Arch of Titus

Victory Procession of the Romans after 70 A.D., carrying the holy utensils of the Jerusalem Temple

My encouraging experience that night in my town MOdi'in,
was both deepened and challenged,
when at the entrance I found an oddly sized brochure
presenting the Learning at "Elul",
a "Beth Midrash", a traditional "House of Learning",
not a school or a college
with teachers and pupils,
with exams and degrees,
but a learning community.

The name of this modern Beth-Midrash says it all:
EL - U - L
It's the beginning of one of those Jewish principles,
that made me, the born Christian, Jewish.
It implies the concept - the reality! - of wholeness,
2000 to 4000 years before the info of Godchannel:

"These and these are the words of the living God".
which refers here to the often opposing teachings
of two traditions at the time of Jesus,
The tradition of Hillel and the tradition of Shammai.

The same "concept" constitutes the Hebrew Bible.
Right from the start, the story of Creation is told twice,
or more exact - using my image of the moving globe:
the first is told from the center of the globe,
where there is no space, no movement, no time, no polarity:
from there God says 7 times, that creation is "good", even "very good".
[November 2, 2011: This is a metaphor for what now I call : spherical time!
open "If you choose to be my host here on earth" , click ctrl/F and put "spherical" in "find"]
The second story is told from the perspective of the outside of the globe.
where there is space, movement, time, duality:
from there God says twice:
"It is not good",
for the Adam to be alone.
Only God's third experiment with creating the Adam succeeds.
And why has it succeeded?
Because God found Wo-man inside Man
and just needed to e-volve her.
This in the first story was there all the time:
God created the Adam,
male and female he created the Adam.

The New Testament followed this concept,
by not bothering to reconcile the contradictions
between the four Gospels, for instance.

Only recently my daughter said:
"I was supposed to facilitate an evening in our Learning Community.
It's about parents and children, we are learning now.
I went to Jerusalem, to "Elul",
because they are ready to give us guidance.
After 4 hours I didn't want to leave.
How much would I like to participate in the learning they do there!"

My own experience with this impressing Learning Situation
dates from my relationship with Ram Eisenberg ,
who was an ardent student and also brought his co-learners to the Succah.

It seems to me,
that my rage about what I call
Israel's RE-ACTing as a holocaust victim
instead of acting as Masters of its destiny,
has been preventing me from following the God of Godchannel,
who is not judging.

Rotem (age 9) and I leafed through an Album of 50 years of the State of Israel.
The year of her birth - 1993 - showed the handshake between deadly enemies: Rabin and Arafat.
For following a process towards peace, Primeminister Rabin was murdered by an Israeli, in 1995.

Today Rabin is publicly called "the criminal of Oslo".

How can I not judge?
How can I refrain from blaming rage?

But Rotem said earnestly:
"That doesn't mean, that the whole people is fucked-up.
There are good people among us,
just like there are good people among the Arabs. "

I felt deep shame.
[See also the task & curse of Shame, July 2007]

This was accentuated by a sentence in the brochure of "Elul",
which closes the "Portrait" of a woman,
who seems to be on "my" side,
with the sentence:
"... each side feels and sees the other
as the cause
of the difficult situation that the State of Israel is in."

In the intro Hana Lasman, Executive Director of Elul says:
"The society in Israel is split in too many contradictory segments:
the dream of one is the nightmare of the other.
Often we fail to see the full picture
and all of us might loose our dreams.

We have a variety of programs with different audiences;
all involve Jewish studies,
search of identity
and dialogue between people
from opposing parts of the Israeli society.
As hard as it is to accept the differences between opinions
there is no other way but listening to each other.
...
Though the world after September 11 is no longer the same,
and once again Israel faces existential challenges,
we see our mission as continuing to prepare for the day after..."

WEEPING CRYING

An example of ancient Talmudic and new modern Elul style interpretation of a Biblical verse presents the diversity of people and the diversity of thinking/feeling presents the diversity of Jewish interpretation of a Biblical verse, and - I add on Nov. 3, 2011 - it also exemplifies and illustrates, how "spherical time" was natural to those interpretors of old: By "mixing" different biblical verses about "Israel's weeping", handed down from completely different situations and periods, they find a meaning which is relevant for their present predicament: click How, oh how does the city sit lonely ... She weeps, oh weeps in the night and her tear is on her cheeks she has none to comfort her among all her lovers and all her friends have betrayed her they have become her enemies. Lamentations, beginning

Nov. 3, 2011 See the story in the Hebrew Wikipedia about Ima Shalom and also in an article about the context of the story: "All gates are locked, except the gates of wounded feelings" But I don't understand why the word "ona'ah", usually meaning "fraud" is translated by Deganit as "wounded feelings"

YEHUDA READS

Weep.

A short story.
Shorter than a sound bite.
Maybe the length of a secondary story in the newspaper.
A story the length of the blinking of an eye
containing everything and no excess at all.
In twenty-nine words the narrator condenses a human drama
that leaves the reader stunned, bewildered, dazed, and - it should be said - curious.
(And by the way, you thought what wished Rabban Gamliel
at the moment when his eyelashes spread out across the floor?)

OH the artfulness of the missing details;
oh the wild image;
oh the instant and terrifying moral judgment!

For all intents and purposes, the story is perfect: it has dramatic tension, conflict, and resolution.
It has three heroes - the simple man/woman, the political-religious leader, and the students.
As in every story and as in life, a battle rages over "For whom will Rabban Gamliel be?"
Is he for the grieving woman or for the students waiting for his response?
To what is Rabban Gamliel committed -
to simple human emotion or to the fulfillment of the burden of leadership thrust upon him?
Must he stubbornly demand to know the whereabouts of the woman from his students,
or perhaps choose not to ask, preferring not to know?
Oh the free will that troubles every good stories' hero,
and troubles everyone from morning until night
(for what is a person if not the hero of a good story?)
Is it better not to know when to know brings pain?

Did the woman continue to cry?
It appears so.
Did Rabban Gamliel continue to teach?
Did his eyelashes grow back?
It appears so.
Did he ever wonder
whatever happened to the weeping woman on the other side of the wall
- the one that made him cry more than he ever had before?
Where did her tears go?
Did he think to himself, perhaps she cries during the day but sleeps at night?
For the students this was an easier solution, no doubt.
Seemingly, Rabban Gamliel returns to himself,
so much so that it says in Echa Rabbah
that her crying reminded him of the destruction of the Temple;
he must have cried over the destruction
- because he must have been unable to cry over the plight of a mother who lost a child?

Only the narrator remains.
He is almost silent, burying the tragedy of the weeping neighboring woman.
Yet almost without us noticing he slips the story in between material that follows
- and we are like Rabban Gamliel and his students
moving on after study, after life, towards renewal,
and towards midrashim even more original and unique
about the pain of the destruction of the Temple
- stories of national religious mourning.
The narrator tugs at the hem of our clothes
and does not allow the complacency to continue.
Go out and see the suffering in the world around you.
Go out and take a handkerchief with you and comfort the mourners and the desolate ones
and those that have not succeeded in rising up after falling apart; ...

Still, the student asks, if after every wall stands a broken woman,
how can we hold on to our eyelids?

How can we avoid letting her reality enter our very essence?
And how can we preserve our tears amidst the constant work of the mind,
which relearns and renews itself each and every day?

Apparently, the struggle between the night and the day ends such
that the students lead their teacher towards the light of day from the depths of the night.
But can a person open the eyes to the day without eyelashes?
Haven't the eyes already become one with the dark?
Crying and squinting in the light,
Rabban Gamliel is led like a blind man to the Beit Midrash
...
Slowly, his eyes become clearer and his eyelashes return;
his thoughts become lucid, and already, he encounters Rabbi Yehoshua.
Slowly, the voice of weeping dissipates
- first dissolving from the ear
and then erased from the eye,
and then finally departing from the mind and from the neighborhood altogether.

"Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who grants the understanding to discern between day and night."

2010

Excerpts from a group e-mail from Ya'cub, Olam Katan Books, on April 20, 2010
about his three days in Istambul, Turkey

Mettin sat down and started a conversation~~~ about the importance of the concept of Torah:
that there is Torah in the form of a book,
but also there is a "Torah" in everything in nature
—that this walnut has a whole tree inside it, and this is "the Torah of the walnut"~~~
He proceeded to talk about modern science uncovering more and more of a mystical understanding.

Another topic was the importance of appreciation, of our being appreciative~~~
and the importance of self-confidence.
"If God is really within us,
then the meaning of faith is not a belief in some thing or other,
but self-confidence..... !"
He went on to say that the most important aspect of God's Unity is His Uniqueness,
and that likewise, each of us needs to be uniquely who we are. ...


Ideas such as these were illustrated by quotations from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur'an~~~

.....
I remember Mettin saying that when he met Rabbi Fruman from Tekoa,
Rabbi Fruman told him that the Turks hold the keys to peace in the Middle East.
But Mettin said he believes it is the Jews who hold the keys to world peace,
...... the Jewish people, unlike the Turks, unlike other peoples,
know all of the nations of the world
and incorporate them within themselves.

And yet a central message I heard up front and clear from both Baba Selim and Mettin Bey
is that our true identity is as human beings.
These cultural things – Turkish, Jewish, Islamic... they are part of us
but it's not the final word on who we are.
I remember Mettin describing the human as the being
who navigates between the subatomic and the manifest universe,
between chaos and cosmos. ...

Mettin was speaking about the idea of the 'chosen people',
and after speaking of the importance of the Jewish people in the world,
he proceeded to develop the idea of the human being as the chosen people
– chosen among all of nature.
(What Lisa later said she heard, was
that within each nation there are the 'chosen' people, the people who have awareness.)
...we should say: asher bakhartanu im kall ha'amim
("Blessed are You O God who has chosen us with all the other nations,")
I can continue to say the more traditional mi-kall ha'amim
("from all the other nations")
but with another meaning.
We have been chosen among the other kinds of "people" (as the native Americans say)~~~
because there are different kinds of tree "people," plant "people,
" there are all of these different kinds of animal "people,"
and out of them all we have been 'chosen' to be the human people.
As we are the ones with Will,
it is we who have the task of shaping our world~~~
which includes caring for the planet
and seeing that God is reflected in it.
I remember my father a"h saying,
"the meaning of being a chosen people is being a choosing people."
...
(Years ago, when I was studying Anthroposophy with Yeshayahu ben Aharon,
I was struck by his saying
that the People of the Israel were the first people to receive a written Torah,
rather than a non-verbal one that was implicit in their culture.
And so, paradoxically, we were the first to have to arrive
at our own understanding, our own interpretation, our own morality~~~
and now the whole world is becoming "Jewish" in this sense.)
So really, none of this was new to me.
Yet I encountered it in a new way this time, in the sharing of the circle.

So here I am in front of my computer, in my own microcosm,
back in "Olam Qatan" here in Jerusalem.
The truth is that after getting back, I found myself missing Istanbul.
Although I'd only been gone three days, I found it hard to return –
hard to let go of the energy of Istanbul and return to the energy of Jerusalem.
... But then of course there's all that wonderful music I brought with me~~
to serve as a bridge between worlds! ...
And now back in Israel the journey continues...

May Israel be blessed, and may we be a blessing to those who are within and around our nation, as we move into another year.