The Sacred and The Profane

The sacred..

Always felt by me to be “other-worldy”

Always beyond reach of the little whiny olive-skinned boychikl

Whose mind was concentrated on the ladies gallery rather than the siddur.

What is this “chiyus” they keep on about in Hassidic discourse?

This vitality? Is it related to sanctity or an alternative matrix?

The divine breath of life that permeates and is incarnated in all things living?

Why do the hassidic masters insist we get in touch with this “chiyus”?

(Reb Hershey tells me he only gets it in the yiddish translation…“leibedig”)

If vitality, then all nature embodies it, is filled with it

Thrives on it,

But where is the sacred?

this usual means divorced from, separated from, privileged spaces,

Kedusha…with all this sacred ramifications

boundaries in time space and person

Seems to be the opposite of chiyus.

I feel the sacred rarely only,

Kol Nidre, dressed in my white kittel before the open ark,

The notion that this night all is being seen by the One above,

And the community joins in the sacred time annually.

The seder night surrounded by grandchildren

whose curious eyes and prepared Torah’s

Are itching to be unloaded the angels in my life.

Shabbat night at 3am struggling with my Degel

I sense a Presence with me, an excitement

as if his lips are moving from the grave

Alongside me. [1]

And rarely in the moment of love, as my heart empties into an-other,

Completely absorbed and unaware of the burden of self for a brief moment.

More recently when the Rebbe grabs my hand in the Friday evening tanzl

After Sabbath services, and an electric-like sensation runs through me

And I feel the sacred once more,

washing the shmutz of the week form my soul.

But this chiyus business is different,

At least what I can make out from the Hassidic masters.

Slowly it dawns on me,

That the very feelings I have had…for so long,

of life flowing through my veins

The very intuition of things mortal,

That deep gnawing sensation in my chest that my life is so fragile

That each moment passing is on this trajectory into the finality of death…

The very sense that every moment is already flowing into the past

That what drives me this minute is already part of my history

That forces way beyond my awareness

From my birth through my death

Has already been written in some future biography

And the choices I make really are not mine.

The energy of rising daily to face anew day

The joy of living and the grief of loss

The sense of the sacred in communal sharing

The oceanic feeling of a choral cantata

but also the naughtiness of passion,

Watching my mother and aunt slowly die and lose their chiyus, their life force.

These very feelings are in fact the “chiyus” I do not sense the sacred here.

For I can only sense them in the context of their very ending.

Within the road map defined by the utter tragedy of life itself,

and my own mortality,

At times during the very experience itself,

The grief within the joy wells up,

At others, the awareness of how fleeting it all is.

The sense of losing those of the prior generation one by one,

in ever increasing frequency,

And the knowing that our generation is next…

Not too long away..

Nothing stands between us and la morte.

The immediacy and sense of urgency..

Of every day and every breath..

Now looming larger than ever.

This “chiyus” this life breath, flux, ether

Is the very stuff of their discourse,

(And unlike Reb Hershey, I see no joy, or liveliness.)

So what does it mean to make sacred?

To realize the connection between the infinite One

and the incarnated “chiyus”

They keep insisting on?

Reviewing the Rebbes below the notion seems more a reflection of their own

Hassidic school, from the students of the magic

to Reb Nachman and the third generation Psyzch school. (Shem MiShmuel).

And this dawning for me is a demythological move

whereby the sacred becomes the

very incarnation of the divine in this world

that animates it and thus totally dependent

upon man to evoke the sacred nature

through his perfecting his body, his very carnal nature.

In a dualistic Lurianic world, man must determine

how the divine is incarnated in the world

by which way the chiyus descends, by his actions,

intentionality, and purity of spirit.

The world is not sacred, there is an infinite chasm between

the divine and the natural order of the universe.

Yet there is in this vacuum between the two the possibility of

redemption of the spirit and the sacred might still

occur but only under the agency

of the adept.

[1] Likutey Moharan 12, When a person learns with holiness and purity, learning something from which the Tzaddik taught, this brings about the aspect of Neshikin, kisses. At the time when the Tzaddik had originally spoke the Torah, his speak became the aspect of Oral Torah and a speaking spirit. Therefore, when we learn the Torah of the Tzaddik, we become attached to him but usually, this goes unnoticed and unrecognized but this is not so in the case of the Tzaddik. The Tzaddik's lips as taught by or Sages, move in his grave. He becomes alive so to speak, when his Torah's are said.