same mikveh that commands “tvol utzeh!”
(by the rebbe of toldos avraham yitschak
Demanding silence as they watch me an outsider
In different cloth, disrobe like an alien.
The same black coated men walking briskly along Mea Shearim
streets, competing with huge buses crawling through the same
Winding road :
That bastion of hassidic/hungarian piety some two unconscious
Minutes from the huge greek orthodox church and complex,
The graves on the mount of olives, next to the Augusta Victoria
Hospital housing the enormous bell donated by
Kaiser Franz Josef from Vienna,
While the nuns walk to their morning matin
at the entrance to the
Armenian quarter,
Past pictures of the first ethnic holocaust 1915-1920 plastered on
Jerusalem stone walls,
(a conveniently forgotten piece of history)
The faithful Muslim men bowing on their prayer mats
on the Temple Mount,
Where, at dawn, just below by the Kotel
that stone wall of wailing,
The sephardi mekubalim recite the siddur of the rashash
Nothing makes sense here
All are hurrying to worship!
All are claiming the truth
All are claiming exclusivity.
Yet somehow, paradoxically
It all does.
The military presence
Always hovering
Always a threat, seemingly arbitrary at times
For some protection,
For others occupation,
Colonialism redux
For all, undesired road blocks, but necessary
These slippery stones bear witness
To the millenia of conquering armies
To the piety
To the blood of the innocent spilled
To the desire and fervent hope for the coming of the messiah
(or his possible second coming?)
And the continuing wrangling over pieces of real estate,
Politics and wheeling dealing over square metres.
The “settlement expansion” and the clear distinctions between red
Tiled roof settlements and arab villages from afar, the facts on
The ground evident to all. The new once proud light rail winds its
Way through east jerusalem and with all the high tech, new
terror tactics at stations along the way
like the stations of the cross.
This Jerusalem of stone,
That gets under the skin and never leaves
That infuriates and irritates
But never relieves,
Like a migraine one must endure
Photophobic and unable to focus on anything but the pain
These stones remain
As witness as testimony
Of its eternity…
I walked these stones first at age 16 and now,
I have lived my life,
They have not changed.
I have failed as Dorian Grey
They have remained steadfast
This maddening city
She points her accusing finger,
She affords no tolerance for anyone
Whatever their conviction, religion, sect
Who compromise their values,
All who live here
Must live fully and without pity
Whatever the cost.
All must endure the slipperiness of her surfaces
And the immutability of her pavements.
This is Jerusalem.
Hesped for Rabbi Emanuel Gettinger
Just being here in this beautiful בית הכנסת with these wonderful faces; we thank you all for coming and sharing with us this precious moment. Those who came from near and far: my nephew Reb Aharon Gettinger came in from LA; Dr. Lipton, you took care of him with such grace and dignity and sensitivity to his wishes. Asher, my colleague Dr. Rabinowitz who introduced me to Abba as a פוסק when I was at Columbia Presbyterian, struggling with the respirator issues back in the seventies. Reggie… Reggie, you had such a special relationship with Abba. Auntie Rozy, I promise you Uncle Mackie is waiting for Abba with a joke at the other side.
Thank you all for coming and sharing in our grief and in our celebration of this life, a life greater than life, a person larger than most, a personality rich in its complexity, a fortitude in strength that carried us all and a humility and self-deprecation that was inspiring.
Abba came close to death three times in the last 18 months. Reb Dovid and I struggled over the phone with sheilos that Abba and I had struggled with for twenty-thirty years, three times. And it was after hearing the megila so eloquently by our friend Ira Wiznitzer and waiting till after bein hashmashot that he finally relinquished his final breath with a מיתת נשיקה on the 65th anniversary of the day I took my first breath, the day before spring. Which brought me this morning, as I woke, to a line from Yeats: "Through winter-time we call on spring, and through the spring on summer call, and when abounding hedges ring, declare that winter's best of all".
Thank you so much for caring, thank you for coming, for grieving with us. It helps us. It relieves us of this great burden, a little.
Where does one begin? Where does one have the nerve to summarize, to review, to analyze, to depict the full facets and the complexity that went into the personality of my שווער ?
His life was spent, as you have heard this afternoon, with the written word. His life was teaching and articulating the Sacred Text. But his last year, ironically, was spent in silence, בשתיקה , and the dignity with which he suffered and died betrayed the nobility of his spirit. His written words, his legacy, they took years, torturous years to birthing and publication, and yet they also betrayed the unspoken, the silence, the שתיקה , the space between the words, the unanswered questions, the "black fire on white fire", to quote the Zohar. His life's work, beyond his teaching, his ministry, his Rabbanut, his נסיעות , his patriarchy of his family, was his struggle with and in
תורה שבעל פה , his unique contribution and approach and his search for his truth, his understanding of the אמת לאמיתה , the truth unto its utmost. Despite controversy, despite the weight of tradition, the truth had to be told. This courage, this audacity that came from his mastery of the entire corpus of Talmud and Poskim and his photographic memory and his active intellect. For me, an over-towering figure in my life, an inspiration in so many ways, so difficult to highlight, so hard to share in public.
But sitting with him through the nights in the ICU, in the horror of the ICU, in the indignity of the ICU and in the quiet times in our home, sitting in his שתיקה , in his silence, throughout all, his lips are moving in תפילה constantly. "ואני תפילה" now has new meaning to me. He had become the very incarnation of תפילה לדוד, תפילה לעני .
There was so much time to reflect on the irony of Abba, of a man of words, his unique articulation, his precision, his grammar, his insistence on the פשוטו של דבר , the פשוטו של מקרא , his life in its simplicity, not naiveté, its clarity, its halachic precision; now silent, בשתיקה . The irony that the notion of בין השמשות should have exercised him in the first place. That gray time, the midrashic imaginative time, ערב שבת בין השמשות , when all sorts of weird creature and things that made no sense in the order of creation like Bilaam's Ass are now created just before Shobbos. That in-between time, that which is לא יום ולא לילה , should have so exercised a man dedicated to precision, black and white, night and day.
Other ironies: his deep connection with students at secular universities, his support of women's learning, his appreciation of the Arts and especially music, his love of astronomy and nature, the day before spring. His openness to critical study methods and yet absolute commitment to Halacha, his ability to talk to all people in all situations, men and women, and communicate with them; his charm, his unique sense of humor – that was usually tied to a semantic joke; his impish laugh.
But beyond this, his mentoring of men and women over the years, who stayed connected to him as a role model, as a sage with a profound ability to listen, intently. His council, his הוראה , always sensitive to the humanity of the situation in a delicate balance of what in secular legal circles might be called the balance between law and equity which is so lacking it today. Never will you meet a person who more faithfully lived his values, and as a central teacher he gave his students the tools to study independently, to think independently, to think critically, never trampling their own values. He was too humble a man.
He understood the mysteries, despite his claiming on many occasions, אין לי עסק בנסתרות . He would not tolerate my often soft Carlebachian interpretations, chastising me with the comment "סתם דרוש" . Boy, did he have my number. Yet he often supported my fascination in study of the זוהר הקדוש by stating: "my father did likewise!" and my love of the midrashic mindset, with the claim that "Rav Riff knew midrash by heart!" He understood that each person had a particular נטייה in Torah that must be respected and nurtured.
More than anything, his methodology was to invite you, the listener, into his conversation, into his struggle with the פשט , and his sense of a solution; inviting you to critique, welcoming commentary. His שיעור was work in progress, an invitation to participate in his reverence for the text and his excitement for the process in its playfulness yet holding it accountable to his intellectual rigor. And most of all, his insistence in the layered and textual strata that laid beneath the text. The sharper his scalpel the deeper the treasures he uncovered. He taught me to see the ים של חכמה , the ים של תלמוד , as an even surface, yet beneath lay layers upon layers of geological constructions and he was going to unpack these layers and lay them before all to see the very architecture and the phylogeny of the text. And yet, ironically again, all the while maintaining a reverence for it, without disturbing its sacred integrity. Where did he learn to balance these complex worlds, the classical Talmudic study sugiah analysis and modern techniques of literary critical analysis?
In the last year or so, in his silence, in his שתיקה , I find myself asking questions more and more. What would Abba think? What would Abba say? What would Abba do? His character is the foundation of my conscience. His precision is the foundation of my self-criticism. His commitment is the foundation of my devotion. I hear his voice reverberating inside when confronting an ethical issue, a comatose patient, a halachic decision. It is of comfort. His word was his bond. He never uttered a lie. His ethics put us to shame. He fulfilled every obligation he undertook. He was self-made and self-reliant. His moral conscience saw no disparity between Torah and ethics. His tears on תשעה באב were genuine. His poetry in קינות broke one's heart. His ability to be משמח a חתן וכלה was famous. His dancing was dignified, his hands wafting in the air, gesticulating his warmth and love. Yet simultaneously he would provide a unique and dazzling דבר תורה in the process. 'How could the children of בית שמאי marry the children of בית הלל if their attributions of the כלה were so different?' You've heard it.
He was stern at times. Don't expect praise if you're his child or grandchild. You're not going to get it. That was not his educational style. He demanded only Excellent, and suffered fools not gladly when it came to כבוד התורה and כבוד for this בית הכנסת . Whether it be פורים or שמחת תורה , there was no let up when it came to קדושה .
His continuing interest in science, computers, mathematics and astronomy, his ongoing subscriptions to specialty magazines in medicine and biology, his amazing all-absorbing mind saw no conflict between these and Torah learning. It was seamless.
His love of Zion and his fierce belief in ארץ ישראל , his suspicions as to the motives behind religious extremism, and his embracing of the charedi and non-charedi world and his respect for the holy young men defending the state of Israel – the soldiers of צה"ל , were legendary. All this made for his truly being called a Mentch Yisrael in the Hirschian sense.
A philosopher he was not, nor claimed to be. He was an interpreter who stuck close to the פשוטו של מקרא , refusing fanciful, pilpulistic or Chasidic interpretations, yet at times his reflection was so deep he understood the mystery and paradox of life and the divine. In truth his insistence on פשט was mirrored in the rational cool calm personality he was in life. It was as if his life mirrored his hermeneutic. He would have made a great physicist but was told by Rav Hutner – "physics shmysics", and as a result we are better off, the Jewish world is better off, for those critical remarks. A life devoted to others, to people, to yidden, to Klal Yisroel. Always humble before those who knew less, never lording his knowledge over the poor or the ignorant. His respect for all life and the other reflected a general and genuine aristocratic soul.
We are now impoverished by his absence in our lives.
In the last few months, Sarah would wheel him into the dining-room on Shabbos. Unable to eat, unable to speak, he would lip-sync the Shobbos zmirot as we were singing it. Sarah went up to him last week and said: "I kiss you all the time, Abba; do you want to give me a kiss?" and she put her cheek close to his lips. And he kissed her.
My dearest Abba'le, forgive me. There were decisions to be made about you without your council and without your consent in the last year… I had to make them. I hope I fulfilled your wishes. You trained me well. I tried to intuit your real desire, your sense of integrity of the human body, not to be disturbed, invaded, prodded, poked… Yet what to do? The horror of that ICU, the total invasion of your privacy… Please forgive me.
We brought you home. I planted you a fern garden… you sat in the sunlight. I held your hand. Sarah, I cannot begin to describe your devotion so I won't even begin.
Abba'le, your silent presence in our home was our greatest gift. Your שתיקה was our הודאות . We were honored by the gift of your life. It will never be the same again.
You left us a day before spring.
The winter time we call on spring, and through the spring on summer call. And when abounding hedges ring declare that winter's best of all.
