Mon, 19 August 2019 = 18th of Av, 5779; Yom Yotzei Min Ha'Klal L'Kol Echad v' Echat!! (Heb. An Extraordinary Day for each and everyone!!)
LIVE FROM THE RAMOT LIBRARY IN RAMOT BET, JERUSALEM, ISRAEL TO YOU, WHEREVER YOU ARE IN THIS WORLD OF OURS . . .
"Yerushalayim (Heb. Jerusalem): Shabbat, July 13, 1996
"This has been an extraordinary day full of sublime experiences. The image--an insouciant stampede of spirit and soul blending into silence--today's metempsychosis. Today I am come again, a metaphrast whose work yesterday was but prose is today verse. . . "--Nitzarim, Yoel. Affair of the Mind. "Two Days I Will Never Forget." Ed. Tracy Lyn Rottkamp. Rottkamp Publishers. New York, New York, USA. 1998.
"The Imprimatur of Time"--Nitzarim Yoel. Matrix. New Fourth Series. Vol. 2, Number 3. Ed. Dr. Norman Simms. Outdigger Publishers. Hamilton, New Zealand, 2004. (Note: This creative nonfiction is housed in the National Library of Israel in Givat Ram, Jerusalem, Israel. The reference number is 506375.)
--My dear reader, I, Yoel David Nitzarim, a Jew born, raied, and educated in the United States of America, am Betzalel Komensky in this story.--
"Imagine that you were alive some four thousand years ago in a place called the Ur of Chaldees. There you had learned of some man named Abraham, who actually heard a voice tell him there is only one G-d. Only one G-d, you thought--how could that be? For ages all human beings believed in th divine presence of many gods, in the goverance of a divine administration. Yet with the advent of this novel insight into the Cretaor of the Universe, the descendants of this man Abraham would be endowed with the certain knowledge that their Creator would protect their survival and guarantee their continued existence. Would moral discord play havoc with this Divine plan? If G-d's chosen people could just be allowed to follow His ways, dream the dreams He would have them dream, if only it could be so. If they could re-evaluate their reason for being in their own time--but alas.
"At 9:00 AM on a Thursday morning, Betzalel Komensky, a wizened, olive-comlected librarian, was standing in a crowd of some one thousand persons. One could hear the final words in Rabbi Etan Lingstrom's homily for the commemoration of the last war in which the Jews and Muslims had sacrificed their lives so that their children would live in peace in the City of Peace. The words hurtled Betzalel into a harsh memory he had been trying to elude for twenty-five years. Yet they confronted him now with an encounter of a new nature, for here Betzalel was not standing in the quaint sandy floor of his house of prayer. Here, in Jerusalem, his mind was being jogged into the reason for his coming to Israel:
"***Glorified and sanctified be His name in the world He created to His will.
"***May He establish His kingdom during your lifetime.
"Then nearly swept off his feet as the muezzin of the Al Aksa Mosque began the azhan for the Zohr just at the same moment, Betzalel became infused with the message:
"G-d is most g---reat! G-d is most great! I bear witness there is no god but G-d!
"The latter words commingled with those of the rabbi's, the first lines of the Kaddish, like the decipherment of a message from the Supernal Will. And Betzalel could feel effusive perspiration cascading down his cheeks as he trembled in the desperation of the moment--Quietness succeeded quietness in a silence so long and wondrous that time seemed to stand still. The likeliness of another word's intervening among men, women, and G-d could not have been farther from the truth of this moment. Standing up to the Word, and mortal would betray the mortality holding a lease on life.
"Five hours later in the early afternoon under the brilliant stark sun of this weekday, the stiff body of one Betzalel Komensky slowly swayed first forward, then backward in a steady cadence. Always facing eastward, Betzalel's stolid facial expression and stoical black garb blended in with the small groups of haredim, the ultra-orthodox Jews, praying in reserved solemnity. At once, like a chorus line bowling in unison, all of the collective knees bent to a forty-five degree angle in what was the beginning of the Mincha afternoon prayer of adoration to the Holy One. Eyes closed in placid, undisturbed reverence, sunken cheeks betraying an ascetic discipline, and a leaden pallor belying an ineffable self-effacement--this description could be attriuted to every young man conversing discomfortably with his won, private Interlocutor. So, too, now--Betzalel's knees were buckling beneath the onerous weight ascribed to a life style imbued in religiousness.
"Creaking and cracking in deference to the One Without A Name, each and every knee provided the percussive accompaniment to the word searing a sacred praise to the Hidden One, whose countenance always eluded even His most fervently earthy creation.
"And here stood Betzalel, the former immigrant from the Netherlands Antilles, phylacteries honing celestial power, facing the ponderous stone before him as he attested to his unconditional devotion. Even with the 500-year-old plight of the Arawaks in his collective conscience, tears welled in his eyes unaccustomed to feeling a sense of here without fear. Meanwhile, precipitously appeared an ever-widening, almost imperceptible lineament whose taciturn extension gradually lit up a smile on an impervious, stern face. Betzael's forehead woke up amid the surging prayers rebounding off the Wall in front of him.
"Then somewhere lost in the matrix of prayer, meditation, and personal suppplication, words crawled out of his mouth to meet their Master halfway at this remaining wall of the Second Temple. In urgency, these words--now accelerating in their transference between Betzalel and the massive rock before him--created a message so ancient in meaning, so modern in intention, like the dream-state enveloping all of civilized humanity when the historic auditory waves were bouncing off the earth's surface via Alan Shepard's voice from his base in the Mercury aircraft in 1961.
"What is more, the words of the afternoon prayers uttered by those pious fellows up and down the entire length of the Wall were swirling in a comfortable cacophony of diverse pitches and timbres into the sound which is heard either in a baby's first cry or in the rash hush of a dying person's final breath; such cried intervene in the worlds encompassing every living soul's lifetime attachment to the Eternal One, a concatenation of love and light always moving in circular motion breathing life into the lifeless lump of clay who becomes one capable of creating in that uniquw fashion called human and soon loses vitality only to rejoin the interminable umbilical cord stretching from the Holy One.
"Clinging to their tradition, a small number of fellow supplicants raised Betzalel onto the magenta-cushioned chair reserved for the "majesty of worship" to their Master of the Universe. This chair--an adornment of those who are baal teshuvah or "reborn"--did not truly exist in the mundane world outside the Wall Plaza; notwithstanding, every single worshiper in the Diaspora has had this image of being brought out of the everyday world into a realm elevating the worshiper lost in prayer toward the Out-----s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d Arm.
"As an accompaniment to one's being uplifted in a show of faith, Hebraized utterances bombarded animate ears beside inanimate rocks. And here Betzalel remembered with his whole being how much he loved and feared and held his L-rd in awe. The very tenets of Betzalel's beiefs s--t-i-r-r-ed the sacred air of this holy place; the intense yearning for a place in the eternal heart of his people clutched at his person as if he were again placed aside Mount Sinai waiting for the commandments to be etched onto rock by the "finger" of the One only seen by Moshe (Heb. Moses), His mortal witness.
"Mortifying himself before the Supreme Being, Betzalel w-a-i-l-e-d the words offering a sign of the covenant between every Jew who remembered the promise made by Hashem-Elohim (Heb. the Divine attributes of mercy, compassion, and justice) to the Patriachs--Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--and their descendants, the nation of Israel. However, this time these binding words held especial meaning; for Betzalel was recalling his personal reason for being present in the holiest of all places on earth for the Jew, the very land where even the air breathed and the water drunk teemed with the inter vivos consciousness welcoming in a new day.
"Here, Betzalel thought, if only I could prostate myself before my Creator, I would learn How I fit into the Divine scheme of things.
"Here was the world in which Betzalel presented himself as the Holy Presence beat life into his s-w-e-l-l-i-n-g heart while it was invoking guidance."
--------------------to be continued on Monday, August 26, 2019