Perspective
Over the wide blue ocean
The puffy white clouds suspended,
Gentle wisps,
The deep azure sky above,
Beyond which, limitless space.
This expanse of blue,
Reminds me not of the sky-blue thread
And certainly not of the Throne of Glory
As the Rabbis would have it..
No, rather my own mortality,
And how little time we have on this glorious earth,
And how temporary is our existence,
How futile our self-imposed meaning
When compared with the majesty of nature.
In the daily grind of traffic
And the gray urban landscape,
(How we destroyed such beauty
For the sake of industry
And greed)
I have almost forgotten this.
Our culture in decline,
Surprised as to how predictable this is becoming
And how we thought we were immune.
But join as we must
The litany of great empires of past
The greed of their wealthy class,
The murmurings of the underclass.
The militarism and excuses for war…
The diagnostic pointers are present once again,
The loss of decency and charity,
The ridicule of education and erudition,
The acceptance of gun violence and state sponsored police brutality,
The spawning of lies from the top down.
From 6000 feet it all seems remote
This miracle of flight,
This steel bird gently purring across the great sky blue,
In the comfort of these seats,
Sipping a Bloody Mary (so early in the day!)
Her liquid redness in stark contrast to the blue outside.
It seems almost irrelevant,
Away from the tumult
And few minutes respite from CNN,
As if, we are in church
On a spiritual odyssey
As if…
This flight..
Is meant to teach and instruct
To provide a hint
To the infinite oneness beyond
The invisible -yet soon to be revealed- galaxies at night
Of our meagre lives…
And…
Perspective.
In the bigger picture
We must not lose sight of our commonalities
With each other
With nature
With the opposing parties
With people of opposing views
With difference
With ethnicity
With sexual preference
With class distinction
With wealth.
In this wide expanse
We are a tiny fleck
In history
In geography
In time.
The Looking Glass
Today I woke up, looked into the mirror
at the aging face, the scars and skin tags
the cuts and tiny imperfections, our aging skins
unmistakably reminding us...
The inner flaws and decades of lies,
deceits and betrayals of self and others
The shortcomings and character defects
shall I continue?
Then it dawned on me
the Almighty deals with every human being
every day....
He is the very mirror behind the mirror
looking in on each of us as we brush our teeth and shave...
for centuries and millennia..
putting up with, suffering our flaws
human flaws...
humanities' imperfections
the wars, the terror
man's inhumanity to man
shall I continue?
Then I had an outpouring of rachmonus
of compassion for Him, Ribono shel Olam!
what You have to put up with!!
oi vey!
oi vey!
I am so sorry for you!!!
You are so condemned to eternity
there is or never will be an end of this for YOU!!
You condemned Yourself to history!
Then I realized..
What the Degel Machaneh Ephraim meant
by his Baal Shem Tov teaching, that all our flaws are
also a reflection of the identical flaw in the Shekhinah!
So....She is the one behind the mirror!
So.... we must pray for HER!
(and the Baal Shem Hakadosh claims,)
then we will be automatically "fixed" (tikkun)
when She gets fixed.
The Meshulach
Of all the “visitors” to our home,
No one challenges me like the Meshulach.
Uninvited, his image appears on my CCTV screen
All I can see is the black hat,
Cannot make out features.
Cannot recognize him from last year (there are so many).
Collecting for this charity or that,
or a yeshiva specializing in this particular area of Halachah
Or merely for themselves, their families, their mountain of debt.
The false intimacy is readily audible.
The flattery is predictable, my connections with Brisk,
Reb Chayim mi-Volozhyn, Breslov, etc. etc. The Yichus!
They look for the pitch,
Yet they exercise me so!
I chide my spouse that in the next world we will asked at the pearly gates
“Did you spend time in study?
“Did you engage in marital relations?
“Did you yearn for the Messiah?”
(The three classical questions cited in the Talmud.)
Then the Divine One will poke us in the ribs and say
“Did you take care of my Meshulach?”
And that seems to get me out of my resistance and inertia
To descend the steps to the front door
Where, often hiding behind the one Meshulach, is a car load of others.
I offer a drink, (Chicago is brutal in summer and worse in winter).
Most do not remove their footwear, leaving a trail across the hallway
which will need mopping up,
And now the pitch begins.
I have heard it so many times
But each Meshulach demands his time
To present his very unique need for my charity.
In my mind as I listen, compassion slowly grows,
Knowing the drudgery he faces daily
Knocking on door after door, often rejected, humiliated.
And fear that one day I too, might be collecting like him, to survive.
But more than this fear,
The Meshulach forces me to dig
deeper and deeper into my well of compassion
He is the litmus test-on a daily basis- as to my well’s water level
He stretches this digging process to the limits.
Tired, hungry and in no mood for such entertainment,
These nightly visits force me to choose between opening the door
Or ignoring the multiple knocks.
The other challenge is in the amount I feel I should give.
(I have three circles of giving.
The inner circle is charities
such as alma maters and synagogues
for my children and my wife and I.
Those institutions we feel we owe a debt of gratitude.
Easy to give and easy to determine
the annual amount since we have a track record.
The outer circle is easy as well…
These are total strangers who we give a minimal amount
and are dismissed happily.
It is the middle circle that constantly challenges me.
These are the ones that demand from us,
Make claims on us, pressure us to give more,
and require resistance or surrender.)
They are very clever, employing such tactics in a few moments,
worthy of intelligence operatives.
Yet deep down I know they are being sent to test us.
To test our deepest character traits and flaws,
of patience, grace, hospitality, triggers to anger
And compassion.
Often I fail
But fear not
Another comes soon after.
Will they all be there to greet me in the next world?
Fingers pointed at me in accusation?
Siding with the divine district attorney in condemning me to eternal guilt?
Thinking I am done with the day on arriving home,
(The litany of patient complaints and suffering
having filled my heart with sorrow)
Exhausted from the advice and struggle, the drama of the employees,
I just want to rest and recharge.
Just then the door bell rings!
The Meshulach allows me no such luxury.
And the nightly ritual begins.
Tikkun Olam, Really?
Really?
We can fix this?
What about Leonard Cohen’s last interview where he adjures us:
“omit the slogans!”
What about his definition of a saint?
What is a saint?
A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility.
It is impossible to say what that possibility is.
I think it has something to do with the energy of love.
Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance
in the chaos of existence.
A saint does not dissolve the chaos;
if he did the world would have changed long ago.
I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself,
for there is something arrogant and warlike
in the notion of a man setting the universe in order.
It is a kind of balance that is his glory.
He rides the drifts like an escaped ski.
His course is the caress of the hill.
His track is a drawing of the snow
in a moment of its arrangement with wind and rock.
Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself
to the laws of gravity and chance.
Far from flying with the angels,
he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state
of the solid bloody landscape.
His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world.
He can love the shape of human beings,
the fine and twisted shapes of the heart.
It is good to have among us such men,
such balancing monsters of love.
“Arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order”
What about Rumi?
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.
Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
After all the exhortations, what is left?
We are to repair the face of God, Cohen tells us, not the world! [1]
All the movements to change the world ended in violence
Genocide, racism, bigotry.
Man’s inhumanity to man begins with ideology.
So, in a post-Holocaust, post-critical, genocidal world
Where is the Tikkun? Where is the mending?
Who are the agents of fixing?
Beyond the middle-class bourgeois
Rationalizing their life style choices
With this charity or that under the slogan “Tikkun Olam”
I look in the mirror and ask
Fix who? What? And the answer stares me in the face…. Me!?
Out there, no! inside…
Now own it!
Own the fixing!
Own the past
Own the abuse
Own the hurt you inflicted and the hurt done to you
Own this bloody Holocaust yes! That too!
After all the years of obsessing
All the theology attempted
All the dead ends found
Own it all.
Own your aging
And that despite all the struggles to free yourself
Own the neediness for approval, for validation, for love
For the eye of a pretty girl
For the Rabbi’s nod.
Own your impotence
Own your failures
Own your need to be relevant
Own your need for your children and grandchildren
Own your betrayals
Own your heresy
Now own this election
Own your society’s choice
Its decision for madness
Own its blanket bombing
Own the drones in far-away places
Own Dresden and Tokyo
Own the Allies’ firebombing
Stop the Tikkun for others for the world
when you still need the fixing yourself!
Stop even the Tikkun for yourself
You spend decades fixing nothing.
Just own it.
Hold it.
Sweeten it.
Maybe that way you might denervate it from its sting.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL1yaiLCQPM
While Israel Burns
“And who by fire, who by water,
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
Who in your merry merry month of may,
Who by very slow decay,
And who shall I say is calling?
And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate,
Who in these realms of love, who by something blunt,
And who by avalanche, who by powder,
Who for his greed, who for his hunger,
And who shall I say is calling?
And who by brave assent, who by accident,
Who in solitude, who in this mirror,
Who by his lady's command, who by his own hand,
Who in mortal chains, who in power,
And who shall I say is calling?”
In Memoriam, Leonard Cohen
Arriving on Thanksgiving (sic)
Israel burns
I do not feel the heat
Nor the smell of burning trees
Like I once did when the Ramot forest behind my house burned
No, this is different,
Seen only the TV screen,
From the vantage of the Elysium fields and the brilliant skies of Jerusalem
Only visual images of cloudy skies over Haifa,
it is merely a chimera,
(Arutz Sheva or CNN,)
And papers with op-ed recriminations as to
the Prime Minister’s ineptitude or worse
His blatant funneling of government funds
appropriated for fire tankers and a “super” 747
To settlements, instead of learning
from the last catastrophe…
Israel burns
On Thanksgiving,
She burns like those forests in California and Oregon
But here it is blamed on terrorists,
arsonist with political motive
If you can’t beat the army, or terrorize the civilian population
Burn the land you love!
Everything here is imputed to motive.
Israel burns
On Thanksgiving,
The flames are familiar
From the Second Temple and Titus
To the burnings in Mainz Speyer and Worms
And the villages of Galitzia
Chmielniki,
The Witches of Salem
Jesse Washington (Waco 1916)
From the flamethrowers of WWI
that terrorized teenage soldiers in the trenches
And the cyclone-B corpses
The towns of Dresden and Tokyo
(Both sides use flames)
ISIS burnings in a cage
Those girls who refused them sex
We are so outraged by the social media coverage
Brought to our smart phones
But nothing has changed.
Flames no longer contained in Hephaestus’ hearth,
No longer a smith for weapons of war
Now loosened by his impotence
(He too was rejected by his mother)
Israel burns on Thanksgiving
Because of the unique wind pattern and humidity
A freak of nature
the scientists tell us
But then nature is changing
And the world is warming
And the President elect refuses to believe science
This fire of rage
Trump supporters beating up free speech advocates
He winks and nods and looks away
The fire of the storm troopers
The burning of Kristallnacht books
Is only a generation away
The civility of Adenauer’s Europe is over.
Israel burns on Thanksgiving
And a piece of us burns inside
In impotence
In rage
The fire in Chernobyl never died
The cooling towers of Fukushima Daiichi
Cannot cope
The coolness of critical thought is insufficient
To put these fires out
They must burn until there is no fuel left.
Our prophet left us last week
His words seem eerily manifest.
Hymns To The Schechina
Oh there You are!
Was wondering where You had gone…
Actually it was I who was out to lunch
You know,
The brain does its thing
The Kritik remains in overtime
The doubting Thomas pokes his finger
Into the wound,
And the reality per reality bears down so heavily
Once more I retreated
Must be a year now
Thinking my self-worth and approval might come
From a local, earthly, social source…
All that work!
All the neediness.
But in the process I neglected You
And You
Came back at me with a rude awakening
A vengeance
For now
Rejected
Betrayed
And exposed!
I return,
Knees bent
Humbled
For having neglected You.
In the Mikvah yesterday
I melted
And Rebbe’s Torah Tinyana 12
Picked me up once more
By his paradox
His humanity
As if he had truly been there
Rock bottom
As well
Alongside me
And was giving me advice
Suddenly
The tears welled up
And this “kavod” he speaks of
This glory made itself present
As I sit today at my shtender in the quiet Beis Medrash
Humbled by the presence of Thou.
It’s not like an I-Thou
Thing..though
I expect no verbal response
But this non-rational sensation came to me
And comforted me
So that this morning my legs went to the Mikvah to dissolve in its waters
And wash the soul of its filth.
I feel optimistic today
Ready to enter the Succah
And feel the “Succot Dovid ha-Nofales”
Feel Her pain, the ongoing Galut
And the “shelter of faith”
We claim in our sacred texts.
In a sacred space
This morning the world is right
Everything is at it should be
Despite the suffering
Despite the self-loathing
Despite the long history of failure
The morning fog hangs over the landscape
Like a blanket of white wool
And the glorious tree
Whose dying leaves reveal their true color
In front of my home
Reminds me that nature too is incarnated.
We are expected to emerge from the safety of our homes into this
Temporary dwelling the Succah
And as the Midrash claims [1]
we somehow pre-empt any divine decree of Galut
By exiling ourselves into the Succah.
This year has been a long exile
So it feels comfortable, even familiar to sit here under the Schechina.
In the dying of the leaves
Their true color emerges
This tree before my home
Reminds me of temporality
For she will have shed her glorious leaves in a couple of weeks
Leaving the bare bark to endure the long winter’s discontent.
It arrests me as I leave my home
I cannot just pass it by
It lays claim to me
Reminding me
There is work to do
A trace of my voyage here to leave.
[1] Psikta deRav Kahana “Nosafot” to Deut 16:13
Post-Halachik Halacha
Post-Halachic Halacha
Avoid the halachic Rabbi/rabbit hole!
Standing on the verge of that chasm,
Seeing the darkness so deep
Don’t take the bait!
For once having fallen you will always lose.
There will always be a Litvak or worse a Brisker
To entrap you with the brilliance of their Halachic construction!
You will have already lost.
Realize only this, as a poor consolation
Halacha is a late historical cultural construction
A product of the medieval mind’s obsession with
Imprisoning its mythical rich late antique tradition
In a rational exoskeleton (looking apologetically over their philosophic shoulders)
Like their Arabic Mutakallim compatriots
Snuffing out all individualism and anarchy.
Codified in the RAMBAM, ROSH and TUR
Now finally we have a constitution
needing generation after generation of further finessing.
Its elitist interpreters-all male-from then down to the 20th century
Poskim, brilliant jurist alike-
Pontificate about women’s bodies and judicial rights,
Their t’shuvot etched in black ink on white paper
Reflecting the collective male communal fear
The dark letters mirroring the black veils,
They would have women wear
hiding all female anatomical parts that might inflame
The communal male androgyny.
You still flock to their altar
Bend the knee at their confessionals,
Check in at the halachic counter,
Where the Dayan, grey faced, bearded and wise
pronounces the p’sak “treif”!
90% of the time- you know it!
Begging for a little leeway?
A gap in the door?
To allow for the egalitarian this or that
But my darling
he sees right though you
He has a radar for this going back to the Chasam Sofer’s battles with Reform
Trained in guerilla warfare
He sees your intent
And like all others under threat
buttons down the hatches in Kansas for the impending cyclone.
Give it up already girl!
The Wizard is exposed behind the curtain.
But none see him for what he is.
Once free of this social construction of violence
This travesty over the bodies of others
Return to the texts!
After all they inhabit you
Like some mythic creature
They require your ongoing attention
The trace you will leave is on their interpretation
Stripped of moralisms and halachic implications.
They will play their notes though you
Allowing your soul to sing.
Ironic how brainwashed we were growing up
As to the ills of reform and liberals!
How they began the “slippery slope” theory in orthodox shuls in Germany
Now infesting all orthodox theology. Mendelssohn became the ultimate villain
(I remember Rabbi Cooper’s diatribes against Louis Jacobs in 1966
using the slippery slope argument in our high school Rabbinics class)
As if we could have avoided modernity…
By using Hirschian, Hoch Deutsch or Rabbi Sack’s flowery Cambridge accent
As if we could ignore modern Bible Criticism High or Low! As if we could accommodate all this in “Modern Orthodoxy”
No wonder the Kiruv movement, the Breslovers and Chabadskers
The Art Scrollers and the Aish sophisticates have appeal
Where else is there a feeling to be found for authenticity?
The young have seen through all the Soloveitchik apologetics
Flocking to Carlebach as a yearning for the real homey mythic experience
There is no alternative.
But the truth must emerge
Nevertheless
And it is painful
The mouth can no longer articulate the liturgy staring accusingly from the pages
The voice cannot sing the melodies
The buttocks cannot sit on the firm wooden pews
The mind can no longer listen to the priest’s homiletics
Only silent witnessing
Like a Quaker
Awaiting the spirit to move one to the inner voice
That never comes.
A silence that can only tolerate veneration under a dark Atterbury sky
In awe of Orion pursuing Lepus
Or a late Beethoven Quartet.
In awe of my father’s devotions
Daily performing in the month of Elul
His shofar, loud and shrill
Decades of commitment
His refusal to eat, to this day, without seeing the hechsher
Having sacrificed so much during the war for the kashrus
His t’fillin donned daily having stood up to Captain Smith of Her Majesty’s Merchant Navy
“in those boxes is your bible too!” melting the hardened heart of Smith (who then relented
and saved his t’fillin from being thrown overboard.)
Then sharing them with other prisoners for the remainder
of the nine-week voyage to Australia
in U boat infested waters of the South Atlantic.
All these halachic observances
Will they die with me?
How can I sincerely face their bite?
Each observance another indictment
Each Mitzva an arrow of criticism
Every movement scrutinized for the Brisker chumrah
And found wanting
What happens when each Mitzva represents another wound?
Another festering sore?
From the psychological wounds
To the spiritual opportunity
To dig deeper into the well of compassion
For the little boy
Embarrassed and ridiculed
Skin too dark for the British school
Conditional love-only available
Still finding the deeper space wide enough
Only the texts now give healing
And allow for my wounded interpretation
A little peace of mind
God's Amnesia
“God’s Amnesia
Pray to God.
Against God,
For God . . . .
Ani maamin for him In spite of him.
I believe in you,
Even against your will.
Even if you punish me
For believing in you.”
--Ani Maamin: A Song Lost and Found Again, Wiesel
“A theology that states personhood and the self, dissolve as memory fades is a theology controlled by biological and neurological categories, not merely informed by them.”
“Dementia” Living in the Memories of God by John Swinton
What if
After 2000 years
Of this long haul of persecution
We have arrived at this nightmarish landscape
Of celestial silence.
No communication,
(Well at least no prophecy, visions, deus ex machina events
Revelations, portents)
Despite the ongoing daily prayers and tears of multitudes
Thronging to worship centers, the Kotel, Uman, 770, shuls and shtiebls.
Praying to our Old Testament God as always
Hopeful for the Messiah to be sent shortly.
What if,
Our divine image/imagining has faded
Our sense of His presence is blurred at the edges,
Our connection is marred by noise?
And, If Herr Rabiner Dr. Freud is correct
What if
Our Fatherly projection of God
Has followed its earthly model?
Watching our fathers in decline
Whether it be short term memory loss
Confusional episodes
Agitations or
Sudden bursts of rage
And the like.
What if
Our Divine Father
Has (kivyachol, of course)
Anthropomorphically speaking (of course)
With the greatest respect due (of course)
Entered a similar aging process (God forbid)
And our earthly projections of
Longer lifespans which have recently un-covered the decaying brain
The tangles and plaques of amyloid infiltrating the cells of the grey matter
The slow atrophy of the cerebral hemispheres,
Alzheimer’s, pre-senile dementias,
These too, surely,
Must accurately reflect themselves in the projected image
of the Divine Father (chas veshalom).
Which might explain His absence recently
During, say, our own Holocaust, or in Hiroshima,
Pol Pot massacres of 2 million, Bosnia and, as we speak, Aleppo.
Now I must qualify this heresy, this holy Apikorsus,
By saying that my description has nothing
Absolutely nothing
To do with the “real Divine”
Who, our philosophers claim
Remains perfect, without blemish or character flaw,
Unchanging and unmoved, perfect and with foreknowledge,
The Maimonidean “Prime Mover” or “First Thought” etc.
The God of the Jewish philosophers down to Hermann Cohen.
Rather I am moving along a slightly different trajectory
Of midrashic and mythic valence.
Whereby a living relationship between creator and creature
Has existed in covenant, in a dynamic interaction,
Where the actions and thoughts of one, influences the other,
Where emotions of one affect the other
And the behavior of either affects the relationship.
This very anthropopathic connection has even leaked into our liturgy
Which proclaims a loving connection between God and His creatures,
And a neediness for God to hear our prayers.
“God desires the suffering of his righteous ones”
and sends them pain and illness to try
What is there to explain a fracture in such a relationship
Where deep trust issue have arisen
Where the silence from above is deafening
And the sense of betrayal is palpable (as in Psalm 22)
ב אֵלִּי אֵלִּי, לָמָה עֲזַבְתָנִּי; רָחוֹק
מִּישוּעָתִּי, דִּבְרֵי שַאֲגָתִּי.
2 My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me,
and art far from my help at the words of my cry?
ג אֱלֹהַי--אֶקְרָא יוֹמָם, וְלאֹ
תַעֲנֶה; וְלַיְלָה, וְלאֹ-דֻמִּיָה לִּי.
3 O my God, I call by day, but Thou answer not;
and at night, and there is no surcease for me.
So many have tried
From Berkowitz and Soloveitchik to Rubinstein and Wiesel,
Only to leave me frustrated with words
And numb in the heart.
Maybe just maybe
We are dealing with a Divine Father in decline
Or worse a case of Divine dementia?
His absence from Auschwitz was not then intended
His silence from Hiroshima was not then malicious
His lack of response to evil was not a hester panim.
We then have no need to resort to medieval Jewish philosophy
Or question Divine justice,
We avoid the classic philosophical problems of evil and theodicy
Which remain unanswered after millennia.
Shlomo was on track by suggesting the problem was not in us,
Not our fault,
Not, chas veshalom in Klal Yisroel
(An unbearable burden, some Gedolim might have us bear)
maybe he mused
the fault was in the holy Torah!
The Torah had somehow failed us
We needed a new Torah
The Torah of the Messiah
This, however, still allows the Divine off the hook
And allows for a million and a half babies to go up in smoke
Collectively
For some thought some reason some rationale
And that is even more unbearable.
No, No, we must once again take the horrific step
A step that might lose us our olam habaah
A hermeneutical move so dangerous we might lose our sanity
But so be it
As we struggle for meaning NOT rationality.
So returning to our medical model
Of decline,
We all see this in our own earthly fathers surely
Watching them slowly deteriorate
Slowly narrow their focus
The visual acuity of their perspective narrows
The perception of their world blurs
Their judgment on life becomes crustaceous.
The Confusional episodes slowly grow in number and concern…
Yet we, as children, remain devoted
And tolerant of their slow decline
Despite the memory lapses
Despite the perseverations and anomias
And even the emotional outbursts
And frustrations
Even the occasional moments of self-awareness of decline.
So why not accept the same for the Heavenly Father (chas veshalom)
Who has secluded Himself in isolation,
Fearful (kivyachol) to go outside for embarrassment
Silently holed up in His study
Looking at the family photo album
Leafing through the Biblical pages
Of stories and battles long gone
Of heroes and prophets
Like an old VFW soldier.
Compassion for the Heavenly Father
Requires much patience and endurance
Just like down here on earth we patiently attend to our parents
“Long suffering and forbearance, slow to anger and mostly compassionate”
וַיַעֲבֹר יְהֹוָה | עַל פָנָיו וַיִּקְרָא יְהֹוָה | יְהֹוָה אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן אֶרֶךְ אַפַיִּם וְרַב חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת : נֹצֵר חֶסֶד לָאֲלָפִּים נֹשֵא עָוֹן וָפֶשַע וְחַטָאָה וְנַקֵה לאֹ יְנַקֶה פֹקֵד | עֲוֹן אָבוֹת עַל בָנִּים וְעַל בְנֵי בָנִּים עַל שִּלֵשִּים וְעַל רִּבֵעִּים :
All those middot we used to recite belonging to God
Now must be applied to us.
We must be slow to anger and compassionate to Him!
The God of creation and decreation
Of wisdom and its corollary dementia
Mirrored and projected in our own,
The archetype for dementia
In its neo-platonic sublunary sphere
Reminds us of the dementia above
The dark sefirotic tree of the sitra achrah
The dark side of wisdom/ Chochma
He who must be also be worshipped or at least
Whose gevurot (including the dark side of chochma=dementia)
Must be “sweetened”.
Mituk Hadin then becomes our task
And in dementia we are the merkava
By enduring His dementia.
In Elul I Tzitter
Rosh Chodesh Elul
It still sends shivers down my spine
“melech basodeh” “ponim sochakos”
We are told by the Altar Rebbe
He is smiling a shmeichl on His face (unlike Yom HaDin!)
The shofar is blown and its piercing shriek reminds me of the Zohar (Pinchas)
Where we are distracting the divine dinim (rage)…
A time for introspection, self-inventory, communal analysis,
personal housecleaning…
But how does an atheist continue such praxis?
Why does he feel the shiver down the spine
in the presence of an absent divine?
In an uncaring heaven,
Where the spiritual Kabbalistic wire diagrams maybe true,
The Kabbalistic framework might be convincing,
The Leshem speaking as he does, to my soul,
But the cold eternal quiet of the cosmos
stares back at us from ever more powerful telescopes
Reminding us of how insignificant we really are
in the cosmic scheme of things
Each day new discoveries of our impotence
in the threat of new meteors colliding or near misses
(“a moon and half distance away last week alone!”)
Each week a new atrocity
Man’s inhumanity to man..
Yet the heart is dead to the reality of past generations
To the past pieties and moralisms.
Yet, in this wasteland, this dark spiritual landscape
the spine still shivers!
The atheist feels the pinch!
The cold morning vapors of “selichos weather”
As I embrace the fall weather impending
(As the dew covers the windshield on our way to daven,
Dad pinching my big toe in the frosty London morning
Now uncovered from the warm sheet
The big toe reminds me of selichos.)
Only the head is alienated
But the legs drag me back to shul.
Maybe we got it all wrong?
This whole kiruv movement
We got infected by the sequence doctrine first-Halacha second
“Bring ‘em back to Judaism with rational argument”
Rabbi Weinberg’s revolution following Chabad.
A whole Artscroll generation infecting our minds
What if…
It’s the other way around
After all we teach our 2 years olds to recite the Sh’ma
Without any theology!
We teach Vayikra to first graders
and the sacrificial cult is their first taste of Torah!
No rhyme or reason for that!
Just the sacred words themselves, with honey on the letters as inducement.
So too our approach should be “NO THEOLOGY”
stop talking this God Talk-this Hashem speak, as if we’re Baalei T’shuvas
Shut up already!
Just do! Perform rituals! Mindfully without doctrine…
retire the “lesheim this or that”!
Let the shivers run down your spine!
With no ideology!
Feel them!
Feel Elul!
Feel Mitzvot
And perhaps
AFTER a lifetime of doing
Maybe
Just maybe
You will have an inkling of the Divine!
Holy Dis-Belief
The words no longer move me
The rhetoric is old hat
The Greeks were here long ago
The orthodox drivel doesn’t even bother me
Like it used to,
Having been dulled by time and personal failure
There are no new chidushim!
Only poets now,
Have something to say
Rilke, Heine, Heschel,
And Shlomo still makes me cry
Although I have no induction to act.
Rummaging through my father’s papers (at 3 am to avoid his rage!)
Papers going back to WWII, internship, prison camp,
the HMS Dunera , Camp Tatura,
I find a booklet addressed to the British High Commission in Canberra,
with an honorific “To His Excellency the British High Commissioner”
(why did he never show us this growing up?)
Handwritten, blue ink, perfect penmanship, cursive,
excellent English (from an Austrian) going through all the trials
and mistreatment these 2000 prisoner suffered
under the hands of the brutal merchant marine officers and enlisted guards.
The penmanship was remarkable. I am sure this had not been read in 80 years.
His pain, his survival, even mentioning at his first
great grandson’s Bar mitzvah three days ago…how 82 years ago
he too underwent this rite of passage only to never see his parents again
4 years later (1939-40). He gets up early to let me know he has to
redo his speech because he must make his great grandson aware of how
lucky he is. This is his legacy. Survival and luck, a guardian angel having
spared him 3 times during the war. His belief in an angel. He must insist his
progeny understand this luck. He wakens me to revise the speech.
This war left so many scars until this day.
A patient presents with symptoms,
Then, as if 70 years meant nothing, suddenly
Launches into memory, must tell me, as if it has to do with her current pain.
Everything has to do with the past. Her trauma.
Speaks of her escape from the Lachwa ghetto…
Tears streaming down her cheeks…
Marrying another survivor in the DP camp
Who then abused her something awful over many years.
The past is ever present, infecting our consciousness
and producing ongoing symptoms.
After this diatribe,
Watching her sacred body
Having doggedly survived
Two years in the White Russian forests
Sleeping on snow,
With this broken tortured abused soul housed within,
What wise words do I have for her symptoms?
Is she really here for yet another label?
A Latin diagnosis that will soothe her seeking mind?
She knows much more than I could ever grasp!
Of human bondage and divine indifference
For, after all,
Let’s agree,
She’s really suffering from
Betrayal.
The body in betrayal
Her parents, culture, ethnicity, Rabbis
Her husband, son, her very sense of survival,
Most of all her God.
I watch my parents
Perched like doves
On their couch arm in arm
Resigned to aging and the loss of faculty
Yet, with each other, they face the uncertainty
Of the future
In their nineties
I remain amazed as to their optimism
And celebration of daily routines.
I am not far behind
And wonder who will I share this perch with
Inconceivable
After years of bickering
To spend so much time with one individual
Inconceivable
To sit on this couch
Listening to orchestras perform
Identifying musical arias, CNN blasting during dinner,
No overt questioning of
What will be…
No raging but moving ever so gently into that dark night
Pure resolution.
Life has enchantment
The bird’s egg mysteriously appearing on the balcony
The Jerusalem sun setting
Its golden hues pouring into the living room
The quiet Sabbath morning
The sweetness of dawn’s air
Their “wall of love” with twenty something great grandchildren,
placed like trophies, these are their real accomplishments.
They give out blessings! To one and all who enter
These are the currency trades they deal
These move them. They traffic in blessings!
The pouring over photo albums
And the rehearsing of life’s victories in War and Peace
The identification of songs and artists
Movies and heartthrobs
Memories of people who hurt them
And those who they laughed with
Little else interests them
Until families arrive
Each bearing their own relationship
Their own babies
Each to be held and cooed over
This is happiness,
Seeing the next and next generation live on
Biologically
If not spiritually.
Life as blessing others.
I watch in awe
(And horror)
Their son…
Knowing their past
Happy in their current bliss
Despite infirmity and limitations
I intervene less and less
Gone are the trips
The wineries and the museums
The entertaining them, their need for trips,
The ride to and from restaurants has become tedious
They much preferring snacks from their love perch
The lounge couch.
Mum sleeps with her feet on dad’s knees and he gently strokes them.
Each visit of mine a little less
Less of this
less interest in that
They talk to each other
In bed
On their perch
In innocence and purity
About this child or that
Avoiding the painful
Seeing only the pride in accomplishments
They are satisfied with life
It has lasted this long
It has endured as they have
The aperture of their lens is humble
And they bask in the what is…
Not the future.
Past and present combine here
Memory and landscape merge
Images and songs
Meld together
There is a flow
Of past aphorisms and truths
Of claims and prides
Of resentments and grudges now laid to rest.
Our time
Our lives
Interwoven
As time passes without stop
It respects nothing and nobody
Not even God
Who is just as subservient to time as we are
Does He get tired?
Surely!
Our puny lives
Our self-assuredness
Our piety drives Him crazy.
Memory blurs
Times conflate
Facts become fictionalized
Fictions become facts
The media is now the very message of truth
Despite its murky intent
And our impoverished intent to make sense of it all
Likens us to a laboratory rat in an experimental cage
Watched by an omnipotent and omniscient scientist
In a white coat streaked with blood.
In the sanitized bourgeois streets of Rehavia
The intellectuals mix with the Haredim
Each locked in his or her own ideology
Political religious and gendered identities
My father walks to his chapel
Where he is feted as the elder
And they present him annually with a token of his survival.
What has changed?
Each of us desire validation
Crave the respect of colleagues
So that we leave a mark, a trace, an image, a reshimu
That we were here,
That some memory lives on,
That we were not forgotten,
That our lives were not meaningless,
So we create and then perpetuate the medieval divine image within…
He who will hand out merit badges and mitzvah points…
He who needs our sacrifice to make it meaningful.
As if we need such a motive today
After the silence, the deafening silence, of the rising smoke,
from the crematoria.
But it is time to wake up from this spiritual slumber
And see reality in all its horror
The horror of dementia, the ICU, the tremors and rigidity,
the incoherence and disorientation,
Not as some medicalized pathology,
rather as the true representation of modernity
Of technology
of genocide
of mechanized killing (from the first machine gun to Auschwitz and Hiroshima)
the last 100 years of brutality.
Of current spirituality and the violence
fundamentalism produced so effortlessly in all faiths
Of unbridled patriotism which becomes xenophobia
Of modern politics and its use of hatred to gain votes
If we can just see though the mirage of technology to its future use in
controlling more and more of our choices and our ethical values and see how
violent it has become under the mirage of its making our lives better and
adding value to us consumers.
If we can just go back to the collective wounded brutalized child and see how
it motivates and produces the violent collective adult, we claim is so mature.
If we can begin to validate the childhood trauma at the collective level…
Then possibly this insanity might awaken to its own reality.
I close the door on my parents having looked in on them, checked in on them,
They lie like two children locked in each other’s arms
In innocence and purity.
The world is alright after all.
Xavier Pichon
Pichon and Fragility
“The earth’s surface is made up of constantly moving plates shifting against one another. You might suppose that a solid, steel-like lithosphere would make for a more stable structure, but the opposite is true. The pressure, tension, and sublimation between the shifting plates - much of which occurs beneath the ocean floor - is one of the reasons the planet can sustain life. The earth’s seemingly Volcano erupting stable surface and molten interior are in constant dialogue, sometimes manifested as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis. The human parallel is striking. The more ductile our outer surface, or ego, the more seamlessly we can flow with the subterranean shifts in our awareness and understanding. Poetry is one conduit. The poet accesses the deep, unseen currents and invites the reader to follow. Nature is another portal, as are music and art. But if our ego is too stiff and rigid, like the dense rock surface of the San Andreas Fault, we cannot make the tiny, ongoing adjustments to our own inward movement. The ego and the soul become disjointed, causing pressure to mount until the correction comes in one cataclysmic jolt. The character Oliver in my novel April & Oliver exemplifies this. He has a created such a fixed, closed outer reality that he has left no room for the influence of more subtle, interior energies, such as insight and intuition. In fact, he is afraid of the power of those blocked off magma chambers, which harbor the musical sensibility he has long buried. Disowning one’s power is a dangerous thing, however, and the seismic adjustment for Oliver will be, by necessity, catastrophic. The metaphor is illustrated by this poem taught to Le Pichon by his mother. Can it be a coincidence that the boy who memorized this poem in childhood went on to become an expert in plate tectonics?
Xavier Le Pichon, one of the world's leading geophysicists, helped create the field of plate tectonics. A devout Catholic and spiritual thinker, he raised his family in intentional communities centered around people with mental disabilities. He shares his rare perspective on the meaning of humanity -- a perspective equally informed by his scientific and personal encounters with fragility as a fundament of vital, evolving systems. Le Pichon has come to think of caring attention to weakness as an essential quality that allowed humanity to evolve.” [1]
Xavier Pichon
Fragility
A presence and awareness to suffering in the world
On being, suffering, in failing we come together
Organized religion forces us into a theology of perfection
Whereby we are constantly being judged
Against a notion of the perfect man the Tzaddik
Where we always fall short in our human failings
Along comes this scientist and teaches us that tectonics
That earthquakes as a refutation of the divine
A theodicy of sorts to the rationalist mind
Weakness as part of the system that is alive
Pointing to the importance of the fragility of human life
At the heart of humanity,
Mirroring the tectonic plates of weakness in the living earth
How weakness is part of a system that is alive
That rather than refuting the divine
Points us to a fractured divine
Within us.
Morning to night I listen
To the suffering of human beings
Mostly impoverished
Most in deep pain that crosses the physical and mental
Defying the simplistic either or models
I listen and see the same pain within myself
The powerlessness of poverty
The fear of the next fall into violence or inner loss
The body as enemy that culturally must be tamed and beaten
In this mythic medical war
Pichon teaches me that we must focus more on the fragility
Which requires compassion
More compassion
In that delicate space of empathy
We enter a community of mutual respect and suffering
Where healing is first and foremost my hearing the pain
Understanding how deep it penetrates the soul
And the softness that underlies the story
The biography of trauma
The larger socio-economic tale of powerlessness
The divine is only present in such encounter
The suffering neighbor
The connection in tears
The stoke of the hair of understanding
The mercy of mutual loss
The depth of camaraderie.
It is so different from the technological mastery
How we treat chronic disease, degenerative diseases of the Brain
And spinal cord
The arthritis
The myalgia and neuropathies
All taxonomies and codes with ICD 10’s and DRG numbers
As if,
If you fall into this category or diagnosis you will be understood
And fixed.
In the slow dementia
Of mind and soul
We must find a spirituality of the fragility, the slow loss of function
Knowing full well we have no cure
Can we still be heroic?
Can we still endure in companionship?
Can we get through to the soul of the demented?
Unless we change the model
Unless we understand the fragility of being human on both sides of the white coat
We will forever remain
Lost in the stone age soulless technology of medicine.
[1] https://soundcloud.com/onbeing/sets/xavier-le-pichon-on-fragility
Theology of Dementia
In anticipation of loss
This sense of the impending,
Inextricable bound to memory,
Ultimately caught up in the past,
The way we interpret reality,
The way we are creative about our biographies
Our wished historiographies,
Through the prism of our resentments,
And delusions.
From our wounds and our experience
Finally, facing the brutal facts
Of age and infirmity, of decay and demise
We stare at it daily,
Or monthly if we visit parents
This starkness,
The facts on the ground
The diagnoses we bear,
The truth of our mortality,
The ending.
We face this,
Deferring the truth of the facts
By all sorts of distractions
The nitty gritty minutiae,
The specifics of actions,
The discussions of trivia,
The visits to the doctors,
Incessant TV noise, too loud,
The movies and Facebook pages,
Anything and everything to avoid the real questions…
How to make sense of the absurdity,
How to face the mediocrity of the self,
The Kritik and his pointing finger!
When we face those who say “j’accuse”
In all honesty,
How our character defects,
Staring at us in the mirror,
The toxic shame rising up
Envelops the soul,
And we see how little we have added,
How poverty stricken our contribution,
How accurate was the headmaster to prophetically
Declare “you are a B student” you will always be!
And all those voices who gathered collectively
At the summer home of the Kritik
To voice the final verdict. Guilty.
Living with,
The anticipation,
Anticipatory grief,
Facing this,
Facing aging parents,
In the presence of memory loss
Knowing that each statement will be forgotten immediately
That the next fall could be the coups-de-grace
That lands mum or dad back in the hospital
For the last fracture and sepsis
Knowing this yet persisting in the normality,
“as if” everything remains normal,
goes on as normal
continues as normal.
Facing my own slow foibles
The loss of keys,
Leaving stuff everywhere,
The shoulder and hip pain,
The slow reduction in ambition
The absent libido.
Issues with memory slowly creeping into consciousness.
I fully accept the decay,
And marvel at how modernity has been so successful in preserving the body
At the expense of the mind and soul.
(The indignity of the ICU still fresh.)
How does one conduct oneself?
In the presence of such an awareness?
In the face of such knowledge?
How does one accept the reality?
What is the myth to hold on to here?
What is the Midrashic interpretation useful to deal with this?
What is the theology of dementia?
Are there myths to hold this new reality?
Does God suffer from memory loss?
Which religion allows for such heresy?
How does one perform rituals to celebrate such decline?
What are their shape?
Is there blood?
“do not go gently into the night”
Thomas tells his father:
But mine is so at peace!
So wondrous he has survived!
Hitler, the Anschluss, -kindertransport- England
The HMS Dunera, U boats, Australia, Tatura
London, The Blitz,
Now 95 he boasts of his isometrics!
His abs firmer than mine!
His shofar blowing as vigorous as ever.
Yet I cannot accept the way he can, so blithely
At least not yet,
I cannot go so gently into the night,
Not yet…
It all stems from that trajectory
Of protest
At the way things are, ever since childhood,
The way things are supposed to be
The way our teachers and authority figures
Projected the Rabbinic God into our childhood psyches
The “Mashal of the King” coming to me only later,
A tyrant with such power,
He can gouge the eyes of his violinist [1]
In the Beshtian parable
In order to hear his favorite piece
Repeatedly, with such passion
He tortures for his pleasure.
I refuse our projections of power,
Our genuflections and rituals to this tyrant,
My heresy is complete in the flames of the crematoria [2]
There is no other path now.
It is so lonely however,
Without my father’s naïve faith
Borne of centuries of Oberlander frumkeit
No community of non-believers
No rituals of heresy,
No ark of post-modern morality to worship,
Only the nightmarish landscape of darkness
Terrorism and
A winter of discontent.
Facing worst of all,
My own character deficits
They indict me consistently,
Disallowing me the authority to speak this way
To think the heresy,
After all
Centuries of Rabbinic authority
The ‘ecclesia’, the Mesorah, the men I still respect for their scholarship
Believers all of them!
(Rav Soloveitchik, A.J.Heschel, R. Auerbach, R. Kook, The Leshem, R. Eliyashiv,
Reb Nachman’s quantum Hassidut)
Men of greater intellect for sure,
Greater spiritual stature,
I even believed their rhetoric-so masterful
Covering up for the divine with powerful Lurianic myths
Of intra-divine fracture…
Even the Kritik laughs at me!
Even at this you are a failure!
A failure of belief-Emunah.
The slow decline also affects courage
The courage to not believe
In the hidebound theologies
The outmoded beliefs in a good God
In the refusal to accept Auschwitz for what it is
And the peer pressure, the community
And its beloved Rabbi, who, at times of weakness,
Makes me feel God is possible,
Degeneration of all biological life
Physical and mental
Slowly mostly
Punctuated by crises
Of the flesh
Emergency rooms ICU rehabilitation,
Then return,
Slightly lessened,
Slightly diminished and so the cycle repeats.
Facing the ultimate
Demise,
Slowly,
What do we think or say on the way down?
The slow drowning
What? I’ll tell you!
A Hymn to no-body
Paul Celan my Rebbe.
[1] There was a king who loved music but his real passion was the violin. A fiddler was brought to him to play and one particular melody captivated him. He instructed the musician to play this melody several times a day. After a time the musician grew weary of the tune and found it hard to play it with the same passion as before. To rekindle the fiddler's love for his favorite melody, the king was advised to summons a new audience every day. Strangers were brought into his palace who had never heard the melody. This arrangement seemed to work. A new audience stirred the fiddler to play with enthusiasm again until there was no one left to invite. What to do? It was decided to blind the musician so that he never see a human form again(Another kinder, more Besht-like version is that he became blind) He then sat before the king and whenever the king sought to hear his favorite tune he would simply say "Here comes someone new, one who has never heard you play before!" And musician would play his tune with the greatest joy.
[2] The story of the Beis Yisroel comes to mind...He once asked Rabbi Lau's older brother who had nurtured him during their internment in a concentration camp the following questions..."were you there?" yes replied Lau "were you by the crematoria?" yes replied Lau "did you see the smoke?" yes replied Lau "did you see the heilige Bashefer go up in the smoke?" Lau was silent.
From The Lowest To The Highest
From the lowest to the highest: a Dada trip!
To mum and dad:
We went…
from
the lowest point of earth: The Dead Sea
Where the silence was deafening, the looming mountains of the Dead Sea
Its caves looking out like the orbital sockets of a newly discovered skull,
The receding line of water a testament to human greed and climate change,
The tractor ride takes a full five minutes to reach this shore line,
Where the crystalline salt grabs onto anything touching the water
And wraps its silky white smooth bullous surfaces around pipes
Where the few cacti spread their branches in all directions,
twisting and turning
to capture the sunlight and grow,
Where the silent masseuse insinuates her soft hands
into your 90 years old frames
Making your bodies come alive if only for a short time,
Where the warm sulfur baths enveloped and carried you floating
As if weightless in outer space
And the fields of date palm trees stand like uniformed soldiers
on the drill quadrangle
From the youngest plantings to the oldest trees topping 50 feet tall,
Mature and producing their sweet succulent fruit close to the trunk,
Like poker players holding their cards.
To
The highest elevation you have flown (in some 8 years)
Having been banned from flying for medical risk
Here you both were once again
In a helicopter!
Hovering above the Old City
The Mount of Olives, the Walls of the Jerusalem,
The Herodian mountain in the distance
(off limits to us by military rule,)
And even Rehov Trumpeldor from 500 feet above!
The horizon sports a reddish haze
But still the view is crystal clear
The gentle slopes of the Judean Hills
The Har Menuchot cemetery…
From the lowest to the highest
This attitude of elevation and depths
The soul’s ascent from the depths
“mimaamakim” from “the depths I cried out to You, Lord”
both your lives lived well…
from
The depths of the Shoah, the depths of the Dunera
The Australian outback
Mum from poverty, from Colonial Life,
the Blitz…the fear
alone in post-War London
new life
new struggles
burdens of providing for larger surviving family
slowly slowly building wealth, brick upon brick
children,
careers,
public duty to community and larger society
honored by both,
surviving most friends
struggling through cardiac and neurological illness
rehabilitation, walking,
pacemakering…
to
Eretz Yisroel
Jerusalem
Ulpan
Bookbinding
Shul
Painting
Yad leKashish
Good food!
Grand children
Great grandchildren
Still on the way!
The heights of accomplishment.
The next generations assured
Following your paths
Your exacting standards
In life, quality, self demand, and faith.
Looking back…
Looking down from the helicopter
At this landscape
This beauty
The green slopes of the hills
The trees, evergreen
The sandy buildings of villages and shechunot,
In this life!
Landscape and memory melt
Past and future blend
Generations all fuse together
We are but links in this wonderful short lived chain
From the lowest to the highest
At the end of the day
Only you can look back
Look up
Look down
And say
“I have lived a good life”
The Sibyl of Cumae. 3730: Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, 1751-1829: Sibylle von Cumae, um 1805. Landesmuseum Oldenburg, Das Schloß.
Building Up Spirituality for Ground Zero
"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo." [1]
“I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
“The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms”
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
“The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect. The suffering in the world is not the failure of God's love for us; it is that love in action. For believe me, this world that seems to us so substantial, is no more than the shadowlands. Real life has not begun yet.”
C.S.Lewis [2]
“The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
From Ground Zero
From No-thing
Ayin
Small steps only are permitted
“Marche a petit pois”
we begin again.
From the wastelands of old theologies
the broken shards
prior suppositions evaporated in the winds of heresy
from the shadowlands
prior self-bloated opinions
deflated in the power of the rational
the prowess of the Id having been once again
demonstrated
We start again..
ever so still
קל דממה דקה
awake in the dark night of the soul
nailed to the cross of Simone Weil
the psalter of Das Niemandsrose
“Sprache, Sprache. Mit-Stern. Neben-Erde”
Paul Celan ever present,
“Non, je ne regrette rien”
Piaf is my teacher here.
So, having put away the daf
Having allowed the obsessive guilt to subside
(For it takes its own toll)
I face the empty sheet on the desk
In the middle of the sleepless night
I face the t’fillin bag lying in front of me
And the circumcised lips
Silent
Unable to pray Tikkun Chazot
The words like molasses will not emerge from the mouth
Silent.
Fully emptied of the sheer mass of Rabbinic corpus
For a while, thankfully
Not buzzing through my head
The inner kritik
Not pointing out my apikorsus
For a moment.
Allowing myself to see the obsessive halachic disorder
With more clarity
In the dark stillness
(despite my father’s voice ringing:
“it has survival value for the observant”
and..
“Uncle Strauss (his partner circa 1959) will not sit in the same portion
of the next world as I….who rise during the cold wet freezing winter mornings
in the dark, to daven in shul daily (for uncle was reform)”
Is it possible now?
To see this as mythical behavior
These rituals?
Born over centuries of accretion
To return to them in a mythic key say of G minor?
Without the obsession? The encrustation?
Take what makes sense,
Leave what is unethical,
Leave what does not make the bar of your inner sense of mythical right?
(“her” critical voice ringing “it’s a package deal! None of this choosing what is
convenient!”) in front of the kids!
of course drowns out the voice of the father
Le Nom du Pere!
Small steps please!
Don’t jump the gun!
We’ve been here before
Any act performed for self, ego, the other,
To be condemned
Impress nobody
Motive is everything
Purity of spirit is the yardstick
Examine each cranny of the mind for residual pomposity
Remember your Viennese roots
Where everything is for show.
Hubris permeates all desire
Pride is the very yeast of the doughy self image.
The “ich zog” must be forever abandoned for its delicious self righteousness.
Once more agree you just can’t walk away from decades of study
The archive is so ready for access,
the neuronal circuits are ingrained,
The midrashic tropes are so present
Like soldiers on parade
A Military Tattoo
Each one waiting to be called forward
To be used when the situation arises
Stepping forward with a quote from the Tanach
And its wonderful midrashic twist
Those late antique Rabbis knew a thing or two about the divine!
Revealing how human God really is!
Resisting the philosophical opposition to anthropomorphism
Oh how I loved to sport those specific naughty parables
Of God’s weaknesses and foibles.
It made the pain tolerable
And the post-Holocaust nightmare abler to survive
Yet the sheer weight of rabbinic training
The heaviness of parental and mentors
Lies on the aging shoulders
And the Apollonic guidance its wisdom
And the Sybilian price to pay for ignoring youth
(Each grain of sand another year
Each grain of sand another blatt)
I, like her in the cage
Shrinking in mind and vigor
Pointed at by passers by,
Paying the price for having engaged the gods
Guiding this inner soul to places where I should not have visited
Now condemned like her, until nothing is left but her voice.
Silence of thought mind and deed is the purifying waters
The order of this New Years Day.
"You shall have your wish, and with my guidance you shall see the
dwellings of Elysium and the latest kingdom of the universe; and you shall
see your dear father's shade."
"Here I am, the plain-speaking Sibyl of Phoebus,
Hidden beneath this stone tomb.
A maiden once gifted with voice, but now for ever voiceless,
By hard fate doomed to this fetter.
But I am buried near the nymphs and this Hermes,
Enjoying in the world below a part of the kingdom I had then."
The Sibyl to Aeneas. Ovid, Metamorphoses 14.110
[1] This Sibyl was not a goddess, although she was seven hundred years old when Aeneas met her. But Apollo (she
said) offered her endless life if she consented to the god's love. And she, as if accepting his gift, pointed to a heap
of sand, and prayed that she might have as many years of life as there were sand-grains in the pile. However, she
forgot Youth, without which immortality is worthless, so the god, hoping that she would yield to his love, promised
endless youth as well; but she, having spurned the god's gift, was fated to became the prey of a long Old Age. For
the amount of sand-grains were one thousand.
[2] In ‘Shadowlands’, a play by William Nicholson
Sils Maria: Maloja snake in the Engadine (Graubünden, eastern Switzerland), “a cloud bank that winds its way through the Alpine pass like a river”.
Sils Maria
From the broken shards of the self,
Lying around me like a shattered pane of glass
Dorian Gray’s mirror having been unable to sustain my image
Anymore,
The clouds of Sils Maria having filled the valley like a snake
Meandering as if to engulf everything in its path
With no curtains left to hide behind,
How many more lows remain to endure?
The failure of self-is evident
The lack of courage to be-is obvious
The pure inertia to write and think-is stark
We have no need to confess this yet again.
But here we are nevertheless,
And the tear wells up in grief,
As the accelerating years pile on,
And the deliverance remains elusive..
Deus ex machina long forgotten,
We have banished the meaningless rituals,
Forsaken the sacred texts that speak to a lost soul
After years of mining that archive for those midrashim
that “spoke” to my broken soul,
And, waiting for godot, we hunger now in silence.
Despite the cabin in the forest
“Walden Pond” in the key of G minor,
nothing bubbles up from the deep
the brook rushes below,
its healing sound gives peace
the crackling fireplace makes the wood glow
but the inner demons remain
gnawing at the corners of the mind
just below the surface of seeming calm water.
The mature mind does have some advantages
No longer rushing in to disastrous amours
The deeper sense of compassion seems to now
Hold the impulsiveness at bay
(remember how Sean Connery lies next to Catherine Zeta Jones
and refrains in a marvelous moment, realizing his age!) [1]
The release of the field of dreams, of work and career
Allows for reverie in places hitherto unknown.
Yet the sadness of what might have been
Does not let go.
The tragedy of decades of belief…
To the inner conviction…
That my intuition about love, life, and god
Was really true
Pervades my heart.
All that effort to come to this place of self-destruction?
Releasing these notions of truth, right, morality, theology,
To the snake-mist curling though the valley
Swallowing my dreams
Now lying in shattered shards
Around me below.
The Divine? It is beyond me. There is no access.
Love? I know less than ever what that means other than pain and torture.
The tricks of language and interpretation seem banal now…
The theology behind them lies in post-modern tatters,
Worse, the certainty is forever gone,
The comfort knowing the sacred text was always there for millennia
And I might add to that tradition of learned scholars
Might continue its tradition of exegesis
Is no longer,
And, as I listen to others, however brilliant, interpret,
I no longer have patience.
The liturgy has me mute
Unable to produce the sounds from my lead lips.
The words glare at me from the pages of the siddur like angry angels.
My father turns 95
A figure of middle European kultur
A Viennese Holocaust escapee, a kindertransport child,
then a British alien internee,
Quotes his Homer and Talmud effortlessly even now,
Swimming effortlessly between cultures of Athens and Jerusalem
He recounts his life and delights in his progeny
Describing it as one of survival, gratitude and pride.
Proudly asserting his Zionism without abashment,
I listen and marvel and his produced narrative, ever aware of his audience,
He speaks of the near death experiences during the war,
The U-boats, the fear, the near starvation,
the absence of the sight of a woman for close to three years,
The discovery on return of the loss of his entire family
The guilt of his survival
I sense his unspoken sense of betrayal of parents
on leaving the train station in Wien,
And my very existence the product of his unconscious betrayal
He makes no mention of my childhood years
the intervening years of poverty and struggle
The humiliation of self when faced with a spouse who lacked his Austrian
Frugality, whose demands were beyond his capability.
As a child I suffered his humiliation
I swore never to allow this to happen to me.
All this is omitted from the narrative
Or maybe his generosity of spirit disallows its expression.
His life
Its parts
Its ending
Its symmetry
His narrative description
All makes sense to him
And gives him pride and satisfaction
Seeing great grandchildren
And adoring grandchildren surrounding him.
My life however, seems the mirror image
It makes no sense
It has no overarching narrative
It feels the lack and bereft of meaning
It mourns the decades search which proved fruitless.
I feel like an orphan
Having combed the planet for master teachers-those of inspiration
I find no one out there who might help me anymore
And going inside
Deep inside
There is only the pain of childhood
Torment, abuse, the secret moves of survival, the lies deceits and betrayals
For self-preservation,
And the character defects that point at me in accusation
Proving my failures
In this inner court of law.
Yet in this snake of mist
Lies wisdom
For this very dark serpentine cloud formation
Signifies the fallen angel of Milton
Whose wisdom forced me out of the garden…
And in order to return I must relinquish that very discerning
Of good and evil
And self judgment
And bring compassion even to this dark space
To allow a new consciousness to arise
Percolate up from the depths of despair
Until the sun burns the Sils Maria
And the beautiful valley emerges from the disappearing snake
As if it has gifted its dying to me.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137494/
The Meaning of Meaning
“There is a heresy that amounts to an affirmation of faith, and an affirmation of faith that amounts to heresy. How so? A person may affirm that the Torah is from “heaven,” but the picture of “heaven” that he envisions is so weird that nothing of true faith remains. And how might heresy amount to affirmation of faith? [When] a person denies [belief in] Torah from heaven, but his denial is based merely on what he has absorbed of the picture of heaven construed by minds filled with ludicrous and nonsensical thoughts. Such a person says: “The Torah must stem from a source higher than this!” and he begins to find its basis in the grandeur of the spirit of man, in the depth of his morality and in the height of his wisdom. Although such a person may not yet have reached the center point of truth, nonetheless this heresy is akin to affirmation of faith and it progresses towards affirmation of belief at its root… and Torah from Heaven is but an example for all the generalities and particulars of religious doctrine, regarding the relationship between their linguistic expression and their inner essence, [the latter being] the true object of faith.”
A.I. Kook, Orot ha-Emunah, 25
To ascribe meaning
Has become for me
An abomination.
As if the words and phrases
The rationalizations and theodicies
The language of suffering
The prosidy of pain,
The construction of a system of meaning
Might have made sense? At one time
Might have made the suffering meaning”ful”
And then what?
Once having ascribed meaning
We go home eased
Close the theology books
Sip our lattes with ease?
Is the pain any less?
Is the sorrow lightened?
Is the anguish diminished?
After years of searching
(since having watched my first movie ever in 1966
“Trial at Nurenberg”.. too young)
tormented by those skeletal images…
stories my father told me…
obsessed during adolescence…
The scholarly articles, read in adulthood
The seminars…Wyschograd, Berkowitz, Rubinstein,
Greenberg, Soloveitchik,
My library brimming with their attempts to make sense
Cohen’s “After the Tremendum”
Elie Wiesel’s polished BU seminars attended,
Read and re read even Hassidic authors’ vain attempts at theodicy,
In a vain effort to make sense of “my life” as well
Child of a “survivor”
These “post-Holocaust” studies…
Filling so many faculty chairs In so many universities
A virtual endowed industry of words
Of teachers instructing their students “Never Forget!”
And “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it”
slogans, images, artifacts, relics from the camps,
then…
A new genocidal mania breaks out in the far east Pol Pot,
Eastern Europe, Serbia, Rawanda,
Endless lists of small atrocities.
And Wiesel warns us like an ancient prophet, and the Pope
And Lord Jonathan Sacks claiming a unique Hebrew contribution
to the history of ethics
That projects its voice today,
Despite the petty injustices the Jewish state ignores
On its own minorities.
This is post modernity.
We have stripped the ancient pagan gods of their mythic power
Then God of the Bible,
Then the Church, the Monarchs, Dukes and kings
Now we are free to kill in ways they never even dreamed of:
Post-modernity: a Descartian demythologized world of rational thinking
Where only the measurable is true.
Of meanings…
I hereby give up!
Not because I am not haunted
Not because it doesn’t still consume me
And drives me to find that very stuff of comfort,
The discourse that somehow finds a web of certainty.
However, I have come to see the quest
As fraudulent,
A false comfort
Since it is founded upon
The optimistic positivist goal
Of eventually finding that very meaning
In other peoples’ tragedy.
It has become ethically problematic for me.
I now see this entire enterprise
Based on the western philosophical
Logical system of thought,
The binary thinking of either /or
as false.
In which our language sets us up for such logical
Argumentation, the rules of syntax grammar and discourse
Represent a game of sorts (thank you ‘Rabbi’ Wittgenstein)
And the rules of that game are arbitrary.
Where we begin with a quest, a question, a proposition
Followed by an inquiry, an exposition, a debate
Testing of theory, the experiment, the poll, the fieldwork
Then examining results:
And proving a new fact.
The use of scientific method in the field of philosophy, theology
and human suffering and anguish.
Meaning is assigned to precisely those facts
we can string together, observe, measure
To form a coherence,
The rhetoric adds to the force for the argument
and we leave with a new theorem.
A new fact, a new truth.
But we forgot in the meantime, that the very rules of the game we entered
decided the very outcome in many ways.
We were seduced by the game not the content!
But what use are these meanings?
What is meant by these new truths?
How do they help?
The victim lies buried,
Tortured or lost,
“Missing in action”
unaccounted for, and
Those of us who have survived
Are left bereft, with a vacuum that emotionally needs to be filled,
With the need to seek answers
To find meaning in the profound loss,
To make sense of the dark heart of man
And his infinite capacity for causing harm
And inflicting Inhumanity on his fellow men
This desire is surely understandable
But futile and ethically problematic, for it serves only the bereaved.
Decades following the Holocaust we are no closer
To solving the darker side of human nature
No fewer genocides have resulted
And the appeal of technology to kill ever more swiftly
And efficiently,
Leave us horrified by the ever greater torture machines.
Our noble religions provide little succor
In their invoking the divine…
We are only digging ourselves ever deeper
By including a silent divinity into this holy debate
A divine that stands by..
As we kill and torture each other
The apologetics of theodicy leave us cold
And the idea of the God remaining silent
(which has plagued the Torah commentators from Genesis on,
albeit unsuccessfully)
Only worsens the argument.
The problem of theodicy remains insoluble
Despite the protestations of wise theologians.
There is no meaning
In the sense of a rationale
A reason, a cause, an explanation,
There is only paradox…
A paradox so deep it remains the essential flaw in creation
And the dualistic faceoff between good and evil
Ever present and locked in battle like Jacob and his dark night angel
Is as true today as in the sacred text.
I know, this is heresy (it doesn’t come cheap)
Of the silent divine…
(granted he may even be suffering impotently alongside us
out of His own choice)
as the only comfort…He is so inscrutable
He defies our ethical system of right or wrong
in His omnipotence and apparent absence
signifying
the absence of meaning
the absent divine
the absent self.
We are thus left alone to work it out
Figure out that which cannot be
Using the bicameral rational mind.
In a post Holocaust world of genocide and killing fields
Of mass casualties, of blowing up planes in the skies
“making sense” philosophically, theologically, spiritually is an anathema
to those who died senselessly,
(let the CNN and Fox pundits argue incessantly their drivel)
we see a senseless theology
a capricious god
who stands by idly laughing at mankind
that is the only sense here.
(This is the holy heresy Reb Nachman speaks of in Torah 64)1
In these dark moments
When the true reality and implication of an unredeemed world looms large
When the full impact of my patients’ deep suffering hits home
And my impotence in providing meaning in the face of their despair, poverty
And hopelessness, stares me in the face…
I take comfort in the resistance to find easy meaning
Trite truisms and theological justifications
So as not to do injustice to the memory of all those who did
and still suffer and cry. For any intellectual meaning falls short
of the direct brutality of the experience
And allows for a rationale which betrays their memory and sanctity.
I must find a path that doesn’t allow me
to so easily slide back into the rational mind
And avoid the addictive desire to seek meaning
But rather confront the pain and suffering head on
Allowing it to percolate through me
Like a shaman
Listening to the pain of others
Bearing their suffering alongside them
Reading the story of their suffering and feeling the pain
Without the neat theological categories that dehumanize them into statistics.
Offering no easy answers to my suffering patients, no supernatural ideologies
(How could one tell a patient locked in their motor neuron diseased body
Or a Parkinsonian shaking like a leaf
There is meaning? How cruel, how perverse!)
All I can do is be present
Be fully present
Listen intently
Frame the narrative and mirror their pain
And validating their anguish.
And as I begin to refuse these easy solutions
Preferring the brutality of the real
The acceptance of human nature to do evil
The acceptance of the Darwinian natural order of violence
The evolutionary necessity of the survival of the fittest
The Tsunami’s quakes, floods, tornados and lightning strikes
As inherent in the world order of things…
I can safely put away the kabbalistic appropriation
Of “Tikkun Olam” and the new age theologically melted down
Notion that we can make the world a “better place”
That Disneyesque ride that now looks so arcane,
Modernity’s lie that through technology and industry,
We will “progress” as humanity
Whereas in fact under this guise we have almost destroyed the planet
In the name of Protestant values and capitalism.
The world did just fine without us for millennia
Animals killed each other for food
Killing is built in to the very fabric of nature
However disturbing the NatGEO documentaries
of the natural animal world seem!
Then along came technical industrial production,
Of goods materials medicines and warfare.
And accompanying this new industrial age
came our tailor made theology and philosophy
Alongside this evolution in brain complexity
To justify and rationalize our dark behaviors
Projecting onto the divine some plan for it all.
In my heresy I reject all this
The Aristotelian set of rules
If A caused B etc.
A and non A cannot coexist etc.
And in the non rational appeal of some natural mysticism
I once again surrender to a pagan order of things
Allowing the darker side of nature, its divine and the self
To participate equally at the board meeting.
Release from the tyranny of meaning
I am able to embody reality as is
And begin from the beginning
Face the darkness without the layers of cultural lens
Without the supernatural explanations
And expose human/divine behavior/cruelty (mine included)
Without justification.
And having jettisoned meaning
We have the Herculean task of confronting ethics
Looking back our texts of terror
Our cultures of violence
Our system of statehood and jingoism
Our petty politicians who pander to xenophobia
Our media who are complicit
The medical- industrial- military complex and its pollution
Of good governance in the halls of power, Washington Brussels etc
That really pander to the capitalists of Wall St.
the hedge managing system that serves only self…
These cruel institutions
And the cruelty of poverty it evokes and causes
All the while the rich getting richer…
The ethics needs to be directed right here.
Now, if we look at all this
Stripped of self-justification
Of political justification
Of theological structures that rationalize the status quo
Of the incessant preachers/pastors asked to say a prayer and invocation
Prior to business as usual
The “Heavenly Father”
beginning the halls of violence with a prayer
To the sky god
If we expose the human cruelty in this
Avoiding “meaning”
We might have taken one small step towards
And evolutionary move away from annihilation.
[1] See my essay Quantum Chassidut: Hitbodedut in a Quantum Key: Contending with the Silence of the Vacated Space & the Holocaust http://www.tzaddikmag.com/guest-features.html (LKS Tsfat Development Corporation Ltd) editor Sharon Marson
Woman saying Tashlich, Uman 2015
