Blog Exodus Day 5: Hide

I Wasn’t One of the Six Million: And What Is My Life Span? Open Closed Open

BY YEHUDA AMICHAI

TRANSLATED BY CHANA BLOCH AND CHANA KRONFELD

    I

My life is the gardener of my body. The brain—a hothouse closed tight

with its flowers and plants, alien and odd

in their sensitivity, their terror of becoming extinct.

The face—a formal French garden of symmetrical contours

and circular paths of marble with statues and places to rest,

places to touch and smell, to look out from, to lose yourself

in a green maze, and Keep Off and Don’t Pick the Flowers.

The upper body above the navel—an English park

pretending to be free, no angles, no paving stones, naturelike,

humanlike, in our image, after our likeness,

its arms linking up with the big night all around.

And my lower body, beneath the navel—sometimes a nature preserve,

wild, frightening, amazing, an unpreserved preserve,

and sometimes a Japanese garden, concentrated, full of

forethought. And the penis and testes are smooth

polished stones with dark vegetation between them,

precise paths fraught with meaning

and calm reflection. And the teachings of my father

and the commandments of my mother

are birds of chirp and song. And the woman I love

is seasons and changing weather, and the children at play

are my children. And the life my life.

     2

I’ve never been in those places where I’ve never been

and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years,

but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time

is my own. The sand on the seashore—those infinite grains

are the same sand where I made love in Achziv and Caesarea.

The years of my life I have broken into hours, and the hours into minutes

and seconds and fractions of seconds. These, only these,

are the stars above me

that cannot be numbered.

     3

And what is my life span? I’m like a man gone out of Egypt:

the Red Sea parts, I cross on dry land,

two walls of water, on my right hand and on my left.

Pharaoh’s army and his horsemen behind me. Before me the desert,

perhaps the Promised Land, too. That is my life span.

     4

Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open

in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed

within us. And when we die, everything is open again.

Open closed open. That’s all we are.

    5

What then is my life span? Like shooting a self-portrait.

I set up the camera a few feet away on something stable

(the one thing that’s stable in this world),

I decide on a good place to stand, near a tree,

run back to the camera, press the timer,

run back again to that place near the tree,

and I hear the ticking of time, the whirring

like a distant prayer, the click of the shutter like an execution.

That is my life span. God develops the picture

in His big darkroom. And here is the picture:

white hair on my head, eyes tired and heavy,

eyebrows black, like the charred lintels

above the windows in a house that burned down.

My life span is over.

     6

I wasn’t one of the six million who died in the Shoah,

I wasn’t even among the survivors.

And I wasn’t one of the six hundred thousand who went out of Egypt.

I came to the Promised Land by sea.

No, I was not in that number, though I still have the fire and the smoke

within me, pillars of fire and pillars of smoke that guide me

by night and by day. I still have inside me the mad search

for emergency exits, for soft places, for the nakedness

of the land, for the escape into weakness and hope,

I still have within me the lust to search for living water

with quiet talk to the rock or with frenzied blows.

Afterwards, silence: no questions, no answers.

Jewish history and world history

grind me between them like two grindstones, sometimes

to a powder. And the solar year and the lunar year

get ahead of each other or fall behind,

leaping, they set my life in perpetual motion.

Sometimes I fall into the gap between them to hide,

or to sink all the way down.

    7

I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment

millions of human beings are standing at crossroads

and intersections, in jungles and deserts,

showing each other where to turn, what the right way is,

which direction. They explain exactly where to go,

what is the quickest way to get there, when to stop

and ask again. There, over there. The second

turnoff, not the first, and from there left or right,

near the white house, by the oak tree.

They explain with excited voices, with a wave of the hand

and a nod of the head: There, over there, not that there, the other there,

as in some ancient rite. This too is a new religion.

I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment.

Blog Exodus Day 4: Growth

Working is another way of praying.
You plant in Israel the soul of a tree.
You plant in the desert the spirit of gardens.

Praying is another way of singing.
You plant in the tree the soul of lemons.
You plant in the gardens the spirits of roses.

Singing is another way of loving.
You plant in the lemons the spirit of your son.
You plant in the roses the soul of your daughter.

Loving is another way of living.
You plant in your daughter the spirit of Israel.
You plant in your son the soul of the desert.

Dannie Abse, from Song For Dov Shamir

Blog Exodus Day 3: Purify

A Woman on the Dump

BY DEBORA GREGER

Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
On the dump?
—Wallace Stevens

Out of the cracks of cups and their handles, missing,   

the leaves unceremoniously tossed, unread,

from a stubble of coffee ground ever more finely   

into these hollowed grounds,

the first shift coaxes bulldozers to life,

sphinxes to tease the riddled rubble

into fresh pyramids of rot. A staleness warms enough   

to waft round the lord of all purveyed.

His to count the hauls past the yawning gates   

of this New Giza into the Middle Kingdom’s   

Late Intermediate Period. There, to purify,   

to honor ourselves, we beg these offerings

of refuse be cast out. To the archaeologist   

of the far-flung future, enough evidence

in the inscriptions to identify most owners:   

spells scratched on the backs of envelopes

to be read out before animal sacrifice,

the milk, ground meat, beer, and soap

joined in this hereafter with the feast’s remains.   

Over tomatoes splitting their sides,

over a teacup stained with roses   

flattened into mosaic petal from petal,   

earthmovers move a little mountain   

and, having moved it, move on,

overturning a diamond sprung from its ring,   

glitter to a magpie’s covetous eye.

If the art of loneliness is landscape,

armload by carload of black-bagged leaves,

landfill contours its likeness.

Blog Exodus Day 2: Honor

Candles

BY CARL DENNIS

If on your grandmother's birthday you burn a candle   

To honor her memory, you might think of burning an extra   

To honor the memory of someone who never met her,   

A man who may have come to the town she lived in   

Looking for work and never found it.   

Picture him taking a stroll one morning,   

After a month of grief with the want ads,   

To refresh himself in the park before moving on.   

Suppose he notices on the gravel path the shards   

Of a green glass bottle that your grandmother,   

Then still a girl, will be destined to step on   

When she wanders barefoot away from her school picnic   

If he doesn't stoop down and scoop the mess up   

With the want-ad section and carry it to a trash can.   

For you to burn a candle for him   

You needn't suppose the cut would be a deep one,   

Just deep enough to keep her at home   

The night of the hay ride when she meets Helen,   

Who is soon to become her dearest friend,   

Whose brother George, thirty years later,   

Helps your grandfather with a loan so his shoe store   

Doesn't go under in the Great Depression   

And his son, your father, is able to stay in school   

Where his love of learning is fanned into flames,   

A love he labors, later, to kindle in you.   

How grateful you are for your father's efforts   

Is shown by the candles you've burned for him.   

But today, for a change, why not a candle   

For the man whose name is unknown to you?   

Take a moment to wonder whether he died at home   

With friends and family or alone on the road,   

On the look-out for no one to sit at his bedside   

And hold his hand, the very hand   

It's time for you to imagine holding.

Blogging Exodus Day One: Start

This year I'm blogging Exodus again, and I think I'm going to try something different. A poem (not necessarily Jewish) that lends itself to each day's theme. So for our first, ("Start") this is what inspired me:

Among School Children

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;

A kind old nun in a white hood replies;

The children learn to cipher and to sing,

To study reading-books and history,

To cut and sew, be neat in everything

In the best modern way—the children's eyes

In momentary wonder stare upon

A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent

Above a sinking fire, a tale that she

Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event

That changed some childish day to tragedy—

Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent

Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,

Or else, to alter Plato's parable,

Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage

I look upon one child or t'other there

And wonder if she stood so at that age—

For even daughters of the swan can share

Something of every paddler's heritage—

And had that colour upon cheek or hair,

And thereupon my heart is driven wild:

She stands before me as a living child.

IV

Her present image floats into the mind—

Did Quattrocento finger fashion it

Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind

And took a mess of shadows for its meat?

And I though never of Ledaean kind

Had pretty plumage once—enough of that,

Better to smile on all that smile, and show

There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

V

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

Honey of generation had betrayed,

And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape

As recollection or the drug decide,Would think her son, did she but see that shape

With sixty or more winters on its head,

A compensation for the pang of his birth,

Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;

Solider Aristotle played the taws

Upon the bottom of a king of kings;

World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras

Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings

What a star sang and careless Muses heard:

Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,

But those the candles light are not as those

That animate a mother's reveries,

But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

And yet they too break hearts—O Presences

That passion, piety or affection knows,

And that all heavenly glory symbolise—

O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

VIII

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Shabbat Zachor: Blotting out Amalek

This past Saturday night as I was dreading the changing of the clock for Daylight Savings, I saw online a cartoon that read “I’m ready to turn the clock forward 8 months until after the elections are over.”

Show of hands, who feels that way? I bet a lot of us do. We’ve been in election mode since the early summer a year ago and we have a long way to go yet. And the process has not made us more astute, or thoughtful about our political choices. Mostly it’s been a lot of yelling. There’s been yelling at the debates; though up until recently the Democrats were having relatively calm discussions about policy. There’s been yelling over the internet. Yelling between the candidates, which has turned increasingly crass. There’s been Yelling between different parts of the electorate, which have devolved into physical attacks. And, of course, yelling threats to the press, to protesters, to counter-protesters.  Are the candidates sexist? Misogynist? Fascist? Communist? Is Trump Silvio Berlusconi, or George Wallace, or Mussolini? Or even worse?

The whole thing raises my anxiety level from one scotch to two-and-a-half, and it worries me considerably. It worries me for our process, which has been getting increasingly harsh and banal for years, and seems to be looking for new ways to demolish our integrity and hope for the future.

I’m starting to wonder if the folks who organized the most recent round of primaries knew the Jewish calendar. Purim is around the corner, which means this Shabbat is Shabbat Zachor, that time when we are tasked with remembering Amalek, how they sought to wipe us out as we departed from Egypt by attacking the most vulnerable of our people. Haman, the villain of Purim is understood to be a descendant of Amalek’s king Agag, and he becomes the archetypal Amalekite: an egotistical, xenophobic leader eager to murder an entire people, our people.

Amalek and Haman are not just historical characters, of course. They are metaphors for those who would commit acts of genocide, who would prey upon the vulnerable, and who has wished over the ages to commit unspeakable acts driven by their antisemitism.

It’s also interesting to also note that AIPAC’s Policy Conference usually takes place right before Purim, as it does this year. Having attended a few times, I can tell you it’s not unusual to hear language echoing those ideas—of the fight against antisemitism and safety of the Jews—at AIPAC’s policy conference.  This year they have invited Donald Trump to speak, declaring it to be an act of bipartisanship. After all, he is the frontrunner on the Republican side, they argue.  And, they clarify, an invitation to speak is not an endorsement.

A few weeks ago Marvin Krislov, the president of Oberlin College, my alma mater, used similar language to describe why they were not firing a faculty member who claims that the Jews orchestrated the 9/11 attacks and the downing of Malaysian flight 370, among other things. She is permitted to speak, Krislov says, but her speech should not be seen as having been endorsed by the college.

Right.

So if we don’t buy that logic from Oberlin, why does it work for AIPAC, exactly? How does this burnish their bipartisan, pragmatic reputation? More to the point, how does this keep Israel from becoming a partisan issue?  As one example, couldn’t they simply have not invited any of the presidential candidates and stayed out of the fray? What does having Trump, who’s own agenda, if you can call it that, seems to speak in the language of violence and xenophobia, accomplish, exactly?

I said before that Amalek and Haman are metaphors, but if we draw the conclusion that they are only metaphors for people we do ourselves a disservice. There are other lessons for us to learn from Haman and Amalek. Amalek is a metaphor for the abuse of the vulnerable, Haman a metaphor for power unchecked and in the service of ego. And they are more than that; they are a mirror for us to look into. At the end of the book of Esther, the Jews are saved not by cancelling the decree, but by doing to the people of Shushan exactly what Haman and his followers would have done to them. That is, the Jews become the mob, performing massacres so numerous that non-Jews pretend to be Jews to avoid destruction. That is a lesson as well: that our values of democracy and free speech cannot be allowed to be manipulated or misused in the pursuit of power and publicity. We also learn from Esther that strength comes from one’s own identity, and that we cannot wait for others to come save the day, or that the problems we face will magically go away on their own.

We are commanded to remember Amalek, and blot their name—what they stand for—from the earth. If we are to truly blot out Amalek, we must stay true to our values, and not give voice to our worst instincts. We must protect the vulnerable especially because they are vulnerable, and we must be suspicious of those who seek power as an extension of their own egos, and would even stoop to use violence in language and action to achieve such power. Early in the book of Esther, Mordechai reminds Esther that she has an obligation not to keep silent, and that perhaps she has more ability to deal with the crisis than she thinks. Mordechai is speaking to us as well. We cannot remain silent, and who knows? Perhaps we were put here for just such a crisis. 

Parashat Pekudei: In God's Shadow

We have come to the completion of the book of Exodus and the Completion of the Mishkan, the dwelling place of God amidst the people. It has taken up torah portion after torah portion throughout the second half of the book of Exodus, and finally, we are seeing the end of the project under Bezalel’s careful eye.  

But who is Bezalel? Bezalel we are told has the divine spirit of skill, ability and knowledge: Chochma, T’vuna v’da’at. He is hand chosen by God to lead the work on completing the Tabernacle. A master artisan, we are told that, in the work he does to finish the tabernacle, he manages to fulfill all 613 mitzvot in the process of completing the work. And his name is immortalized as the name for Israel’s school of Art and Design.

But I think there’s more to Bezalel, to be found in breaking down his name. Check the midrash:

Midrash: Numbers Rabbah 12:3

The Holy One, Blessed be God, said to Moses, “And you shall make a menorah of pure gold.” Moses asked God, “How shall we make it?” “Of beaten work…” said God. Nevertheless, Moses still found difficulty in understanding, and when he came down he forgot its construction. He went up again and said: “How shall we make it?” God told him, “Of beaten work.” Still Moses experienced difficulty, and when he descended he forgot…Finally God drew a Menorah in fire and showed him its construction. Yet, in spite of all this, it caused Moses difficulty. The Holy One, Blessed be God, said to him, “Go to Bezalel and he will make it.” So he told Bezalel, and he immediately constructed it. Moses began to wonder, saying: “To me it was shown ever so many times by the Holy One…yet I found it hard to make, and you who did not see it, constructed it with your own intelligence! Bezalel! You stood in the shadow of God (Be-tzal-el) when the Holy one showed me its construction!”  

One way to read and understand this is describing a character, a person who is in God’s Shadow, and therefore is able to learn and understand what even Moses cannot understand.

Another is to see Bezalel as a template: the ones who will complete the work, who will see the Divine vision through, are those who are in God’s shadow.

We think of the shadow as a negative in modern imagery: it’s the one who needs to hide who dwells in the shadows.

But it is also in the shadow that we are shaded and protected. That’s the imagery we receive again and again. We are protected in the shadow of God’s wings, the shade of God’s Sukkah stretched over us, and most importantly, the shadow of the cloud that dwells over the people and the Mishkan as they rest from their journeys.

It is in that shadow that creativity emerges, and it is in that shadow that growth happens. It is in the Shadow that the details get hammered out, where people can dream and imagine and shape.  It is in the shadow that a kind of reverie can take place. As Aviva Zornberg writes:   “it counteracts the hunger for premature certainties, for completed images that deaden the imagination.” Shine a light too soon, and the ideas crumble.  The self we are trying to create crumbles.

So, how much time do we actually get to spend in the shadows? How much time to we get be creative, to grow, to be in God’s shadow? When do we have time to learn what Zornberg calles the ‘cautious audacity’ that ‘intuitive confidence in the moment’ in the Shadow of God? How often do we get to be Bezalel?

I know I don’t have enough time—not enough time to study, to reflect, to play-in-work.  There’s too much to do and not enough time to really reflect, never mind breathe. But we need that time, those moments of creative audacity. As Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan wrote: “An artist cannot be continually wielding his brush. He must stop at times in his painting to freshen his vision of the object, the meaning of which he wishes to express on his canvas. Living is also an art."

We are artists in our own lives, we are Bezalel, but only if we choose to step back from the canvas we are creating and step into God’s Shadow. May we be brave enough to do so in our lives. Amen.