Zadok HaDin
“On the day when Rabbi died the Rabbis decreed a public fast and offered prayers for heavenly mercy. They furthermore announced that whoever said that Rabbi was dead would be stabbed with a sword. Rabbi's handmaid ascended the roof and prayed: 'The immortals desire Rabbi [to join them] and the mortals desire Rabbi [to remain with them]; may it be the will [of God] that the mortals may overpower the immortals.' When, however, she saw how often he resorted to the privy, painfully taking off his tefillin and putting them on again, she prayed: 'May it be the will [of the Almighty] that the immortals may overpower the mortals.' As the Rabbis incessantly continued their prayers for [heavenly] mercy she took up a jar and threw it down from the roof to the ground. [For a moment] they ceased praying and the soul of Rabbi departed to its eternal rest. 'Go,' said the Rabbis to Bar Kappara, 'and investigate.' He went and, finding that [Rabbi] was dead, he tore his cloak and turned the tear backwards. [On returning to the Rabbis] he began: 'The angels and the mortals have taken hold of the holy ark. The angels overpowered the mortals and the holy ark has been captured.' 'Has he,' they asked him, ',gone to his eternal rest?'- 'You,' he replied, 'said it; I did not say it”[1]
In a world unmitigated by chesed
(for after all “olam chessed yibaneh”)
then the horror of death
the unmitigated loss of a loved one forever
the pain of separation
is consistent with the prayer above, ZADOK HADIN
the claim that God is just and metes out deserved reward
that His world is based on Mishpat, we claim.
But what happens when all unravels?
When the innocent suffer,
When a million babies go up in flames?
What narrative suffices?
What Jobian exegesis satisfies abomination?
Can we be satisfied with Lurianic myths of souls and reincarnation?
Or paradoxical faith of Reb Nachman?
Or eschatological visions of the resurrection of the dead?
I still mix up mercy and grace
Touched by my Christian culture
I see grace as divine grace, a gift from the treasury of unearned gifts
To the sinner who repents because of it.
But chessed/grace and gevurah/din are on opposite poles of a spectrum
So whatever din is
Chessed is the mirror image.
Chessed is not dependent upon my actions
Chessed is open and unconditional
Din is measured and earned
Din is meted out to the nanogram not more
Its precision is defined in the Book of Life and Death
Punishment is exact, halachic.
So what is rachamim/mercy?
Mitigation? the parade of witnesses at the sentencing hearing
Influencing the judge to soften his justice
Having already been pronounced guilty?
What of a world where God is in hiding?
Where Mengele was called an angel
Of death no doubt, but an angel nonetheless?
And Satan? What of his role in forcing God’s hand with Job?
Where God is swayed by him? Where is mercy/rachamim?
There is a feminine quality to rachamim
The Rechem is the cosmic womb
Out of which all emerges
And God exposes His femininity when he delivers rachamim
And what of this Mituk Hadin? This “sweetening of harsh judgments/dinim?
That the Zaddik has the ability to “sweeten” the judgment?
By his actions, his piety, and his own vicarious suffering?
How does that alter the definition of DIN?
As if God can be swayed, His rage assuaged,
His strict sense of justice moved…
And those Talmudic sages who died without fault?
We are told they too must die…
For the world has been forever altered by that cunning old serpent
So the Rabbis bid we “hang their death on the Nachash Ha-kadmoni”
That primordial serpent who precipitated death in this world.
In a neat system of ethics and virtue there is no room for chessed
But this is not a neat street (and Mr. Plumbean could not care less).
And God has introduced the notion of mitigation and mercy/rachamim
Precisely because of His chessed.
Kabbala teaches these archetypes are found within the godhead too!
Reflecting the holographic image of the human soul.
And in the production of the human from a putrid drop of semen
The Ari z’l describes the journey through which
the drop travels in the process of
unification (yichud) as a process that unifies chesed and gevurah:
“And then yesod of Abba is clothed in yesod of Ima, where chesed and
gevurah are mixed together...
That is why yesod is called ‘West’ (ma’arav), for it is
a ‘mixture’ (eiruv) of chesed and gevurah together.
Each soul has this anatomical duality,
this schizophrenic graft (eiruv) that tears it
apart throughout life…
As if we live the life of the divine
Or He lives His anguish through our suffering.
And then we are judged…
The sefirotic tree and the tension between chessed and gevurah
is the basic spiritual DNA of the universe and reflects
the same quality of the divine immanent within it.
And in this Lurianic system we see for the first time
the power of the human/adept
In rescuing the divine from its own gevurot.
Since creation produced a catastrophic implosion within the divine,
And a failure, it devolves upon the mystic
to rescue the lost divine sparks, that
have been surrounded by the forces of satanic evil (husks/kelipot)
And return them through the power of ritual practice
and meditational yichudim.
This “sweetens” the gevurot.
The world of creation is a dark gnostic place where evil rules
And represents the explosion of gevurot out of the divine godhead
In this world of divine refuse,
The human soul has no chance,
Only the Zaddik might overcome the powers of evil and banality
Through his life of piety, abstinence and self-abnegation for human desire.
He alone is able to sweeten the harsh judgments (gevurot) through his
Mesiras nefesh, his martyrdom.
In my body I only experience Midat Hadin
The slow decline is irreversible
The diabetes progresses despite medicine
The shoulder and hips crackle and creek from wear and tear,
And the memory loss, well let us leave it at that!
This is nature, the cycle of birth decline and death
There is no escape, [2]
הולא הזחא ירשבמו claims Job
This is Mishpat, de natura, din period.
And in this setting zaddok hadin is appropriate.
Only in our mythic narratives and texts of faith
Have we come to see the divine
Working in history,
And project images of grace in His miracles.
And sense of chesed at times in nature, music and lovemaking
Those moments when the sublime is felt
And being alive is tasted on the palate like a good wine
[1] BABYLONIAN TALMUD, Ketubot 104a (Rabbi I. Epstein ed., The Soncino Press 1935)
[2] It is known that this world is like a cloak for the elevated world. Just as clothing allow us to get an idea of the shape of the person wearing the clothing without revealing his true essence, so too God can be understood, though not truly, through examining the physical world. It is said of man that he is created in the image of God…which means to say that through contemplating man’s physical body, a person can come to know God.
The Circle of Tears
Crie du chat
Brooding on my ongoing waves of emotions,
Tears flooding in suddenly from the strangest triggers
Of memories of mother.
Even my father refers to her now
As “of blessed memory”
Having processed the facticity of her absence
And its permanence.
He no longer awakens to an empty bedroom
Asking me if Mom is coming home.
I still cry for my mother,
I used to cry with her present in my life,
As a child,
Often in outrage as to her petulance
And obstinacy,
And facing my father’s rage at my inability to control my tears,
(His Prussian sense of the British upper lip,)
Extending to a 6 year old whiny olive-skinned kid (too dark for him)
But suddenly, in an insight, that came from nowhere,
In the back of Berditchev, that enclave of outcasts, miscreants, and dropouts
Where all are accepted, and the singing is beyond,
In the holy city of black and white Lakewood that tolerates only conformity,
Where the Hallel in this shul, brought me joy for the first time since her death
I am surprised at my tears of joy.
These tears come from such a different place
Than the broken heart, a different anatomical region,
a different planet of being.
And it was here,
At the back of shul,
Of Berditchev
I realized
Those childhood tears from the moment of birth
(they tell me I cried a lot)
To the tears of this moment
Are a long continuous stream of lachrymosity
For the world, for the broken self, for the past, for the future.
But even more so
I realized in a flash
That the tears of this newborn
Were prescient tears
They are the tears of an unconscious feel
for the tears that will be shed
One day, one day
Having left the cradle of the cosmic egg
Nurtured by this woman
Who gave her life blood and carried me through term
Suffering the weight of twins
And the agony of delivery and post-operative pain
And being told by the nurses “you had your fun carnally
Now you must pay the price”
That this woman
My mother
Would one day
Without my consent
With no ostensible rationale
(Other than the “Nachash Ha-Kadmoni”)
Be lost to me.
Even then, that first crie du chat
At the moment of entry into this world
I was already crying for her,
For the loss of her,
That was to be.
And despite the guardian angel Lailah
Who supposedly taught me truth
about the world of righteousness/wickedness
And adjured me to be good (much good that did!)
And warned me of the perils of this world
(I would forever be attracted to those!)
And promised she would meet me
at the time I will be ready to leave this world
To see if I had lived a good life…
And supposedly my birth cries come
from leaving this idyllic garden of the womb, into
the world of suffering and retribution,
Or the cries were from the amnesia
for the Torah I had suddenly forgotten
when she slapped me on my philtrum…
I know better
(I always thought I did which infuriated my grammar school masters)
I know better
The cries are not for the past
The idyllic womb and hankering to return to it,
a place of serenity and warmth,
Or even the learned discourses of the Torah,
No…They are for the future
This little baby cried for the tears I now shed
In a continuous stream of salty consciousness
For the mother I would one day lose
As I have now done
And the circle of tears is now complete.
Kotel
April Fool’s Day 2019
A blustery evening on the slippery stones of the plaza
the clouds have raged all day.
The wet air reminds me of London in April after a shower.
The sky closes in on the yellow-bathed Kotel.
I count only 4 or 5 men leaning close to the wall
the soggy stones receiving their tears.
The rest are huddled in the side catacomb warmed by space heaters,
I joined the evening prayers.
I face the huge Herodian wall wondering
how many slaves were used to hold these massive
stones.
A long-bearded man begins the prayer-
I'm glad I will be able to say Kaddish.
I sit on a plastic garden chair facing east and I am lost in time and memory.
The hum of the worshipers surrounds me as I sit in my grief
facing the future without mother.
Grief is such a lonely experience.
Why did I come here?
Because an ancient text told me this is the last place on earth
where a trace of Her resides?
But the Kotel is silent tonight.
The stone-faced wall gives no hint of Her presence
in fact its grand facade makes no impression on my soul.
It is too fraught, it has too much culture,
historical and religious baggage for just a wall.
No icons, no images, no statuettes to focus the mind
It is too harsh, too bleak, too cruel providing no relief for the mind to unload.
Yet there is something very real about tonight.
Facing a silent obelisk in front of me,
a stone the height of two men reaching to the arched
ceiling, this will survive time, surely my life.
And my descendants will come here to pray
and beg for their lives and ask relief of their suffering.
And as mother is no longer in my life, and as I mourn her loss,
this wall stares back at me in silence,
reminding me of how silent the cemetery is.
How eternal the ending is, and will be for me in the not so distant future.
How I need to befriend death and stop escaping its silent message.
The prayers end with my solemn Kaddish
and I am grateful for my strangers-in-prayer who wait
for me to end, each knowing that one day
they will need a quorum themselves to memorialize their loved ones.
I leave the plaza acknowledging
how few worshipers came on this forlorn Jerusalem evening
as a wet cold wind wraps herself around my bare neck.
This place, this plaza, this Kotel is too much too
many tears, too much history, too many claims,
too many political narratives and cultural
appropriations.
No wonder She is silent.
Kaddish For Mum
“There are circumstances that must shatter you; and if you are not shattered, then you have not understood your circumstances. In such circumstances, it is a failure for your heart not to break. And it is pointless to put up a fight, for a fight will blind you to the opportunity that has been presented by your misfortune. Do you wish to persevere pridefully in the old life? Of course you do: the old life was a good life. But it is no longer available to you. It has been carried away, irreversibly. So there is only one thing to be done. Transformation must be met with transformation. Where there was the old life, let there be the new life. Do not persevere. Dignify the shock. Sink, so as to rise.”
― Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish
“The notion of afterlife is far less important than the liberation of the deceased’s soul from this world, meaning that the Kaddish is most importantly a responsibility towards the living. The prayer increases the living’s awareness of the fragility of life. One recites Kaddish to remember one’s own mortality, but also to keep from dwelling on that mortality: ‘[…] the bottom line is startlingly clear. In words and through practice, Kaddish insists that the mourner turn away from death and choose life.”
-Diamant, Anita. Saying Kaddish
Nothing forces me to confront
The divide within me,
Between Kavana and Keva,
Between,
The soul torn between its desire for epiphany, d’veykut,
experience of the oceanic pleroma,
and the realization that that ritual, custom, minhag, tradition
Halacha…survives the erosion of time and enthusiasm of revolution.
Nothing forces me to confront
That divide within me,
More than the KADDISH.
The daily grind, the volume of text to daven to merely arrive at Kaddish
The anxiety of getting to shul ahead of davening
To grab the lectern
Or just make the first kaddish in time
(Which bookends the entire service)
The services requiring your presence throughout, with no interruption.
All this designed to not grieve Mum
But to enact a millennium of custom, ritual behavioral norms of
Grief’s expression within the halachic legal framework and tradition.
All this business has dragged me back to the halachic altar
From where I fled long ago for the spiritual pastures
of a freewheeling romantic hassidic piety.
Where I have fought the battle against hidebound orthodox thinking
And brain dead piety,
Neither the German medieval pietists nor the heady French elite scholars,
But the fertile divide between the latter day
Lithuanian scholarly tradition and the
rhetoric of the Baal Shem Tov’s students as my teachers,
That first generation of Masters,
working through his spiritual revolution,
some 200 hundred years ago.
Now, however, the recitation of the mourner’s Kaddish
Forces me back to the benefits of repetition
The mantra like quality of its recitation
And the polyphony of joining others
An orchestra out of tune with itself,
Some with the same pitch, others tone deaf,
Everyone with a slightly different pronunciation
Betraying their roots, often as Baalei T’shuva with
No roots, but aping the Rebbe who influenced them most.
And it is the repetitive quality that may be working through me
To acceptance
Of the travesty of death
Of the outrageous absence of HER in my life
Of the emptiness of the apartment without her perched on the easy chair
Listening to Heifetz, Kreisler and Pearlman.
The anger is slowly subsiding
The oceanic waves of grief still occur
The dark depression subtending it all,
Yet the very focus on the pecking order each day
The negotiations with other mourners
Of who shall take the lectern,
(The pecking order of who has greater halachic mourning status..)
Watching the clock at home warily,
Ordering the events of the day around these service times,
Arriving before the davening when often the shul is empty,
And the attentiveness to the moment the reader ends the previous prayer
Triggering the cacophony of
“magnified…sanctified, may His great name be blessed…”
All of this..
The attention away from Mum and on this ritual...stuff...
Is the chemical composition of acceptance
and the rabbinic genius and the practice of minhag Yisroel.
I liken it to the keva/Halacha/ritual performance of the wedding ceremony
Where the reading of the ketuba in archaic Aramaic takes some 8 minutes
And all listen or muse while the honor
is bestowed upon an elder to recite it word for word.
The Bride and groom accept this,
despite the preposterously archaic sums of money
Set aside in the “contract”…the ritual reading takes place nonetheless.
These rituals adorn the ceremony and hang like fruit
To be plucked because of tradition
and hallowed in time in the nature of things
That get repeated generation after generation.
It is less the ratio/mind/cause
and more of the tone/ritual communal custom/minhag
That causes the transmission of praxis.
“Surely it is foolish to hate facts.
The struggle against the past is a futile struggle.
Acceptance seems so much more like wisdom.
I know all this.
And yet there are some facts that one must never, never accept.
This is not merely an emotional matter.
The reason that one must hate certain facts
is that one must prepare for the
possibility of their return.
If the past were really past, then one might permit
oneself an attitude of acceptance,
and come away from the study of history with a
feeling of serenity.
But the past is often only an earlier instantiation of the evil in
our hearts.
It is not precisely the case that history repeats itself.
We repeat history—or we do not repeat it,
if we choose to stand in the way of its repetition.
For this reason, it is one of the purposes of the study of history
that we learn to oppose it.”
Mum is actually teaching me through her absence
Her loss
Her present absence
Each time I think when reciting the Kaddish
By her absence
And the halachic behavior it triggered in my observances
For this year
As her son
And mourner
No greater bond
Acknowledged in Halacha
This need for keva/repetitiveness.
Her structured disciplined life comes to mind, it
Triggers a memory from childhood days
of daily practice of scales and arpeggios on the piano
and my mother’s stick ever present should I slack in the daily routine.
She was harder on herself.
Did this bring out the rebel in me all these years?
To refuse authority, be it political or halachic?
The maverick with a guttural hatred of tyranny
and the heretical refusal to bow to Rabbinic authority?
Does this Kaddish now bring me full circle to the daily
Genuflections -the five bendings of the knee during Kaddish,
Albeit kicking and screaming, as I did as a child,
A metaphorical hint to the need to return to the primal site of trauma
The mother as agent of violence, discipline,
repetitive scales and arpeggios until perfection?
Now from the grave sending this message
etched in my loyalty to memorialize her daily
For a year in this Kaddish, the prayer for the dead,
or maybe this prayer for the living?
Maybe the Kaddish is sent for me? From beyond the grave?
Religion, and the Kaddish, can be used
as a religious strategy that practices both a positive
dogmatism, in the sense of giving support and structure to the mourner,
and negative dogmatism, in the sense that it structures the process
of mourning for the mourner, but not in cooperation with the mourner.
By performing a ritual, obligated or voluntarily,
the mourner repetitively performs the act of mourning,
which is more essential than definition or interpretation.
Because the Kaddish is stronger as a rhythm
than it is in terms of its content, the rhythm and sounds become like a
mantra when it is repeatedly and mechanically recited.[1]
Kaddish is teaching me the value of repetitive ritual,
the recitation, mantra-like, of Aramaic words.
Encoded in Halacha and historicity,
forcing me back to the discipline of practice and the
acceptance of authority outside myself.
Thanks Mum
Once more you influenced me
In your absence your teaching reaches me
In my Kaddish in the key of C# minor,
I feel the discipline you always tried to instill,
Your absent presence once more,
Sanctified, magnified, may her name be Blessed, Mum.
[1]Gillman, Neil. ‘Coping with Chaos: Jewish Theological and Ritual Recourses’. Death, Bereavement and Mourning. Ed. Samuel Heilman. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2005. 135-150.
The Sacred and The Profane
The sacred..
Always felt by me to be “other-worldy”
Always beyond reach of the little whiny olive-skinned boychikl
Whose mind was concentrated on the ladies gallery rather than the siddur.
What is this “chiyus” they keep on about in Hassidic discourse?
This vitality? Is it related to sanctity or an alternative matrix?
The divine breath of life that permeates and is incarnated in all things living?
Why do the hassidic masters insist we get in touch with this “chiyus”?
(Reb Hershey tells me he only gets it in the yiddish translation…“leibedig”)
If vitality, then all nature embodies it, is filled with it
Thrives on it,
But where is the sacred?
this usual means divorced from, separated from, privileged spaces,
Kedusha…with all this sacred ramifications
boundaries in time space and person
Seems to be the opposite of chiyus.
I feel the sacred rarely only,
Kol Nidre, dressed in my white kittel before the open ark,
The notion that this night all is being seen by the One above,
And the community joins in the sacred time annually.
The seder night surrounded by grandchildren
whose curious eyes and prepared Torah’s
Are itching to be unloaded the angels in my life.
Shabbat night at 3am struggling with my Degel
I sense a Presence with me, an excitement
as if his lips are moving from the grave
Alongside me. [1]
And rarely in the moment of love, as my heart empties into an-other,
Completely absorbed and unaware of the burden of self for a brief moment.
More recently when the Rebbe grabs my hand in the Friday evening tanzl
After Sabbath services, and an electric-like sensation runs through me
And I feel the sacred once more,
washing the shmutz of the week form my soul.
But this chiyus business is different,
At least what I can make out from the Hassidic masters.
Slowly it dawns on me,
That the very feelings I have had…for so long,
of life flowing through my veins
The very intuition of things mortal,
That deep gnawing sensation in my chest that my life is so fragile
That each moment passing is on this trajectory into the finality of death…
The very sense that every moment is already flowing into the past
That what drives me this minute is already part of my history
That forces way beyond my awareness
From my birth through my death
Has already been written in some future biography
And the choices I make really are not mine.
The energy of rising daily to face anew day
The joy of living and the grief of loss
The sense of the sacred in communal sharing
The oceanic feeling of a choral cantata
but also the naughtiness of passion,
Watching my mother and aunt slowly die and lose their chiyus, their life force.
These very feelings are in fact the “chiyus” I do not sense the sacred here.
For I can only sense them in the context of their very ending.
Within the road map defined by the utter tragedy of life itself,
and my own mortality,
At times during the very experience itself,
The grief within the joy wells up,
At others, the awareness of how fleeting it all is.
The sense of losing those of the prior generation one by one,
in ever increasing frequency,
And the knowing that our generation is next…
Not too long away..
Nothing stands between us and la morte.
The immediacy and sense of urgency..
Of every day and every breath..
Now looming larger than ever.
This “chiyus” this life breath, flux, ether
Is the very stuff of their discourse,
(And unlike Reb Hershey, I see no joy, or liveliness.)
So what does it mean to make sacred?
To realize the connection between the infinite One
and the incarnated “chiyus”
They keep insisting on?
Reviewing the Rebbes below the notion seems more a reflection of their own
Hassidic school, from the students of the magic
to Reb Nachman and the third generation Psyzch school. (Shem MiShmuel).
And this dawning for me is a demythological move
whereby the sacred becomes the
very incarnation of the divine in this world
that animates it and thus totally dependent
upon man to evoke the sacred nature
through his perfecting his body, his very carnal nature.
In a dualistic Lurianic world, man must determine
how the divine is incarnated in the world
by which way the chiyus descends, by his actions,
intentionality, and purity of spirit.
The world is not sacred, there is an infinite chasm between
the divine and the natural order of the universe.
Yet there is in this vacuum between the two the possibility of
redemption of the spirit and the sacred might still
occur but only under the agency
of the adept.
[1] Likutey Moharan 12, When a person learns with holiness and purity, learning something from which the Tzaddik taught, this brings about the aspect of Neshikin, kisses. At the time when the Tzaddik had originally spoke the Torah, his speak became the aspect of Oral Torah and a speaking spirit. Therefore, when we learn the Torah of the Tzaddik, we become attached to him but usually, this goes unnoticed and unrecognized but this is not so in the case of the Tzaddik. The Tzaddik's lips as taught by or Sages, move in his grave. He becomes alive so to speak, when his Torah's are said.
The Secret of Schechina Be-Galuta
The Divine feminine,
Lost in the world of reality
Drowning in the mathematical precision of Halacha
And the black and white world of (teva) nature.
The Lost Princess remains swooned in the water castle [1]
Awaiting the Zaddik who knows the healing powers of the ten pulses.
And those addictions that pull me down,
For work, the use of time, the obsessions of the heart, the rage;
The Degel tells me, are happening to her too,
Mirrored in my soul.
Does this raise the stakes?...or comfort me?
How to live life with this gnosis?
As if, my troubled life, in fact all tragedy
Is but her screaming for attention.
The doubting Thomas, this familiar Kritik in the head
Pulls me further down into the blotte
The rational mind used to be so certain
But not so lately.
Who is She after all?
I know of her as mother but beyond?
In Her absence only is the gaping hole in my heart
And indicator of her lasting power.
Has she joined Her?
What does that mean for me?
Mother is no more
And Her absence points me to the eternal Mother
She incarnated,
And the pain is unbearable.
Surprised by my level of grief,
I turn to the texts of comfort
And the rituals of mourning
Hoping for an insight
Even if non logical
A hint a feeling, a Wordsworthian intuition
Embedded in a millennium of wisdom
The twists and turns of minhag
Envelop me in discussions of behavior
The expression of grief socially,
All the while allowing me the inner freedom to grieve
And await insight as I pass through the rites of separation and loss.
My mother,
Larger than life
Who nurtured me inside her body
Bore me,
Trained me,
Prepared the life path for me
Albeit kicking and screaming, but in the end
I had no other choice,
No other path anyway like familiar
To the difficult sometimes impossible road
She set me on.
She was harder on herself
But that was little solace
For the little brown-skinned whiny kid
Whose romantic fantasies controlled
His waking life.
In this vale of tears
Things become clearer slowly
Understanding deepens
And death looms larger
As it takes more and more of my beloved.
Is it because death is inevitable?
In the face of such finality
Where all is levelled
No matter who
No matter what has been accomplished
No matter how pious
How beloved?
A new perspective evolves
Molded from the pain.
The remains of the day,
What is left in the gaping loss?
In the vacuum she left behind
Unwillingly taken from this world
Is her life’s motivation,
Her drive,
Her uncompromising demands,
Her self-critique,
Of all those who connected to her
She held me to the greatest standard
Demanded most from me
But was most loyal to me.
I tried not to disappoint
But she would never let on
Always demanding more.
If Yosef Karo has his muse, it was his mother
Who drove him in Maggid Mesharim
If Reb Chayim Shumlevits ran to Kever Rachel
It was crying “mama, mama Chaikel is du”
If the Lelover Rebbe’s eyes rolled up
By his Shabbes tish, he could be heard mumbling “mamale mamale”
Now I must take my place
With those who have lost the living presence of the great mother
And settle for the memories reflections and loss.
In this haze I must divine what she might want
How she would react
What she would ask of me.
It comes easily now
But for how long?
In memory we will now meet again
In the heart of pain, we will converse
In the sorrow of loss, I will continue to love
She who bore me
Nurtured me
Demanded so much.
With mum now part of Her,
The stakes are raised
Possibly too high for me
For now all pain is her’s too
And my task in rescuing the Schechina
Becomes more urgent.
There is no time to waste
All she demanded becomes more urgent
I’m not getting younger
There is so much to accomplish
In these tears
In the unbearable pain
I am being summoned
By her, by Her.
The secret
Those ten pulses
The healing
Of the Lost Princess.
[1] Rebbe Nachman’s Water Castle, Sippurei Maasiyot
After The Funeral
After the funeral
In times of grief and anger
We turn to our texts of comfort
For relief from the anguish
And unbearable pain
Her loss
This deep hole in the heart
The pit in the stomach
The uncontrollable tears
There is some comfort in these texts
The ones that arise..
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
You struggled to the end
Every breath so hard
You refused to let go
Resisting the grim reaper
Every muscle in your frail chest
Pulling in unison
Starving for oxygen
Pulling it in
The struggle
Never easy
Nothing came easy to her
From childhood
Up at 5am
The violin
Initially an instrument of conditional love
Later the vehicle that transported her over the seas
To play before Vaughn Williams
And finally an instrument of shame
As she realized the loss of her prowess when picking up the fiddle
Not having practised
My last vision of her holding it.
It defined her and the love of her life fell for her
Because of it
And in the last few years we would sit and watch
Videos of the masters Heifetz, Menuhin, Kreisler, Zuckerman, Perlman.
She drew such satisfaction watching their mastery.
Nothing came easy to her
Her work she brought home
Knew no boundaries
(of course we suffered)
And that conditional love was taken to new heights
As she pushed us to excellence without compromise
And we suffered
As we fulfilled her dreams.
Nothing came easy
As those who critiqued her disciplinary style challenged her in public
At times demeaning her
At times insulting her professionalism
Yet she kept her silence
Never stooping to respond.
Her faith kept her going “God help me through this!” She remembers thinking.
Nothing came easy
As she followed Dad to the Holy Land
The language the people the rudeness the foreignness
Of it all.
But her fierce zionism that came over her in 1967
After the Six Day War, watching it on British TV
Was uncompromising and surprising
She was always the musician and apolitical.
Nothing came easy
As she succumbed to the infections that followed her failing white cells.
The hospital visits and pokes and proddings
The infusions and intesntivie specialists.
Never once did she complain
Never once did she wince
Never once did she cry.
Her aristocratic bearing did not allow
Self indulgence.
This does not come easy for us
In the end we are left with this absence
The absence of her life and her iron will
Her loving presence and her blessings
Her calling everyone “darling”
Her devotion to her grandchildren and the little ones of the new generation
A matriarch in the truest sense
Beloved by all
Her siblings surviving her
Held her in the highest esteem
The loss is too much.
So those texts come to me
to comfort me..
Those Rabbis its imaginative souls
Pondering the catastrophe
After the funeral
And the utter anguish
Of the destruction
And the fire
Who conceal their innermost thoughts
In the radical fictional narratives of the parable
And the unacceptable anthropomorphism of divine pathos.
On Summoning the dirge singers of Jeremiah
The Rabbis produce this dialogue between a divine
Bereft of the temple
Now seeking solace by mimicking the mourning rituals of the Torah.
Never having experienced loss before
The Holy One Blessed be He
Asks the prophet how to alleviate His divine infinite sorrow
Well, the reply comes, we sit on the ground
and let our hair become disheveled
And so the Divine mimics our sitting shiva.
(citing a verse that puns on the practice in true
midrasnhic style)
What else does he do?
Well, he puts sackcloth and ashes
And the Lord does the same.
This rabbinic projection of the Divine response to catastrophe
Calms me
It allows for the pain and anguish to be expressed without shame
The tears flow easily
In between the black letters
Leaking into the ink
Just like their emotions and pain leaked into the dry legal tomes
That would become medieval halachic Judaism.
As I mourn her loss
The unbearable pain
The deep aching
Etched in my face
I take comfort in the memory of life
Her life as a text
As a parable of a bat melech
A biography of an aristocrat
A SARGON princess.
Mum
Shaare Zedek Hospital, Jerusalem
Lying in grace on hospital bed
Her face upward to heaven in this crazy holy city
Eyes closed the weight of the eyelids now too heavy to bear
Yet fully alert
She remains fully lucid!!! Despite all this..
Infection, inflammation, collapse of lung,
pleural effusion, wasting, destruction of the
body, tubes out of every orifice, beeping machines, alarm chimes,
Her skeletal frame breathes under duress,
Each breath an exertion,
Each inspiration using all she has to muster.
I help turn her and am shocked by her skeletal frame
Her hands however, have not changed,
The beauty of her slender fingers that played that
Mendelsohn Violin concerto that
enthralled and bewitched Dad (1946) remains,
They feed her via a Gastro tube (zonda) so she no longer eats...
she no longer drinks either (due to possible aspiration)
and has no desire (taava) for either.
She no longer speaks due to her voice box
destroyed by the incessant coughing,
yet she whispers and understands everything.
She cannot sleep due to the incessant hospital noise.
Alarms, nurses walking in and out,
a change of patient in the next bed,
the phlebotomist, X-ray tech etc etc.
With no earthly bodily functions under her control,
nor desire for human needs..
she has now become angelic.
So, she blesses everyone who comes into her eyesight
(which has failed due to macular degeneration)
she kisses everyone’s hand,
and blesses them, like a Rebbetzin,
(the most unlikely description and one she would
immediately disown.)
unbelievable…
I sit in vigil during the sleepless nights
and am powerless to change the medical
situation, the prognosis, the current state of things.
I have had to learn through her,
endurance and patience and acceptance in all of this.
But my medical training was just the opposite!
“never give up!. fight the malach hamaves” the angel of death,
So, tell me,
How am I expected to allow him in
and watch the grim reaper approach silently without resistance?
She beckons me and holds my hand and kisses it.
A wave of agony overcomes me like I have never experienced before.
It is located deep in the belly and behind the sternum,
a pain that defies medical description.
(Saying goodbye to mum? Really? ...flooded in tears...
All I ever did was to make her proud... I'm still that little boy)
By her bedside...she cradles my head...
and all the childhood resentment and pain are
forgotten...I have received unconditional love
finally after so long here...I am at peace.
If I was pessimistic today and broken,
my emotion mixes/interferes with my medical
judgment and clinical prognosis…
In this moment, in this pain I suddenly became unselfaware,
totally lost in the anticipatory grief of her loss, drowning in tears.
And at this moment despite the pain,
I was so fully absorbed…
Knowing I was in pain yet overwhelmed by the sense of loss,
of this towering personality in my life….
(I think I get what the Sanzer said to his chosid
after burying his son on the way out of the beis olam…
He had a shmeichel on his face…
and the chosid could not understand it…
The Rebbe said:” I felt a searing pain in my back
as if someone had plunged a knife
into my heart from the rear(on losing my son)
then when I tried to see behind me,
where it was coming from
I looked back and saw…it was the Heilige Bashefer”)
I think I get it…
Not in the sense of the heilige bashefer as “out there”
in the Buberian sense of I/Thou,
but in the Degel sense of being so absorbed IN THE FEELING without
thinking it for a second and totally at one with the feeling the experience
(the DAAS of the pain…) so this is dveykus!
Then somehow you are in this space of genuine experience
with no thought beyond or outside of it so that this pain and anguish
(like making love?) (juissance) to the extent
you fully experience it with nothing beyond IT.
As if you have returned to the Eitz HaChayim before the split,
even in this agony.
She paradoxically has taught me just this!
She whose body bore me into this world
Whose body I was totally connected to.
Whose demanding spirit drove me for decades,
Whose love was dependent upon my performance,
Who now blesses me with no strings attached.
A strange different planet
I hold her hand and stroke it in the middle of the darkness
and another day passes.
She does not leave this world but suffers for another day
Aliza and Sasha fly in to see her before they marry in a month
She knows
She knows
That I must walk her down the aisle
That I cannot be in mourning
So she holds on
Even now
At the ending
She resists
And will leave this world on her own terms.
An Aristocrat.
A Sargon woman.
Dad's Prussian Precision
His day begins with routine
As it will end
At 98 this keeps him going
But the precision is remarkable.
Each day the coffee awaits him,
As he emerges fully dressed and immaculate.
Followed by the davening, Tallis and T’fillin
The retzuos (black straps) wound precisely equidistant on the arm
White hairs peeking between the black lines
Then wrapped around the batim (phylacteries)the identical way daily.
The tallis folded in quarters then doubled over to fit the blue velvet bag.
Now to the cereal, only half the bowl mind you,
he always makes sure to leave half,
And nothing over the minimum that will satiate him, not a morsel more.
(Can one forget the solitary mango that arrived from India annually
As he dissected it into 6 exact slices and passed to each at the table
Or the slicing of a turkey with surgical precision)
Where did he learn this (Vienna no doubt).
Exercises with Ganadi follow a precise course of calisthenics
The bends, push-ups, the range of motions, weights,
All in spoken in German to allow the trainer
to learn a new language from Dad.
Now the art instructor arrives
and he chooses his portraits and carefully measures
the blank sheet for his drawings with ruler and pencil,
more like an architect, so as to
produce as best a replica.
(unlike Mum’s impressionist landscapes that provide a mood and effect).
I never realized until I was house sitting,
just how regimented he is with himself
I remember as a child his morning rise for Shul no matter the weather,
and his moderation at the table,
But now?
He stands at the door at 8:55am on Shabbat morning
For “services begin at 9am” even though he knows
That there will unlikely be a minyan for quite a time,
(This little shul struggles to survive
on the goodwill of its few surviving octogenarians
members with attrition by the year).
This tiny Germanic shul (once Traditional not Orthodox)
Where Ben Gurion used to come to write his speeches,
Now provides a local minyan for those willing
to sit on the wooden benches for some 2 hours.
We return home for Kiddush and while washing the dishes
I see he only drank a sip of the Kummel.
I am in awe of this self-discipline at 98!
This Prussian sense of duty and order.
And, when I get too teary-eyed in front of Mum by her bedside,
Knowing what I know with the gnosis of only a physician,
He chastises me for exhibiting such emotionalism.
He is not for sentimentalism.
In fact I only saw him cry once
And break down (in Sobibor Concentration Camp) on the phone.
Other than that I never saw him laugh either, to excess.
His humor is sardonic, that Viennese type
that mocks the world and the foibles of others
The very opposite of the self-deprecating British
It also has to be very clever with a semantic pun or a quip.
“Zag der emir tzu dem sheikh”
“shtei du!”
Perhaps this is the key to his longevity.
I know one thing…
I have neither the discipline nor the stamina to live such a regimented life
The end does not justify the means for me.
I think he did not respect my gushiness
(As a child he was furious when I cried
And I cried a lot!)
He had no patience for this little brown-skinned snively, whiny kid
Who was not very good at sport.
His love of the classics and quoting Greek and Latin proverbs
As well as nuanced German words that gave more meaning to a sentiment
Albeit in multiple syllables!
He is at the end of the day a “continental” gentleman
With a British stiff upper lip.
No wonder I feel more comfortable with the
easy going if naïve American
With little for way of layers of sophistication or kultur.
But this weekend I realized the secret to his longevity.
Drawing by Tsiona Dec 2018
The Impending Ending
“T’is fearful thing
To love
What death can touch
To love, to hope, to dream,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
Love,
But a holy thing
To love what death can touch”
Anon. 12th Century
Holding her hand
I put it to my lips
These iconic fingers
Whose magic mastered the fiddle decades prior
And now paints landscapes
And impresses Tsiona to draw them holding the brush.
The beauty of form has not diminished
They are perfection in form
Where all other body parts have withered
Their skeletal majesty remains
In my hands as I raise them to my lips
No words,
Just the kiss and the holding and stroking
Says it all.
The bond
Mother and son
Despite everything
Maybe because of everything
I am who I am because of it.
She, the driving force
A Tsunami that swept thought my tiny consciousness
Demanding and unbending,
Love, conditional
The pain and misery
The torment and irrationality
Internalized in a life driven to this day.
Now by her easy chair, perched daily
with dad by her side watching her lovingly.
All is calm.
She smiles rarely
She never did
She looks ahead
with that same tragic sense that flows though my veins
no wonder we are bound
in flesh and spirit.
Dad sits on one side holding her hand and gently stroking it
Devoted to her
From the time she bewitched him
(her fiddle tied the knot)
Suffered her for decades
Yet does not leave her side,
While I, sit temporarily on the other side
She is engulfed by the two men who adore her
Oblivious to the moment
Living in the eternal now
No memory for near or premonition of events to unfold.
All decisions are made with a wave of the hand signifying
“no” or “enough” or “rubbish”, or “not worth my time”
But now unable to vocalize rely on those mimes fully.
How does one face destiny?
The ending of things
In the slow decay of time
The daily challenge of living usually taken for granted,
Where every activity now must be calculated,
necessary, there being an economy of effort
By the nursing aides who measure the time for this and the effort for that.
Watching the slow decline of mental and physical prowess
Accelerating each month,
Facing the ending of things with uncertainty.
The weekly blood analysis plots the objectification of decline
The indices of iron, potassium, albumen, white cells project from the page
like witnesses on the stand, pointing accusingly, in one direction, to the dock.
The children discuss the meaning of this or that change,
having plotted them on the graph
Which meanders up and down prompting this or that intervention.
Powerless to redirect or change the flow of the river of fate,
(This was predetermined by genes and a life of living),
As it ploughs inexorably to the sea of death.
This in between time of decay and shutting down
I am not prepared for emotionally.
Leaving her each time with a heavier heart
This woman is the vitality of my life,
Albeit mostly unacknowledged,
The force majeure, hated and beloved at the same time,
Who had such impact on the soul of the writer,
That nothing passes muster to this day,
Unless it passes through the unconscious critical eye of la nom du mere.
Her mark in my psyche has little to do
with the small frame I pick up to transfer to the
commode today or place in the front seat of the car
on the next visit to the hematologist for the iron infusion.
The head of the department looks at the blood results
without even glancing at his patient. He knows too much and probably
wishes to protect himself from her loss.
How else to explain his lack of humanity.
She now physically resembles Nana,
sitting in the green arm chair, neck flexed hunched over,
and head looking down, into the bleak future, knowing everything.
Suffering the very living and struggle of today.
With the weight of the struggles of the past, heavy on her shoulders.
Mum no longer vocalizes, her cords torn
by the month-long coughing of her recent pneumonia.
(Should have I admitted her sooner? Would it have helped?
Knowing how she hates that place).
Her speech is rare and articulated without sound,
Yet she whispers, “when will you come again”
and my heart melts in pain.
I do not know when.
I do not know if,
There is no timeclock revealed to me
Marking the ending
Which feels not so far.
There is no violin playing outside her bay in the ward.
Naftali comes to visit and plays
but she does not muster the usual excitement
Hearing her own fiddle being played,
knowing the tone (she has perfect pitch of course)
Her eyes lit up with recognition and satisfaction.
That was a few years ago, despite the stroke,
the musical appreciation
That locus of the cerebral circuitry
had been unaffected by the clot
And she wept hearing the sound of her fiddle
wafting in to the ward.
The mind realizes but the heart cannot bear it.
The idea of life without her steady presence,
Her watchful eye on my progress and achievements
Even my downfalls (she alone flew in to Boston
to support me in my trial in 1984)
Now perched on her recliner the world comes to her,
Her progeny lovingly attends in pilgrimage,
recognizing her matriarchy and strength of character
And intuition and moral authority, her presence
and impact on so many lives
Above all mine.
The inner voice keeps telling me
“this is but the way of all flesh” and
“her longevity has been a blessing”
And the facts of nature and time and the blood analyses
all show you with great accuracy
the prognosis of the ending inching closer
As it should.
But the heart bleeds nonetheless.
She reveals the inner connection between love and loss
in her silent uncompromising commitment to her values
and her refusal to ever complain.
This aristocracy of spirit exacerbates my sense of awe.
She is in control of even this.
She bends to no one but herself.
And when the time comes it is she who will decide the end.
Not the disease not the fatigue, not the process.
I want to mark this time, I want to not let it slip,
too often we ignore the slipping and sliding as
the ending inches closer, as if it betrays
the neat paradigm of healthy, disease and absence.
I validate and valerate this phase too.
These precious moments of intimacy, hand in hand,
listening to a Heifetz Chaconne
(and her shaking her head in disbelief at his mastery)
as if hearing it for the first time
(though I play it each time I come)
or Victor Borges’ musical humor,
are the way we share those critical values she holds dearest.
I have inherited from Nana and her the tragic sense of life.
This lens colors all joy and grounds all perception
in a rootedness of shared empathy.
It drives the engine of compassion for others
and sympathy for those suffering.
Now, however the focus is on her pain and her ending,
which tears me apart.
Unbearable Leaving
Anticipatory Grief
Can one say kaddish in advance?
After all, yitagadal veyitkadash is in the imperfect tense
Or the jussive?
May His name be magnified, sanctified!
Each time I leave Jerusalem
The apartment,
My father,
I hug his slender frame
His bones more and more prominent
Wondering if this is the last time I feel him
His warmth
His stature
His upright posture.
He too saw his father on that Viennese platform in 1938
Not knowing he would never see him again.
Now I replay this scene every time I leave Jerusalem.
An epigenetic wound I carry
A return to the primal scene of trauma
Played out in the next generation.
The pain is unbearable
The not-knowing insane
The slow decline observable now
A loss each visit of this or that.
This time a new unsteadiness on his feet
An ataxia of the soul readying for its dizzying flight to come.
He proudly shows me his new hobby
Having watched Mum, paint for years he has now taken up the art.
And drawing horse after horse in varying poses
His love of equus always expressed in my childhood
From dressage to that disturbing play in the West End
A psychic drama unfolding in the psychiatrist’s office
Of a young boy who violently enucleated a horse.
With a heart as heavy as a stone mountain
I take my leave
In the unknowing that characterizes my life more and more
As uncertainty bathes me like a dark shadow
In so many areas of my life
The only certainty is our mortality
And the slow dying of the leaves
In the chill of autumn.
Journey's End
The horror, the terror
The loss of humanity,
The effect on decency,
Of the blood spilled in those trenches of WWI
All who lay in those muddied fields,
The sheer magnitude of the loss,
A generation of young men,
Guided by general HQ staff on both sides
Likes pawns in a chess game.
Each soldier lost,
A life,
A son, father, brother, friend.
Husbands leaving children and wives behind
A generational loss of millions,
The next, orphaned without the father
La nom du pere…the absent fatherhood.
And as I watch, sobbing,
For what man does to man
In the name of…
Statehood, religion, politics, fatherland,
All the...isms.
The false twentieth century promises
The broken ideologies,
The religions of blood,
Red rivers flowing into a sea of death.
For honor and dignity and a sense of purpose
Dying in the name of...
Dying for a cause…
Dying for the flag…
That bloodied uniform
Bedecked with ribbons or medals
Each speaking of some heroism or battle survival.
And that uniform
And that rank
And that split between lower class enlisted
And educated Oxbridge officers.
And the sheer decency of the British soul
As portrayed
And experienced
And the pride of the Austro-Hungarian soldier
(I remember pictures of a proud uniformed Ziga Barzi)
And yet my olive 1970 skin
Was a barrier to my enlistment
in the Guards
When interviewed,
As a young medical student.
“Not the right stuff”
For their regiment.
The outsider..
The Jew…
Not privileged to serve
Maybe of dubious moral character
Did they think?
As expressed by melatonin pigmentation.
We are sent into war
We are meant to die
“Pro patria morie”
We glory in death
For country, culture and freedom.
But at the end of the day
Lies this insanity
This bloodthirst
What Jung called Wotan.
A mythical drive to end and destroy
To dominate and bleed.
With the so-called Enlightenment
Comes the modern day state
And its darker side
The state of terror.
My Israeli nephew grieves for his lost comrade-in-arms.
He visits his family
And honors his memory
But that hole in his heart remains
Like a lesion
God shaped
He nurtures the pain
Drowned, once, in chemicals to soothe the anguish.
And my patients and comrades with PTSD
who suffer daily the reoccurring loss
Ever present…
The moments of death
And the mystery of their survival
The guilt and self-recrimination
The living in-the-absence of friends and comrades-in-arms
The nightmare that never ceases.
We only have the survivors
And the memories,
And the historical record.
But what have we learned from this mass blood-letting?
About man, god and history?
The visual images haunt me
In a ghost-like apparition
A dream that keeps coming back
As if in a past life.
I too am drowning in the terror of the trenches
Facing my fear of the end
Of death creeping up on me
For that moment,
The ending of all that is near and dear
Precious and fraught.
The end of loving another
The end of helping an-other
The end of caring for an-other.
C G Jung’s Study Ascona, Switzerland
