CONDENSATES: Build me an altar of unhewn stone, untouched by blade forged in fire. Only naked may you approach me and only naked I you. No more the need for the copper mirror, Venus’ artifice. My heart bursts at the thought of the Hebrew slaves reflecting their nakedness, at a time of bondage, magnifying the erotic. Freedom, the word for everything that is tumbling from your lips, you. Incinerated. A flash upon the golden altar. A military caravan left stranded by the side of the road. No need for killing. Words only. Your touch, your piercing glance, intoxicating aroma. There is no bounty I would not lay at your feet, no sense withhold, no gesture stifle. No more the wanderer, I bask in you, sovereign. Your sentries show me utmost respect. For that I tip them handsomely. There is no love in hell, only information. The entrance to love’s chambers is flanked by ferocious beasts who sing in antiphonal chorus and all the more her beauty praise.
Who languishes for want of bliss? Who settles for a lesser estate? The ghosts that cry underneath the ruins? Be still. There is an ancient vessel set atop an acacia shelf inside my lover’s cupboard. Behold every liniment of our liberation, the very word a book that bounces off the lips and cries, open. I will write that book and read it with you, each page torn out another feast. The road you travel one day after another delivers you from state to state. Yet at a certain speed and in a callow frame of mind you might not take note of it, the thawing of the hardened earth, the first stage of ripening. You are with me from seed to luscious fruit. Sky bright, trees bare, a crisp energy crackles the land. Leap. The mountain of Jacob and the mountain of Esau are one. Every word, our direction.
[Prayer of the Creatrix, Canto III, The Aquarian Bible]
I shlep myself into the basement sanctuary of the Chabad House and deposit my carcass onto an aluminum folding chair. The sun is about to set on the festival week, the last glimmer of Passover. A ragtag assembly of hangers-on slowly gathers for the promised event, The Feast of the Messiah. We are a mixed bag of wide-eyed suburbanites, transplanted Brooklynites, and a smattering of out-of-town visitors. My family and friends are not the least enthusiastic about the obscure religious observances that somehow manage to grab my ear and yank me in. But it is here that I find the seedbed of The Redemption, the rectification of so much dissonance. At least in my own peculiar psychic soundscape. My rabbi is gone. He and his wife hightailed it to the mothership, Crown Heights. There are large festive gatherings in the households of the hasidim and of Moroccan Jews this evening. The Moroccans really know how to party it up—long tables groaning with sweets, all variety of fish, dancing, matchmaking, ritual baths and the blessing of trees. A real communal hoedown, a cornucopia of all that’s fundamentally human, the scaffolding for life’s blessings.
Mimouna, the Moroccan name for the festivities, is the whole ball of wax. The entire community boogies in the name of fertility, prosperity and freedom, the fruits of the exodus from bondage in Egypt. By contrast, the hasidic observance is downright dour. The emphasis is definitely NOT on the food. Bare bones ‘feast’. Wine, matzah, a little nosh. The sole focus, Moshiach. A spirit meal. In my rabbi’s stead stands Levi Katz. He is in town visiting his in-laws for Passover. The harsh fluorescent light refracts into rainbows through his wispy blonde beard. John Lennon spectacles, slid halfway down his nose, enhance the effect. The whole extraterrestrial look, rumpled wide-brimmed black fedora and floor length black duster. He comes from another planet to bring us the news. “Hello.” Footfalls on linoleum, the sound of chairs scraping. “Please take a seat for the first cup of wine.” He smiles his gap-toothed smile. We get quiet. “My name is Rabbi Levi Katz. Your rabbi generously invited me to share a word with you at this seudah, this ‘feast’. Before I give you my download, let’s bless the first cup. Has everyone filled his glass?” The pock pock of plastic cups, metallic scrape of screw top lids, glug of kosher sacramental wine leaving the bottle. I look around the room and don’t recognize anyone there. Nor does anyone else. Strangers in a strange room.
So here’s the deal, when it comes to being a part of anything. There’s two aspects of joining that are a shade different from each other. One is recognition—recognizing and being recognized. You are you, and that’s what they want you for. Specificity. And the other, which may be a corollary of the first, is harder to put into words. It’s the universality, it’s the loveliness. This is the hidden message of all the comic books that I loved to bury my face in, my guilty pleasure while waiting in the barbershop as a kid. Nick Fury and the Howling Commandos, The X-Men, The Fantastic Four, and the entire pantheon of Marvel and DC superheroes, each with his own superpower, fighting for truth, justice and the American Way. I wasn’t so sure about the American Way, but then again I grew up in the 60’s and the American Way was not cool.
We were not all on board the Moshiach train back in the ’60’s. I didn’t even particularly think much about being Jewish. Curtis Lemay and Timothy Leary—General Bomb-em-into-the Stone-Age and Doctor Turn-on-Tune-in-Drop-out—preached opposing cultural missions, very different ideas of bad guys and good guys. And what love had to do with it. A generation weaned on Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz. Every year like clockwork, the universality of the family TV room. Salman Rushdie’s very first literary influence was The Wizard of Oz. Maybe it gave him the courage to survive the fatwa of the wicked wizard of Tehran. His secret power, the power to write. Click his typewriter keys and he was home. I’m not sure why Cat Stevens thought that Salman Rushdie should die. But apparently in his incarnation as Yusuf Islam he said so to the British press. Hard to believe from the man who wrote Moon Shadow. Go figure. Go.
But you see, two teams inevitably have to line up against each other, each with its set of equal yet opposing superpowers. The Pandavis versus the Kauravis in the Gita. The Titans versus the Olympians. Cowboys and Indians, Communists versus the Free World, Nazis against the Allies. The comic book of old has morphed into the video game of today. I stumbled across this cool kabbalistic twist on the whole universality in diversity thing by Stu Horvath, “Editor in Chief of Unwinnable, writer, photographer, metal connoisseur, horroristi, board game tyrant, apostate, grump.” Take a look:
This notion of universal sympathy pervades our thinking, without us even realizing it. From the hermetic mantra of “as above, so below,” to the Neo-Platonic idea of the macrocosm and the microcosm, to modern consumerism, imitation and correspondence are still powerfully compelling.
One persistent example of correspondence is Adam Kadmon. A Kabbalistic concept, Adam Kadmon was originally an attempt by the philosopher Philo of Alexandria to reconcile two contradictory Biblical accounts of God’s creation of Adam – one that was made in His own image on the fifth day and another formed out of the earth, sometime after resting on the seventh day. The second Adam is our famous progenitor, the husband of Eve and former resident of Eden. The first Adam, however, is neither man nor woman, but something more general, something heavenly. Philo envisioned Adam Kadmon as the Logos, the divine, animating principle of the universe, less a single man and more the entirety of humanity. Over the ensuing centuries of theological thought, Adam Kadmon became the primeval, universal soul, of which all human souls are a part.
I have discussed how writing code for a videogame is not dissimilar to speaking the language God used to create the world, according to Kabbalistic traditions. Then, does playing games not make me Adam Kadmon to all the characters whose shoes I have walked in? Are those avatars, and all the other fictional characters I’ve ever inhabited, not part of a greater whole? They become like Tarot cards, representative of different aspects of my personality – the Fool, wandering the Capital Wasteland; the Emperor, sitting upon the throne of Albion; the Devil, planning a reign of terror in Vice City.
All these characters I’ve lived are pieces of me. What, then, am I a piece of?
What indeed? Yet we the people of Israel are still at war with our Palestinian brothers. I do not subscribe to the myth of universal slaughter preceding universal redemption. In spite of the fact that a sweet teacher of mine once told me, a friend of mine most loving and peaceful, that it was a great moment in a writer’s life when the image of murder arises in his writing, a vampire from a liminal realm. I was a killer as a young boy, as many young boys are. Fortunately for the world at large, I limited my carnage to the insect population in my backyard. I may pay for that on the day that the insect armies line up across the battlefield from the humans. I was also a rock thrower, a latter day David in the face of injustice before I had ever heard of his battle royale with Goliath. By the time I reached adolescence I had put childish violence behind me, and chose instead to do battle with words. Jokes. But I had no idea what side I was on.
It is Passover 2009. I am a relative newcomer to hasidic circles. Still feeling that stranger vibe. I am a few months into my obsession with the Song of Songs, tantric Judaism by my reckoning. Cosmic engineering through the union of masculine and feminine mojo. All the more ironic as my own earthly union with Beth is dissolving. My then wife, and our friends Jeff and Anya, pretty much figure I’ve gone off the deep end with the heavy hasidic stuff. But for me this evening is a rare treat. A hotshot from Baltimore, reputed to be a true Renaissance man of the hasidic world, a protégé of a curmudgeonly and reactionary Israeli mekabul, aka an adept at the mystic arts of Kabbalah. Hard to know what to expect, genius or horror. Read the Israeli mekabul on the significance of letters and numbers and it will blow your mind. Genius. Read about his politics and it will blow it out the other end. Horror.
“Eight days ago, on the eve of Passover,” Reb Levy kicks in, “something happened in the cosmos of which most of you were probably unaware, Birkat HaChamah, The Blessing of the Sun. It rolls around only once every twenty eight years.” Pause for effect. This obscure observance is news to me and I am intrigued. Launch. “Its intersection with Passover is even more rare. Birkat HaChamah is always on a Wednesday, based on Beresheit, the book of Genesis. The formation of the sun and the moon and the stars is on the fourth day of creation. Wednesday. There’s a series of simple calculations, using the fact that the 365-day length of a year and the actual length of the transit of the sun differ by one quarter of a day. Every four years a given calendar date advances by one day of the week. So you see it takes four multiplied by a week’s worth of years for the calendar to arrive back at the same day of the week. Twenty eight years. Simple, nu? That’s how we keep coming back to the day the sun returns to the place in the cosmos it occupied on the day of its creation. Over and over again. Each time we round the 28 year cycle we empower the fiery solar ball with our blessings to continue on its way, doing the work of the Creator. So what does that mean, ‘empower’ the sun? The Jewish conception of the sun. The Levites of the ancient Temple chanted psalms and invoked the blessing formula, first facing the sun and then turning their backs on it to face the House of the Unknowable One, the Cosmic Generator Room. To the ancient priesthood the sun was not the impersonal stellar mass of either Copernicus or Ptolemy, though theirs were forms of solar empowerment as well. It has always been our conception of the sun, how we hold it in our heads and cause it to exist in our minds, rather than our calculations, that gives it the power, within our consciousness, to bring life to the cold earth and move the sluggish planets in their orbits as we have mathematically defined them.”
| PARTITIONS. The Ovstrovster Rebbe, a holy ascetic, fasted daily for the entire forty years of his reign. Each evening he would break the fast with a crumb of hard tack and a glass of water, then begin again the fast of the next day. His father was an uneducated baker who recited psalms and shed tears into the bread as he kneaded the dough. The son, the future Rebbe, developed a revulsion for food. Other learned souls attempted to dissuade the young rebbe from further self-mortification, among them the great and holy Gerer Rebbe. The Ovstrovster remained undeterred. He was known far and wide for his simplicity, his purity and his learning. By the Ovstrovster Rebbe’s mystic reckoning, he determined that the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, the eve of the political liberation and birth of his people Israel, the event for which Passover is the commemoration, had happened on a Wednesday. Fast forward, hopping and skipping every twenty eight years, to Temple times and presto! You land on The Blessing of the Sun. The convergence of the first Passover with the Sun cycle, as the Rebbe determined, would have occurred roughly three and a half millennia before his lifetime. That most rare convergence was about to fall out again in 1925. The Ovstrovster was convinced that Moshiach and the final redemption from the bonds of materiality would arrive precisely on April 8, 1925, the day of the next Great Convergence. His disappointment at the non-event can only have matched his Messianic fervor. Three years later, at the point of death, the Rebbe’s skin turned to paper and his bones to the spines of books. [Katz, Krishna. The Once and Future Rebbes] |
Reb Levi’s speech and gestures wax manic as he dashes from topic to topic. He leaves most of the audience in the dust. The crowd barely hangs on. Some break ranks to explore the second and third cups of wine with nothing more than a few scraps of matzoh to soak it up. Their faces are plastered with blank stares at the intergalactic rebbe. Others turn away to distract themselves in side conversations, or to gawk at their cell phones. Standard operating procedure for synagogue affairs. I, however, am riveted. I just found out about this obscure observance, which I find unaccountably cool—we get to renew the sun’s contract in the world of our souls to continue to radiate its energy for the work of ongoing creation once every twenty eight years. Twenty-first century thaumaturgy. Humanity as demiurge. Co-creators with the Mind of the Prime Mover, the Source. In on the conception, and therefore the reality, of everything. Including the damn Sun! A really big thought. No wonder it doesn’t roll around any more often than 28 years. It doesn’t get much more shamanic than that. Or so it appears to me at the time.
The idea of the Feast of the Messiah is to ramp up the focus a notch, from the physical Redemption out of Mitzraim, Biblical Egypt. “The name Mitzraim,” the rebbe reminds us, “translates as the Narrows, the Straits. The bottleneck between Africa and Asia. Could be any mental, emotional or physical or spiritual tight spot. The trap of believing that anything we perceive in the material world somehow exists in and of itself and possesses some kind of independent reality from our conception of it. Physicists have let us know in their terms, atoms and empty space, that what we see is by no means what we get. Neurobiologists and psychologists have gone to some lengths to demonstrate that what we perceive in the world is conditioned entirely by the machinery through which we perceive it. Epistemologists have duked it out for centuries about whether or not we can know what we think we know. Seudat Moshiach, the Feast of the Messiah, is intended to jump start a Redemption from the narrows of materiality, above and beyond the Redemption from the bondage of Egypt.” Nirvana, samadhi, you name it. That was his game.
I find myself daydreaming. Of ecstasy. Maybe the couple cups of wine supported only by a few crumbs of matzah are seducing my neurons. I slip into an hallucinatory reverie. Rebbe Katz morphs into a jazzy Pied Piper of Lubovitch. In the still air of the basement sanctuary his voice mellows, extolling panpsychic reality…
We must rouse ourselves and take the air. Throw open the front door and walk a jaunty walk down the street of our new neighborhood, happy to be wearing shoes. They make all the difference when you want to stroll about. The neighbors scatter like so many chicks in a barnyard. One stands at my feet and blinks at me, her head cocked sideways. I offer her crumbs and she seems content. There is a chill in the air. The sun is bright, a good day for a walk. Do not be deceived by the mundane appearance of the little brick row houses on my street. My street is a secret launching pad for intergalactic exploration. You are the first to be told of this. Keep it under your hat. The work of intergalactic exploration must be conducted surreptitiously, yet in broad daylight. Ha!
Each of the little cells that feeds off the main thoroughfare contains a busy workshop for one of the parts of the grand project. None of them knows the whole picture, the master plan. Nor do I. I’ll show you my part of the blueprints when we go home. Right now we’re out for a breath of fresh air. Yes, it’s odd that no one else is on the street today. It can feel lonely, or ominous. There’s a joke that I am desperately resisting, the feathery edge of laughter. The words in my ears refuse to obey the boundaries of their syllables, running into each other, jostling each other, fusing like little yeast cells. Something’s brewing. Soon we will be intoxicated. Behind one of these doors I’m sure there is a distillery. How else to make fuel for intergalactic journeying. I don’t think that’s my part. But I’m not sure. I don’t remember my assignment. I have forgotten the due date. I don’t know where to send my final project. Oh well. I think I’ll look for a large open space to do calisthenics.
I bang my head. It’s nothing. I strip off my clothes and leave them in the front yard. Nothing. I run through the streets wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar. Nothing more. I can do anything. All the nothing you could possibly want. I scatter seeds for wild birds. They take flight at one movement of my foot. I feel the thrill of their flight in the muscles of my chest and arms, rippling across my shoulders. I am a large bird circling and wheeling in the sky among other large birds. I dive and break the water’s surface. I laugh and sway in the breeze, a cattail among cattails, my legs and feet alive with the bubbling energy of all the life that touches me. I stare into the steel blue sky and see my own blank eyes staring back at me. What are they doing up there?
They are my beacons in search of a lover, someone who can swim and fly. I long to float in her arms, caressed by the delicate tendrils of her hair. We fuse briefly and pull apart again and again, remaining connected by the finest of filaments, each retaining a small piece of the other until at last, we are an undulating mosaic. My heart beats wildly in my throat. I match your imperfections with mine. The tension is delicious. I am all flow and I am a billion particles. I offer you my hand in play. That is my best offer. Take it.
The actual Reb Levi, the one standing on the linoleum floor in the basement of the Chabad House, evinces a wan smile, shifts from one foot to the other, and patters on in his slightly pressured way. “Ok, now this is key. Deuteronomy 31 gives us the recipe, the specifications of assembly. ‘You shall assemble your men, your women, your children and your….strangers!’” He raises a finger as he counts off each of the four types of assemblies and especially emphasizes the last category, draws it out for effect. Strangers. Ok, don’t fail me now Reb Levi. One of the things that really makes my stomach do back flips is the insistence in some Orthodox circles for translating the Hebrew word ‘ger’ as proselyte rather than as stranger. As in ‘strangers in a strange land’, the kickoff of the Passover story, Robert Heinlein’s frickin’ source. We were not proselytes in a proselytic land. The text in Leviticus, Kedoshim, the ‘holiness’ tract, from which Western Civilization derives the Golden Rule, not only says ‘love thy fellow as thyself’, but follows hard by with ‘love the stranger as thyself’. Astounding! Thirteenth century BCE desert nomads. In fact, of the thirty six mentions of the word ‘ger’ in the Torah, whenever the subject is clearly the treatment of strangers, the word is immediately followed by the ‘proof texts’ from Exodus 2 and 22, strangers in a strange land. A painful page from the founding myth of the Jewish people, oppressed immigrants laboring under the heavy hand of Pharaoh. You could fill a whole library with the books that repeat or analyze this narrative in all its many incarnations. A library of pain. The library of last resort.
| CONDENSATES. I have been to the librarian of last resort. She asked to see my library card. I emptied my wallet, my valise, my pockets, my suitcase, my shoes, my socks. That’s when she took out her magnifying lens, ivory inlaid handle, beveled-edge glass. Her large yellow eye stared through the glass at the matrix of objects splayed out before her. It was only then I noticed how fine her hands, how delicate her fingers, her plain manicure verging on puritanical. Oh how I wanted to be touched by those fingers, caressed by those hands. I felt the ghost of my present self floating supine, parallel to the ground, three feet in the air. I felt a tapping at the door to the warehouse of the wind, at the iron gate, by the ghost pillow. An electric shock runs down my spine, a fierce caress. Spectral fingers move me, shift my tectonic plates. I hear someone say, he killed his wife. I want to say, that’s not true. But my vocal cords are paralyzed. I am stuck in second gear. I had spent decades hunting for Job. By the time I found him, he would point his bony finger and rasp at me, it’s in the contract. And so it was. At first I tried to foster indifference. It didn’t matter, after all. Life is suffering. I thought my gig was to ride shotgun on the pain train.
Outside the tiny slit of a window in the alchemical study, a beautiful grey blue sky glides across the fawn colored earth. She walks her fingers to the sides of my rib cage. A momentary thought, she’ll pluck out my liver. The twisted snake that winds its way through the center of my life takes another subtle turn. An old joke. An empty gesture. A dropped missive in the quiet of the library. It is easy to hear the buzz of the Yellow Court. No official presence. A subtle tinge of paranoia. Who is sending me all these messages?
|
We have always been strangers in strange lands, the living proof text for a radical principle the world has yet to embrace. Especially radical for a Bronze Age cult. Way beyond the Magna Carta’s illusory nod to the rights of the nobility. Ours was a declaration of rights to every citizen and every stranger that dwelt in our midst. I wonder when humanity will no longer need the experience of slavery to stoke the fires of compassion for our oppressed kindred. The diving board from which we leap the Red Sea. I am feeling edgy, don’t want to be disappointed. Reb Levi paces as he speaks,”From the time that we entered the Promised Land, it was declared that there be a shemittah year, a year of ‘release’, at the end of every seven year cycle. That is when we let the land lay fallow, the land’s Sabbath. The essential holiness of the land. We release our fellows from debt and indentured servitude, a time for ingathering, for an assembly of the tribe.”
He pauses for a minute, takes a sip of water and mops his brow with the shockingly ornate kerchief in the breast pocket of his long black kapota. Its gaudy paisleys catch my eye. Too garish for American manufacture. Most likely a product of India. Strange tastes for an otherwise austere looking hasid. He continues once he’s refreshed himself and again plasters a disarming smile on his face, “Deconstructing Deuteronomy’s definition of assembly we may deduce the structure of the entire twenty eight year cycle. After the first brace of seven years we must hold the the assembly of men. After the second seven, the assembly of women. The next, children. And now, at last,” he turns and scans the room slowly from behind his wire-rim spectacles to squeeze the last remaining bit of consciousness out of the flagging neurons in the crowd, “at the end of the full twenty eight year cycle we observe the ancient Levitical practice of Birkat HaChama. The assembly of strangers.” A judicious silence. “The creation cycle is about to roll around again on the cosmic keyboard.” I am perched on the edge of my seat.
Reb Levi nods as he inspects his flagging audience. “Let’s say the b’racha over the third cup.” The crowd complies, even those who are well into their cups ahead of the rabbi. We wait for him to continue. “So what does it mean, assembly of strangers?” Puzzled looks. “Well, I’m a futurist. This is near and dear to my heart.” A strange claim for a guy wearing a hat and getup that are seventy five years out of fashion. But I’m willing to cut him some slack. The futurist goes on,”This is the year when we as Jews reach out to all the other communities of thinkers and worshipers, scholars and artists. It is our duty to bring their knowledge home. Science, literature, art, other religions. It is our obligation to study it all. In each of us lies the possibility of placing another of humanity’s puzzle pieces in its jagged niche, to repair the fractured vessel of Creation.” I am screaming yes! yes! yes! inside my head. “The great rectification of all knowledge.” He stops once more to let it sink in. This rabbi, from an atavistic sect known for xenophobia and anti-Darwinism, is totally blowing my mind. He does some numerological sleight of hand and waves his arms around the trendier scientific ideas of our time—String Theory, Quantum Computing, Neuroplasticity—all the while waxing eloquent about the great paintings, masterpieces of literature, philosophical conundra and musical marvels of transglobal culture. I’m afraid he’s lost most of the crowd but wow, I have both feet on the running board of that train. I don’t know what planet he came from, but all I could think was sign me up. Little did I know that in a few more incarnations Reb Levi’s vision would bear its final fruit.
The reader is instructed to proceed directly to Chapter 6: Adam is Banished.
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