The Grief of it All
“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.
Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.
Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.”
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
“Grief is love's souvenir. It's our proof that we once loved. Grief is
the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love
was once mine. I love well. Here is my proof that I paid the price.”
Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior: A Memoir
Born into grief
The mother’s scars,
The father’s unconscious betrayal,
The olive-skinned boy,
Too dark for the taste of the British racist teachers
Questioning too much,
Refusing to obey authority immediately,
A sense of the tragic already then
Permeates his being.
This inheritance of grief,
Born a mere 5 years after the tremendum
Those night panics,
The fear of death so early
A feeling that my life had already accordioned
And I was sensing my impending demise.
This sense of the tragic quality of life,
That fuels the very core of the universe,
That the divine catastrophe that was creation
(The Lurianic “breaking of the vessels”)
Affected every holographic particle,
Infected every heart (chalal hapanui)
Resulting in that the sum total of all human suffering.
My early horror seeing human suffering,
The amputee veteran opening the doors of Harrods,
And man’s inhumanity to man, so close.
My melted soul when facing the tears of another
My ability to question god and his justice,
So early
Now haunts my very interpretation of texts, history and culture.
It is as if
I cannot escape this globalizing tendency
Despite post-modern critique
Knowing full well that history is in the details
Having philosophically relinquished overarching thematics and trajectories
(Knowing that doctrine and ideology and historiography led to Auschwitz)
I still move in those drives to make meaning over the meaningless.
As if I feel that I cannot settle for the mundane and the particular
I search for the delusion of a Frankl universe, this elusive search for meaning,
The Father figure, who will make sense of it all finally,
The relief that the god-image might provide.
The sense of acceleration of time informs the tragic,
As if
My life’s path has so little time left
So much to still accomplish
And
Faced with my failures
And mediocrity
I hang suspended in this space of frustration.
Peculiar how grief rears its head
In the most unexpected places
In the moment of lovemaking
I am overcome with grief,
In the beauty of a pastoral landscape
It overwhelms me,
In holding my darling grandchildren
Their tiny heads in the nape of my neck,
Or my son resting on my chest on a Chesapeake Bay yacht
Under the stars, my heart melts in grief.
Anticipatory grief
Of things as yet to unfold
Of losing loved ones,
As yet to leave this world
Each parting a possible last.
Of body parts no longer functioning
And anticipating what is yet to afflict,
Of faculties, no longer able to sense
The beauty and mystery of music and a sunset.
Bathed in these tears,
I face the future
Drowning in grief
(It does not release me)
the little boy inside continues to be heard
pulling me to the deep,
inside the heart of darkness.
Rayna Batya
Not yet a year old
She beckons me with her hand
As if to say “Come Dada”
And leaves her mother’s arms for my embrace
Putting her head on my shoulder
She lies quietly and calm
As I stroke her slowly
And whisper “Dada loves you”
Today she uttered the word “Da”
And crowd to me on all fours.
I grab her placing my lips in the nape of her neck
With a “poid” a loud blow kiss that makes the sound of a belch.
As I hold her
Rocking slowly to calm her
I am in heaven once again
With each child
This age
When they first realize a Dada
And come to me
With open arms
And react to my invitation for
“Hoppa hoppa Reiter”
Some German child son my father used to sing
That I have bastardized
That even the older children laugh at when I sing
The moment is frozen in time for each child
And now Rayna Batya’s time has come.
For these few months I will be in heaven
As each one responds to me as Dada
After which they will become more and more socialized
And I will recede into their pantheon of elders.
For now I am in heaven
This deep connection does of course, much more for me,
As I join the long chain of fathers and grandfathers
Who hug their children and grandchildren unconditionally.
This embrace puts everything else in life into perspective
Making everything else meaningful
And worth all the time effort trouble and sorrow
As she lies on my neck
I am filed with a lightness of heart
And a fullness of being
This little peanut does that to me
Her green eyes
Her smile and giggles
Her soft skin
In one little bundle
Holding me
Helpless
Dependent
Yet in full control
She is aware!
pre-verbal
Yet her little vocal gestures inform us all of her desire
As if she has not need(as yet) for language
She conveys all through her eyes and expression
Her inspiratory sighs
And her wild gesticulations
She draws this love out of me
It is as wide as the ocean
And as she slowly falls to sleep in my arms
I know the future is certain
And I am comforted.
The Ghost Called God
What if,
This apparition we used to name God
This ghost of certainties past
That haunts our deepest wells of conviction
That moves around our subterranean cerebral caverns
And pricks our nocturnal obsessions,
What if,
The ghost moves around us despite ourselves
Despite our conscious efforts to resist
Despite the rational mind
The knowledge and Kultur,
The sophistication and refinement of theology,
What if,
She leaves us not alone
In the face of our desire to be rid of Her
Like an old girlfriend who keeps stalking you
As your original feelings have been drowned out
by her persistent need to control you,
Forcing you to flee like a bird
From her suffocating grasp.
What if,
All your careful maps of history and theology
Of science and thought,
Of certainty of the randomness of reality, and the singularity of the
Mistake we call human life on earth,
Of the absent “intelligent design” as just another modern day theology,
Are challenged by this ghost of childhood fantasy.
(Remember those heady days when you really felt Her
On the Finchley Brook bench at night under the star filled sky
Overwhelmed at 15 by the sheer majesty of the universe)
And the certainty of the sky-god’s “manifold manifestations”.[1]
What if,
Despite all this,
Despite the acceptance of my own limits
And mediocrity,
And other limits of my own understanding
(of quantum physics, deeper philosophical discourse
Academic acrobatics, even talmudic dialectics needed for the worst sugyas)
And moral failures, betrayals and deceits,
Despite my intuitive knowing of what is real and true,
She keeps surfacing…
A haunting in the Stanley Kubrick sense
A presence that will not leave even as I rage against any authority
Any intelligence with a claim to moral conscience,
That allowed or stood by while so many went up in smoke
in the ovens of Europe.
What if,
I have no choice,
Like my failing body,
Slowly allowing decay to move in
Both in the brain and pancreas
The loss of energy earlier in the day
The sleep-lesser nights
The skin discolorations
The ever greater need for daily routine
And lowered levels of tolerance for others.
No choice to Her haunting presence.
What if,
My loss of choice to refuse Her
Leaks into my awareness of decline
And acceptance of earthly finitude
And sense of tragedy
About life, love, and connectedness
About my own moral integrity
And theological indignation
What if,
This ghostly apparition
Is a mirror image of my-self?
[1] The name of my beloved grandfather’s unpublished book “God and His Manifold Manifestations” circa 1930
Prisoner Without Bars
LIKE A PRISONER WITHOUT BARS
I stand fixed in my cell,
They tell me there is a way out
An exit strategy,
If only,
I would recover,
Keep this Halacha or that
Learn this Masechta or that
Have more faith,
Those old familiar voices (the kitik inside my head)
Here in the Holy City,
It is quiet.
The street observes the Sabbath too you know!
The calm and sensory relief from the noise of bustling traffic
Envelopes her stoned houses and communal buildings.
This of course, only exacerbates my guilt!
This brick of basic observance…the Shabbat!
As a human construction,
The brilliant mind of ancient prophets and scribes
Foreseeing the need for this sacred day
Brought to fruition,
Today!
Acts as a further indictment of my doubting faith.
I could just walk away
Go other places
Blunt this feeling
Understand the social trajectory of human creative thought
Realize the common historical
cross-cultural patterns of religion and myth
As I have done,
But why does it still hold me then?
Why do I love the silent streets?
Knowing the system that produced this, needs
People who believe
Who practice
Obsessively
Who will throw stones if it is violated,
A medieval trade.
In jail,
Those I learn with I cannot talk to,
Those I pray with I cannot learn with,
And the others do not even understand the problem!
Like the couple last night who are Baalei Teshuva from WACO Texas
(!)
Their certainty was stifling,
Their belief, professed of course, in public without shame,
was insufferable,
And their deafness to my subtle view of the divine was frustrating.
I am a prisoner
Of my own making
A community of one
The bars remain in my illusion
Holding me in
Restraining me from further growth
Knowing there is an outside
Yet mistrusting what they are selling
Afraid of losing my partner in the process
And those whose naive approval I still need.
How painful the double life is
As if
The Rabbi does not know
As if
He does not get “complaints”
But more painful is my mediocrity
Not to have carved out a system of thought
Knowing full well how I mistrust such systems
Of having nothing but grief to offer…
Of my inability to get past the fact of God’s inaction
In the face of a million and a half babies who went up in smoke filled
crematoria, the stench of THAT does not escape me for a moment
And infects every thought of a benevolent deity.
The Shul as a jail
Where the other prisoners shockle with wide brimmed black hats
Tallis over their heads
Tsitzis dangling out and longer than the black jackets
Like a white stream of faith pouring from their certainty.
Proudly demonstrating their commitment to Halachic minutiae.
Shouting the credo aloud!
“lesakein olam bemalchut shaddai”
(as if God is hard of hearing)
or… “yehei shmei rabba”
fulfilling the rabbinic dictum,
that he who screams this, will be rewarded…
All this profession of outer faith
All this God talk..
All this inner emptiness..
Now nauseates me.
I feel literally claustrophobic
And must run away
But my shthender protests!
How can you leave me!
What will people think?
You know your wife will ask Morty where you are!
And there will be consequences!
Even worse the jail of the past!
I am forced to drive my mother in-law and wife to listen
to Tova Lichtenstein last week,
along with 200 adoring women.
Her erudition and delivery is flawless
Her derision of Hassidim fervent,
Her love of learning as the Rav’s daughter, expected
Her devotion to her husband’s use of secular poetry, refreshing,
But her defense of him, curious, as she carved out his truth:
Between the Haredi world of scholarship
and her put down of pop culture
“He only meant hi-brow…Nothing after the 17th century interested him.”
As if this gave him some kind of hechsher validation.
The next day I am feeling nostalgia for those years spent in Boston with
the Rav, I owe him so much, what a transference!
What an authority figure for me!
As he validated the schizofrumkeit of Torah and Madaa
Of secular knowledge alongside Torah
Of the divided soul of Adam
Of the Lonely Man of Faith.
How many years I was spellbound until I realized the untenable
Quicksand this really was, for my soul.
Hassidut was my therapy..
It spoke to the soul not the mind
And was a real barrier to the Brahman Boston intellectual elite.
It also provided an real intellectual path
even though it professed the mystical.
The nostalgia quickly turned to guilt,
and a sense of betrayal
For after all,
This Sunday evening room filled with sane, normal people in Skokie
Was such a light relief to the black Rogers Park Haredi orthodoxy!
Yet even here I was a prisoner of the post…
Postmodern and Post rational, post centrist orthodoxy
Post all these doctrinal differences.
The sense of middle ground as she admitted and well-articulated,
The path of her father and husband was the “Brisker”,
proudly announced,
Yet she failed to acknowledge the rejection of the real Brisker dynasty,
The other side of the family who had expelled them of course,
For their straying from the extreme Brisker path
and their approaches to secular learning, and their avowed Zionism.
This centrism could not hold even in Artscroll/Lakewood America,
And so, the elegiac tone was not merely for her mourning
the recent loss of her husband,
it also encompassed her father’s legacy.
In this deep frame of depression
I faced the week
But the universe was kind!
There was a key to the door of the jail the next morning in an email.
Theology of Absence- Interview with Yishai Mevorach, an editor
of Rav Shagar’s writings.
by Alan Brill
Brill writes:
“The students and colleagues of Rav Shagar each developed different aspects of his thought. Rav Yair Dreyful, his co-founder of Yeshivat Siach Yitzhak emphasizes the emotive and personal existential value of Torah and mizvot. Some of his students, emphasize the need to re-integrate mysticism and meditation, of Rebbe Nachman, Chabad, Zohar, Rav Zadok, and Rebbe Kalonymus Kalman Shapira. Others prefer intellectual discussions of post-modernity, language games, paradox, and Israeli society. Some of his students learned from him a need to be open and found paths in psychotherapy, poetry writing, filmmaking, and scholarship. Yishai Mevorach, one of the editors of the Rav Shagar’s writings, looked where he was pointing and went forward into the chaos. The universe is kind!” [1]
As if I was being given a message
Despite your jail!
There are no bars!
This trajectory of yours is shared with others,
Who struggle with the same writers and Rebbes,
Who see chaos and a post-Holocaust nightmarish world without God
Yet do not wish to give up on our tradition!
But remain in the space between tradition and modernity.
Soloveitchik and Lichtenstein lived in a pre-postmodern era
Where history meant fact
And philosophy meant certainty
Where science meant optimism in the future of mankind,
But now?
After Auschwitz
After all went up in flames.
Including certainty and faith.
How could you continue as if
It had never happened?
In this new Jail, I now reside
The bars may not be there
But emotionally I feel them
Constraining my flight from this overwhelming task
Not to leave this world without making sense of the desolation.
I run from it every day
I fill the day with everything BUT this duty.
Except for moments like these
In the Holy City
Which beckons even me
To respond
With a new hallucination.
Here there is clarity.
Our task?
To see the vertical only in the horizontal
We can no longer afford the luxuries of religious fervor
Our hands upward in prayer to the Silent One above
No
We need a moratorium on the god word
A cessation of hyper religious expression in public
As long as those horrors out there,
The genocide and mass murder,
The child slavery and global exploitation of the poor continues,
The collusion of global corporations with international banks and
politicians in an unholy alliance that make the rich even richer,
And of course, the destruction of climate and mother earth,
Stop all the piety!
Stop the self-indulgence
The feel-good sanctity
The frumkeit
Please!
Because in fact we are all in this jail without bars, together.
[1] Mevorach recently published a book called Theology of Absence: On Faith after Chaos (Resling Publishing, 2016) 171 pp, [Hebrew] where he is developing a postsecular, post-modern theology from Rav Shagar. (Resling publishes translations of works of literary and philosophic theory.)
The Pocket Watch
For Abba
In the twighlight
You find your comfort-
In the grayness of that in-betweeness
That Halacha often finds uncomfortable,
There you have made your life’s labor of love.
Bein Hashmashos
That in-between space, between
Light and dark, heaven and earth, G-d and man,
Where those parts of creation that “just did not fit”
Were finally brought to being (midrashically)-
In that space you labored your life, in love.
So what better gift from those who love
Admire and respect you
Than this gift of precision and antiquity
A man-made apparatus
Invented by human ingenuity
To tell the difference between day and night, dark and light
And the minutiae of daily life as it is lived
But broken into solitary fragments
Hour by hour-Minute by minute-
A pocket watch of antiquity
From an age when men had to slip their hands
Into their waist coat pockets
To retrieve this precious machine
In an act of gravitas
In an act of withdrawing into the moment
Into that in-between space, between
A lived life and an observed life.
What better token of our love
Than this antique piece
Which bears the silver of its years
And the era of its industry
With the dignity of its mission
To plainly and humbly tell time
As you have done, observing so many sunsets over the Hudson
In your research into those ancient scholars
And their pursuit of a defining moment
When the sun finally wanes
And succumbs with such dignity.
וּמִבְּשָׂרִי, אֶחֱזֶה אֱלוֹה “Umivsari Echeze Bo”
וּמִבְּשָׂרִי, אֶחֱזֶה אֱלוֹהַּ
“ And when after my skin this is destroyed, then without my flesh shall I see God”
Job 19:26
Looking out on the landscape below
Some thousand feet up in the tropical rain forest
All the way to the blue coast line
In the distance
I feel the benign soft hand of mother nature Laying out the
green forest canopy like a carpet For my eyes to glide down
Beckoning me into her arms
In a lush embrace.
No wonder the ancients worshipper her
Afraid too, of her fierce rage.
But today she is calm
The rain clouds, despite the humidity
Allow for a tepid warmth
Protecting us from the fierce Caribbean sun.
Then the sky gods arrived
And later, the Old Testament
With justice and mercy
And all manners of reasoning,
And the price to pay was all manner of demythologizing,
Allowing for the illusion of the beginnings and.. the ends of
time Where the final reckoning might take place
And the payoff for sin or redemption.
As if the psychic projections of mankind needed this sense
Of right and wrong,
But with it, the tyrant god mirroring the tyrant king.
And so
We inherit this psychic embryology
Projecting good and right on the divine
And bad and evil onto the devil
A split psyche with its public persona and private
darkness within.
But looking down today
It feels good to embrace her once again
Free from the social, religious and cultural constraints
Free from the traffic and noise,
Free from the expectations of work, family and social order.
For a few minutes.
Yet fixing and healing must be done The work must continue
The “tikkun” will take place willy-nilly And it must begin here and now
Within me.
How to deal with the darkness within
The wounds of the past bearing heavily on the present.
How to become more compassionate
More open
More willing to tolerate and suffer
Not to be triggered
Not to be afraid
Not to see work as an escape from the inner task at hand.
How to stop projecting it all on the sky god or the devil
How to stop projecting the wounds of the past onto the divine
How to own the inner demons
These questions remain
Here today.
Yea “I went to the woods” alright
But Waldon Pond is no longer accessible
There is no time
Everything is accelerating
Living is a cyber whirlwind
And just keeping up is breathtaking.
So, let me enjoy her warmth and lush carpet of green
Beckoning me today
A moment of respite
In an aging mind
Becoming stuck in routine
To avoid the ultimate questions
We all face
And realizing how fragile this all is This time
This place
In me
To resist the constant sense of failure Morally,
intellectually and socially For just this moment.
Perspective
Over the wide blue ocean
The puffy white clouds suspended,
Gentle wisps,
The deep azure sky above,
Beyond which, limitless space.
This expanse of blue,
Reminds me not of the sky-blue thread
And certainly not of the Throne of Glory
As the Rabbis would have it..
No, rather my own mortality,
And how little time we have on this glorious earth,
And how temporary is our existence,
How futile our self-imposed meaning
When compared with the majesty of nature.
In the daily grind of traffic
And the gray urban landscape,
(How we destroyed such beauty
For the sake of industry
And greed)
I have almost forgotten this.
Our culture in decline,
Surprised as to how predictable this is becoming
And how we thought we were immune.
But join as we must
The litany of great empires of past
The greed of their wealthy class,
The murmurings of the underclass.
The militarism and excuses for war…
The diagnostic pointers are present once again,
The loss of decency and charity,
The ridicule of education and erudition,
The acceptance of gun violence and state sponsored police brutality,
The spawning of lies from the top down.
From 6000 feet it all seems remote
This miracle of flight,
This steel bird gently purring across the great sky blue,
In the comfort of these seats,
Sipping a Bloody Mary (so early in the day!)
Her liquid redness in stark contrast to the blue outside.
It seems almost irrelevant,
Away from the tumult
And few minutes respite from CNN,
As if, we are in church
On a spiritual odyssey
As if…
This flight..
Is meant to teach and instruct
To provide a hint
To the infinite oneness beyond
The invisible -yet soon to be revealed- galaxies at night
Of our meagre lives…
And…
Perspective.
In the bigger picture
We must not lose sight of our commonalities
With each other
With nature
With the opposing parties
With people of opposing views
With difference
With ethnicity
With sexual preference
With class distinction
With wealth.
In this wide expanse
We are a tiny fleck
In history
In geography
In time.
The Looking Glass
Today I woke up, looked into the mirror
at the aging face, the scars and skin tags
the cuts and tiny imperfections, our aging skins
unmistakably reminding us...
The inner flaws and decades of lies,
deceits and betrayals of self and others
The shortcomings and character defects
shall I continue?
Then it dawned on me
the Almighty deals with every human being
every day....
He is the very mirror behind the mirror
looking in on each of us as we brush our teeth and shave...
for centuries and millennia..
putting up with, suffering our flaws
human flaws...
humanities' imperfections
the wars, the terror
man's inhumanity to man
shall I continue?
Then I had an outpouring of rachmonus
of compassion for Him, Ribono shel Olam!
what You have to put up with!!
oi vey!
oi vey!
I am so sorry for you!!!
You are so condemned to eternity
there is or never will be an end of this for YOU!!
You condemned Yourself to history!
Then I realized..
What the Degel Machaneh Ephraim meant
by his Baal Shem Tov teaching, that all our flaws are
also a reflection of the identical flaw in the Shekhinah!
So....She is the one behind the mirror!
So.... we must pray for HER!
(and the Baal Shem Hakadosh claims,)
then we will be automatically "fixed" (tikkun)
when She gets fixed.
The Meshulach
Of all the “visitors” to our home,
No one challenges me like the Meshulach.
Uninvited, his image appears on my CCTV screen
All I can see is the black hat,
Cannot make out features.
Cannot recognize him from last year (there are so many).
Collecting for this charity or that,
or a yeshiva specializing in this particular area of Halachah
Or merely for themselves, their families, their mountain of debt.
The false intimacy is readily audible.
The flattery is predictable, my connections with Brisk,
Reb Chayim mi-Volozhyn, Breslov, etc. etc. The Yichus!
They look for the pitch,
Yet they exercise me so!
I chide my spouse that in the next world we will asked at the pearly gates
“Did you spend time in study?
“Did you engage in marital relations?
“Did you yearn for the Messiah?”
(The three classical questions cited in the Talmud.)
Then the Divine One will poke us in the ribs and say
“Did you take care of my Meshulach?”
And that seems to get me out of my resistance and inertia
To descend the steps to the front door
Where, often hiding behind the one Meshulach, is a car load of others.
I offer a drink, (Chicago is brutal in summer and worse in winter).
Most do not remove their footwear, leaving a trail across the hallway
which will need mopping up,
And now the pitch begins.
I have heard it so many times
But each Meshulach demands his time
To present his very unique need for my charity.
In my mind as I listen, compassion slowly grows,
Knowing the drudgery he faces daily
Knocking on door after door, often rejected, humiliated.
And fear that one day I too, might be collecting like him, to survive.
But more than this fear,
The Meshulach forces me to dig
deeper and deeper into my well of compassion
He is the litmus test-on a daily basis- as to my well’s water level
He stretches this digging process to the limits.
Tired, hungry and in no mood for such entertainment,
These nightly visits force me to choose between opening the door
Or ignoring the multiple knocks.
The other challenge is in the amount I feel I should give.
(I have three circles of giving.
The inner circle is charities
such as alma maters and synagogues
for my children and my wife and I.
Those institutions we feel we owe a debt of gratitude.
Easy to give and easy to determine
the annual amount since we have a track record.
The outer circle is easy as well…
These are total strangers who we give a minimal amount
and are dismissed happily.
It is the middle circle that constantly challenges me.
These are the ones that demand from us,
Make claims on us, pressure us to give more,
and require resistance or surrender.)
They are very clever, employing such tactics in a few moments,
worthy of intelligence operatives.
Yet deep down I know they are being sent to test us.
To test our deepest character traits and flaws,
of patience, grace, hospitality, triggers to anger
And compassion.
Often I fail
But fear not
Another comes soon after.
Will they all be there to greet me in the next world?
Fingers pointed at me in accusation?
Siding with the divine district attorney in condemning me to eternal guilt?
Thinking I am done with the day on arriving home,
(The litany of patient complaints and suffering
having filled my heart with sorrow)
Exhausted from the advice and struggle, the drama of the employees,
I just want to rest and recharge.
Just then the door bell rings!
The Meshulach allows me no such luxury.
And the nightly ritual begins.
Tikkun Olam, Really?
Really?
We can fix this?
What about Leonard Cohen’s last interview where he adjures us:
“omit the slogans!”
What about his definition of a saint?
What is a saint?
A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility.
It is impossible to say what that possibility is.
I think it has something to do with the energy of love.
Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance
in the chaos of existence.
A saint does not dissolve the chaos;
if he did the world would have changed long ago.
I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself,
for there is something arrogant and warlike
in the notion of a man setting the universe in order.
It is a kind of balance that is his glory.
He rides the drifts like an escaped ski.
His course is the caress of the hill.
His track is a drawing of the snow
in a moment of its arrangement with wind and rock.
Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself
to the laws of gravity and chance.
Far from flying with the angels,
he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state
of the solid bloody landscape.
His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world.
He can love the shape of human beings,
the fine and twisted shapes of the heart.
It is good to have among us such men,
such balancing monsters of love.
“Arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order”
What about Rumi?
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.
Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
After all the exhortations, what is left?
We are to repair the face of God, Cohen tells us, not the world! [1]
All the movements to change the world ended in violence
Genocide, racism, bigotry.
Man’s inhumanity to man begins with ideology.
So, in a post-Holocaust, post-critical, genocidal world
Where is the Tikkun? Where is the mending?
Who are the agents of fixing?
Beyond the middle-class bourgeois
Rationalizing their life style choices
With this charity or that under the slogan “Tikkun Olam”
I look in the mirror and ask
Fix who? What? And the answer stares me in the face…. Me!?
Out there, no! inside…
Now own it!
Own the fixing!
Own the past
Own the abuse
Own the hurt you inflicted and the hurt done to you
Own this bloody Holocaust yes! That too!
After all the years of obsessing
All the theology attempted
All the dead ends found
Own it all.
Own your aging
And that despite all the struggles to free yourself
Own the neediness for approval, for validation, for love
For the eye of a pretty girl
For the Rabbi’s nod.
Own your impotence
Own your failures
Own your need to be relevant
Own your need for your children and grandchildren
Own your betrayals
Own your heresy
Now own this election
Own your society’s choice
Its decision for madness
Own its blanket bombing
Own the drones in far-away places
Own Dresden and Tokyo
Own the Allies’ firebombing
Stop the Tikkun for others for the world
when you still need the fixing yourself!
Stop even the Tikkun for yourself
You spend decades fixing nothing.
Just own it.
Hold it.
Sweeten it.
Maybe that way you might denervate it from its sting.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL1yaiLCQPM
While Israel Burns
“And who by fire, who by water,
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
Who in your merry merry month of may,
Who by very slow decay,
And who shall I say is calling?
And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate,
Who in these realms of love, who by something blunt,
And who by avalanche, who by powder,
Who for his greed, who for his hunger,
And who shall I say is calling?
And who by brave assent, who by accident,
Who in solitude, who in this mirror,
Who by his lady's command, who by his own hand,
Who in mortal chains, who in power,
And who shall I say is calling?”
In Memoriam, Leonard Cohen
Arriving on Thanksgiving (sic)
Israel burns
I do not feel the heat
Nor the smell of burning trees
Like I once did when the Ramot forest behind my house burned
No, this is different,
Seen only the TV screen,
From the vantage of the Elysium fields and the brilliant skies of Jerusalem
Only visual images of cloudy skies over Haifa,
it is merely a chimera,
(Arutz Sheva or CNN,)
And papers with op-ed recriminations as to
the Prime Minister’s ineptitude or worse
His blatant funneling of government funds
appropriated for fire tankers and a “super” 747
To settlements, instead of learning
from the last catastrophe…
Israel burns
On Thanksgiving,
She burns like those forests in California and Oregon
But here it is blamed on terrorists,
arsonist with political motive
If you can’t beat the army, or terrorize the civilian population
Burn the land you love!
Everything here is imputed to motive.
Israel burns
On Thanksgiving,
The flames are familiar
From the Second Temple and Titus
To the burnings in Mainz Speyer and Worms
And the villages of Galitzia
Chmielniki,
The Witches of Salem
Jesse Washington (Waco 1916)
From the flamethrowers of WWI
that terrorized teenage soldiers in the trenches
And the cyclone-B corpses
The towns of Dresden and Tokyo
(Both sides use flames)
ISIS burnings in a cage
Those girls who refused them sex
We are so outraged by the social media coverage
Brought to our smart phones
But nothing has changed.
Flames no longer contained in Hephaestus’ hearth,
No longer a smith for weapons of war
Now loosened by his impotence
(He too was rejected by his mother)
Israel burns on Thanksgiving
Because of the unique wind pattern and humidity
A freak of nature
the scientists tell us
But then nature is changing
And the world is warming
And the President elect refuses to believe science
This fire of rage
Trump supporters beating up free speech advocates
He winks and nods and looks away
The fire of the storm troopers
The burning of Kristallnacht books
Is only a generation away
The civility of Adenauer’s Europe is over.
Israel burns on Thanksgiving
And a piece of us burns inside
In impotence
In rage
The fire in Chernobyl never died
The cooling towers of Fukushima Daiichi
Cannot cope
The coolness of critical thought is insufficient
To put these fires out
They must burn until there is no fuel left.
Our prophet left us last week
His words seem eerily manifest.
Hymns To The Schechina
Oh there You are!
Was wondering where You had gone…
Actually it was I who was out to lunch
You know,
The brain does its thing
The Kritik remains in overtime
The doubting Thomas pokes his finger
Into the wound,
And the reality per reality bears down so heavily
Once more I retreated
Must be a year now
Thinking my self-worth and approval might come
From a local, earthly, social source…
All that work!
All the neediness.
But in the process I neglected You
And You
Came back at me with a rude awakening
A vengeance
For now
Rejected
Betrayed
And exposed!
I return,
Knees bent
Humbled
For having neglected You.
In the Mikvah yesterday
I melted
And Rebbe’s Torah Tinyana 12
Picked me up once more
By his paradox
His humanity
As if he had truly been there
Rock bottom
As well
Alongside me
And was giving me advice
Suddenly
The tears welled up
And this “kavod” he speaks of
This glory made itself present
As I sit today at my shtender in the quiet Beis Medrash
Humbled by the presence of Thou.
It’s not like an I-Thou
Thing..though
I expect no verbal response
But this non-rational sensation came to me
And comforted me
So that this morning my legs went to the Mikvah to dissolve in its waters
And wash the soul of its filth.
I feel optimistic today
Ready to enter the Succah
And feel the “Succot Dovid ha-Nofales”
Feel Her pain, the ongoing Galut
And the “shelter of faith”
We claim in our sacred texts.
In a sacred space
This morning the world is right
Everything is at it should be
Despite the suffering
Despite the self-loathing
Despite the long history of failure
The morning fog hangs over the landscape
Like a blanket of white wool
And the glorious tree
Whose dying leaves reveal their true color
In front of my home
Reminds me that nature too is incarnated.
We are expected to emerge from the safety of our homes into this
Temporary dwelling the Succah
And as the Midrash claims [1]
we somehow pre-empt any divine decree of Galut
By exiling ourselves into the Succah.
This year has been a long exile
So it feels comfortable, even familiar to sit here under the Schechina.
In the dying of the leaves
Their true color emerges
This tree before my home
Reminds me of temporality
For she will have shed her glorious leaves in a couple of weeks
Leaving the bare bark to endure the long winter’s discontent.
It arrests me as I leave my home
I cannot just pass it by
It lays claim to me
Reminding me
There is work to do
A trace of my voyage here to leave.
[1] Psikta deRav Kahana “Nosafot” to Deut 16:13
Post-Halachik Halacha
Post-Halachic Halacha
Avoid the halachic Rabbi/rabbit hole!
Standing on the verge of that chasm,
Seeing the darkness so deep
Don’t take the bait!
For once having fallen you will always lose.
There will always be a Litvak or worse a Brisker
To entrap you with the brilliance of their Halachic construction!
You will have already lost.
Realize only this, as a poor consolation
Halacha is a late historical cultural construction
A product of the medieval mind’s obsession with
Imprisoning its mythical rich late antique tradition
In a rational exoskeleton (looking apologetically over their philosophic shoulders)
Like their Arabic Mutakallim compatriots
Snuffing out all individualism and anarchy.
Codified in the RAMBAM, ROSH and TUR
Now finally we have a constitution
needing generation after generation of further finessing.
Its elitist interpreters-all male-from then down to the 20th century
Poskim, brilliant jurist alike-
Pontificate about women’s bodies and judicial rights,
Their t’shuvot etched in black ink on white paper
Reflecting the collective male communal fear
The dark letters mirroring the black veils,
They would have women wear
hiding all female anatomical parts that might inflame
The communal male androgyny.
You still flock to their altar
Bend the knee at their confessionals,
Check in at the halachic counter,
Where the Dayan, grey faced, bearded and wise
pronounces the p’sak “treif”!
90% of the time- you know it!
Begging for a little leeway?
A gap in the door?
To allow for the egalitarian this or that
But my darling
he sees right though you
He has a radar for this going back to the Chasam Sofer’s battles with Reform
Trained in guerilla warfare
He sees your intent
And like all others under threat
buttons down the hatches in Kansas for the impending cyclone.
Give it up already girl!
The Wizard is exposed behind the curtain.
But none see him for what he is.
Once free of this social construction of violence
This travesty over the bodies of others
Return to the texts!
After all they inhabit you
Like some mythic creature
They require your ongoing attention
The trace you will leave is on their interpretation
Stripped of moralisms and halachic implications.
They will play their notes though you
Allowing your soul to sing.
Ironic how brainwashed we were growing up
As to the ills of reform and liberals!
How they began the “slippery slope” theory in orthodox shuls in Germany
Now infesting all orthodox theology. Mendelssohn became the ultimate villain
(I remember Rabbi Cooper’s diatribes against Louis Jacobs in 1966
using the slippery slope argument in our high school Rabbinics class)
As if we could have avoided modernity…
By using Hirschian, Hoch Deutsch or Rabbi Sack’s flowery Cambridge accent
As if we could ignore modern Bible Criticism High or Low! As if we could accommodate all this in “Modern Orthodoxy”
No wonder the Kiruv movement, the Breslovers and Chabadskers
The Art Scrollers and the Aish sophisticates have appeal
Where else is there a feeling to be found for authenticity?
The young have seen through all the Soloveitchik apologetics
Flocking to Carlebach as a yearning for the real homey mythic experience
There is no alternative.
But the truth must emerge
Nevertheless
And it is painful
The mouth can no longer articulate the liturgy staring accusingly from the pages
The voice cannot sing the melodies
The buttocks cannot sit on the firm wooden pews
The mind can no longer listen to the priest’s homiletics
Only silent witnessing
Like a Quaker
Awaiting the spirit to move one to the inner voice
That never comes.
A silence that can only tolerate veneration under a dark Atterbury sky
In awe of Orion pursuing Lepus
Or a late Beethoven Quartet.
In awe of my father’s devotions
Daily performing in the month of Elul
His shofar, loud and shrill
Decades of commitment
His refusal to eat, to this day, without seeing the hechsher
Having sacrificed so much during the war for the kashrus
His t’fillin donned daily having stood up to Captain Smith of Her Majesty’s Merchant Navy
“in those boxes is your bible too!” melting the hardened heart of Smith (who then relented
and saved his t’fillin from being thrown overboard.)
Then sharing them with other prisoners for the remainder
of the nine-week voyage to Australia
in U boat infested waters of the South Atlantic.
All these halachic observances
Will they die with me?
How can I sincerely face their bite?
Each observance another indictment
Each Mitzva an arrow of criticism
Every movement scrutinized for the Brisker chumrah
And found wanting
What happens when each Mitzva represents another wound?
Another festering sore?
From the psychological wounds
To the spiritual opportunity
To dig deeper into the well of compassion
For the little boy
Embarrassed and ridiculed
Skin too dark for the British school
Conditional love-only available
Still finding the deeper space wide enough
Only the texts now give healing
And allow for my wounded interpretation
A little peace of mind
God's Amnesia
“God’s Amnesia
Pray to God.
Against God,
For God . . . .
Ani maamin for him In spite of him.
I believe in you,
Even against your will.
Even if you punish me
For believing in you.”
--Ani Maamin: A Song Lost and Found Again, Wiesel
“A theology that states personhood and the self, dissolve as memory fades is a theology controlled by biological and neurological categories, not merely informed by them.”
“Dementia” Living in the Memories of God by John Swinton
What if
After 2000 years
Of this long haul of persecution
We have arrived at this nightmarish landscape
Of celestial silence.
No communication,
(Well at least no prophecy, visions, deus ex machina events
Revelations, portents)
Despite the ongoing daily prayers and tears of multitudes
Thronging to worship centers, the Kotel, Uman, 770, shuls and shtiebls.
Praying to our Old Testament God as always
Hopeful for the Messiah to be sent shortly.
What if,
Our divine image/imagining has faded
Our sense of His presence is blurred at the edges,
Our connection is marred by noise?
And, If Herr Rabiner Dr. Freud is correct
What if
Our Fatherly projection of God
Has followed its earthly model?
Watching our fathers in decline
Whether it be short term memory loss
Confusional episodes
Agitations or
Sudden bursts of rage
And the like.
What if
Our Divine Father
Has (kivyachol, of course)
Anthropomorphically speaking (of course)
With the greatest respect due (of course)
Entered a similar aging process (God forbid)
And our earthly projections of
Longer lifespans which have recently un-covered the decaying brain
The tangles and plaques of amyloid infiltrating the cells of the grey matter
The slow atrophy of the cerebral hemispheres,
Alzheimer’s, pre-senile dementias,
These too, surely,
Must accurately reflect themselves in the projected image
of the Divine Father (chas veshalom).
Which might explain His absence recently
During, say, our own Holocaust, or in Hiroshima,
Pol Pot massacres of 2 million, Bosnia and, as we speak, Aleppo.
Now I must qualify this heresy, this holy Apikorsus,
By saying that my description has nothing
Absolutely nothing
To do with the “real Divine”
Who, our philosophers claim
Remains perfect, without blemish or character flaw,
Unchanging and unmoved, perfect and with foreknowledge,
The Maimonidean “Prime Mover” or “First Thought” etc.
The God of the Jewish philosophers down to Hermann Cohen.
Rather I am moving along a slightly different trajectory
Of midrashic and mythic valence.
Whereby a living relationship between creator and creature
Has existed in covenant, in a dynamic interaction,
Where the actions and thoughts of one, influences the other,
Where emotions of one affect the other
And the behavior of either affects the relationship.
This very anthropopathic connection has even leaked into our liturgy
Which proclaims a loving connection between God and His creatures,
And a neediness for God to hear our prayers.
“God desires the suffering of his righteous ones”
and sends them pain and illness to try
What is there to explain a fracture in such a relationship
Where deep trust issue have arisen
Where the silence from above is deafening
And the sense of betrayal is palpable (as in Psalm 22)
ב אֵלִּי אֵלִּי, לָמָה עֲזַבְתָנִּי; רָחוֹק
מִּישוּעָתִּי, דִּבְרֵי שַאֲגָתִּי.
2 My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me,
and art far from my help at the words of my cry?
ג אֱלֹהַי--אֶקְרָא יוֹמָם, וְלאֹ
תַעֲנֶה; וְלַיְלָה, וְלאֹ-דֻמִּיָה לִּי.
3 O my God, I call by day, but Thou answer not;
and at night, and there is no surcease for me.
So many have tried
From Berkowitz and Soloveitchik to Rubinstein and Wiesel,
Only to leave me frustrated with words
And numb in the heart.
Maybe just maybe
We are dealing with a Divine Father in decline
Or worse a case of Divine dementia?
His absence from Auschwitz was not then intended
His silence from Hiroshima was not then malicious
His lack of response to evil was not a hester panim.
We then have no need to resort to medieval Jewish philosophy
Or question Divine justice,
We avoid the classic philosophical problems of evil and theodicy
Which remain unanswered after millennia.
Shlomo was on track by suggesting the problem was not in us,
Not our fault,
Not, chas veshalom in Klal Yisroel
(An unbearable burden, some Gedolim might have us bear)
maybe he mused
the fault was in the holy Torah!
The Torah had somehow failed us
We needed a new Torah
The Torah of the Messiah
This, however, still allows the Divine off the hook
And allows for a million and a half babies to go up in smoke
Collectively
For some thought some reason some rationale
And that is even more unbearable.
No, No, we must once again take the horrific step
A step that might lose us our olam habaah
A hermeneutical move so dangerous we might lose our sanity
But so be it
As we struggle for meaning NOT rationality.
So returning to our medical model
Of decline,
We all see this in our own earthly fathers surely
Watching them slowly deteriorate
Slowly narrow their focus
The visual acuity of their perspective narrows
The perception of their world blurs
Their judgment on life becomes crustaceous.
The Confusional episodes slowly grow in number and concern…
Yet we, as children, remain devoted
And tolerant of their slow decline
Despite the memory lapses
Despite the perseverations and anomias
And even the emotional outbursts
And frustrations
Even the occasional moments of self-awareness of decline.
So why not accept the same for the Heavenly Father (chas veshalom)
Who has secluded Himself in isolation,
Fearful (kivyachol) to go outside for embarrassment
Silently holed up in His study
Looking at the family photo album
Leafing through the Biblical pages
Of stories and battles long gone
Of heroes and prophets
Like an old VFW soldier.
Compassion for the Heavenly Father
Requires much patience and endurance
Just like down here on earth we patiently attend to our parents
“Long suffering and forbearance, slow to anger and mostly compassionate”
וַיַעֲבֹר יְהֹוָה | עַל פָנָיו וַיִּקְרָא יְהֹוָה | יְהֹוָה אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן אֶרֶךְ אַפַיִּם וְרַב חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת : נֹצֵר חֶסֶד לָאֲלָפִּים נֹשֵא עָוֹן וָפֶשַע וְחַטָאָה וְנַקֵה לאֹ יְנַקֶה פֹקֵד | עֲוֹן אָבוֹת עַל בָנִּים וְעַל בְנֵי בָנִּים עַל שִּלֵשִּים וְעַל רִּבֵעִּים :
All those middot we used to recite belonging to God
Now must be applied to us.
We must be slow to anger and compassionate to Him!
The God of creation and decreation
Of wisdom and its corollary dementia
Mirrored and projected in our own,
The archetype for dementia
In its neo-platonic sublunary sphere
Reminds us of the dementia above
The dark sefirotic tree of the sitra achrah
The dark side of wisdom/ Chochma
He who must be also be worshipped or at least
Whose gevurot (including the dark side of chochma=dementia)
Must be “sweetened”.
Mituk Hadin then becomes our task
And in dementia we are the merkava
By enduring His dementia.
In Elul I Tzitter
Rosh Chodesh Elul
It still sends shivers down my spine
“melech basodeh” “ponim sochakos”
We are told by the Altar Rebbe
He is smiling a shmeichl on His face (unlike Yom HaDin!)
The shofar is blown and its piercing shriek reminds me of the Zohar (Pinchas)
Where we are distracting the divine dinim (rage)…
A time for introspection, self-inventory, communal analysis,
personal housecleaning…
But how does an atheist continue such praxis?
Why does he feel the shiver down the spine
in the presence of an absent divine?
In an uncaring heaven,
Where the spiritual Kabbalistic wire diagrams maybe true,
The Kabbalistic framework might be convincing,
The Leshem speaking as he does, to my soul,
But the cold eternal quiet of the cosmos
stares back at us from ever more powerful telescopes
Reminding us of how insignificant we really are
in the cosmic scheme of things
Each day new discoveries of our impotence
in the threat of new meteors colliding or near misses
(“a moon and half distance away last week alone!”)
Each week a new atrocity
Man’s inhumanity to man..
Yet the heart is dead to the reality of past generations
To the past pieties and moralisms.
Yet, in this wasteland, this dark spiritual landscape
the spine still shivers!
The atheist feels the pinch!
The cold morning vapors of “selichos weather”
As I embrace the fall weather impending
(As the dew covers the windshield on our way to daven,
Dad pinching my big toe in the frosty London morning
Now uncovered from the warm sheet
The big toe reminds me of selichos.)
Only the head is alienated
But the legs drag me back to shul.
Maybe we got it all wrong?
This whole kiruv movement
We got infected by the sequence doctrine first-Halacha second
“Bring ‘em back to Judaism with rational argument”
Rabbi Weinberg’s revolution following Chabad.
A whole Artscroll generation infecting our minds
What if…
It’s the other way around
After all we teach our 2 years olds to recite the Sh’ma
Without any theology!
We teach Vayikra to first graders
and the sacrificial cult is their first taste of Torah!
No rhyme or reason for that!
Just the sacred words themselves, with honey on the letters as inducement.
So too our approach should be “NO THEOLOGY”
stop talking this God Talk-this Hashem speak, as if we’re Baalei T’shuvas
Shut up already!
Just do! Perform rituals! Mindfully without doctrine…
retire the “lesheim this or that”!
Let the shivers run down your spine!
With no ideology!
Feel them!
Feel Elul!
Feel Mitzvot
And perhaps
AFTER a lifetime of doing
Maybe
Just maybe
You will have an inkling of the Divine!
Holy Dis-Belief
The words no longer move me
The rhetoric is old hat
The Greeks were here long ago
The orthodox drivel doesn’t even bother me
Like it used to,
Having been dulled by time and personal failure
There are no new chidushim!
Only poets now,
Have something to say
Rilke, Heine, Heschel,
And Shlomo still makes me cry
Although I have no induction to act.
Rummaging through my father’s papers (at 3 am to avoid his rage!)
Papers going back to WWII, internship, prison camp,
the HMS Dunera , Camp Tatura,
I find a booklet addressed to the British High Commission in Canberra,
with an honorific “To His Excellency the British High Commissioner”
(why did he never show us this growing up?)
Handwritten, blue ink, perfect penmanship, cursive,
excellent English (from an Austrian) going through all the trials
and mistreatment these 2000 prisoner suffered
under the hands of the brutal merchant marine officers and enlisted guards.
The penmanship was remarkable. I am sure this had not been read in 80 years.
His pain, his survival, even mentioning at his first
great grandson’s Bar mitzvah three days ago…how 82 years ago
he too underwent this rite of passage only to never see his parents again
4 years later (1939-40). He gets up early to let me know he has to
redo his speech because he must make his great grandson aware of how
lucky he is. This is his legacy. Survival and luck, a guardian angel having
spared him 3 times during the war. His belief in an angel. He must insist his
progeny understand this luck. He wakens me to revise the speech.
This war left so many scars until this day.
A patient presents with symptoms,
Then, as if 70 years meant nothing, suddenly
Launches into memory, must tell me, as if it has to do with her current pain.
Everything has to do with the past. Her trauma.
Speaks of her escape from the Lachwa ghetto…
Tears streaming down her cheeks…
Marrying another survivor in the DP camp
Who then abused her something awful over many years.
The past is ever present, infecting our consciousness
and producing ongoing symptoms.
After this diatribe,
Watching her sacred body
Having doggedly survived
Two years in the White Russian forests
Sleeping on snow,
With this broken tortured abused soul housed within,
What wise words do I have for her symptoms?
Is she really here for yet another label?
A Latin diagnosis that will soothe her seeking mind?
She knows much more than I could ever grasp!
Of human bondage and divine indifference
For, after all,
Let’s agree,
She’s really suffering from
Betrayal.
The body in betrayal
Her parents, culture, ethnicity, Rabbis
Her husband, son, her very sense of survival,
Most of all her God.
I watch my parents
Perched like doves
On their couch arm in arm
Resigned to aging and the loss of faculty
Yet, with each other, they face the uncertainty
Of the future
In their nineties
I remain amazed as to their optimism
And celebration of daily routines.
I am not far behind
And wonder who will I share this perch with
Inconceivable
After years of bickering
To spend so much time with one individual
Inconceivable
To sit on this couch
Listening to orchestras perform
Identifying musical arias, CNN blasting during dinner,
No overt questioning of
What will be…
No raging but moving ever so gently into that dark night
Pure resolution.
Life has enchantment
The bird’s egg mysteriously appearing on the balcony
The Jerusalem sun setting
Its golden hues pouring into the living room
The quiet Sabbath morning
The sweetness of dawn’s air
Their “wall of love” with twenty something great grandchildren,
placed like trophies, these are their real accomplishments.
They give out blessings! To one and all who enter
These are the currency trades they deal
These move them. They traffic in blessings!
The pouring over photo albums
And the rehearsing of life’s victories in War and Peace
The identification of songs and artists
Movies and heartthrobs
Memories of people who hurt them
And those who they laughed with
Little else interests them
Until families arrive
Each bearing their own relationship
Their own babies
Each to be held and cooed over
This is happiness,
Seeing the next and next generation live on
Biologically
If not spiritually.
Life as blessing others.
I watch in awe
(And horror)
Their son…
Knowing their past
Happy in their current bliss
Despite infirmity and limitations
I intervene less and less
Gone are the trips
The wineries and the museums
The entertaining them, their need for trips,
The ride to and from restaurants has become tedious
They much preferring snacks from their love perch
The lounge couch.
Mum sleeps with her feet on dad’s knees and he gently strokes them.
Each visit of mine a little less
Less of this
less interest in that
They talk to each other
In bed
On their perch
In innocence and purity
About this child or that
Avoiding the painful
Seeing only the pride in accomplishments
They are satisfied with life
It has lasted this long
It has endured as they have
The aperture of their lens is humble
And they bask in the what is…
Not the future.
Past and present combine here
Memory and landscape merge
Images and songs
Meld together
There is a flow
Of past aphorisms and truths
Of claims and prides
Of resentments and grudges now laid to rest.
Our time
Our lives
Interwoven
As time passes without stop
It respects nothing and nobody
Not even God
Who is just as subservient to time as we are
Does He get tired?
Surely!
Our puny lives
Our self-assuredness
Our piety drives Him crazy.
Memory blurs
Times conflate
Facts become fictionalized
Fictions become facts
The media is now the very message of truth
Despite its murky intent
And our impoverished intent to make sense of it all
Likens us to a laboratory rat in an experimental cage
Watched by an omnipotent and omniscient scientist
In a white coat streaked with blood.
In the sanitized bourgeois streets of Rehavia
The intellectuals mix with the Haredim
Each locked in his or her own ideology
Political religious and gendered identities
My father walks to his chapel
Where he is feted as the elder
And they present him annually with a token of his survival.
What has changed?
Each of us desire validation
Crave the respect of colleagues
So that we leave a mark, a trace, an image, a reshimu
That we were here,
That some memory lives on,
That we were not forgotten,
That our lives were not meaningless,
So we create and then perpetuate the medieval divine image within…
He who will hand out merit badges and mitzvah points…
He who needs our sacrifice to make it meaningful.
As if we need such a motive today
After the silence, the deafening silence, of the rising smoke,
from the crematoria.
But it is time to wake up from this spiritual slumber
And see reality in all its horror
The horror of dementia, the ICU, the tremors and rigidity,
the incoherence and disorientation,
Not as some medicalized pathology,
rather as the true representation of modernity
Of technology
of genocide
of mechanized killing (from the first machine gun to Auschwitz and Hiroshima)
the last 100 years of brutality.
Of current spirituality and the violence
fundamentalism produced so effortlessly in all faiths
Of unbridled patriotism which becomes xenophobia
Of modern politics and its use of hatred to gain votes
If we can just see though the mirage of technology to its future use in
controlling more and more of our choices and our ethical values and see how
violent it has become under the mirage of its making our lives better and
adding value to us consumers.
If we can just go back to the collective wounded brutalized child and see how
it motivates and produces the violent collective adult, we claim is so mature.
If we can begin to validate the childhood trauma at the collective level…
Then possibly this insanity might awaken to its own reality.
I close the door on my parents having looked in on them, checked in on them,
They lie like two children locked in each other’s arms
In innocence and purity.
The world is alright after all.
Xavier Pichon
