Dad's Prussian Precision

His day begins with routine

As it will end

At 98 this keeps him going

But the precision is remarkable.

Each day the coffee awaits him,

As he emerges fully dressed and immaculate.

Followed by the davening, Tallis and T’fillin

The retzuos (black straps) wound precisely equidistant on the arm

White hairs peeking between the black lines

Then wrapped around the batim (phylacteries)the identical way daily.

The tallis folded in quarters then doubled over to fit the blue velvet bag.

Now to the cereal, only half the bowl mind you,

he always makes sure to leave half,

And nothing over the minimum that will satiate him, not a morsel more.

(Can one forget the solitary mango that arrived from India annually

As he dissected it into 6 exact slices and passed to each at the table

Or the slicing of a turkey with surgical precision)

Where did he learn this (Vienna no doubt).

Exercises with Ganadi follow a precise course of calisthenics

The bends, push-ups, the range of motions, weights,

All in spoken in German to allow the trainer

to learn a new language from Dad.

Now the art instructor arrives

and he chooses his portraits and carefully measures

the blank sheet for his drawings with ruler and pencil,

more like an architect, so as to

produce as best a replica.

(unlike Mum’s impressionist landscapes that provide a mood and effect).

I never realized until I was house sitting,

just how regimented he is with himself

I remember as a child his morning rise for Shul no matter the weather,

and his moderation at the table,

But now?

He stands at the door at 8:55am on Shabbat morning

For “services begin at 9am” even though he knows

That there will unlikely be a minyan for quite a time,

(This little shul struggles to survive

on the goodwill of its few surviving octogenarians

members with attrition by the year).

This tiny Germanic shul (once Traditional not Orthodox)

Where Ben Gurion used to come to write his speeches,

Now provides a local minyan for those willing

to sit on the wooden benches for some 2 hours.

We return home for Kiddush and while washing the dishes

I see he only drank a sip of the Kummel.

I am in awe of this self-discipline at 98!

This Prussian sense of duty and order.

And, when I get too teary-eyed in front of Mum by her bedside,

Knowing what I know with the gnosis of only a physician,

He chastises me for exhibiting such emotionalism.

He is not for sentimentalism.

In fact I only saw him cry once

And break down (in Sobibor Concentration Camp) on the phone.

Other than that I never saw him laugh either, to excess.

His humor is sardonic, that Viennese type

that mocks the world and the foibles of others

The very opposite of the self-deprecating British

It also has to be very clever with a semantic pun or a quip.

“Zag der emir tzu dem sheikh”

“shtei du!”

Perhaps this is the key to his longevity.

I know one thing…

I have neither the discipline nor the stamina to live such a regimented life

The end does not justify the means for me.

I think he did not respect my gushiness

(As a child he was furious when I cried

And I cried a lot!)

He had no patience for this little brown-skinned snively, whiny kid

Who was not very good at sport.

His love of the classics and quoting Greek and Latin proverbs

As well as nuanced German words that gave more meaning to a sentiment

Albeit in multiple syllables!

He is at the end of the day a “continental” gentleman

With a British stiff upper lip.

No wonder I feel more comfortable with the

easy going if naïve American

With little for way of layers of sophistication or kultur.

But this weekend I realized the secret to his longevity.

The Impending Ending

“T’is fearful thing

To love

What death can touch

To love, to hope, to dream,

And oh, to lose.

A thing for fools, this,

Love,

But a holy thing

To love what death can touch”

Anon. 12th Century

Holding her hand

I put it to my lips

These iconic fingers

Whose magic mastered the fiddle decades prior

And now paints landscapes

And impresses Tsiona to draw them holding the brush.

The beauty of form has not diminished

They are perfection in form

Where all other body parts have withered

Their skeletal majesty remains

In my hands as I raise them to my lips

No words,

Just the kiss and the holding and stroking

Says it all.

The bond

Mother and son

Despite everything

Maybe because of everything

I am who I am because of it.

She, the driving force

A Tsunami that swept thought my tiny consciousness

Demanding and unbending,

Love, conditional

The pain and misery

The torment and irrationality

Internalized in a life driven to this day.

Now by her easy chair, perched daily

with dad by her side watching her lovingly.

All is calm.

She smiles rarely

She never did

She looks ahead

with that same tragic sense that flows though my veins

no wonder we are bound

in flesh and spirit.

Dad sits on one side holding her hand and gently stroking it

Devoted to her

From the time she bewitched him

(her fiddle tied the knot)

Suffered her for decades

Yet does not leave her side,

While I, sit temporarily on the other side

She is engulfed by the two men who adore her

Oblivious to the moment

Living in the eternal now

No memory for near or premonition of events to unfold.

All decisions are made with a wave of the hand signifying

“no” or “enough” or “rubbish”, or “not worth my time”

But now unable to vocalize rely on those mimes fully.

How does one face destiny?

The ending of things

In the slow decay of time

The daily challenge of living usually taken for granted,

Where every activity now must be calculated,

necessary, there being an economy of effort

By the nursing aides who measure the time for this and the effort for that.

Watching the slow decline of mental and physical prowess

Accelerating each month,

Facing the ending of things with uncertainty.

The weekly blood analysis plots the objectification of decline

The indices of iron, potassium, albumen, white cells project from the page

like witnesses on the stand, pointing accusingly, in one direction, to the dock.

The children discuss the meaning of this or that change,

having plotted them on the graph

Which meanders up and down prompting this or that intervention.

Powerless to redirect or change the flow of the river of fate,

(This was predetermined by genes and a life of living),

As it ploughs inexorably to the sea of death.

This in between time of decay and shutting down

I am not prepared for emotionally.

Leaving her each time with a heavier heart

This woman is the vitality of my life,

Albeit mostly unacknowledged,

The force majeure, hated and beloved at the same time,

Who had such impact on the soul of the writer,

That nothing passes muster to this day,

Unless it passes through the unconscious critical eye of la nom du mere.

Her mark in my psyche has little to do

with the small frame I pick up to transfer to the

commode today or place in the front seat of the car

on the next visit to the hematologist for the iron infusion.

The head of the department looks at the blood results

without even glancing at his patient. He knows too much and probably

wishes to protect himself from her loss.

How else to explain his lack of humanity.

She now physically resembles Nana,

sitting in the green arm chair, neck flexed hunched over,

and head looking down, into the bleak future, knowing everything.

Suffering the very living and struggle of today.

With the weight of the struggles of the past, heavy on her shoulders.

Mum no longer vocalizes, her cords torn

by the month-long coughing of her recent pneumonia.

(Should have I admitted her sooner? Would it have helped?

Knowing how she hates that place).

Her speech is rare and articulated without sound,

Yet she whispers, “when will you come again”

and my heart melts in pain.

I do not know when.

I do not know if,

There is no timeclock revealed to me

Marking the ending

Which feels not so far.

There is no violin playing outside her bay in the ward.

Naftali comes to visit and plays

but she does not muster the usual excitement

Hearing her own fiddle being played,

knowing the tone (she has perfect pitch of course)

Her eyes lit up with recognition and satisfaction.

That was a few years ago, despite the stroke,

the musical appreciation

That locus of the cerebral circuitry

had been unaffected by the clot

And she wept hearing the sound of her fiddle

wafting in to the ward.

The mind realizes but the heart cannot bear it.

The idea of life without her steady presence,

Her watchful eye on my progress and achievements

Even my downfalls (she alone flew in to Boston

to support me in my trial in 1984)

Now perched on her recliner the world comes to her,

Her progeny lovingly attends in pilgrimage,

recognizing her matriarchy and strength of character

And intuition and moral authority, her presence

and impact on so many lives

Above all mine.

The inner voice keeps telling me

“this is but the way of all flesh” and

“her longevity has been a blessing”

And the facts of nature and time and the blood analyses

all show you with great accuracy

the prognosis of the ending inching closer

As it should.

But the heart bleeds nonetheless.

She reveals the inner connection between love and loss

in her silent uncompromising commitment to her values

and her refusal to ever complain.

This aristocracy of spirit exacerbates my sense of awe.

She is in control of even this.

She bends to no one but herself.

And when the time comes it is she who will decide the end.

Not the disease not the fatigue, not the process.

I want to mark this time, I want to not let it slip,

too often we ignore the slipping and sliding as

the ending inches closer, as if it betrays

the neat paradigm of healthy, disease and absence.

I validate and valerate this phase too.

These precious moments of intimacy, hand in hand,

listening to a Heifetz Chaconne

(and her shaking her head in disbelief at his mastery)

as if hearing it for the first time

(though I play it each time I come)

or Victor Borges’ musical humor,

are the way we share those critical values she holds dearest.

I have inherited from Nana and her the tragic sense of life.

This lens colors all joy and grounds all perception

in a rootedness of shared empathy.

It drives the engine of compassion for others

and sympathy for those suffering.

Now, however the focus is on her pain and her ending,

which tears me apart.

Unbearable Leaving

Anticipatory Grief

Can one say kaddish in advance?

After all, yitagadal veyitkadash is in the imperfect tense

Or the jussive?

May His name be magnified, sanctified!

Each time I leave Jerusalem

The apartment,

My father,

I hug his slender frame

His bones more and more prominent

Wondering if this is the last time I feel him

His warmth

His stature

His upright posture.

He too saw his father on that Viennese platform in 1938

Not knowing he would never see him again.

Now I replay this scene every time I leave Jerusalem.

An epigenetic wound I carry

A return to the primal scene of trauma

Played out in the next generation.

The pain is unbearable

The not-knowing insane

The slow decline observable now

A loss each visit of this or that.

This time a new unsteadiness on his feet

An ataxia of the soul readying for its dizzying flight to come.

He proudly shows me his new hobby

Having watched Mum, paint for years he has now taken up the art.

And drawing horse after horse in varying poses

His love of equus always expressed in my childhood

From dressage to that disturbing play in the West End

A psychic drama unfolding in the psychiatrist’s office

Of a young boy who violently enucleated a horse.

With a heart as heavy as a stone mountain

I take my leave

In the unknowing that characterizes my life more and more

As uncertainty bathes me like a dark shadow

In so many areas of my life

The only certainty is our mortality

And the slow dying of the leaves

In the chill of autumn.

Journey's End

The horror, the terror

The loss of humanity,

The effect on decency,

Of the blood spilled in those trenches of WWI

All who lay in those muddied fields,

The sheer magnitude of the loss,

A generation of young men,

Guided by general HQ staff on both sides

Likes pawns in a chess game.

Each soldier lost,

A life,

A son, father, brother, friend.

Husbands leaving children and wives behind

A generational loss of millions,

The next, orphaned without the father

La nom du pere…the absent fatherhood.

And as I watch, sobbing,

For what man does to man

In the name of…

Statehood, religion, politics, fatherland,

All the...isms.

The false twentieth century promises

The broken ideologies,

The religions of blood,

Red rivers flowing into a sea of death.

For honor and dignity and a sense of purpose

Dying in the name of...

Dying for a cause…

Dying for the flag…

That bloodied uniform

Bedecked with ribbons or medals

Each speaking of some heroism or battle survival.

And that uniform

And that rank

And that split between lower class enlisted

And educated Oxbridge officers.

And the sheer decency of the British soul

As portrayed

And experienced

And the pride of the Austro-Hungarian soldier

(I remember pictures of a proud uniformed Ziga Barzi)

And yet my olive 1970 skin

Was a barrier to my enlistment

in the Guards

When interviewed,

As a young medical student.

“Not the right stuff”

For their regiment.

The outsider..

The Jew…

Not privileged to serve

Maybe of dubious moral character

Did they think?

As expressed by melatonin pigmentation.

We are sent into war

We are meant to die

“Pro patria morie”

We glory in death

For country, culture and freedom.

But at the end of the day

Lies this insanity

This bloodthirst

What Jung called Wotan.

A mythical drive to end and destroy

To dominate and bleed.

With the so-called Enlightenment

Comes the modern day state

And its darker side

The state of terror.

My Israeli nephew grieves for his lost comrade-in-arms.

He visits his family

And honors his memory

But that hole in his heart remains

Like a lesion

God shaped

He nurtures the pain

Drowned, once, in chemicals to soothe the anguish.

And my patients and comrades with PTSD

who suffer daily the reoccurring loss

Ever present…

The moments of death

And the mystery of their survival

The guilt and self-recrimination

The living in-the-absence of friends and comrades-in-arms

The nightmare that never ceases.

We only have the survivors

And the memories,

And the historical record.

But what have we learned from this mass blood-letting?

About man, god and history?

The visual images haunt me

In a ghost-like apparition

A dream that keeps coming back

As if in a past life.

I too am drowning in the terror of the trenches

Facing my fear of the end

Of death creeping up on me

For that moment,

The ending of all that is near and dear

Precious and fraught.

The end of loving another

The end of helping an-other

The end of caring for an-other.

The Analyst

Sitting on the couch

In his study

Lined by books and artifacts,

The closest space to Ascona.

This Jungian analyst

I trust…

But so far a drive from work…

Each time a pilgrimage,

An annual dialysis of the soul.

This time, the events of life

The struggles and challenges

Are recounted once more,

The ritual dance between analyst and analyzed.

The pet peeves, the resentments,

Most have not changed since the last visit.

(why would they? A prisoner of the soul’s making)

Some are new.

The tears flow easier here,

A safe space.

As an acute listener he takes it all in,

And at strategic times will mirror my feelings

But add a vital insight that changes my whole perspective

As if I had been blind to that seemingly trivial point all along

And that missing piece of the puzzle shone a light on the whole

Making it coherent,

Yes, coherence is what I am looking for.

Not answers,

There are none,

Our lives and destinies are more or less predetermined.

(The genetics and epi-genetics accounts for 99%)

But to make sense of it all

Yes, that is the relief from the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune! [1]

And I leave each time with a sense

that my biography and struggles have meaning

To him at least,

He is moved by my fears, anxieties, triumphs and accomplishments.

He has made sense of the acute pain that drove me here

to drive for two hours or more.

As I recount in this recurring aging narrative

I hear myself telling a story

Of a boy, traumatized in post War England,

a young man in search of meaning, the long years in medical training,

The relationships, parenting, mentoring, teaching,

And this story, like the parables of midrash, is a “fictional truth”

As it filters through my biases, colored memory,

My unconscious wishing him to respect me,

My conscious downplaying the darker aspects of my desire,

My failings,

My betrayals,

The deceits and lies laid open on the surgical table for dissection,

Allowing the surgeon to see the abscess without shame

“that to be restored the sickness must grow worse” [2]

But, as a good reader of texts, he sees through all this

And, seeing a gap or fault line in the text, he jumps in,

Correcting my misperceptions, and narrative bias,

All the while with grace and compassion.

And, as I ponder the visit and the meeting,

I realize that the Torah text is my text

I am the very written word, the logos

My life, my drama, my endurance,

The Genesis family intrigues are mine

The betrayals of Joseph by his brothers, I own,

The backroom manipulations by the Genesis women behind the scenes

Controlling the destinies and marital choices

are the same as produced my victimhood,

The power struggles in the king’s (father in law) court

and his generals are mine.

And as of the analyst?

Well he is the midrashic interpreter

The strong rabbinic reader,

Disclosing the biases within this sacred text of mine,

He hears both protagonists and the angelic greek chorus?

This Shakespearean drama and its heroes and villains.

He, above all reads my plot line like he would a biblical text,

And his parables unpack the hidden desire of my soul.

He makes coherence where there was only a question mark.

And uncovers, dis-covers the true unconscious desire of the plot.

Leaving him each time is cathartic,

Not because the pain is any less,

It isn’t!

But the narrative has more cohesion.

The story of my life gains dignity

I become more and more comfortable with my role

Like a Bach fugue I struggle with performing

Until practice makes it easier each time.

The healing is how he places my struggle

as part of a larger human mythic struggle

Between the nomos and the eros,

Between law and narrative,

Between orthodoxy and free unfettered anarchic spirit.

He shows me just how archetypal the battle I wage is,

How I incarnate a millennial struggle

Of culture and faith

Between religion and spirit

Of autonomy versus authority.

———————————————————————————————————

And reading the biblical text this Shabbat

And the midrashic theme of “Moses hitting the Rock”

And the Chassidic free-wheeling meditations on the midrash,

I realized in a moment, a flash of insight,

That the struggle to make sense of this enigmatic pericope

Was parallel to the struggle of my own on the analyst couch.

That each week the text I wrestle with is my auto- biographical text

The text reflects my hidden desire, my own narrative.

Each year the parallel lines grow closer and closer.

The text slowly becomes me, inhabits me,

and the biblical narrative is a mere trigger for the eternal struggle

to make meaning of the mystery of my life.

The interpretation is my reading into my narrative,

not the accident of the parsha

And the sleepless Friday night is the deep aching need

To refuse the night,

Refuse the darkness,

Refuse the incoherence.

The pacing in my study surrounded by my sacred friends (seforim)

Who, like soldiers in a theological army at attention, on the shelves,

with the books piled on my round desk,

in disarray inform me and allow me to mine them for

An insight that resonates rhythmically with my insides.

Slowly like giving birth, painfully an chidush is born from deep within.

Until recently seeking validation in some other reader’s commentary

I no longer seek such approval,

For the one authority that will allow credence to my reading.

I think now I have found my own voice.

(Like the midrash recounting greatest gift Moses received on high

when receiving the 10 commandments…

Was paradoxically from the Angel of Death!

Instead of seeing it as the gift of the mysterious miraculous incense

like the commentators suggested, as I saw it as the gift

of the angel himself the gift of mortality.)

This voice that comes up now

Has no need for theological or rabbinic back-up

(The weight of the tradition was always heavy!)

There comes a point when you embody a response

With all the (limited) reduction you already bring to the table.

This audacity (put-down as a child too often)

Only came with the realization that this text was mine, was me,

That the greatest gift for me ever

Was the realization of my own limited lifespan

How fragile it really is

How time slips through my fingers like water [3]

Despite best efforts to delay or fill with meaning.

The days accelerate

There is so much still to do

So much to learn

So much left unsaid.

So this angel of death was my gift

My reading,

And the text was my life.

[1] “Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them: to die, to sleep no more; and by a sleep, to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

Hamlet Act iii sc i

[2] “The wounded surgeon plies the steel that questions the distempered part; beneath the bleeding hands we feel the sharp compassion of the healer's art. Resolving the enigma of the fever chart. Our only health is the disease. If we obey the dying nurse whose constant care is not to please, but to remind of our, and Adam's curse, and that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.”

TS Eliot, #3 Easter Cocker

[3] “What is an oath then, but 3 words we say to God? Listen, Meg. When a man takes an oath, he's holding his own self in his own hands like water. And if he opens his fingers then, he needn't hope to find himself again. Some men aren't capable of this, but I'd be loathed to think your father one of them.”

Sir Thomas Moore, “A Man for All Seasons”

Siblings

Watching my mother

Watching her siblings in the film

Their memories of pain in childhood

Their recounting accomplishments with no self-awareness

The aristocracy of spirit shining through

The humility apparent

This is the genetic stuff that infuses my cells

The narrative that is the very mitochondria of my soul

These stories are the Torah she be’al Peh of Sargon dynasty

My only access to explaining how and why I think the way I do

Their legacies burned in suffering

Now inform me of my patterns of thought and relating to the world

As I peek at the pictured albums they leaf through

And talk of “the twins” present as tiny dark skinned creatures

Their eyes bewildered at a world they cannot understand

Restrained and as yet struggling to be still in front of the camera

I was one of those twins in those black and white pictures

Some 60 odd years ago

Yet in a way nothing has changed

My eyes still look out in bewilderment

Although now

Despite the books and philosophies

The pessimism already there is more polished.

The tragic view of everything is magnified

And the horror at other people’s pain

Reflected in Eric’s sensitive responses.

Mum’s impish delight at being free of her shackled life

And repeated incredulity at Becky’s detailed recounting of events.

Becky’s memory for details over 80 years ago with such clarity

Eric’s self-doubt as to why after all these years the pain of the brutal

Beatings and starvation, the childhood abuse he suffered

Would bring him to sudden tears decades later

Yet all three share the burning sense that life must be worked at

Every minute a precious opportunity not to be wasted

Every task to be accepted

Permeates all three.

I come away with a deep gratitude for their lives lived before me

And how my very makeup is connected

through genotypic and phenotypic mirrors

Reflecting in oblique and not direct ways

The prison of my soul.

Interpreting the world and the self needs such a prism

So that one can be aware of the distortions

That color ones’ perceptions.

“Aah! that is why I react in such a way”

“Aah! that explains my deep response to this”

“Aah! This needs further soul repair.”

All the aha’s are thanks to the reflections and mutual interactions

Of their lives and interpretations and distortions of their memories

Painted on a canvas of momentous 20th century events

Of Empire, The Raj, Christian education,

WWII London, and post War rebuilding

A larger than life epic that suits

the larger than life Sargon dynasty

Where I Feel Most Comfortable

Where I feel most Comfortable

In those in between spaces

Between the neurological hemispheres of certainty

Where nothing is proven

Where doubt is validated

Where black and white are refused.

In the twilight more is revealed

Things happen there

New life-forms bubble up

New insights and imaginations

Hidden from the sunlight of day

It is those in-between characters that

Teach me

Not the holier-than-thou types.

Nor the criminals…

But those who have struggled

To make sense of the absurd

And reflect the self-honesty

(So difficult and courageous)

Which I lack.

For as I age,

Everything becomes less clear

All certainty has faded

And belief lies shattered on the rocks

Like an old shipwreck.

My comfort lies in the space between

I am drawn to the ocean-side

Between land and sea,

Knowing full well the carnage it caused not long ago

Its rage and murderous intent

Although calm now.

I am drawn to those figures in history who never figured it out

Whose radical doubt about humanity

Fueled their ethical intent

(refusing some divine code from above.)

I am moved by their spirituality in the face of nihilism

(The cancer that eats me alive, slowly.)

And yet,

I remain moved by the warmth of ritual life

The smells of Erev Shabbat

The slow circular hassidic dance after kabbalat Shabbat

The excitement of learning through Friday night-the secrets of Torah

The sense of the divine in the sacred words and texts,

In the space between the black letters…

The sounds of zemirot in harmony

The feel of my grandchildren’s growing small heads

As I bless them weekly,

The daily gratitude to the universe/cosmos/divine

For being alive

For the blue blue sky and azure ocean

For the sounds of a Schubert impromptu,

(Pollini’s interpretation of the drie klavierstucke [1] that still brings tears)

For the beauty of a girl in a Keats ode,

For my children’s accomplishments out there in the real world

For my patient’s gratitude and acknowledgement.

It has become these small things

Not the theological issues and crises I used to be absorbed in

That now form the matrix of my thought.

I have been humbled by the mystery

Brought to my knees by the impossibility of my making sense of any of it,

Diminished by my own intellectual mediocrity,

Forced to face the immense scholarship so much better than my own

On the very subjects of theodicy and the texts of terror in my own tradition.

Facing again and again my failure to prevent the four nails

in my spiritual coffin

(That of evolutionary biology, astrophysics,

neuro-biology and the archeology of texts)

From sealing my fate precisely because I lack the intellectual tools to refute.

(The school of rhetoric and Epicurus won,

the schools of Apollo and Socrates lost).

I now reside in the space between my two hemispheres…

Fully accepting the Dawkins’ and Hawking’s and Hitchens’

arguments in the left hemisphere,

The rational mind fully attuned to the

Tyson DeGrasse formulation

(pre-digested for small minds like myself)

Fully accepting textual criticism and archeological refutations

of the claims of religious faith,

Fully accepting the biology of spirituality and the

predetermined genetic predictability of 99%

of our behaviors and the violence committed in the name of…

God/religion/church/mosque.

Yet also realizing the human spirit and

spiritual-psychic projections that history,

violently at times, provided

in the wonderful sacred texts of humanity as having value…

Yet also openly moved to tears

by the right hemisphere’s sensitivity to music, love, beauty and grace.

The little things that connect people,

the giving and receiving and social transaction of breaking

bread and drinking good wine with friends and colleagues.

The moments of intimacy in a long surviving marriage.

Between these two hemispheres that are so out of tune with each other

(The bicameral mind if you will)

The schizofrumkeit of living in both worlds

AND ACCEPTING BOTH the secular and sacred

Albeit never having been able to intellectually reconcile them

(An unacknowledged Soloveitchik paradox)

Knowing how young the human mind really is

on the evolutionary scale, how little we really

know of ourselves, looking into the mirror daily and seeing

less and less that makes sense,

Of my behavior, my foreboding, my rage,

my triggered responses, my inner spirit.

The knowledge of the darkness within the genocidal rage without,

that has failed to be explained by 100 years of psychology

and even kabbalah…The simple projection onto the divine

of all our traumas and hopes

The inner child wishing for certainty, hope and relief….

Embedded and prisoner of neurological pathways and neuronal circuitry

Of childhood traumas and epigenetic inherited grief

Unable to manage the software I wish to recalibrate

All this

Strung between

Spun between

No escape

Holding all this

Living through all this

The insanity of the belief system

With no respite

With no real alternative

I sing a song to tomorrow.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86CNMb6J7Iw

Eric's 90th

Uncle Eric

On the occasion of your 90th

As the years march on

As the limbs slowly fail

As time passes through like a laughing visitor

Overstaying his welcome!

You remain the ever-growing inspiration.

Your life,

Your commitments

Your relating to all people

Irrespective of creed color or ethnicity

Your all encompassing, unconditional love

Your validating all struggles large and small

Your devotion to wife and family

Remain like a northern star

Constant and pointing the direction for others to follow.

You cared for me (and Rochelle) in our infancy, those

crying babies! The love engrained in our bodies to this

day, a place of softness in the heart of memory, the

tissue of unconscious recognition awakened each

time we meet.

As children huddled around a tiny black and white TV

straining for the moment the camera panned away

from the BBC conductor and we caught a glimpse of

Uncle Eric, in China…in Europe, or elsewhere across

the globe.

Your are the family legend, in reality

The myth in the flesh,

The aristocracy of goodness incarnate

A restoration of the name SARGON!

Of kindness, morality ethics and faith.

Of one who endured so much in childhood,

And rather than be defeated by it,

used it as fodder for ethical development.

Never to allow it to happen to others if you could

somehow protect them, foster them, guide them and

inspire them.

You remain my guiding light

My motivating principle

My ethical compass

What is left but to bless you,

Your life,

Your wonderful personality

With health and good cheer

With “nachas” from your family

For you are the patriarch for all of us

With love and unconditional loyalty

Your nephew

Julian

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