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Living in Jerusalem is like reflecting on an eternal moment as through a kaleidoscope of daring anthropopathy: continuation . . .Part Three

Yoel Nitzarim

MEd at Northeastern Illinois University

发布日期: 2017年9月24日

Before I conclude this tale, I wish to share a memory of an experience I had with my students at East-West University, in Chicago, Illinois, about fifteen years ago. I was approaching my classroom to teach an English Composition II class when I heard loud shouting emanating from the classroom. Two young male voices pierced the quietude of the morning session: one Indian Hindu; the second, a Pakistani Muslim. The anger and hatred in the tone of the voices was so palpable that I could barely think. Upon entering, I immediately requested that both students be seated. They glared at me as I told then to listen to me: "This is a sacred domain. It is the forum for blessed discourse on the vital matters of the day, especially those pertaining to your lives. Without reverence for the moment, for one another, and for the very arena in which we find ourselves, no education can take place. Whether one is a monotheist or a polytheist, it is incumbent upon each and every one of us to remember that before we even consider our beliefs, we must remember that each and every one of us is a living human being who shares time and space in the very same world. Accordingly, we all must comport ourselves humbly, reverentially, kindly, compassionately, decently, humanely and tolerantly with dignity, nobility, and awe. Our time on this earth is limited: we are--each and every one of us--mortal, fallible, and vulnerable. Listen to me, now. Listen carefully! We need one another to behave like human beings seeking understanding, seeking peaceful coexistence, endeavoring to find ways to improve this world--including ourselves, our relationships with others, and our relationships with the world itself. This university--this very classroom--is where the process of learning how to become human begins. Listen! Do you hear the silence in the room? Listen closely! Can you perceive our presence in what was previously an empty space? Listen intently! Our presence creates a certain august atmosphere for change, for transcendence, for pursuing what it means to be human in this world. Whether we are of the belief in One G-d or of the belief in many gods, first and foremost we are--each and every one of us, not a deity of any sort! We are creations who can create a better lot for us all! That is our most important job in this world--to make it a better place for every living soul to inhabit. Listen to the lesson of your humanity--of your common humanity. You do to others as you would want them to do to you! Speak softly, respectfully, kindly, understandingly, humbly; and act nobly as you are meant to act as a human being!

And now to continue with the tale . . .

A vision:

I was seated between two grandfathers: Shlamik and Barukh. It was a Friday night, erev (Heb.: eve) Shabbat (Heb.: Sabbath) meal. The prayers were chanted, the blessings over the grandchildren were offered, and the meal was consumed in song. Wine was the drink of choice, bt song was the appanage. We relived the coming of the Sabbath with Shlomo Alkabetz' "Lecha Dodi." [Please see an explanation and interpretation of this blessing in the footnote following the tale.] It was as if we washed our hands with every inflection of every soothing note we sang, yet the sounds were perfunctorily in a minor key as if to remind us of the day before, Shivah Asar Betammuz, a fast day (the seventeenth day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, the day which commemorates the breaching of the wall of the Old City of Jerusalem by the Roman legions, just three weeks before the destruction of the Second Temple). The fast had been difficult . . . very difficult because it was so hot.

This was my first fast. First times are always times of anxiety for me, and this one was the first of the first, after I had claimed womanhood at age twelve, my first menstruation cycle. I didn't understand why it was necessary to remember the crumbling of the walls of Jerusalem. I just had to imagine how terriboy thick and immovable they had to be; after all, they protected the holy city of my dreams. These imaginations attached me to my people as a fetus to the womb. Would I have still celebrated the sabbath even after the great walls of Jerusalem had tumbled to the ground? How would I receive my lovely quee--The Sabbath Queen--in such a state of pandemonium? Where the joy? Her grace and aplomb--these, her crown; my heart--this, my mortal receptacle.

Unprepared was I fro this event . . . and for the one in the coming week. Yes, exactly seven days would pass to a second shivah, the evacuation of my entire family to the concentration camps to north of the blue line in southern Lebanperdition. I would befriend Margot Frank in Bergen-Belsen and share her unfortunate fate. Would children somehow be able to remember? What about their children and their children's children? What children? Would any survive?

And the day after, a second vision of a more recent time occurring some forty-eight years later:

I was leading my squad of ten Golani paratroopers on a reconnaissance mission behind the lines seven kilometers in southern Lebanon. The terrain was unimaginable, almost like the surface on Mars. We were constantly tripping over unexpected crags in the ever-rising layers of rocks, projectiles more formidable than the unseen enemy in our midst.

Around one turn and another turn and another, my troops and I, their lieutenant, were confronting shadows and jousting with the images the clouds reflected on the rocks, almost like apparitions of Ya'akov (Heb.: Jacob) and Esav (Heb.: Esau) finally squaring off in the last arena for their birthright. Just that morning I had written my parents a three-page letter in which I informed them of my good spirits and optimistic outlook. Realizing that I only had forty-two days remaining in my second tour of duty in Lebanon, I looked forward to my planned trip to India in late October after the holidays (Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkoth, Simchat-Torah, and Shemini-Atzeret). Perhpas I would even marry to my true soul-mate and sweetheart Kochav (Heb.: Star) in Calicut, a neighboring city to Cochin, by the time I would reach my twenty-sixth birthday. Kochav's family had emigrated to Israel from Cochin when she was a toddler some twenty-one years earlier. Our deepest wish was to revisit her birthplace and become a couple officially by the ordained rabbi, an Israeli by chance.

Notwithstanding all of the good intentions, the next turn met with trouble of a lethal nature. I never knew what hit me. But what about our would-be children? Our own family?

Thousands upon thousands of Israeli soldiers have been killed and maimed in Israel's hundred plus years of survival, so why would my death offer any more meaning than those of my comrades? The old saw about saving one life's being the same as saving the world wouldn't apply to me this time around.

Needless to say, my life was a loss to Kochav, both her family and mine, and my buddies in arms. More than that, as I look back on that existence, I realize that I would have been an abba (Heb.:father) before too long, and would have added to my community a prosperous family of perhaps two children of the statistics are accurate. All for naught--my life met with a premature end, only to take up residence in my spiritual self again for the eighth time that I am aware of . . . and anon and again that number seems to pale in relationships to the possibility of more than fifty-eight hundred years of human existence after the creation of Adam.

Now heading into the fifth creation of the world after four times of previously total destruction, the time of a final stage in human existence as heralded by the Messiah would appear so sweet. Would humankind be ready for such a moment in eternity--this question would still need to be held at bay until an opportune time in the future.

In the third week of school, I still figured I would be successful in my chosen field of study. Grandma Lee was on the phone twice a week at this point since she had her own intuitive sense of my emotional state of mind. We would talk for a few moments; then my asthma would force me to abort the conversation and return the phone to Ima. It was on Thursday of this week that I had a restless night of sleep, only to be providentially awakened by the third and penultimate vision:

I was stranded in a cistern, one of hundreds of such refuges architected by Shimon bar-Kokhba and his soldiers in Beit Guvrin. Holding a chisel in my right hand, I was left to continue etching out the tunnel in which I was kneeling when two Roman soldiers overran my chamber all of a sudden.

Grandma's conversation with me triggered this vision to be sure. Again she asked me about any relationship I might have with my invented "Rebekkah." Only this time I was intuitively prepared for a response to her query: "Rebekkah" and I have an allegorical relationship, Grandma. We have met at another time and place dating back about two thousand years! At this time the very existence of Jerusalem has been in question, and I swear by all that is holy that she and I want to build a future as a family. I am a kohen (Heb.: of the priestly sect, a descendant of Moses and Aaron), a priest entrusted with the care of the tabernacle in the Holy of Holies. To me, my life is invested with exacting the Word of the L-rd together with the life Rebekkah and I can create in the holy city of Jerusalem. But unbeknownst to me is the fact that Rebekkah is not a Jewess: on the contrary, she is a descendant of a pagan, a Canaanite, specifically, a Jebusite and the father of a top general in King David's army. Thus, any children we hwould produce together would be incomplete in terms of their spiritual covenant with the Jewish people. Their adulterated souls would also affect my ability to care for the holy tabernacle.

I would create a psalm in honor of the rite of marriage, a testimony to the strength of the marital bond as demonstrated in the of the Holyvows to forge a new union out of formerly two solitary separate human beings. This psalm would never become incorporated into any future praises to the Holy One, yet its inception would engender the foundation for a myriad generations of devoted Jewish offspring to G-d's law as manifested in the Torah, for it would be cited and recited during Shabbat meals as a family custom. Rebekkah's original name is Sedheq, for she was a he who lived as a god at the time of Jerusalem's becoming the City of David; according to Jewish tradition, though, this god becomes embodied in the Shekhina, G-d's female guardian and judge of the world at all times. This explication so befuddled Grandma that she would never again sk anything more about "Rebekkah," except for her having to kknow my take on why I needed to create such a long, intricate fabrication about having a girlfriend in the first place.

My response was one that commenced with an ancient psalm and concluded with a statement solidifying my loving bond with my grandmother onto eternity. Here is that psalm:

Midway between night and day

There stretches a shadow of the

Holy One whose right to examine

And re-examine Moses' receiving

Of the uncertain past

Of a struggling people

To the ko'ach (Heb.: strength + the "k" is the initial letter and sound for the word "chalah" or bride and "ch" is the initial letter and sound for the word "chatan" or bridegroom)

(The cha-tan and ka-lah)

Of the Word.

Making aliyah (Heb.: ascending) to the rakiah (Heb: heavens)

And reaching the summit

Permits the very beginning

Surely, the inkling of a

Night turned dawn

To be discern:

The dark transmuted into light

Just as the ka'lah bonds

With the cha'tan in an initiation

Rite of proud ascension into

Holy matrimony.

This, then, is the sign of Sinai.

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Yoel Nitzarim, author

Matrix: New Fourth Series, Volume 1, Number 6 (2003)

ISSN 01775-9461

Norman Simms, ed.

Outrigger Publishers

Hamilton, New Zealand

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"Lecha Dodi," a song and blessing for Shabbat by Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz