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.