In the Final Generation

“In the final generation…there are zaddikim who can recognize transgressors and heretics who are connected to their soul root.

Therefore, they (the zaddikim) have to deal with them (the heretics) in wondrous manners in ways impossible to comprehend from an exoteric perspective.”

Rav Kook: Shemoneh Kavazim: #326

“A heretic can be found who has strong illuminating faith which flows from the source of supernal holiness than thousands of ‘believers’ of little faith.”

Rav Kook: Orot Ha-­‐Emunah 21

I know not of roots and souls “shoresh veneshama”

Technical terms that are disconnected from our experiential vocabulary

(despite being bandied about by kabbalists as if understood by them!)

I know I am disconnected,

from tradition, belief, authority, praxis and worst of all, Self.

For I feel its anguish.

I sense its forlornness

I hear its cry.

I hear words like root and soul and could scream!

The latest fallen idol…you may ask?

The realization that I was strung between

the Soloveitchik/Netziv/Volozhyn textual mastery axis

And the Kook/Carlebach/Izhbitz/Breslov prophetic intuitions.

And now…decades later,

The shattered remnants on the ground look up at me

With a sense of betrayal and chronicles of wasted time.

The new agnosticism, informed by “Rabbi” Nietzsche,

the passage of time watching the religious fads come and go

Each group (Hassidic or otherwise) reaching its height

then fracturing into warring parties

The cross cultural nature of believing communities, authorities, doctrinal wars

The real dark side of ideologies and collectives.

In the hollowness of the absence of ideology and hope

In the grey landscape of memory for the comfort of ritual and community

In the solitude of no chevraya

Das Niemandsrose

Takes center stage.

In the silence, in the night, in the study of my father

I feel his pain, and his lessening interest in anything outside.

He watches me for approval of his 94-­‐year-­‐old lips

Blowing the shofar, it gives him pleasure, not many things do.

And my accompanying him to shul once more

For selichos…

Like in London 50 years ago in the cold fog

Wiping the chilly mist off the windscreen

To don his precious t’fillin

That survived the war, now over 70 years ago.

He called it “selichos weather” as the cold wet autumn chilled the bones.

I see too much.

The contrived nature of Halachic praxis

The endless upmanship of those imitating Brisk’s

Obsessive focus on Halachic minutiae

The clear historicity of its development

The mistakes and errors of the scribes affecting

the most ancient sacred texts

The holy piety masking the fear of nonconformity

The outrageous Kiruv claims for happiness and fulfillment

The absent acknowledgment of the dark forces beneath the surface

Of community,

The violence subtending all collectives and ideologies.

The unacknowledged problems of sex abuse and pedophiles in our community

The hushed victims by spiritual authority, bribes, threats.

The heroin crisis in our midst and loss of fine young people.

The neo-­‐Hassidic fervency and naiveté

The petty in fighting between gedolim and Rebbes

And in my loneliness

With no one to lend ear

I scream in the wilderness of this silent study…

Of the failure within and without

This creeping awareness of my part, my culpability and inertia

in this generation’s error.

And my timidity and absent courage to fight

Preferring the nihilism of my couch and the endless ways

To escape the pain, I seek.

And, of course, this aging thing

The nightly discomfort wakens me to stumble towards the relief station

Maybe even twice!

The memory of objects, keys cel phones forgotten on planes and offices

The missed appointments (because I failed to write it down)

A slow awakening to the dementia that awaits

The inertia preventing me from exercising

with all sorts of excuses, primarily the utter boredom of it all.

“Crustaceous” came to mind when describing other’s slow insistence

on the old ways Behaviors, habits, jokes, immediate responses,

food choices and divrei Torah. Admonitions, opinions, politics,

all become ossified in this web of calcification, tangles,

And amyloid. I used to call others this term.

Watching it in the mirror actually happening to me now,

And the echoes of mortality

Sounding louder and louder

Having watched parents and in laws decline

I now submit to the same process

The inevitability of time’s course

And its seeming acceleration

Towards this end

Of self

Of being

Of life

How did I ever feel so immortal when young?

Reading medical articles one by one

About my sins of omission and commission

Of diet and exercise and diabetic control

Of early brain rot due to all three

And persistent avoidance of periodic insertion of scopes into every orifice

To avoid this or that cancer

It’s like watching the play of my life, fast forwarded

So that I cannot escape the anxiety of its inevitability.

As a child I always feared the passage of time

Dreamed of facing death as an old man

with a pot belly out of a Dickens novel,

It would awaken me in a sweat from my sleep.

Now,

Without the promises afforded by religious claims

(never believed them anyway)

not even the spiritual claims of mysticism,

I am left with the psycho dynamic wish fulfillment theories

Of my 20th century “Rebbes” Freud Jung and Fromm, Hillman et al.

I must prepare myself, finally, having avoided doing this work,

for the ongoing struggle to take back all the projections

And own this failed life

Own the past

The people I have hurt

Admit the past,

Live in the reality,

And silence the inner Kritik.

I must come to acceptance

Of this life as it is

With its failures and upsets

The essentially moral failure

To live one’s essence

This false self

Born in the violence of being educated by survivors

(and abused)

exposed to irrational rage

and power by fiat, tyranny no less

with no protection.

The wounded boy had to survive.

But this is no excuse for the individuated man

Who should have done the inner work of healing right?

Having examined his core beliefs and resentments on the couch

Of self awareness

And by this age have made peace with the past

Not continue to be driven by it

Triggered by authority and criticism

Into rage

And powerlessness.

And destructive behaviors.

Yet I do still find my voice in strange places

(Leaving more global issues to my children)

I prefer the quiet spaces where my heretical readings of sacred texts

Fill my heart in my search for meaning.

These “friends” have been with me for decades

during my struggles with orthodoxy

Refusing to merely give up on them, now,

Merely because of their human authorship.

I am choosy however, restricting my archive to

Aggadah from Talmud, Midrash, Parshanut and Hassidut,

Post Holocaust writings on faith and covenant…

I prefer to return to them once again

Seeking hidden mysteries as yet undisclosed

In the archeological textual digging of the multi-­‐layered opaque

Black letters on white landscape or parchment

I love the first editions, smelling of old times on fragile cheap paper,

With the editions framed in the front with ornate baroque designs.

Trained with much patience and in gratitude,

to use the tools of analysis of Talmud, by my revered father in law,

Reb Hershy, Professors Brettler, Fox, Fishbane,

and my beloved George of course,

Who taught me how to be committed to one text for decades (the Leshem).

And reading Rav Kook in a new key,

with the new uncensored versions of letters and essays

As well as the traditional Hassidic masters,

Plumbing them all for Jungian undertones:

Searching for that text that quickens the pulse and makes me gasp

(they still do!) that ahaah! moment

having discovered something new that reflects the engine of my self.

Mirroring the soul’s desire,

Finding dark spaces

The space between the lines

Uncovering what was not said

What needed to be said

What was left unsaid

And the author’s unconscious desires,

That mirror my soul’s.

In these readings I find solace

In the company of other like minded souls

And a purpose in leaving a slight trace

Of my self, my struggles, my search, my path,

In such writing,

I find comfort that others journeyed this path

With the same tightrope balancing act,

Struggling with tradition readings against the grain,

At times exposing the past textual immoral assumptions

Without regret or piety,

For the ongoing battle for moral sense

The authority and sheer weight of rabbinic tradition vs. the moral equity

Of our times and struggles

Like a good judge/reader should.

Unlike the academic, the Wissenschaft schools

I read and study for pleasure and for purpose

This study is my lifeline, my oxygen,

in the constant refining of the ultimate questions

That have plagued me since childhood

But also I am in love with the sacred text

Albeit like Celan, denuded of philosophical and theological claims,

More like a love poem that will not let me rest.

And in the space between doctor and patient

I will find ongoing solace

As we both traverse life’s decay

Ostensibly my documenting decline

Yet also providing solace for wounded souls

Who I firmly believe express their woundedness in the various symptoms

Presented on arrival into the examining room.

In that sacred space a magical force

Operates, of trust, mutuality of suffering, and wisdom.

This mystical bond keeps growing deeper as I age

And empathize more and more

And objectify less and less

For medicine as an art has become that intuitive sense

Of what is unique to this or that particular patient

Not what they have in common with every other sufferer of that malady

And in the interaction with children and grandchildren

Where the transmission of culture, memory and my very being

Is the currency worth more than gold,

But just watching them chat away among themselves also

fills my heart with comfort, as do

their constantly inquiring minds with incessant questions

It fills me with pure joy.

In study work and family, I must find meaning

In this path

Where death alone defines just how precious

My remaining time is.

Framing my life as I would a literary work

Allows me to focus on the unfinished business…

As a coda,

The dreams as yet to fulfil

of travel…

The sweet air of Snowdonia, the rolling Cotswolds,

Other places I need to visit

To feel the wind in the sail on the Pacific

And feel the awe before the blue ice glaciers of Alaska

The Aurora Borialis…

A pilgrimage to Sobibor concentration camp where my grandparents perished.

And once again to stand barefoot in the Paradeisi Synagogue in Cochin

Where I felt an alteric connection to my ancestors.

Of study…

To finally to complete with George the Leshem,

and thereby understand the Lurianic project.

Of music

To complete the Bach prelude and fugues

And understand Chopin.

Of family…

To see my kids settled and independent

Each making his and her contribution.

So much left to do…

This Study

This study…

This study is empty

Only the books line its wall now

standing like soldiers

Just like Sarah likes them

Neat and tidy,

Like the rare book section of a library

Many are leather-­‐bound

Representing those with special meaning

Chosen carefully for bookbinding

Representing the special choices

Their dark burgundy (with gold leaf) color contrasts

with the light oak wood The round table with flowers in the center

Uncluttered.

A potted green plant survives the ending of his life

Slowly awakening to this spring

Growing in the large framed window

Facing the sun approvingly with its leaves.

But I feel uncomfortable sitting here

With his large picture portrait

Looking down benignly

Eliyahu’s brilliant portrait

Classical posture and ever so present

It fills the room

As if he had never left

As if this room remains

His…

The room is too tidy

It lacks my clutter

Having evacuated it a year or so ago

Willingly and with love

As he moved in,

Silent and suffering in silence

Until the last breath.

So we covered the books

And removed all the clutter

That represents my stuff

The trinkets and little man toys

(That give us pleasure more for their familiarity

Signposts of where we have been in the past

Places and people)

The ink pens, old passports, worry balls

Pictures of the past,

Bags and briefcases,

The electronic bric a brac accompanying I-­‐phones I-­‐pads

Chargers, receipts, all the insignificant stuff I hold dear And drives her crazy.

Now uncomfortably neat, bare of all but seforim

All the apikorsus missing

This library is sanitized

Merely the canon of rabbinic literature, commentaries and superglosses.

And before this idealized burgundy library

As if at its helm,

this large and singular picture

His presence,

Bearing down,

As in life,

A presence too transparent,

Overpowering to those who venerated him

However benign looking now,

For me he remains a judging of self

And exposure of my failures

Of demanding self praxis

Goals yet to be met

Textual volumes

Marginalia upon marginalia

The hair-­‐splitting subtleties of tort law

Exposing my continuing ignorance

And Discomfort.

Self-­‐acceptance is clearly not present now

The portrait and the burgundy leather bound volumes

Have conspired to press upon my soul

To become this alien space

Once so intimate

A place of meeting friends colleagues and meshulachim

A space that mirrored my real self

My space.

Now, only foreign.

I’m not sure the clutter returned would change this…

Ever since he inhabited this space

In his utter suffering silence

His holiness filled the small study

And the reshimu-­‐the residue remains

Long after the body gave up the ghost.

In this space Seemingly sterile now

No longer holding the shot glasses comfortably

Where secrets over scotch are shared

Where people bare their souls to me

Where marriages are clarified

And incurable diagnoses confirmed

Where young men make critical decisions

Where my thoughts fill the space on quiet Shabbat nights

As the dawn approaches

And self-­‐understanding slowly bubbles up

In this unique sacred time

Pouring over obscure Hassidic texts

Or a Yeats poem.

His presence here is enigmatic

As his presence in my life

As I come to frame his influence in my life

His lasting reshimu

The light as well as the darker spaces

Overwhelming presences

My decades of resistance yet influence

The sheer power of his personality

And quiet unsaid judgments

Reflecting my wounds

And focusing on my transference

Surely this is not a place of comfort

And quiet

Not after him

Not after his quiet suffering in this space

Not after the divine visitation and kiss of death here In this space

Now sanctified

No, this study has become a sort of shrine

The large unframed portrait

His face against a black background

His bright pleasant but serious expression

His pale skin color against the irrational darkness of space

Reflecting his intuition that the rational mind can somehow grasp

Everything

If only sufficient effort is applied

So different from my gnostic pessimism

My suspicion that in this quantum world

Only irrational numbers

And irrational forces in the psyche

Have ruled the last century And my soul.

In the end his rational mind

Overcame his Hassidic mystical background

And my non-­‐rational mysticism

Overcame my father’s middle European enlightened rationalism

My nihilism and pessimism suffuses my heart

And my tragic sense (so Greek!)

Makes more sense of the world

Supporting further my discomfort here.

I am not sure I can return here

To this shrine

To this sacred space

Too sacred for my soul

That needs freedom to think

And observe,

Freedom to explore the heretical

In order to frame the orthodox

Freedom to write the unacceptable

In order to move the conversation deeper.

So I take my leave now

I leave this study

Albeit with reverence

His presence

His overwhelming influence

Like chains

I must get free

Free to think once more.

And make sense of him, with time.

Dad Walk

וילכו שניהם יחדו

Walking arm in arm

father and son

in silence

the cool Jerusalem spring air

Dad comments repeatedly on the quiet

the absent traffic

on this Shabbat morning.

“Magic” he described the feeling walking with me, later

“not like father and son”

Our task from his home to the hospital

was to visit his beloved partner

forlorn without her

at times disoriented

focused only on her visitation

worried about her pneumonia

as was I

we slowly make our way to the Bokur Cholim

internal medicine floor.

In her ward are 4 other women.

The one behind her, disallowing the curtain to be drawn for Mum’s privacy

screaming if we in any way tamper with it

born in Kovno , Lithuania

and sings early zionist songs during the night

keeping all awake.

She has no visitors despite many children

have they given up on her?

Opposite mum is an Arab woman

covered from head to toe at all times

with many many visitors streaming in and out during the day

seven daughters her husband boasts to me

the youngest in Bethlehem University studying business.

each daughter prettier than the next but the youngest unmarried scholar

is stunningly beautiful.

I kibbitz with him about dressing more like the patriarch he is

what with 37 grandchildren at 57 years!

All this banter takes place in the cultural divide

that separates citizens of this so called secular

society but hovers like a pall over all interactions.

Lastly the “Schvester”

a single spinster in her 90’s

no family survived the Holocaust but her

frail and fragile

in long gown

and tiechel

she has a steady flow of visitors all planned by the neighborhood

so only one at a time,

they daven with her

and speak little.

She came to Jerusalem after the Shoah

from Germany

sole survivor

now the mascot for her local Geulah neighborhood

all the young and not so you women are happy to visit “Shvester”

no men come by.

And the fourth is my mother

unwilling to be here

out of place in such company

ignoring the others as much as possible

despite my holy sister’s constant visitations to their needs too.

This pneumonia this petty cough

the shadow on the X ray that convinced the ER physician

of the need for the admission

the antibiotic infusions, the periodic inhalants that irritate

her reluctant walks up and down the ancient corridors

of this building once a hospice

in the old city.

I hold my father’s arm as we ascend the worn stone steps to the second floor

I wonder how many decades it takes to wear down the central third of the step

how many people trod these steps on their way to beloved relatives

how many walked these stones in the hope of recovery.

The stones steps can tell stories we long forgot

bearing the weight of humanity

they groan and slowly wear down

under the sheer mass of suffering.

We don’t know

we never know

we can only endure

these moments of uncertainty

but during these times

the arms interlocked

father and son

in silent movement

there is no-thing to say

the obvious lies before us

illness decay and mortus,

so the moment is treasured like no other

in the anxiety of what may be

we tread the steps humbly

following the countless before us.

All differences fall away before the tremendum

all opinions and treasured beliefs seem trivial here

I ask my father about a recent spat,

based on what I believe is the very conflict surrounding the soul of the family

“does one ignore religious differences in the children for the sake of the unity

of the family?”

he thinks for a few minutes

relying: “it’s not worth making a stand”

and for a minute all my resentment falls away

and his judgement makes so much sense

when seen from his perspective.

Father and mother take on different meaning

this late in life

they are the gift that endures

and each month I visit

I am given another gift

another lease

albeit tenuously

albeit seeing the slow decline

so I treasure this

and even more so when this gift is threatened by possible mortal illness.

I am truly gifted

the very privilege of walking with my father

this Shabbat

in the quiet streets of Jerusalem

in the cool spring air

the blue sky meeting the yellow stoned buildings

all is right

even here and now

in the anxiety of the moment.

In the Absent Sublime

“And indeed there will be time

To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—

[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—

[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

"That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all. “

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

T. S. Eliot, 1888 – 1965

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither,

William Wordsworth 1770-1850

Nah, im Aortenbogen

im Hellblut:

das Hellwort.

Mutter Rachel

weint nicht mehr. Rübergetragen

alles Geweinte.

Still, in den Kranzarterien, unumschnürt

Ziw, jenes Licht.

Paul Celan GesammelteWerke 2: 202 1986

“Spirituality and sexuality are not your qualities, not things which ye possess and contain. But they possess and contain you; or they are  powerful  deamons,  manifestations  of  the  gods,  and  are,  therefore, things which reach beyond you, existing in themselves. No man hath a spirituality unto himself, or sexuality unto himself. But he standeth under the law of spirituality and of sexuality.”

C.G.Jung: “Septem Sermones ad Mortuos”

The certainty of others…

Their impoverished beliefs…

Insufferable and overbearing,

The Halachic minutiae of observances

The infractions and focused obsessions of…

The need for…

Absolute control of behaviorisms,

The intolerable self-­righteous enthusiasm,

The utter Holier-­than­‐thou­‐ness.

The absent voice of Whom?

Paul Celan’s hymns to no­‐body?

In the silence of no­‐response,

In the stillness of the cosmic no­‐thingness,

I lie motionless.

Bereft of my Friend and receiver of thoughts

He who once might have listened to my soliloquies

My prior fullness of being

Intimations of immortality

Wordsworth’s sense of the sublime

In nature and music

Now laying fragmented in the satanic mills of the soul.

Left with only the nostalgia, regret, guilt

Of what might‐have­‐been­‐feelings

Bereft of certainty­‐

of that sense of the sublime.

After Maa’riv Kabbalat Shabbat the tansel

In the customary solemn circle,

Unexpectedly the Rabbi grabs my hand and squeezes it

When singing

“sanctify me with Thy Mitzvot… Purify our hearts”

קדשנו לבינו וטהר מצותכב

An electric shock of regret fires through my body from his hand,

as a sense of insufficiency and fraudulence

Fills my soul.

My heart cries in jealousy for his simple faith.

Then again at the Shabbat table

The candles lend a golden glow

To the beautiful silver laden white clothed altar.

As the silent guests await my benediction קידוש

This moment in time feels so holy­‐

It catches my breath‐as I hesitate to utter

Words meant to fulfill their Halachic obligation

By one who can no longer represent as a שליח

(For heresy disqualifies.)

I live in that space of desire

For authentic words

That reflect truth

Knowing full well

I can no longer

Open my lips to produce the words,

Oh for a doxology I could die for!

Or just believe in!

A salvific higher authority!

Not a mere projected wish for a return

To a father figure I might have respected.

A fulfillment of the little Julian’s urgent plea for

Help from the cruel matriarch.

(left unanswered)

Herr Freud put paid to that idea!

Reducing my once cherished beliefs to rot.

Facing now my shame

And the faith‐less­‐ness

Of the landscape­‐that is my terrain

The absence of certainty

That is the barren wasteland of my visual field

It offends me to see it in others

As if I have become intolerant to the very

Presence of faith in others

As if their Emunah, בטחוו and הלכה mirrors

  And exacerbates

My own lack, digging the knife even further in.

In an adolescent rage of dis‐ownment,

I am repulsed. It is too fresh

This wound

For salting by others.

Paralyzed by my inability to take a stand to act,

To say no! despite authority’s ongoing hold

Simultaneously by my resentment

and my old friendly character defects

The wounding of others

The cruelty within me…

Now with no religious impulse to confront me

The ודוי the חרטה the process of T’shuvah 

No Higher Authority peering down from heaven

No allegiance to Rebbe or halachic edicts

The Four Ells עמות דלד have dissolved 

Leaving an open minefield of explosive rage

Ordinance left to cause amputations of the heart

In vitriolic self denigration

No medicaments in my medical tool kit left to heal

These wounds of the soul

Caught between reverence for the tradition

And a deep heresy and suspicion

I am nailed to the cross of powerlessness.

Now, only the daily­‐mirrored self‐image

The Dorian Grayed picture of decay

The inventory of pain inflicted on those near and dear

Keep me from sleep.

Dreams of crumbled building basements

Old authority figures from the past

Pointing accusatory index fingers

At the naughty boy once more

Outside the classroom for some misdemeanor

Yet emerging from this rubble

The simultaneous realization

Slowly, slowly

An “intimation”

That this rational mind does not do justice

To the complexity of the psyche

Cannot reduce it to mere conscious understanding

Of self or text.

That hidden beneath the surface calm

lies layers and grottos

Of unearthed truth

That I am still open to the very core

Of what bubbles up

Humbly accepting this as revelation

Must suffice for now.

The mystery of existence lies within this darkness

Is born here in the recesses

And I do accept its very deep and “holy” birthings.

That I live on the edge of this precipice

Of life and knowledge

And the looming end of things

Accepting my ignorance

My pain

My flaws

And remain humbled by the incalcitrance

of the truth

Of history, text and the self.

This is my lasting belief.

Intimations From Beyond: Shloshim for Abba

The Vurke Rebbe’s son complains to the Kotzker “My father has not come to me in a dream”[1]

“And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and groves,

Forebode not any severing of our loves!

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;

I only have relinquish'd one delight

To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I love the brooks which down their channels fret,

Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they;

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

Is lovely yet; The clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;

Another race hath been, and other palms are

won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

William Wordsworth. 1770–1850

There is an interesting Zohar [2] that says that everyday a Bas Kol cries out from heaven: “Oh, Return (My) wayward sons.” The Slonimer Rebbe comments on this passage in the Zohar, citing the Baal Shem Tov who asks the following difficulty: Who cares? We don’t hear this voice everyday in our lives so the Bas Kol surely isn’t affecting us on an experiential level. What good does it do for us to know that such a phenomenon exists? However, the Baal Shem Tov answers this question with another question. When a person wakes up in the morning and out of the blue decides to do t’shuva, where does that inspiration come from? When a person suddenly decides to completely change his life and dedicate himself to Torah learning, how does such an idea even come into the person’s head? Even when a person finds the inspiration to improve himself even a little bit, how does that happen? This is the Bas Kol.

Intimations from no-dreams

No one comes to me

No Bas Kol

Despite my wish

For Abba to contact me

And tell me what?

He forgives

The decisions

The invasion

The horror of the last year

He forgives my indiscretions

He forgives my impiousness

My behavioral imperfections

My past.

I was there for his last breath

Holding his arm

Refusing resuscitation demands

Knowing the last breath was at hand

The last breath was his decision.

Attendant in reverent expectation

Unsurprised by the kiss of death

Fully appropriate, and desired.

Enough! your eyes said to me (albeit inferred)

Tired of this frame

The body never held out much for you

A barrier to the intellectual pursuit of scholarship

A nuisance at times

And the last two years of total ascetic life

No taste of food or drink

Just being and thinking

A prisoner of the body

Locked in to the earthly

A transition of sorts

But agonizing nonetheless

A tragedy

Watching you suffer in silence.

A dream…

You…

So maddening

So overpowering in my consciousness

“Do not go gentle into the night”

you did not leave passively

you fought three times the angel of death

but he came after Purim

and this time you threw no fire bolts at him

no divine name carved on your Mosaic staff

this time, you allowed this

you were always in control

even of this.

The ending

The completion of this life

Led uncompromisingly by rules

The final moment

Privileged to be present

(unlike the death of Dada and Nana

which was cruelly withheld from me

for which I never forgave the circumstances of my distance

which still causes me pain so many decades after

the inability to be present

to say goodbye

to hold the hand and kiss the lips

of those who nourished my childhood)

Living in the absent dream

The no Bas Kol

You have not come to me Abbele!

In the Vurke Rebbe’s 30 days

I have no Kotzke to go to

No one to complain to

No one to storm the heavens in search of you

Where are you now?

I knew you were right

“amito shel torah”

Alone you stood your ground

Despite the odds

Against the mighty Gra

Are you in his Heichal?

Are you excitedly proving him wrong finally?

Did he nod? His approval?

Privileged to have had you reside here

Your daughter’s love bathing you

The last breath taken here surrounded

by the library of Torah you toiled so long in

The beloved seforim accompanying you on this last voyage

Paying you homage as humble servants

taking their leave

Knowing you have been received in the eternal library

The Beis Midrash on High

And you will argue your theories eternally there

In the good company of your colleagues.

The study is back to “normalcy” still, without my clutter,

I will have you know,

The holy books line its walls without the modesty curtain

Gazing at the emptiness of your presence

Just a candle is lit…

A trace of your soul remains,

This sanctuary to your memory.

And my ferns!

My ferns!

Have returned

And with them

The seeds, their children

Having survived this bitter winter

Against all odds

You would want to know that.

You sat out there on the deck

In the privacy of the fern-lined deck

In the warm sunshine

Holding your daughter’s hand often.

You seemed to find peace among those tropical ferns

Little ferns

So fragile

You would be comforted.

They are back on the ledges now

Awaiting the warm sunshine once more

To grow

In your memory.

Please send me a Bas Kol

At the very least.

Please

I need to know this was what you wanted

In your holy silence.

You cannot leave this way.

A dream perhaps?

[1] Shlomo Carlebach story of the “Vurcke Rebbe and the ocean of tears” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIBBJo0Op0k

[2] Every day a bas kol calls "shuvu banim shovavim, return to me o' wayward sons." (Chagigah 15)

Jerusalem Stones

Jerusalem stones

Walking, walking…

The lonely streets

So quiet in the shabbat-deserted landscape

Few cars, little noise finally,

After a week of traffic and throat-acidic-air pollution.

The stones bear witness

Slippery in the rain

Treacherous at times

So irritating

Yet they seem unconcerned

For the petty lives and loves of today’s broken souls

This city of paradox

So many faiths crowded together

People isolated or trapped in their respective mythologies:

The sounds of the muezzin mixes unharmoniously

With the church bells,

The steeples and the minarets dot the skyline

In competition for the soul of Jerusalem.

So many faiths

Each claiming its own truth

Each disowning the other

Each sending its children here for instruction

From the diaspora

For inspiration and intensity of study

From its spiritual teachers,

Yet the “other” seems not to exist

However fatefully forced to live in close proximity

In the wet stone buildings of this eternal city.

The paradox of the old and the new

The East and the West

The shtreimel and the burkah

The bekeshe and the nun’s habit

The density of pure piety per square foot

Competes with heaven itself

For the “truth” about the divine.

Does god in fact smile down on all this from heaven?

I am drawn here

Despite myself

I don’t like this intensity

I don’t like the heat

I don’t like the downpours

I prefer the quiet cool rolling cotswolds…

Where it rains so finely the drizzle doesn’t bother me

I like to be left alone from prying eyes

Who size me up by my yarmulke or clothing

Analyzing my shade of orthodoxy and praxis

By the implication of leather or felt, length of jacket,

It is almost too much, this noise and chatter,

The cottage industry of talmudic erudition

This pressure cooker

Waiting any moment to burst.

Too much to bear at times,

The blood stained sidewalks and café houses

Of Dr. Applebaum and his daughter,

Of children of all ethnic backgrounds

Sacrificed on the altar of parental

And societal and ethnic expectations;

These stones have witnessed the pain and suffering

Of those willing to surrender to this eternal city

Of those willing to die for myth and text and ideology

Of those unwilling to be scapegoats again in history

“Jerusalem of Gold”

The inspiration of poets and midrash

Shemer and Amichai

Broke their teeth on these stones and soil

The old city and new

The bustling the Christian tourists

Confirming the archeology of their saviour

With pseudo-science willingly provided by “certified” tour guides

In German tour buses with A.C. and cushion comfort.

This part of earth where the jewish faithful come to be buried

Hurriedly, flown in, heavy zinc lined coffins

Now only covered in white cloth, coffinless,

Followed by men in beards,

An industry for the mafia/black coated chevra kadisha

Who control food and graves in this secular country.

I walk by an abandoned muslim cemetery opposite the luxurious

Waldorf Astoria, the silent graves

bespeaking a different era of Turkish rule

And obvious graves of classy and wealthy patricians buried just

Outside the old city.

A city drowning in a millenia of tears, an old foto,

Circa 1917, general Allenby dismounts out of deep respect

At the Jaffa gate…the Turks have left finally after hundreds of

Years of Ottoman rule…

And the Christian conquerer proclaims

a free city for all faiths (sic)

The mullahs and the priests and rabbis lined in a row,

Bowed in deference,

The only commonality is obeisance to the new colonizers

The Turks and Marmadukes the British and the Zionists

Those who loved this city of gold

More than life

Those who would never leave its gates once having arrived

(not even for Uman!)

The study of halls of learning

Piety and punctilious observance of minutiae

(i watch them examine the aravot

With microscopic precision

Or push wildly to get closer to the rebbe in his succah

Or the funerary bier of the zaddik)

Those men who comb their payot before the mikveh

Unaware of their effeminate trimmings

The same mikveh that commands “tvol utzeh!”

(by the rebbe of toldos avraham yitschak

Demanding silence as they watch me an outsider

In different cloth, disrobe like an alien.

The same black coated men walking briskly along Mea Shearim

streets, competing with huge buses crawling through the same

Winding road :

That bastion of hassidic/hungarian piety some two unconscious

Minutes from the huge greek orthodox church and complex,

The graves on the mount of olives, next to the Augusta Victoria

Hospital housing the enormous bell donated by

Kaiser Franz Josef from Vienna,

While the nuns walk to their morning matin

at the entrance to the

Armenian quarter,

Past pictures of the first ethnic holocaust 1915-1920 plastered on

Jerusalem stone walls,

(a conveniently forgotten piece of history)

The faithful Muslim men bowing on their prayer mats

on the Temple Mount,

Where, at dawn, just below by the Kotel

that stone wall of wailing,

The sephardi mekubalim recite the siddur of the rashash

Nothing makes sense here

All are hurrying to worship!

All are claiming the truth

All are claiming exclusivity.

Yet somehow, paradoxically

It all does.

The military presence

Always hovering

Always a threat, seemingly arbitrary at times

For some protection,

For others occupation,

Colonialism redux

For all, undesired road blocks, but necessary

These slippery stones bear witness

To the millenia of conquering armies

To the piety

To the blood of the innocent spilled

To the desire and fervent hope for the coming of the messiah

(or his possible second coming?)

And the continuing wrangling over pieces of real estate,

Politics and wheeling dealing over square metres.

The “settlement expansion” and the clear distinctions between red

Tiled roof settlements and arab villages from afar, the facts on

The ground evident to all. The new once proud light rail winds its

Way through east jerusalem and with all the high tech, new

terror tactics at stations along the way

like the stations of the cross.

This Jerusalem of stone,

That gets under the skin and never leaves

That infuriates and irritates

But never relieves,

Like a migraine one must endure

Photophobic and unable to focus on anything but the pain

These stones remain

As witness as testimony

Of its eternity…

I walked these stones first at age 16 and now,

I have lived my life,

They have not changed.

I have failed as Dorian Grey

They have remained steadfast

This maddening city

She points her accusing finger,

She affords no tolerance for anyone

Whatever their conviction, religion, sect

Who compromise their values,

All who live here

Must live fully and without pity

Whatever the cost.

All must endure the slipperiness of her surfaces

And the immutability of her pavements.

This is Jerusalem.

Hesped for Rabbi Emanuel Gettinger

Just being here in this beautiful בית הכנסת with these wonderful faces; we thank you all for coming and sharing with us this precious moment. Those who came from near and far: my nephew Reb Aharon Gettinger came in from LA; Dr. Lipton, you took care of him with such grace and dignity and sensitivity to his wishes. Asher, my colleague Dr. Rabinowitz who introduced me to Abba as a פוסק when I was at Columbia Presbyterian, struggling with the respirator issues back in the seventies. Reggie… Reggie, you had such a special relationship with Abba. Auntie Rozy, I promise you Uncle Mackie is waiting for Abba with a joke at the other side.

Thank you all for coming and sharing in our grief and in our celebration of this life, a life greater than life, a person larger than most, a personality rich in its complexity, a fortitude in strength that carried us all and a humility and self-deprecation that was inspiring.

Abba came close to death three times in the last 18 months. Reb Dovid and I struggled over the phone with sheilos that Abba and I had struggled with for twenty-thirty years, three times. And it was after hearing the megila so eloquently by our friend Ira Wiznitzer and waiting till after bein hashmashot that he finally relinquished his final breath with a מיתת נשיקה on the 65th anniversary of the day I took my first breath, the day before spring. Which brought me this morning, as I woke, to a line from Yeats: "Through winter-time we call on spring, and through the spring on summer call, and when abounding hedges ring, declare that winter's best of all".

Thank you so much for caring, thank you for coming, for grieving with us. It helps us. It relieves us of this great burden, a little.

Where does one begin? Where does one have the nerve to summarize, to review, to analyze, to depict the full facets and the complexity that went into the personality of my שווער ?

His life was spent, as you have heard this afternoon, with the written word. His life was teaching and articulating the Sacred Text. But his last year, ironically, was spent in silence, בשתיקה , and the dignity with which he suffered and died betrayed the nobility of his spirit. His written words, his legacy, they took years, torturous years to birthing and publication, and yet they also betrayed the unspoken, the silence, the שתיקה , the space between the words, the unanswered questions, the "black fire on white fire", to quote the Zohar. His life's work, beyond his teaching, his ministry, his Rabbanut, his נסיעות , his patriarchy of his family, was his struggle with and in

תורה שבעל פה , his unique contribution and approach and his search for his truth, his understanding of the אמת לאמיתה , the truth unto its utmost. Despite controversy, despite the weight of tradition, the truth had to be told. This courage, this audacity that came from his mastery of the entire corpus of Talmud and Poskim and his photographic memory and his active intellect. For me, an over-towering figure in my life, an inspiration in so many ways, so difficult to highlight, so hard to share in public.

But sitting with him through the nights in the ICU, in the horror of the ICU, in the indignity of the ICU and in the quiet times in our home, sitting in his שתיקה , in his silence, throughout all, his lips are moving in תפילה constantly. "ואני תפילה" now has new meaning to me. He had become the very incarnation of תפילה לדוד, תפילה לעני .

There was so much time to reflect on the irony of Abba, of a man of words, his unique articulation, his precision, his grammar, his insistence on the פשוטו של דבר , the פשוטו של מקרא , his life in its simplicity, not naiveté, its clarity, its halachic precision; now silent, בשתיקה . The irony that the notion of בין השמשות should have exercised him in the first place. That gray time, the midrashic imaginative time, ערב שבת בין השמשות , when all sorts of weird creature and things that made no sense in the order of creation like Bilaam's Ass are now created just before Shobbos. That in-between time, that which is לא יום ולא לילה , should have so exercised a man dedicated to precision, black and white, night and day.

Other ironies: his deep connection with students at secular universities, his support of women's learning, his appreciation of the Arts and especially music, his love of astronomy and nature, the day before spring. His openness to critical study methods and yet absolute commitment to Halacha, his ability to talk to all people in all situations, men and women, and communicate with them; his charm, his unique sense of humor – that was usually tied to a semantic joke; his impish laugh.

But beyond this, his mentoring of men and women over the years, who stayed connected to him as a role model, as a sage with a profound ability to listen, intently. His council, his הוראה , always sensitive to the humanity of the situation in a delicate balance of what in secular legal circles might be called the balance between law and equity which is so lacking it today. Never will you meet a person who more faithfully lived his values, and as a central teacher he gave his students the tools to study independently, to think independently, to think critically, never trampling their own values. He was too humble a man.

He understood the mysteries, despite his claiming on many occasions, אין לי עסק בנסתרות . He would not tolerate my often soft Carlebachian interpretations, chastising me with the comment "סתם דרוש" . Boy, did he have my number. Yet he often supported my fascination in study of the זוהר הקדוש by stating: "my father did likewise!" and my love of the midrashic mindset, with the claim that "Rav Riff knew midrash by heart!" He understood that each person had a particular נטייה in Torah that must be respected and nurtured.

More than anything, his methodology was to invite you, the listener, into his conversation, into his struggle with the פשט , and his sense of a solution; inviting you to critique, welcoming commentary. His שיעור was work in progress, an invitation to participate in his reverence for the text and his excitement for the process in its playfulness yet holding it accountable to his intellectual rigor. And most of all, his insistence in the layered and textual strata that laid beneath the text. The sharper his scalpel the deeper the treasures he uncovered. He taught me to see the ים של חכמה , the ים של תלמוד , as an even surface, yet beneath lay layers upon layers of geological constructions and he was going to unpack these layers and lay them before all to see the very architecture and the phylogeny of the text. And yet, ironically again, all the while maintaining a reverence for it, without disturbing its sacred integrity. Where did he learn to balance these complex worlds, the classical Talmudic study sugiah analysis and modern techniques of literary critical analysis?

In the last year or so, in his silence, in his שתיקה , I find myself asking questions more and more. What would Abba think? What would Abba say? What would Abba do? His character is the foundation of my conscience. His precision is the foundation of my self-criticism. His commitment is the foundation of my devotion. I hear his voice reverberating inside when confronting an ethical issue, a comatose patient, a halachic decision. It is of comfort. His word was his bond. He never uttered a lie. His ethics put us to shame. He fulfilled every obligation he undertook. He was self-made and self-reliant. His moral conscience saw no disparity between Torah and ethics. His tears on תשעה באב were genuine. His poetry in קינות broke one's heart. His ability to be משמח a חתן וכלה was famous. His dancing was dignified, his hands wafting in the air, gesticulating his warmth and love. Yet simultaneously he would provide a unique and dazzling דבר תורה in the process. 'How could the children of בית שמאי marry the children of בית הלל if their attributions of the כלה were so different?' You've heard it.

He was stern at times. Don't expect praise if you're his child or grandchild. You're not going to get it. That was not his educational style. He demanded only Excellent, and suffered fools not gladly when it came to כבוד התורה and כבוד for this בית הכנסת . Whether it be פורים or שמחת תורה , there was no let up when it came to קדושה .

His continuing interest in science, computers, mathematics and astronomy, his ongoing subscriptions to specialty magazines in medicine and biology, his amazing all-absorbing mind saw no conflict between these and Torah learning. It was seamless.

His love of Zion and his fierce belief in ארץ ישראל , his suspicions as to the motives behind religious extremism, and his embracing of the charedi and non-charedi world and his respect for the holy young men defending the state of Israel – the soldiers of צה"ל , were legendary. All this made for his truly being called a Mentch Yisrael in the Hirschian sense.

A philosopher he was not, nor claimed to be. He was an interpreter who stuck close to the פשוטו של מקרא , refusing fanciful, pilpulistic or Chasidic interpretations, yet at times his reflection was so deep he understood the mystery and paradox of life and the divine. In truth his insistence on פשט was mirrored in the rational cool calm personality he was in life. It was as if his life mirrored his hermeneutic. He would have made a great physicist but was told by Rav Hutner – "physics shmysics", and as a result we are better off, the Jewish world is better off, for those critical remarks. A life devoted to others, to people, to yidden, to Klal Yisroel. Always humble before those who knew less, never lording his knowledge over the poor or the ignorant. His respect for all life and the other reflected a general and genuine aristocratic soul.

We are now impoverished by his absence in our lives.

In the last few months, Sarah would wheel him into the dining-room on Shabbos. Unable to eat, unable to speak, he would lip-sync the Shobbos zmirot as we were singing it. Sarah went up to him last week and said: "I kiss you all the time, Abba; do you want to give me a kiss?" and she put her cheek close to his lips. And he kissed her.

My dearest Abba'le, forgive me. There were decisions to be made about you without your council and without your consent in the last year… I had to make them. I hope I fulfilled your wishes. You trained me well. I tried to intuit your real desire, your sense of integrity of the human body, not to be disturbed, invaded, prodded, poked… Yet what to do? The horror of that ICU, the total invasion of your privacy… Please forgive me.

We brought you home. I planted you a fern garden… you sat in the sunlight. I held your hand. Sarah, I cannot begin to describe your devotion so I won't even begin.

Abba'le, your silent presence in our home was our greatest gift. Your שתיקה was our הודאות . We were honored by the gift of your life. It will never be the same again.

You left us a day before spring.

The winter time we call on spring, and through the spring on summer call. And when abounding hedges ring declare that winter's best of all.

Tefillin

Wrapping the straps,

Binding,

Imprisoning the head and arm

(Never mind the boxes…

The parchment…

The creed…

The dogma inside…)

Now, only focus

On the violent binding

Of this arm,

Black leather straps,

On olive-­‐skinned arm.

La nom-­‐du-­‐Pere

Father on the Dunera Ship

Confronted by Captain Smith

Tossing overboard these “inflammatory boxes”

With Hebrew destined for Nazi spies!

Into the Atlantic ocean,

As if,

These Hebrew inscribed parchment etched words

Were Coded messages to the Nazis:

But the very debris tossed over is picked up by a U boat captain

Ready to sink the Merchant Marine vessel

And, reading the German letters to parents and loved ones,

Thinking these stinking Jews are in fact German POW’s

“escorts” the vessel to Durban!

and “protects” it from enemy torpedoes.

A miracle my father exclaims.

“This…Is your bible too!”

Dad courageously points to the parchment within

And Captain Smith is moved,

And allows him to retain his pair of T’fillin

Now sharing them with some 200 orthodox

“aliens” bound for Australia daily.

Back in London I watch him bind his straps with love

As he connects to this ritual as no other.

But for me,

This binding,

This black leather on daily skin,

This binding me to a crucifix

With black leather,

This ritual has become the litmus test

Of my faith.

As the years pass,

And my skepticism grows,

And the religion and fervor of my youth,

And my mid life turn to the rapture of Hassidut, wane

And my sober realization of my own decline,

And my preserving parents and in­‐laws in sickness,

And my disdain at the current culture of surface faith

Art-­Scroll triteness,

Brain dead Orthodoxy,

This litmus test reveals the truth

The current “state of the union”

It, daily, alone, reveals the desolation within

As it mirrors my absent presence.

As it accuses me in absentia

As it alone “binds” me to my father’s faith

Sturdy at 94!

To this day!

Watching him bind it...in love.

How long?

You might ask

How long?

Before you relinquish

You surrender to the Litvak within

The skeptic,

The kritik,

The heretic?

Let it go!

Stop the hypocrisy!

Some voice shouts from within!

Inside is desolation

Inside is silence

Inside is the tzimtzum that is so deafening it crosses the universe!

I am alone

In my heretical insistence in binding these straps

For his sake.

Not Him.

Subject-Object-Desire

“Your business in this world is not to assure the salvation of a soul thirsty for peace; nor is it to provide your body with the advantages of money. Your business is the quest for an unknowable destiny. It is for this that you must struggle with a hatred of the limits that the codes of propriety oppose to freedom. It is for this that you will arm yourself with a secret pride and an indomitable will. The advantages that chance has given you – your beauty, your glamour and the impulsiveness of your life – are all necessary for your laceration. Of course, this testimony won’t be fully revealed: the light emanating from you could be compared to the moonlight falling on a sleeping countryside”

Georges Bataille(1897‐1962)

L’Alleluiah, catéchisme de Dianus(194)

THE SUBJECT OF DESIRE

The heart is filled and overflows

With love,

Brimming, brimming over

Like pouring liquid nitrogen into a beaker It just can’t contain it

So it bellows out in a white cloud

Over the brim

Like hot springs

Unable to contain the sulfur clouds

Billowing out, billowing out,

Hovering above the chasm

Of unknowing

So the heart cannot contain

As it too wells up

In the pain

Of loving and

Of unrequited-­‐ness

All one can do is observe

(Gently if possible)

How curious the usually deadness

Is brought to life

So unexpectedly

And how close this desire

Is to the old wounds-­‐

The absent validation,

The abuse and tyranny,

The powerlessness,

Of childhood-­‐

Subjected to arbitrary discipline

How close the tears from this resemble

Those ancient salty drops

Held back by pure will

Until unable to control, they

Slowly form on the corner of the eyes,

A sign of capitulation to the monster

And lack of further strength on my part.

How close this pain is to the very wounds of youth

The rejection and the torment

The impossibility of conquest

The setting of the bar too high

The inevitable disappointment

Only adding to the prosecuting attorney’s growing file

Proving the character defects of this B specimen.

And yet how blissful

To feel

In the heart

After so long

At 30000 feet

In the silence of the darkened cabin

Where others sleep -­‐or at least try-­‐

To feel this desire in that very place of wounding.

What triggered this?

What object within the object?

I sit amazed at how little I really know

About this unconscious soul

I know only that I was captured

Unwittingly

Poor innocent thing!

The eyes for sure…sad, tortured, wounded,

Eyes that saw too much,

Eyes that were betrayed,

And knew too much for her age

The mouth, that smiles a sweetness into the trusting wind

The way she stands with one leg resting on another

Her very posture betraying purity of spirit

And her modesty among others who would flaunt their femininity

She stands out in silent demure.

Yet all of this falls short

In describing why now

Why her?

Why her eyes?

What in me was so moved by her gentility.

Her teasing and her double entendres

Never letting on her feelings

Her impeccable style of unacknowledged seduction

The knowing without saying

The seeing without letting on

The smiling eyes that caress the deepest wounds

All the while

Never giving away her self

Trusting no one

Me? for sure not!

She is wise!

Parsing her body like a textbook of anatomy

The perfect symmetry of parts

The beauty unparalleled

I am the Vesalius of form

And she is the very model that reflects perfection.

Simple and almost unconscious of her power

A woman struggling against demons within and without

Challenges of work home and family

Embedded in her own life and friends

The last thing she needs is this complication.

THE DESIRE

The bonding between subject and object

The heart’s desire

The locus of this obsession

The fear of moving from this point further

The refusal to hurt so many people

The art of observing the self in burning desire

Without acting on it

Without moving on it’s demand for relief

Either way, conquest or rejection

Anything for relief from this agony,

Rather, a gentle reflection

As if looking into a mirror

Albeit naked

The aching,

aging body

Framed in the Dorian Grey sunset

So this desire as mirror of the hungry soul

Dissatisfied and wanting more and more

Of life

Of love

Of burning

Your business is the quest for an unknowable destiny.

It is for this that you must struggle with a hatred

of the limits that the codes of propriety oppose to freedom.

Bataille calls this a catechism!

A sacred ritual requiring painful acts of sacrifice

As in the Christian reliving of His death and crucifixion

For surely it requires such courage

To even accept your feelings as real, appropriate

And true to yourself,

Even when defying conventions piety and the social order.

The desire points at you with an accusing finger

Holding the subject and object in an unholy matrimony

Probing your courage to defy

To validate that inner child that was squelched

And determine whether now

Maybe now

After all these years

You might find that which your soul had been searching for

All along.

Eric 2014 London

“Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.”

Alfred North Whitehead

I come to London

For “kever avot”

It is Elul

The time for annual introspection

and moral accounting…

Customary to visit the graves of ancestors

Which coincides with nana’s Yahrzeit

And hence my visit to Edgwebury Sephardi cemetery

To see Nana and Dada…

As the years pile on

As the grave remains the same

I kneel

And pledge my eternal love for the only grandparents I knew

But the gift is really Eric

My dearest uncle

Whose tall frame graces the kitchen

At 5am, making coffee

Reminding me of Dada in the same spot

When I used to visit him

On Mallard Way in Kingsbury

As a teenager.

In the sixties.

We sit and sip coffee in the wee hours

And he describes his philosophy of life

(So similar to Dada’s)

On religion:

“family friends and discipline!”

the rest is superfluous!

Oh that word! My mother lived by it!

And Dada told me a similar epithet

I note how similar their views are

As I sit between the two generations

And find myself drawn ever closer to

This genetic imprint despite decades of rabbinic study

For which Dada had no patience!

“Alfred North Whitehead comes mind”

“and Spinoza” I tell Eric.

He asks whether I ever found Dada’s book

“God and His Manifold Manifestations”

“No” I reply

“But I bet I could rewrite it pretty accurately from my genes!” He laughs.

A disciplined man

He rises each morning to practice the viola

As always

At 80 something!

Like my mother and Becky

Who I visited yesterday at the Nightingale home

She whizzes around this sprawling place like she owns it!

Discipline and Family are his creed

He is in constant contact with all his children

Knows each one’s struggles

A patriarch in the truest best sense of the word.

Yes I come here

To see Eric

And his uncanny resemblance to Dada

And feel my deep connection to this man

And his ethics

A prince of a man

A role model for me

He gives me courage…

As I tell my children

“When I grow up…I want to be like uncle Eric!”

to this day.

Sitting with Eric

He mourns the loss of his wife

I think of those few hours I sit with him

His children piously leave to hear the Megillah

Who would have thought?

I cannot leave him alone

He is “sitting Shiva”

The traditional way of mourning by nailing our buttocks to a low chair

For a week or so

Paradoxically his mourning is punctuated by the Sabbath where mourning

Is prohibited no matter how close the loss

Then followed on its heels by Purim

the day of merriment and alcoholic stupor.

These two days rudely intrude on the dignity of his loss

And now we are together for a couple of hours

As he reviews the last years of Florence’s illness

The injustice of the British nursing home system

The institutionalization of the elderly

The pure human cruelty that took place there

His frustrations and revulsion at the care

His revolution

And the last days.

I remain inspired by this man

He teaches me how to live life

How to remain faithful without love reciprocated

How to play,

How to host guests

How to give to others without end

How to master an instrument

How to remain committed despite everything

How to laugh from the belly

Now, how to mourn.

I weep silently for his loss

I look forward hopefully for his indomitable spirit to resurface

To rebuild his life and his humor to resurface

To begin teaching and performing and examining students once more

To live life fully as he had done prior to his focus on Florence for so long.

His head hangs low in fatigue

He feels he has failed her

He could have done more

Despite her progressive disease

He is hard on himself

Always has been

Yet gracious and understanding to all others.

His spirit will return

I feel it

Even now

He greets visitors and worries about feeding them

Always about the other

He is hopelessly impossible to emulate

I always fall short.

Lifta

Watching Eliyahu’s lush wide angle lens

capture the homes and landscape

The empty, silent buildings

The green shrubbery and hills surrounding

The cold water gushing into the Mikveh

I used to take my sons to, before the Holy Days

I am filled with shame,

Having never questioned the silent witnesses

The dilapidated stonework and arched rooms

The emptiness of what once was

Merely accepting the fact as part of history

Never asking who lived here?

Are they still alive?

Where?

Now watching the human rights groups visiting

The screen focuses on the single survivor

Who eloquently points to where he once lived

He speaks of Lifta with emotional warmth

Some 3000 souls living in peace

In hundreds of stone walled homes

Now vacant and rotting.

The detritus of iron beds still sticking out of the earth growing

Inexorably on the floors.

I would walk here often

Across the valley from my home

Never questioning the dotted stone homes

Zigzagged along the side of the hills

Hugging the landscape, seemingly haphazardly

Like small toy box houses when seen from my garden across the valley.

Then came the highway that divided the valley in half

And walking the dog became more difficult

And the noise made the sweet smelling valley

Less inviting, as did the diesel fumes.

Back then the mist filled the valley early int he morning

And the deer frolicked carefully

Always wary of possible threats

The dump on the top of the hill was filled with rainwater

And Gilbert loved to jump into the cool refreshing water

Albeit emerging muddy and filthy.

The heather in April and the perfumed moss

The wetness and fructification of the spring valley flora

Supported and formed the sustaining natural backdrop to this village.

Now memories are darkened by the history brought to my consciousness

Having read of Allenby reaching Lifta

Seeing the photos of the British army

And the capitulation of the Turks

And the realization that Jerusalem was theirs on reaching…Lifta!

A fateful place, a turn in the fighting 1919

Allenby dismounting off his horse out of respect for the old city

The Rabbis and Imams and Mullahs there to greet him

A new dawn

The realization of a millennial dream

Allenby, Balfour, Weitzmann, making this happen.

Lifta, the place triggering this new change

The place of no resistance

Of capitulation to Empire, once Turk, then British now Israeli.

A place of forgotten memories

Of lost dreams

Where families lived generation after generation

Now denied their collective story even

In the rubble of what once was.

Lifta looms large in my memory

Times of bonding with my sons

The climbing and talking

The jumping into the clean waters

The questioning of tradition’s claim as to its association

With Joshua bin Nun

And our participation in, yet critical discussion of tradition

This Lifta as the trigger of our approach to tradition, culture, and religion.

It’s almost as if Lifta was the very blind spot I am now forced to see

The lacuna, my son, himself so attached to,

Now had to demythologize,

In exploding the gentle leafy green family myth

Embodying the good times

The family times

The conversations we engaged and broke our intellectual teeth on;

Now shattered by the light focused ont he very retina that gazed unawares.

The ethical lacuna

In not questioning

In not seeing these homes

These families

This village

As an open moral wound.

Too much time

To allow it to fester in memory

He focuses his wide angled lens over the valley

And the zigzag of homes form a jagged knife

That cuts deep into my heart.

Lifta captures the imagination for many:

Now neo-Hasidic groups

Squat in hovels

And the night air is interrupted by the wails of Breslover Chassidim

Pouring their hearts out to the Almight silent One

Now nature groups pass through the valley with middle-aged folk

Sun capped and binoculars suspended

Chatting and jovial

Unawares of the history of this place

Beyond the flora and fauna

Now horses carrying school girls wearing their riding gear with arrogance

And pride, walking carefully along the path

Anxious to avoid the rocks.

I think back in shame

My time here

My assumptions

My appropriation of the Zionist idea

My acceding to the reigning powerful myth

Not questioning more

Not asking who lived here and why they were absent

The silent spaces

This once thriving village

Souls living and dying

Generations passing down stories

Now skeletal structures

Chimeric shadows of the past

This story of Lifta

Points an accusing finger…At me.

The Kofer's Credo

“Besides the term "min" ( מין ) for "heretic," the Talmud uses the words

"ḥiẓonim" (outsiders), "apikoros," and "kofer ba-Torah" (R. H. 17a), or "kofer

ba-ikkar" (he who denies the fundamentals of faith; Pes. xxiv. 168b); also

"poresh mi-darke tzibbur" (he who deviates from the customs of the

community; Tosef., Sanh. xiii. 5; R. H. 17a). Of all these it is said that they

are consigned to Gehinnom for all eternity (Tosef., Sanh. l.c.; comp. ib. xii.

9, apparently belonging to xiii. 5: "He who casts off the yoke [of the Law],

and he who severs the Abrahamic covenant; he who interprets

the Torah against the halakic tradition, and he who pronounces in full the

Ineffable Name—all these have no share in the world to come”).”

(Wiki)

In order to salvage the text

We invite kofrim

Our holy brothers in disbelief

Those whose conscience forbids them

The facile easy answers to theology and the like.

We invite them

Because they are within us too

In moments of lucidity

And allow us permission

To disbelieve

To disinherit the worn out truths

But as for the text, neither of us shall forsake

The text is sacred to both of us

And in it and around it we shall gather

Struggling in our own separate ways

To make sense of someone else’s path

A bygone era’s trace and etchings in history

Those before us who also kneaded the sacred words

In this effort the black letters form platforms

Where we dive into the space between the letters

Allowing our imaginations to roam freely

Producing new Torah

True to tradition

For own children to see our struggles

Our etchings in the parchment

The crowns and jots and tittles

Are thorns in our sides

Forcing us to remain in discomfort

With the received tradition

To always questions and benchmark

Those values against our own equity

Holding their values to the sunlight

Of our new dawn.

We share the belief that the undifferentiated Divine radiance shines down

Incarnating our souls

In both light and dark shades

In a speckled shadowy hue

Both Schechina as well as Satan/Samael incarnate in our hearts

And our task is to be present to both, as they manifest themselves

And struggle within us.

Not to explain rationalize theologize or moralize

Rather be present and endure the process

Watch and gaze intently

As the oscillations of Shabbat and Chol permeate us

As the holidays, births, tragedies and life transitional rituals

Are played out with wonder.

Mindful ever of our light and dark sides

The evil within and without.

Across the sacred text we both sit

And babble the Talmudic folio after folio

With commentaries and super commentaries

One of us is satisfied

The other seeks parallel worlds

Mythological similitudes from other cultures

And eagerly rushes to critical analytical tools

That open the text to its semantic and ancient

Roots like an archeological dig.

But both remain faithful to the integrity of the word

And the notion of sacred text

Hallowed by a millennia of scholarship

And beloved, and cherished,

by its readers and students of all ages.

Sacred not because of some external deus ex machina

Rather the incarnated divine in all of us

Studying and struggling with its words

And arcane ideas

Making sense of it for our own road maps.

In this space we share common ground

The Torah binds us

Despite our difference

Despite our polar opposite views

It matters not!

Come and sit by me

Share with me the wonder

And in doing so heal the world.

In The Fresh Jerusalem Air

In the fresh Jerusalem air

All is quiet

3 am

As my mind wanders back to you.   

In the middle of this war

At night it is quiet

The people sleep

But my heart is still in battle mode

Pondering its mysteries

And its yearnings.   

Unable to pray

As an outcast

For my duplicity

In loving too much

In this silent air

I pay vigil.   

Old wounds from childhood loom near

fresh as ever

the flesh pink and bloody

in the dark stillness

will you be the one?

will you not hurt me?

will you finally not turn the jagged knife?   

Trusting the darkness

for sure this will not fail me

restless at 3 am

the mind wanders  

back to you.

Quo Vadis Domine

From the back of the car

my father (age 93),

spurts out these words,

out of nowhere,

driving back from Tiberias

my mother sitting beside him (age 90),

translates accurately, “where to now, O Lord”

laughingly, proudly,

“ I went to a convent, so I should know.”

she responds to his amazement,

they laugh. We laugh in amazement.  

My twin sister sitting in the front next to me

remains baffled,

and I, in my ignorance,

feel ashamed that I did not locate this term

(I was by now familiar with most of his references)…

even now,

my father’s Greek and Latin skills,

trump all my reading, and attempts at classical self-education.

We are amazed that, at this age, they connect

in the world of Latin and Greek

today as equals.

And that we still have much to learn, even now   

“Quo vadis Domine”

how apt

how perfect

for right now,

paralyzed by indecision

and fear,

again finding myself at another crossroads,

one too many

I stand.

“Where to now, O Lord?”  

Torn apart by tradition

and the Law…

yet knowing nothing but what

my intuition tells me is real,

now feeling only much guilt for my hurt of others

razor edged by my sense of right and injustice

the inner Kritik turns against myself above all.

Fuming at authority,

wounds of youth, no doubt

drowning in love,

another, each day.

“where to now, O Lord?”  

Right you were Jesus, or was it Paul?

to question the Almighty

as to “where now?”

what made my father utter these words

as we drove back from a mini vacation

a one day fling,

by the Sea of Galilee

as he dunked in the water

“mikveh, mikveh” I taunted him,

as he lowered his misnaged fragile frame

in the mild waters of the Kinneret,

reminding him of his new task

his gift to me

of a blessing written by his own pen

in ink…  

{to calligraphy on “klaf”, on parchment,

blessings to his grand and great grandchildren

now his wishing to give me a gift of the same

a “priestly blessing”

requiring the use of the Tetragrammaton

requiring a “tvila” a baptism, by ritual law.}  

Barely able to negotiate the rocks as we emerged

he seemed pleased with himself.

“Where to now, O Lord?”  

These words ring in my ears

and Mum’s immediate response

and translation

of his Latin,

her “convent” Latin and prayers

forced on all colonial children of the Raj,

no matter what their creed

My ignorance as to the meaning of the words

humbles me

they still have secrets at this age

that we as children have not deciphered

yet the words resonate in my head and will not leave me.

“Whereto next, O Lord”  

For them, the pleasure of new arrivals,

their 14th and 15th great grandchild this last week

my parents holding a new born in their arms

commenting on and stroking her silky black hair

Eugene’s first grand daughter Elisheva Tzipporah

they are so excited to hold the baby

Dad says the “the oldest and the youngest”

referring to himself

patriarch,

22 grandchildren plus 11 they married

15 great grandchildren

their pleasure tells it all

living each day

is sufficient

enough

life is good

survival from the horrors for this…is worthwhile.

but “Where to now, O Lord?”  

As for me?

Ah there is a different meaning implied

lagging them by some 30 years

knowing full well

how they feel

how they live

how they struggle

for me?

well….

firstly is my issue with “Domine"

rebel that I am,

and that somehow the question begs an answer:

Torn as I am

between faith and doubt

certainty and the abyss

belief in a future

and realization that the divine is as much invested

in this failed experiment

called being human.

The Divine is a work in progress too (apikorus that I am)  

Images surface of King Henry IV after the battle of Agincourt

a la Shakespeare,

come to mind…a different Domine

Richard Branagan playing Henry, (Henry V Act 4)

singing..

“Non Nobis Domine

Non nobis Domine

Sed nomine, sed nomine

Tuo da gloriam”  

“Not to us, O LORD, not to us

but to your name be the glory,

because of your love and faithfulness.”  

Psalm 1151 

Swept away by the flourish

as by the good British cheer

the decency

the goodwill

the old boy charm

that only the British can muster

while killing French all the while.  

But this Domine quote haunts me as I return home

it will not leave me,

for we are all being asked this

daily,

“Where to now O Lord?”  

Christ, Christians, The Bombay convent, Mum and Dad, and all of us.

with or without the ‘Lord” part?

the question remains

the man is charged

an answer is demanded

from inside or above

it matters not.

The question haunts

the wound it exposes hurts

the answer remains an enigma.  

My parents have no issue with the very quotation

as my in laws might,

they remain comfortable in that dual world

Dad in the classics of a Vienna gymnasium

Mum in the British Raj education,

only attainable in a Christian convent in Bombay around the 1930’s,

giving her access to the Cambridge matriculation

and allowing her passage to a London Royal college education

eventually.    

But I come to realize the very irony

knowing the price and compromises this education entailed

the very compromise that resulted in their meeting and my birth

For I remain a product of their betrayal, unconscious of course,

each of their own tradition

Yet it energizes my very being,

it motivates my writing,

and precipitates my heresy

My very genetic code

the DNA of my spirituality

is marked and imprinted by their very

hunger to survive in a post Colonial and Post Holocaust world

by swimming in a deep deep compromise

with the very Tradition that spawned them.  

In this quotation

and their very ease and comfort

and satisfaction in its recitation and translation

lies my discomfort

for it exposes the deep flaw

and fault line

in my soul.

It exposes the very core of my existential struggle

the very question

as to “where now?”

with or without the “Domine”

Do I go it alone?

or with the opium of religion

the comfort of the “Higher Power”?  

No, Elisha ben Avuya chimes in my head

“leit din veleit dayan ”

he thunders

and no Rabbi Meir is present

to thwart his philosophical attack.

For he has drunk form the vines of Epicurus

who sees reality in cause and effect terms

in his Pardes (Paradiso) orchard where he mentors

between his home and his school.  

And like Elisha,

I too have seen the young boys and girls climb the Halachic tree

at the behest of their (heavenly) F/father(s)

to rescue the poor chicklets

and “shoo away the mother bird”

only to fall to their death

in some Nazi camp

a million and a half times.  

And I have seen the genocide continue

worsening with the technology of killing fields

and my very silence

lack of protest

voyeurism on TV and you tube

shock me even more.  

We have learned nothing

forcing me now into this silence

and erasing the “Domine”

for a while now.

Thus bereft I can merely restate the question

Quo Vadis?

Quo Vadis?  

For in the wasteland

that is the inner landscape of my soul

bereft of the rituals and comforts of faith and hope

I must face this question alone

without my parents faith

without the messianic relief in sight

claimed by Tradition

in the emptiness of seeing the future

as this inexorable move to technology

government invasion of privacy

killing fields beyond anything we imagined

cybernetic humans where the very humanity

is progressively dwarfed in quantum leaps.  

What have I/we left our children?

My parents left me Domino

I leave my children pessimism, doubt, faithlessness,

the legacy of an Elisha

Epicurus?  

In the wasteland of my soul

where decades of attempts to tame the beast within

and exposing the deep dark shadow

of the wounds of the inner child

have not changed my behavior

nor my triggered responses to those who know how to turn the knife.

Now realizing that all the reading

inner work

meditation

pilgrimage

mentoring

journalling

prayer

study

do not stop the clinking finger

the mouse

-leading me to momentary worlds of fantasy

and relief at such a price.  

Knowing all this

facing all of this

surrendering to all fo this

“where to now?” I need a new theology for this cybernetic age

without the comforts and trappings of the old

No promises

No Messianic claims

No vertical wishful rescue ‘from above”

No promises of self-fulfillment through

this or that Rebbe

three day fasts

ablutions

confessions

self flagellations

rolling in ice,  

but a closing together of souls

in a harmony of shared values

a resistance to machines

government

Rabbis and Priests

violent collectives

totalizing value systems

overbearing theories of truth

charismatic leaders

anything in uniform claiming to protect democracy

and a support of non-violence

privileging no one ideology over another

and a new sensitivity for the poor the downtrodden

and the underprivileged.  

This is my Quo Vadis.   

Weeping As Sacred Text

“Your business in this world is not to assure the salvation of a soul thirsty for peace; nor is it to provide your body with the advantages of money. Your business is the quest for an unknowable destiny. It is for this that you must struggle with a hatred of the limits that the codes of propriety oppose to freedom. It is for this that you will arm yourself with a secret pride and an indomitable will.The advantages that chance has given you – your beauty, your glamour and the impulsiveness of your life – are all necessary for your laceration. Of course, this testimony won’t be fully revealed: the light emanating from you could be compared to the moonlight falling on a sleeping countryside. Nevertheless, the wretchedness of your nudity, and the trance your body falls into when aroused by being nude, will be enough to destroy the image of a limited destiny for human beings. In the same way that lightning when it strikes opens its truth in those it touches, eternal death, revealed in the pleasures of the flesh, will reach the elect few. It is with these that you will enter into a night where everything human is lost, for only the vastness of a darkness hidden from the servitudes of the day could conceal a light so dazzling.Thus, although in the alleluia of nudity, you are not yet at the summit where truth is revealed in its entirety. Beyond the delirium of ecstasy you will still need to laugh, entering into the shadow of death. At this moment the bonds binding you to everything solid will dissolve and unravel. I don’t know whether you’ll laugh or cry, discovering your countless sisters in the sky.”    

       

      Georges Bataille (1897-1962) – L’Alleluiah, catéchisme de Dianus (1947)     

“One of the controversies in the Talmud includes the discussion about whether or not Moshe Rabbeinu wrote the last eight lines in the Torah describing his own death (Bava Basra 15a): Moshe, the servant of G-d, died there in the Land of Moav, as G-d commanded. He buried him in the valley of Moav opposite Beit Peor, and no man knows his burial place unto this day ..(Devarim 34:5) According to Rebi Yehudah in the Talmud, Yehoshua bin Nun completed the Torah for Moshe. However, Reb Shimon disagrees: Is it conceivable that Moshe, the greatest prophet that ever existed, who did the impossible by receiving the Torah from G-d Himself, did not receive and write every word of the Torah? On the other hand, does it make sense that Moshe wrote about his own death? Yes, says Reb Shimon-with a "tear" in his eye. The Talmud doesn't really indicate whose opinion is more valid, and for this reason, later commentaries also debate the issue. On one side of the disagreement, there is the Chacham Tzvi, Reb Eibeshitz, and the Torah Temima who side with Reb Yehudah, while the Ritvah, the Ain Ya'akov, the Maharsha, the Mizrachi, and the Maharal, all hold like Reb Shimon. The Arizal himself seems to indicate that Moshe wrote the words himself. The Vilna Gaon writes that there is a way for both points of view to be correct. According to the Gra, Moshe did receive the entire Torah from beginning until the end, and wrote the entire Torah down-on Har Sinai. But wait a second-Har Sinai occurred forty years before the end of Moshe's death, and before many of the stories that had yet to occur  Did Moshe know everything that was supposed to happen in the future at the time he received the Torah, and simply acted as if he hadn't?   Yes, and no, says the Gra. Moshe did possess all the stories in advance of their happening, but, didn't know what they were until after G-d told him. The reason is because Moshe received the entire Torah at one time in a very long stream of letters, only to be broken up into their proper words and paragraphs at the right time, at G-d's command-after the event occurred-an amazing miracle. This would mean that Moshe received the "letters" that would eventually describe his own death, but, that it fell to Yehoshua to form the actual words that described his Rebbe's death for all the generations to read and mourn. But what about the fact that R. Shimon said that Moshe wrote the last eight lines about his death "b'dimah," with a tear in his eye? The answer is that in truth, "dimah" can actually also mean "mixed up." In other words, when Moshe wrote about his death, it was in "mixed up" form.    Instead of following the usual protocol of repeating the Torah and then transcribing it, a distraught Moshe does not reiterate the final verses. Moreover, instead of ink, Moshe uses less permanent tears to record these sorrowful last 8 verses.[1] Intensive mourning also interferes with the process of revelation. Another interpretation of this passage offered by the Vilna Gaon (In aderet Eliyahu) may have a similar connotation. According to the Gra, Moshe wrote the final verses bedema-(with tears) bedimua—(with confusion) that is, in confusion and out of order. Perhaps these two interpretations of R. Shimon’s teaching converge: Moshe, writing in tears of sorrow, wrote a confused Torah. For the Torah of trauma and irreparable loss is one of chaos and confusion.[2]”         

Finding myself suddenly weeping

unexpectedly

in the middle of nowhere

no trigger

no obvious cause   

A weeping welling up from interior dark spaces

(really, do we need to go there yet again 

examined a thousand times

wounds still raw…

despite endless analysis)   

No, this weeping seems to have come from a different place

a place of no-hope,

of finding no-love,

and a realization that all along there had been no-connection.   

A place of ultimate darkness and dread,

a knife-edged living, on this razor sharp perch,

with the possibility of falling any moment

into the abyss, for any given trigger.

Of no longer being able to fight off the enemy,

having struggled too long,

and the unravelling of decades of self-deception.   

Weeping for the childish dreams that never materialized

yet which formed the very basis of my existence and yearning and hope

the adolescent love that exhausted me for months on end but never fulfilled

even now.

For the illusion that in all that effort the profit had meant something

the growing realization that all the so-called accomplishments meant for naught

nothing lasting,  

no trace of this life,

no legacy or self worth-worth preserving.   

A grief so deep,

for a life thus wasted

having fooled so many for so long

(or maybe not),

now no longer able to keep the mirage

the prosecutor is fully apprised

the mirror is now cracked

revealing a Dorian Grey of immense decrepitude

and senile rotting.       

This life

this text

this pursuit of unattainable goals,

all the neurotic obsessive pursuit of texts, tractates, treatises, sermons

thinking delusion-ally

that somehow some answer, some awakening, would magically

calm and alleviate the original wound,

yet in the end evoked no response,

no lightness of being

no inspirational light  

no internalization of ideals morals or role models.

leaving me only mistrust of Rabbis lecturers, mentors  

and the gnawing Doubting Thomas pointing into the fleshy bloody wound.   

This emptiness

this nothingness,

this gaping hole in the heart of reality

the screaming silence,

puncture by only the sobs   

All this wells up as I grieve

over this lost life.

[1] Pinchas Winston Parshat Hashavua Vezot Habrachah 5757

[2] http://text.rcarabbis.org/torat-tisha-beav-torat-timahon-the-confused-torah-of-tisha-beav-bydavid-c-flatto/

The Theology of Gaza

The siren sounds in my twin sister’s back yard

as I sip her fine scotch

and listen to my hero nephew speak of blood and war.

I was told to listen to the direction of its trajectory

and worry if it comes from the south

and run to the “safe room”

But I am in Jerusalem

Surely they are not that accurate to risk

sending rockets to where their brethren share the Holy City?

I wonder what my mother thinks at 90 years

arriving in London 1941,

lying on her bed during those terrible nights in the Blitz

as Hitler’s “doodlebugs” (the V1 rockets)

primitive versions, had just enough fuel to reach London

living in fear the humming engine carrying the bomb

would stop-signifying a vertical gravity drop

on the buildings of citizens.

Here too these primitive devices end their trajectory

and just fall dead straight.

But today as I return home,

my heart is in Zhitomer

a tiny village in the Ukraine

making its name felt on the front page

announcing the rescue of its Jews

by the Jewish Agency ad their transfer to Israel.

Yet again…

Cossacks, Russians, Nazis, Ukrainian National Guards,

Eizatzgruppen….memories…

now Ukrainian right wing fascists, the new government

their descendants…

Zhitomer ah…the name sends shudders

down the spine of book collectors like me…

a city that holds the Tzion of the Rebbe Reb Zisha,

Zhitomer ah…

the printing press that took over

after the brothers Schapira

(grandchildren of the Rebbe Reb Pinchas of Koretz)

who were forced to run the gauntlet by the Tzar’s army,

and were taken away to exile

closing the Slovita printing press

and moving it to…yes, Zhitomer.

Now house to the printing of many 19th century great works

(in competition with its more powerful press run by the brothers Romm)

Once again Jews flee

but the Israeli government

has their backs covered this time,

God Bless them

they are coming to Israel on Aliyah.

Safe from the fascists

they’ll only have to contend with rockets and air raid sirens now.

The Cossacks have come again

Russian separatists, Ukrainian Nationalists?

it matters not,

Jews are no longer safe.

But my heart belongs in these little shtetleich,

Zhitomer, Mezhibuz, Breslov, Berditchev

where the romance of Hassidut housed

the “Pauline Revolution” within hidebound orthodoxy.

Where the heart, not the mind, was placed

at center of religious life and worship.

Where the revolution against fundamentalism,

dogma, doctrine and frumkeit…

by the Talmidim of the Baal Shem Tov flourished

where Jews were powerless in the body politic but masters of spirit,

where I still sense their spirit on my pilgrimages

and can find a little solace out of my own headspace.

Meanwhile in GAZA the bleeding goes on…

the images craftily used by HAMAS for PR purposes

are winning the hearts of the citizens of the world…

and CNN drinks from their fountain without objectivity.

Yet despite all the media and contrived images on social networks

despite even the unrepresented righteousness of our cause

these bleeding men women and children haunt me at night

as a Jew.

And the tears for the loss of the divine image in man

(no matter his religion or passion)

his madness or fanaticism

are shed upstairs

For the god of all religions MUST be crying no?

or what type of a deity is He, right?

these tears

ring in my heart and soul.

War…

its consequences

the collateral damage

the lives

the cost

for the sake of real estate?

really?

human blood for real estate?

like Rwanda? Northern Ireland? Cherkvenitzia?

now Gaza?

The winds of fanaticism once again

whatever the faith doctrine dogma

leave a trail of blood everywhere in their path

drops of blood forming rivers in the memory

of peoples and cultures,

ordinary citizens,

with no interest or choice in this ideological warfare.

I leave the Middle East with a heavy heart

heavily invested in my tradition

but bleeding in my heart for the blood

that has run through the streets of Gaza

and for our valiant boys

who innocently protected the homeland

30000 attend the funeral of one bright faced abductee

the public display of cohesive mourning is overwhelming.

Jerusalem is silent

the tourists fled

the streets participate in the mourning.

The complexity of Jewish history I’ll leave to Rabbi Wein

or other Art Scroll philosophers,

All I feel now is the pain of the mothers

who lost their children on both sides,

and the blood of the innocents,

all I feel now is God’s pain,

or that of the Shechinah.

Born 5 years after the Tremendum

I remain haunted

by the blood of the innocents…

the millions who died on both sides of the World Wars

screaming out to me

millions and millions

from the blood soaked soil of Europe

this is my haunting…

these are my dreams

their memory,

And still nothing new

And nothing learned

noting gained

The blood still runs easily

and Human Life is valued no more

all is sacrificed for the sake of ideology dogma and doctrine

in the name of a NEW WAVE OF FUNDAMENTALISM

needing perhaps a new message?

a new corrective?

a new Crusade perhaps.

This virus…

This war…

points to the demonic,

(how else to explain the thirst for blood and torture?)

alive and well in the hearts of men

Sammael was right (in that Yemenite Midrash)

his son Cain…

born of his fornication with Mother Eve…

Cain, now spoke within the heart of men,

he had accomplished his father’s task.

Despite Adam’s attempt to slice him into pieces and devour him,

Despite the League of Nations and the UN

and all the resolutions from the East River,

nothing has changed.

The heart remains infected with this virus.

Only the method of killing and torture has changed

the technology of the killing fields

drone warfare

and Laser Beams.

Yes, I leave Israel

with a heavy heart

(bleeding liberal I am),

for the blood that cries out from the earth of the Holy Land

the silent brave screams of those young soldiers who died in vain

and the memories of Slovita, Zhitomer, Cossacks and Nazis

and now Hamas, Holy Jihad, ISIS,

whose lessons we failed to learn

that all blood is red, now co-mingled once again in pain.

All mothers cry and die inside for their sons

either side of the fence, the wall, the border,

it’s always been that way

the children of Gaza were innocent

as were the non-combatants.

But for some doctrine, dogma or holy belief

on both sides…

that deifies and fetishizes real estate

and prefer the Napoleonic theory of “sovereign statehood”

and worship of the outdated senile European notion of states

over unique new solutions

in this world of cyberspace and global commerce that knows of no borders.

Really? Can’t we create a post modern “No State” solution?

One that refuses borders and killing machines, that “federalizes land?

Let’s return to

an experimental village type

co-existence.

Defy modernity

It brought only death.

It is not the religious divide that makes this solution impossible

it is the notion of modernity ending (we had hoped)

but still not ending, with Auschwitz

that allows for ongoing genocide war and torture.

Only when enough blood has spilled

only then, exhausted from the hemorrhage,

will both sides sit together.

Will mothers grieve finally

Until then we watch from our smartphones and screens

the networks vying for closer and closer immediacy to the frontline

reporters and photo crews “embedded”

filming, filming the ER and hospitals

the results of collateral damage

that deadens our sensitivity even further

every war…deeper into the blood,

as if CNN and BBC and Fox and AL Jazeera

are themselves complicit in allowing us

this voyeuristic juissance of blood-stained victims.

Religion and Technology

Warfare and Modernity

combine in this perfect storm

to deaden us to the real human pain

and provide a foil for the true issues

that the human heart is broken

filled with the demonic.

As if political posturing and brinkmanship

will do other than “kick the ball down the road”

So I am alone,

torn between my double refutation of the politics

and the fundamentalist delusion that

somehow our sins are an impediment to progress

that the Imminent coming of the Messiah

or the Qura’nic jihadist promises of 70 Virgins

might do anything other than harm human kindness and progress

or end the violence.

Forcing the Hand of the One Above: Erev Tisha B’Av 2014

בָּאתִי לְגַנִּי אֲחֹתִי כַלָּה אָרִיתִי מוֹרִי עִם בְּשָׂמִי אָכַלְתִּי יַעְרִי עִם דִּבְשִׁי שָׁתִיתִי יֵינִי עִם חֲלָבִי אִכְלוּ רֵעִים שְׁתוּ וְשִׁכְרו דּוֹדִים

My father in law

struggling

ICU

ventilator

dependent on others

so alone

staring silently

bearing all this

these horrors

at the end of this life, 89 years

now tubes

the indignity of examinations

constant poking

needles

X rays

screen settings

beeping machines

noise of purring technology

exposure

artificial light

the absence of day and night

interminable horror.

Knowing all this

powerless over all of this

the IMPULSE came to me

to force the hand of the powerful

One Above…

such insolence!

but then watching him

in this state of powerlessness

this powerful man

larger than life

who influenced so many people

most of all me (at times begrudgingly)

his mastery of texts

his oratory

his Halachic judgement…

where is the way out of

this American inability to let go?

once the technology is in place.

Are we not simultaneously both

beneficiaries as well as victims of medical wizardry?

And where is the exit strategy once we embark on the machines

that breath and maintain blood pressure artificially?

Something needed to be done at this point

out of the mechanics and physics of the inescapable decline.

Something meta-physical

So off I went with my trusted pal Allan

since I had no clue as to what I was doing

merely that I would create

a perfumed garden on my deck

so that when he would be brought home

he might enjoy the beauty and privacy of the deck

enclosed in green.

Buying the pots and earth and chemicals

the hose and sphpritzer the small garden tools

Reminded me of 6 Claremont Park, Finchley

back home…

parents working sundays in the garden

the pond, the goldfish, the forts incessant croaking,

the ten apple and pear trees in the back

facing the meandering “Brook”

which overflowed one year submerging the garden

in a rain-drenched summer.

I had never shared their passion and delight

but now returning to my deck

our garden-less plot on which our townhouse

stands

this is my garden.

Carefully patting the soil into each container

with the help of my grandchildren

who take these tasks very seriously

the plants go into each side by side

then the framed containers are screwed

(by Allan, who, of course, has power tools)

into the bannister tops around the deck.

Finally the deck is enclosed by 9 black-potted planters

and I feel as proud as farmer Giles [1]

and every night I emerge to water them lovingly.

This by any standard is a modest attempt

and I have no idea what prompted me to go out

and commit to this project

yet deep inside

the impulse to “force the hand of the One Above”

kept ringing in my ears.

For having created the vessel the “kli”

surely spirituality too hates a vacuum!

surely Abba will come home and be present to this mini Garden of Eden

awaiting him in its privacy and greenery.

He used to like to sit out here in the sun drenched visits

away from the enclosed dark West Side apartment

absorbing the sun on my deck

So now all is ready for him.

All is prepared

the “arousal from below”

has been initiated,

we must but wait for improvement.

[1] Beyond Our Ken 1958-1964 BBC, featured characters such as Betty Marsden’s Fanny Haddock (which parodied Fanny Cradock). It was also notable for Pertwee’s Frankie Howerd impersonation, Hankie Flowered, and Hugh Paddick’s working-class pop singer Ricky Livid – the name being a mickey-take on contemporary pop singers’ stage names such as Marty Wilde and Billy Fury. Another favourite was Kenneth Williams’ country character, Arthur Fallow field, who was based on Dorset farmer Ralph Wightman, a regular contributor to the BBC radio programme “Any Questions?” Fallowfield’s lines were full of innuendo and double entendre – on one occasion Horne introduced him as the man who put the sex in Sussex. Fallowfield’s reply to any question began: “Well, I think the answer lies in the soil!” http://rokradio.com/beyond-our-ken/

The Song To End All Songs

"The Song of Solomon", like many of the songs on The Red Shoes, contains heavy background vocals by the Trio Bulgarka group, amplified by the use of a Fender Rhodes. Bush herself plays the Fender Rhodes heard in the recording, as well as the piano and the keyboard. Percussion instruments and guitar were also used.!

As well as the title, which refers to the Bible, Bush uses a number of literary references and allusions in the lyrics of the song. The lines in the second verse, for example, "Comfort me with apples...", are taken from the Biblical book. Additionally, Bush references figures from mythology in the third verse, among them the lovers Iseult and Marion. She also highlights the willingness of the song's protagonist to "do anything" for her lover with the reference to the Rose of Sharon, from the Bible and the John Steinbeck novel The Grapes of Wrath.!

Kate Bush - Song of Solomon starring Jessie Matthews

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Sonnet 116

Love is my sin and thy dear virtue hate,

Hate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving:

O, but with mine compare thou thine own state,

And thou shalt find it merits not reproving;

Or, if it do, not from those lips of thine,

That have profaned their scarlet ornaments

And seal'd false bonds of love as oft as mine,

Robb'd others' beds' revenues of their rents.

Be it lawful I love thee, as thou lovest those

Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee:

Root pity in thy heart, that when it grows

Thy pity may deserve to pitied be.

If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide,

By self-example mayst thou be denied

Sonnet 142

“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any poossible relation witht he beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.”

-Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return, that we may gaze upon thee. What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the mecholat Machanayim”(dance of the Machanayim[see Bereshis 32:3]).

Shir Hashirim 6:13

Obsessive love

she has the strongest voice

he seems to come-then disappear

“trust men”

she might say…

but she is besotted.

powerful men…

powerless women

abused by her brothers

assaulted by watchmen meant to protect,

mocked by the “daughters of Jerusalem”her voice rings true

even now

after millennia.

her playful delight

in his arms

in nature

in perfumery

just treasuring life and love

its pure feeling

images, not lectures,

with no thinking to darken its hue

lying together in bliss

the body’s landscape comes alive

mountains and valleys

hills and dales

every expression pointing to sensuous touch

and caressed contours.

the “curves and edges”

the “perfect imperfections”

all the more for its humanness.

in the end

is the Song

what remains

of this tryst

people are long dead

cultures gone

landscape has forever changed

only those words

that survived the ages

etched into parchment

in black black ink

and canonized as Holy

for some curious Midrashic reason

For maybe these Rabbis realized

that of all the books of the Bible

moralistic, pietistic readings

written by pious scribes

and well intended copyists,

this single book

reflected a truth far deeper

than the imagined perfections of the others,

that this book alone

with its unrequited love

and pain in the flesh

pointed to a reality of human condition

that could not be ignored

a reality about human longing for man and woman

and possibly the Divine too.

love as an impossibility

the chances of lovers loving equally

and intensely at the moment of climax

what goes on in each others minds

what are they thinking?

of the past?

the present?

who are they really making love to?

an image?

a chimera?

an idealism?

what have they projected from their deep wounds

what illusions does love play?

“Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness, serious vanity, misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this.”

William Shakesopeare, Romeo and Juliet

Cry For Me Schechina: Purim 2014

Purim

For millenia,

“She” has watched and suffered alongside us

having had no part of the very “set up”

at the dawn of Genesis, by the Divine Creator,

in that Lurianic myth,

In fact on day 4, (wednesday), I believe

She…was demoted to the size of the moon

(for an innocent question about balance in the order of things no less!)

and since then has languished,

alongside us…kissing the walls of the flaming Temple goodbye ten times-

the long exile begins and

Mother Rachel, buried alone, cries for us too,

Schechina accompanies us into Galut

aeons of pain without end…

and now unacknowledged, Auschwitz sees Her in flames too.

Ah but the secrets of Torah hid this very mystery,

Malchut-Schechina…

Apart and banished from Her beloved (Zohar)

the Divine is split and gendered

longing like the “spring and the mountain”

of Rabbi Nachman’s tale…

to be rescued like the “Lost Princess”

wounded by the 10 poisoned arrows

to be healed by the ten melodies of the “beggar without hands”.

And, as the ARI z’l astonishingly claimed,

it must be by our part,

yes we mere humans,

are the very instrument

to reunite Her once more

agonizingly slowly,

over time,

through our rituals and behavior

our studiousness and even our suffering (Leshem).

But what of now?

even now?

some 70 years or more later

after the Tremendum

She is spoken of less and less

Her silence is deafening.

Can this myth still work?

Where She suffered the worst agonies

alongside our parents…

we don’t think of Her do we…

(As the Degel had wished)

In the greyed landscape of agnosticism

and self-centeredness,

where our halachic practice has become commodified and branded,

where even the pious motives

of Talmidei Chachamim and the sea of Black hats completing shas

reveal more the obsessional need for textual mastery or,

worse, a reward with a ticket into the ultimate (Madison Square) Garden,

A Heavenly Paradiso.

Where the divine bean counter is envisioned as computing

the balance sheet of a life.

Hoping for a black rather than red ink stamp of approval.

No, She is ever abandoned, worse now

having watched her sisters incinerated

in the ovens of Europe and Japan

and the killing and violence persists

the rape and the torture

the powerlessness and abuse behind the front doors

of the so called safe homes across Amerika.

Abused at work, the abuse of even girls…

Incarnated in the symptoms of my patients years later.

OK! Enough of theology and myth Julian

no narrative, no myth, no “feminist renewal”

could even do justice to Her abuse and ours.

The ongoing inhumanity of man to man and man to woman

affects Her nonetheless.

Relinquish your theologies in the smoke of Birkenau

chimneys and radioactive clouds over Hiroshima,

and incendiary bombs over populations centers of Europe

and drone attacks on wedding parties.

Then what of me? What of my own ethical imperatives?

Without theology I am left in front of the distorted mirror

bereft of neat theories and self serving justifications;

bereft of grand totalizing schemes that make sense except

for the victims of water boarding and torture;

carrying all this and owning it as a member of my generation of indifference.

Horrified by my own persistent defects of soul and character

Might we then examine the inner landscape of my memory and dysfunction?

What led me here to this moment of awareness, if not the very wound of

my own obsessions and the poverty of the texts to address them?

She has beckoned me all along,

in dreams and compulsions,

the images were so uniform,

coming so close to Her consciousness

through the very wound,

the deep split in my soul,

of my own lies, deceits, betrayals and hurting of others?

my putting the theory before my raising of children

sacrificing them on the altar of other people’s expectations.

She has beckoned me

more so, in my wounded view of the feminine,

sealed by a disciplinarian mother whose love was ever conditional

whose love I could never earn sufficiently?

resulting in a vision split between

the virgin goddess and the whore of Babylon?

Having been exposed to this dark side of the feminine

the mother, the anima, I spent years in search

of the inappropriate object of desire.

Now,

A slow dawning on the horizon of my soul

that all along this deep yearning for the archetypal

“woman of my dreams” was none other than the Great Mother, Her.

Enveloped time and again by Her unconscious presence in all women

driving me towards her/Her for the appropriate and the other,

the fascination, the infatuation, the obsession,

(maybe this one will heal my deep split-

maybe now I might feel both love and passion together?)

Coming to view this in a different key

this wound as not pathology alone

coming to finally own all of it,

in fact, leading me to this sacred moment

in time-this dawn of liberation-

where theology and psychology met finally

and my worship changed forever.

Seeing all of it

the light and the dark

as Her manifesting in me and through my experience

and yearning and searching for Her ultimate image

through the appropriate and inappropriate

was in reality merely a search for Her.

She too has a dark side

This was the single greatest relief.

(Maybe this is what the kabbalists meant by Yichud?)

For now I worship at a different altar

the “god of my understanding” is none other

than a goddess…

and my access to the ultimate unknowable Maimonidean Divine

must go through Her.

(all entrance to the king must go via the Matronita…Zohar).

Ironic isn't it how He needs Her more than ever.

So… without changing any rituals, Mitzvot or religious demands,

without a change in texts, studying, meditation or pilgrimages

Yet a profound change in the inner landscape, in the desire,

where this newly dis-covered conjured image,

has changed the dynamics for me, albeit in a new key,

which of course changes the entire symphonic sound,

despite ostensibly reading the same notes on the parchment.

In worshipping Her and, through her, all women,

I have moved downtown from the Temple of Apollo

to the Temple of Dionysius,

I sacrifice myself at the altar of eros

and in the seduction and obsession

of love I find solace in her/Her…

for every woman is now a gift from Her

a spiritual opportunity,

to connect with the Great Mother

to drown in Her…

and be reborn.

So forgive me my dear for flirting

it is not only my Viennese genes

(where it is after all an art form!)

No. it is really a process of slow seduction

as deep in my soul as a subterranean well

nourishing me and enlivening me,

making me whole and gendered

in my representation of zeir anpin

in my admittedly poor and aging attempt

to recreate, time and again

that initial adolescent thrill,

that sent shivers of delight though my whole body

(in complete opposition to the more typical experience of

focused male cycle of genital need followed by relief)

at the conquest of her/Her,

and the sacred realization

that She too needs to be adorned by my devotions (kishutim)

seduced slowly and carefully

an art form that requires practice and perfecting.

And in the core of this seduction lies the surrender

to the possibility over and over again

(and of increasing frequency with age)

of rejection, that most painful and wounding of responses

going to the very heart of this sacred enterprise

and de-validating it,

yet ( I now realize) necessary and humbling,

for the soul to be refined once again in the crucible of compassion.

Now in the rare conquest lies a newfound humility,

at the very magic of this alchemical process,

(like in Jung’s dream of Tiferet and Malchut)

and the gift of acceptance,

and validation by the innocent child deep inside me

before the abuse corrupted my neural networks,

but even more so, a message from Her…

a silent “yes” can be heard…from off the biographical stage

“you have vanquished ME!”

and the deep desolation inside

is momentarily relieved.

And there is no further need to “act out”.

And that is the litmus test of this whole exercise/devotion.

Nothing has changed in time (nor over generations)

in this neurological hard wiring, the amygdala is stable,

nothing has changed in that glorious feeling deep down

since my adolescence,

only the dawning of awareness that this very eros of desire

is Divine.

So forgive me

if this looks and sounds impious

as if I am justifying a behavior that seems inappropriate

a gadfly, womanizer, flirt,

for I am finally pursuing the woman/Woman of my dreams

without shame

and it takes a lifetime…

after which I will be reunited with the Great Mother

once more, and drown happily in Her again.

Maybe what is needed for Her rescue

is a new ritual in the key of G minor

that validates Her and Her plight

that brings consciousness of Her into the

daily rituals and study halls.

Having demythologized Judaism in the Lithuanian

yeshiva halls of Volozhyn and Lakewood

we also banished Her

having appropriated and absorbed the European

psychic double standards regarding eros

we sanitized our praxis into a scholarly-analytic

Halacha-obsessed matrix.

We valorized the intellect and the performative alone.

She is excluded from the study halls

as are women who wish to participate.

Her rescue will require a re-tooling, a new software,

a softening,

and opening to vulnerability,

and the imaginative,

a sensitivity to Her incarnated women down here

a relinquishing of the mastery of texts,

for an intuitive understanding,

a reinvestment of the teaching of myth/kabbalah/chassidut

without the misogeny.

Maybe maybe,

We can then give appropriate tribute to the millions of women

who also perished, there,

who are abused here,

who have no voice anywhere,

who work in silence everywhere,

who continue to suffer:

it is only after this is fixed will She be honored.

The Horror of the ICU: A Mediation on LOGOS and APOLLO

The aim of this study was to illuminate the meanings of being critically

ill in a sound-intensive ICU patient room, as disclosed through

patients’ narratives. Patient rooms in ICUs are filled with loud activity

and studies have revealed sound levels comparable to those of a

busy road above the patient’s head. There is a risk that the sound or

noise is disturbing and at worst a major problem for the patient, but

there is a lack of knowledge concerning the patients’ own

experiences. Thirteen patients were asked to narrate their

experiences of the sound environment in ICU patient rooms. The

interviews were analyzed using a phenomenological- hermeneutical

method inspired by the philosophy of Ricoeur. Six themes emerged

from the analysis.

Conclusion: The meanings of being a patient in a sound- intensive

environment were interpreted as never knowing what to expect next

regarding noise, but also of being situated in the middle of an

uncontrollable barrage of noise, unable to take cover or disappear.

This condition is not to be seen as static; for some patients there is

movement and change over time. The meanings indicate that the

unpredictable shifts between silence and disturbing sounds stress the

critically ill patient and impede sleep and recovery. Our findings

indicate the need to reduce disturbing and unexpected sounds and

noise around critically ill patients in high-tech environments in order to

facilitate wellbeing, sleep and recovery. Nurses have a vital role in

developing such an environment.

Meanings of Being Critically Ill in a Sound-Intensive ICU Patient Room - A

Phenomenological Hermeneutical Study Lotta Johansson, Ingegerd Bergbom, and Berit Lindahl. [1]

I WORRY about the horror of the ICU

despite all good intentions

and the dizzying scientific advances

and gains in fighting disease and death

acute heart and lung disorders

stroke and arrhythmias

But the price,

the price

we pay,

in terms of our loss of dignity and humanity.

Watching my father in-law

after massive stroke

connected to ventilator

a silent vigil

in the presence of technological noise…

The price,

in human suffering

was not calculated

he was not consulted

yet he survived through this very Apollinic miracle

of the intellect, the mastery of science and technology.

so...

we have disconnected the tubes

and survival is now assured

with such a deficit

and knowing

how he had felt about these things

and watching his stoicism

and dogged faith

in the face of all of this

the very indignity of his exposure

the absence of privacy

every index of bodily function displayed

on monitors

to see and hear the beeps

and the sounds of breathing, pulse,

alarms bells and whistles going off

all around.

Suddenly this rhythm is disturbed by the loudspeaker blaring

sudden codes Blue, Red, or Green,

over loudspeaker for all to hear

medical staff and patients…

sudden rushing of personnel to one room

and then silence.

Not knowing what happened.

Except for those initiates in white

To whom the gnosis was handed down.

The terror and horror

is evident all around

humanity is not important

only physicality

in this temple to the body, survival

no, not even the body...(skin gets ignored)

rather, survival of vital organs the heart and lungs

a temple to the pulse and blood pressure

a church to the oxygen content of blood and the culture of

body fluids.

What happened to us?

the Apollonic analytic impulse gone awry

for the sake of mere body survival?

We sacrifice the soul

we trample over the heart

we trod over the psyche in pain.

Depression, anxiety, terror, paranoia

have no place here,

like the trenches of WWI

in the trenches of medical warfare

those feint of heart must go home

but here, to die peacefully?

it's either or…

For if you enter these rooms

you must surrender soul at the front door

and live the indignity of exposed documentation of every body index

the numbers game,

the spreads,

the cultures of bacteria,

the analysis of blood until anemic.

Then to submit to the insertion of tubes into every orifice

that force in or retract body fluids

that invade the inner spaces of bladder

lungs, gastro-intestinal tract or veins.

They measure what goes in and what goes out

they analyze and form spreadsheets and x-cel files

and then alter the program accordingly.

If, and only if, you release your body to them

might you withdraw to the mind

withdraw to the only space left you have control

the imagined body of pain:

the mind's eye, the imagination, the inner turmoil.

That is if you are not turned prodded poked or injected

Trached, intubated, pegged x rayed, scanned ultrasounded, or merely EKG’d.

Then they make rounds on you,

Those boys in white

as if you as an independent thinking person

do not exist

for what you have to say has no relevance

they have you pegged already

there is nothing you could offer

no information of any use to them.

They huddle and decide

without your consent

(you left that at the front door remember?)

as to the next course of action

in their war against the angel of death.

Of course their motive is pure

Of course they studied hard to get here

Of course they claim victory in their battles

Of course they do so with courage

They are on the hero’s quest after all.

They are on a mission

they have rules of engagement

there are commanders and generals and privates

there is rank.

There is competence and incompetence

And behind all of this is another industry of malpractice lawyers

Just waiting to pounce on them.

In this tyranny of the soul

how does one survive?

really?

What must one sacrifice

to survive?

what scars are left from just this grotesque omission?

this failure of vision,

tied down

on the altar of Apollo?

The mastery of Logos?

I think I know...it came to me….

EROS!

she is left to wither

never to re-cover,

never to rise.

She is the sacrifice to the men in white

the high priests of Apollo and Logos.

Her softness and intuition

Her mildness and round corners

Defies the hard edges of the machines

gathered around the bed of the Patriarch

With her, chasms of separation and alienation are bridged.

The Goddess is absent.

Woman’s psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos. The concept of Eros could be expressed in modern terms as psychic relatedness, and that of Logos as objective interest.

(Jung, Aspects of the Feminine, 1982, Princeton, p65).

Logos is a certain peculiar quality in a man's being which leads him to discriminate, to reason, to judge, to divide, to understand in a particular way. And one cannot understand all this without also thinking of its antithesis, the equally intuitive concept of Eros, which would be then a principle of relatedness, seeing things together, gathering things together, establishing relations between things, not judging things, not looking at them properly, but rather attracting or repelling them. Maybe we need a medicine based on EROS not LOGOS so that we can choose, the question is what would it look like? The ancient Greek word psyche means “butterfly,” a creature that undergoes a long period of metamorphosis in the chrysalis state before awakening is possible. The maturation of the soul unfolds through the lure of Eros. The myth teaches us that without the prick of Eros, the containment of the imaginal realm he creates and experiences of erotic destruction, the psyche remains virginal and infantile. An example of a virginal psyche can often be seen in someone who is fascinated with dreams and visions but is caught in constant reflecting. Transformation begins in imagination and reflection but requires a move forward into the possibilities that have been imagined. Reflection is not enough. Psyche needs embodiment. Eros provides the impetus for this movement by bringing a passion and desire for a fuller and richer life. According to Plato, Eros doesn’t just have to do with our relationships to people, but with all interactions, both inner and outer, to nature and to spirit. Eros has to do with intentions of the Self. As individuals, we need to be willing to suffer the bitterness as well as the sweetness that Eros brings. The god’s wondrous beauty needs to be seen and known, which can only occur through our own personal suffering and sacrifice. This is not neurotic suffering, but suffering in service to the Self. Our awakening begins with our yearning to “be in touch” with each other and with our sense of how “out of touch” we are with our archetypal roots. Eros gives the soul this yearning Apollo and Daphne.

The myth of Daphne is an illustration of fate and revenge of the gods. She was part of cruel power play between two archers, Apollo and Eros. The proud Apollo bullied Eros who shot two arrows, one tipped in gold and the other in lead to find revenge. Eros, the son of Aphrodite enchanted his arrows to cause total lust and desire in the golden arrow victim, and total hatred in the recipient of the lead tipped arrow. Apollo was hit with the golden arrow, and the object of his desire, Daphne, was struck by the lead one. The struggle between lust and chastity is ended when Daphne turns into a laurel tree. She begged her father to transform her body forever in order to escape Apollo’s desire for her. Eros is a superhuman power which, like nature herself, allows itself to be conquered and exploited as though it were impotent. But triumph over nature is dearly paid for. Nature requires no explanations of principle, but asks only for tolerance and wise measure. "Eros is a mighty daemon," as the wise Diotima said to Socrates. We shall never get the better of him, or only to our own hurt. He is not the whole of our inward nature, though he is at least one of its essential aspects.

(Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957. "On the Psychology of the Unconscious” P.32f)

Eros is the god of sexual desire. He marries Psyche, a goddess/human representing the human soul. They have one daughter Hedone. Hedone is the quest for pleasure with only good consequences. The English word hedonism is derived from this word, but has a meaning far from the original. Eros is also known in Rome as Cupid. Might we begin with medicine and the trenches of the ICU with an experiment in EROS? Might this expose the Apollonic torture around us in the name of love?

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3439833/