Deuteronomy Cycle 7 Ekev

Ekev

Sometimes the beauty of God is revealed in a deep cry as you pull one more layer off your soul. It hurts like crazy. The beauty pours in even when you don’t know. Perhaps you starve yourself for it, isolate yourself for forty days or forty minutes, reach first with pounding heart into the radiance of Being. You feel a Oneness that glistens in the rush of snow-melt, the snow melt of your heart. You feel like a creek that can’t give up, not even now, this late in the summer, in the August of your life.  You taste a wind. You are lit-up.  You’ve been close, getting closer, moving into the center of an absolute essence that holds you like a soft light.

 There aren’t any words or visions or even a touch to validate this.  All of the myths and stories can’t come close to describing how you feel. The personification of God, the manipulation of Him into human terms, that human hammer on Divinity that tries to pound it into quotidian reality, that continual twisting of His Being to try to catch a few drops of Him on your tongue, those demands you are sure are His, those words of prayer that aren’t words, those visions that can’t be visions, even His sight of You…none of this is really Him. It’s simply the mirage, the mask with which you communicate the existence of God to the other….even though you have felt so much more.

  

And the problem is bringing some actuality of a God who you continually approach to those who are even further away!

To repeat: You are moving with love in one direction. Then, in your intimacy, in your embracing of the Holy One, the people take part in a weak and horrifying backwards movement.

And the Divine senses and knows. 

So you race back to them with some attempt to place in their understanding a gift from God…the tablets. But here’s the problem: Their distance invalidates the holiness of the gift. They could barely have understood it from their original place. Now that they are even farther the gift loses all accessibility and therefore all meaning.

The only way to love God now is to break the gift… to break something glimmering with the Truth…to break something real and holy beyond words. How necessary to save the Holiness beyond the symbol! How tragic!

I think it would do us all well to figure out how we can avoid the necessary breaking of more and more tablets. For it keeps happening. It hasn’t just stopped now that the gilded calf has been burned. We build more calves. Every moment. Every day. And therefore more tablets are broken.

What is the modern gilded calf?

I think that today we have to be aware of jumping to accusations. In a world in which our need to defend ourselves has multiplied exponentially, we need to be aware of when we are defending ourselves and when we are making well meaning but  aggressive fiery blind attacks.

This is written only with love and respect for rabbis who have been my teachers and mentors. But we can go too far with our vindication of others.  One example seems to be the production of Klinghoffer at the Met.  Before stating that it’s an evil piece of art, we must realize that we are turning it into our modern gilded calf, not through adoration of it (of course) but through an adoration of self and a hatred for it without even knowing (as we cannot all be dramaturgues) what this production really is.  Such behavior is  just going to  make the antisemitism already prevalent in society even worse. What do we do? Well, just as everyone can’t tiptoe close to God and everyone can’t be a rabbi....well, likewise everyone can’t know the elements of art.  I think though that we can trust the President of Julliard when it comes to fair and powerful artistic creation. Please note: Julliard produced this play a few years ago.We can therefore pragmatically have trust in the foundation of the piece. As for this production? I don't think it would behoove the Met to present a  solid piece of work in a biased and unbalanced form.

   

But the real question here is how we, the Jewish people, are reacting to this. The last thing I want to see are more broken tablets.  Once again, we know that this is a cause and effect situation. Create a gilded calf and forget any passing Opera...what we will end up watching are those tablets breaking breaking breaking. So let’s be careful please. And  please note: There is evil. But we need to swing that sword carefully so it doesn’t become a tool for a new-found and highly understandable..and yet highly destructive… idolized layer of armor.