The Abishter had each of us in the proverbial glory of His mind when He created the oasis of Torah repose for Adam. During the week humanity must toil to earn our being alive in conjunction with the verse, ‘by the sweat of your brow you’ll earn bread.’ (Bereshis 3:19) To what end is this cycle of efforts with the mouth’s teeth always gnawing and the constant demand of our needs?  The prosperous too, may feel bound, stricken and frustrated, even restricted – this expression of mundane anguish is no ‘chiddush,’ novel idea. Already king Solomon related to us in Koheles  ‘Hashem made Adam simple but they seek many intrigues’ (Koheles 7:29) and the Ch’Z’L counterbalance with ‘who is a wealthy person? One who is happy with his portion.’ As heard from Rabbi Moshe Schapiro shlit’a, of YU’s Gottesman Library, this may be understood as the halachic definition of wealth.

Humanity looks out from individual perches and experiences a world which offers the appearance of unlimited fulfillment and gratification. The earth expands as a taut belly pregnant with life and possibility into the space which bedazzles (Yom Zeh Mechubad) השמימ מספרים כבודו וגם הארץ מלוה חסדו  but days come and whither as the shadow of a bird is fleeting (Koheles Rabbah) and we know nothing of the banquet except in our hearts, when we search with great effort, for the land’s expanse is a clever force against us. But even those who appear sated and tired saddle up for more at this cornucopia of potentially endless bounty. This is the quagmire of Egypt, from which we were redeemed. Like tar quells the mammoth’s roar, the greatness of humanity is kept, concealed in Egypt’s straits ensnared in the superficial value of a thing.

Do not lose sight of your true purpose איש מלחמה! Vessel created in His tzelem and soul obligated to reveal His demut. Make manifest your G-dliness (צלם ) and unique Torah expression (דמות ) bring praise and glory to G-d for Israel is the crown of the creation, the Shabbos groom, the Yid’s expression realizes and elevates the face of creation. The Abishter encourages us and reveals a secret of His likeness by informing us, ‘the objective is so near to you as to cleave; in your mouth and heart; for you to act with.’ (Deuteronomy 30:14) Clearly we must realize this ‘objective’ is not an exterior experience dependent initially on material considerations but an interior dynamic, the seed of the moment, available immediately, which may permeate our actions with meaning but does not require any specific form to initiate. The definition of our reality derives from interior intent as the oak’s energy pushes forth from seed to tree. That which is not in ‘our hand’ is not counted.

This inner focus, expressed so wonderfully by the Holy king David, … שביתי ה’ לנגדי תמיד expresses itself as the individual’s personal intent, from his own free will, to perform any task, with meaning. Not imagined or personal meaning but Eternal meaning, לשמה. May we actually achieve this totality of being?  Just how near to the discovery of total meaning is a person? The seed is within him and the garden beckons every seventh day with the Holy Shabbos. The light of purpose and understanding reveals itself and frees the Yidele from his mundane burdens, elevating him to his established setting in Olam Haba. As the peytan sings Shabbos is ‘m’eyn Olam Haba.’

Often times we find ourselves running into Shabbos kodesh, the holy Sabbath, exhausted from the week. What follows? A rushed prayer service, slumbering down at the table, eyes half shut expressing a longing for our blankets; on occasion even breaking into Shir haMaalos, the prelude to the post-meal blessings, after the fish for a jest. Exhausted and vulnerable, suddenly the week’s influence rears itself upon your weakened state. How easy to let go and get lost in the nostalgia of the mundane and the strong pull towards sleep.

“Wake up! Wake up!” We actually sing these very words in the Lecha Dodi hymn, our escorting of the beloved Sabbath Queen, Friday evening. The week’s activities should not crash into Shabbos kodesh. It is told, one Hasidic rebbe would smoke his pipe, its embers toasting up to the border between days.

This act he did to clearly delineate between the two times and to enjoy maximally both realms as a Jew should in the proper contexts as defined by halacha. But the holy man’s expression arrives with focus and intent, not the pressure building, nerves-tested as candle-lighting nears, flurry of hasty actions stirring the home’s air. As this author heard from R. Ron Yosef Strosberg, in the name of Ch’Z’L, ‘The six days both prepare us for Shabbos and receive their purpose and vitality from the seventh day.’ Shabbos is the revelation of Hashem’s Achdus, the Sublime kolleles of His Action of Creation.

Both the past and the future are anchored to the Sabbath, an idea alluded to in the Lecha Dodi hymn. We sing regarding the unique dynamic of the Sabbath’s importance for both the past and present, She is ‘The last in deed and the first in thought’ the initial consideration that birthed the whole of our worlds from the elemental matter of our neighbors and loved ones to the deepest portions of the cosmos. As the Holy Chafetz Chayim z’t’k’l states in the opening to his Mishneh Brurah, Adam too shares this most important trait of being the initial consideration and the final ‘station’  for the creation deep within the Eternal splendor of our souls – only to celebrate our Sabbath Queen/Bride with G-d in union!

It is difficult to fathom that our sole purpose is revealed and given over to us on a weekly basis yet the Jew must know! No destination exists for the Jewish family beyond Shabbos.

The week and all its details, even the years and careers of our lives are folded into the totality of the seventh day, Shabbos kodesh. Each individual day and its mark of distinction, a commemoration of the act of creation are lost in the wholesomeness of the Sabbath.  To sensitize ourselves to this ‘actuality’ (R. Sh. R. Hirsch z’t’k’l on Bereshis ) and invigorate the Jewish body we must cleave to Shabbos kolleles to better clarify and reveal the week’s capacity to one another and the community. Through the day’s order of services, singing, eating and learning, our activities permeate and find life throughout the whole of Shabbos, empowering the day’s traditional activities (yes, even naps!) with the power of learning a weekday kollel achieves with its daily seder, schedule. How could this be?

Here emerges the splendor of Shabbos. The total radiance of the Torah’s crown in our world is revealed only through the kolleles of Shabbos kodesh. The day is a taste of the eternal day on which He is One and His name is One. The concept of a Kollel comes from the word ‘klal’ in Hebrew, which superficially means all. However it has a deeper, interior meaning as well.

Just as the glory of the fruit is the flesh which is hidden and sustains while the appearance only catches the man’s eye so he desires it, this distinction of meaning signifies the transition from individual parts to a whole, a revelation of unity.

This author heard from Rav Herschel Reichman, shlit’a, of Yeshiva University, “You have a chair made up of 9 pieces of wood. Separately each piece is an individual unit. But put together as a chair you have one thing,” Transcending its nine parts, this sublime ‘tenth’ element is the kolleles, the oneness of the thing.

We seek to unite with all His worlds to obtain the sublime sweetness of His Unity, to know the Abishter’s world and the Great Love given us. Searching out His kolleles through humility and awe demonstrates sensitivity to the understanding of Shabbos and brings Her fragrance and radiance into the future, our new moment, to climb higher and higher still. Pursuing growth, increasing, in the end, our realization and observance of Shabbos which, as our ‘mouths fill with laughter’ we know today that we knew it yesterday and will know it again, G-d help us, tomorrow.

It is, to quote R. H. Reichman, in the name of the Heliga Yid z’t’k’l, the great and never-ending nascent spiral staircase until Shabbos permeates our every moment. Ripe with His intent, whole beings as one of body and soul united with the Divine in the embrace of Shabbos. G-d, having created and chosen us, now shares, as a king and queen share in the whole of the kingdom, His love and His estate.

Though we may tremble upon reflection with trepidation and humility, the protocol of the royal family is new to the bride, more complex and prohibitive than that of a commoner, yet she knows it is more refined and scarce. To desire and engage in the Sabbath’s bounty Hashem has instructed us how to properly react to the holiness of this day, to reveal the flesh of the fruit, the interior of the human, in reality their essence which, like Shabbos kodesh, is eternal. For this reason a person should not think of all the prohibitions necessary on Shabbos as inhibiting but rather as freeing. Just as a master musician tempers their body through discipline and practice to his love of music, enabling them the refined experience of expressing a personal art form, so too must a Jew make an effort to draw out the refinement of our Holy Sabbath.

With the proper focus and effort our Shabbos experience may unbind us from the pangs of gravity, from the very thing, which holds us back: our physical form and its limitations. During the week we may often only reveal what our occupations and accomplishments deem us as. However, in Her holiness, for G-d has separated and sanctified the seventh day, Her light reveals the real you, the spark of your soul which extends beyond the ages, deeper than your marks of distinction. She is ageless and offers the experience of immortality.  Shabbos is the eternal experience in this world nothing is beyond Her horizon. Struggle to rise, to shake the dust from your clothing and prepare.

I self identify young.

But not like that, not like what you’re thinking.

More like, there is the kid.

The noir kid. That outsider, you know it too, falling into adulthood and the void. Being pressed, pinned down with gravity and the weights of this world all warring against that fire pushing out, wanting to spread, rampant with exhilaration. 

Gravitational forces, nuclear forces, all of this love affair expanding the space in which we dwell.

The kid does not want to go back, relive those things from which our stories are derived. It’s not that the content is too much, rather, the sentiment kills him. Your love in his eyes, the glimmer of your presence, our embracing, vanished into the distortions of memory, sleeping in dust on your window sill in cold NYC apartments full of relationship vignettes and escapism. Our hearts quieted forcibly, the singularity drawing matter nearer, and supernovas shining long after their heat has been quelled.

I have, mostly, felt confident in pursuing those matters I warranted worthwhile.

(Wait, I am lying to myself, I must be. It is boldly stated on the front page on all the papers. Just look at all the anguish, the conflict. The obsessions with headlines, with moving images and scenes, dialogue, while our warm bodies cool, away from those humans we can touch and know and comfort. It is hard to push off that understanding, that regret, a crushing regret, that I have spoken out as though with authority, when the world’s borders offer no suggestion that an understanding has occurred.)

I shared that often heard universal declaration that does not allow for regret, at least confessing to regret.

Today, I have a completely different, and better, I think, attitude regarding such things. I confess, there is much I regret and allowing for this detail to manifest as a means toward growing, enables for the bloom to intensify. It would be silly of me to state, “I regret nothing.” First, because I am unsure how to quantify “nothing,” exactly, and, secondly, regret runs a broad spectrum and some matters simply cool into a solid form, regrettably. Some regrets, too, are large, so much so, that awareness of them yet waits. It is not that night has fallen, only that their shadow cast is vast and when the sun casts its light over the many landscapes, there’ll be even greater reconciling.

In High School, I was declared, “most aloof.” Probably because I was acutely sensitive to details and shy as a result, having rushed on occasion, a torrent of contemplations onto peers and, in turn, being ostracized for having done so.  I took myself incredibly seriously, thinking, what the soul desires, is genius. To observe it, to perform as such, with the fluid shimmer of mastery, all vessels articulating in the living body, the sublime expression arriving, seamless. I could not feel hung up on being misunderstood, because the right person, the good room, will want to work at getting you, not shutting you down. But this meant moments of anxiety, fears of abandonment, loneliness between the braving it out, since, when you are green, a novice in your execution, the sapling might fail, even under normative exposure.

No, I am young, like bold sentences, or unabashed enthusiasm for Hemingway. Fresh, still not caring for what’s in vogue, not afraid to stand outside of boxes, isolated, unhampered by the needling, the bullying of those posturing over insecurity. Not fearing the accuracy, the space necessary for pithy advances. I am hiding, kind of choosy and unafraid of committing, fearless in the face of loving. I am daring you, devilishly, to seek me out.

I anticipated becoming older, like a bloom unfolding, and without question the pleasure of revelation pleases the soul, the wine ages, complex changes occur and you evolve, G-d helping, into a better you. But the chance to be something like the way you see yourself, will be one day come to rest under the top soil and clay.

Please G-d, I do not want to stop being concerned with caring until then, no matter how steep the hill’s incline, growing slopes until mountains face you down, and there, at Your modest peak is the crown revealed.

Oh, how I empathize with you, I do. I hear you out there, precious soul, beyond diamonds, obsessions, and priceless is what you are. Worthy of true attention. But there is more, the kernel of recklessness adolescence provides, offers a deeper secret, and therein is youth found. A dynamic that I have known to be remissed often, even in the young.

Our imaginations, only adolescent with contrivance, but coupled with disciplined intent become inspiring. We might nurture strong desires for newness, embrace the metamorphosis change provides. Continuously redefine, refine, and mold the fruits of our hands, humbled before the limit of our knowing. I do not want to stop and define myself. Rather, I want to know more, feel more, understand greater, deeper matters, until the world bares its holiness to me with even greater intimacy. To continue all these things, until I cannot.

I remember meeting my former wife, I was a Yeshiva University sophomore, she was a Barnard sophomore, but we had an age gap of 9 years, my having enrolled at university as a 25 year old. I had younger, upper class-men friends, we would get drunk at the Dublin House on 79th and Amsterdam a few nights a week. One of them would teach me how to invest, another would hate me for abandoning him to marriage. But, when her and I were together the dynamic between us made sense, we were, each of us, who we wanted to be, we shared an equitable concept of what the future should look like; essentially, we both wanted meaningful lives.

She and I would hang out in her dorm, my dorm being male only, and I would listen to the 3 or 4 of her 6 other roommates talking openly about being authors, writing great American literature, and their boyfriends espoused the same too. I spent considerable time with them, having the kinds of conversations I miss today, when that kind of connection is not around. Outside of a social context, the desire to avoid small talk, I could unravel on any topic so long as being earnest counted. We all wanted and expected greatness, not because it was valuable or we were conceited, but because there was no reason to limit what might be the future. We had the privilege of expectations.

Then, when we would say good night, she and I retiring into the privacy of our intimacy, I would say, “after graduation, grad school, they’ll be jobbers.” I was guessing, I had seen and met people, known others, who were killing themselves for their art, and this was, I told her, privileged conjecture. I didn’t know for sure, but I felt it. The talk wasn’t manifested in the endless need to promote your work, and that after you had spent all those hours editing, returning to edit edits, no one asking you to keep telling the world, this is me, this is my voice. Waking up, totally ignored, lost in obscurity, and resume the climb. No, this was the funny, in the moment, shouting, and listening for echoes across the canyon’s maw while vacationing on your parents’ dime. This was feigned scholarly rapping on TV shows that captured your attention between the occasional output of work that suggested talent but lacked the considerable amount of germination necessary to field a profitable harvest.

Shortly after the divorce, 16 years after our love had first blossomed, years of gravitational waves later, I was down in the East Village, back on Manhattan Island. I was visiting the furniture restoration store I had worked at during those early college years, where I learned wood working techniques when I was first married. I had gone from the none to handy musician to antique restoration guy in a couple of years.

Now I was just visiting. I had let go of that work years back, since having been told the job “didn’t suit a college grad, a married man with a future.” I took a post at a Washington D.C. think tank. I saw my wife wander, then choose, and settle into a career with education, like her Mother, and her Grandmother before her. She had wanted to be a scientist, maybe work in forestry, but as the pieces fell into place she had an opportunity to establish a career track that offered security and stability. While teaching she pursued graduate degrees in pedagogy and later, advancing beyond her predecessors, administration, maxing out on her potential salary bases.

But this day, I was walking the seven or so avenues from the shop to the subway. It was summer, dusk, warm, even congenial despite the day blending into the evening with heavy charcoal clouds opaquely rolling across the building cut sky.

Striding across 3rd avenue, it began to rain. Hard, then torrentially. The streets cleared in moments, but I had no umbrella and was quickly soaked. I just kept walking.

It was a warm rain, like I remembered from my childhood, and I felt like someone in Georgia who could drive in the snow.

I passed a block housing a retired Catholic church, there was an allee and when I passed under it, the rain was muted. The hard driving storm raged outside the trees’ canopy and underneath the leafy ceiling, the water fell lazily onto my wet form. I had an epiphany.

I called my ex right away, trying to protect my phone from the water and rapid fire spoke to her with the kind of exuberance that had prompted her to call me manic before the divorce and told her of my discovery.

Finally, our differences, her frustrations, all that grew into anger until becoming rage, were suddenly, years later, clear to me. She was little interested in the fact that my processing capacity could take this long but allowed me to speak of it to her of it anyway. And bless her, she never rejected the opportunity to listen, she only capped it when she had her fill and, though divorced, full of unresolved and broken hopes, who I am never left her consideration. She appreciated, albeit silently, my loyalty to these dynamics.

Loosely, I exclaimed to her these thoughts:

I desired the full soaking, I had this starving hunger for understanding, for knowing, cleaving and doing. I needed these heavy torrents of relentless consideration and now it was clear that this overwhelmed her when, in my youthful ignorance, I had wanted her keep up with me, I had wanted her as my partner.

We would walk often, thirty, forty  blocks, rather than take the subway, and my pace, quickening, my thoughts unraveling, I would advance thirty feet ahead of her, stop, look back at her chasing after me and wait until she caught up and the process would begin again. She would anger that I was not walking “with her,” and I would anger for being hampered in my gait. I now saw that I needed the obstruction of the trees’ leaves to translate my love of the water* to another person and that effect on me, that lesson, though late for her and I, was good, appropriate. I cried, somewhat happily too, and apologized, espousing in a series of run-ons, my contrition and she called me dramatic, told me I rambled on too much, and the process began renewed.

But time had marched forward and neither of us desired that shared space with all the violence of contempt and instead of reconciling these differences, or seeing how such a parallax between two in love might give our lives depth and advantage, there was a caving into the attractions considered cool, a desire to reclaim that privilege of conjecture, or to simply avoid concessions, to abate change, keep progress in the realm of thought. The revision of that fear towards commitment, capricious tendencies, as observational discernment, being correctly choosy, and reconsidering your station as some new life other than that of your ancestors, simply because this moment of being was currently yours.

Breaking these habits is tough. Rabbi Yisroel of Salant had stated it easier to learn through all of Sh’a’S, than change one character trait. The manifest entropy of single life makes such an exertion difficult, the propulsion necessary to jet yourself forward into an eternal relationship that eventually replaces the patterns and friends cultivated in the evening leading up to middle age, with responsibility, allegiance, and compromise exhaled as sighs, hinting to a recollection of Van Gogh’s fabled last words, “the sadness will last forever.”

What was left for that genius, as he lay in bed, mortally wounded, facing absence, smoking his pipe, looking into the void and all the creations his imagination filled it with, except his brother’s sad and anxious words thumping away, that maverick loneliness, and the possible realization that it is better to be alive and loved, tempered, than unbridled and exhausted as the worlds advance into night.

The hickory’s

charred embers, bathed

in lava

red clarity;

untold chimeras climb,

slow river lazy,

sedulous tendrils’ whispers,                                                                                                   

lassoing your mind,

that tendered calf,

soon converted to gelatin,

licking the collagen restraints

of a ghost

off your fork.

“Four entered P’R’D’S’ — Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Acher (Elisha ben Abuyah),^[1] and Akiba. Ben Azzai looked and died; Ben Zoma looked and went mad; Acher destroyed the plants; Akiba entered in peace and departed in peace.”   Chagiga 14b

There are concepts which are known to the many and others which the few tarry over. The finest portion remains only for the discoverer. When the crown of a generation exhales, not all which exalts the master can be shared.

This is like a man who sanctifies a particular woman and they become as “one flesh.” The pair is known in public as husband and wife, they acquire a distinct set of halachos, some revealed, some private, for their new station while the deepest elements, both physically and emotionally, of their bond are properly hidden, the intimacy of their knowledge relative only to each other and to HaShem.

The verses in Bereshis 2:24/25 stating:

2:24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.

2:25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

They are bonded to one another as two forces escaping the entropy of mazal and revealing one new unit, one kingdom among the kingdoms of Israel. Gathered on this new madrega, as the tents of Your people, in their wholesome design, perfect, and Your crown is exalted. The verse follows that in their shared space, they are not ashamed from their nakedness, their individual vulnerability, as they would be in an inappropriate context.

This is the ahava raba, the great love. All of us alive today, cleaving, remain bound up in this matrimony between HaShem and Israel and her splendid myriads, each of us a cherished spouse and our secrets, between soul and G-d, arrive expressed in novel words of Torah, deeds, the intimacy hidden. For His beloved, the treasures are not hid away in vaults or labyrinth, but rather exposed, residing in the open as the Land sits between the nations’ furies, the people, scattered as a remnant in strange lands, and Your Torah, dwelling in the clay vessels of the humble, approachable to all who seek them with sincerity.

Megillah 31a

Rabbi Jochanan said, Wherever you find the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He, there you find His humility. This is written in the Torah, repeated in the Prophets, and stated a third time in the Writings. It is written in the Torah: “For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, mighty and awe-inspiring God, who shows no favouritism and accepts no bribe.” Immediately afterwards it is written, “He upholds the cause of the orphan and widow, and loves the convert, giving him food and clothing.” It is repeated in the Prophets, as it says: “So says the High and Exalted One, who lives for ever and whose name is Holy: I live in a high and holy place, but also with the contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.” It is stated a third time in the Writings: “Sing to God, make music for His name, extol Him who rides the clouds – God is His name – and exult before Him.” Immediately afterwards it is written: “Father of the fatherless and judge of widows, is God in His holy habitation.”

Through this trait of modesty, the expression of humility reveals worlds and, as we say by Havdala, where you find His greatness, there too you discover His humility and because of that dynamic, the greatest portions of this world are “hidden” in broad daylight where few search for them.

 

It is with great trepidation and fear that I approach the words of our holy master and teacher the R’M’K, ztkl. How may I approach such grand ideas? It is true, the text speaks of uniform concepts generally acknowledged to exhibit an understanding of the Kabbala, yet our holy Master’s primary concern is to effect transformation of character, to enable the Soul’s shine to greater enhance the body; to elevate the student that he/she may emulate Hashem through the 13 middos revealed in the verses from Micah. To be m’kabel, is to be humble, without the hindering effects of pride, since what is not known, may not be limited and in this state does the tree grow from a seed, and its form might then be described since, from Adam till now, we are established to define this world.

It is important to not lose touch with the goal our teacher sets before us: gather and shine onto this world light, delivered through instruction from our holy teachings, to make this world worthy of the Other, hidden from us, Who desires our return. This begins in the self and is completed in that smallest space. We must relent in a quest for quantifiable greatness and realize, as heard from my master, R’Y’A’b’A, even the sigh of a person, made over thoughts of doing teshuva, is an atonement and elevates him beyond measure and as my master taught me HaShem dwells over the broken, the ill, the dying, who have lost the desire for those matters which distract from the Eternal. The quest we are set on, does not require renown, the greatest of our saints were repulsed by fame, honor, having a strong, loud, presence. It requires our receiving the world HaShem gives us through the manipulation of our primal selves, our instinctual trust of those matters which are impermanent, into a forbearance for the understanding and drawing nearer our G-d and His letters to us, the holy Torah. We are given a pithy statement and the rest is for us to unearth. Here, humility allows the student to place difficult and cryptic concepts into a practical context, for there is nothing which is removed from us, rather it dwells in us, as the wellspring at Hagar’s feet (When the angel showed the well to Hagar, it is said (v. 19) “then God opened her eyes,” to which the Rabbis comment that everyone is presumed to be blind until God opens their eyes (as the well did not “fall from the sky” but had been present the entire time. Her anguish and avoidance prevented her from seeing it). Another exposition learns from this that Hagar lacked faith in God. She was afraid that there would not be enough water and the well would dry up, and so she first filled the skin, and then gave Ishmael to drink. (Tamar Kadari)).

Devarim

30:12 It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up to heaven for us and fetch it for us, to tell [it] to us, so that we can fulfill it?”

 

30:13 Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us and fetch it for us, to tell [it] to us, so that we can fulfill it?”

 

30:14 Rather,[this] thing is very close to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can fulfill it.

 

In Pirke Avos, it is asked which trait is best and answered, the lev tov, for all other traits are elevated in its warmth. When we receive the world, as entities reflecting tov sholet ra, we increase the magnitude of light and good and increase the capacity for redemption to the worlds. This is far more powerful, despite being invisible, than actively cajoling the masses into political action, which generally increases strife since, when one opinion rules over another, for whatever purpose or intent, the under-thumb struggles for freedom, and to paraphrase from Sohlzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago, they usually acquire it. This is the cycle of war in Exile.

When one dresses under the influence of the Tomer Devorah, and they recognize, see, the holiness of G-d’s creation emanating from each portion, each soul, in it’s proper manner, the world cannot help but be better. This is a personal redemption and alludes to the messianic day, that, while not knowing how this day will manifest, we understand certain choices will be so obvious, the yetzer hara will hold no sway just as today we shun from consuming the repulsive and those who do are considered mentally impaired.

In Brachos regarding Rebbe Meir and Bruriah, after davening for the hooligans to do teshuva, rather than be destroyed, the culprits do, in fact, come to teshuva. How could this be, if teshuva requires free will?

My master and teacher, R’Y’M’b’Y’A, shlit’a, taught regarding the amidah, all the brachas praise HaShem for what He provides us with, except one, the bracha for teshuva which states, HaShem desires it. The Abishter desires this from us! We can give to Him as well. Also, the Gemara, Brachos 33b states: “everything is in the hands of heaven except for fear of heaven.”  Obviously, these statements exist as goads to increase our understanding of G-d’s wisdom and it would be foolish to limit their meaning to superficial considerations when all of the world, this great garment, speaks of the wisdom our teachers have encapsulated via proverb and anecdote. By davening for the hooligans, Rebbe Meir and Bruriah generated more light into the world, that in turn made the decision to do teshuva more obvious to the group of delinquents and while still utilizing free will, their path toward a successful teshuva was less hindered with distortion, the decision more readily apparent. When you receive the world with correctly articulated kindness and compassion, the world, illumined, raises itself to you.

The most valuable things of the nations and their members are hidden, secreted away so they cannot be found by those who might wish to take them.

The most precious treasures of HaShem are placed in the open for those willing to seek them through humility.

Israel.
His Children.
The Torah.

Because of this, we recite on waking, modeh/ah, for when we open our eyes, per His generosity, we receive immediately that greatest portion, our living soul, and the capacity to comprehend His goodness.

My son, may he be blessed, asked, “Abba, can I learn the secrets of the Torah? Can I learn ALL of them?”

I answered him, though he is young, as I have written here today.

Ha, Yingele, they cannot be numbered and they are available to those who cry and toil over the holy letters, words, and passages of our Torah, and the words of the sages, those who increase Shalom, and whom goad the bent towards repentance or anger (none are ambivalent before them). Those having mastered silence.

These points of infinite light, gemstones valued beyond anything measurable, arrive without limit and are ever-present; even with the smallest portion, is the seeker elevated in riches, as the whole arrives from the crown of the Yud. For the discoverer, it is like drawing water from a river whose current never ceases, all the water is one but there is nothing which is not new.

You’re not alone,

the sky’s curve

falling

into dusk’s net,

night’s veil drawn near;

scarcely time for breathing.

Our vanished joy, instead awestruck,

light, falls,

time ripples

into song

and dreams

like evening gatherings

spent with loved ones

lost.

“Fuck,” he said, fresh stepped into a pile of dog-shit on the corner of 186th and Laurel Hill Terrace during a time of cold beers, Black and Milds spliced with marijuana, and the declination of grammar.

After scraping the sole of his shoe along the curb, he pushed between two cars tightly parked. He hit the bodega down the block and dropped a few dollars on a quadruple espresso, cooled it with cream and chugged it walking down the block towards his apartment building.

The space of the studio quieted when he entered and with a slack pace he’d sit leaning back in the chair, feet on the desk set against the north/northeast corner windows of a top floor Washington Heights pre-WW2 apartment opening up to a view of everything north of his position in the Heights.

No tall structures rose to blot the view, no neighbors could peer in and so the large window remained without curtain and instead of a pressing city, a flat landscape of mostly moon grey building tops spread out, quilted above with a vast sky and he knew that G-d loved him.

The clouds, sometimes roiling, other times still, or set in a space drifting in uniform melancholy across the atmosphere, were portals for meditation. Time allowed infinite variety and when only a bright pale blue shone, he’d squint against the sun as day rolled slowly into night, into stars and wonders, his mind contemplating on these advancing distances, their slow waltz through space in time, but most importantly, he spoke with G-d during these meditations, in conversations unfurled without prejudice, reminiscing on those who were kings, like the best of their yolk, gathered to fathers wanting too.

He wrote out these conversations with Kerouacian diligence, their occurring by way of thoughts and forms, patterns and fractals, then flowing onto paper into piles of manuscripts scattered about the trail of his passage.

He could not keep up with them and worried about their archiving. But they would be, his master stated, to give his kids, his lovers, for posterity, a bit of the travels that took him from one end of the world to the other.

The thoughts always returned to the roundabout, that analog spinning mechanism on the playground. He remembered it from his youth, twirling, and his friends one by one jumping onto it; he could never time it right. Fear gnawed at him then, and today. He knew it wasn’t only a lack of timing.

A light pulse became present, not unlike the presence of amphetamines, but accompanied with visuals. A kind of inner grind, his teeth, hips, he had to flex his feet and caught a glimmer of light, bluish, in the corner of his eye. An electric star hiding in the upper left hand corner of his focus. The effect was mild, almost so he reveled in the subtlety, forgetting what was coming, how the reef springs onto the vessel’s hull.

Becoming fatigued, the event unraveled slowly. His sweat cooled in the room’s air which was fresh and moving, while his presence drifted with detachment; sounds coming on percussive, remote and rolling to and fro, slowly as tides, revealing and hiding pools of syncopated moments. Interspersed, as rocks jutting out from sandy shorelines, distorted sounds against a fluid audible. He knew, quietly, but he could never concede this, why she had thought him insane, the parallels were awfully uncanny.

Visually, the affectation arrives and he feels clammy. He feels outside his body, like cold nights under only sheets, as though he is lacking a shell and his soul is cooling, condensing into beads of euphoria desiring union. He is yet to become afraid and so must remember, force the recollection of what is coming. He senses it now, the turning welling up and he swallows the panic punching out of him. The door, he must slam it on the tentacled grip of this pariah, his body, the house in this room stretching, the isolation punishing him through gravity, till the door is bulging, the room is being squashed and that force is advancing, it is seeking him out.

Nobody to call as his fears increase, the anxiety pushing his guts out and nausea rising in him. His parents are exempted, his loves have fled him and the vast expanse of his faith, that dogged nature of his trust, infantryman like, ramped up with determined loyalty. He is alone and must overcome this riptide of fear pushing him down, crushing these cells into the dust. The emptiness, the pale glow of this barren room recalls the frightening solitude of his place, our Earth’s setting, on the water’s skin.

He is not communicating well. The pressured speech, quick breaths hamper him, and he feels robbed of being normal at this stage, the wave of awe curling forward just over the wall of terror which falls on him first. He wakens in the battle goaded into exertion, realizing the peak has yet hastened it’s arrival and he’s suddenly afraid of what’s coming, since, as it is stated, “beginnings are always difficult.”

Washing his hands, his face, with soap first, after, through ritual, the reptilian markings of his animal-hood bloom into presence and he reads the ledger inscribed on his countenance. Light contorts around the object of focus, the outer parts moving, constricting, as though gravitational lensing has been microcosmed. The self washing out into fluid light, leaking onto the aged oak planks of his flooring as though the sun hides behind you and only the corona, fiery and fluid, licks at the space, accompanies the object, and suddenly, It arrives.

A terrible, crushing weight, as though the whole of the cosmos have drained into a point inside his being, forcing him down, breathless, gasping, clutching for an object to support him and he collapses onto the floor in raw, naked shame, the regret boiling out of him. The space presses down onto him, the arrogance of his want torn out of his heart, his mind unable to breathe, and he cries out with a torrential anguish, crumpled on the flat plane of wooden flooring, empty of value, lacking meaning and an embarrassment to his ancestors, his providers of light. He cannot catch his breath enough to sob and his eyes go blind with tears and still, facing this demise, he is afraid to confess lest it be real and final for all time.

The fire in him, that does not consume, speaks up, gently, nurturing and fills him, warming the hollow of his terror, saying,”if it be that final moment then do not hide, you are loved and desired.”

Suddenly, as though finally able to move forward, the shock lifts and he does so, with this personal redemption and vocalizes aloud that he knows from this spot he may never return and despite the shell of his person, he admits to the vulnerability that he will end, he will be known in light without the blankets of flesh that hide and all details become understood with excruciating exactness. He cries out in that moment fearing his soul will depart from the horror and pleads for mercy and compassion and understanding, that She return to him, in this moment, when he has struck a pinprick in the barrier that hides them from each other. He has provided Her with that She seeks out.

He loves Her, pours out his lacking, gives Her the neediness which animals despise, and returns the great love She exudes and he knows now they are lovers renewed and he laughs aloud.

Calmed by Her presence, he climbs the ladder to his bed, sits back, spine straight, against the wall, and swallows the isolation up until he arrives and understands that one new thing waiting all these millenia for discovery, a gift from the river’s current, and the place of Her reign increases and he is grateful, and for Her is the moment at its first breaching.

Keep digging, architect at the site, don’t quit. The find is present but obscured in the many layers of dust caked as dirt, dried, baked mud, and him, with delicately applied fingers, despite their awkward thickness, brushing away the crumble until that cherished Something lost is newly discovered, again.

Discovery is not creation but the Creator desires this discovering as though they are creations, worlds, even limited as it all is to these infinitesimal moments scarcely present in the great ribbon of our being.

Later, drunk on the come down, most importantly, alone, his thoughts focused on not losing this involvement, on remaining with the righteous masters that have departed, staying alive, he sought out, with desperation, to remain that child who found the wooded acres full of everything desirable worth finding.

But, he was beginning to understand the practical difficulty with aging. Gravity and time, the soul, the heaviness pressing into her, wearing away at the body and its splotches, bruises, failing components, until the form, finally at rest, lay hidden among the dusts, atoning.

And despite this, these meditations unravel, through nebulae, through process, the river’s flow never-ending.

If he had money

he had prostitutes drugs art

better to work friend.

Placing Hamsun’s, Growth of the Soil, onto the bathtub’s lip, submerging my head under the water, the silence blankets me and I don’t want to come up again.

Last night’s Chinese dinner, that with tip, came out to twenty four dollars, left me a twenty in my wallet, and nothing else. It’s better to evacuate the previous night’s dinner, than to just throw the money into the toilet, true, but the day after, hungry again, you could think, what’s the difference.

Yawning, running a bath, the day’s leap through southeastern windows, sunny, I’m tired and I have a check due me – just get motivated, pick it up. After rent and car payments, I would have enough for Chinese the rest of the week, or pizza, a small bag of smoke, beer or wine, and worrying about the future. Fortunately, attention deficiencies make moments everyday seem new and full of endless possibilities.

Otherwise, I day dream the various exit routines: diving out the window of my fourth floor apartment, stopping the car while crossing a bridge and flinging myself over the rail; the unhinged mania route like suddenly sawing at my neck with dull keys, or the two inch fishing blade on my belt as I walk towards my parked vehicle in the late mornings, but soon forgetting about those plans and thinking something good waits for me while rummaging through dust blanketed badlands like the soft tones of a Fender Stratocaster weeping, when played right.

The monitor glowed. I could see it from the open bathroom door, waiting for me, the electricity’s blue desire. But I hated the machine currently and angrily refused to engage her keys or to give her the tender tapping, morse code love of written expression, at this time.

The bathwater cooling, I rose up, dropping the water level, released the drain, and ran the shower to rinse off and finish bathing.

I would be meeting Thomas tonight, the cranky genre writer, who hated any opinion opposite his and only slow tortured those with like opinions, which could not have been worse, since you did not expect to have to defend yourself while agreeing. It also meant tactical agreement had to be well considered before opted as a strategy. Nevus would be joining, too.

Nevus, the nearly authentic, broken splotch of earnest attempting. Cigarettes, fast food, drinking – a tremendous amount of arguing would be going down tonight.

“Only the expectation of satiation provides an offer for romance…” That remark, stated by Nevus, was what stuck in my neighbor’s mind and she repeated it every time I saw her, telling me how funny he was. 

Having no money requires a youthful stamina – no romance, no insulation, swim the meridian. Beaten hearts, broke, the fracturing veneer readily apparent against the thick walls of affluence affording those with wealth the privatization of suffering while bureaucracy humiliates the vulnerable, whether brilliant or dull, the exposure mires them down in communal, statistic-like, antagonism. As Nevus often says, “Who doesn’t have a fear of stats?

I feel somewhere between the boldness of Henry VIII and Radiohead’s ‘Creep.’ Of course the far sweep of the former’s hyperbole dampens the strength of the latter’s presence – I can only hope!

A kind of wandering forbearance, Lord Stanley like, waiting for one or the other to prevail. That may be one of the deeper questions, as to which prevails; why, do I choose it? The line doesn’t seem small at the outset, rather the nearer one is to the edge, the sharper it becomes. For kings and their courts, it reckons the sword’s blade as literal, and for fools, disillusionment and isolation.

Rather than commit, why not fall somewhere in between, where lie possibilities of innumerable outcome? A spectrum of opportunities; the myriad of pathways emerging as river deltas.

Rubbish!

Some just overlook the best fruit, too self centered to hear the words spoken, too obstinate to know their most capable of friends because they’re unsure, they’re afraid and frozen outside of their blankets. They can’t know and so packs are formed to better hide from the necessities of loving and all the efforts these entail.

Later, the daylight ticked away past trailing horizons of sardine grey rooftop lines, we sat in the high, tin ceilinged room, the lighting, hard water yellow. Some of the eyes following a seam of pale amber plane, the wall sloping suddenly into gray shadows, darker against the space. Thomas sat, stiff spined, an Italian master. The room cocked out of symmetry, all of us drinking from watery scotches. This lapping for attention and the loneliness of misheard intent, quiet ripples on the pond’s surface, loves below, unseen, each hungry for affection and assuaged through contention.

The dialectic setting pragmatic hounds against the didactic viewing of cinema as literature, excepting Thomas whose harp, mostly on writing, was staunch in both his rejection and subsequent betrayal of the kind he felt amateur.

I was amateurish, mainly because I did not write for publishers, I mean, I hardly knew how! This would both confound and enrage Thomas, pushing out a kind of pressured speech like rant against not paying artists for their work. It was a desperate segue, true, but the point must be engaged, eventually, of course. I would not disagree, but, lacking an object to pummel, the anger would eventually find a target at the table, especially someone writing and not being paid, then the torrents ran undammed.

The table was round, thankfully, wise others stanching the exuberance. Nevus had a new girlfriend present, her aquiline profile caught in sports bar dim, stated, sweetly, a distinction between artistic writing and commercial writing.

That I understood, and could learn from. Then, in the pause of transition, I’d listen to Thomas berate, usually Nev., and think on the sloppily edited manuscripts stacked and published from his house with all sorts of typos. Not a few, including that epidemic scourge of properly spelled words incorrectly contexted by a lack of human observation. But I am just frustrated, punk rock ethos beguiling, and probably, like the others, loathing the lack of complete control.

The strongest arguments need repressed personalities to obtain that necessary amount of belligerence submission requires. It is just an unfortunate dynamic, doubtfully serendipitous, that, in the taut bondages sometimes catching us, the very same kind of victims are the greatest oppressors.

Nevus was an easy target. Earnest man-child, blindly caught in a perfectionist trap that he considered his own cultivating. Sweet, soulful warrior who lived with his Mom. I loved him dearly, his words strangled weaker talents, he resided as this ghostly prodigy singing the greatest love songs.

Nevus, nor Thomas, made much money. Thomas would jaw me in my friend’s absence. We were always broke, he would yarn, but unencumbered for years. Nevus and I would have conversations of this kind at three in the morning: “A person has to work at failure, same as success.”

“Thomas,” I would say, “you want fame, then artistry. Nevus and I covet your consistency, yes, but I look at Nevus and want to self-destruct like he does. My fear, though, is that it’d be no accident by me. And, after all that, Nevus thinks I’m some chieftain here to bring about a redemption. How absurd is all this!?”

The distraction. Fears of success. Those deep points all the analogies flow forward from, the metaphors, the myths. Archetypal musings, youth’s spring.  What is the world telling me, writing in secret, lost, seeking out the city, desiring the country?

Sometimes the conversations would twist a struggled weave, like a delivery boy, a bicyclist, plotting a wobbled course east up the hill on 187th between Wads. and Broad., blanketed in slush and ice.

“Did you really write, “a deep brooding overcame him…?”” Asks Thomas.

“Yeah, I did.” I say.

Thomas replied, “you weren’t mocked in English Comp 101 over phrases like that?” 

“I don’t know, not really. I don’t know. Probably -” I stammered.

“Purple, pure fucking purple,” says Thomas.

Of course, I should not have been baited, as drunk as I was:

“You are square. Set in all the mundane borders of the box and thick with obviousness.” Is all I could muster, which was saying something.

How did we get home?

I remember Thomas sat on the orange rust bench of the subway car, cheeks suddenly puffing out, then relaxed. He stared straight ahead and did it again, a noodle suddenly emerging from his mouth. Then it happened again, his cheeks puffed. Again.

He was swallowing his vomit, it was clear now. When the train stopped, Harlem at 125th street, he leapt up and holding his head out the doors, vomited a long stream of booze and Chinese food.

I was trying to keep from nodding off, keep from getting jumped. The arrival passed. The elevator arrived and we went from steam to winter. I walked the old sport to his door, he had fallen and cracked his nose the last time and I resolved to see him home. I kicked his cat back into the apartment when it tried to break out and trudged through the cold grey landscape back to my place, finishing the evening.

Before I knew it the door shut, I freed my limbs of winter wear and felt the heat blasting from the radiator. Mid January and my windows were opened. The hours, deconstructed into minutes, those fragmented into seconds, the time lost without any output. I could not be productive all the time, and this void could, G-d forbid, remove me from the world as an empty vessel. There in the dim light of my studio, the raucous cacophony of Charles Ives beating the walls, I rubbed swollen eyes and heard all the musings drowned out by 3/4 time waltzing.

I sat before the keyboard, drunk-typing. The title fell onto the screen amid room spinning derision, “I Don’t Want Cats, I want a Girlfriend.”

I laughed, typing, “He is the Buddha, and because of you, doubting something you cannot limit, this is true,” only stopping to piss into an empty two liter so as not to pause the muse.

In the end did we remain grounded, focused on an agenda? Probably the others, but I was too sick from alcohol to care much.

Rockets need boost to overcome the gravitational pull of earth, generated by a release of force through the form of combustion: fuel, fire, exhaust, thrust, motion, etc.: circuit.

We’d have to repent and make money, to live. There can be no other way.