Hester Panim/Eclipse of the Divine

“I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”

T.S. Eliot

“Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God-such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is passing. But it is not a process which can be adequately accounted for by instancing the changes that have taken place in man’s spirit.

An eclipse of the sun is somethingthat occurs between the sun and our eyes, not in the sun itself….But when, as in this instance, something is taking place between heaven and earth, one misses everything when one insists on discovering within earthly thought the power that unveils the mystery.

He who refuses to submit himself to the effective reality of the transcendence as such—our vis-à-vis—contributes to the human responsibility for the eclipse.”

Martin Buber

The sun breaks above the razor sharp horizon

A tiny pink sliver at first

Peeking, sheepishly,

As if testing the landscape’s response

The clouds above and below open like a curtain

Welcoming the new day’s visitor

She cares not what we think or feel

She just gives of her radiance and warmth

And the world benefits

And nature bows to her majestic kindness

as life continues another day

Due to her largesse there are lush pastures of green

Open landscapes of rolling hills and vales

Carpets of forests and canopies

Her chlorophyll hides the true brilliant colors

Of the autumnal dying leaves.

The fauna in the lakes and rivers are warmed

As the mating season owes its loves to her

And nature is nourished once again.

Indeed she cares not

If she also burns and dehydrates

Causing fires and death

Heatwaves that kill millions

Parched deserts of drought

Oblivious to the poles or equator

We are the planets revolving around her after all

She is just there

Punctually

Daily

Showing up

Predictably

calculably

(even years ahead)

When she will make her entrances and when she will

take leave at sunset

Halachically we are guided by “neitz” and “shkiya”

Arguing incessantly as to the actual moment

She will enter the “vilon”

Or descend into the mikvah like ocean.

It is up to us

The receivers of her beneficence

To determine how to enjoy and survive with her life sustaining rays

And when to protect ourselves for fear of getting burned

Of not gazing at her directly

For fear of blindness

Of shading from her in the heat of the day

Her orange glow this morning seems so benign

The stuff painters will revel in, on their canvases

Trying to get the right hue of orange/redness.

People stand in reverent silence on the beach

and meditate ahead of the

Toil of the day

But soon she will ascend the Florida sky

And her brilliance will require protection once again

As we approach her zenith at midday

Until she makes her daily descent over the city landscape

Plunging me into and the world back into darkness.

It occurred to me that my metaphor of the divine has

been faulty, all along….

That my conception has been soiled by philosophy,

theodicy, history,

And my people’s victimhood

(after all just look at us mere decades ago)

That, for just a moment I might rather take a step into nature instead, and

Looking at our planet from out there in space

This singular azure blue globe with its wispy clouds

surrounding it and the deep blue oceans meandering across it

Could not have survived without her

That we as earth propel through the darkness of space along with our sisters

In an orbital dance around her

In exact proportionate spin

A precision in distance and nearness

to allow life and love.

Extending the comparison to our sacred texts

Like the warnings of Moses to the Israelites not to get too

close to the Divine rage

The fire that emerged suddenly and unpredictable when

those got too close to the Tabernacle

Or the Deuteronomic prediction that in the sinful future,

The face of the divine will be hidden (hester panim)

Allowing for all sorts of calamity.

In those hoary times there will be a total eclipse

And the earth will be plunged into spiritual darkness in

the midst of daylight sun

Her territory and domain encroached upon by the prince of darkness

Yet the phenomenon of eclipse remains,

built into the very fabric of our orbit

It’s bound predictably, calculably, to occur through no

“fault” of our own

Like the nature of human love

Whose eclipse of the heart follows the passionate love

And at times all is plunged into chaos and darkness

And only man’s heart of cruelty remains

To his fellow man, unspeakable crimes

Or to himself in destruction through his addictive

behavior, the amygdala of self-hatred.

Yet the sun remains hidden behind the eclipse

Patiently waiting to re-emerge

To formally take charge once again

Order shall now proceed

Chaos is forgotten

And the world returns to where it was

With the wasteland and the trauma

Burnished in the soul of recovery.

And once she reigns again

It is as if

Nothing had happened

All is returned to the ebb and flow of life once more

The day comes

The day goes

Sunrise and sunset resume

Is it possible that this sun reflects the very divine

Not only in nature but also in relation to earth to history

to us?

POSTSCRIPT

“The Present events are an affliction and that is an unbearable fact. We must contemplate this affliction in all its bitterness and without consolation while loving God as author of all things-including this same affliction-and as author solely of good”

Simone Weil “Attente de Dieu”

“The grand enigma of human life is not suffering, but affliction. It is not astonishing that innocents should be killed, tortured, flushed from their countries, reduced to misery or slavery, imprisoned in camps and cells—since we know there are criminals who commit these acts. Neither is it astonishing that sickness imposes long periods of suffering that paralyze life and make it an image of death—since nature is subject to the blind play of mechanical necessity. But it is astonishing that God has given affliction the power to take hold of the very souls of innocents and to seize them as their sovereign master. In the best case, the one marked by affliction only keeps half his soul. God himself cannot prevent what has happened from having happened. What better proof that the creation is an abdication? What greater abdication of God than is represented by time? We are abandoned in time. God is not in time. Creation and original sin are only two aspects, which are different from us, of a single act of abdication by God. And the Incarnation, the Passion, are also aspects of this act. God emptied himself of his divinity and filled us with a false divinity. Let us empty ourselves of it. This act is the purpose of the act by which we were created. At this very moment God, by his creative will, is maintaining me in existence, in order that I may renounce it. God waits patiently until at last I am willing to consent to love him. God waits like a beggar who stands motionless and silent before someone who will perhaps give him a piece of bread. Time is that waiting. Time is God's waiting as a beggar for our love. The stars, the mountains, the sea, and all the things that speak to us of time, convey God's supplication to us. By waiting humbly, we are made similar to God. God is only the good. That is why he is waiting there is silence. Anyone who comes forward and speaks is using a little force. The good which is nothing but good can only stand waiting. Beggars who are modest are images of Him. Humility is a certain relation of the soul to time. It is an acceptance of waiting. That is why, socially, it is the mark of inferiors that they are made to wait. "I nearly had to wait" is thetyrant's word. But in ceremony, whose poetry makes all men equal, everybody has to wait. Art is waiting. Inspiration is waiting. He shall bear fruit in patience. Humility partakes in God's patience. The perfected soul waits for the good in silence, immobility and humility like God's own. Christ nailed on the cross is the perfect image of the Father.”

Simone Weil "The Things of the World" The Simon Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (New York: David McKay, 1977) pp. 423-4.

In The Dying of The Leaves

In the dying of the leaves

All summer the warm wind rustles the golden leaves

Like a shimmering of tea lights at dusk

It seems this will last forever

But now as the sky goes gray with the brooding clouds

And the morning wind chills the air

Everything looks to the impending gloom of winter.

Those once golden leaves turn all colors

Some redden into brilliant hues

Others into fall colors that make New Hampshire into a Persian rug.

The wind conspires with the trees to allow the leaves to fall

Its force and ferocity at times justly earning the title

of its “Windy City” locale

And ironically only in the dying of the leaves do

their true colors become revealed.

Who would have guessed that the uniformity of chlorophyll had been masking

Each one’s genetic uniqueness.

Who would have predicted this veritable luscious intoxication of color

A painter’s paradise of acrylic.

Where she once glorified in rustling through her branches

Welcomed for spreading pollen and fertilizing the next generation of flora

She now participates in the death throes

that will leave the tree bereft and skeletal

In its winter survival mode.

That same wind blew the crematoria ashes for miles

Leaving a frosty powder of victims’ skeletal remains

Covering the green grass

Of the countryside with its secrets

Europe remains a vast graveyard

The culmination of kultur and technology

The end of the experiment of the Enlightenment.

That wind heralded a new winter

A nuclear wasteland of the soul

With its newer genocides and atrocities

And the red bloodlust increases each time

with the use of “neutral” technology.

In the dying of its victims

Their true colors are revealed

A Persian rug of pain and suffering

A multicolored pastiche of human misery

The torturer’s brush uses tears instead of acrylic.

La Nom du Pere

Of fathers and Sons

Born 5 years after,

Father a refugee

Haunted by betrayal

His stern eyes

The Prussian ritual

The moderation

The survival

The refusal to emote

The son

Too soft

Crying too much

Evoking his rage

Skin color too olive

(Unlike the Viennese pallor)

The German nanny

The abuse

The hours under the stairs in the darkness

The fear evermore of the dark

The son asks for a blessing

Father is 101 years old, now

He places his hand on the son’s head

He hears the first word of the blessing

יברכך

And breaks down

Fathers and sons:

All his life

Unconsciously bearing the father’s survivor guilt

Trying to make sense of this insanity

Rushing to this or that solution

Kook, Chabad, Carlebach, Breslov

Freud, Jung, Hillman,

SHATZ, Frank, Scholem,

BESHT Degel Nachman

Only to be dashed against the rocks of reality

Theology implodes

The addictions that promised momentary solace

Work, rage, ETOH, porn, validation in religion, hospital army

Nothing alleviates the impending sense

That all the struggles

All the rationales

All the texts and trajectories of theological understanding

Of the rational left hemisphere,

Leave this cosmic gap

This holy vacuum

A Chalal hapanui

Of the heart

As if

Everything that moved, motivated and pushed

This child

Who already at nine,

Sensed his impending demise

Fast forwarded 70 years

Seeing his image facing his death

Without meaning

Awaking in a panic in the night.

Now at the end of things

The end of his prime

Having solved nothing

Found nothing

Dis-covered only we are reflecting a gaping chasm

Between doctrine and reality

Theology and absence

Meaning and insanity

That all language and truth went up in the smoke of the crematoria

(Anything less would be a disservice to the memory of the victims.)

He throws up his hands

In defeat

Refusing to accept old orthodoxies

Unbelieving the new latter-day saints

Realizing its mimicry

A pantomime of sorts

Left alone

Facing the failure

Of nerve

Of daring

Or heresy

We have awoken from a 70-year-old coma

(like Choni)

But unlike his venture into the Beis Midrash

We

See the fragments of what once was..

The vibrant yeshivos now reconstructed

Like zombies

Like never before

Thousands sitting and learning

Shteiging away

And hassidic look-a-likes

Piously shockling in their designer shtreiml’s

What is our task?

The task I failed at?

To pick up the fragments,

To view what we can reconstruct,

To salvage whatever we can from the rubble

Of millenia-filled sacred texts,

To make sense of what makes sense

In this nightmarish post-Tremendum world

Where nothing has been learned

From those exhortations to be kind

But so much from the minutiae of halachic constructions.

Let’s see which texts were predictive

Which Masters understood the darkness within

Who foresaw the catastrophe?

Nothing has changed outside the texts

Man’s inhumanity-to-man persists unabated

The ferocity in the heart of man

The dark soul within

This demonic soul

Did we have a Nietzsche? A Kafka? A Simone Weil?

Who could hold both the weight of tradition and the insanity of genocide?

Would the Piacetzna have said and claimed what he wrote

before his deportation

About Divine Weeping

Had he known a million babies went up in smoke?

Awakening from this coma

We too failed,..al chet

For we too gave up on the Ribbono shel Olam

(As the Klausenberger Rebbe claimed that first Yom Kippur

In the DP camp.)

Facing failure

Refusing the old doctrines

We are left in this gap

Of Holy dis-belief

Of Holy atheism

Of Holy apikorsus

This, my father,

Is what I have to transmit to my sons

This will disappoint you no doubt

For you believed in simple Emunah

And hated my forays into Midrash and Chassidut

“he thinks too much”

Maybe you are right

maybe the only way forward

Is survival alone,

And transmitting the doctrine to the next generation

But you forgot once again this pesty kid

Born five years after

Condemned to struggle

Yearning for the Great father in heaven

Yet giving Him the finger

For what he did to His children

And still asking you to bless me.

Eric's Notes

He’s playing the slow movement of the Mendelssohn violin concerto

The Andante..

His arthritic fingers vibrato on the strings, to produce

A sound, mellifluous like an aged Pinot Noir

His wrist moves the bow of experience

His wrist fluid yet strong

Worshiping the Muses

Of 60 years of muscle memory

With the mastery that only comes with decades of passion

To this art.

As the music emerges from instrument and player

I see musical notes flying up heavenward

And my mother

Who played this very piece in the Royal College circa 1941

In her velvet black evening gown

With her long neck bent over the instrument

Listening now

From above intently,

for the correct intonation, pauses, technique and mastery

for she would tolerate nothing less from her young brother.

His face now identical to Dada’s

The austerity genetically marked forever.

The self-discipline and self-demands now internalized

The refusal to indulge in musical emotionality,

No, the feeling must emerge only from the technique

The complete understanding of the composer’s intent alone,

Old school.

So ironic, despite the youthful years of trauma, isolation from friends,

Sports, socializing, (for Dada would insist he needed to practice, practice,)

He became the most sensitive human beings

Caring only for others

Always kind and considerate

I still quip to my kids

“when I grow up I want to be like Uncle Eric!”

The last sibling to survive

His sisters’ absence is palpable.

Now the “gentleman of Jerusalem” in his 90’s

Barely able to walk

His legs giving out

His balance off,

But once seated on his perch

Immediately regains mastery of his life through his instrument,

It is the violin shaped luchot that carry him,

Its letters, the musical notes (and tears) that now flow.

Much like the Hebrew letters flying off the Luchos

In response to our communal idolatrous orgy

Slipping into our familiar addictions,

When this so-called savior doesn’t show up to rescue us,

There now develops a tug of war with the Divine,

wishing to retrieve the tablets

And Moses holding on to them for dear life…

Until the letters flew off in protest

Too holy for this people,

The tablets now became too heavy to carry and fall

Smashing to the ground.

Here too I see the notes flying off

His aged, wooded viola’s tones

Wafting up in a spiral smokey plume

Like incense,

The music dissolves into the black dots and crotchets flying

Bearing with them the soul of the player (or is it just the listener?)

Demanding answers to the question why?

In his music he reaches places his intellectual mind does not (dare?) enter.

In the andante he explores the very tragedy of our family

The genetic traits that allowed Dada

to both push him to his limits

as well as write his heresies,

And this sweetness from all this suffering

opens my broken soul to feel what it feels.

The Hebrew letters and the Mendelssohn’s notes are one and the same

Reflecting his grandfather’s attempt

to salvage the lost letters of his faith for modernity

And the musical cries of “Hear ye Israel” [1]

Now wafting in his sweetness

Drowning in the sound

The tears mix with the notes

And carry them up to Mum

These tears are full of rage and little acceptance

But Mum would surely approve

Of her virtuosi brother (so virtuous) and his broken listener

Hymns to the drowning,

Unable to swim in the ocean of grief

Rage rage in the dying of the night…

[1] Oratorio Elijah

Pangs During a Glorious Performance

Orchestra hall is hushed awaiting the entrance of the soloist

The anticipation in the air is palpable

It has been so covid-long

Since I sat in this hallowed sanctuary

Having brought my grandchildren here last

For the Italian concerto

I have returned

Albeit be-masked like the other worshippers

Bathed in the yellow warm light of this circular temple

Facing the majestic organ pipes at attention like soldiers.

Suddenly the door opens, and in she floats,

A low-cut gown, midnight blue, straight then flaring at the bottom

She glides across the stage like a mermaid

Slowly she removes her black mask

And places it (with disdain?) on the concert master Chen’s music stand (!)

I cannot describe her performance better than Johnson (below)

But found myself weeping in the Larghetto

Solti’s orchestra revealing the greatest string section in the world

The lush svelte sound so unique to Chicago

Was the perfect partner to the mastery of her 40-year-old career.

When music moves me it is like love-making,

At the center of the experience is this Rilke-like sense of the tragic

That death is the pure counterpoint to this sublime

That these few moments of exalted spiritual experience

In life, merely reflect its ironic and tragic at its core.

These precious moments lie in stark contrast

To both the mundane, the routine, the dulling of the senses of the ordinary

How we have anesthetized ourselves from the horrors of the outside world.

Later I am overwhelmed by a sense of impropriety..

(beyond the fact that only here-

among the intellectuals and music lovers of Chicago

Sitting between their dress ties and gowns

in the box section- am I acutely aware of my difference

My yarmulke screaming out

my embarrassed ethnicity to one and all)

No, what overcomes me are the memories of Ukraine,

the military hospital, the blast injuries,

the impending doom that awaits.

Here I am sitting in this rarefied temple of kultur and refinement

Listening to what arguably might be

the greatest performer and orchestra of this concerto alive,

In this perfection of sound and acoustics,

Among the gentile class of music lovers I share with,

While that horror is going on a plane ride away.

And my thoughts go back to Warsaw Ghetto and Mariupol

And a possibly similar scene during the war

when the Berlin Philharmonic played

And good upper class educated sophisticated German citizens

listened enrapt by the wizardry of Furtwengler,

In their evening gowns and tuxedos

While the crematoria burned.

In what moral universe does music and art get an ethical pass

No wonder after Auschwitz

the modern enlightenment project gets called into question

No wonder we have learned to split and detach

as if geography prevented leakage of the horrors

Into our hermetically sealed music halls and psyches.

Tonight I am complicit.

Matan Torah 2022

History,

Revelation,

Our myth of Sinai returns now for celebration

Ritual and community.

Special food for the palate and flowers for the sanctuary.

The long line from revelation to exile to redemption

Rosenzweig’s trinity of history,

Yet in our century all has been rehearsed

All has been encapsuled

The failed secular messianic movements 

The failed dictatorships

The secular theologies of flag county and honor

One big experiment in social engineering that only led to ethnic cleansing.

From the European of learning to Auschwitz to Yom Yerushalayim

Giddying changes for our community.

Before our eyes within decades,

The desert blooms,

The county thrives,

Start-up nation attracts billions from investors globally

Women’s revolution in Torah bringing

the new gift of insight into our sacred texts 

Technology and torah allowing us the dizzying mastery

of 2000 years with one click

(except on Shabbat when we return to our “am Haaretz status”)

But recently the tiny RNA virus that toppled our lifestyles

Recalibrating work and play where economies toppled

and nations blamed each other.

And the horrors of another war 

of man’s inhumanity to man,

To remind us of the darkness within,

That is destined to boil over volcanically every century

Making that post WWII 70 year calm another aberration in Hegelian history

A blip in the centuries fighting over a piece of real estate…

Now we return to that normal, 

Europe’s soil hungers for blood and must be satisfied with more.

Yet here we are

We dig once more into texts of Decalogue and Ruth and the Degel

Of self-understanding as a covenantal community

As well as on the individual trajectories

The personal miracles

The personal revelations

The renewal of commitment to recovery and healing

The openness to transcendence

The time to reflect and meditate on another year

Of learning

Of growth

Of optimism in the face of darkness.

Yizkor seems to mar the festivities

But that is our genius

For loss and trauma are never far from joy

Like the glass we break under the chuppah

We must remember those we lost

Moving from grief to an etching of love and memory

In the heart.

We have created this monotheistic ideal

Yet Schechina is down here with us

A matrix of love and

Suffering alongside us quietly

She wears at times a black bodice

And longs for her beloved

Trapped with us in an eternal exile.

We take all of this

On the macro level- as a community among others

As a nation state among others

And as individuals within communities

And struggle with seeing our tradition as once more relevant

Its ideals and mission

Its promises and utopian messianism

The myth of Matan Torah

Forgive Me

Forgive Me

Reb Melech

I know it was your Yahrzeit

All the chassidim flowed in

Krakow is a sea of black,

For those who came to participate in the new industry

(Charedi Kivrei Zadikkim tourism)

I was being driven to the border past Reyshe / Rzeszów/Lancut/Lizesk

On the highway racing past you…

Thinking how many times I prayed by your tziyon,

Wondered how all types of chassidus come together by you,

You somehow bring us/them under your unconditional love

Even broken souls like me.

REMAH

Forgive me too Rav Moshe (Isserless),

I used to stop by you on the way to Lizesk

A nod to my Oberlander father

Reassuring him that even the Satmer Rov

Omitted “veyatzmahk pirkunei”

The gravesite is quiet in the chilly brilliant spring sunshine

(The tree grows over your tziyon, just like in the photos

from the turn of the 19th century)

no cannon ball holes piercing your tziyon

(like the Chozeh!)

Stopping by the cradle of minhag Ashkenaz in deference to you,

Don’t worry Dad I used to say, the stylish move to chassidus

Does not supplant your minhagim…

It was theological not behavioral!

Then I look for the Megaleh Amukos

(on whose matzevah is inscribed: “he had gilui Eliyahu x3”) !!

But Rabbosai, you know there Is this war going on,

Next door, across the border

While you both rest peacefully,

Yet for an inexplicable reason

I felt the need to come here

To be here

Despite my wife’s exhortations

(the Ukrainian NAZI’s were the worst butchers in WWII)

Despite the AZOV fighters’ NAZI insignia

Despite the steely eyed soldiers guarding the fascist cross

By the lake where we do tashlich in Uman

And the assaults on chassidish kids on the streets of Pushkina

Despite history..

At the border

I see thousands of women and crying children

lined up by the border heading into Poland

Images of the forced lethal marches circa 1944

Each carrying a heavy heart and a wheely, leaving for safety

Leaving behind their loved men to fight

It’s an epic story of human misery and transmigration

I feel I am in a movie set

This long line in the no man’s land between war and safety.

Once again Europe drips with blood.

I am filled with pride as I see the Israeli flag on red medical volunteer suits

Literally hundreds of volunteers yelling in Hebrew

even units of Israeli medic soldiers help out

with their tents, food and equipment, truly a kiddush Hashem.

I walk in the opposite direction to the refugees,

so my path is clear, and I feel a loneliness

As I am walking into the fray.

An Israeli Major sees me stumbling carrying bags

of heavy donated equipment and insists on

helping me.

Four bubbly Israeli volunteers offer me fruit

from their supermarket cart they are taking to the

other side where thousands wait in line in silence.

I want to hug each one.

I volunteered in 1972 as a medical student during the Yom Kippur War

Now memories of those same whiney sirens surface

as we descend into the shelter.

For all the talk, writings on Post Holocaust this and that,

I need to be here…

“Never Again” applies to all human beings

So please forgive me Reb Melech and RAMO

I will come back on a better day.

Dad At 101

Born in an epidemic

100 years ago

A survivor for a century

Surfing on the aphorisms of classical wisdom

As if we learned what he felt necessary through his pithy wisdoms alone.

Having born witness to Hitler’s march into Vienna

Kindertransport

Internment

The love of his life

Starting a family

Communal work

Synagogue warden, President,

National prominence

Aliyah

Art and calligraphy

COVID brings it full circle

I know not when he began to blow shofar

In Tatura Internment camp?

Prior in Vienna?

But at 101 he continues to blow

He loves to entertain his guests

(despite Mum calling it “showing off”)

Even when cognitive articulations fail

As if his shofar blowing

Represents his will to breath

The serpentine shofar bending to his will

As if he finally tamed the inner snake of desire

And the outer monster of this century

The power of his sound

The power of his Prussian will

The power of his survival

Memories of his blowing in shul in the 60’s

Those last few kolos

We were on tenterhooks as kids

Carrying the shame of his failure

And the pride of his success

What began the century

Now ends it

The shofar heralding its onset and its end?

The jubilee of his life now bookended?

As if the microbe infecting millions

Killing millions

Began the worst century of human history

A harbinger of the killing fields of Europe

And Asia, the soil dripping with death

Screaming from the blood soaking it.

How he survived all of this,

This horrific century

Doggedly refusing to surrender

To the rules of others

His own iron will

Of moderation

Health, exercise

Care of the body and mind

No extremes mind you.

His Aliyah as a final arrival to the field of dreams

His delight in walking the streets unabashed of his yarmulke

Impossible in Europe

A microscopic reflection of what has taken place in the miracle of Zionism.

But also an inner protection, a survivor’s immune response to tragedy

Through walling off the emotions of loss

And the price one pays for that

The sense of betrayal of parents and sister

On the Vienna banhoff platform

And the demands of discipline and results from children

No room for failure

No expression of emotion allowed

Especially crying….

As I watch him blowing

It is as if he is telling me

I may not express myself

I may not tell you my feelings

I may not divulge my inner thoughts, I never did,

But here is my legacy

Listen to the power

Listen to the cadence the pitch the perfection

Here

This is what I leave my children

The memory of this sound

The sound that grows stronger and stronger

The sound of the jubilee

In this land of Jubilees

The optimism of the survivor

The spiritual immunity I give to you

To survive.

For Esther Was Here...And I Knew Not

אָכֵן֙ יֵ֣שׁ ה' בַּמָּק֖וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה וְאָנֹכִ֖י ל֥אֹ יָדָֽעְתִּי׃

“God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love….

Simone Weil, Waiting for God

Sitting next to my father,

Holding his 100 year old crafted hand,

He strokes mine gently, knowingly,

In silence.

I bow my head to kiss his hand

In sheer deference to this Prussian survivor.

No words need be spoke

(he cannot hear)

All has been said

All is left now to be present

To pay homage

We look at her picture together

(A book dedicated to her memory has her portrait)

We both stare at it and at each other, appreciating what we both mourn.

We share the same loss but in such different ways.

In fact this picture as well as her portrait look down from every wall,

As do her drawings and watercolors of flora and fauna,

A veritable gallery of her perception,

where she once toiled, despite failing eyesight,

These testaments (reshimu) to her once presence,

Force me to conjure her slender violin fingers in mine

On this same couch,

Despite her now physical absence-

I feel her absence, here more than anywhere else

And this overwhelming sense of her presence

Clouds my ability to heal the knife-like pain in the chest,

That has resurfaced from those early days of mourning,

As if her chimeric vitality emerges from the walls.

Opening the wounds of the heart once more.

I feel like I am in the Van Gogh immersive

Which allows no escape,

Yet in her very absence, even now she once more teaches me,

In this unbearable absence, her ghostly spirit nonetheless present

Showing me a theology she never articulated,

Always being a God-believer, (and more so after the Six-Day War)

A fierce advocate for Zionism,

She blessed people constantly in her waning years

Yet never professed any creed.

Mother is showing me a path I had read but never experienced

Through her excruciating absence and my painful longing

In that deep chasm of loss,

How I must cast aside any intellectual grasp,

Any attempt to make sense of the non-sense,

Any hope to resolve the pain of loss through the tincture of time.

Mother is teaching me in this immersive

To fully embrace the feelings of the eternal broken heart-

To realize any solace must come from the infinite distance

Of her not being here,

and in my yearning,

suspended in my inability to let go of her.

In her absence

Despite her absence

She is most present to me.

Here in her apartment

A mausoleum of sorts,

She once again is teaching me Rebbe Nachman’s paradoxical theology

(the parable of the mountain and the spring)

In ways I never experienced.

For (according to Weiss) it was precisely God’s absence

That allowed for faith,

(no experience of mystical union, nor intellectual reasoning),

An Anti-theology if you like,

The only hope in the Kafkaesque despair of

the yearning , not the learning or understanding.

That this was the only path to finding the light of His presence.

This she taught me through her loss, in the heart.

“Over the infinity of space and time, the infinitely more infinite love of God comes to possess us. He comes at his own time. We have the power to consent to receive him or to refuse. If we remain deaf, he comes back again and again like a beggar, but also, like a beggar, one day he stops coming. If we consent, God puts a little seed in us and he goes away again. From that moment God has no more to do; neither have we, except to wait. We only have not to regret the consent we gave him, the nuptial yes.”

Rabbi Nachman’s Story of The Seven Beggars

“And this is the life of the world: At the far end of the world there is a mountain, on the mountain top is a rock, and a fountain of water gushes from the rock. This you know: that everything in the world possesses a heart, and the world itself has a great heart. The heart of the world is complete, for it has a face, and hands, and breasts, and toes, and the littlest toe of the world’s heart Is more worthy than any human heart.

“So at one end of the earth there is the fountain that flows from the rock on the mountain top, and at the other end is the earth’s heart. And the heart desires the mountain spring; it remains in its place far at the other end of the earth, but it is filled with an unutterable longing, it burns with an endless desire for the distant fountain of water.

In the day, the sun is like a blazing whip upon the heart, because of its longing for the spring; but when the heart is utterly weak from the punishment of the sun, a great bird comes and spreads its wings and gives the heart rest. But even while it rests, it longs for the mountain spring, and It looks toward the peak of the mountain, for if it were to lose sight of the spring for but one instant the heart would cease to live.

“Because of its great longing, it sometimes tries to go to the fountain, but if it goes nearer to the foot of the mountain it can no longer see the spring on the top of the mountain, and so it must remain far away, for only from a distance may a mountain peak be seen. And if it were for an instant to lose sight of the spring, the heart would die, and then all the world would die, for the life of the world and everything in it is in the life of its heart.

“So the heart remains longing at the other end of the earth, longing for the spring that cannot come toward it, for the spring has no share in Time, but lives on a mountain peak far above the time that is on earth. And the mountain spring could not be of the earth at all, since it has no share in the earth’s time but for the earth’s heart, which gives the spring its day.

And as the day draws to its close, and time is ended, the heart becomesdark with grief, for when the day is done the mountain spring willbe gone from the earth, and then the earth’s heart will die of longing and when the heart is dead all the earth and all the creatures upon the earth will die.

“And so, as the day draws to a close, the heart begins to sing farewell to the fountain; it sings its grief in wildly beautiful melody, and the mountain spring sings farewell to the heart, and their songs are filled with love and eternal longing.

I Tried But The Gates Were Locked

“I tried but the gates were locked”

I tried, but the gate was locked, all three.

It would be at least an hour

Until the gatekeeper, the guard, would show up to allow folks in for services.

I realized that for much of my life the gates have been locked.

Like Jude the Obscure, whether the university walls or the heavenly gates,

I have not had the access codes,

All these gates were locked.

I paced up and down the outer walls of the shul and noted the wording above etched in

Jerusalem stone:

What is the remez being sent to me?

No access to my seforim left last night inside…

My ‘quota” prior to davening….

Now a prisoner of outside the walls of the Beis Midrash.

I begin to pace, and gyrating my stiff hips,

Up and down the sidewalk alongside the gates.

At least I will not waste the time standing idly,

rather work out the stiffness in my joints

A daily ritual to resolve the arthritic shoulder and hips, expected at this age.

The sense of failure grows as I realize my “appointment”

with the Chabad Rabbi

To learn the Alter Rebbe prior to davening,

would not happen, my Likutei Torah “fix”

Each Shabbat morning, that sets the high bar for what the day demands,

The expectation of the Rebbe beyond all my human capabilities,

Yet framing my Shabbat nevertheless.

The gates are thick black-brown already tarnished iron bars welded together

make the shul an impenetrable fortress,

unlike the European shuls that are almost invisible from the outside.

Here the Jerusalem stone stands out from the neighboring buildings

nevertheless the iron gates protect it.

Outside the gates I have nothing, no texts, only my mind…

and the deep sense of exclusion…outside the locked gates.

Then the Rabbi shows up!

And wonders why I am standing outside the gates!

Showing me that the shank had not gone through both holes

And in fact

The gate was open all the time!

I had not tried to open the gate

Thinking the padlock was functional.

He opens the gate with ease and I follow him dutifully;

But my heart bleeds and I start weeping inexplicably,

For not only was I excluded and access denied for 45 precious minutes,

My sense of exclusion was now entirely a myth…

my self-denial was false…

the gate had been open the whole time.

The tears flowed from the very failure of my failure.

Jude could not have walked right in to Christminster,

But I could have opened the gates of the Lord.

In my illusion of being locked out,

I spent 45 minutes drowning in the self-indulgent

Misery of exclusion and sense of inadequacy.

I was fooled by my lack of investigation,

Seeing the lock as open, in assuming I was locked out.

This assumption was so real

that the dramatic opening of the gate with such ease

Cause this flood of emotion, a reverse catharsis that only revealed

Just how excluded I was…

I was excluded from the very exclusion!

A reversal of the very validation of my sense of failure

Even more painful than the original feeling.

This only revealed the fool

The incompetent

The inattentive

A lifelong inattention to detail.

Yet another character flaw.

We enter the shul and he grabs the text and begins to learn.

We study the mystical meaning of Zecharia’s vision of the menorah

Its meaning and message in Likutei Torah.

And the two olive trees on either side of the menorah:

And I am thinking ..

Is this the very bifurcated scene of the high priest

standing before the angel of God on one side

and the Satan on the other?

Is this not precisely the same Satan who subverted me this morning

What is he teaching me?

The illusion of my self sabotage?

The accuser pointing out the two olive trees pulling me apart

The gates are now open

But the inner Kritik/Satan is alive and well

And Jude the Obscure remains outside the walls of Christminster.

The Light And The Dark of COVID

The light and the dark of COVID

For sure the disruption to life as we know it..

The lock down on a sunny cold December morning

The eerie quiet on the streets of Jerusalem

Feeling like Shabbat

But not…

The wind makes itself felt

On the cheeks

Making the sun even more friendly and healing than usual.

This year represents a fracture from the usual

The way we do things

The way we interact with one another

A reset button has been pushed

Not of our own making

For many the niceties of social interaction

The inability to go to each other’s homes

And make polite conversation

Has been a blessing

What wonderful excuses we now have

Not to meet unwelcome relatives

On holidays

And for those of us who felt discomfort

With the community of worshippers

With little choice in shuls

This blessed COVID came none too soon

For here was our out

At least for those of us at high risk

And Shabbes became an island of private sanity

Where the Schechina wafts through the soul

With its own rhythm and cadences

And the midrashic imagination has fertile soil

To soar and dive

To feel the light and the darkness of the divine.

Economies have tanked

Things just stopped

Commerce, shops, service industries-

Hitting the poor of course-, disproportionately

The traffic on the highways has thinned

And it’s as if the frenetic commercial drive

and greed has been checked by this invisible

Bug, this virus, this corona shaped

beautiful coral colored spiked circular image.

As if, mother earth and her tiny messengers

have brought the massive economies and greedy

multinationals to their knees with one tiny microbe

infecting without regard to GDP.

More importantly its effect on relationships

The masking of the face

The absent cues and facial gestures

That signify emotions

Reducing communication now to voice only

And the eyebrows.

Even more importantly

The sensation of touch has been severely curtailed

Allowing for an atrophy of this faculty

No more the hug of a fellow congregant

(Shlez always said shaking hands was goyish!

“A yid needs to give another a hug!”)

No more the compassionate hug of a patient

I recently diagnosed with an incurable illness

No more the furtive hug of another woman disguised as friendship

Maybe the loss of touch the most damaging of all.

Watching David Attenborough’s images of nurturing mammals

The gentility of mothers stroking their furry young

Ingrained in our paleo brains

In our genetic imprint

The need for the mother’s touch

The stroke on the cheek

The reassuring hug around the neck

Things we starve for,

Beyond survival

Flight or fright

That maternal reassurance

Forestalling the existential nightmare of what is in store

Now or eventually

That darkness and eventual ayin….

Her loving touch that will be mirrored in every touch henceforth

And in her wake

Every touch of a woman

Now lost in the official rules of COVID engagement

Governed by rule of law

Just like Halachah

Where the rules overtake the heart

And the law is an ass

No chance for that archetypal connection

That replays the lost mother

Now the secular government has joined your halachic framers

In an unholy alliance

To forbid this need

This alone has done more damage than all others.

The Unmasking of The Masks

The unmasking of the masks

We have normalized the covering of the face

What we once looked on in horror,

What Islamic women covered to our chagrin,

(and resulting political/legal responses in Europe)

Not so long ago,

Is now our norm.

The facial cues we used to rely upon in our social intercourse,

The curve of the mouth’s edges,

The cheek muscles pulled back in a smile a grin or a growl,

Those subtle emotional cues,

Now are hidden.

We only have the eyes now,

And their limited expression

Peeking above the KN95 barrier,

To discern any response to our verbal challenges.

Persona, mask, personality,

These we were taught

Were only the external manifestation of the soul..

Masking the inner light that was kept from view.

Herr Rabbiner Professor Freud gave us a darker version,

Of forces beneath the surface that needed suppression,

The Id, the naked ape inside,

Despite the genteel middle-class Viennese gemutlichkeit

That persona was the projected image of our better selves

What we would like others to see, not the real darker self.

Now fully masked,

We interact with one another

Unable to decipher the cues that once alerted us

To the response of the other.

Unable to see a flicker, a smile, a tersing of the lips in anger

Unable to respond in kind.

How will this affect our connections, our relationships?

How will we know when she returns a naughty look?

Left only with a wink, and a unilateral eyebrow rise?

Without the impish smile that usually accompanies the warmth of the gaze?

It is as if we need to begin again.

Like infants,

Gazing at divine mother’s eyes at the breast

Where it all begins,

And the toddler reads nonverbally, mother’s approval or otherwise, in her face, her smile

And the infant learns to obey her facial expression with such precision.

(I will never forget my earliest memory circa 1954

my father’s glare

In shul as a toddler on Yom Kippur

during Kedusha

As he stared me down to stop interrupting his piety.

His lips were tight, and his eyes burned deep into me.)

We will have to relearn new skills

To see only in the eyes

Everything we need

To read another’s soul,

To seek approval or disavow reproof

To discern betrayal or intuit a sly cunning

To see warmth and love

Or hatred and jealousy.

How to learn this?

Impossible with our aging neurons.

We will leave that to the young

Who will now have that advantage over us,

Seeing what we cannot

Behind the mask

The Soul of Jerusalem

The rain makes the stones of Jerusalem glow,

As if they are being shined for a new season of spring,

The sky, most of the year an azure blueness of infinity,

Now menacing us with its angry granite grey clouds

Crossing the sacred skyline of the Old City.

Walking becomes treacherous,

As the stones provide no assurance

That your gait will get you to your destination,

So I walk hesitatingly across the landscape of Rehavia

Walking down Narkis is particularly hazardous,

On my way to the sacred space that is Mayanot.

Winter is miserable here,

There is no let up,

No possibility of that brilliant azure blue during this season

And everyone reflects the depressive atmosphere

In their gait, their posture and facial expression.

But this is after all Jerusalem.

It has survived millennia,

It surely passes through this annual depression,

Without hesitation

Its people manage too,

A potpourri of ethnic mixes etched in their skin color,

Each with their own genetic story,

Each here for a particular thought, promise, dream, rationalization,

Seeing this piece of real estate as the spiritual center of the world.

My father too,

Walks carefully on the slippery stones

A survivor, he senses danger personal and with his ethnic radar,

Reminds me to step with caution,

As he has always done,

First priority has always been caution, survival, rebuilding.

He too came here,

15 years ago,

Never looked back,

This Holy City was for him

A place,

Where he never again would need to “look over his shoulder”

As he had for decades in Vienna, Australia, London

Always wary

Always worried

Maybe it could happen again?

Mistrust of government

Police, authorities

Now free,

This city of dreamers, mystics and madmen.

Here he feels at home,

Despite the slippery stones.

We dress up tonight

I know he loves to look dapper,

Crisp white shirt and tie,

Blue blazer and camel cashmere winter coat, trilby hat

Quite the gentleman!

We walk into the lobby of the King David

We note the absence of Mum

Who used to come here on the balcony overlooking the Old City

Father and son.

Fathers and sons…

Do all sons feel this way?

The clock ticks

Time is merciless

Each visit a gift.

He sits overlooking the Sea of Galilee

The cloudy skies make a haze of the lake

But so quiet and peaceful

His mind focuses on starlings flying around chasing each other

His mind flows to eternal nature

He is at peace.

We make Havdala and look at the empty easy chair

Where mum would rise to pay respect to the exit of Shabbat

And hold each other’s hand in that father son knowing

No need for words

The pain of her absence binds us.

On the table are his paintings,

His daily routine includes a couple of hours with his palate,

Inspired by mum,

And his choice is always horses and birds

With a couple of pictures of his cat Candy

Whom he adores as she plays hard to get

Intuitively knowing that’s what he needs.

Back in Jerusalem

The rain pounds the window sill

And the wet chills the bone

But in his Prussian precision

The routine goes on

The measured portions

The schedule

The tucking of his tztiztis exactly folded into his underpants,

A survivor he thinks about those long gone

And I, his son

remain

In awe.

Maybe he is the soul of Jerusalem?

Aunty Becky Tombstone Setting

Aunty Becky Tombstone setting

On behalf of the Ungar clan,

I and Rochelle are sorry we could not be here today,

Rochelle and I have only the fondest memories of Becky,

From the days at the Menorah Primary School

Where, as our teacher, we still remember the vocabulary list

and the multiplications tables!

As well her impatience with our arithmetic development!

Which was matched only by her insisting that no child might think

we were getting preferential treatment because she was our aunt.

But she was always fair (unlike our mum who seemed arbitrary

most of the time).

Those ancient days still bear down in the deep recesses of the psyche.

It was hard to reconcile Becky as a teacher during the week, and loving aunt on Sundays,

When we went round to Mallard Way or their newer home in Kingsbury.

The contrast between her sweet fried fishballs and

Mum’s unsweetened, boiled, fishballs

(They were small soft and delicious just like her.)

Mirrored their characters so appropriately!

As we progressed beyond into grammar school our relationship warmed

As she was no longer burdened by any conflict of interest,

And she became our second mother.

Always ready to give advice when we complained about Mum

Always there to give a hug,

The love now seemed unconditional.

There is a foto (please hand out copy or show it blown up)

of Becky and Essie in London shortly

after she arrived,

In Trafalgar square with the pigeons,

With her older sister she seemed happy and safe

And that lasted her whole life.

As the years progressed they became closer

and the distance between London and Jerusalem

only intensified their love.

When Becky came to visit they sat hand in hand on the couch,

Thanks to Tony who orchestrated these wonderful times together.

Rochelle and I would visit her in Nightingale

where she would tell us how tired she was,

Yet often, over Shabbat, she seemed to love the services there,

and knew everybody and their business.

She would have made a great gabbai.

Our last visit with her before she passed was so painful for us,

There was a deep sense of tragedy she inherited from the Sargon side,

And it was reflected in her beautiful eyes.

I am sure that the proximity of her leaving this world to Essie David and Ray

Meant that they would all never be alone,

They would storm heaven together.

May her memory be for a blessing

Sweet akeyka-bakey

Rivka bas Eliyahu Avraham.

Finally I Get It!

You! you! YOU!

You know it really has only to do with one thing!!!

The secret of the universe!

The heart of the universe!

The heart!

This heart of darkness.

Rebbe knew this secret..

(The heart and the spring [1])

He knew!

Your secret.

That You in…. You…in Your infinitude

Your Magnitude

Your Majesty

Are seduced by one thing only…

The heart!

The heart of the world

The heart of suffering

The heart of a wide-eyed boy

Whose girl finally shares a glance with him from the lady’s gallery

Of Finchley Central Synagogue

Circa 1964.

You understand that!

You demand that!

You are only moved by that alone.

I get it!

In the flirting!

In the search! Le cherche du femme!

In the failed conquest!

In the surrender to another’s rejection!

You are there!

You!

Are still moved by that!

Not the voluminous Talmudic pages learned by heart…

Not the erudition of the scholars..the pilpul..

Not the mastery of texts by the Talmidei Chachamim

No!

Only this little boy

Whose heart was inflamed,

And after years of pain and suffering and pining,

She sent a glance his way…

From the lady’s gallery…

And he fell apart…

His heart dissolved…

A solution of divine proportions!

She!

Had glanced his way!

Her gaze..

Was as vast as the cosmos,

It traversed the universe to him,

Taking decades to realize this…she…

The Matronita

Had glanced upon the zoharic knight on the white horse below the castle

Who had pledged eternal platonic love for her.

And now,

The universe makes sense

Finally,

I realized what makes YOU tick! Lord

You , You, You!

Take pleasure in this alone.

You share in my heart pain.

However, when the Heart needs to rest a bit,

so as to draw a little breath [Yid. oyf zoyfn] then

comes a Big Bird and spreads its wings above it,

shielding it from the sun; then the Heart gets

a little rest. But even then while resting

it also looks facing the Spring and still longs for it.

But since it longs so much for the Source,

why does it not go to the Source?

Only, as soon as the Heart wants to go close

to the Mountain upon which is the Source

then it no longer sees the peak;

it cannot look at the Spring —

and as soon as it would not look at the Spring

it would expire, for the Heart's entire vitality

is only from the Source, so when it stands facing the

Mountain then it sees the Mountain peak where the Spring is,

but immediately as soon as it wants to go to the Mountain,

the peak no longer appears (for such indeed is the way with a tall

mountain; standing from afar the peak is visible,

but upon going nearer the peak is no longer visible).

Then it can no longer look at the Source and could

— Mercy save us! —

expire, and if this Heart

— Mercy save us! —

would expire the whole world would be destroyed,

for the Heart is the very vitality of every thing,

and how can the world endure without the Heart?

Therefore the Heart cannot go to the Spring;

it only stands facing the Spring, longing and screaming

without cease to be able to come to it, as mentioned.

[1] And there is a Mountain, and on the Mountain stands a Stone, and from the Stone emerges a Spring. Now, every thing has a heart, and the entire world also has a heart, and the Heart of the World is a complete structure, with face, hands, feet etc. But the nail of the foot of the World's Heart is heartier [Yid. hertziker] than the heart of anything else. And the Mountain with the Stone and the Spring stands at one end of the world, while this Heart of the World stands at another end of the world, and the Heart stands facing the Spring, desiring and hoping continuously, exceedingly, that it should come to the Spring, and the longing and desire of the Heart to come to the Spring is just extraordinary. It screams nonstop, the Heart, to come to the Source, and the Source longs for the Heart too. Now, the Heart has two things that make it weak. One, because the sun pursues it exceedingly and scorches it (because it always yearns and desires to come to the Source), and the second thing that tires the Heart is due to yearning and desiring, that the Heart constantly yearns and wishes; it keeps pouring out its soul for the Source and screaming and so forth, as above, so as to come to the Source, for the Heart is always standing facing the Source, and screams "Na! Gevald!" [Yid. Please! Woe!], and keeps on yearning most exceedingly for the Source, as mentioned.

Cuba Dancing, Letting Go

Mistakenly I join a group of tourists

visiting dilapidated synagogues and cemeteries

For how could I not include this on my itinerary?

A sense of shame were I to skip this,

The decay of the buildings and peeling 50-year-old paint a testament

To poverty and exodus of the community after la Revolution.

The community leader tries to entertain a group of elderly tourists

led by their rabbi

From Delaware, who only wanted her picture (with plaque)

alongside the presidente.

We are no longer in the original sanctuary which they say

is now leased to a dance troupe (!)

We are in a smaller ignominious hall with fading yellow hanging curtains,

And old mustard-colored cinema seats lined up as pews

with a central gangway in the middle.

We are shepherded next to the dining hall

where old age folk are being fed,

I am embarrassed to stand there in voyeuristic show

designed to get the tourists to contribute.

Next onto the Holocaust “museum” consisting of a hallway

with the usual murals depicting Nazi Europe

and pictures of the ill-fated SS St Louis liner

turned away with 900 passengers, back to Europe to meet

their fate. The 83 year old guide

(why do all old Cubans look like Hemingway?)

speaks of his years growing up in Cuba,

with profound nostalgia.

Some of us restless ones, begin to wander.

We are used to high tech images and commanding videos with

colored murals, personal stories at least, testimonies, this is so pitiful.

I wanted to see the grandeur of the sanctuary,

so I slowly open the door to find the dance troupe in session.

They are dancing on what was the elevated platform

in front of the Aron Hakodesh which has been

boarded up but obviously still there.

I am initially sad that the community needs to survive on this rental

but all thoughts vanish then they begin to rehearse.

These young ballet dancers are oblivious to anything but their craft,

they swing through the air and twirl on their toes.

This is not modern dance,

more the classical ballet Havana is famous for.

I am amazed at the architecture of their slim bodies.

There is no fat, only muscles and sinews and

insertion points of muscles in joints.

I feel I am watching a live exercise in anatomy.

But then the music begins and I am spellbound by the movement

and the music together.

As they spin and fly through the air, defying gravity,

always landing with grace, the power and strength

and control reminds me of a classical oil painting,

then imagining them on stage in a huge ballet theatre

I am transported through time and space along with them.

Their bodies in motion carry me along.

The women rehearse for 30 seconds then men take over

with the same sequence of music and moves.

Tears overwhelm me, this place of Jewish history,

with a Holocaust museum on the other side of the

doors, and a failing shul and elderly feeding hall, then this!

The old folks and young lithe bodies together

unaware of each other in one building.

How does all fit? How can it?

I am so moved by their youth and vigor, their dedication to the art,

thinking of nothing but the performance, the moves,

the elegance and grace as they fly through the air.

I feel this was no accident, these young folk, the future,

with no “theology” in their minds, clueless in

fact as where they are dancing,

(for them a rental space) for me, on the altar,

the BIMA, before the Ark of the Covenant,

held to be so sacred a space by generations of worshippers,

They think not, they must not,

they must in fact, inhibit the mind

so that the body can perform.

(I remember when performing a Bach fugue

how in fact I had to let go of the thought of the notes

and just let the fingers play and play until the

fingers got it right).

Through constant rehearsal they train their limbs into muscle memory,

striving to mimic the intent of the choreographer who at times critiques,

and at others gets up to show them the move she wants.

As they dance it dawns on me the lesson to be learned.

They are the future, they express their spirituality in their bodies,

in their movements, their artistry IS their spirituality…

And for me, in a subversive way there remains holiness here still,

from the decrepit halls behind us and the institutionalization of

Holocaust memorials and “museums”

as an identity marker to the past,

here was something vital alive and urgent.

Alive with the movement of youth and vigor in the present.

I am so taken by one of the male dancers whose grace was feminine

yet so strong, An Adonis, a Greek god,

spinning and twirling through the air,

his jumps were high always landing with gentility.

Maybe this was the lesson. The future, the youth,

the next generation was giving us a message.

Forget the theologies and theodicies,

forget the rationalizations and even the heresies,

watch us!

Committed to the body to beauty to motion

to commitment to our craft

Watch us dance!

Rapturous dance

Leave the head behind, it only impedes,

Leave the heaviness

Leave the gravity/gravitas

Allow the body to soar in space

The new sanctuary

The body as temple

Worship here!

Follow the new rituals of pas de deux

The new rabbi as choreographer

Next time I daven is Shul

it will be the first time since my aveilus

that I will be permitted to tansel

The post kabbalat Shabbat dance around the bima back home.

The Rabbi will hold my hand and welcome me back after a year of mourning

And I will bring back these movements

I will try to let go and let the swaying of our Hassidic tansel

Move me out of the headspace and into the rhythm and movement as we sing

Shabbes Koidesh Shabbes Shabbes Koidesh!

And mother will nod approvingly.

Surrender To The Mystery

Surrender to the Mystery

Surrender to the mystery!

Dad at 99

Soldering on

Prussian Precision routine

Looks the same as when he was 70

Mum’s succumbing

Her leukemic white cells unable to

Mount a defense

Against that last pneumonia

Simply unable…

And our turning 70

Whatever happened to those decades?

They seem to have accordioned

Folding into each other in a blur

This single truth,

Slowly advancing towards us

Like a dark cloud on the horizon

Initially of little consequence

(Too many others things to contend with)

Now approaching silently and menacingly,

Too large to ignore any longer,

In the fantasy of youthful immortality,

The greying sky,

Casting a pall over everything.

For every person since time immemorial

Must surrender to the inevitable,

The ending of things,

Putting one’s mental house in order

Requires a staging of the soul

To be receptive to “passing on”

To that very fact,

To be able to face it as a reality not merely a concept.

Time is the enemy…

Every day passing,

Every wasted minute now pointing its accusing finger

The seasons and the festivals are counted differently

How many more seder nights?

And each grandchild’s rite of passage

A marker along this path

The days have a precious quality

Sunrise feels like a light in a cathedral, during in through the stained glass windows

Sunset feels like the soul going into hibernation.

Rain especially,

Has a delicious quality,

And the cold winters become increasingly unbearable.

The body announces its slippery decline

In subtle ways,

The shoulders creak when arising during the night to void,

Taste buds are demanding the familiar,

Reluctant and uninterested in trying new recipes and exotic dishes.

By 4pm the body fatigues,

unable to see the last batch of patients with vigour.

By 8pm no new discussions or decisions can be made.

Rashi script on the Daf becomes a marker year after year

As to the retinal decline,

And hearing above ambient noise becomes more and more irritating.

We won’t discuss the libido in good company

But you can imagine.

And what of all of this learning?

Accumulation of data,

Facts and figures,

Thesis and papers,

My books standing like soldiers in the library

In an army of memory surrounding me with comfort,

Each reflecting my struggles and interests over 50 years.

Textual mastery and interpretation,

Theological reflections and discourse,

Historical analysis and the continual seeking of trends,

The sum total of what is understood and what has been forgotten

None of this brings us closer to understanding the mystery.

We seem to have come round full circle

Seeing yet again the mystery behind this whole human endeavor.

The myths we create to inspire and calm the very horror of the ending

The world to come,

Paradise,

For those fortunate to have lived a good life

The recycling of souls

Looking down from heaven

Angelic beings

Seem now, purely wish-fulfillment

As the ending looms, a different perspective arises

Slowly now perceptibly,

Who taught us how to prepare for death?

Beyond the confession? The Zadok Hadin

Halacha is almost matter of fact and detailed about what to do

But how to feel? Not a word.

And what of those Hassidic Masters?

What did they learn from lying in the open grave?

Beyond the panic and terror?

Or those Carpathian Hesychastic monks in their caves for years on end?

Surely those with near-death experiences make claims from the beyond?

I fear the wisdom preached cannot remove the terror,

And certainly does not listen the mystery.

Surrender to the Mystery

Maybe this is the reason for poetry and music

The Greeks (tragedies) understood that

The last bastion against the tyranny of time

The eternal world rotating on the axis Mundi forever

The horror of man versus the gods

The impossibility of man winning.

Maybe the mystery itself has what to teach?

Something divine about it?

Something in common perhaps?

Both unknowable and ineffable

Both unpredictable and uncanny

Both appearing at times unjust and petulant

And the mystery of birth, being and death becomes

The singular event we face without satisfactory explanation

Rational understanding,

Maybe this is the point

The unacceptable fact is the teacher

The very knowing we know nothing

The surrender and acceptance is the goal.

For every passing, time, time, time,

Midas Hadin

ברא -אהלים :לוא אמר ברא ה', שבתחלה עלה במחשבה לבראתו במדת הדין, ראה שאין העלום מתקיים, הקדים דמת

Rashi to Genesis 1:1

Imagine

In the place of NOT-God

Where history and suffering cohabit

Where blind hatred and genocide flirt

And the angel of death moves with impunity

And my mother knows what is happening to her and is mortally afraid

In this space, the harms I have caused others accumulate

Bearing down weightily, confronting me with “j’accuse!”

It is precisely here

Where the NOT-God/Schechina dwells,

In the heart of darkness,

Forced, wrenched and torn from the Divine pleroma

Without her consent, banished from the father’s table

In the beginning….before time.

Imagine

How she must to suffer alongside us

Eternally yearning to be reunited with her GOD

But prevented by the same divine decree

That divine self-indulgence, pique and experiment (kivyachol)

In humankind (Midas HaDin)

Like a mad scientist in a laboratory who just cannot give up

And the rats on their treadmills are going crazy.

If only He’d begun with Midas HaRachamim

What would it have looked like today

Orgies and fun? (God forbid!)

Too much loving?

Unconditional praise?

Certainly, the need to avoid so much destruction?

(The verse ״These are the generations of the heaven

and the earth when they were created״ (Gen. 2:4)

suggested to the rabbis the creation of prior worlds,

while the verse ״You carry them away as with a flood״ (Ps. 90:5)

was also interpreted to refer to the destruction of these prior worlds.

The Zohar (1:262b) suggests that God did not actually build these

prior worlds, but only thought about building them.

That this world was not the first that God created

was believed to be indicated by Isaiah 65:17: “For,

behold, I create new heavens and a new earth and the

former shall not be remembered nor come to mind.”

Zohar Hadash identifies the prior worlds as totaling 1,000,

as does Or ha-Hayim 1:12, which states that before God created this world,

He created a thousand hidden worlds. These hidden worlds were

created through the first letter, aleph. That is why the Torah,

in the report of the Creation of this world, commences with the second

letter, bet. The existence of the 1,000 worlds is linked to the verse

You may have the thousand, O Solomon (S. of S. 8:12).

Weren’t those worlds enough to show him

the devastating effects of Midas Ha-Din?

Now condemned to a history of divine gevurot

Infecting down below every interaction burdened with these kelippot

Splitting our hearts into chambers of good and evil.

Imagine

Moments of grace

Where She glimpses of the divine, transcending time and space

And one can feel the presence of His absence

Where a wormhole allows Her to gaze

And fill with desire

Taking me along for the ride.

The weight of being is lifted

By a delicate unbearable lightness

As if the anchor that chains me to the inexorable sense

of progress of time

Time passing,

Time wasted,

Time running out,

Is lifted momentarily.

This Midas Ha-Din

That took her from me

Producing an utter grief

This overwhelming Kaddish

Transforming the grief into memory

A spiritual cardio-conversion,

As this year of mourning comes to a close

I wonder whether the recitation was for her, the Schechina or myself.

Is it not possible…

This brilliant psychodrama of Kaddish

The obsessive repetitiveness of it,

The public display of it,

Its tone and cadences,

The swaying and the steps back and forward

The body in motion with the heart

Is, in fact a Kaddish for myself?

That as the year winds up

The cessation of its recitation looming

A new anxiety

Having been baptized a couple of thousand times

I must face the silence

The no-recitation when the service calls for those members

of this exclusive club to stand and be counted

Those whose entrance fee has been paid with tears

I must stand down

The sheer terror of no mourning no response no expression.

Can I not continue to say Kaddish forever?

Why am I stopping in two weeks?

If I feel I must

If only for my own demise?

(this is not a Halachic question!)

Imagine

In the place of NOT-God

There is a silence too

A not saying of Kaddish

For the worlds He destroyed

For the laboratory rats sacrificed for His eternal experiment

The silence that screams in the Sahara Desert

The silence representing the failure to adequately mourn the loss

The enormity of the bereavement

The silence after every life breathed no longer

For the permanent absence

For His allowing the angel of death free reign

For the Midas Ha-Din.

Ashen Soul

הַאֲזִינוּ הַשָּׁמַיִם, וַאֲדַבֵּרָּׁה;

וְתִשְמַע הָּׁאָּׁרֶץ, אִמְרֵּי-פִי

Give ear, ye heavens, and I will speak;

and let the earth hear the words of my mouth.

Sitting in a manicured courtyard,

Palm trees surrounding this sacred space, allowing for privacy

The sound of water gushing into a small pool,

The manicured quadrangle allowing for the sun’s rays

To cause a kaleidoscope of shadows on the perfectly set stones.

In the cloistered sanctuary of this spa for the wealthy,

A Bodhisattva is placed in the center,

Presumably to provide an air of serenity,

In a sitting posture, the Buddha clasps two bowls in his lap

I gaze at the idol, in the center of the quadrangle,

Jealous that it sits, still, beyond time and history,

Having lived a life and taught how to escape “dukka”

The sorrow and suffering of this world.

I however cannot escape history,

My soul is ashen,

Infected by a white powdery substance

That was released some 70 years ago

When millions were cremated,

And the smoke and ash billowed heavenward.

Whereas the blood-soaked earth and mass graves of Europe

betray the genocidal numbers who cannot speak from the earth.

What of those consumed by the fire?

Those who went up in smoke in a fine powdery haze of ash

What happened after?

Where are they now?

The ash returned to earth

To contaminate everything

“no one living would ever be able to escape them, these ashes would be contained in the milk that will be drunk by babies yet unborn and in the breasts their mothers offer them: the ashes will linger in the flowers which will grow out of them and in the pollen with which they will be fertilized by bees, they will be in the depths of the earth too, where rotted woodlands transform themselves into coal, and in the heights of heaven, where every human gaze, equipped with a telescope, encounters the invisible layers which envelop this wormy terrestrial apple of ours. These ashes will be contained in the breath and expression of every one of us and next time anybody asks what the air he breathes of is made of. He will have to think about these ashes; they will be contained in books which haven’t been yet written…”

(Arnold Lustig, A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova, trans, Jeanne Nemcova, New York: Harper and Harper Row, 1973, 1973)

The white ash settled on the grassy Bavarian meadows

and forever daisies bear some guilt for not having refused.

Nature accepted what the heavens refused.

The Bodhisattva looks down avoiding my gaze

What is there to say?

It’s an idol after all

And Halachically forbidden to describe its beauty.

So why did the ash fall back to earth?

Why did heaven refuse it?

Why didn’t God suspend the laws of gravity?

Not lovingly inhale every one of the million babies.

Let’s say he was out of touch

(for how we could go on living and worshipping Him

had he been present to History’s worst horror?)

What about Michael, Rephael, Uriel and Gabriel- surely our archangels

should have received them lovingly?

Even Mamale Rachel could not be found.

Silence.

Only one angel who was a quite willing accomplice- Samael/Satan.

So the ash fell back down to earth obeying His natural laws

And infects my soul.

It is the frosted lens by which I see everything.

Even joy is contaminated by this white powdery gloss.

הַאֲזִינוּ הַשָּׁמַיִם “Listen O heavens!”

No longer are you a valid witness!

You let the ash rain back down

No longer are you a valid witness

You are summarily disqualified

וְתִשְמַע הָּׁאָּׁרֶץ “Let the earth give ear”

It cannot-its ears are filled with ash, you cannot bear witness

You hide too much blood

Moses our teacher no longer has eternal witnesses to rebuke Israel

When it sins,

Case is now dismissed for tainted witnesses

Even the judge is absent.

The Bodhisattva promises escape

But a luxury I simply cannot indulge

Memory and history do not end

Men went on living

But the idea of man did not survive.

Terumos Ha-Deshen

The scooping of ash from the Temple altar

And its cleansing after the sacrifices of the day,

-The priests would compete for this ritual-

Seeing it as the choicest of tasks.

What High Priest would dare approach the ashes of the crematoria

Seeing the same sacred task a millennia later

Vying for the job,

Scooping the holy powder of a generation

From the altar consecrated by human not animal sacrifice.

The priests are the kapos

Scooping the human powder

With satanic zeal

For heaven refused to accept them.

A generation later we see

How we too have been sacrificed for so long

On the altar of our messianic expectations

A rescue from above

אֲנִי מַאֲמִין בֶאֱמוּנָּׁה שְלֵּמָּׁה

בְבִיאַת הַמָּׁשִִֽׁיחַ, וְאַף עַל פִי שֶיִתְמַהְמִֵּֽׁהַ,

עִם כָּׁל זֶה אֲחַכֶה לּוֹ בכָּׁל יוֹם שֶיָּׁבוֹא

“even though he may tarry”

Tragically too late for history

אני לא מאמין

The Ending

The ultimate secret

That we all share,

That we cannot abide,

That we avoid at all cost,

That we drown in anything,

Alcohol, drugs, tobacco, sex

To avoid facing it..

This secret..

The Mystery..

The sod..

The roz..

This enigmatic kabbalistic gematria

That fails to reveal.

This secret is…

Is our mortality!

Our ending.

Our facing the approaching end.

The end of it all.

Our consciousness.

Our self image.

Our very existence.

In this crisis,

Bathed in tears,

Bathed in memories,

The earliest memories,

And the lost memories,

The a-hah moments,

Saying goodbye…

To mother, holding her hand…

In her fears, in that dreaded hospital bed,

Drowning in her fears,

I am helpless.

I cannot fix this.

She again teaches me,

Having born me,

Facing the end of her Kaddish,

In another month,

(I fear the stopping,

Of this recitationary obsession,

For the nothing=ness

Of the day after

In minyan

Silent.)

In this space between recitation and silence

She lingers

She bears down on me

She remains in my heart

The Secret of Life: The Ending

This force

This presence

Her presence

In her absence

The Schechina

Suffers through her

In the silence

I suffer her,

Bereavement means bereft

Holding those slender violin fingers

In mine,

Knowing what is to come

What must happen,

Knowing in the head

But refusing in the heart.

My holy twin rebounds how Mum

Voiced her fear of loneliness

And she jumped into her bed holding her

Comforting her in her ultimate fear.

And now

Only now,

In these tears,

Do I understand,

The suffering of Her

In Galut,

Schechinta be-galuta

I had to suffer this loss

To understand and feel the Divine loss,

The last 8 verses were written bedema

In tears, by Moses (?)

As if he was prescient

And knew what my mother would anguish over.

The ending must be growing in tears

For us

For her

For Her.

And my own ending,

The three score years and ten that loom shortly,

My own biblical lifespan now exhausted

I must return to her/Her

For strength

To endure this

Awareness

Death and the Maiden comes to my ear.