Without you, I guess the whole architecture of the upper worlds has to collapse.  The thrones, powers, archons.  The visions of Enoch, Ezekiel.

All falling into the physical universe with the sound of crashing scaffolding, and the lightness of filaments.

Now there’s nothing left.  We’re alone, flat.

Still, the tracks of the ascending mystics are preserved, as they rose through the heavens.  How high they reached, what they saw. 

The floor of liquid shining alabaster that did not drive Akiva mad. 

The sense of the throne of God, infinitely far above, pressing down.

Whole dimension of compassion.  Whole dimension of wisdom.  In bands like the clouds of Jupiter.

Assiah, Yetzirah, Beriah, Atzilah.  The four worlds.  The Tzadikim, even now, are struggling to ascend in their morning prayers. 

They start with the band of energy that sustains, pours into our universe, our minds.  And they reach, if they’re at their best, nearness to God. 

Much like the first manifestation of the unknowable.  How do they ever return, to the carpet of the shul?!

I sense it now, somewhere up and to my right—the crystal structures that move!  The Rube Goldberg devices of the spirit.  That our prayers and our actions operate.  We pull levers, unleash cause and effect. 

We cause the crystal structures to move, draw down blessings, unite energies.  Each of us, lifting our world like Atlas.

Adam Kadmon, that huge human figure, towers up from our universe, through all the worlds!   Stars and clouds of hydrogen in his thighs.  The top of his head in bliss.

And the Shekinah.  Who I first understood in my sister, then my wife.  Her home is Atzilah.  There she can stretch out.  Visit with the Torah and the Hebrew letters.

Before she’s called back, by us.  Before she’s re-traumatized, burnt out, run ragged.  By our stupidity.  As we’re tortured in the divine plan.  Whenever she’s here, with the mother whose son was just shot–they found his body in the reservoir–she’s crucified, all day, all night.

Each morning, the Tzadikim try to ascend.  So do millions of us, through various methods.

The closeness to God still exists.  Visions are still possible, consolation still flows, strong as ever.

But the light has gone out, the warmth.  What will happen?

My mother went down into rainwater and barely-restrained slop.  The water immediately stained the wood, attacked.  It wouldn’t be long till…

My mother who was so neat…

So lonely.  I see her forever embraced by God.  If everything ended in her bed in the nursing home…

No one was more loyal.  She needed you.  To stay sane, stay alive.

Through you she could have a little mercy on herself. 

And she was so obedient.  Not reading Hebrew, she put everything she had into the Shema.  I heard a wild regret in her voice, piety, and beyond that a kaleidoscope—a fundamental sweetness, love she couldn’t express, the true pain of the struggle.

Same with the way she took a hand from her walker, reached up and kissed the mezuzah.  The purity.   The wish to be a good girl for you.  What more could you ask for?

But if there is no you…

*

Me, I like to think of a you.  So October 7^th is, somehow, for the good.

I’m walking, gifts wherever I look.  From you, but indirectly.  Don’t picture you releasing this breeze from your hand… 

More that you, the unknowable, were slightly manifest, in some Eden many removes from matter.  You touched in a point, from which realms unfolded, a whole cascade of invisible infrastructure—each of your qualities a separate…reality.

I like to bathe my head in these silvery thoughts. 

But I know I’m an animal.  What are the chances we’ve discovered the truth?  That you really don’t want us to mix meat and milk?

Atheists and aliens look at me with pity.  My golden retriever is peering intently into space, asking for and receiving your guidance.

Do life forms on other worlds also believe in you?   There you separated the hydrocarbons…

Throughout the universe, we all pray together.

Part of me is heavy, knowing the truth.  ‘Truth is (desolate, soul-crushing) beauty’.

No soul to crush.

Take away the you.  Forbid me to use it, to go there.

And part of me is lighter, cleaves a little bit to you, lifts. 

I do know you fashioned my wife.

As a being in a solar system, I can only know with certainty that this laugh of hers, on the phone with a friend, is Light. 

You imbued her with some of your nature.  Kissed her and sent her off, excited to see what she would do.

I guess many people feel this way about those they love…

I was, to my shame: pale, ineffectual.  Not in my body.  Never carefree.  Slogging, each day a crisis.

In other words, a neurotic Jew.  Could see it in the mirror.  Italians played sports, fucked like porn stars, laughed in big groups at the table.  Friends, family, they leaned and merged, their boundaries fluid.

While I was, in my genes, with the Hasidim–inbred, nearsighted, never looking up from the nitpicking Talmud.  Doomed to miss out.

Which is why I hated them.  Had the urge to bully, knock off their hats, rip out their sideburns.

Decades like this, decades.  The stain, like sexual abuse. Tried to block it out.

Shabbat, the high holidays, Israel, the chai and Jewish star—no.  Jewish authors—no.

The false Messiah, whose followers shat on the Torah—that excited me.

 A Jewish woman—no.

*

And then, yes.  Can’t speak honestly on these early dates, come off like a Nazi.  Held my tongue, listened. And then, slowly, slowly, through osmosis, through love…

The root—Canaan, 2000 BC.  Archaeology of Jericho.  Parchment scrolls.  How did the Torah, not that I read it, come together?

With her on Friday night:  prayers, but then singing, dancing, hugging.  Good wine.  I’m…not quite motionless. 

Proud Jews.  Jews who go to the gym. With bass voices.  And the teachings.  Love thy neighbor.  Oh, my older sister did that, showed me.  I formed, much distorted, around it.

The Psalms, the Creation, Abraham and Sarah.  God, so often needy, but having his moments. 

The Hebrew letters—archetypal, etched, with mysterious antennae.

One night, I bust a few moves!  Flapping like a chicken…

*

And then, October 7^th.  Feels like a Holocaust.  And the backlash.   ‘Hitler should have finished the job!’

Then you know what?  I am part of the us.  Not quite singing Hatikvah.  Not wearing a yarmulke.  But smiling sadly at those who do.  Nodding to the young man wearing tzitzit in the park.  To the scared but defiant. 

Still no flag in the yard.  Sympathetic to the people of Gaza.  But suddenly alive and mourning the centuries of pogroms.  The blacksmith killed by his neighbors. 

Friends with the Jew who bought a gun.  Admiring, not just Sephardic joy, but Ashkenazi study.  Thin Hassid davening on the train—I want to buy you a steak.  I’m smiling at you, even subtly pumping my fist.  You don’t look up, but that’s ok. 

Not just Kafka and Einstein, but you, and the thousands like you pressing their foreheads to the graves of the Tzadikim.  Even the landscape around—the Kineret and the hill country, the dry lifeless soil that I once recoiled from.  

It’s random, to be born Jewish–right?  I don’t know anymore, but a little like Israel itself, when Jews first came from everywhere, many more than expected–my empty places are filling out, with something both familiar and new.