Midas Hadin
ברא -אהלים :לוא אמר ברא ה', שבתחלה עלה במחשבה לבראתו במדת הדין, ראה שאין העלום מתקיים, הקדים דמת
Rashi to Genesis 1:1
Imagine
In the place of NOT-God
Where history and suffering cohabit
Where blind hatred and genocide flirt
And the angel of death moves with impunity
And my mother knows what is happening to her and is mortally afraid
In this space, the harms I have caused others accumulate
Bearing down weightily, confronting me with “j’accuse!”
It is precisely here
Where the NOT-God/Schechina dwells,
In the heart of darkness,
Forced, wrenched and torn from the Divine pleroma
Without her consent, banished from the father’s table
In the beginning….before time.
Imagine
How she must to suffer alongside us
Eternally yearning to be reunited with her GOD
But prevented by the same divine decree
That divine self-indulgence, pique and experiment (kivyachol)
In humankind (Midas HaDin)
Like a mad scientist in a laboratory who just cannot give up
And the rats on their treadmills are going crazy.
If only He’d begun with Midas HaRachamim
What would it have looked like today
Orgies and fun? (God forbid!)
Too much loving?
Unconditional praise?
Certainly, the need to avoid so much destruction?
(The verse ״These are the generations of the heaven
and the earth when they were created״ (Gen. 2:4)
suggested to the rabbis the creation of prior worlds,
while the verse ״You carry them away as with a flood״ (Ps. 90:5)
was also interpreted to refer to the destruction of these prior worlds.
The Zohar (1:262b) suggests that God did not actually build these
prior worlds, but only thought about building them.
That this world was not the first that God created
was believed to be indicated by Isaiah 65:17: “For,
behold, I create new heavens and a new earth and the
former shall not be remembered nor come to mind.”
Zohar Hadash identifies the prior worlds as totaling 1,000,
as does Or ha-Hayim 1:12, which states that before God created this world,
He created a thousand hidden worlds. These hidden worlds were
created through the first letter, aleph. That is why the Torah,
in the report of the Creation of this world, commences with the second
letter, bet. The existence of the 1,000 worlds is linked to the verse
You may have the thousand, O Solomon (S. of S. 8:12).
Weren’t those worlds enough to show him
the devastating effects of Midas Ha-Din?
Now condemned to a history of divine gevurot
Infecting down below every interaction burdened with these kelippot
Splitting our hearts into chambers of good and evil.
Imagine
Moments of grace
Where She glimpses of the divine, transcending time and space
And one can feel the presence of His absence
Where a wormhole allows Her to gaze
And fill with desire
Taking me along for the ride.
The weight of being is lifted
By a delicate unbearable lightness
As if the anchor that chains me to the inexorable sense
of progress of time
Time passing,
Time wasted,
Time running out,
Is lifted momentarily.
This Midas Ha-Din
That took her from me
Producing an utter grief
This overwhelming Kaddish
Transforming the grief into memory
A spiritual cardio-conversion,
As this year of mourning comes to a close
I wonder whether the recitation was for her, the Schechina or myself.
Is it not possible…
This brilliant psychodrama of Kaddish
The obsessive repetitiveness of it,
The public display of it,
Its tone and cadences,
The swaying and the steps back and forward
The body in motion with the heart
Is, in fact a Kaddish for myself?
That as the year winds up
The cessation of its recitation looming
A new anxiety
Having been baptized a couple of thousand times
I must face the silence
The no-recitation when the service calls for those members
of this exclusive club to stand and be counted
Those whose entrance fee has been paid with tears
I must stand down
The sheer terror of no mourning no response no expression.
Can I not continue to say Kaddish forever?
Why am I stopping in two weeks?
If I feel I must
If only for my own demise?
(this is not a Halachic question!)
Imagine
In the place of NOT-God
There is a silence too
A not saying of Kaddish
For the worlds He destroyed
For the laboratory rats sacrificed for His eternal experiment
The silence that screams in the Sahara Desert
The silence representing the failure to adequately mourn the loss
The enormity of the bereavement
The silence after every life breathed no longer
For the permanent absence
For His allowing the angel of death free reign
For the Midas Ha-Din.
Ashen Soul
הַאֲזִינוּ הַשָּׁמַיִם, וַאֲדַבֵּרָּׁה;
וְתִשְמַע הָּׁאָּׁרֶץ, אִמְרֵּי-פִי
Give ear, ye heavens, and I will speak;
and let the earth hear the words of my mouth.
Sitting in a manicured courtyard,
Palm trees surrounding this sacred space, allowing for privacy
The sound of water gushing into a small pool,
The manicured quadrangle allowing for the sun’s rays
To cause a kaleidoscope of shadows on the perfectly set stones.
In the cloistered sanctuary of this spa for the wealthy,
A Bodhisattva is placed in the center,
Presumably to provide an air of serenity,
In a sitting posture, the Buddha clasps two bowls in his lap
I gaze at the idol, in the center of the quadrangle,
Jealous that it sits, still, beyond time and history,
Having lived a life and taught how to escape “dukka”
The sorrow and suffering of this world.
I however cannot escape history,
My soul is ashen,
Infected by a white powdery substance
That was released some 70 years ago
When millions were cremated,
And the smoke and ash billowed heavenward.
Whereas the blood-soaked earth and mass graves of Europe
betray the genocidal numbers who cannot speak from the earth.
What of those consumed by the fire?
Those who went up in smoke in a fine powdery haze of ash
What happened after?
Where are they now?
The ash returned to earth
To contaminate everything
“no one living would ever be able to escape them, these ashes would be contained in the milk that will be drunk by babies yet unborn and in the breasts their mothers offer them: the ashes will linger in the flowers which will grow out of them and in the pollen with which they will be fertilized by bees, they will be in the depths of the earth too, where rotted woodlands transform themselves into coal, and in the heights of heaven, where every human gaze, equipped with a telescope, encounters the invisible layers which envelop this wormy terrestrial apple of ours. These ashes will be contained in the breath and expression of every one of us and next time anybody asks what the air he breathes of is made of. He will have to think about these ashes; they will be contained in books which haven’t been yet written…”
(Arnold Lustig, A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova, trans, Jeanne Nemcova, New York: Harper and Harper Row, 1973, 1973)
The white ash settled on the grassy Bavarian meadows
and forever daisies bear some guilt for not having refused.
Nature accepted what the heavens refused.
The Bodhisattva looks down avoiding my gaze
What is there to say?
It’s an idol after all
And Halachically forbidden to describe its beauty.
So why did the ash fall back to earth?
Why did heaven refuse it?
Why didn’t God suspend the laws of gravity?
Not lovingly inhale every one of the million babies.
Let’s say he was out of touch
(for how we could go on living and worshipping Him
had he been present to History’s worst horror?)
What about Michael, Rephael, Uriel and Gabriel- surely our archangels
should have received them lovingly?
Even Mamale Rachel could not be found.
Silence.
Only one angel who was a quite willing accomplice- Samael/Satan.
So the ash fell back down to earth obeying His natural laws
And infects my soul.
It is the frosted lens by which I see everything.
Even joy is contaminated by this white powdery gloss.
הַאֲזִינוּ הַשָּׁמַיִם “Listen O heavens!”
No longer are you a valid witness!
You let the ash rain back down
No longer are you a valid witness
You are summarily disqualified
וְתִשְמַע הָּׁאָּׁרֶץ “Let the earth give ear”
It cannot-its ears are filled with ash, you cannot bear witness
You hide too much blood
Moses our teacher no longer has eternal witnesses to rebuke Israel
When it sins,
Case is now dismissed for tainted witnesses
Even the judge is absent.
The Bodhisattva promises escape
But a luxury I simply cannot indulge
Memory and history do not end
Men went on living
But the idea of man did not survive.
Terumos Ha-Deshen
The scooping of ash from the Temple altar
And its cleansing after the sacrifices of the day,
-The priests would compete for this ritual-
Seeing it as the choicest of tasks.
What High Priest would dare approach the ashes of the crematoria
Seeing the same sacred task a millennia later
Vying for the job,
Scooping the holy powder of a generation
From the altar consecrated by human not animal sacrifice.
The priests are the kapos
Scooping the human powder
With satanic zeal
For heaven refused to accept them.
A generation later we see
How we too have been sacrificed for so long
On the altar of our messianic expectations
A rescue from above
אֲנִי מַאֲמִין בֶאֱמוּנָּׁה שְלֵּמָּׁה
בְבִיאַת הַמָּׁשִִֽׁיחַ, וְאַף עַל פִי שֶיִתְמַהְמִֵּֽׁהַ,
עִם כָּׁל זֶה אֲחַכֶה לּוֹ בכָּׁל יוֹם שֶיָּׁבוֹא
“even though he may tarry”
Tragically too late for history
אני לא מאמין
The Ending
The ultimate secret
That we all share,
That we cannot abide,
That we avoid at all cost,
That we drown in anything,
Alcohol, drugs, tobacco, sex
To avoid facing it..
This secret..
The Mystery..
The sod..
The roz..
This enigmatic kabbalistic gematria
That fails to reveal.
This secret is…
Is our mortality!
Our ending.
Our facing the approaching end.
The end of it all.
Our consciousness.
Our self image.
Our very existence.
In this crisis,
Bathed in tears,
Bathed in memories,
The earliest memories,
And the lost memories,
The a-hah moments,
Saying goodbye…
To mother, holding her hand…
In her fears, in that dreaded hospital bed,
Drowning in her fears,
I am helpless.
I cannot fix this.
She again teaches me,
Having born me,
Facing the end of her Kaddish,
In another month,
(I fear the stopping,
Of this recitationary obsession,
For the nothing=ness
Of the day after
In minyan
Silent.)
In this space between recitation and silence
She lingers
She bears down on me
She remains in my heart
The Secret of Life: The Ending
This force
This presence
Her presence
In her absence
The Schechina
Suffers through her
In the silence
I suffer her,
Bereavement means bereft
Holding those slender violin fingers
In mine,
Knowing what is to come
What must happen,
Knowing in the head
But refusing in the heart.
My holy twin rebounds how Mum
Voiced her fear of loneliness
And she jumped into her bed holding her
Comforting her in her ultimate fear.
And now
Only now,
In these tears,
Do I understand,
The suffering of Her
In Galut,
Schechinta be-galuta
I had to suffer this loss
To understand and feel the Divine loss,
The last 8 verses were written bedema
In tears, by Moses (?)
As if he was prescient
And knew what my mother would anguish over.
The ending must be growing in tears
For us
For her
For Her.
And my own ending,
The three score years and ten that loom shortly,
My own biblical lifespan now exhausted
I must return to her/Her
For strength
To endure this
Awareness
Death and the Maiden comes to my ear.
The Schechinah at 32,000 Feet
Schechina at 32,000 feet
At 32,000 feet one is allowed to let the mind wander,
At 32,000 feet certain thoughts are permitted, no?
Lord, can you allow me certain thoughts at this altitude?
will you permit me thoughts unacceptable and inappropriate at ground level?
Up here I am close to the heavens, can we agree?
up here the blue sky seems more pure (and eternal)
up here the burden of my own mortality is lifted momentarily,
up here I feel the license to say things not allowed down below,
thoughts that would be misinterpreted “down there”.
So permit me some heretical thoughts, maybe?
for up here, I fear less the inner Kritik!
up here my flight attendant,
has been inexplicably liberal in the administration of bloody Mary’s.
Let me then express
what I would never dare down there,
let me invite you
to feelings not revealed,
let me in
on what you know already
since you are so intuitive from that which has hitherto
been congealed.
The transgressive includes you my dear,
beyond the professionalism and propriety,
the learned intellectual discussions
over Pinot Noir and Netziv!
the heart has no boundaries (you know, of course)
and the heart will have its way no matter what the consequence.
For the Divine operates under atmospheric conditions
and today surprisingly the sky is blue
the heavens have an azure clarity,
which means the real truth is present and obvious
which means down below we are in trouble.
So forgive me a while,
under the Mariological influence,
of a deadly combination of sky blue and the redness of this inflammatory concoction,
and reminiscences of the black Madonna of Częstochowa,
(at least the Vodka in the Bloody Mary survived!)
allowing the inner Kritik ( wife? Mother? for whom I mourn thrice daily?)
a moments reprieve.
Up here at 32,000 feet,
where all barriers to expression maybe removed
for a while,
I can say the following
and not pay the price down below.
I love you my dear
and through you I love Her,
though the very transgression
beyond the rule book
beyond the Halachic
beyond the appropriate.
For She makes demands
on me,
and I have little idea how to handle Her
despite my age
and struggles.
She still thinks/demands satisfaction as/is possible.
Strung between Wife, Mother and Schechina (the RAMAK was correct)
between every woman I have loved and the law
here I am today, this moment
my tears and my heart in unison
the head games are out of the picture up here (thank goodness or Godness)
the reality of life, love and death so clear,
and the knowing heart fills my being,
with no higher criticism (Biblical or Psychological!)
to account to.
I am writing at 32,000 feet, a dizzying height even without Vodka!
But my fingers are merely gliding over the keyboard
a demoness has possessed them for a few,
The words flow like the red liquor
The censor is off duty, we have fooled it at 32,000 feet
And outside... the eternal blueness,
but inside…. the bloody Mary lingers a little longer
imbibed in the incarnation of Mary/Schechina/You
I am at peace if only for a few.
Only in Pain
Only in pain
Can I connect
An realize that I am at the center of this trauma.
In the fog of alcohol
In the release from the left hemisphere
Something happens,
A paradox,
clarity emerges!
That my very existence
My existential being,
Emerges,
And finds solace
And meaning,
And validation.
In only this…
The nadir..
The very Even Shesiya
From which the world emerges
Spun out like a thread..
In the Kaddish..
Among the cacophony of black-hatted voices..
Responding dutifully,
A sea of frumkeit
precisely here!
is where it all takes place.
Downstairs this Tisha B’Av,
my wife watches videos,
of Charedi Rabbis spewing mussar
for this will save her soul,
or her guilt.
And I upstairs,
I think about Gisa Fleischman
and how she was tortured..
but he (Rabbi Dov Ber Weissmandl)
gets away (Kastner’s train?)..
How she was nailed to the floor of the cattle car
And gassed as soon she arrived in Auschwitz..
And why I feel responsible for it,
Why?
Why?
We are missing the point!
Emily North
Treeft Ohn di Lecht
“The wife lighting candles was the whole G'mar Kedushas Shabbes.
The husband Treeft Ohn di Lecht so his wife could light smoothly
was the whole Hadlaka.
My father never missed a Friday,
lighting my mother's candles in advance then blowing them out so
the wicks are ready for the flame, trimming the bottoms
(of those triangular candles called trilites)
so they fitted into the candle-holder,
dripping hot wax into the candle holder so the
round candles stood steady. That's called Treefing (dripping) in Yiddish.
Turns out that's the Ikkar Mitzva.
The Izbicy explains it as because the רצון in the שימוש is
infinite, while the actual Mitzva is only as big as the person can do it.”
Reb Hershey Worch, Degel Parshas Beha’alotecha
Our candles are sanitized today,
The oil is measured into these tiny holders
The wicks burn immediately,
There is no need for “treefing”
There is no messiness
No dripping
No pools of oil around the Lichter
Even the candles burn immediately,
Like our religious practice,
It comes in tiny aliquots of Artscoll-directed unimodal
Fuzzy modern day amalgam of Ashkenzai/Litvish rules,
Accessible on line or in flashy covered
Books with literal artwork that leaves nothing to the imagination.
Reading the mourner’s guide to kaddish
One might be led to thinking
This came straight from Sinai,
These customs that emerged over centuries of mid-European cities
Synagogal handling of pogroms and Crusades,
The genre of piyutim and chronicles penned by survivors,
Is gone, (other than the Kina for the Shoah
By the Bobover Rav or Rav Schwab)
Now I can fulfill all the rules of mourning by merely
Referencing the relevant chapter
All paginated with ease in black and white
Cross referenced for all situations one might encounter during the year.
There seems to be no room for local minhag
For there is no “local” anymore
The European tapestry of communities
and their particular customs
has vanished, the Shtam-
Baum for each kehilla guarded jealously
of its own unique minhagim,
(Dad told me about the “Sheva Kehillos
surrounding Vienna, and the Shifshul,
each with different customs and slight
variations in nusach),
Yet now all are straightjacketed by Halachic practice
More so, “hashkofo” ideology,
That slippery doxological tool that has no rules
And allows for no deviance.
Orthodox Ideology determined by the Yeshiva World
or ever changing Daas Torah and give
such power to the “gedolim”
(leading to the validation of strange notions
such as anti-vaccination, in the name of Torah.)
One is labelled “apikoros” the way deviants
were labeled in communist or fascists states,
Anyone not conforming to the ideological frame
Of the dictator might be labeled
Then excommunicated.
Mostly it is key words that trigger such response
with the accuser having the faintest
understanding of the concept being discussed.
Our candles are sanitized today,
The oil is measured into these tiny holders
The wicks burn immediately,
There is no need for “treefing”
There is no messiness
No dripping
No pools of oil around the Lichter
Even the candles burn immediately
Between Layla and Lilith
“For R. Hanina b. Papa made the following exposition: The name of the angel who is in charge of conception is (Layla)’Night', and it takes up a drop and places it in the presence of the Holy One, blessed be He, saying, 'Sovereign of the universe, what shall be the fate of this drop? Shall it produce a strong man or a weak man, a wise man or a fool, a rich man or a poor man?”
Talmud, Niddah 16b
In my mother’s womb
I “learned” of her travails, felt her anguish,
She (as Layla) “taught” me everything she had suffered,
I could even see מסוף עולם עד סוף עולם
From that lamp she placed on my head [1]
(which explains my infant frowns in all those black and white fotos)
Having seen too much (in utero).
And this childhood existential fear and nocturnal panics,
Begging my father at bedtime
“please leave the door open a sliver to allow just a little light”
for fear of those demons of the night even through to teenage.
The sensing of death even then, reflecting a (hitherto undescribed)
epigenetic haunting from my survivor dad.
Layla had introduced me to the devotional arts
and spiritual feelings as I was
moved by the starry summer night
(by the Brook near Holders Hill Road)
the immensity of the myriad lights in the heaven
and my sense of insignificance before this infinity.
Or introduced me (thank you Mrs Lunzer)
to the oceanic feeling that comes from music.
(the Brandenburgs at 14).
But adolescence brought a different angel (Lillith) to my door,
Driving my lust for bodily cravings, triggered by specific images.
Walking up Hendon Avenue to Finchley lane
to catch the 240 double-decker bus,
Seeing in the stationer’s shop window
magazines with covers of lewd pictures, for
schoolboys like me (and dirty old men),
their beckoning looks as if paradise was to
be found within its pages.
Visiting Uncle Emil (Dachau survivor) who kept naughty magazines
under the cushion of his lounge chair, secretly sharing them with me
when we were alone, or my older cousin Jeanette
who toyed with me, leaving images of her cleavage
to taunt me at night.
Caught between these two angels
but not realizing anything more than my being
torn between the religious fervor and lustful guilt,
the struggle to live a single life
without this see-saw emotional cost, began.
Later, much later, after the white knuckling and Mussar,
the attempts to conquer the evil inclination failed,
and the “schizofrumkeit” founded on this duality:
attracted to the divine, the devotions, the praxis,
the study and prayer, the pilgrimages to קברי צדיקים,
the Apollonian vision,
Even the crushes of platonic love for the ideal (Sargon) women,
allured by their purity and innocence,
Yet simultaneously or soon after,
triggered by a female image, too much skin or a
gesture, a feeling of being real in the body,
feeling the skin tingle and the heart
pulsate and the loins heat up,
as passion and lust arose in this Dionysian phase,
courtesy of Lillith, followed by the
inevitable crushing guilt that only adolescents
can describe fully.
It was much later that in discovering the feminine divine
in the notion of a living
Schechina and seeing Schechina consciousness
as a deeper sensitivity to the hidden
aspects of the mysteries of Torah,
did I find these two aspects of Her as manifest in
our two angels.
My connection to Schechina led me to these two archetypes
of the virgin goddess and the whore,
Layla and Lillith, both of whom I had, in effect,
been worshipping all along.
They represented Her light and dark elements and
needed attention and devotion.
I sensed an enormous relief from this discovery
without any suggestion that I was finding an excuse for bad behavior.
It was not an ethical decision, rather I felt that I was being shaped
by these two archetypes unconsciously,
before I even knew what these feelings meant.
She provided relief giving expression to my deepest yearnings
to return to my cosmic mother without regressing
to infantile or pathological behaviors.
The oceanic feelings from both the body in passion
as well as spirit in music and poetry
fed from the same deep well .באר של מרים
She demanded devotion and suffered rage
Herself at times, (at times genocidal)
when dis-connected from her consort-
driving me insane all the while, with her
suffering reflected in my addictions to the flesh.
Worshipping at her altar I could finally find relief
in validating the split within me,
Layla and Lillith reflecting Her split Self,
and through them I was being taught the
need for integrating both archetypes within my soul.
And in my grief for the loss of my temporal mother,
I have lost much more than my earthly mother,
more than her overpowering presence in my life,
forcing me to achieve evermore for her sake and never allowing
myself the luxury of resting, for fear of wasting a moment,
more than this demanding paradoxical woman who made
even more demands on herself until the end, who drove me
as a needy child with her conditional love, her irrational rage, and her
superhuman demand for excellence and self-improvement.
I realize that I am bereft of the very incarnation of the Schechina
in my mother, the only bodily presence of Her,
kissing me in the end, holding my hand, and asking
when will I return to visit before I had even left.
I am bereft of my Layla (for who else held me in her womb
teaching me if not my mother?) Who promised me just
before birth she would revisit me before I left this world
to see whether I had followed her advice in living a good life,
a worthy life, and ethical life, and bereft of my Lillith
who drove me crazy when younger to experience her nocturnal
pleasures (succubus) and fantasies.
In my grief I must now learn to internalize her once physical presence,
her kiss and her touch, her long slender violin fingers,
her dark sephardic (Sargon) beauty, remembering
in the heart only the way Schechina was incarnated in her so fully,
and how she is now free from the earthly body of pain,
aging, fractures, dyspnea, transfusions and final illness.
We are given limited time (which accelerates with age) on earth
in this incarnation, and I am puzzled why we learn often too late.
Why it takes decades to gain wisdom, understanding and experience in living,
parenting, mentoring, doctoring,
only to leave it to the next generation to begin all over again.
And now I must learn something new,
to bring all this into the heart of pain and
loss, without her/Her to welcome me again,
her arms outstretched, her cheek so
soft, few wrinkles, her hand holding mine,
with no earthly manifestation of Layla/Lillith
to guide me, in my heart and loins,
the dance between Apollo and
Dionysius.
I am saying the mourner’s kaddish for Mum,
for my lost soul and for the Schechina
herself, who has lost a (Sargon) princess,
who bore me and provided me these two
angels who would guide me for better and for worse.
“When the time arrives for man to quit this world, the same angel appears and asks him, "Dost thou recognize me?" And man replies, "Yes; but why dost thou come to me to-day, and thou didst come on no other day?" The angel says,"To take thee away from the world, for the time of thy departure has arrived." Then man falls to weeping, and his voice penetrates to all ends of the world, yet no creature hears his voice, except the cock alone. Man remonstrates with the angel,"From two worlds thou didst take me, and into this world thou didst bring me." But the angel reminds him: "Did I not tell thee that thou wert formed against thy will, and thou wouldst be born against thy will, and against thy will thou wouldst die? And against thy will thou wilt have to give account and reckoning of thyself before the Holy One, blessed be He.” [2]
[1] R. delivered the following discourse: What does an embryo resemble when it is in the bowels of its mother? Folded writing tablets. Its hands rest on its two temples respectively, its two elbows on its two legs and its two heels against its buttocks. Its head lies between its knees, its mouth is closed and its navel is open, and it eats what its mother eats and drinks what its mother drinks, but produces no excrements because otherwise it might kill its mother. As soon, however, as it sees the light58 the closed organ opens and the open one closes, for if that had not happened the embryo could not live even one single hour. A light burns above its head and it looks and sees from one end of the world to the other, as it is said, “then his lamp shined above my head, and by His light I walked through darkness” Job XXIX, 2. Talmud Niddah 30b
[2] http://www.booklover.com/legendsofthejews/1/1lotj10_the_soul_of_man.html
The Anatomy and Physiology of Kaddish
יתגדל ויתקדש שמי רבא
Magnified and Sanctified be Thy Holy Name
I intone the Kaddish prayer,
Often as many as five times in the course of a service,
Amidst the cacophony of other mourners,
Some semi-literate, others mono-tonal,
One exuberant in his volume and pious intensity
(of course he sits right next to me,
Booming his piety!)
I prefer an elegiac tone..
Kaddish in the key of Elgar!
The prosody of mourning…the physiology of grief in rhyme and meter,
Which alone opens my heart to the grief of my recent loss.
Since the words do nothing to evoke death or reference to bereavement.
The text refers only to high theology and the resurrection
A disconnect that only now forces itself on my daily consciousness
As I recite this doxology aloud,
And the community responds aloud יהא שמה רבא
קדיש יתום
The Kaddish is the ultimate disconnect
Between title and textual content,
Never mentioning death itself,
Forcing me to focus on my grief and anguish without the semantic assistance
Of which the devotional words normally afford as triggers for the heart.
No, I must muster the feelings of loss each time afresh and resist
The fall into textual rote and repetitiveness along with the others
Of this Magnificat.
Of course this is by Rabbinic design: יהא שמה רבא
To sway us away Kaddish by Kaddish from thoughts
Of dissent, heresy, questioning the divine judgment.
In line with the very צדוק הדין that began by the graveside
Justifying the divine and providential hand in the death of the loved one.
(As if the mere repeating of the doxology makes it true)
I find myself more deliberate in enunciation of the words
Than in my usual davening,
precisely to evoke a depth of feeling
through my tonal nuances and cadences.
In part, a resistance to end as quickly as possible,
Which usually leaves me alone
(except for my exuberant neighboring worshipper)
reciting עלינו ועל כל ישראל after the others have already completed
ואמרו אמן
Which leaves my words as often the last public oration
concluding each davening,
As if my words effect a sort of closure on the service (albeit unwittingly).
My voice as the ending of things, like the ending of my mother’s life.
It feels as if the very repetitive nature of the kaddish
is designed by Rabbinic genius
By this constant rehearsing of the Kaddish
(did Wieseltier actually count how many times he
recited it, or Goldman or Kaminetsky?)
Day by day for the year of mourning,
Effecting its own closure by moving the lost beloved
From the acute pain of physical absence,
(The absent touch, kiss, holding the hand,
embrace, even “when are you coming next Julian?”),
To a laying to rest of all these tangibles, in the memory of the heart.
I can testify to the truth that the depth of grief lessens
And this daily recitation of Kaddish has helped in the mourning process
though not through the intrinsic meaning
behind the Aramaic archaic language itself
rather through the constant rehearsing of the stanzas,
a letting go of the beloved (and that deep aching gaping wound
The chasm of reality without her, the never-again-ness of life without her),
Through the ritualized sequence of this prayer,
Embedding her memory in my heart
One day at a time.
How do I confront the sheer size of text?
The need for such repetitive recitations (albeit with intentionality)?
Facing the sheer consumption of such volume of devotional material?
How to maintain the reverence for the memory of her loss
Morning, noon and night?
This was always my difficulty with “davening”
and in the past, I followed the advice
Of mentors in “choosing” which psalms of the פסוקי דזמרה I would focus on
And so on…I had the luxury of choosing…
But now, the rigor of punctuality and attendance to recite the early Kaddish,
And the attention to points in the roadmap
of davening where the Kaddish is triggered,
Forces me into a new mode to fulfill this Mitzvah of davening.
How can one not fall to reverie or distraction?
As one navigates some 45 minutes (at a minimum) of worship
Or more than 2 hours on Shabbat?
Usually I would bring reading materials to Shul
My Shtender a veritable mini-library
(plus a mini scotch for refreshment!)
Feeding my halachic attention-deficit disorder!
(of course only religious material, would I justify to myself!)
But now, taking in the timing for the various Kaddish’s
dotted across the prayer landscape
And the recitation as an act of memory and dedication,
I am stretched, even exhausted by the daily task at hand-
A military-style mission-
Accomplished by serious attention to detail
Watching the speed and volume of davening,
Not my strong point.
When allowed to “stand before the amud”
העבר לפני התיבה
And leading the prayers,
I am instructed (warned) by the beadle
who, like a station master, pocket watch in hand,
Checkered flag at the ready,
Whistle between his lips,
for the Tefillah locomotive to leave the station,
He writes for me (newby) on a chit the following:
6 45 am אמר רבי ישמאל
6:48 am ברך שאמר
6:54 am ישתבח
7:04 am שמע
7:08 am עמידה
7:14 am חזרת השץ
And small a clock with seconds hand
is placed on the lectern next to the oversized siddur.
(He once chided me commenting
“your pesukei de’zimra was too short and your chazaras
haschatz was too long!”) true to his vocation as station master!
All this distracts any kind of kavvanah for the davening, let alone the Kaddish!
Then comes the different Nusach for different minyanim I attend.
(Ashkenaz, Sefard, Hassidishe, Habad, Sephardi, Kolel, and on),
When the Kaddish is said differs as does
the very text of the Kaddish, most dramatically the
ויצמח פרקוני
Or even whether at all (after Sefiras Ha’omer)
All these finer points need negotiation and lateral thinking
As the local minhagim of each minyan requires this skill.
This is not a task for the fearful,
as minhagim differ from shul to shul.
The the emotional strain and anxiety of “grabbing the amud”
(or as Dad called it “chapping” the amud…)
The need to show up early to be present with Tallis and t’fillin
before the start time
And equitably sharing it with the other aveilim,
(didn’t he already do שחרית?
Isn’t it my turn?
Yesterday I had an early flight so had to daven in another shul
מנחה גדולה(Mincha Gedolah)
As I entered I asked if there was another chiyuv
and offered to lead in the absence.
Directed by the laity to take the amud
I was grateful for the opportunity once more,
To memorialize my mother by taking the amud.
For me the kavod for my mother is the leading
the service, not the Kaddish itself since
קדיש יתום
Was originally meant for orphans!
And, as a stranger to this minyan, I graciously accepted.
Then another mourner showed up and confronted me at the amud.
I yielded…( he was threatening!)
for being a “stranger”
(according to some poskim)
the local member takes precedence
But I felt cheated nonetheless, he was late.
This is a high stakes game for us aveilim!
The Kaddish’s biggest effect on my life
Is on my daily schedule.
Whether showing up early for the morning prayers
And that deadline for Mincha
I discovered a newfound (DSM V) “highway anxiety syndrome”
Whether the Edens Highway will be lighter than usual
or will I miss davening because of some
car crash?
Will I make it in time to “grab the amud”
Or will I even make the Kaddish?
I already dread the winter months
And how will I negotiate the commute home,
what with the weather and the early sunsets.
And my abhorrence of airline minyanim on planes
Having always considered it a חלול השם
I now seek out others, on board, to help me say Kaddish in the kitchen
At the back of economy, suffering the knowing looks and disdain of the crew.
עבודה
I remain uncertain whether this whole avodah
And the toll it takes on my peace of mind each day
And the disruptive effect on my usual schedule
Wasn’t intentional?
Or a just a historical byproduct of life in the shtetl?
Not for those who ride the highways and byways of modernity.
Is this ? כבוד המת כבוד המת
Surely Mum would have said “Just get on with it, Julian!”
In her usual British pragmatism.
Maybe it is merely the accumulation of generations of מנהגים
Characteristic of the expansion and inflation of מנהג ישראל
Into routine praxis.
The relief comes daily with the conclusion of מעריב
When the daily chore is done.
When the last Kaddish and the
עלינו ועל כל ישראל
Rings out,
And the sense of duty fulfilled,
The burden relieved for another night,
That train has finally pulled into the station,
A sense of accomplishment washes over me
Ever so slightly
undeservedly.
עלינו ועל כל ישראל
I know not whether this helps my mother’s soul in heaven
I know how she lived her life,
With integrity, honesty and sincerity.
She had no fear of גיהינום
And I am certainly not a person who has the
זכותים to rescue her from it in any case.
The Kaddish has helped me in a profound way, however.
This daily mantra has forced me into a verbal performance ritual
(much like my old piano practice of scales and arpeggios)
And a dance between my recitation and the communal responses
יהא שמה רבא מברך
It has given me a profound new respect
For the habitual in ritual,
The constant repetitive, recitative, verbal articulation,
The demonstrative and the declarative,
Yet almost unconscious flow of words
As intentional flow of a stream of consciousness
Too fast to focus on any particular thought
Removing comprehension from the left hemisphere and analytic part of mind
Into a subconscious stream.
It has therefore changed me in the core
Forcing me to articulate without thinking
Those doxologies I always struggled with…magnified and sanctified...really?
Leonard Cohen’s resistant Kaddish comes to mind…
Public displays of emotional piety and devotion
were always problematic for me
Even an anathema,
Having witnessed so much hypocrisy as a child and in married life,
For me devotion and piety were always
inward expressions of the love of the divine
And like all lovemaking,
Restricted to the privacy of the intimate spaces,
Never to be worn on the sleeve. Certainly not in public acts of piety.
נשמה
My public davening was relegated to the Yamim Noraim when
In the company of my children, we would sing in harmony to the divine
(usually borrowed from D’veykus niggunim!)
It was for me an experience of devotional prayer
through the harmonic cords of music
Not the words.
Music was the very vehicle that allowed my soul to soar,
Now, however, I am forced through the non-musical nusach of daily Kaddish
To demonstrate doxology without public display of piety
and without the luxury of sacred music.
This is my challenge.
Another instance is the minhag is to wear the Tallis over the head
In this shul, for me, another anathema,
(Dad says that in Austro-Hungary
only the shul Rabbiner would wear it over the head
as a sign of eminence and talmudic erudition.)
Here every Tom Dick or Baal T’shuva
shockles with his Tallis over his head, unable to even
pronounce the words of kaddish de’rabanan without stumbling.
Yet, if I am leading the service,
I must don Tallis over head, from beginning to end.
Maybe the Rebbe feels “fake it until you make it!”
All this remains uncomfortable for me,
But I do not have the luxury to do anything but comply,
For here in this shul,
I am a member!
And have status (unlike that minyan where I was a stranger)
In the “pecking order” of chiyuvim.
קבלת שבת
Ironic how, many years ago, this very Rebbe
stopped me from davening kabbalat shabbat
Someone asked him why?
He replied my davening was too בעצבות
For admittedly, at times I got carried away by לכה דודי ,
“come my bride (Sabbath Queen)”
Moved to tears by the niggun.
Inappropriate (sic) for the שמחה of Kabbalat Shabbat.
I accepted his decision with no regret.
My notion of שמחה included the discharging
the pain of the secular week and the cry of the
Schechina, the Sabbath Queen to be rescued!
(more consistent with Rebbe Nachman’s paradoxical notion of שמחה)
I daven from the heart and it pours into the text and is triggered by the text
Joy includes everything within it, the tears are still tears.
How ironic then, שמע קולינו
That the same Rebbe stands near the amud
Now listening to my daily Kaddish and, at times
My voice cracking up when memories of my mother well up
During kaddish or during שמע קולינו
He, of course, understands I am in mourning.
I have a new respect for the wisdom of our rabbinic tradition,
And how מנהג ישראל emerges from centuries of legal halachic precedence,
Stemming from various local שאלות ותשובות
across the communities of Ashkenaz.
(until recently I suffered from a prejudicial resistance
to the obsessive halachic minutiae of
halachic splitting of hairs, Pharisaic Judaism)
I preferred surfing the larger theological questions of theodicy
(having been born a mere 5 years after the Tremendum,
after the greatest challenge to Jewish Theology in its history)
And having struggled with these larger questions
in my study of Midrash/Hassidut.
Surprised was I to learn how deeply theology is embedded
in the little rituals we perform, when we bring attention
and meditation (kavanot) to them.
קונה
The wisdom embedded in our morning stages
from Aninus, to Aveilus, to Shloshim, to the return
too the stone setting after 11 months, all point
to a deep psychological understanding in grieving.
More so with the Kaddish.
It focuses me away from the grief, however hard that is right now,
Easing up as the year progresses day after day.
How ironic it is that Mum’s loss
Should have been the trigger
For this awakening,
Never one for the minutiae herself
She always focused on the bigger picture.
Never once did I see her complain
Despite her suffering,
Multiple hospital admissions, the poking and prodding,
the IV’s the infusions,
The pneumonia’s gasping for air,
Never once did her philosophical view of life falter.
So paradoxical that her absence has forced me
into these backroads and alleyways
Of local praxis, a worm’s eye view of ritual praxis,
Despite my genetic predisposition to understand
the grander schemes and patterns and fault lines
of tradition.
יתגדל ויתקדש שמי רבא
Sanctified and Magnified
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 are subsumed in the mystery of the Holy Name.
We recite the kaddish
Without understanding of the why-why she died why
they died (so many million קדושים)
We say Kaddish for the קדושים קדושים
Zadok HaDin
“On the day when Rabbi died the Rabbis decreed a public fast and offered prayers for heavenly mercy. They furthermore announced that whoever said that Rabbi was dead would be stabbed with a sword. Rabbi's handmaid ascended the roof and prayed: 'The immortals desire Rabbi [to join them] and the mortals desire Rabbi [to remain with them]; may it be the will [of God] that the mortals may overpower the immortals.' When, however, she saw how often he resorted to the privy, painfully taking off his tefillin and putting them on again, she prayed: 'May it be the will [of the Almighty] that the immortals may overpower the mortals.' As the Rabbis incessantly continued their prayers for [heavenly] mercy she took up a jar and threw it down from the roof to the ground. [For a moment] they ceased praying and the soul of Rabbi departed to its eternal rest. 'Go,' said the Rabbis to Bar Kappara, 'and investigate.' He went and, finding that [Rabbi] was dead, he tore his cloak and turned the tear backwards. [On returning to the Rabbis] he began: 'The angels and the mortals have taken hold of the holy ark. The angels overpowered the mortals and the holy ark has been captured.' 'Has he,' they asked him, ',gone to his eternal rest?'- 'You,' he replied, 'said it; I did not say it”[1]
In a world unmitigated by chesed
(for after all “olam chessed yibaneh”)
then the horror of death
the unmitigated loss of a loved one forever
the pain of separation
is consistent with the prayer above, ZADOK HADIN
the claim that God is just and metes out deserved reward
that His world is based on Mishpat, we claim.
But what happens when all unravels?
When the innocent suffer,
When a million babies go up in flames?
What narrative suffices?
What Jobian exegesis satisfies abomination?
Can we be satisfied with Lurianic myths of souls and reincarnation?
Or paradoxical faith of Reb Nachman?
Or eschatological visions of the resurrection of the dead?
I still mix up mercy and grace
Touched by my Christian culture
I see grace as divine grace, a gift from the treasury of unearned gifts
To the sinner who repents because of it.
But chessed/grace and gevurah/din are on opposite poles of a spectrum
So whatever din is
Chessed is the mirror image.
Chessed is not dependent upon my actions
Chessed is open and unconditional
Din is measured and earned
Din is meted out to the nanogram not more
Its precision is defined in the Book of Life and Death
Punishment is exact, halachic.
So what is rachamim/mercy?
Mitigation? the parade of witnesses at the sentencing hearing
Influencing the judge to soften his justice
Having already been pronounced guilty?
What of a world where God is in hiding?
Where Mengele was called an angel
Of death no doubt, but an angel nonetheless?
And Satan? What of his role in forcing God’s hand with Job?
Where God is swayed by him? Where is mercy/rachamim?
There is a feminine quality to rachamim
The Rechem is the cosmic womb
Out of which all emerges
And God exposes His femininity when he delivers rachamim
And what of this Mituk Hadin? This “sweetening of harsh judgments/dinim?
That the Zaddik has the ability to “sweeten” the judgment?
By his actions, his piety, and his own vicarious suffering?
How does that alter the definition of DIN?
As if God can be swayed, His rage assuaged,
His strict sense of justice moved…
And those Talmudic sages who died without fault?
We are told they too must die…
For the world has been forever altered by that cunning old serpent
So the Rabbis bid we “hang their death on the Nachash Ha-kadmoni”
That primordial serpent who precipitated death in this world.
In a neat system of ethics and virtue there is no room for chessed
But this is not a neat street (and Mr. Plumbean could not care less).
And God has introduced the notion of mitigation and mercy/rachamim
Precisely because of His chessed.
Kabbala teaches these archetypes are found within the godhead too!
Reflecting the holographic image of the human soul.
And in the production of the human from a putrid drop of semen
The Ari z’l describes the journey through which
the drop travels in the process of
unification (yichud) as a process that unifies chesed and gevurah:
“And then yesod of Abba is clothed in yesod of Ima, where chesed and
gevurah are mixed together...
That is why yesod is called ‘West’ (ma’arav), for it is
a ‘mixture’ (eiruv) of chesed and gevurah together.
Each soul has this anatomical duality,
this schizophrenic graft (eiruv) that tears it
apart throughout life…
As if we live the life of the divine
Or He lives His anguish through our suffering.
And then we are judged…
The sefirotic tree and the tension between chessed and gevurah
is the basic spiritual DNA of the universe and reflects
the same quality of the divine immanent within it.
And in this Lurianic system we see for the first time
the power of the human/adept
In rescuing the divine from its own gevurot.
Since creation produced a catastrophic implosion within the divine,
And a failure, it devolves upon the mystic
to rescue the lost divine sparks, that
have been surrounded by the forces of satanic evil (husks/kelipot)
And return them through the power of ritual practice
and meditational yichudim.
This “sweetens” the gevurot.
The world of creation is a dark gnostic place where evil rules
And represents the explosion of gevurot out of the divine godhead
In this world of divine refuse,
The human soul has no chance,
Only the Zaddik might overcome the powers of evil and banality
Through his life of piety, abstinence and self-abnegation for human desire.
He alone is able to sweeten the harsh judgments (gevurot) through his
Mesiras nefesh, his martyrdom.
In my body I only experience Midat Hadin
The slow decline is irreversible
The diabetes progresses despite medicine
The shoulder and hips crackle and creek from wear and tear,
And the memory loss, well let us leave it at that!
This is nature, the cycle of birth decline and death
There is no escape, [2]
הולא הזחא ירשבמו claims Job
This is Mishpat, de natura, din period.
And in this setting zaddok hadin is appropriate.
Only in our mythic narratives and texts of faith
Have we come to see the divine
Working in history,
And project images of grace in His miracles.
And sense of chesed at times in nature, music and lovemaking
Those moments when the sublime is felt
And being alive is tasted on the palate like a good wine
[1] BABYLONIAN TALMUD, Ketubot 104a (Rabbi I. Epstein ed., The Soncino Press 1935)
[2] It is known that this world is like a cloak for the elevated world. Just as clothing allow us to get an idea of the shape of the person wearing the clothing without revealing his true essence, so too God can be understood, though not truly, through examining the physical world. It is said of man that he is created in the image of God…which means to say that through contemplating man’s physical body, a person can come to know God.
The Circle of Tears
Crie du chat
Brooding on my ongoing waves of emotions,
Tears flooding in suddenly from the strangest triggers
Of memories of mother.
Even my father refers to her now
As “of blessed memory”
Having processed the facticity of her absence
And its permanence.
He no longer awakens to an empty bedroom
Asking me if Mom is coming home.
I still cry for my mother,
I used to cry with her present in my life,
As a child,
Often in outrage as to her petulance
And obstinacy,
And facing my father’s rage at my inability to control my tears,
(His Prussian sense of the British upper lip,)
Extending to a 6 year old whiny olive-skinned kid (too dark for him)
But suddenly, in an insight, that came from nowhere,
In the back of Berditchev, that enclave of outcasts, miscreants, and dropouts
Where all are accepted, and the singing is beyond,
In the holy city of black and white Lakewood that tolerates only conformity,
Where the Hallel in this shul, brought me joy for the first time since her death
I am surprised at my tears of joy.
These tears come from such a different place
Than the broken heart, a different anatomical region,
a different planet of being.
And it was here,
At the back of shul,
Of Berditchev
I realized
Those childhood tears from the moment of birth
(they tell me I cried a lot)
To the tears of this moment
Are a long continuous stream of lachrymosity
For the world, for the broken self, for the past, for the future.
But even more so
I realized in a flash
That the tears of this newborn
Were prescient tears
They are the tears of an unconscious feel
for the tears that will be shed
One day, one day
Having left the cradle of the cosmic egg
Nurtured by this woman
Who gave her life blood and carried me through term
Suffering the weight of twins
And the agony of delivery and post-operative pain
And being told by the nurses “you had your fun carnally
Now you must pay the price”
That this woman
My mother
Would one day
Without my consent
With no ostensible rationale
(Other than the “Nachash Ha-Kadmoni”)
Be lost to me.
Even then, that first crie du chat
At the moment of entry into this world
I was already crying for her,
For the loss of her,
That was to be.
And despite the guardian angel Lailah
Who supposedly taught me truth
about the world of righteousness/wickedness
And adjured me to be good (much good that did!)
And warned me of the perils of this world
(I would forever be attracted to those!)
And promised she would meet me
at the time I will be ready to leave this world
To see if I had lived a good life…
And supposedly my birth cries come
from leaving this idyllic garden of the womb, into
the world of suffering and retribution,
Or the cries were from the amnesia
for the Torah I had suddenly forgotten
when she slapped me on my philtrum…
I know better
(I always thought I did which infuriated my grammar school masters)
I know better
The cries are not for the past
The idyllic womb and hankering to return to it,
a place of serenity and warmth,
Or even the learned discourses of the Torah,
No…They are for the future
This little baby cried for the tears I now shed
In a continuous stream of salty consciousness
For the mother I would one day lose
As I have now done
And the circle of tears is now complete.
Kotel
April Fool’s Day 2019
A blustery evening on the slippery stones of the plaza
the clouds have raged all day.
The wet air reminds me of London in April after a shower.
The sky closes in on the yellow-bathed Kotel.
I count only 4 or 5 men leaning close to the wall
the soggy stones receiving their tears.
The rest are huddled in the side catacomb warmed by space heaters,
I joined the evening prayers.
I face the huge Herodian wall wondering
how many slaves were used to hold these massive
stones.
A long-bearded man begins the prayer-
I'm glad I will be able to say Kaddish.
I sit on a plastic garden chair facing east and I am lost in time and memory.
The hum of the worshipers surrounds me as I sit in my grief
facing the future without mother.
Grief is such a lonely experience.
Why did I come here?
Because an ancient text told me this is the last place on earth
where a trace of Her resides?
But the Kotel is silent tonight.
The stone-faced wall gives no hint of Her presence
in fact its grand facade makes no impression on my soul.
It is too fraught, it has too much culture,
historical and religious baggage for just a wall.
No icons, no images, no statuettes to focus the mind
It is too harsh, too bleak, too cruel providing no relief for the mind to unload.
Yet there is something very real about tonight.
Facing a silent obelisk in front of me,
a stone the height of two men reaching to the arched
ceiling, this will survive time, surely my life.
And my descendants will come here to pray
and beg for their lives and ask relief of their suffering.
And as mother is no longer in my life, and as I mourn her loss,
this wall stares back at me in silence,
reminding me of how silent the cemetery is.
How eternal the ending is, and will be for me in the not so distant future.
How I need to befriend death and stop escaping its silent message.
The prayers end with my solemn Kaddish
and I am grateful for my strangers-in-prayer who wait
for me to end, each knowing that one day
they will need a quorum themselves to memorialize their loved ones.
I leave the plaza acknowledging
how few worshipers came on this forlorn Jerusalem evening
as a wet cold wind wraps herself around my bare neck.
This place, this plaza, this Kotel is too much too
many tears, too much history, too many claims,
too many political narratives and cultural
appropriations.
No wonder She is silent.
Kaddish For Mum
“There are circumstances that must shatter you; and if you are not shattered, then you have not understood your circumstances. In such circumstances, it is a failure for your heart not to break. And it is pointless to put up a fight, for a fight will blind you to the opportunity that has been presented by your misfortune. Do you wish to persevere pridefully in the old life? Of course you do: the old life was a good life. But it is no longer available to you. It has been carried away, irreversibly. So there is only one thing to be done. Transformation must be met with transformation. Where there was the old life, let there be the new life. Do not persevere. Dignify the shock. Sink, so as to rise.”
― Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish
“The notion of afterlife is far less important than the liberation of the deceased’s soul from this world, meaning that the Kaddish is most importantly a responsibility towards the living. The prayer increases the living’s awareness of the fragility of life. One recites Kaddish to remember one’s own mortality, but also to keep from dwelling on that mortality: ‘[…] the bottom line is startlingly clear. In words and through practice, Kaddish insists that the mourner turn away from death and choose life.”
-Diamant, Anita. Saying Kaddish
Nothing forces me to confront
The divide within me,
Between Kavana and Keva,
Between,
The soul torn between its desire for epiphany, d’veykut,
experience of the oceanic pleroma,
and the realization that that ritual, custom, minhag, tradition
Halacha…survives the erosion of time and enthusiasm of revolution.
Nothing forces me to confront
That divide within me,
More than the KADDISH.
The daily grind, the volume of text to daven to merely arrive at Kaddish
The anxiety of getting to shul ahead of davening
To grab the lectern
Or just make the first kaddish in time
(Which bookends the entire service)
The services requiring your presence throughout, with no interruption.
All this designed to not grieve Mum
But to enact a millennium of custom, ritual behavioral norms of
Grief’s expression within the halachic legal framework and tradition.
All this business has dragged me back to the halachic altar
From where I fled long ago for the spiritual pastures
of a freewheeling romantic hassidic piety.
Where I have fought the battle against hidebound orthodox thinking
And brain dead piety,
Neither the German medieval pietists nor the heady French elite scholars,
But the fertile divide between the latter day
Lithuanian scholarly tradition and the
rhetoric of the Baal Shem Tov’s students as my teachers,
That first generation of Masters,
working through his spiritual revolution,
some 200 hundred years ago.
Now, however, the recitation of the mourner’s Kaddish
Forces me back to the benefits of repetition
The mantra like quality of its recitation
And the polyphony of joining others
An orchestra out of tune with itself,
Some with the same pitch, others tone deaf,
Everyone with a slightly different pronunciation
Betraying their roots, often as Baalei T’shuva with
No roots, but aping the Rebbe who influenced them most.
And it is the repetitive quality that may be working through me
To acceptance
Of the travesty of death
Of the outrageous absence of HER in my life
Of the emptiness of the apartment without her perched on the easy chair
Listening to Heifetz, Kreisler and Pearlman.
The anger is slowly subsiding
The oceanic waves of grief still occur
The dark depression subtending it all,
Yet the very focus on the pecking order each day
The negotiations with other mourners
Of who shall take the lectern,
(The pecking order of who has greater halachic mourning status..)
Watching the clock at home warily,
Ordering the events of the day around these service times,
Arriving before the davening when often the shul is empty,
And the attentiveness to the moment the reader ends the previous prayer
Triggering the cacophony of
“magnified…sanctified, may His great name be blessed…”
All of this..
The attention away from Mum and on this ritual...stuff...
Is the chemical composition of acceptance
and the rabbinic genius and the practice of minhag Yisroel.
I liken it to the keva/Halacha/ritual performance of the wedding ceremony
Where the reading of the ketuba in archaic Aramaic takes some 8 minutes
And all listen or muse while the honor
is bestowed upon an elder to recite it word for word.
The Bride and groom accept this,
despite the preposterously archaic sums of money
Set aside in the “contract”…the ritual reading takes place nonetheless.
These rituals adorn the ceremony and hang like fruit
To be plucked because of tradition
and hallowed in time in the nature of things
That get repeated generation after generation.
It is less the ratio/mind/cause
and more of the tone/ritual communal custom/minhag
That causes the transmission of praxis.
“Surely it is foolish to hate facts.
The struggle against the past is a futile struggle.
Acceptance seems so much more like wisdom.
I know all this.
And yet there are some facts that one must never, never accept.
This is not merely an emotional matter.
The reason that one must hate certain facts
is that one must prepare for the
possibility of their return.
If the past were really past, then one might permit
oneself an attitude of acceptance,
and come away from the study of history with a
feeling of serenity.
But the past is often only an earlier instantiation of the evil in
our hearts.
It is not precisely the case that history repeats itself.
We repeat history—or we do not repeat it,
if we choose to stand in the way of its repetition.
For this reason, it is one of the purposes of the study of history
that we learn to oppose it.”
Mum is actually teaching me through her absence
Her loss
Her present absence
Each time I think when reciting the Kaddish
By her absence
And the halachic behavior it triggered in my observances
For this year
As her son
And mourner
No greater bond
Acknowledged in Halacha
This need for keva/repetitiveness.
Her structured disciplined life comes to mind, it
Triggers a memory from childhood days
of daily practice of scales and arpeggios on the piano
and my mother’s stick ever present should I slack in the daily routine.
She was harder on herself.
Did this bring out the rebel in me all these years?
To refuse authority, be it political or halachic?
The maverick with a guttural hatred of tyranny
and the heretical refusal to bow to Rabbinic authority?
Does this Kaddish now bring me full circle to the daily
Genuflections -the five bendings of the knee during Kaddish,
Albeit kicking and screaming, as I did as a child,
A metaphorical hint to the need to return to the primal site of trauma
The mother as agent of violence, discipline,
repetitive scales and arpeggios until perfection?
Now from the grave sending this message
etched in my loyalty to memorialize her daily
For a year in this Kaddish, the prayer for the dead,
or maybe this prayer for the living?
Maybe the Kaddish is sent for me? From beyond the grave?
Religion, and the Kaddish, can be used
as a religious strategy that practices both a positive
dogmatism, in the sense of giving support and structure to the mourner,
and negative dogmatism, in the sense that it structures the process
of mourning for the mourner, but not in cooperation with the mourner.
By performing a ritual, obligated or voluntarily,
the mourner repetitively performs the act of mourning,
which is more essential than definition or interpretation.
Because the Kaddish is stronger as a rhythm
than it is in terms of its content, the rhythm and sounds become like a
mantra when it is repeatedly and mechanically recited.[1]
Kaddish is teaching me the value of repetitive ritual,
the recitation, mantra-like, of Aramaic words.
Encoded in Halacha and historicity,
forcing me back to the discipline of practice and the
acceptance of authority outside myself.
Thanks Mum
Once more you influenced me
In your absence your teaching reaches me
In my Kaddish in the key of C# minor,
I feel the discipline you always tried to instill,
Your absent presence once more,
Sanctified, magnified, may her name be Blessed, Mum.
[1]Gillman, Neil. ‘Coping with Chaos: Jewish Theological and Ritual Recourses’. Death, Bereavement and Mourning. Ed. Samuel Heilman. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2005. 135-150.
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.
The Secret of Schechina Be-Galuta
The Divine feminine,
Lost in the world of reality
Drowning in the mathematical precision of Halacha
And the black and white world of (teva) nature.
The Lost Princess remains swooned in the water castle [1]
Awaiting the Zaddik who knows the healing powers of the ten pulses.
And those addictions that pull me down,
For work, the use of time, the obsessions of the heart, the rage;
The Degel tells me, are happening to her too,
Mirrored in my soul.
Does this raise the stakes?...or comfort me?
How to live life with this gnosis?
As if, my troubled life, in fact all tragedy
Is but her screaming for attention.
The doubting Thomas, this familiar Kritik in the head
Pulls me further down into the blotte
The rational mind used to be so certain
But not so lately.
Who is She after all?
I know of her as mother but beyond?
In Her absence only is the gaping hole in my heart
And indicator of her lasting power.
Has she joined Her?
What does that mean for me?
Mother is no more
And Her absence points me to the eternal Mother
She incarnated,
And the pain is unbearable.
Surprised by my level of grief,
I turn to the texts of comfort
And the rituals of mourning
Hoping for an insight
Even if non logical
A hint a feeling, a Wordsworthian intuition
Embedded in a millennium of wisdom
The twists and turns of minhag
Envelop me in discussions of behavior
The expression of grief socially,
All the while allowing me the inner freedom to grieve
And await insight as I pass through the rites of separation and loss.
My mother,
Larger than life
Who nurtured me inside her body
Bore me,
Trained me,
Prepared the life path for me
Albeit kicking and screaming, but in the end
I had no other choice,
No other path anyway like familiar
To the difficult sometimes impossible road
She set me on.
She was harder on herself
But that was little solace
For the little brown-skinned whiny kid
Whose romantic fantasies controlled
His waking life.
In this vale of tears
Things become clearer slowly
Understanding deepens
And death looms larger
As it takes more and more of my beloved.
Is it because death is inevitable?
In the face of such finality
Where all is levelled
No matter who
No matter what has been accomplished
No matter how pious
How beloved?
A new perspective evolves
Molded from the pain.
The remains of the day,
What is left in the gaping loss?
In the vacuum she left behind
Unwillingly taken from this world
Is her life’s motivation,
Her drive,
Her uncompromising demands,
Her self-critique,
Of all those who connected to her
She held me to the greatest standard
Demanded most from me
But was most loyal to me.
I tried not to disappoint
But she would never let on
Always demanding more.
If Yosef Karo has his muse, it was his mother
Who drove him in Maggid Mesharim
If Reb Chayim Shumlevits ran to Kever Rachel
It was crying “mama, mama Chaikel is du”
If the Lelover Rebbe’s eyes rolled up
By his Shabbes tish, he could be heard mumbling “mamale mamale”
Now I must take my place
With those who have lost the living presence of the great mother
And settle for the memories reflections and loss.
In this haze I must divine what she might want
How she would react
What she would ask of me.
It comes easily now
But for how long?
In memory we will now meet again
In the heart of pain, we will converse
In the sorrow of loss, I will continue to love
She who bore me
Nurtured me
Demanded so much.
With mum now part of Her,
The stakes are raised
Possibly too high for me
For now all pain is her’s too
And my task in rescuing the Schechina
Becomes more urgent.
There is no time to waste
All she demanded becomes more urgent
I’m not getting younger
There is so much to accomplish
In these tears
In the unbearable pain
I am being summoned
By her, by Her.
The secret
Those ten pulses
The healing
Of the Lost Princess.
[1] Rebbe Nachman’s Water Castle, Sippurei Maasiyot
After The Funeral
After the funeral
In times of grief and anger
We turn to our texts of comfort
For relief from the anguish
And unbearable pain
Her loss
This deep hole in the heart
The pit in the stomach
The uncontrollable tears
There is some comfort in these texts
The ones that arise..
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
You struggled to the end
Every breath so hard
You refused to let go
Resisting the grim reaper
Every muscle in your frail chest
Pulling in unison
Starving for oxygen
Pulling it in
The struggle
Never easy
Nothing came easy to her
From childhood
Up at 5am
The violin
Initially an instrument of conditional love
Later the vehicle that transported her over the seas
To play before Vaughn Williams
And finally an instrument of shame
As she realized the loss of her prowess when picking up the fiddle
Not having practised
My last vision of her holding it.
It defined her and the love of her life fell for her
Because of it
And in the last few years we would sit and watch
Videos of the masters Heifetz, Menuhin, Kreisler, Zuckerman, Perlman.
She drew such satisfaction watching their mastery.
Nothing came easy to her
Her work she brought home
Knew no boundaries
(of course we suffered)
And that conditional love was taken to new heights
As she pushed us to excellence without compromise
And we suffered
As we fulfilled her dreams.
Nothing came easy
As those who critiqued her disciplinary style challenged her in public
At times demeaning her
At times insulting her professionalism
Yet she kept her silence
Never stooping to respond.
Her faith kept her going “God help me through this!” She remembers thinking.
Nothing came easy
As she followed Dad to the Holy Land
The language the people the rudeness the foreignness
Of it all.
But her fierce zionism that came over her in 1967
After the Six Day War, watching it on British TV
Was uncompromising and surprising
She was always the musician and apolitical.
Nothing came easy
As she succumbed to the infections that followed her failing white cells.
The hospital visits and pokes and proddings
The infusions and intesntivie specialists.
Never once did she complain
Never once did she wince
Never once did she cry.
Her aristocratic bearing did not allow
Self indulgence.
This does not come easy for us
In the end we are left with this absence
The absence of her life and her iron will
Her loving presence and her blessings
Her calling everyone “darling”
Her devotion to her grandchildren and the little ones of the new generation
A matriarch in the truest sense
Beloved by all
Her siblings surviving her
Held her in the highest esteem
The loss is too much.
So those texts come to me
to comfort me..
Those Rabbis its imaginative souls
Pondering the catastrophe
After the funeral
And the utter anguish
Of the destruction
And the fire
Who conceal their innermost thoughts
In the radical fictional narratives of the parable
And the unacceptable anthropomorphism of divine pathos.
On Summoning the dirge singers of Jeremiah
The Rabbis produce this dialogue between a divine
Bereft of the temple
Now seeking solace by mimicking the mourning rituals of the Torah.
Never having experienced loss before
The Holy One Blessed be He
Asks the prophet how to alleviate His divine infinite sorrow
Well, the reply comes, we sit on the ground
and let our hair become disheveled
And so the Divine mimics our sitting shiva.
(citing a verse that puns on the practice in true
midrasnhic style)
What else does he do?
Well, he puts sackcloth and ashes
And the Lord does the same.
This rabbinic projection of the Divine response to catastrophe
Calms me
It allows for the pain and anguish to be expressed without shame
The tears flow easily
In between the black letters
Leaking into the ink
Just like their emotions and pain leaked into the dry legal tomes
That would become medieval halachic Judaism.
As I mourn her loss
The unbearable pain
The deep aching
Etched in my face
I take comfort in the memory of life
Her life as a text
As a parable of a bat melech
A biography of an aristocrat
A SARGON princess.
Mum
Shaare Zedek Hospital, Jerusalem
Lying in grace on hospital bed
Her face upward to heaven in this crazy holy city
Eyes closed the weight of the eyelids now too heavy to bear
Yet fully alert
She remains fully lucid!!! Despite all this..
Infection, inflammation, collapse of lung,
pleural effusion, wasting, destruction of the
body, tubes out of every orifice, beeping machines, alarm chimes,
Her skeletal frame breathes under duress,
Each breath an exertion,
Each inspiration using all she has to muster.
I help turn her and am shocked by her skeletal frame
Her hands however, have not changed,
The beauty of her slender fingers that played that
Mendelsohn Violin concerto that
enthralled and bewitched Dad (1946) remains,
They feed her via a Gastro tube (zonda) so she no longer eats...
she no longer drinks either (due to possible aspiration)
and has no desire (taava) for either.
She no longer speaks due to her voice box
destroyed by the incessant coughing,
yet she whispers and understands everything.
She cannot sleep due to the incessant hospital noise.
Alarms, nurses walking in and out,
a change of patient in the next bed,
the phlebotomist, X-ray tech etc etc.
With no earthly bodily functions under her control,
nor desire for human needs..
she has now become angelic.
So, she blesses everyone who comes into her eyesight
(which has failed due to macular degeneration)
she kisses everyone’s hand,
and blesses them, like a Rebbetzin,
(the most unlikely description and one she would
immediately disown.)
unbelievable…
I sit in vigil during the sleepless nights
and am powerless to change the medical
situation, the prognosis, the current state of things.
I have had to learn through her,
endurance and patience and acceptance in all of this.
But my medical training was just the opposite!
“never give up!. fight the malach hamaves” the angel of death,
So, tell me,
How am I expected to allow him in
and watch the grim reaper approach silently without resistance?
She beckons me and holds my hand and kisses it.
A wave of agony overcomes me like I have never experienced before.
It is located deep in the belly and behind the sternum,
a pain that defies medical description.
(Saying goodbye to mum? Really? ...flooded in tears...
All I ever did was to make her proud... I'm still that little boy)
By her bedside...she cradles my head...
and all the childhood resentment and pain are
forgotten...I have received unconditional love
finally after so long here...I am at peace.
If I was pessimistic today and broken,
my emotion mixes/interferes with my medical
judgment and clinical prognosis…
In this moment, in this pain I suddenly became unselfaware,
totally lost in the anticipatory grief of her loss, drowning in tears.
And at this moment despite the pain,
I was so fully absorbed…
Knowing I was in pain yet overwhelmed by the sense of loss,
of this towering personality in my life….
(I think I get what the Sanzer said to his chosid
after burying his son on the way out of the beis olam…
He had a shmeichel on his face…
and the chosid could not understand it…
The Rebbe said:” I felt a searing pain in my back
as if someone had plunged a knife
into my heart from the rear(on losing my son)
then when I tried to see behind me,
where it was coming from
I looked back and saw…it was the Heilige Bashefer”)
I think I get it…
Not in the sense of the heilige bashefer as “out there”
in the Buberian sense of I/Thou,
but in the Degel sense of being so absorbed IN THE FEELING without
thinking it for a second and totally at one with the feeling the experience
(the DAAS of the pain…) so this is dveykus!
Then somehow you are in this space of genuine experience
with no thought beyond or outside of it so that this pain and anguish
(like making love?) (juissance) to the extent
you fully experience it with nothing beyond IT.
As if you have returned to the Eitz HaChayim before the split,
even in this agony.
She paradoxically has taught me just this!
She whose body bore me into this world
Whose body I was totally connected to.
Whose demanding spirit drove me for decades,
Whose love was dependent upon my performance,
Who now blesses me with no strings attached.
A strange different planet
I hold her hand and stroke it in the middle of the darkness
and another day passes.
She does not leave this world but suffers for another day
Aliza and Sasha fly in to see her before they marry in a month
She knows
She knows
That I must walk her down the aisle
That I cannot be in mourning
So she holds on
Even now
At the ending
She resists
And will leave this world on her own terms.
An Aristocrat.
A Sargon woman.
Dad's Prussian Precision
His day begins with routine
As it will end
At 98 this keeps him going
But the precision is remarkable.
Each day the coffee awaits him,
As he emerges fully dressed and immaculate.
Followed by the davening, Tallis and T’fillin
The retzuos (black straps) wound precisely equidistant on the arm
White hairs peeking between the black lines
Then wrapped around the batim (phylacteries)the identical way daily.
The tallis folded in quarters then doubled over to fit the blue velvet bag.
Now to the cereal, only half the bowl mind you,
he always makes sure to leave half,
And nothing over the minimum that will satiate him, not a morsel more.
(Can one forget the solitary mango that arrived from India annually
As he dissected it into 6 exact slices and passed to each at the table
Or the slicing of a turkey with surgical precision)
Where did he learn this (Vienna no doubt).
Exercises with Ganadi follow a precise course of calisthenics
The bends, push-ups, the range of motions, weights,
All in spoken in German to allow the trainer
to learn a new language from Dad.
Now the art instructor arrives
and he chooses his portraits and carefully measures
the blank sheet for his drawings with ruler and pencil,
more like an architect, so as to
produce as best a replica.
(unlike Mum’s impressionist landscapes that provide a mood and effect).
I never realized until I was house sitting,
just how regimented he is with himself
I remember as a child his morning rise for Shul no matter the weather,
and his moderation at the table,
But now?
He stands at the door at 8:55am on Shabbat morning
For “services begin at 9am” even though he knows
That there will unlikely be a minyan for quite a time,
(This little shul struggles to survive
on the goodwill of its few surviving octogenarians
members with attrition by the year).
This tiny Germanic shul (once Traditional not Orthodox)
Where Ben Gurion used to come to write his speeches,
Now provides a local minyan for those willing
to sit on the wooden benches for some 2 hours.
We return home for Kiddush and while washing the dishes
I see he only drank a sip of the Kummel.
I am in awe of this self-discipline at 98!
This Prussian sense of duty and order.
And, when I get too teary-eyed in front of Mum by her bedside,
Knowing what I know with the gnosis of only a physician,
He chastises me for exhibiting such emotionalism.
He is not for sentimentalism.
In fact I only saw him cry once
And break down (in Sobibor Concentration Camp) on the phone.
Other than that I never saw him laugh either, to excess.
His humor is sardonic, that Viennese type
that mocks the world and the foibles of others
The very opposite of the self-deprecating British
It also has to be very clever with a semantic pun or a quip.
“Zag der emir tzu dem sheikh”
“shtei du!”
Perhaps this is the key to his longevity.
I know one thing…
I have neither the discipline nor the stamina to live such a regimented life
The end does not justify the means for me.
I think he did not respect my gushiness
(As a child he was furious when I cried
And I cried a lot!)
He had no patience for this little brown-skinned snively, whiny kid
Who was not very good at sport.
His love of the classics and quoting Greek and Latin proverbs
As well as nuanced German words that gave more meaning to a sentiment
Albeit in multiple syllables!
He is at the end of the day a “continental” gentleman
With a British stiff upper lip.
No wonder I feel more comfortable with the
easy going if naïve American
With little for way of layers of sophistication or kultur.
But this weekend I realized the secret to his longevity.
Drawing by Tsiona Dec 2018
