Before He Thought Silence
Before He thought, about this world An idea arose in His mind, Israel.
In the silence of shtok kach ala bemachshava
He thought of the martyrs, Rabbi Akiva, and the mothers who would sacrifice their children in the churches of Mainz, Speyer and Worms, and the babies who would go up in the flames of Hitler’s inferno.
In that first breath of life He too had to die a bit.
In His plenitude, in His pleroma He too had to make room, of Not-Him, an internal dying to the self.
From His breath, I breathe... That unconscious deep inhalatory gasp recognized only when I surface after being too long submerged
In the purifying waters of the supernal mikveh,
When I realize just how primitive this reflex gasp is,
Unable to control it. (And they say water boarding is not torture!)
But in that breath-His exhalation into my lungs comes at a price
For He demands, requests, begs, We live, and return the favor!
But how! We finite creatures living out our puny lives
At the end of which we too must "give up the ghost"
And breathe that last breath
When that very last exhalation gets no inspiration and We stop....breathing
We ex-pire.
Yet taught in the secrets of Torah about the "kiss of death" reserved for the precious few, the Patriarchs, Moses, the Tzaddik/saints and Reb 'Melech', (even my wife's grandfather! was witnessed)-in whose death mirrored that primordial act of creation- in the kiss-
the breath is literally sucked out, sucked back into the divine. misas neshikah
But those chosen received this gift precisely because they lived each moment, Each breath as if...what was being asked,
What was being demanded,
Was a readiness at any moment,
For mesiras nefesh
To give infinite pleasure back to the divine By self-sacrifice
To give up the ghost immediately upon request.
As the martyrs were so ready- the daily rituals and customs seem to focus on training us for the possibility for such similar demands at focal points in history- (do we need to rehearse them again?)
The martyrs argue among themselves as to who should go first,
Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel or Rabbi Shimon the High Priest,[1]
Who should be first to die, and As the Piacezna mourns his son in the fall of 1939, in the Ghetto Warsaw,
He rereads the death of Sarah our matriarch[2]
As one of possible suicide in order to confront her Maker With the real question behind the Akeda, the binding of Isaac.
Not his survival rather his descendants' martyrdom! She foresaw in her prophetic mind Generation after generation of blood, and man's inhumanity to man.
This was not the blessing promised to her husband! She was to present herself prematurely to protest and complain
That this might be the lot of her descendants. "And the remaining of her years did not protest."
But God demands no less of what He himself gave in creating this world.
Mesiras nefesh as imitato dei, A true replication of creation, in the very act of dying.
By dying and giving Him our last breath
We, too, act in creation in the very surrender to creation.
We, too, breathe back into God what He had given so painfully
By limiting Himself in this world.
By transforming our desire for self-preservation Into the desire to breathe back into Him
We are replicating His desire to create
Resulting in His dying-if only a little.
When the angels then protest citing "zu Torah vezu schora!" Is this Torah and is this its reward" God's response remains "shtok! Kach ala bemachshava.
“Be silent! For thus it arose in My mind".
[1] Avot deRabbi Natan 38:3. the reason being "not to watch the death of my friend" but reworked in Eish Kodesh By R. Kalonymous Kalman Schapiro Succos 5702 as "I want to be t'chila the first to be martyred because being first forges new paths in worship. Alluding to the death of his beloved son; who also was meant to forge new paths in hassidut."
[2] See Rashi to Gen. 23:1-2. and midrashim op cit.
The Latest Station In a Long Mythical Drama
If creation was the expulsion of DINIM
From within the pleroma of the infinite
An infinite desire to rid itself of itself,
Of its GEVUROT, once and for all,
Then the world as is, the cosmos, ourselves
Represent this divine refuse
(remember Jung’s first dream, a turd falls from sky onto his father’s altar!)
Then its culmination, terminus ad quo, its nadir
When time, space and people coalesced all at once
(the reverse of the High Priest in the holiest place at the Holiest time
Pronouncing the Ineffable Name)
Which allowed for the supreme manifestation of
GEVUROT/DINIM/the demonic
To come to a crashing climax
When history stopped being history
And the divine expulsion of Lucifer was complete
In the ovens of Auschwitz.
For surely,
As Kabbalah teaches,
The very mystery of the universe
The single claim above all others
Is that “what s below is mirrored above” and vice versa
This mirroring of the divine,
The verisimilitude,
Manifests both its good and dark side (kelippa/sitra achra)
And in this paradoxical unity of upper and lower worlds
(Where Rabbi Akiva warns his students embarking on a trip to
the upper worlds
“do not split between the upper and lower waters!”)
The illusion of reality, the world, history and time
Must be pierced by the visionary adept,
As part of his worship,
Who must see beyond geography, even the laws of physics
and the needs of self,
And suffer the evil from the above
Since he “knows” the divine disconnected self (Schechina)
is suffering down here too.
He is a knight of the Matronita. The Lost Princess
And where She goes he follows
In Her suffering
He too feels the pain and longs for her reunification with Her consort.
For the exile of the human spirit below
Is mirrored above in an infinite fractured divine,
And this infinite divine pain is felt below
So the bloodletting and burst of genocidal fury
Against the chosen people
In the most refined kultur of Beethoven and Goethe,
Must be seen as an unleashing of a demonic force
That defies sociopolitical and historical analysis
Leaving a gap of understanding after all the historical facts
have been rationally analyzed and hypothesized.
This gap expressed only as the demonic,
Reflecting rather a Divine self-wounding of infinite proportion.
Resisting ideologies of theodicy and theoria that might justify, explain,
rationalize or even accept guilt (a very Rabbinic trope),
Resisting doctrines of good/evil, reward/punishment, vicarious suffering of
the righteous servant etc etc,
(Which held the faithful for a millennia
Who until hitherto were
Accepting of responsibility for each pogrom
Encoded in the liturgy, piyyutim and chronicles,
But no longer of use)
In the face of a million babies in the smoke filled chimneys
Of the crematoria.
So where to turn to?
In the infinite silence of the transcendent?
To make any sense of it, (forget Hester Panim)
Or jettison all theologies and theodicies once and for all?
The Kabbalist turns to midrashic and zoharic tropes
Of the feminine divine- Schechina,
Weeping as she left the Temple court, Jerusalem circa 70CE
The weeping city alone,
Or the hypostatic Rachel crying from her tomb in Bethlehem.
Watching her children chained into exile.
He turns to that Schechina, lost and disconnected from Her consort
Trapped down here in a world of demons/kelippot
Unable to reunite or bring the Messiah,
The weeping black widow by the Kotel,
And sits on the ground weeping on her behalf reciting Tikkun Rachel and
Leah at midnight.
In these tears he inhabits a new silent landscape, the wasteland.
In a black and white movie where all is grey,
He no longer sees his suffering in theological categories
Having spent centuries following the Lurianic kavvanot, tikkunim and zivugim,
Rituals and ascetic practices designed to get noticed upstairs,
To fix things upstairs,
Rolling in the snow, Tikkunei shelleg-mortifications and fasting.
He must now find a new path in a genocidal era
With no hope for deus ex machina
Or Messianic figure,
(for if Elijah should arrive now-he would turn him away
Having ignored the screams of a million babies and their mothers)
No, he returns to the paradigms of protest and pathos
Of the parables of a king weeping in his inner chamber
Lamenting the loss of his people
Unable to be consoled
And finds deep compassion within
Despite a resentment the size of Munich
And a gaping wound in the heart as deep as Hades.
For, as the hassidic masters claimed
The only path now is one of mittuk hadin,
The holographic Din within him, the demonic side of him,
By comforting the Lost Princess as she lies swooned in the Water Castle
And feeling her pain as she sees the infinite loss
(Like the night Reb Zisha awoke to the screams of a million babies
Running away from that little shtetl Ushpetzin
200 years before they fired up the ovens).
Or carry the weight of the Divine בכי
Like the Piacetzna instructed us before his deportation to Treblinka
To not focus on one’s own pain,
Rather be a merkava for Her pain
As She dies alongside the victims
An infinite weight to bear.
From that first tzimtzum of infinite contraction
A sea of infinite pain produced by this huge self-inflicted
Intra-divine vacuum/wound,
Down to the long history of man’s inhumanity to man,
Culminating in the horrors of the “years of Fury”,
And the current technology of the killing fields.
The adept collapses all time into the mirror of his own soul
Seeing across the infinity of space
With his third eye,
Seeing this demonic dark side of the divine
In himself too,
And realizing he alone can hold this paradox.
All he can utter
Despite this travesty
Is
יתגדל ויתקדש שמי רבא
Magnified and Sanctified be Thy Holy Name
We are born into this world
We die in this world
The Holy Name was there before us
The Holy Name remains after we are no longer here
We are forced to focus on the eternal Thou
Not our mortal selves
Not even our beloved losses
We focus on the mystery behind the Holy Name
The unfathomable grief and tragedy of life
And death all subsumed in the mystery of the Holy Name.
And develop compassion for His infinite, eternal pain.
This was never about us
Our biography
Neither our narrative
Nor our ending
We are merely the latest station in a long historical/mythical journey
Who tragically, were witness to
Or survivors of,
The culmination of a series of down-chaining
demonic forces that landed on our timeline
And in our backyard,
Of pure Wotan will, force, desire and bloodletting,
Unleashing a new age of genocidal fury.
What can he do
This adept?
But weep..,
And carry this dark side of the divine.
Epigenetic Survival
“Vienna, that scrollworked bastion, smoldered with more demons of the future than the most forward-minded cities of the West.”
Frederick Morton, A Nervous Splendor
I dream of Dad last night
Looking at the roundness of a buttock
Approvingly…
In Vienna, female human anatomy and its proportions were taken oh so
seriously!
Reminding me of his father, who annually had to meet the Viennese store
buyer, enormous purchasing power
To sell his woolen goods for the next season,
She “demanding” he pinch her bottom with a Viennese wink.
His knowing look then glances at me!
Teaching me unconsciously the need for “good stock”
Implying a generous rump
In choosing the mother of the next alpha males….
The survival of the fitter, over centuries
The natural selection of choice partners
Requires the ample rump, stocked with fatty nutrients
To feed the sampling trees, the little ones especially during times of hunger,
And exile.
And that dream glance, the look, at me, transmitting this tool to the son.
Why would Dad come to me ?
And why with such base desire?
No high fallootin’ philosophical wisdom from beyond?
An insight? A thought? A piece of advice in my ongoing struggles?
Oh the Viennese double standards !!
How we choose our spouses!
What unconscious embedded predetermined desires…
Handed down in genetic formation
Tiny microscopic armies of DNA
Without a spoken word
Nor rhyme nor reason
He preferred the exotic slim Sephardi Indian beauty
Her delicate long fingers encompassing the neck of the fiddle, with mastery
Her playing seducing him for life
Forever devoted to this musical impressario
To what he sarcastically called the “cholent girls” from East London
Mostly from middle Europe themselves.
The body encodes these prejudices deep within the mitochondria
Not even permitting awareness to the person all the while,
making lifetime decisions about soul mates.
And Dad worshipped her until her dying breath
And beyond, forlorn, “my late wife” he would pine…
Thank you for the dream
With Every Breath על כל נשימה ונשימה
When a person is sleeping, however, the soul [neshama] [is left within him,and it] warms the body so it will not get too cold and die. That is what iswritten: “The spirit [neshama] of man is the lamp of the Lord” (Proverbs 20:27).
Rabbi Bisni, Rabbi Aḥa, and Rabbi Yoḥanan say in the name of Rabbi Meir: The neshama fills the entire body, and when a person sleeps, it ascends upward and draws life for him from above. Rabbi Levi said in the name of Rabbi Ḥanina: For each and every breath that a person takes, he must laud the Creator. What is the source? “Let every soul [neshama] praise God” (Psalms 150:6) – [read instead:] Let every breath [neshima] praise God.
Gen Rabba 14:9
A Hasidic master known as the holy Berdichever, the Kedushat Levi
He starts from Kol Haneshama tehalel yah. Levi Yitzhak asks us to recognize that every day we are a new creation. The Psalmist says, "Kol haneshama tehallel Yah" -- "Every living thing praises God" (Psalms 150:6). And the Midrash makes a tiny twist, yielding "Kol haneshima"-- "With every breath one praises God." Al kol neshima v’neshima – as the breath is constantly trying to leave us (release). But God keeps returning it to us. When this happens, we’re a great being. When this happens we have a great connection/joy/gratitude in serving God.
God breathes new life into us at each moment. Were it not for the loving vitality of the Divine, we would not survive from moment to moment. Each breath, each moment of life, is a new blessing, a new creation. And if we consider this, then we see that each moment is a new opportunity, a new beginning, in fact, a new lifetime. Entering each moment in this way, we may see clearly what is ours to do: to deepen love, to heal a soul, to save a life, to make a difference, to change the world.
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev (1740–1809)
Jastrow
The Inner Spark - The inner essence of the soul, which reflects, which lives, the true spiritual life, must have absolute, inner freedom. It experiences its freedom, which is life, through its originality in thought, which is its inner spark that can be fanned to a flame through study and concentration. But the inner spark is the basis of imagination and thought. If the autonomous spark should not be given scope to express itself, then whatever may be acquired from the outside will be of no avail.
This spark must be guarded in its purity, and the thought expressing the inner self, in its profound truth, its greatness and majesty, must be aroused. This holy spark must not be quenched through any study or probing. The uniqueness of the inner soul, in its own authenticity – this is the highest expression of the Divine light, the light planted for the righteous, from which will bud and blossom the fruit of the tree of life.
Orot Hakodesh 1:177
Rabbah said: If the righteous wanted, they could create a world. What
interferes? Your sins, as it is written (Isaiah 59:2), "Only your sins separatebetween you and your God." Therefore, if not for your sins, there would not be any differentiation between you and Him.
We thus see that Rabba created a man and sent it to Rav Zeira. He spoke to it, but it would not reply. But if not for your sins, it would also have been able to reply. And from what would it have replied? From its soul. Does a man then have a soul to place in it? Yes, as it is written (Genesis 2:7), "And He blew in his nostrils a soul of life." If not for your sins, man would therefore have a "soul of life." [Because of your sins, however] the soul is not pure.
This is the difference between you and Him. It is thus written (Psalm 8:6), "And You have made him a little less than God." What is the meaning of "a little"?
This is because [man] sins, while the Blessed Holy One does not. Blessed be He and blessed be His Name for ever and ever, He has no sins.
Sefer HaBahir 196
A Midrash to Neshama
Neshima…breath
With every breath
It dawns upon me
No longer the brainstem controlling the ebb and flow of air
But a gift from
Above
No longer a historical event
Now a moment by moment gift
Of life of breath
I breath out
My resentments fears anxieties
My harms, the wreckage of the past, the people I hurt
My acts of commission and omission
All goes out with the polluted exhalation
And then a moment of death until You revive me once again
With that primordial breath of life even against my will
I cannot even control that!
As if to say
“live despite”
Your flaws, your excesses, your selfishness, your use of other for your own
pleasure….despite despite despite!
Here it is another breath
Here it is I’m not ready for you
Another opportunity to surrender your self
Standing in the way of this hunger for real life, the source of life
Don’t settle for less
This breath is an invitation
To surrender more and drown in the divine
With a song
Just sit quietly
And drown
In the sorrow of what is right now warts ‘n all
This failed life breath out!
This “piss-poor protoplasm”. Breathe out!
This nutty perfectionism breathe out!
This insane worry about reputation it’s too late!
Now…wait…until you cannot hold it any longer
And you must surrender to the inhalation
See?
Let Him fill you up
Breathing in His divine flow
The “shefa” for the moment
The neshima עַל כּלָ נשְׁיִמהָ וּנשְׁיִמהָ
So…
Every morning
Upon awakening from the 60th of death…sleep
Your first inhalation should follow this awareness
You have been revived from the dead
But you are expected to die to life nonetheless
Through surrendering this day
A deep breath of life
Hold it in for as long as you can
And be grateful
That is your neshama!!!!
Radical Acceptance
Yesterday the horizon was razor sharp
The azure blue sky abruptly ending
Where the ocean claimed its watery turf
As if, heaven and earth’s boundaries
Were clearly delineated,
Their limits forever set
The divine …safely distanced from the mortal
The depths of the oceans, however, are another matter
The vast geological variations hidden below the calm surface
Betraying mountains as tall as and caverns as deep as
Anything on the surface.
What a contrast to the blue celestial nothingness of infinity.
Today however all is different
In the fog and haze of the same vista
The horizon is barely visible.
The grey clouds merge imperceptibly
into the ashen gray ocean
Everything lacks clarity as if…
The heavens touch earth only in such times of visual blurring
Of doubt and uncertainty
The horizon now representing a leakage of sorts
Allowing only now, for the perception of contact.
In these two visions of the horizon lies
the charge for radical acceptance
The blessings of clarity and acuity
But also the place where all is lost
All hope of contact is surrendered
All belief questioned
Especially of the lost Self
The illusions of control of one’s life
Even morality/religiosity
Teaching one the bloated sense of
imitation piety meant nothing,
Where the celestial spheres appear indifferent
to the suffering and anguish below
Where even the hiddenness of the Divine is itself hidden [1]
Yet the knowledge that another day will harbor
a different landscape and fuel
another vision of that same horizon
With the hope of divine intervention in all its clarity
forces on me
Bears down on me a radical acceptance.
That all this was meant to be this way
This duality
This oscillation
Hovering between the hope and despair
Clarity and confusion
Light and darkness
Pencil razor-sharp horizon yesterday
and blurring hues of grayness today
Learning so late in life
That equanimity of the soul is so precious
That deep connection with higher Self
Demands the light AND the darkness within
And accepting this is the very challenge.
[1] Likutei Moharan 56:3:19
Dveykus, A New Definition
When totally broken
When there is nothing to support self
The breaking the disintegration the utter failure.
Of all mechanisms to relieve the deep anguish
Of facing the self in collapse
In free fall with no “rock bottom” to even break it
The only option is surrender.
Of even the modicum of achievements
Accepting the failure of this life
The list of defects, unsurmountable
The harms done to others, incalculable.
The belief that restoration is possible, shattered.
Dragged down to one’s knees.
Giving in, giving up, surrender to its limit.
Drowning in the tears of self-loathing
Even this needs to be sacrificed.
Maybe this is a new definition of Dveykus.
Forget the pious definitions !
Maybe just maybe …
The only way to connect with this perfect higher power.
Is one of emptying the self.
The very removal of the bloated importance of the grieving self
The tragic the inevitable the total suffering package
Free falling into what was feared as oblivion.
The loss of identity
The loss of all that was struggled for.
The loss of all that mattered and loved.
In this very fall
Is the total surrender into?
Dveykus
Dad's Tombstone Setting And Siyum
You will notice on the cover of your booklet over the picture of Sabba Willy the words:
And well may you ask why it is placed there and its connection with Sabba Uncle Willy?
My beloved father has been gone from this world some 10 months ago but it feels like a dream. The pictures videos and plethora of images you will see tonight give us the false impression of his ongoing aliveness and only exacerbate the pain of his loss.
Eugene’s evocative words on the tombstone, paralleling Mum’s in brevity yet capturing in a few lines the essence of Dad was mirrored by his remarks tonight.
Thanks to all our wonderful speakers including the Siyum and divrei brochoh from Motty, The Dvar Torah from Reb Refoel Moshe, the poetic lines from Chaim, the superb analysis of Dad by Batya, The poignant message from Vienna from cousin Anthony and above all the presence and blessings from Uncle Eric’s viola in response to all of us chanting:
“when I grow up I want to be like Uncle Eric” in unison!
Indeed the biggest tribute to dad was you! All of you! Showing up tonight to honor his memory.
Each of the four tables representing the four branches that emanated from his vision, each so different in temperament character, approach to life and Torah, yet each emanating from the tapestry of dad’s personality and he would have approved of each one you tonight with love humor sarcasm and wit.
My hope is we stay together as a family unified in our love of Mum and Dad and in their unconditional love of each and every one of us, that their memory guide us when we meet the hard spots in life and their inspiration of “just get on with it” as expressed here by uncles Eric’s message:
Let me return to the original question:
Its first mention of the term seems to come from a midrash (sorry Dad!) on the very first verse of the Song of Songs:
The song of songs which is Shlomo’s. Our Rabbis taught, “Every Shlomo (because they were at a loss to explain why [Scripture] did not mention his father, as it did in Mishlei and Koheles) mentioned in Shir Hashirim is sacred [=refers to God], the King to Whom peace שָׁלוֹם belongs.
Maseches Shavuos 35b.
It is a song which transcends above all other songs, which was recited to the Holy One, Blessed Is He, by His assembly and His people, the congregation of Yisroel.
Sabba too was a man of peace. In shul at work in the family he was a peacemaker. As I watched him rise in the ranks of the Federation to become a Vice President it was this precise quality that made him appreciated by all. In his lay-chairmanship of the Federation Kashrus he commanded the respect of both the United Synagogue Beth Din as well as the Kedassia sister supervising bodies thereby giving credibility to this fledgling authority to the point that EL AL acquired the Federation kashrus for all their flights out of Heathrow. His respect for the Dayanim on issues of kashrus as well as his ability to interact with secular officials of the airline proved to be the winning combination.
In the tense standoffs in shul during the High Holidays it was sabba the peacemaker who smoothed over hurt feelings.
My second citation comes from our liturgy :
Every Friday night we welcome the angelic guests to the Shabbes table with the yehi ratson that also contains the following phrase:
And we too pray for peace….Oh Almighty King who peace is His, bless me with peace ….
Sabba was a happy man always optimistic and as Eliyahu recorded…always saw the cup half full. God blessed him with inner peace despite the world at war despite Hitler…despite his losses and near death experiences…always looked on the bright side of life ( BTW he hated Monty Python! always favouring the sardonic European sense of humor).
In the last reference I remember weekly when
Dayan Braceiner and later Rabbi Zvi Telzner had the custom to invite a layperson the honor to begin the pizmon for seuda shlishit and Dad always was honored with the following zemirah:
He would then proceed to sing it a la German oberland tune….he must have remembered from Vienna…
May the Possessor of peace grant us blessing and peace—from left (north) and from right (south), peace upon Israel. The merciful One, He will bless His people with peace, and they will merit to see children and grandchildren occupying themselves with Torah and with commandments, [bringing] peace upon Israel. Advisor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of peace (Isaiah 9:5).
His own spirituality was always one of humility…he hated show and imitation piety…
In researching the term the most poignant Torah that encapsulated Sabba Willy’s sense of shalom I turn (as always) to the deepest writings of
Rav kook in Orot Hakodesh.
There is one who sings the song of his own life, and in himself he finds everything, his full spiritual satisfaction.
There is another who sings the song of his people. He leaves the circle of his own individual self, because he finds it without sufficient breadth, without an idealistic basis. He aspires towards the heights, and he attaches himself with a gentle love to the whole community of Israel. Together with her he sings her song. He feels grieved in her afflictions and delights in her hopes. He contemplates noble and pure thoughts about her past and her future, and probes with love and wisdom her inner spiritual essence.
There is another who reaches toward more distant realms, and he goes beyond the boundary of Israel to sing the song of humanity. His spirit extends to the wider vistas of the majesty of humanity generally, its noble essence. He aspires toward humanity's general goal and looks forward toward its higher perfection. From this source of life he draws the subjects of his meditation and study, his aspirations and his visions.
Then there is one who rises toward wider horizons, until he links himself with all existence, with all God’s creatures, with all worlds, and he sings his song with all of them. It is of one such as this that tradition has said that whoever sings a portion of the song each day is assured of having a share in the world to come.
And then there is one who rises with all these songs in one ensemble, and they all join their voices. Together they sing their songs with beauty, each one lends vitality and life to the other. They are sounds of joy and gladness, sounds of jubilation and celebration, sounds of ecstasy and holiness.
The song of the self, the song of the people, the song of humanity, the song of the world all merge in him at all times, in every hour. And this full comprehensiveness rises to become the song of holiness, the song of God, the song of Israel, in its full strength and beauty, in it full authenticity and greatness.
The name “Israel” stand for shir el, the song of God.
It is the Song of Songs of Solomon, shlomo, which means peace or wholeness. It is the song of the King whom is wholeness.
Rav Kook, "Lights of Holiness", trans. by Ben Zion Bokser (New York: Paulist Press, 1978)
Dad sung his own tune…was merutze…lakol…beloved by all…
He arose beyond all the pettiness to see the bigger whole…
Blown by the winds of war and fate to foreign lands…powerless and at the mercy of others…nonetheless he survived to build anew a family a legacy that reflected his deepest spirit… that of peace.
Dad was a happy man..
She-hashalom shelo...
His peace was his…
He embodied peace…
May his memory be an inspiration to his children and yotzei chalotzov
And his example of peace to klal yisroel.
Tefillin
Wrapping the straps,
Binding,
Imprisoning the head and arm
(Never mind the boxes…
The parchment…
The creed…
The dogma inside…)
Now, only focus
On the violent binding
Of this arm,
Black leather straps,
On olive-skinned arm.
La nom-du-Pere
Father on the Dunera Ship
Confronted by Captain Smith
Tossing overboard these “inflammatory boxes”
With Hebrew destined for Nazi spies!
Into the Atlantic ocean,
As if,
These Hebrew inscribed parchment etched words
Were Coded messages to the Nazis:
But the very debris tossed over is picked up by a U boat captain
Ready to sink the Merchant Marine vessel
And, reading the German letters to parents and loved ones,
Thinking these stinking Jews are in fact German POW’s
“escorts” the vessel to Durban!
and “protects” it from enemy torpedoes.
A miracle my father exclaims.
“This…is your bible too!”
Dad courageously points to the parchment within
And Captain Smith is moved,
And allows him to retain his pair of T’fillin
Now sharing them with some 200 orthodox
“aliens” bound for Australia daily.
Back in London I watch him bind his straps with love
As he connects to this ritual as no other.
But for me,
This binding,
This black leather on daily skin,
This binding me to a crucifix
With black leather,
This ritual has become the litmus test
Of my faith.
As the years pass,
And my skepticism grows,
And the religion and fervor of my youth,
And my mid life turn to the rapture of Hassidut, wane
And my sober realization of my own decline,
And my preserving parents and in-laws in sickness,
And my disdain at the current culture of surface faith
Art-Scroll triteness,
Brain dead Orthodoxy,
This litmus test reveals the truth
The current “state of the union”
It, daily, alone, reveals the desolation within
As it mirrors my absent presence.
As it accuses me in absentia
As it alone “binds” me to my father’s faith
Sturdy at 94!
To this day!
Watching him bind it...in love.
How long?
You might ask
How long?
Before you relinquish
You surrender to the Litvak within
The skeptic,
The kritik,
The heretic?
Let it go!
Stop the hypocrisy!
Some voice shouts from within!
Inside is desolation
Inside is silence
Inside is the tzimtzum that is so deafening it crosses the universe!
I am alone
In my heretical insistence in binding these straps
For his sake.
Not Him.
Nature As A Sacred Text
Running away
5 hours north
My buddies and I
Finally reach this carpet of beauty
standing transfixed by nature’s luxurious annual gift
These fall colors.
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
seduce my eyes.
I’m drowning in jouissance.
The presence of the lake this morning ,calm
The glassy mirrored surface reflecting the regimental
yellow trees of the shoreline.
The lake, the trees
The water exclaims!
“Be quiet there’s work to be done.”
Bestowing their grace and rewarding the reverance
With my flowing heart…
There is a silence in the forest that is quieter than silence,
A stillness in the moist foliage under my boots.
The smell of the moist leaves is a unique scent.
That calms the memory from its wounds.
After the morning of mist and cloud , the sun
bursts forth through a thick grey cloud cover.
Shining a new light on the shimmering leaves
Gracing us above the forest line
There is a slight breeze making the perfection of the day complete.
In the red painted cabin in the woods
The wood-burning fire warms my chilly hands.
But the smoke makes me dizzy.
Also euphoric
Suddenly I awaken to the precious moment.
And gratitude for everything
Accepting finally the reality as is
The world as is.
Without ideology
Without hate
For a moment
Just love.
These trees are the letters of a sacred text.
The cloudy white atmosphere, the space between the letters
The water below, the vowels that give it meaning.
And I the reader in bowed posture
Attempting to decipher the message.
Stop in my tracks…
Listening to Her in the leaves
She is crying.
She is wounded.
Too much blood
Absorbed
In the moist ground below me
Where I am treading
Is sacred.
Indian voices
Native American cries
Are not extinguished.
“Who are you to have come here.
To drink in our sacred tapestry
Without our assent?”
Time has not assuaged the violence done to us.
Nor has the grassy bank silenced our presence for centuries.
And elsewhere she screams for nations steeped in violence.
Fighting as we speak in the Holy Land
The horror has returned.
The unspeakable is present.
The images too much to bear.
She is in pain.
And inflicts pain because we failed Her.
A pogrom here a massacre there
Gets our attention.
To the demonic.
In this silent place
A forest sanctuary
There is a sanity for a moment.
A clarity intuited but not understood.
Before we return home to the front line
Her Dying Breath
She lies supine.
Gasping
Every breath a supreme effort
Her chest heaves.
Struggling
Her neck muscles assist
In the united effort to draw in oxygen
Even so, the oximeter reveals the declining saturation.
All is failing.
These agonal breaths takes me back.
Imagining my own first breath
Most likely inverted.
My tiny ankles grasped by some stern
White-starched nurse in Florence Nightingale uniform
As they would have, circa London 1950.
When was my first cry?
had she smacked my tush already?
to awaken me to what would be a long litany of smacks.
(An appropriate welcome for this naughty child’s arrival)
gasping as I must have, inhaling the cold March air,
in response to the shock and pain
a harbinger of the trauma to follow.
My muscle memory surely fails me,
It might alternatively been an angelic hand.
Realizing I had emerged from the Edenic warm amniotic safe harbor
To the cold British air:
Having been tutored in kol hatorah.
Able to see misof olam ad sof olam.
With the help of the ner daluk al roshi
Maybe it was her known as Leylah
Who swiped me on my frenulum?
Or clouted me on the head (like my German nanny Crystal)
That angelic concussive blow
That forced my first breath.
And for-getting all I had learned.
On the inside.
In this steely ICU another ping from the ventilator
Awakens me to the stark reality.
After decades of unconscious breathing
Her ventilation now increasingly faltering
What was once taken for granted now demanding every ounce of her effort.
I have failed her.
She begged me to take her home.
From this ghastly inhuman sterile space.
I failed her.
Having promised her that once she was off the pressors, I would.
But that never happened.
I watch powerless over my broken promise.
And her diminishing breath sounds.
And when the Almighty breathed into Adam’s nostrils
His first breath,
From the depths of the Holy One…
Into the lifeless flesh already formed
Awaiting this vital humor,
Suddenly Adam becomes.
Separate from nature and God.
A sentential being.
Self-aware
Of not being God
Of a self as separate,
Pulsating with the rucach chayim, inhaling the breath of life
Ensouled.
Was God smiling at him?
Did Adam feel pain?
Did he imagine his dying breath already then?
And when God buried Moshe Rabeinu
And sucked out his dying breath with a kiss.
Did He too cry, as the midrash tells us,
The divine mourner receiving nechama.
For His beloved deceased
On this isolated mountain top?
Did Moshe Rabbeinu remember his earliest cries in the basket on the Nile River?
As he gave up his ghost for the last time?
We watch her final breath.
Whereupon Sarah shrieks “Ema Ema!”
Sobbing in agony “she’s not breathing.”
But now she is calm.
There is no further struggle.
Chest does not rise.
All is silent.
The machines are silent.
The silence is deafening.
After so much struggling
The final breath had left.
A lifetime of effortless breathing has ceased.
With a final divine kiss
Misas neshika
A life dedicated to learning.
And intellectual mastery
Her legacy aligned with her forebears.
How she readily accepted the mantle of the royalty of the Beis Harav
Instilled by her father.
Now she too is gathered to her ancestors.
Who will no doubt welcome her?
Approvingly
Of her life’s trajectory
Committed above all other priorities.
Instilling in her children and grandchildren this one singular task
To perpetuate the particular avodah in torah scholarship that characterized the Beis Harav
And the ethos of Volozhin
Her Lithuanian Camelot
Demanding no less that perfection, mastery, and dedication to this singular purpose
Ignoring all other demands of modernity
Or caring not of others criticisms.
Rest calm now Ema
Your struggle is over.
No more need to climb that mountain of inhalation.
No more need to struggle and toil in learning.
Your life’s work is finally complete.
Rest easy Ema
You succeeded.
Your father and forebears approve.
They are smiling and welcome you to the yeshiva shel maalah.
All your fears and anxieties are allayed.
Rest assured.
You have left descendents.
Who are following your example and charge.
Proof of your dedication
Each one a reflection of the light you imparted.
And they received a facet of the diamond of Volozhin.
You shone forth like a beacon from a lighthouse in the fog.
In your departing breath
The Divine kissed your life, your legacy.
Davening In The Key of C# Minor: נפילת אפים
There is in the morning services this moment
This physical postural change
Neither standing nor sitting
But a theatrical falling onto once’s face
It’s called tachanun.
After the conclusion of the Shacharit Amida, it is customary for men to “fall on their faces” and plead before God. By doing so, they fulfill the mitzva of prayer in all three of its positions – Birkhot Keri’at Shema while sitting, Shemoneh Esrei while standing, and Taĥanun (“Supplication”) while bending forward (“Nefilat Apayim”). We learn this from our teacher Moshe, who pleaded to God to forgive Israel following the sin of the Golden Calf.
Despite its great virtue, the Sages did not ordain Nefilat Apayim as an obligatory prayer or fix its wording. Anyone who wished would add prayers of supplication while lying prostrate after reciting the Amida. Perhaps specifically because of its superior value – its expression of total submission to the Creator – it is fitting that it comes from the heart, from one’s unguarded resolve.
I fall on my non-Tefillin arm by Tachanun
The penitential confession of symbolic prostration
Burying my head in my right arm
I utter the words of penitence,
וַיֹּֽאמֶר דָּוִד אֶל־גָּד צַר־לִי מְאֹד נִפְּ֒לָה־נָּא בְיַד־יְהֹוָה כִּי־רַבִּים רַחֲמָיו וּבְ֒יַד־אָדָם אַל־אֶפֹּֽלָה
But my fallen head feels a kind of petit morte.
(Like the holy Ari suggests),
The lowest point of the service (at least physically)
And with the lowered head, the broken heart follows,
Pierced by a thousand betrayals, lies and deceits.
Then we arise to complete the davening
עָלֵֽינוּ לְשַׁבֵּֽחַ לַאֲדוֹן הַכֹּל
Swaying to recover the broken soul.
This davening seems like a sacred symphony of sorts, (or maybe a requiem?)
Each Tachanun a preparation
Each נִפְּ֒לָה־נָּא
A request to become an expert in nefilah,
Each falling a prescient training for the final irreversible fall
Into the grave.
The daily falling a ritual sacred practice of mindful dying.
וְעַל־כֵּן כְּשֶׁאָדָם נוֹפֵל, חַס וְשָׁלוֹם, לִבְחִינַת מְקוֹמוֹת אֵלּוּ, דְּהַיְנוּ לִבְחִינַת מְקוֹמוֹת הַמְטֻנָּפִים, וְנוֹפֵל לִסְפֵקוֹת וְהִרְהוּרִים וּבִלְבּוּלִים גְּדוֹלִים, וַאֲזַי מַתְחִיל לְהִסְתַּכֵּל עַל עַצְמוֹ
“Therefore, when a person falls into places of this sort, God forbid—i.e., into the “filthy places,” falling into doubts, heresy and great confusion—if he then begins examining himself and sees that he is very far from God’s glory—and as a consequence of his seeing himself far from His glory, having fallen into such places,”
Likutei Mehoran 12
Davening as Requiem
If tachanun pulls me down, down, where are the highs of this daily symphony?
Start with the initial birchat hashachar as the prelude/introit.
It’s wakeup blessings reminding us to acknowledge the miracle of awakening, opening the yes, feet on the ground, belting up, then the ultimate existential question (so soon after brushing my teeth?)
אֱלֹהַי נְשָׁמָה שֶׁנָּתַֽתָּ בִּי טְהוֹרָה הִיא
Who is this בִּי this receptacle that houses the נְשָׁמָה ?
Next comes the Kyrie with Pesukei dezimra
and the Psalmists in praising the divine,
A mellifluous group of levitical songs imagined on the steps of the Temple..
Which brings us to the Gloria/Offertory of the doxological Shema surrounded by its blessings a fore and aft, maybe (this cry traditionally prior to martyrdom), is embedded in the mystical joy of this daily pilgrimage.
And immediately followed by the deafening silence of the Amidah
The pause in the oratorio where the deafening silence in a sea of fellow worshippers binds us all more than the cacophony of individual supplications. In this silence the logorrhea ceases for a while and lips continue to mouth words inaudibly.
In the silence I am present to the grief within my sternum, and giving it space, in the silence I can almost hear the little boy crying once again, the sensation of powerlessness in the face of unjust punishment, and the rage of adults venting uncontrollably.
In this space the silent presence of Shechina
is also felt as awe pervades the shul.
The reader now begins the public amidah followed by the Sanctus of Kaddish… the angelic chorus teaching us how they praise the divine…
Which brings us back to the Confiteor of tachanun and the falling falling, through death, through the grave, through the dark night of the soul into the arms of …
“Lose yourself,
Lose yourself in this love.
When you lose yourself in this love,
you will find everything.
Lose yourself,
Lose yourself.
Do not fear this loss,
For you will rise from the earth
and embrace the endless heavens.
(Rumi chides us….)
Finally, we arise to end with Aleinu Leshabeach עָלֵֽינוּ לְשַׁבֵּֽחַ לַאֲדוֹן.
Ite missa est…
I imagine the contours of this symphonic work, its cadences, rises and falls as an orchestral score, and each section a different color,
And on different days in different keys,
Although today I prefer C# minor, Bach’s sacerdotal key,
With its foreboding tones
The entire oratorio an act of surrender and submission,
an admission of man’s inability to have conquered the inner snake,
That the experiment of human history only produced
more and more technological innovations to mass murder and genocide.
A prayer for acceptance of these facts and a surrender
to the very setup that placed in the Garden…
The initial awakening, the profession of faith,
the highs of the silent prayer followed by the
inevitable fall (from grace) in Tachanun,
and resurrection in Aleinu forms the contours of this composition.
I rise and fall with the sections, like the music of the oratorio,
like my biography, a palimpsest of human brokenness before me.
I imagine davening on the organ of Kings College Cambridge,
with the puny altar boys in their white levitical uniforms, and falsetto voices,
positing the grandeur of the cathedral and vulnerable vocal cords
that will soon break in their testosterone rush.
Each day another matin, each day the cycle of surrender
needed to break the serpentine darkness within.
R. Bachayei.